It is being reported that Microsoft is trying to pay News Corp. to “de-index” their search results from Google. Rupert Murdoch (billionaire tyrant) has hinted that he’d like to prevent Google from spidering the websites for the companies that News Corp. controls. Ironically enough, what he wants can be done today for free using the appropriate rules in robots.txt.

If this report is true, it sure seems like a desperate attempt to gain search engine market share by Microsoft. What might really happen if this deal goes through? I’ve got to believe that viewership at the various sites would drop considerably. “The masses” know how to use Google to find stuff. If the stuff they’re looking for disappears, will they be willing (or knowledgeable enough) to use Bing to find it? I’m not sure that’s the case. Should this scenario play out, I can see things going one of two ways: either Microsoft wins and gains market share, or both Microsoft and News Corp. lose big time.

Gizmodo has a good take on this situation, claiming simply that, in the end, we’ll all lose. This will definitely be an interesting thing to watch in the coming months.

Has anyone seen the following bug with the Amazon wish list system? When I purchase something from my list, the purchased item is no longer automatically removed. Instead, it reports a “quantity received” value, and apparently must be manually removed from the list. This is highly annoying, and applying the “unpurchased” filter doesn’t affect the purchased item’s visibility.

Am I the only one seeing this problem?

I just found out that Intuit will acquire Mint for $170 million. Though I’m not surprised to hear about this, I’m a little disappointed. Intuit is the company that owns Quicken, so there are now fewer players in this game (which is never good). Time will also tell whether or not the service gets any better or worse as a result of this acquisition. The recent updates to Mint were spectacular, so I’m hoping their momentum continues. Being sucked into a large company, however, is never an easy transition. According to the Mint CEO, Mint will remain a free service, though I can imagine Intuit charging users for a “premium” version of this tool in the future. Only time will tell where this goes.

I have yet to check these out, but it looks like the folks over at Mint.com (which I recently wrote about) have made things easier in various places around the site. The biggest improvement for me is that you can now view a detailed time line of your net income, with way more stats than before. I am very excited about this new feature, and am looking forward to checking it out this evening.

Update: The new updates to Mint are outstanding! Everything I’ve wanted in the tool, plus more, is here. An already great tool has just gotten even better.

Way back in January, I bit the bullet and signed up for an account at Mint.com, a free, web-based personal finance tool. Moving into a new house had brought with it a substantial amount of financial responsibility, and I wanted an easy way to track where my money was going. Now that I’ve been using it for 7 months or so, I thought I’d post a few thoughts on the service.

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Jeffrey Zeldman has written an interesting article on URL shortening and, more specifically, how he rolled his own using a plugin for WordPress. He also points to an excellent article written by Joshua Schachter, describing the benefits and pitfalls of link shortening utilities. Both articles are worthy reads. I suggest reading Joshua’s article before Jeffrey’s.

Do you use URL shortening services? I mainly use bit.ly at Twitter, mostly because that’s what everyone else seemed to use. Have you found some services to be better than others?

I’ve bitten the proverbial bullet and joined twitter. You can follow me (if you’re so inclined) at my oh-so-clever username: jonahbishop. I’ll be using the service for small things that aren’t quite worth a blog post (it will not take the place of this site). We’ll see how it goes over time.

Frustratingly enough, when I signed up for twitter, the site was having major problems. Thankfully, things seem to be back to normal now. I’ve noticed a strange thing with the service, however. After climbing into the twitter pool, I noticed a number of leeches attaching themselves to my account. In other words, a number of random people started following me for no apparent reason (I recognize none of them). Does anyone else here who uses twitter see the same thing? Is there a way to stop it? Are these people simply spammers out to get “trackback” style web-cred?

You’ve no doubt seen the commercials for the “free” triple credit score reports, or the “learn to work at home” packages on TV. In most of these cases, a URL is provided in the ad for you to visit. For the observant among us, note that the URL changes. Most often, a number appears at the end. For example, workathome.yes.you.can might become workathome58.yes.you.can and then workathome132.yes.you.can. This observation leads us to our Internet Safety Tip of the Day:

If the URL in an advertisement changes on a regular basis, you should stay away!

Especially since those “free” reports will actually cost you $30 a month.

This tip brought to you by the Internet Safety Council, the letter D, and support from viewers like you. Thank you.

In a surprising move, Time Warner Cable is scrapping the bandwidth cap tests for Rochester, NY. Not only that, but it looks like TWC will be shelving the tiered pricing tests across the board, while “the customer education process continues.” Maybe the internet works after all.

Jeffrey Zeldman has pointed his readers to an interesting article entitled Digg, Facebook Stealing Content, Traffic, Money From Publishers? The article focuses on the recently launched DiggBar, and the negative effects it’s having on the web. I gave up on Digg long ago, and this just furthers my intent to stay away from the site. With shady practices like this, it doesn’t deserve my attention.