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Everyone is all ga-ga this week over the G1, the new HTC phone from T-Mobile, which is the first phone powered by Google's Android phone OS. So to temper the excitement a bit and get back to reality, I came up with a list of 5 reasons not to get the G1.

Google quietly introduced an audio search tool called GAudi this week in Google Labs. For now, Google is using to the tool for experimentation purposes to index political content in YouTube videos, but chances are they are exploring this for more than good citizenship points and will expand it at some point in the future.

I spoke to Rob Jackson, who started the Phandroid blog and the AndroidForums.com discussion groups and asked him about the impact of the release of the first Android-powered (open source) cell phone, the HTC Dream, which is due for release by T-Mobile on Oct. 20th

In spite of its best efforts, Microsoft remains a company back on its heels flailing wildly at the market forces changing the software business. Seinfeld isn't going to change that and neither is a PR blitz. While Microsoft remains a business force, it needs to change fundamentally the way it does business to maintain its industry position moving forward.

This morning EMC, Microsoft and IBM announced they had worked together over a two-year period to create a content interchange standard for enterprise content management systems. There are lot of benefits to this agreement for content management customers, but I think the real story here is that three huge companies came together for the benefit of the many over the benefit of the one. It doesn't happen every day and it's worth pointing out.

If this is the best Bogusky and his team can do to compete with the highly successful, and should I say, really funny, Get a Mac Campaign, Microsoft is truly throwing its $300M down the toilet because this is ad is pure crap.

Google took a direct shot at the bow of Microsoft and Apple yesterday and the battle for world domination continues unabated. Whether the market will bear yet another browser is an open question, but it seems that for Google, this is more than a browser war, it's a fight for the soul of the desktop (and the hand-held for that matter).

To no one's surprise, except perhaps the New York Times, internet traffic is going global, and more so with each passing year. The result is that more traffic is flowing through servers outside the United States. The chief concern about this development, according to the NYT article, was the fact that it has made it more difficult for US intelligence agencies to spy on internet traffic.

Elgg, a new open source social networking platform aimed specifically at the education market, provides a safe, open source alternative to the popular blogging platforms such as LiveJournal and Blogger, and the even scarier (at least to educators) Facebook and MySpace.

Microsoft has announced a $300M dollar ad campaign, featuring 90s TV star Jerry Seinfeld, which according to multiple reports has been designed to save Vista and salvage Microsoft's battered reputation. There is so much wrong with this strategy, it's really hard to know where to start.

Microsoft products have always presented a paradox for organizations. On one hand they seem to be universally derided. On the other, they remain the corporate standard. Open source, SaaS/online and other alternatives have had a hard time gaining widespread traction in large organizations. That's partly because companies would likely rather deal with the devil they know, a de facto standard, rather than something else, and partly due to institutional inertia.

Community journalism encourages members of the community to participate in the news process, not just as passive readers, but as active producers of the news itself. This direct connection to the product is similar in many ways to the kind of community building that goes on in open source development.

Alfresco released Alfresco Labs (Beta) 3 today and with it announced a new capability that enables businesses to leverage Microsoft Sharepoint functionality without buying additional Sharepoint licenses. Sound too good to be true? Itâ??s not, and what has allowed Alfresco to do this is the 2004 EU Commission order for Microsoft to publish the Sharepoint protocol.

That collective sigh of relief you hear this morning is probably the millions of YouTube users who are relieved that Google and Viacom have reached an agreement to protect their privacy. All I can say is thank goodness that common sense prevailed for once.

AP is reporting this morning that Eric Schmidt, he being CEO of the great and almighty Google, thinks it would better if Yahoo! remained independent. Nothing too self-serving there, is there?

Apple and Adobe have both gotten some press lately for going to the trademark police after a couple of small business people had the audacity to publicize their products by including corporate trademarks in their business name.

My colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols recently wrote a piece on his fine Practical Technology blog called Dear Microsoft, Thanks for the help, Linux in which he argues that Microsoftâ??s ill-timed decision to cut off easy access to XP tomorrow (June 30th) combined with its announcement it would be releasing the next version of Windows in January, 2010 effectively lends a death blow to Vista and creates a huge opportunity for desktop Linux.

Last week Adobe surprised a few people--well, at least it surprised me--with the announcement that it was including Alfresco content management services as part of its LiveCycle Enterprise Suite Update 1 package.