Since I’m an optimist I try to imagine they do it mainly to encourage innovation and better solutions to the world’s problems both on and offline. Even if that’s not the whole story, it’s very feel good. It infuses a sense of fun and open-mindedness since they are always a bit quirky are aimed a broad age and range of people.

Contests can be a good way to get things done and you don’t have to fly people to company headquarters either. Guy Kawasaki got his book cover designed by running a contest.

Here is a list of some Google contests (feel free to fill me in on any I’ve missed):

• Google Highly Open Participation Contest
• Doodle 4 Google competition
• Google Moon Contest
• Build Your Campus in 3D Competition!
• Google Desktop Gadget Contest

Here’s another Google contest for college students who want to assist local businesses about online marketing. It’s called the Online Marketing Challenge.

Here are some details for the Online Marketing Challenge:

• It was developed with college professors around the world
• Students get $200 worth of free advertising dollars to spend on a campaign
• Groups of students find local businesses to run an internet marketing strategy
• Starts in February 2008 and participants run the campaign on a three week timeframe

If you teach a college course (this makes me want to actually) this is a great way to give students practical experience on Google’s dime. The contest winners get a trip to the Googleplex and get to meet the developers of Google AdWords. Probably some swag too. No cash, but a bit of fun.

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For those who remember the days when Microsoft feared the Netscape browser would render the desktop a utility of minimal importance, desktop applications like AOL’s hint at what that future would have looked like. Except, of course, that AOL Desktop runs on Windows, so Microsoft’s place on the hardware remains safe.

The App Map reminds us of the Speed Dial feature in the Opera browser. Instead of little pictures of websites, App Map shows thumbnails of the open browser, IM, and email windows currently running.

AIM has been integrated into the desktop, opening with a click of a button in the toolbar. Email and web browsing open the same way.

But the version of AIM in the AOL Desktop isn’t the goodie-filled one I have running as a separate applications. Where’s the status message feature?

In email, AOL’s MapQuest service provides a quick way to place a map or directions into a message. MapQuest has been a high quality service for some time, making its inclusion a welcome one.

AOL Desktop users can access other POP3 email accounts by adding their information to the Mail Settings. Services like Gmail, Verizon, and Comcast offer POP3 access, as do many ISPs.

Installation of AOL Desktop makes Internet Explorer the default browser, and sets AOL Search as the default search engine. As our readers know, search drives advertising, and ads drive revenue.

For web browsing with AOL Desktop, a caching feature called TopSpeed can be enabled to use with AOL Explorer. This web acceleration technology requires the user to login to AOL with a valid screen name.

AOL Desktop’s toolbar has quick links to the multitude of content areas the web services provider freed up after switching from its subscription walled garden to the more open Internet audience-supported model.

Running AOL Desktop, in a way, felt like a return to that model circa 1994, albeit with much prettier graphics and improved features. The software offers an easy all-in-one way to manage one’s experience online, placing the essentials of web, email, and IM in one place.

It’s going to take some work to break people of their ingrained habits of firing up separate applications to do these tasks. That would be AOL’s real accomplishment with Desktop.

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Currently when you mail yourself something you get this at the bottom of the email

Pretty useful and helpful, however the email a story could use some options, like say for example allowing me just to send the URL. Why would I want to do that, so I could use twittermail to email things to my twitter account. This becomes even more useful for those of us who run/manage multiple websites with role accounts. Sure I could just click through, open the URL, copy the url and change tabs to webmail and copy and paste it, but just think how much better, faster, easier it would be, if I could do it natively in Google reader.

Google’s also trying really hard to get into bookmarking space with their latest attempt Google shared stuff. How about adding that functionality into the bottom of Google reader. You could take it a step further by integrating the bookmarlet functions for popular services like Digg, Mixx, Propeller, Delicious, Sk-rt, Hugg, stumbleupon and others. Just don’t get all creepy and require people to give you the login info, just replicate the bookmarklet functionality.

Steve Rubel has an interesting series on turning GMail into your personal nerve center (part 2). I know you recently added search functionality to Google Reader as well. Well how about taking it a step further and realizing what Steve is trying to do and merging the Google reader search into Google desktop search. While we’re at it hey Ken Norton of Google Documents, can I lobby for adding Google documents into Google desktop search too? C’mon I know you guys can do it you’ve got Gmail married into Google desktop search already.

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The article is worth the read if you have any concerns about what emails to read or not to read.

In Short

Emails that promise free games, windows security patches or updates, nude celebrity pictures, or anything that seems out of the ordinary should be deleted immediately.

A source in the Register article "recommends PC users do not open executable files attached to email messages from addresses they do not recognise or trust and to ‘refrain from opening any message that purports to feature nude celebrities’."

