Brief summary of things I've read today

Scott Karp points out that advertisers don't really care about pages or visits, they care about buyers and Google made $10 billion last year without even trying to measure its audience.

Via Adverlab and Techeblog, Google without AdWords. There goes that $10 billion...

Via Craig Newmark, The New York Times shows us again that tracker funds beat managed funds.

The UK's latest military satellite (SatNews) is called Skynet. Way to encourage hysterical technophobia guys - name your military satellite after the evil computer network in the Terminator films.

Godwin's Law at XKCD.

Mashable says that Google is making us dumber because rather than remember things (URLs, presidents, metric-to-imperial conversions) we just ask Google. Not so, I think - Google is encouraging us to behave more cleverly. Typing URLs or keywords into the Google toolbar rather than the browser's address field is not the lazy or the dumb choice but the rational one. Why? Because a mis-spelling in the address bar takes you to a 404 or - worse - a typosquatting site full of malware. Mistype the address or the keywords into the Google toolbar and you're one click away from the site you really wanted because unlike your dumb browser Google has learned what the last million people to make that typo really meant. Or in other words - Google makes us so smart that it trains us to tap the wisdom of the crowd rather than rely on our own mental resources. Forget distributed computing, Google enables distributed thinking.