Lou Pickney's Online Commentary
Parallels
Tuesday
August 23, 2005
"My weakness is that I care too much"
-Papa Roach "Scars"
"I can't help believing
There's no happy ending here
Drive into the darkness
But the end is getting near"
-Alex Hardcastle "Drive"
"We begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing"
-R.D. Laing
Through the quirky-but-interesting Blogshares game that I've enjoyed playing online, I've discovered some interesting stories (and, as you might imagine, some interesting blogs). The latest story is about China, a Communist country, and its attempts to stifle the growth in popularity of a 28-year-old woman called Sister Furong (real name: Shi Hengxia), who has gained fame for posing/protesting in front of two universities in Beijing that refused to allow her entry. Here's the story from Yahoo. Notice the part about the "secret undercover police" and keep it in mind when you hear of similar things being done by the U.S. government.
You have to love the aggressiveness of Google. Today I found out that the company is going to launch a program called Google Talk, which is going to rival AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, and MSN Messenger. It's integrated with the company's outstanding G-Mail program, from what I've read. That will be a tougher hill to climb than the e-mail hill (where Google was able to blow away the competition with a "better mousetrap" combination of vastly larger disc space, a new style of archiving, and a superior spam filtering program). Really, they need to find a way to let all of the various programs talk; this is still like the old days, when you could only e-mail within your own service: Prodigy users could only e-mail other Prodigy users, AOL users could only e-mail other AOL users, etc.
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