David Notik

Shalom can mean either hello or goodbye in Hebrew.

In this case it means hello. Today, Google announced the official launch of its operations in Israel.

From one article:

Woodside added that Google would “convert” most of its products to Hebrew within the next 18 months.

From another article:

"Israelis are chronic searchers. The search is the main use they make of Internet, while for Americans, the main use of Internet is e-mail. The Israeli surfer adopts technologies faster," TheMarker quoted Brand as saying.

and:

And then there was snow. By Sunday, New York City was blanketed in it, and I eventually set out from my city apartment with no plan or purpose.

East 73rd Street.

A pleasant calm, a magical serenity, and yet the air abuzz with an almost electric positive energy. Smiling faces, a child's shriek and a burst of his father's laughter from afar.

2nd Avenue bus lines still running.

Warm bundles of people, a dazzling array of colors and clothing. Dapper doormen scraping concrete with their shovels as they work to be the first to clear the front of their building.

So Seattle didn't win the Super Bowl. Bummer for us Seattelites, thrilled to even just see the Hawks make it to the Bowl for their first time. Next year, perhaps.

But hey, the commercials were great. And this year, all the commercials are being made available after the game, including on Google Video.

While checking them out, I noticed Google Video now lets me embed videos in my own pages. Yet another small step for Web kind.

So, here are my two favorites:

Hummer commercial. And no, I don't endorse huge gas-guzzling personal vehicles.

The United States government asked that leading search engines give over information on what their users search for. It said it wanted this information as part of the Bush administration's appeal over COPPA, the Child Online Privacy Protection Act -- more specifically, to prove that child pornography was indeed a serious problem warranting government regulation.

Yahoo, AOL, and MSN complied. Google, however, resisted. After narrowing its initial request, the government now wants all search queries for an entire week -- quite a lot of data, considering Google processes hundreds of millions of searches a day. And the information would not contain any personally identifiable information. Still, Google is resisting the pressure, saying it will fight the request "vigorously".

Google cited various reasons it would not comply, from the significant resources necessary to complete the request to the fact that it's not a party in the government's case and its request was "overreaching". But what they've really done is throw the case into the spotlight, prompting novel questions about privacy in a connected world.

Google just announced the ability to take your Google personalized homepage with you on the go. Called Mobile Personalized Home, the service lets you see the same content you customized on your PC.

I've said it before: Google does personalized homepages correctly. I use it to watch my e-mail, weather, news, stocks, movie times, and even subscribe to feeds from other sites -- all in one clean, simple interface. Now, I can get it on my cellphone.

I tried it, and it was mostly a breeze. (I wasn't able to see the Personalized Home link with "www.google.com" entered in my phone, but "www.google.com/xhtml" had the link). I logged in, and stuff from my personalized homepage was there.

True, clean, easy integration. As the Web matures, and information becomes more meaningful and connected, services like Google's personalized homepage let us avoid the clutter (read: no ads) and see this information on our own terms (read: not picked by editors).

Google gets this. This, my friends, is why so many love Google's products.

Update. The title of page on my mobile phone is "iGoogle" -- is this indicative of something to come? In fact, that explains what the "/ig" part is in the URL used to get to the PC version of the personalized homepage. And iGoogle.com goes to the personalized home page as well.

Used this new service? Thoughts on other services like it? Post a comment, and share.

I started a blog so I could join the perpetual conversation. Recent innovations make it much easier to participate (take blogging itself), and the current culture surrounding online conversation encourages free exchange and sheer human dialogue. Rather than meticulously craft each post (something it's hard to find the time for), it's important to post often, and post freely. I plan to incorporate that mindset, and to participate in the conversation more frequently going forward.

I've also encountered other issues. I want to post thoughts and opinions on noteworthy current events, but I also want to share longer pieces on the bigger picture. I want to post news as it happens, but follow up later with a more comprehensive opinion. I want to write for a technical audience, but I want everyday folk to glean something too. Doing all this cohesively is a challenge.

In the coming weeks, I'll experiment with better presentation on my blog. And I invite your comments and suggestions. Use the comment form and participate!

I decided that once I start talking to the world, there's no turning back. This is only the beginning.

An updated Google Video, announced Friday during Google's keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas has just been launched. It's complete with the ability to purchase high quality content from a wide selection of initial premium content providers like CBS and the NBA. In tandem, Google now allows anybody to upload video content and set a price, with no minimum or maximum.

It's all part of a new era of television, micropayments, and more choice in how we get and use all types of content. Things I'm passionate about. I'll have more to say later this week.

The high-tech sector in Israel is booming once again, with the amount of workers this year reaching levels just shy of those seen before the dot com bust. Intel, the world's leading computer chip maker and one of Israel's largest private sector employers, announced it plans to spend $3.5 billion dollars to build another Israel-based plant.

Read the full article from News.com.

Things have come a long way for Israel. As the story says:

"...in 2000, Israel was hit not only by the dot-com collapse, but also by the Palestinian uprising, which drove away foreign players who had been crucial to high-tech development here."

Now, Israel's economy is growing steadily, with the tech sector playing a vital role.

"Israel now has more than 70 companies listed on the Nasdaq, more than any other country outside of the United States."

Yet another sign that the technology sector is doing well worldwide. And being Jewish (though I am American born and I have yet to visit Israel), a testament to the Jewish state's growing contribution to the information revolution.

There's news today that Google has filed documents with the SEC that shed new light on its alliance with AOL. Google plans to create a separate Limited Liability Company to hold its AOL interests (called HoldCo in the documents), and in July of 2008 Time Warner has the right to buy it back for appraised fair market value, or the holding company can go public itself.

This of course shows that Google really isn't concerned with diluting its own business with AOL assets, and their main concern is the attention of AOL's userbase. I believe Google wants AOL to succeed on its own, as its still an easy way for many to get onto the otherwise unwieldily Internet. The more people on the Internet, the more people can use Google's services.

Google will show AOL how to be viable on the open Internet. After that, it might make more sense for Time Warner to manage it themselves. My prediction is that Google proves to be the best thing that ever happened to AOL. On the other hand, not everyone agrees it's good for Google.

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Also of note in the SEC filings about the alliance is the detail that Google Talk users will have to first register with the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) service to be able to communicate with AIM users. (One implication of this might be that rather than blindly let Google users connect to AIM users, AOL instead has knowledge of these users and can count them as part of their own userbase.) The filings clearly state that you'll be able to connect to AIM via the Google Talk client, and they make no mention of other clients.

But Google is firmly and publicly about open communications and the ability to choose your client. So it seems safe to say that when I register my Google Talk account with AIM, I will be able to (eventually perhaps) then speak to AIM users from any client that supports the Google Talk service (and any client can, really).

With this scenario, Google makes inroads towards open communications on an open Internet.

Updated.