Google Blog Search has changed – it used to be a less-than-OK version of Technorati, its now trying to copy Techmeme / Memeorandum. Looking at the Tech section vs Techmeme, three observations (here’s a copy of the output)

Google’s New Blog Search:

(i) Its not clear how priority works – this is from the front page, note the rise in No of Blogs talking about a subject from 13 up to 17 up to 25 as it goes down the page (rather than receding), and a seemingly random no. of hours selected.

(ii) One think I like in Techmeme is you see all the blogs commenting on the front page, and you can see their headings by clicking on an expansion button, thus not having to leave the page. This is because I have specific people I like to read, rather than the standard “clamp on” tech news blogs all reporting the same story. Here I don’t get that visibility without a click through

(iii) There are only 10 stories per page – one of the good things about Techmeme is you can scroll down a load of stories without leaving teh page, makes it much easier to use – especially on small screens or slower connections like many mobiles

TechCrunch points out the nub of it:

at this point it’s too early to tell if Google Blogsearch will be more useful than any of the other memetrackers (or if its even in the same league). Much of its utility will lie in how often the listings are updated, how many sources it pays attention to, and how it assesses a blog’s credibility – a memetracker is only as good as the stories it presents.

- and as a number of people noted in the comments (and I found vs Technorati) Google seems to picks up the blog posts far later.

So far, not so good then

But the bigger issue for me is why is Google copying all these things (Wikipedia with Knol, Firefox with Chrome, MS / Open Office, etc – and here, initially Technorati and now Techmeme with Google Blogs) ? Clearly Google is looking at every service that has high traffic and thinking “we’ll have some of that” as the benefit to them is they sell Ads to their own pages. (There are no Ads on Blog Search yet, but no doubt they will come). Not only that, it captures extra user data for a spot of mining.

The issue is this potentially distorts competition as badly as anything Microsoft or IBM ever did in their heydays – the fear that Google will build an X the minute one succeeds in anything, and subsidise it via its other operations so the original player can’t succeed, must be an issue.

I wonder which Googlestraw willl be the last one before the anti-trust camel is backed?

It was pointed out to me that one of the reasons the Financial Meltdown may not have made it into fair Social Medialand (see my post here) was that no SocMed geeks were writing about it. This is of course not strictly true – Umair Haque has been warning for a while of the coming Megapocalypse. . Paul Kedrosky, a paid up geek, has been blogging on the subject too for some time. Henry Blodget is (very publicly) ex Wall Street, though you have to treat his stuff with care, as another financial blogger, Graham Pieterz, shows. But to give him his due, SAI is the earliest place I know of to examine this impact on the Tech community.

(And to be fair, so have many other non techgeek bloggers and economists, but they tend to use dreary words like “correction”, “de-leverage”, “end of the 1930′s Kondratieff cycle” – its so depressing, who reads that stuff ? – even “downwave isn’t really the epitome of excitement)

And this is the problem – compared with the Dory-fish like attraction of Shiny Shiny new toys, and the California Cult like raptures of the Web 2.0 neo-hippies, the tarnishing of the World We Live In pales into insignificance. What is needed is some viral va-va-voom, some sexiness to make all this sad stuff more Sticky, a term that will capture the zero growth zeitgeist.

Nicholas Taleb uses the term “black swan” for the concept of the unpredictable event, ie seeing 1,000 white swans will not predict the black one. You can argue that it’s a lousy metaphor, but it serves the purpose of striking a strong chord. In this case, the Megapocalypse was not unpredictable – many have predicted it over the past few years – but its exact timing, impact etc were – though we knew it would be big.

We have only had shiny white swans in the tech news for so long, so the returning to the roost of the black ones is a fitting metaphor for Techpression 2.0.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) will reportedly debut later this month. Tech news outlets are widely reporting that the much-anticipated update will be available on April 29. Microsoft was not immediately available for comment.

The final version of Windows XP SP3 was slated for delivery during the first half of 2008, but Microsoft seems intent on downplaying the attention it might get in favor of pushing Windows Vista, especially in light of the uproar about extending the life of XP.

Tests by Devil Mountain Software show that Windows XP, coupled with Service Pack 3, runs some desktop computing tasks roughly twice as fast as Vista. Devil Mountain also discovered that SP3 offers a 10 percent performance boost over XP with SP2, while performance gains with SP1 for Vista were negligible.

Not Much New Here

Windows XP debuted in October 2001. The last update, SP2, was released in August 2004. SP3 is slated to be the last major upgrade of the OS. Like most service packs, XP SP3 combines fixes that were previously released.

Most of the fixes have already been available to users who keep their system updated though Windows Update or who visit Microsoft’s Download Center to download fixes individually.

That’s an important point, according to Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. Consumers who have diligently kept up to date with Microsoft downloads, he said, have a PC that operates much the same as PCs waiting for XP SP3.

“There is some new functionality for XP. Windows Server has a new feature called Network Access Protection. I believe Microsoft’s plan is to shift the client for Network Access Protection for XP in the service pack,” Cherry said.

Saving Time on Rebuilds

That said, one of the advantages of having SP3 in a bundle is making computer rebuilds easier. Service packs, Cherry said, can save…

An icon of the dot-com era is making a comeback of sorts. The Industry Standard launched Monday in a new online-only format, with news and analysis on the Internet economy and a social networking twist.

The resurrection comes 10 years after the weekly’s initial print launch in 1998. The magazine folded just three years later in the wake of massive layoffs in the dot-com sector and a precipitous fall in ad revenues.

At its height in 2000, the self-proclaimed “newsmagazine of the Internet economy” garnered revenues of $140 million and boasted more advertising pages than any other consumer magazine.

A year later, as the dot-com bubble burst around it, yearly revenue had dropped to $40 million. Despite a reputation of journalistic excellence and credibility, it closed its doors in August 2001.

At the time, the magazine’s payroll still included 180 employees. It goes live Monday at http://www.thestandard.com with a staff of four, along with about 50 outside contributors and bloggers, some of whom worked for the original Standard, according to general manager Derek Butcher.

Advertising sales will be handled by the Industry Standard’s parent company and sole investor, Boston-based International Data Group, a publisher of more than 300 magazines covering technology, digital entertainment and video games.

Aside from tech news, the San Francisco-based site will also feature a “prediction market” where users place virtual “bets” to forecast events in the industry, such as mergers, or how many of a certain gadget might sell by year’s end.

For instance, when news breaks that Microsoft wants to acquire Yahoo, betters can begin voting on whether Yahoo will accept the deal.

Users will have profiles and be able to bet against a group of friends or the whole market.

Those with the best track records will accumulate the most net worth and be able to wager more virtual cash on their next…