Oshkosh M-ATV MRAP at X-Games 17 (Los Angeles)

I've written about the MRAP previously, but it was quite an experience to see one of these mofos up close. The word is BIG!!

(The Navy set up a big recruitment station at the X-Games.)

The MRAP is a high-mobility mine-resistant ambush-protected combat vehicle. The units were developed as a key anti-insurgency vehicles, designed to protect soldiers from IEDs (improvised explosive devices). By 2005, in Iraq, roughly half of all combat casualties were due to IED attacks. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who retired in June, said the deployment of MRAPs in Iraq and Afghanistan has saved "thousands of lives." The Oshkosh M-ATV page is here.

Click to enlarge the image below:

An End to Internet Anonymity?

Actually, it's a terrible idea, because ending anonymity online would empower governments. Not everyone who writes anonymously is a stalking douchnozzle progressive nihilist. Although folks should think twice about using their real names, especially if they have strong moral standards. The progressive left won't stop until you're destroyed. (And sometimes you've gotta fight back.)

The topic's in the news, at London's Daily Mail, "'It has to go away': Facebook director calls for an end to internet anonymity."

Critics complain that the forced introduction of some kind of 'on-line passport' would damage the freedom of speech and blunt the internet as a tool for dissidents to speak up against oppressive governments.

Also, at AdWeek, "Erin Andrews, Randi Zuckerberg Dish on Digital Dilemmas While Chelsea Clinton details 'survival skill'."

Wizbang's Redesign

Check it out. It's smooth looking and modern.

Most of the blog updates folks are doing use the online magazine format, which honestly I don't love as much as the traditional reverse chronology. There are great blogs, for example, Lonely Conservative and Maggie's Notebook, but I'm still so resistant to change I guess I'd go with more of a Legal Insurrection look. Whatever happens, I'm looking forward to comment registration. As noted at Wizbang:

The Disqus comment system appears to be working out well. There are lots of features available to Disqus users that are documented in their knowledge base. As there are years of comments that have been imported from our old site, regular commenters may be able to merge their profiles and claim old comments. There’s even some tricks like being able the enter the @username of another commenter. While some do not like the fact that commenters must be registered, I think I’ve made it as easy as possible to leverage other identity systems as opposed to having to create a whole new persona. Requiring registered commenters makes for a better community and will allow us to police it more effectively.

This is exciting. I'm hoping to restore some of the previous vitality I had at the comments here. Wordpress is cool with the registration function, so that's a big incentive for change. I'm also talking to potential contributors to build a multi-author roster of right-bloggers.

Stayed tuned.

Googlization

A book review, from Evgeny Morozov, at The New Republic, "Don't Be Evil: Google and the Technocratic Conscience":

For cyber-optimists and cyber-pessimists alike, the advent of Google marks off two very distinct periods in Internet history. The optimists remember the age before Google as chaotic, inefficient, and disorganized. Most search engines at the time had poor ethics (some made money by misrepresenting ads as search results) and terrible algorithms (some could not even find their parent companies online). All of that changed when two Stanford graduate students invented an ingenious way to rank Web pages based on how many other pages link to them. Other innovations spurred by Google—especially its novel platform for selling highly targeted ads—have created a new “ecosystem” (the optimists’ favorite buzzword) for producing and disseminating information. Thanks to Google, publishers of all stripes—from novice bloggers in New Delhi to media mandarins in New York—could cash in on their online popularity.

Cyber-pessimists see things quite differently. They wax nostalgic for the early days of the Web when discovery was random, and even fun. They complain that Google has destroyed the joy of serendipitous Web surfing, while its much-celebrated ecosystem is just a toxic wasteland of info-junk. Worse, it’s being constantly polluted by a contingent of “content farms” that produce trivial tidbits of information in order to receive a hefty advertising paycheck from the Googleplex. The skeptics charge that the company treats information as a commodity, trivializing the written word and seeking to turn access to knowledge into a dubious profit-center. Worst of all, Google’s sprawling technology may have created a digital panopticon, making privacy obsolete.

