Today, my brand new MacBook Pro arrived. I have maxed it out on all specs in terms of performance–it is the fastest laptop on the planet.

I’ve never ever used a Mac before, except from the usual 30 seconds you get once in a while in an electronics store, so I am looking very much forward to seeing how I’ll like it. I will still keep my beloved Thinkpad, though :-)

So if you have good tips for Mac beginners, must-have apps that I need to get or anything like that, please let me know.

There is a lot of talk about Google (GOOG) these days because they broke the 500 dollar/share roof. The valuation seems crazy, but I haven’t looked into whether it is sustainable or not, so let’s not discuss that :-)
However, I had a little look into the money Google spends on innovation (or research and development) versus Yahoo (YHOO) — and Yahoo has outspent Google every year for the past five years (I didn’t look further back). Still, if we look at the stock price since Google went public, Yahoo’s share price is flat compared to Google, whose share has quadrupled.

Here is a slide illustrating that point exactly from a presentation my good friend Thomas Joachim Hansen and I held yesterday.

I read a lot of blogs (100+) every day, and there is so much that I want to share—but I simply can’t find the time to make several blog posts a day on that account. Luckily, Google Reader has launched a new feature, where you can share certain posts that you read in their reader—example below.

Now, every post I read that I want to share is automatically linked to my Links site, where you can access it and go to the original post.

I’m running WordPress for my blog, and I’ve been pretty happy with the category system embedded (I used to run Blogger). However, I felt the need to tag my posts with Technorati, so I installed Jerome’s keyword plug-in. It works perfectly. Thanks Jerome.

In addition to my feed (the red radar on the left), which you can use to syndicate my blog and stay updated on whatever happens here, I have introduced a mail subscription service (powered by the wonderful Feedblitz web service). If you’d rather get posts by mail, plug in your e-mail in the field in my sidebar, and you’re rolling.

I previously commented on Google’s China launch. Since then, Google has put a post up (Google in China) on their web site in response to all the negative press and blogging they have been subject to since the China launch:

Google users in China today struggle with a service that, to be blunt, isn’t very good. Google.com appears to be down around 10% of the time. Even when users can reach it, the website is slow, and sometimes produces results that when clicked on, stall out the user’s browser. Our Google News service is never available; Google Images is accessible only half the time. At Google we work hard to create a great experience for our users, and the level of service we’ve been able to provide in China is not something we’re proud of.

This problem could only be resolved by creating a local presence, and this week we did so, by launching Google.cn, our website for the People’s Republic of China. In order to do so, we have agreed to remove certain sensitive information from our search results. We know that many people are upset about this decision, and frankly, we understand their point of view. This wasn’t an easy choice, but in the end, we believe the course of action we’ve chosen will prove to be the right one.

Launching a Google domain that restricts information in any way isn’t a step we took lightly. For several years, we’ve debated whether entering the Chinese market at this point in history could be consistent with our mission and values. Our executives have spent a lot of time in recent months talking with many people, ranging from those who applaud the Chinese government for its embrace of a market economy and its lifting of 400 million people out of poverty to those who disagree with many of the Chinese government’s policies, but who wish the best for China and its people. We ultimately reached our decision by asking ourselves which course would most effectively further Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally useful and accessible. Or, put simply: how can we provide the greatest access to information to the greatest number of people?

Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world’s population, however, does so far more severely. Whether our critics agree with our decision or not, due to the severe quality problems faced by users trying to access Google.com from within China, this is precisely the choice we believe we faced. By launching Google.cn and making a major ongoing investment in people and infrastructure within China, we intend to change that.

I thought the decision made sense before I read this (read my post: Google Launches in China), and I still do.
Prominent Google observers still don’t see the positive in the decision. (John Battelle: The Real Irony Here).

You are following the China Exposé.

Google has launched the localised Chinese version of their web site, Google China, albeit not fully equipped with all features found at Google.com. Google has for a long time postponed going into China, because of the censorship restrictions imposed by the Chinese government, which Google has found incompatible with their values. Although Google.com is also censored when accessed from China, this censorship is exercised by the government and not Google themselves. Now, however, Google has followed in the footsteps of competitors Yahoo! and MSN, and launched a localised Chinese version with voluntary censorship.

Critics believe this decision conflicts with Google’s Do No Evil mantra. From a business perspective, however, the decision makes perfect sense: (1) Competitors are already in the Chinese market and more importantly (2) via the Chinese version Google now gets an inside, controlled approach to the censorship as opposed to the external censorship applied to Google.com. The latter will enable a better understanding for search and internet patterns of Chinese web users, but, in the long term, also offers the possibility of increasing bargaining power towards the Chinese government with regard to censorship.

Examples of censored searches include queries for the Tiananmen Square massacre and the—in China forbidden—Falun Gong movement.

Read more: Here Comes Google China, Google Joins Chinese Censor, and Google Makes Right China Decision.

You are following the China Exposé.

In the buzz of web 2.0, I had heard about a service called del.icio.us for some time now—actually for a very long time. And I had gone to their website several times to see what this was about, but every time I found myself leaving their website, because of lack of intuitive design, explanation of purpose, and clarity of contribution to the user. Well, call me a late adapter or whatever you want, but now I finally signed up. And I love it.

• del.icio.us is a web service where you save all of your bookmarks online, so you can access them from any computer. That’s not new. What’s great about the service, however, is:del.icio.us makes it extremely easy to find your bookmarks again, because you “tagged” them with a number of keywords of your choice and saved them in a flat hierarchy. The easy retrieval of your bookmarks is one of the real advantages.
• Super fast and easy saving of bookmarks is also a huge advantage, because saving a bookmark, then, does not become an obstacle. Further, if you run Firefox and install the del.icio.us extension, you are really rolling.
• You can browse everyone else’s bookmarks—on the fly. So you really know what moves the web (and/or the world, for that matter) the second you surf. This can also be done by keywords, of course.

So I like this web service a lot. It also makes it a lot easier for me to do my links page, right here on my blog. If you visit it, you will see a lot of output coming directly out of my del.icio.us bookmarks, most notably the tag cloud. The tag cloud contains all the different keywords I have assigned to my bookmarks. The biggest and brightest are the keywords that have been assigned to bookmarks most often. Go explore it on my links page.

The new Skype beta is out with video calling, mood messages (text next to your name in the contact list), and contacts grouping. Read more at the Skype Community.

Google is now on the IM/VOIP wagon. Download Google Talk here. For now, Skype still is my preferred choice.

It appears that you need a Gmail account to use Google Talk. Whether it will stay that way, I don’t know. If you don’t have Gmail (and I know you), let me know and I’ll invite you.

Two blog posts from the Skype Journal:

• Google talk… first impressions
• Google Talk Skype Killer

I was looking all over the web for feed graphics–the small ones that says “RSS 2.0″ and “ATOM 0.3″ (those you now see on my right sidebar). Even Google’s image search could not help me (or maybe I was just using the wrong key words?!).

However, I found that Feed for All has a dynamic graphic creator, that allows you to format text and colour.

I have finally seed up an RSS feed in addition to my Atom feed. Click on the xml button on the right bar, to get my feed.

For those of you who are new to RSS and what it means to subscribe to it, check this out:

• Wikipedia on RSS - a good introduction

If you use Firefox, I can recommend the Sage plugin, which I use as my rss reader.