2nd Annual Silicon Valley Wordpress Meetup!

Yes, I was there! Even though I primarily blog on blogger, I was at the Wordpress meetup today. And I got some free Wordpress schwag as well (no, I'm not referring to pot), a T-shirt and a laptop sticker. I also got to meet up with various users/contributors and one of the lead developers (who I sat next to, woohoo!), Ryan Boren.

I was a little disappointed with the whole meet up though. Why? Well, two reasons. Firstly, the turnout was low, which wasn't that big of a deal for me. And secondly, I was hoping the organizers would get a little down and dirty with implementations and code; but considering that this was my first barcamp meetup, I guess that was normal. The meetup was held at Building 43 at Googleplex (the Google HQ) and we were treated with dinner as well. However, the best part was that I got to see the unreleased backend of Wordpress; it is going to roll out early next year. Ryan's having a baby and then there are the holidays, so the original date had to be postponed (even though the Wordpress site says otherwise).

I am planning to attend the monthly South Bay Bloggers meetup this December as well. It is being held at the Coffee Society on Stevens Creek, right opposite to De Anza College in Cupertino.

Cricket on Google

Apparently, it's good to have desis working at Google. Google's added a new feature with which by searching for something like "cricket Pakistan" would show the current score on the main Google search results page. For more info, refer to the Google blog over here.

Google Population Statistics

Interested in checking out graphical representations of the world's population? Well, the pinster, found me this tool on Google. It's quite sad when you check out certain areas like Africa, Rwanda, etc. You can find the tool here.

Google Does No Evil?

Google has been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately. It started off about a week ago when a Watch Dog organization stated that Google ranked worst off when it came to privacy, even worse off than rivals Microsoft and Yahoo.

Then came the news about Google's anti-trust case against Microsoft. Why? As it is, Microsoft introduced a system of widgets in Windows Vista which is similar to widgets in Apple's Mac OS X. However, Google went along and filed a case against Microsoft for something that should have been a part of Windows in the first place. This according to Google keeps people from using Google Desktop, which is Google's version of widgets. I believe that this is more of a cry baby approach to dealing with the situation.

Last, but not the least, there was a flaw found in Google Video which enabled unauthorized access to one's MySpace account when a Google Video was embedded on a MySpace profile. There's more information on the issue available here.

Google is just another company unlike what a lot of computer geeks wish to believe. Google is not run by the Jedi Council and is out in search of the dollar just like any other company in existence. If Microsoft would do a bunch of things, like Mary Jo points out in her blog, there's a lot of noise. However, when Google does something similar, everyone seems to cheer it on.

It's funny how it goes, how people try to separate things into the right/wrong categories when there is no right and wrong, just a difference of opinion.