Google opts-out of allowing publishers to opt-out: (From the WSJ - Free) “Google Inc. will resume scanning copyrighted library books into its search engine after a self-imposed hiatus, despite the efforts of some publishers and authors to block it from doing so without the copyright holders’ permission.”

Why e-mail should be more like RSS: I’m one of those people who barely scratch the surface of using all the features software offers. Then, one day, I’m thinking, “I wish I could do this” and after poking around a little, I discover the feature was there all along.

For example, using (on my Mac) NetNewsWire, I have lots of RSS feeds organized in a hierarchy of folders (It looks a little like this screen shot on the Ranchero website, but mine is way more obsessively organized. When I travel, I usually spend some time pruning feeds from the list, or moving feeds from one folder to another.)

Long ago, I came to the conclusion that all feeds are not created equal. Some I want to be refreshed very often, and I want to check them as soon as they are refreshed. Others I want to check only in the evening. Some I like to see on the weekend. Some, I can wait until I “get around to it.”

So, duh, I just discovered (from the rockstar of organizational hacks like this, Merlin Mann) that NetNewsWire has my dream feature, one that’s probably been there forever - and one I wish I had on my e-mail. By choosing the “Info” option under the “Window” menu, I can set up custom refresh schedules for each feed, or for an entire folder of feeds. You can even set it up to opt out of a manual refresh of all feeds.

Can you do that with e-mail? Let mail from person A into my in-box immediately. Let mail from person B into my in-box only once every hour. Let mail from person C into my in-box every full-moon. Etc. If we had RSS-mail instead of e-mail, we could.

Update: Thanks to those power Mac mail users who have headed me into a higher state consciousness. As much as I thought I was a filtering fool, there apparently is much more I can do.

The Jarvis effect? After the market closed today, Dell said “BOO!” to its shareholders:

“Dell posted preliminary third-quarter earnings below expectations amid weaker sales to U.S. consumers and in Britain….Dell, whose shares fell as much as 5.1 percent in after-hours trade, also said it would take charges of about $450 million in the third quarter for costs of repairing some computer systems for customers…”

Observation: In hindsight, when he blogged his frustration with Dell last summer, Jeff Jarvis was experiencing something that the company is now admitting was taking place on a much broader scale. (However, I guess Forbes would call Dell a “victim” of a blogger attack.) Here, we have an example of a frustrated, then angry, articulate blogger serving as a leading indicator of underlying problems.

Happy Halloween: My friends, the Mathews, let a few of us have some fun painting the front of their home on one of Nashville’s best streets for trick-or-treating - Whitland Ave. Fortunately for the neighbors, the house is undergoing major renovations and is about to be painted by some pros. (I helped paint the jack-o-lantern.) Stay safe tonight.

All the news fit to blog: The NY Times is aggregating blogger-reaction to the nomination of Alito to the Supreme Court.

Observation: Nice to see the editors at the NY Times recognize bloggers are more than “attack” dogs. However (and with some irony), sites like Memeorandum are doing a better job following bloggers commenting on NY Times stories than the NY Times is doing itself.

Tracking these conversations is beginning to look like an Escher staircase.

(via: Nashville is Talking)

Single focus: Advertising Age is sponsored by a single-advertiser advertiser this week: Infinity. Gee, I wonder if the readers of the magazine will get confused about where the advertising stops and the edit begins. I wonder if the media and adveretising professionals who get the magazine will be really outraged about this. Not.

(via: David Shaw)

Seeing double Google: When I saw the WSJ Headline “Google Weighs on Madison Avenue” (free), I thought I’d already blogged it…but then I remembered the story I blogged had “dominate” in the headline (Google wants to Dominate Madison Avenue, too - NYT).

Observation: Is it news that Google is in the advertising business and “brokers” ads? That model, as I’ve said AdNauseum, is the basis of AdSense ads that appear on the web pages of publishers (including bloggers) other than Google. For months, we’ve read they are experimenting with using this sales agent business model in other media. I’ve tried really, really hard to find something newsworthy in these two new articles, but can’t. Apparently they are written for readers emerging from spending the last couple of years under a rock.