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Picasa, my favorite Windows photo-organizing software, has a great new upgrade from Google, which acquired the company a while back.
The funny thing here is that, though you will find Picasa referred to here and there as a "service," it's not really that; it's an old-fashioned, standalone desktop application with a bit of sharing coated on top. I'm not stating that as a criticism -- I love Picasa, and it's helped me keep track of the absurd quantities of photos of my kids I've taken over the past five years. Much as I love Flickr, there's no way I'm going to upload that volume of photos across the Net.
It's just odd to think of Google, the locus classicus of the new world of distributed web-based computing, doing this sort of product, and just giving it away. John Battelle has more here, noting that there is no business model of any kind behind Picasa. That worries me, only because I'd really like to keep using this software for a long, long time.
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Another turn of the technodialectic: Google implements a new HTML tag to defeat comment spam. Congrats to the Google/Blogger developers for implementing this. On first glance, looks like a smart solution: The rel="nofollow" tag as an attribute in an HTML link tells Google not to pay attention to the link for pagerank purposes. If your blogging tool is set to automatically insert this code into any links created by commenters on your blog -- and we should expect that now from SixApart, Blogger, Userland and anyone else in the biz -- then you pretty much have shot the horse out from under the comment-spammers, and they ought to go away. (Though Chuq Von Rospach says they won't as long as there's even a tiny fraction of vulnerable, un-upgraded blogging software.) More comment from Dave Winer, who loves the news, and John Battelle, who's not so sure.
Will this tool also somehow lock-in existing blog power relations, as a commenter on Battelle's blog complains? I dunno. It seems to me that there's still plenty of room in the blogosphere for links created by blog authors to point to newcomers. And commenters can still link away -- their links will only be followed by live readers, though, and not the Googlebot. On balance, sounds good to me. Of course, the techno-dialectic being what it is, the comment-spammmers will figure out some new, more devious scheme to subvert Google before long.
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