Well, who's right?

If you've read Morozov previously you might have an idea. Either way, continue reading.

LulzSec Targets Murdoch-Owned Papers

At New York Daily News, "Turnabout: Internet hackers attack Rupert Murdoch, wreak havoc with The Sun's website." And New York Times, "Lulz Security Says It Hacked News Corporation Sites."

This is pretty nasty, but it's hard to feel bad for News International. Check The Real Sabu on Twitter.

And at Telegraph UK, "The Sun's website 'hacked by LulzSec'":

On Twitter, LulzSec also claimed to have hacked into News International email accounts and began posting what appeared to be passwords to individual email addresses as well as mobile numbers for editorial staff.

There were some indications that the information accessed may have been several years old.

One tweet mentioned a Sun email address for Rebekah Wade - the unmarried name of Rebekah Brooks, News International's chief executive.

Mrs Brooks has used her married name since 2009 and she left the The Sun to become a News International executive the same year.

It also posted a mobile number for Pete Picton, a former Sun online editor who left .

Also at TechCrunch, "Updated: The Sun and News International sites hacked, Lulzsec claims responsibility" (via Mediagazer).

End of Blogging?

The question's only slightly rhetorical.

John Hawkins tweeted last night, and he got me thinking:

The right side of the political blogosphere is dying. I don't think anything smaller than say 50k views a day will be relevant in 5 years.

I was, well, "Hmm ... I don't know ..."

I'd just seen Glenn Reynolds post on this the other day, and he linked to Technology Review, "Google+ Marks the End of Blogging as a Means of Personal Expression." I'd read that earlier, so I Googled, and came up with Felix Salmon's, "Is blogging dead?" There's an interview with The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal, and both Salmon and Madrigal stress the same point: Independent, single-author blogs are a dying breed:

... old-fashioned single-person blogs are largely a thing of the past, with the exception of enthusiastic practitioners in the fields they write about, be it banking or science or anything else. And those people normally blog independently, rather than as part of an old- or new-media company.

I've been blogging for 5 and a half years. I'm averaging probably 2,500 visitors a day, the majority of those through search. I don't have a large commentariat, for various reasons, not the least of which is that progressives trolls ruined the threads. But I keep plugging away because I enjoy it for me. I get my news and entertainment from blogging, and I have enough of a core readership to get feedback and encouragement to keep it up. Besides, I don't trust the MSM most of the time, so I feel an obligation to keep going, for the public good, however marginal my contribution might be.

In any case, I checked my blog ranking at Technorati. I'm still in the top 100 of political blogs, which surprised me. At one point American Power was ranked #40 at Technorati, and for a while I was in the top 50 at Wikio (I'm #94 now). Doug Ross recently ranked my blog #100 in the conservative blogosphere.

Blog rankings generally reflect the volume of incoming links, i.e., how many other blogs are linking to you. But it seems as though it's gotten more difficult to stay ranked, although the traffic has improved over the years, through search and through greater opportunities for networking and marketing. That said, change is in the air. I'm thinking about a Wordpress switch-over soon, transforming American Power into a more sleek, professional blog. I'm also thinking of soliciting a team of bloggers, people who share my ideological goals and a desire to expand the blog into a multi-media portal and neoconservative repository.

Anyway, I tweeted John Hawkins back and he said he was going to work up a post based on that earlier tweet. And he did: "The Slow, Painful Coming Death Of The Independent, Conservative Blogosphere." There's a lot of wisdom there, for example:

The market has ... become much more professionalized. When I got started, back in 2001, a lone blogger who did 3-4 posts a day could build an audience. Unless your name is Ann Coulter, you probably couldn’t make that strategy work today.

