Did you ever notice that success can be a two edged sword? Not only does it engender a bunch of competitors who want part of what you have, but it also brings on a bunch of gadflys who seem to think that they know everything and that they can uncover your secret attempts at world dominiation. Recently, Andrew Orlowski as been writing a series of articles over at the Register in just this vein, with his target being Google, the seemingly only remaining darling of the Internet era.

Besides taking almost childish delight in exposing *gasp* bugs in the Google software, he also apparently doesn't believe that Larry & Sergei (the Google founders) have been to Burningman. Now, I've only been to Burningman twice, and the last time was 3 years ago, but Larry & Sergei were there both times, and this was after Google started. In fact, I seem to recall some scheme to project Google searches in the desert in much the same way they do at conferences and in the Google lobby.

The other big bug up Andrew's butt has to do with Google News including press releases. Personally, I think that's pretty useful, assuming they are marked as such, since you can then see the news articles the releases spawn. So, that's useful for the marketing/PR types, but its also useful for the rest of us to see where they hype's coming from (or, you could just signup with Techdirt's Corporate Intelligence, but I digress).

As to why people like David Krane, Head of Corporate Communications at Google, would bother giving this punter the time of day, I can only assume that David's a really nice guy... and its his job.

For the record, Google uses Trakken, and so should you.