iAlja's Online Hub
A new global treaty could allow corporations to police what we do on the Internet. Last week we successfully pushed back the US censorship bills — if we act now, we can get the EU Parliament to bury this new threat — add your voice now!
My latest blog post in which I try to justify all the time I’ve been spending on Pinterest and to extract some valuable lessons.
Design For How People Learn by Julie Dirksen is a must read book not just for learning designers, but for anyone who has every tried to make their colleagues or friends learn something new. And doesn’t that describe most of us?
The book is packed with practical tips and vivid examples that can guide you towards better learning experiences regardless of your field of work. So, what are you still doing on this page? Go on, visit the book’s website, peek inside the free sample chapter, and buy this wonderful book!
P.S.: I saw this book mentioned enthusiastically on various blogs, but I think I stumbled upon it first on Garr Reynolds’s 10 great books to help you think, create, & communicate better in 2012 list, so you might want to check that one out as well.
Yep, Google did it. It was just a matter of time, really. But knowing that it was going to happen doesn’t make it any less painful.
Ok, sure, at least they will be making it easy to toggle between personal and global search, though I do wonder if the average user will even notice or understand this mess.
And I fail to see what Google+ has to do with my world. I’m not using it, my friends are not using it, so how is this “My World”? My World is on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, …. But I guess there is just one social network to rule them all in the Googleverse now? Hell, they don’t even want us using Google Reader to be social anymore!
And you just gotta love the official announcement Search, plus Your World. It’s full of poetic bullshit that can be summarized as “we’re doing it for your own good!”, but it’s pretty clear they are only doing it because they want to get hold of more of our information.
And here I was, thinking Google was still about organizing “the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (source). Silly me. Apparently, it’s more about controlling the world’s information. All we can hope for at this point is that they’ll know when to stop (though I doubt it). Or else this just might be the beginning of the end for the mighty search giant, who stopped focusing on search and instead decided to become the playground bully. Maybe that’s the big catastrophic event predicted by the Mayans for this year? ;)
Anyway, it’s good to see Twitter is pissed off. I am as well. Not just because of a yet another #googlefail, but because we’re surrounded by half-baked beta Google products. And it’s supposed to be ok because they’re “open” and free. If they are so keen on search, why does search in Google Reader, their own product, suck so much? Why isn’t there an easy way for me to search my +1s (argh, I hate that name…) and automatically share them with people wherever I want to?
I’m seriously contemplating replacing Google Search with Bing for a month and see how it goes. And that makes me sad. Wasn’t Microsoft the evil one not long ago? Guess Google wants to take over that title as well.