Instead, most successful blogs today have large staffs, budgets, and usually, the capacity to shoot traffic back and forth with other gigantic websites. Look at Redstate, which is tied into Human Events, Hot Air which connected with Townhall, Instapundit, which [is] a part of Pajamas Media, Newsbusters which is a subsidiary of the Media Research Center and other monster entities like National Review and all of its blogs, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, and the Breitbart media empire. An independent blogger competing with them is like a mom & pop store going toe-to-toe with Wal-Mart. Some do better than others, but over the long haul, the only question is whether you can survive on the slivers of audience they leave behind. This plays into #5.

Go read the rest.

John's got a couple of suggestions, and I'm going to be working on integrating those into my blogging soon.

Stay tuned.

More on Google+

I shared my thoughts already.

Here's Holy Taco, "The Minuses of Google+" (via Linkiest):

99% of social media is masturbation (the metaphorical kind). No one really needs it to keep in touch with their good friends, you probably talk to those people other places, like in person and other crazy things. You use social media to make jokes, post links you like, hilarious photos and tell everyone what you’re doing in status updates. It’s not social media so much as “I’m important” media. If anything, with its circles and segregation, Google + makes it harder to be lazy about telling people what you’re up to.

Long-Form Journalism Reborn

I never bought the notion that long-form was dead, but everything's hip for the moment on the Internet. Now, long-form essays are hip again. Demand is driven, paradoxically, by a backlash against instant gratification short-form technology (tweets, social networking, etc.) At the Independent UK, "The long-form resurrection: Will snappy websites kill off lengthy magazine reads?":

Last summer, the editor-in-chief of technology magazine Wired wrote and ran a cover story declaring, "The Web is Dead". A year earlier, the then managing editor of Time.com had rung the death knell on long-form reportage journalism. Wired's Chris Anderson claimed that newer, better ways to use the internet – apps, say – were pushing the conventional web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox et al) into terminal decline. Time's Josh Tyrangiel argued that the culture of rapid-fire news on the internet meant that Time magazine's distinctive essays were just "too long" to work on its website. In his view, the web had rendered the entire form obsolete.

Now, judging by an emerging online trend, both theories seem to have awkwardly mutated to produce a wobbly, exciting new truth: narrative journalism, the kind of expertly crafted piece that sprawls over thousands of words and swallows up a whole lunchtime to read, is far from dead. Thanks to nifty advances in technology (smartphones, tablets, ebook readers) it is undergoing a major revival on the internet. Classic writers of the genre – such as Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson – are now filtering through to a new, fast-growing audience.

In his 1972 New York magazine essay, "The Birth of the New Journalism" (available now at Instapaper), Tom Wolfe described the form as a "discovery, modest at first, humble, in fact, deferential, you might say, was that it just might be possible to write journalism that would... read like a novel". He, and Gay Talese (whose 15,000 word, 1966 Esquire piece, "Frank Sinatra has a cold", is considered one of the best long-form profile pieces ever written) "never guessed for a minute that the work they would do over the next ten years, as journalists, would wipe out the novel as literature's main event". Which, at its peak – particularly in the US, where the tradition really took hold – it almost certainly did. But this form of novelistic investigation has been in serious decline for the past decade. Long-form always takes considerable time and money – investments the print industry now finds it increasingly tricky to sustain. So, why the resurgent interest? Can it really all be down to more efficient ways of using the internet? Well, yes and no.

Keep reading.

Could Facebook Go the Way of Myspace?

I've thought about this, with the launch of Google+.

At Time, "Could What Happened to MySpace Happen to Facebook?":

MySpace fell from grace for several reasons. First, they sacrificed the service's integrity in pursuit of monetization. For those who remember, the user experience declined drastically once the service hit a critical mass.

We were bombarded by ads—highly irrelevant ones and many of a sexual nature (at least mine were). There came a point in time where I literally said to myself that the service had become unusable. I heard the same from a plethora as others as well. The turning point was when they lost control to the advertisers. Their monetization strategy was poor and because of that the site went downhill.

