Microsoft’s new ad push is called the “Mojave Experiment,” and the point is this: due to bad word of mouth, people have poor thoughts about Windows Vista, but when they actually use it (under a different name, Mojave) they think it’s God’s gift to operating systems.

It is true that Vista (which I admit I also have a limited, but largely positive, experience with) gets railed on by a lot of people who aren’t sure why it’s so terrible. But there is a reason for this: when Vista was released and people upgraded their computers from XP, stuff quit working. Hardware, games, everything: kaput.
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China’s government has backtracked on an earlier pledge that journalists would have unfettered Internet access free of censorship by state authorities during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Now, that promise is gone and journalists will be prevented from accessing any information about the occupation of Tibet, Taiwan independence, the Tiananmen Square protests, and other sources of information deemed subversive by Chinese leadership.

China is not doing itself any favors with their explanations for the blockage: initially, a government spokesman blamed the problems on site hosts. Now, they are acknowledging the problem has nothing to do with hosting or technical issues.
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Scrabulous, the Facebook app that has over 500,000 users, has been shut down today in the US and Canada by the Indian brothers that created it. Big, evil Hasbro has put the drop on them and now it’s game over.

But not so fast. What really happened here, and is Hasbro really evil for protecting intellectual property?

Undoubtedly, Hasbro could have handled this situation much better. The best course of action would have been to create their own version of Scrabble for Facebook early on and corner the market. All of these old game makers would be smart to get on their horses because there is money to be made. The brothers that created Scrabulous are making a lot of money.
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First, to get it out of the way, it’s pronounced “cool” (in my head, though, I pronounce it “kewl”). Second, don’t accidentally type in “culi.com” or you will see some very naughty things that may get you fired.

Now that we have that out of the way, what is Cuil and can it compete? Do we need another search engine?

So far, in various queries I’ve tested, the results are rather poor. However, that is to be expected on the first day of a search engine. I doubt Google had it all figured out from day one. But I also read that Cuil has one trait that a lot of people are scratching their heads over: they do not take incoming links into consideration when posting search results.
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Peter Kafka at SAI has a good report on the fortunes of MySpace and Fox Interactive Media (FIM).

Growth for MySpace has leveled out while it increases for competitors like Facebook. That is the bad news, certainly. However, engagement by those who are still on the site is going up. What’s the point of having a ton of new users if they don’t spend any time on the site? The fact of the matter is that while Facebook has taken the worldwide unique visitor lead, MySpace is slaughtering them on engagement with about 50% more average minutes per visitor.
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Google’s Matt Cutts is reporting that Google plans on updating toolbar PageRank in the next couple of days, and will also be removing some of the penalties incurred during the great PageRank massacre of 2007.

Many blogs that feature paid posts were demoted last year (apparently) for chronic selling of paid links. Some paid media providers were more interested in promoting themselves than their clients, and littered their blogger sites with a cornucopia of easily identified code. I’m not saying this is exactly how it went down, but it couldn’t have helped.
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Ever since I purchased my iMac back in March, it has been plagued with wireless dropouts. It’s not the worst thing in the world, they usually occur every couple hours or so and are worse while doing certain tasks. For most normal web surfing, it’s not a problem. It doesn’t make the computer unusable, but for tasks that require a long, steady connection (like Skype), Leopard is a disaster. On my iMac, Skype lasts about two minutes before shutting down. On my little Eee PC, I can talk on Skype forever in full camera mode and it never dies. And this is at the same desk as my Mac.
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This fall, Facebook will integrate Microsoft’s Live Search with their social network, giving Microsoft the ultimate return on their $240 million investment. Along with Live Search will come Microsoft’s search advertising. Things were already looking up for Live Search, and now they’re looking even better.

Live Search had a big month in May, getting 15% more visitors than the previous month, and they have also inked a deal with Hewlett-Packard to get the Live Search toolbar installed on HP PC’s.

MySpace has a similar search and ad deal with Google, but so far, things aren’t exactly going to plan. Lackluster results have led to finger pointing from both sides, notably with MySpace accusing Google of doing a poor job with their ad service. Searches just aren’t utilized through social networks very much. People are accustomed to using the search bar in their browsers by now.
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Google today has formally launched Knol, their service for the sharing of knowledge about anything the author may have in mind. While on the surface it may resemble Wikipedia, there are some key differences that make it unique and unlike an online encyclopedia.

First of all, there is no one entry for a particular topic. In Knol, a search for a particular topic will bring up any number of results, all individually rated and commented upon. The author is the only one allowed to make changes to a particular knol, and can moderate based on his or her preferences. Instead of Wikipedia’s one entry for “ford mustang,” there may be several on Knol written by several different authors. The most relevant ones will be thus rated by users and will appear at the top of the heap.
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Robert Scoble went on a rant today about the sorry state of Tech blogging. He covered a wide variety of issues, including the influence of PR firms, the lack of fact checking that goes on in a rush to be first, and the inordinate interest in business (the Yahoo deal’s constant place on TechMeme being one of his pet peeves).
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