St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Now it’s offical that google is just too big! Aol recently bought a 5% share of AOL for $1 billion dollars. They beat Microsoft and Yahoo. I’m not sure why they had to buy a 5% share in the company to advcertise to AOLer’s. Read the Full story here

I mean AOL has advertising procedures already set up, are they really making all the other advertisers buy a stake in the company? It makes you wonder why they would do it. Perhaps they only did it because Microsoft and Yahoo wanted to do it too. Why did Microsoft and Yahoo want to do it? Perhaps they only because google wanted to do it.

Shouldn’t they have to pay to use the google search engine like everyone else, instead of getting paid? Somehow this deal is suspected to end up with whomever the “winner” was providing search capabilities for AOL. but AOL already has search capabilities provided by google. Now google gets to keep ad revnue generated by AOL’s captive users I would imagine but they had that already. This deal doesn’t make sense to me at all but what do I know about big business?

What does this mean for AOL users? Nothing. They will still be a captive audience. Thier e-mail addresses will still be sold, they will still be spammed by what is the world largest spam company (AOL), their AOL browsers will still crash frequently, they will still receive sub-standard security tools like anti-virus, firewall, and anti-spyware (isn’t AOL itself spyware). They will of course remain the laughing stock of all internet users. And of course, they will still pay more to acess the internet, even though, most of the time, they aren’t really on the internet, but something that looks like it.

Microsoft announced they will make no new versions of Internet Explorer or patches, security fixes or updates. This will go into effect at the beginning of 2006. On January 31st Microsoft will pull the downloadable IE from it’s web site.

Microsoft has been slowly phasing out Internet Explorer for Macintosh since Macintosh released it’s latest version of a web browser called Safari. Even though Internet Explorer is bundled with Mac OS X the mac users I’ve spoke withy prefered just about nay browser but Internet Explorer. Of course that’s hardly a scientific study. I only know 4 Mac Users.

This is of course great news for Web Designers, the internet and the public in general. Not as good as the next version (IE 7) is bad. But even one less computer using IE 7 is a great thing.

Every web site needs hosting. I’ve always providied web hosting for my clients but now I’ve added new featues for my web design clients. I’m also making a web site that lays out the different hosting features, packages and options.

It has a nice look and whe it’s finished clients will be able to pay thier hosting fees right on the web site if they prefer. Of course the old method of a check in the mail still works too.

You can view (remember, it’s not finished yet) the site here:
St. Petersburg web hosting

Berlin is the first City to get thier own top level domain name.

Sounds crazy but it’s true. The top level domain name extenstion will be .berlin. I’m hoping the ICANN will do more of this. It may be a little awkward, actually the word I would use is “clunky“. But I still think it’s cool. Not so much .berlin, but what about .nyc or .vegas? Some cities with long names may have to be truncated for instince my city - St. Petersburg .stpete perhaps?

Which brings about a good point. there are some major cities that are in differnet parts of the world but have the same name. St. Petersburg , Florida and St. Petersburg Russia for example. The ICANN may have opened a can of worms that will wiggle around causing all sorts of troubles.

I’m actually surprised that I like it becasue in general I’m not fond of all these new top level domains like .info .pro and .biz. Begrudgingly, though I could see their usefullness though I don’t like the trend they set. In practical terms, hardly anyone is using them. And while they do make it possible for some to get the exact domain name they prefer, at the same time it forces some small businesses or individuals to purchase more domain names to protect them selves against “anti” sites. For instance Joe Blow’s Furniture store bought joeblowfurniture.com for his website and joblowfurniture.org, .biz, .info and .net just capture the mistyped urls and to stop his competion from buying them. now he has several more to buy them.

What do you think?