The second reason was because they failed to innovate in order to meet the needs of their users. In short, MySpace ran out of ideas. The site started with the humble idea of giving people their own spaces on the web but never evolved it into much more.

Facebook, on the other hand, has taken a different approach. They have not only been innovating and evolving the service to meet the needs of their users, but they have also been employing a business model that actually works for the service and is valuable to people. This model includes the subtle yet relevant placing of ads.
Facebook has innovated and monetized without sacrificing their network's integrity for the almighty dollar. Facebook also has another market force in their favor, and that is the philosophy of "sunk costs."

Continue reading.

I have two e-mails accounts, Facebook and Twitter, and the blog. Now there's Google+ and I've used it a bit. It's nice, but folks have to prioritize and economize. If Mark Zuckerberg doesn't lose his cool he and Facebook will be fine. Word has it that he blew the video chat launch. See: "Is Facebook’s Video Chat Really ‘Something Awesome’?" Mostly, it all just seems like so much. I think we're too interactive as it is. In any case, Althouse has an upbeat post in Google+, "'4 Reasons Artists Are Loving Google+'."

News International CEO Rebekah Brooks

As reported earlier, Britain's Guardian has been on the warpath during the Murdoch hacking scandal. Here's The Guardian on Rebekah Brooks of News International, "David Cameron and Rebekah Brooks: a special relationship":

Not since Dylan played the Albert Hall has there been a hotter ticket. MPs expected such demand for seats in the Boothroyd Room of Portcullis House next Tuesday that the appearance of Rebekah Brooks before the culture and media committee was due to be relayed by video to an overspill room – even before Rupert Murdoch and his son James performed the latest in a week of jaw-dropping U-turns and agreed to join her.

It is certain to be an occasion worth clearing your diary for. The last time Brooks condescended to be questioned by MPs, she made the striking admission that the Sun had paid police for information – a statement that she later explained did not mean that she knew of any actual cases of police being paid by her journalists. A decade, several arrests and an entire newspaper have passed since then, and this time there is rather more to talk about.

Murdoch senior's defence of his embattled empire will now be the main event, but it's the under-bill bout with Brooks that I'll be looking forward to most. Such has been the media preoccupation with Cameron's curiously trusting relationship with one former Murdoch editor (yes, I plead guilty) that his much closer embrace of Brooks has undergone little scrutiny.

That's the statement at the clip above, via the extraordinary roundup at the New York Times yesterday, "Updates on British Phone-Hacking Scandal."

Rupert Murdoch Agrees to Face Parliament

There's too much news for a roundup here.

Check Google's news page for Rupert Murdoch. See Mediagazer as well.

Also, at New York Times, "Murdochs Now Say They Will Appear Before Parliament."

LONDON — In an abrupt reversal, the News Corporation said on Thursday afternoon that Rupert Murdoch and his son James would testify next week before a British parliamentary panel looking into phone hacking. They will appear along with Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of the company’s beleaguered British newspaper group, known as News International.

Earlier in the day, the Murdochs had sent letters to the panel, the Commons Culture Select Committee, refusing an invitation to appear.

Plus, Rupert Murdoch's interviewed at Wall Street Journal, "In Interview, Murdoch Defends News Corp."

In his first significant public comments on the tabloid newspaper scandal that has engulfed his media empire, News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch vigorously defended the company's handling of the crisis but said it would establish an independent committee to "investigate every charge of improper conduct."

In an interview, Mr. Murdoch said News Corp. has handled the crisis "extremely well in every way possible," making just "minor mistakes."

News Corp. owns The Wall Street Journal.

RELATED: At WSJ, "News Corp. Caves as Support Fades."

Amazon to Battle Apple iPad With Tablet

At Wall Street Journal:

Amazon.com Inc. has battled Apple Inc. over digital books, digital music and mobile applications. Now the two companies are taking their clash to another front: the tablet market.

