Maszman Speaks!

Are you a home beer brewer look­ing to go beyond bot­tles? If you are, a Rochester, NY com­pany, A.D.M. Amal­ga­ma­tion has just the ticket for you. Home­brew kit #HBK-1 has a 5 gal. soda tank, 5 gal C02 tank and commercial-grade fit­tings for $209.95. Help­ful staff, too.

Not that I’m admit­ting to any­thing, but the well known web-based job board Mon​ster​.com is warn­ing users about fake job post­ings that are used to scoop up per­sonal info about job seek­ers. How big could this be?

The e-mail, labeled a “crit­i­cal ser­vice mes­sage,” is going out this week to all active users of Monster’s main site, com­pany spokesman Kevin Mullins said Thurs­day. Mullins said he did not know exactly how many peo­ple that included, but that it is “def­i­nitely well into the millions.“

Oop­sie! Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity, the Ithaca-based Ivy League school, sent out a wel­com­ing let­ter via email to hun­dreds of stu­dents. Unfor­tu­nately, they were stu­dents the col­lege had pre­vi­ously rejected. Mis­takes of this mag­ni­tude were much more dif­fi­cult in the age of paper mail.

If I had $5K to burn on a dig­i­tal cam­era, the Kodak DCS Pro 14n would be mine.

The ques­tion in the minds of some folks, is “what is Google, really?” The Dave Winer link in the pre­vi­ous entry begins to explore that very ques­tion (and links to oth­ers doing the same). The issue, it seems to me, is rooted in the trust of the search results. If peo­ple begin to sus­pect that the rank­ing is no longer objec­tive, even if they are, some­one else will come along an usurp Google as the search leader. That won’t stop Google from being a leader in some other aspect of the web, and in fact may help them con­cen­trate. Per­haps this what they’ve been work­ing for all along.

After hav­ing been (sort of)* off the air fol­low­ing the Google acqui­si­tion of Pyra Labs, Ev is back with a new design. He’s start­ing to lift some of the fog over the acqui­si­tion, bit by bit. Still some peo­ple aren’t exactly thrilled with the whole idea.

*His archives were being updated, but not the main page. You had to know where to look.