Google is on top and making a grand profit. Now that the numbers for Google's profits are in, it's safe to predict that Google is on top of the search game for a long time to come. So, in the great American tradition of rooting for the underdogs, let's look at Google with the eyes of an underdog. What isn't Google?

Is Google nice? They aren't evil. This is enough, right?

It's a rare thing for corporations to have a double or triple bottom line. But can you say no to billions of dollars of profit when your corporate legal framework requires you to acquire business and grow? If google can only sustain the "not evil" phase that's a victory. Maybe if Google were "nice" they wouldn't survive.

Politicians are discovering the new political maxim in the Web 2.0 age: "The next stupid thing you say may be on YouTube." This great NYTimes article examines the new political landscape in which millions of grassroots cameras and instant video publishing are shining new light into the banal and risk-averse world of modern politics.

Some political analysts say that YouTube could force candidates to stop being so artificial, since they know their true personalities will come out anyway. “It will favor a kind of authenticity and directness and honesty that is frankly going to be good,� said Carter Eskew, a media consultant who worked for Senator Lieberman’s primary campaign. “People will say what they really think rather than what they think people want to hear.�

Dapper

... This looks like the coolest gizmo ever... a gizmo maker! Here's the site http://www.dappit.com/ Here's the explanation according to Dapper's blog:

Dapper is a new service. You may have noticed that there are many of those emerging these days. Dapper, however, is different. It’s a new kind of service. Dapper’s mission is to allow you to use any web based content in any way you can imagine. And by use, we mean going beyond just reading or viewing a webpage. You may want to create an RSS feed or a Google Gadget for a site, take a site’s content and put it on a map, receive an email alert when your site’s Alexa’s ranking goes below 5000, or create a mashup of your favorite band’s tour dates and a camping locations reservation website to organize your musical camping vacation. Whatever you want to do, however you want to mold the web, Dapper can help you do it.

Mashups

are one of my favorite things - synthetic creativity born from the creativity and generosity of open technologists whose works are available on the web to be cross-pollinated with other technologies or datasources to produce brand-new things. It is an ever-accelerating artform in the World Wide Mesh that promises endless Darwinian generative possibilities. Recently the term has been showing up in common culture and the meaning risks dilution. Let's get specific. What exactly is a mashup? Mashups: The new breed of Web app is a new IBM article that provides a great overview of the history and the categories of "mashups" - and bears reading even for Technorati who already get and even contruct mashups.

Just like it says. Check out this amazing tool: http://www.scrutinizethis.com/

Submitted by Brooks Cole

Isn't it fun to come to somebody's house and scan their bookshelves or their CD collection to peer into their souls? It's like a holographic UPC code, the soul signature of a person expressed as an array of what interests them and what you share or don't share. If the library belongs to a potential love interest, you might raise your eyebrows at finding How to Turn Your Ex-Boyfriend into a Toad: And Other Spells for Love, Wealth, Beauty, and Revenge or The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers.

Photography is a great equalizer. Photography has enabled the defense of freedom and fundamental rights, providing evidence to the subversion of law and the trampling of those freedoms for later redress. A photo can shine light upon malfeasance that powerful perpetrators might otherwise lie their way out of.

No wonder those who protest too much about defending liberty, all the while subverting it, are doing all they can to prevent individuals from exercising this fundamental, transparentifying right.

As Bert P. Krages II points out in this fascinating introduction to a newly-released flyer called The Photographer's Right,

We at CivicActions have helped clients to develop "Social Media" websites which enable members of a community to bond around shared media for fun, learning, advocacy and transformation. One of the principal aims of this development has always been the empowerment of individuals and communities to rise above the echochamber of monolithic media channels by accessing wider sources of content and even by becoming the media makers themselves.

Now YouTube, the current granddaddy of Social Media sites in the videosphere, and best known for "America's Funniest Home Videos"-style fare, seems to be growing into a role of crucial and transformative importance: leveling the playing field for presenting disparate eyewitness views of something as profound and inflammatory as the current Hizbollah-Israeli conflict -- unfiltered by editors, advertisers or even production values. It's chaos, but somewhere in the triangulation of a million lens-eyes, we can hope that the complex truths of such difficult circumstances may be brought to light in ways that don't fit neatly in between car commercials.

Lately I've been spending time trying to solve user experience problems and finding ways to give social network members the fullest range of publishing and surfing capabilities, all the while feeling like the Drupal Content Management System CivicActions has standardized on is at once a lifesaver and a concrete overcoat. Drupal is immensely powerful. And it can be notoriously resistant to beauty and ease.

But one thing Drupal does well to is to play with Web2.0 concepts in its friendliness to RSS feeds both into and out of the page node container. Witness the del.icio.us and Frappr and Flickr feeds that appear in the right column of our website.

After nine months of development, The Institute of Noetic Sciences has launched "Shift in Action" 1.0, an already thriving online community of like-minded thresholders committed to personal, social and global transformation.

The tireless and amazing CivicActions team engineered the site, with partner HoloCosmos providing architecture, visual design and online marketing. Stephen Dinan, the Institute's Director of Membership and Marketing, was the visionary client and head of a talented team there.