Amazon plans to release a tablet computer by October, people familiar with the matter said, intensifying its rivalry with Apple's iPad

While Amazon has long offered digital content on its website, it has lacked much of the hardware to go with it. Now the Seattle company hopes customers will use its tablet to buy and rent that content, said people familiar with its thinking.
An Amazon spokesman didn't respond to requests for comment.

Amazon's looming entry into the tablet market, which Chief Executive Jeff Bezos has hinted at in his appearances this year, is the latest example of how technology companies, once focused on a particular segment of the industry, are increasingly jostling one another on multiple fronts.

Amazon's sure becoming a major player all around. RTWT.

Amazon Wants Voter Referendum to Decide Online Sales Tax

At Los Angeles Times, "Amazon aims to have voters decide on sales-tax law."

I hate government by ballot box, although this one's a referendum rather than initiative, so what the heck? Besides, I miss running Amazon at the blog, and Governor Brown's a blithering idiot.

O.C. Teenager Pleads Guilty in Facebook Feud That Escalated to Violence

Online debates can get pretty nasty. And around here people have crossed the line. I'm still getting threats on RACIST = REPSAC = CASPER'S blog.

That kind of craziness never turns out well. At O.C. Register, "Teen pleads guilty in Facebook stabbing."

SANTA ANA – A teenage boy from Laguna Beach has been sentenced to a year in jail after pleading guilty to stabbing a former classmate in a feud authorities say started on Facebook.

Michael Jason Wilson, 17, avoided a possible 15-year sentence if his case had gone to trial and he was convicted of felony aggravated assault against the victim and two of his friends.

Wilson pleaded guilty Monday to felony assault with a deadly weapon with a sentencing enhancement for inflicting great bodily harm.

As part of the plea agreement, two other felony counts of assault with the same sentencing enhancements were dismissed, according to court records.

*****

According to authorities, Wilson and a former high-school classmate had an ongoing rivalry through Facebook. The dispute included text messages and e-mails, though authorities did not disclose the nature of the argument.

Wilson agreed to meet his rival, identified only as 17-year-old Julian C., at his home. Julian C. brought along three friends who waited in a nearby car.

Wilson stabbed Julian C. in the stomach with a 12-inch knife and also slashed the hands and arms of two of Julian C.'s friends when they intervened and were able to take the knife away from Wilson, according to authorities. The third friend of Julian C. was not injured.

Crazy people.

Milly Dowler Family Pressures Rebekah Brooks to Quit News International

At Yorkshire Post, "Do honourable thing and quit, Dowlers urge Rebekah Brooks."

RELATED: There was a really good piece earlier at Pajamas Media, from Mike McNally, "Victory for the Anti-Murdoch Alliance as 'Phone Hacking' Scandal Shuts UK Tabloid."

... there’s a widespread sense of Schadenfreude at seeing a publication that dealt in scandal and sleaze brought down by a scandal of its own, and I’m certainly no fan of the paper. However, there’s a disturbing political dimension to this affair. Few are talking about it – understandably, as no-one wants to be seen as trying to defend the paper’s appalling behavior – but the crusade against the NoW has been driven at least as much by the desire to damage the Murdoch empire and Cameron’s Conservative government as by any concern for those whose phones were hacked, or for the reputation of British journalism.

After the 2007 court case and jailings, the phone hacking affair appeared to be closed. It was the left-wing Guardian newspaper which reopened the saga with a series of reports in July 2009 – and it’s no coincidence that this was at the time when it was becoming clear that Murdoch was switching his allegiance, and that of his papers, from the Labour Party to the Conservatives. The story was enthusiastically taken up by the BBC, which coordinated its coverage with the Guardian; both organizations saw the phone-hacking story as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to attack both a powerful rival media group, and (through the Cameron-Coulson connection) the Conservatives. Just for good measure, and lest anyone doubt the political and business motivations involved, the New York Times piled on last year.

