Google once claimed its stakes in the search wars as the site with the clean, uncluttered interface that challenged you to "Feel Lucky". With expansion into paid for search ads, a host of desktop software tools including Google Desktop and Google Earth, and new Web features like GMail, Blogger, the Google Toolbar, Google News, Froogle, Google Pages and more, one has the option to find nearly as much data on Google as one associates with more established portal sites - namely Yahoo!.

Yet another wall falls down today with the debut of Google Finance. Rather than forge their own way with a "Moneygle" site or some other such nonsense, this page is ripped right from the Yahoo! playbook. With Yahoo! Finance having a significant headstart, Google Finance aims to offer stock charts, financial news, chat rooms and many of the familiar items we've come to expect from Yahoo! Finance and other similar sites on the Web.

I've used many of Yahoo!'s stock sites and functions with near-exclusivity for years, especially with the quasi-demise of the Excite@Home franchise. (I started with my.excite.com rather than my.yahoo.com) It should be interesting to see if Google can offer a superior service - one strong enough to push me to move over - but it better be worth the recreation of all my custom stock portfolios and news sources...

More reports on this announcement:
CNET: Google To Roll Out Its Own Finance Site
Forbes: Google Rolls Out Financial Site
San Jose Mercury News: Google Launches Financial Web Site
SearchEngineWatch: Google Launches Google Finance
Silicon Beat: Google Unleashes Google Finance

Already with 17 full seasons under its belt, The Simpsons is the longest-running entertainment series on television, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, Fox just signed on for two more seasons, the show's 18th and 19th, which extends the contract through the 2007-2008 season. A Simpsons junkie myself, it's incredible to realize that there are children driving on the roads today who have never known a world without the wacky antics of Marge, Homer, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, not to mention the hundreds of other characters who have made the show unique. By the end of the two new seasons, these Simpsons era teens should be graduating from high school. (Unless they opted to instead watch the full DVD sets from the first seven seasons released so far instead of doing their homework.)

When the show first debuted, I was too young for my parents to be comfortable with my watching, especially on Sunday nights. It was too irreverent. Now, owning all seven DVD sets, and having imbibed reruns to my full content, I'm a quote-spewing, analogy reciting, Conan O'Brien worshiping fool. While it seems the show has lost its way over the last five or eight years, there are still precious few comedies that can compete with the ridiculousness the town of Springfield offers. The amusement for me lies in the fact there are countless references to sophisticated books, arts, and film - double entendres and wise cracks clearly not aimed for the pre-teen set. I stress to others how intellectual the show is and I usually get blank stares in return, but it's quite hilarious on all levels. I just hope I'm not embarrassed by whatever watered-down plot lines the newest generation of writers comes up with.

By all measures, the launch of Microsoft's (MSFT) Ultra Mobile PC, Origami, was a dud. People are seeing it as yet another attempt for the software giant to force the world to adopt tablet computers, when that market may simply not exist. While Origami was largely expected to compete with everything from the iPod to Sony's Playstation Portable, it's recognized as being just yet another subnotebook - too large to put in your pocket, and too small to replace your laptop. Quite the niche, eh? (See: CoolTechNews: Another Failure for Microsoft)

But the company's not done. Dean Takahashi of the beleaguered Mercury News is claiming that in a separate project, Microsoft is planning a device that primarily acts as a video game player, and also plays music. It's suggested the machine is being championed by the group behind the XBox 360, and it too will compete with - you guessed it - Apple's (AAPL) iPod and Sony's Playstation Portable. The machine's debut, much like Windows next generation operating system, Vista, is not expected for more than a year. Undoubtedly, we will continue to hear rumors about this constantly until then, and when it too fails, Microsoft will go after the iPod ... again.

From the age of 10 or so, I read the local paper every day - whether that was the Appeal-Democrat, which served the Marysville/Yuba City metropolis in Northern California, the Chico Enterprise Record in Chico, or the San Francisco Chronicle when I started attending UC Berkeley in college. For a long time, I knew that I wanted to make a career out of news reporting for newspapers. I held an internship at the 35,000 circulation Chico Enterprise Record, and wrote as a staff reporter for the 23,000 circulation Daily Californian in Berkeley, covering the crime beat, and dabbling in city council news or the UC regents.

Even in college, one of my two majors was Mass Communications, and I entertained thoughts of an internship at places like the Sacramento Bee, when offered it by a visiting speaker to one of my upper division journalism courses.

But by the time I was a junior, the Web had struck full-force, and as the Online Editor for the Daily Cal, I was keenly aware that the Web was the future, and the newspapers, as we knew them, represented the past. With access to the Web, I could gain sports scores and stock quotes instantly that were seriously outdated by the time they reached the next day's paper. I could even read editorial positions on papers across the country or the world, well beyond the local smokeshop or newsstand. And when it was clear that there was much more opportunity to focus on my Web efforts than as a journalist, I followed that route into Silicon Valley.

Which leads us to today's topic. Newspaper circulations are falling across the country, and in those areas where Web access is most rampant, the decline was most steep. According to a report in November of 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle's circulation fell more than 16% in a six-month period. Now, with major transitions at Knight Ridder's newspapers, the Silicon Valley's last great paper, the San Jose Mercury News, is up for sale to the highest bidder, and people are concerned that its high journalistic ideals may fall by the wayside. However, the Merc, as it's known, has long been a Web pioneer, and I would assume its tech-rich reader base can put up with the idea of them skinnying down a few reporters and possibly going Web-only. With access becoming ubiquitous, and news on the Web being more timely, maybe it's a bunch of noise about nothing.

We stopped receiving the Chronicle by sophomore year of college, and have never resigned up for the Mercury News, San Mateo Times or a host of other available papers. Their time, like the telegraph before it, is over and done. It's time to grow and move on.