Last night, I got out the Dell laptop from the office and decided to finally do two things: accept all Windows updates I'd been neglecting, hopefully speeding up the device, and more importantly, add Apple's recently introduced Safari 3.0 browser for the platform. After a quick download and reboot, we were using what I believe to be the best Web browser out there on a decidedly sucky platform. While the application is great, and I've already made it my default browser for Windows, I was disappointed to see I couldn't log in to my .Mac account and retrieve all my bookmarks. I hope Apple plans to soon integrate this feature into the Windows browser.

That's the background behind my most recent contribution to The Apple Blog, titled Seeking .Mac For Windows Safari. Per agreement with them, I will not be cross-posting the piece, but instead, have provided a link. Enjoy.

Overnight, from Sunday to Monday, the number of reported RSS subscribers to my blog dropped by more than a third. Yet this isn't a true gauge of a reader exodus. Instead, it appears that Google has suddenly, without warning, turned off the company's reporting statistics to individual bloggers. As Google Reader is among the most popular RSS readers out there, this simple on-off switch is having dramatic impact on the statistics of popular bloggers everywhere, some of whom report losing thousands of readers.


My RSS Feed Subscriber Stats Take a Dive

Feedburner's user forums, where customers share experience's with the Web's most popular RSS syndication engine, shows the ensuing calamity, with headlines like the dramatic "Lost over 50 subscribers in one day???????????" and "My subscriber count dropped by more than 5,500 today!" to the more analytical "Google FeedFetcher not reporting subscribers". For bloggers to whom the number of RSS feed readers indicates a certain level of self-worth, or may even drive advertising rates, the reduced transparency by Google is possibly seen as a severe ego blow.

The Feedburner team is working to determine the source of the problem, but all signs point to Google. Earlier this year, Google made headlines by starting to report user statistics, adding to RSS populations across the board, but this now two-day outage is causing the reverse effect, as what goes up, must come down.

The problem is hardly isolated, as you can see from Google, Where Are My Readers? and Problème Feedburner - Google confirmé, surely the tip of the iceberg.

As Google continues to own more and more of my data, and John Battele and others are getting Google fatigue, and outages like the recent blip with Google Reader stay in my memory, my warm and fuzzy feelings toward the world's best search engine are certainly fading.

The way that Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 was a wakeup call and turning point in the public opinion around the War on Iraq may only have been the controversial filmmaker's opening salvo on the way the American people view their way of life, and the way they trust their government and big business to tell them the truth or offer them the best option available.

Moore's follow-on, 'Sicko', which addresses the state of our healthcare industry, and compares it negatively with universal coverage seen elsewhere in the world, is incredible, a must see for anybody who pays taxes, pays for health benefits, or intends to gain medical care in this country at some point in their life. And it's already available on the Internet, if you know where to look, weeks before its planned debut in the theaters by the end of the month.

While Fahrenheit 911 was seen as starkly political, divided in red state/blue state mentalities, Sicko makes no such alignment. It follows individual American's stories as middle-class couples fight off bankruptcy due to co-pays and premiums from cancer or heart disease. We see a woman whose 18 month old baby is turned away from an out of network hospital with a 104-degree fever, only to die somewhere else. We hear the stories of volunteers who worked at Ground Zero who have come down with debilitating respiratory problems, only to be denied care.

While allusions are made to Nixon's opening up the HMO system, and Bush/Cheney's promises to support our troops and citizens ring comparatively hollow, this is not an attempt to recruit a generation of liberal Decmocrats. Instead, it is a call for change, made ever so stark by the seeming utopia found elsewhere that has me wondering why my wife and I have poured tens of thousands of dollars each of the last several years into a system that doesn't work.

What I strongly advise for you to do is find the movie online wherever you can, and watch it. Then, make sure you take yourself and as many people as you care about to the theater when it opens. Those people who choose not to see it because of what they may think of Michael Moore, or what they might think universal coverage represents, are keeping themselves as close-minded as the Flat Earth Society.

So take a few cues from Slashdot (Michael Moore's New Film Leaked To BitTorrent) and Webomatica (Watch Sicko at Google Video) and get your copy. It is bound to change the way you think about how you go to the doctor and pay your bills today. I know I'll be watching it again.

To debut early Monday morning on Athletics Nation...

Most of the time when we think about the A's, we think of their activities on the field. But off the field, they remain a team, looking to one another to find friendships and learn just a little bit more about the rest of the players in the clubhouse. A's second baseman, Mark Ellis, guides us through a common game of word association, with the A's.


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