So what is the big deal? After all it is just spam!? NO, when anyone opens this spam and clicks a link within it a malware program may be installed into the user’s computer at which time the computer is added to a network of machines used to quietly send out even more SPAM. This type of attack is estimated to be responsible for up to 20% of the email SPAM we all receive today.

Please do your part and screen the email you open! In fact, I strongly recommend using a community-supported SPAM filtering program like Cloudmark Desktop (formerly Cloudmark SpamNet). Cloudmark costs only $3.40/mo. ($39.95/yr) and it does a great job of protecting my email from 95%+ of the 500-1000 SPAM I receive in a single day. My entire company has used Cloudmark to eliminate email SPAM for over 2 years and it has little or no error rate.

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Turns out, according to eWeek, that Forrester Research sees Microsoft being threatened where all the money is, in the enterprise market.

“The high volume of client inquiries for Linux on the desktop clearly indicates it’s not going away any time soon. Expect Linux to experience growth over the next year as the distributors work hard to make it an enterprise-class offering,” Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray said in the report.

Vista, Microsoft’s long-awaited replacement for XP, has not flown out of the gate in the business market. Adoption has been far slower than Microsoft would like, as the operating system represents one of its two major revenue streams, the other being the Office productivity suite.

Linux vendors hoping to overcome Microsoft at the operating system level will face several hurdles. Custom applications that require Windows may not run well in emulation on a Linux system, if at all. That would be enough to keep an enterprise from making the switch.

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“Desktop for Linux now supports many more image formats and will show better thumbnails for them in your search results,” noted Jim Zhuang, a software engineer, on the Inside Google Desktop blog.  “You can also customize the hotkey used to launch the quick search box.  And most importantly, Desktop for Linux now searches the content of Microsoft Office documents – our most requested feature.”

“Most importantly” and “most requested” could be subjective terms, however.  Over at The Register, “Mike” reacted to the development by writing, “Okay, I know it’s possible, but how many linux users are actually going to have microsoft office documents on their machines that they need google desktop to search through?”  A person living up to the screen name “Sceptical Bastard” then issued a similar response.

It’s surprising that Google would make such an oversight – given its involvement with the Open Invention Network, one would expect the search giant to be more attentive to these details.  Yet some members of the Linux community may indeed have asked for the feature, and it shouldn’t harm anyone who didn’t.

Also, the other features included in the upgrade have yet to be criticized.  Google may not have nailed this release, but Google Desktop for Linux has, on the whole, gotten better.

Close the browser, though, and the IM client sticks around.

This is the kind of “rich Internet application” that I’d expect to see tons of next year after Adobe’s AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight get better understood (and get finished). Already Pownce has an Adobe AIR version that’s looks similar to an IM client. Anyway, I have an interview with R. Chandrasekar, CEO of Velvet Puffin, and he gives me a demo, too, which I’ll embed here for your viewing pleasure. He came to see me from Singapore, so we met in a restaurant near SFOs airport. Sorry if it’s a little noisy there.

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I noted to myself that it finally got over some of the ugliness that turned me off of earlier Linux-on-the-desktop attempts. He showed me, and a few other people some of the cool things (much nicer 3D switching than even OSX has, for instance). Damn, I thought to myself, it’s time to give Linux another look.

Then, tonight, I see another article over on ITPro about the future of Ubuntu and Linux as a desktop platform.

I should credit several readers lately for bugging me about Ubuntu. I forget them all, though, and don’t want to cause any hard feelings. Thanks for staying on my case. It sure is looking nice!

Anyway, it’s time to get an interview with Mark Shuttleworth. Anyone know him and want to introduce us?

Looks like Dell is seeing the same thing, too, Digg is linking to a report that Dell is expanding its line of Ubuntu-powered computers.

What do you think? Is this finally Linux’ time on the desktop? Is it getting good enough to get more than a tiny number of geeks to switch?

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WinJournal aims to bring journaling, blogging and podcasting into one application. Its blogging capabilities tie into MovableType, TypePad, WordPress, Live Journal, Blogger and Windows Spaces. You can even publish your entries to a web server via FTP. Not sure if that includes an RSS feed or not, but it does sound like a great option. Or you can just use WinJournal write your own entries that don’t get published.

Some of the other options include wiki style links, spell check, auto save, security/encryption, WYSIWYG text editor, calendar, multiple journals, labels, full screen mode and tabs. There is also a skins manager to change the look an feel of WinJournal. This is good as the default skin under XP isn’t good. I switched it to WLM and it is much nicer.

Overall, it looks as if WinJournal has a lot of nice features. The folks over at MarinerSoftware are working hard on creating a quality desktop blog client and it’s well on its way.

If you’d like to try WinJournal, head over to the beta page and give it a spin. It’s free while in beta and worth the checkout.

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