Other UK news organisations were slow in taking up the story, either because they were Murdoch owned, or sympathetic to Cameron, or because they knew their own journalists had also engaged in phone hacking and other illegality. But with the BBC driving coverage on its prime-time broadcasts, 24-house news channel, and website, the story became impossible to ignore, and the chance to damage Murdoch became irresistible to other rivals. Coulson’s resignation was the first victory for the anti-Murdoch alliance, and they’ve been keeping up the pressure in a bid to derail News Corp’s bid to take a controlling stake in British satellite broadcaster BSkyB.

I find it revolting, but check the Guardian's coverage for more information. They're out for blood over there.

Marc Andreessen on the Tech-Sector Bubble

Or non-bubble, to be precise.

At New York Times, "Bubble? What Bubble?":

Contrary to all the recent hype about a bubble, you’ve said that tech companies are actually undervalued. So in true 1999 fashion, should I take my life savings out of mutual funds and toss it into tech stocks?

I’m certainly not an investment adviser, but on a 30-year basis, these things are cheap. If you compare how big industrial companies like G.E. are valued compared with big tech companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Google and Apple, tech stocks have never been valued more poorly in comparison. So not only is there no bubble — these prices are reflective of the fact that the market still hates tech. This bubble talk is about everybody being unbelievably psychologically scarred from 10 years ago.

Your venture-capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is heavily invested in Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. You’re hardly an unbiased observer.

True, but the counterargument is I put my money where my mouth is.

Continue reading.

Google Makes Facebook Look Socially Awkward

At Wall Street Journal:

Mark Zuckerberg might want to fast-track Facebook's initial public offering.

In what appeared to be a hasty response to the launch of Google's rival social-networking product, called Google+, Mr. Zuckerberg on Wednesday unveiled Facebook's new video-chatting feature. He called it "super awesome." Too bad Google made the same feature available in 2008. Indeed, Facebook suddenly looks vulnerable. This could be bad news for investors who have recently paid top dollar for stock in Facebook in private sales.

Rule No. 1 when launching a social network: Make everyone wait in line. Exclusivity was how, in its early days, Facebook built buzz. For more than two years, you couldn't get in unless you had an email address ending in .edu. Google is using a similar strategy with Google+.

Facebook should take note that Google used the strategy before to kneecap Yahoo in all-important email, a key driver of Yahoo's traffic. Then Google rolled out Gmail—but only by invitation at first.

Rule No. 2 is to deliver a better service. Adopting a new social network could prove similar to adopting a new email address: Many will try it out, but to keep using it, they have got to be given good reason. That Gmail offered significantly more storage space than typical Web mail meant millions were willing to make the switch. Similarly, Google+ offers upgrades on what many perceive to be Facebook's shortcomings.

For starters, Google+ gives users a handy way to organize their social contacts into different "circles"—friends, relatives, colleagues, etc.—with which they can share appropriate things. Though Facebook now offers the option to create "Groups," users broadcast their information to everyone by default.

Google+ also offers group video chats. That is why Facebook's announcement of one-on-one video on Wednesday seemed to fall short. Facebook has yet to introduce group video chat.

The biggest hurdle for Google+ is getting users, of course. But it is integrating the service with Gmail, which already has 240 million unique users world-wide, according to comScore. Meanwhile, the user experience on Facebook is a victim of the site's success. Users have accumulated so many online "friends" it can be difficult to organize them. And users often feel assaulted by too much or irrelevant social information, like Zynga game updates. Ultimately, Google+ is a chance for social networkers to start over.

Still more at the link.

Interesting.

And see Midnight Blue, "My Thoughts on Google +."

RELATED: "Managing Google Plus Privacy Settings [Google+]." And, "How to Disable Google Plus Email Notification."

Evolution of the Media: Back to the Future

I've been referring to today's mass media as the "partisan press" for some time. Left-leaning critics long ago attacked Rush Limbaugh and Fox News for biased reporting that wasn't "real news," but of course most folks understand the mainstream press as progressive, and it's gotten worse in recent years, especially during the Obama administration.

