I rarely look beyond the front page at “Slashdot”:http://slashdot.org these days because any insigtful community commentary is usually lost among the thought-free braying of anti-Microsoft zealots. A couple times a week though, I’ll look beyond the front page, and if I manage to find an insightful or informed post, I might even click on the author and read anything else they’ve posted recently.

Last night I was reading a thread about apple starting to distribute video via the iTunes music store when I came across a poster who goes byAs Seen On TV. He was making some well considered and well informed points about Apple’s place in the content business, and he was using the royal “we” when representing Apple’s position.

He’s clearly an Apple employee, and people are “already speculating”:http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=148958&cid=12485560 about who he is (assuming, no doubt incorrectly, that he is near the top of the hierarchy.)

A blog forSparkle Body Spray. This might be worse than “Yub”:http://www.yub.com.

At least they don’t appear to be censoring comments. Four of six are critical of the entire concept (the other two appear to be shills).

To be honest, I feel gross even linking to it, so I put in a no-follow attribute so as not to help their google rank.

via “Gaping Void”:http://www.gapingvoid.com

Google has some new beta offering called “Google Web Accelerator”:http://webaccelerator.google.com/ which promises to speed your web browsing experience. Sounds, great, right?

Conceptually, the accelerator isn’t all that different from the web caches used by a lot of ISPs and large corporations. Google basically keeps up to date copies of popular web pages and then transfers them to you using their superior servers and connectivity.

If widely used, this could mitigate “The Slashdot Effect” which often brings small sites to their knees when they suddenly find themselves featured on that popular website.

Which actually brings up another point. Often times, people will add a link to a version of the page from the Google Cache to the early comments of a Slashdot thread so that people can read the article even if the site has been swamped by the sudden burst of traffic. The accelerator is in some ways like an upgrade to the google cache.

Google also uses some other tricks, like anticipating what users might want to see and downloading the page before they click on it. Also, to save bandwidth (their’s probably, more than your’) if a page changes that you already have on your PC, it will only send the part of the page that has changed.

When I started this entry, I’d planned to post about how it was a fools bargain to turn over so much information to Google about browsing habits, but then it occured to me, they’ve long been collecting pretty much the same information, at a lot lower cost to themselves, from any user with the Google toolbar installed with the PageRank indicator turned on.

Of course, I’ve not had PageRank turned on for years. The value of the little guage in the toolbar is far less than the intrusion of them tracking my browsing behavior. This would seem to be an attempt to try to strike a new bargain with users to get at that same data.

I’m sitting at the University Village outpost of Zoka. Next to me are a couple of guys from Delicious Monster, who make a cataloging application for the Mac called Delicious Library.

They have been bitching loudly for the past 10 or 15 minutes while one of them seems to be Instant Messaging with the rep for some sort of Mac dealer chain (maybe the Apple Store).

At the root, it is natural comiseration about the frustrations of maintaining a business relationship, but the attitude is rather arrogant and negative, it’s being spoken loudly in a public place and the result is that it makes me not like them very much. I wonder what will happen if Steve Jobs takes and interest in what they are doing and launches a competing product. Will their arrogance be any match for Steve’s?