roam

I have to agree. My work laptop came with Vista. I tried getting along with it, but I didn't like it as much as XP. When working on a project, everything worked fine on XP and Ubuntu but not on Vista, so I had to switch to Ubuntu.

It was easier (at least for me) to come to grips with it even though I've never been an avid Linux user.

By now I've started working on a new project and decided to give Vista another chance. Two days later... I'm back in Ubuntu.

Why would you complain with Google? It's doing what it's supposed to do: index the web. Should we expect Google to know where the data was originally published? I do, because it's an important metric in determining PageRank besides the number of inbound links. But that doesn't mean Google shouldn't index it. It might simply be intended as a mirror of the first site.

In a recent court case in the Netherlands, some company A filed a complaint against a website because it ran a story about another company B that went bankrupt and mentioned the plaintiff in an unrelated story on the same page. Searching for the plaintiff's company name and "bankruptcy", Google would show you a summary that looked like company A had gone under. Does that make the website responsible? Is it Google's fault? The judge decided the website should take responsibility and fix it. I think that you're wasting your time when you're searching Google to find out whether your company has gone bankrupt.

In the case of spamxyz.org: report it as spam. In the case of the Dutch court case: use your common sense. In the case of newspapers crying about summaries in the search results: use robots.txt. But people should stop pointing at Google to fix all the problems on the internet. They could do a lot better, but there are plenty of scenarios in which you don't want Google to do decide on their own whether they should show a site in their search results or not.

PS: regarding Wikipedia data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_database

I agree with your last point: "stick with stuff you can migrate". But moving away from Google App Engine doesn't have to be a pain (depending on how much of the storage options you are using) and in the case of AppJet it's simply a matter of setting up "AppJet in a Jar": http://appjet.com/download.

Yes, a FAQ is certainly useful. But in the case of the Browseology FAQ and homepage, you have to take a step back and try to look at it through the eyes of a first time visitor.

Above the first input box there's a link with the text "then join". To me that looks like I have to create an account. Rephrase it.

But the number one problem I see is "your URL" and "the URL". Honestly, what does "Copy & paste your URL" mean? Do I have to enter amazon.com? Do you want the URL to my MySpace page? Even in the FAQ it isn't clear what kind of URL you're referring to.

Or maybe I'm just a bit dense ;)

Actually, such a standard exists: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.1.2.

I think Opera is (or was) the only browser to support this.

Mozilla Prism: http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/prism/