A related point is raised at The Economist, "A special report on the news industry: Bulletins from the future." There's a huge graphic at that link, and some background information, and then this summary:

Clearly something dramatic has happened to the news business. That something is, of course, the internet, which has disrupted this industry just as it has disrupted so many others. By undermining advertising revenue, making news reports a commodity and blurring the boundaries between previously distinct news organisations, the internet has upended newspapers’ traditional business model. But as well as demolishing old ways of doing things, it has also made new ones possible. As patterns of news consumption shift, much experimentation is under way. The internet may have hurt some newspapers financially, but it has stimulated innovation in journalism.

And check GigaOm for an analysis with lots of links to The Economist's report: "Back to the future: Is media returning to the 19th century?" This one, from The Economist, gets to the nub of things, "Coming full circle: News is becoming a social medium again, as it was until the early 19th century—only more so." And from the conclusion there:

The biggest shift is that journalism is no longer the exclusive preserve of journalists. Ordinary people are playing a more active role in the news system, along with a host of technology firms, news start-ups and not-for-profit groups. Social media are certainly not a fad, and their impact is only just beginning to be felt. “It’s everywhere—and it’s going to be even more everywhere,” says Arianna Huffington. Successful media organisations will be the ones that accept this new reality. They need to reorient themselves towards serving readers rather than advertisers, embrace social features and collaboration, get off political and moral high horses and stop trying to erect barriers around journalism to protect their position. The digital future of news has much in common with its chaotic, ink-stained past.

Be sure to read that whole thing. Arianna Huffington's point is especially interesting, considering how well she's made out with new media. But most important is how everyday people are producers of news. That's one of great things about blogging. I like sharing my life and politics and sometimes I've not only offered original reporting on the news, but I've also become part of the news.

The Future of Space

We need a space program. The end of the Space Shuttle Program makes us think about our priorities and world preponderance. America's not relinquishing scientific leaderships just yet, thank goodness.

There's an appraisal at New York Times, "3, 2, 1, and the Last Shuttle Leaves an Era Behind" (via Memeorandum).

Also at USA Today, "Shuttle ends 30-year run, but U.S. will be back":

Though shuttles will have launched 135 times with unique achievements — and two catastrophic failures that claimed the lives of 14 courageous astronauts and reminded a stunned nation of the price of pioneering — the program never did vastly expand the human presence in space.

But fret not. The end of the shuttle is not a signal that America is becoming less adventurous. It is simply the latest indication that technology advances in fits and starts, and rarely along the trajectories projected by the experts.

America will be back with a new manned space vehicle at some point. This may happen for political reasons if China, or some other nation, goads us into action by embarking on an ambitious program of its own. And it will happen for a variety of reasons when engineers overcome the one barrier that has frustrated them — the prohibitive costs of getting the first hundred miles or so off the Earth's surface.

In the meantime, let's step back and consider the extraordinary age that we have created ...

Google to Retire Blogger!

The brand name "Blogger," that is.

With the launch of Google+ there's some other developments in store as well, called "brand unification."

See Mashable!, "EXCLUSIVE: Google To Retire Blogger & Picasa Brands in Google+ Push."

Say goodbye to the Picasa and Blogger names: Google intends to retire several non-Google name brands and rename them as Google products, Mashable has learned.

The move is part of a larger effort to unify its brand for the public launch of Google+, the search giant’s social initiative.

Blogger and Picasa aren’t going away, of course — they’re two of Google’s most popular products. Instead, according to two sources familiar with the matter, Google intends to rename Picasa “Google Photos” and Blogger will become “Google Blogs.” Several other Google brands are likely to be affected, though our sources made it clear that YouTube would not be rebranded. The technology giant shut down Google Video, its failed web video service, in May.

Meanwhile, it looks like Ann Althouse has gotten the full archives from Google, and should be making her switch-over soon. See, "'Hello. I am on the Blogger team and am one of the guys who has been helping Ann with her blog...'"