Ok so that tagline is actually a bit of lie and should be “terrific forums for everything”. Steve Pavlina recently launched forums on his blog with areas to discuss everything personal development related, including business, health, and even psychic development! I used to post on his forums for shareware developers as the man has a way of bringing together fantastic and virtually troll free communities together to discuss interesting knowledge.

I’ve mostly been paying attention to the business forum myself, but hope to dive into some of the other ones occassionally too. I highly recommend checking them out.

Steve Pavlina recently wrote about his 30 day news fast trial that he has decided to continue with indefinitely. Despite his excellent points, I’d like to write a post disagreeing with Steve on the matter.

Steve cites a number of reasons why news should be avoided, which can be roughly summarized as news is a short-sighted, biased, negative, selective, irrelevant, shallow, untrustworthy, inactionable and redundant source of information. Even with truly quality news sources these points all apply in some doses, but if most of the news you receive is inactionable then I say that the root problem is you are listening to the wrong news!

I have several fields of interest, of which business and computer technology are of highest relevance to my daily life. I like to keep on top of them for a number of reasons, and sometimes the highly summarized trendy myopic news media suffices. Where Steve has taken an extreme approach of avoiding all news, I simply stay away from the stuff that holds no value to me. I’ve found that a great way to do that this is through RSS feeds, so long as your RSS reader isn’t setup in a way that is visible during work. I have my RSS feeds setup in my GMail account, which I check roughly twice a day. I click the interesting headlines that show up, while my brain automatically filters out those that aren’t relevant.

What do I gain from not blocking myself off from the news media?

1. Inspiration. Whether I need a blog post topic or I’m on the lookout for a new business idea, being exposed to current topics provides fuel for new ideas. Sometimes the greatest breakthrough could be in taking an idea from a different discipline and applying it to something relevant to me.
2. Competitive information. Knowing how the market is doing, what certain companies are up to, and what sort of business and technology advances are out there, or just what’s hot provides plenty of material relevant to my business making decisions.
3. Awareness of trends. Since the news media is indeed myopic, profit-oriented, and controls heavily what people discuss, it provides a good idea of what the current trendy issues are in a particular subject area.
4. Avoiding becoming myopic myself. It’s fine and well to focus on and become an expert in a chosen field, but I don’t want to feel like I am living under a rock. That’s where the stereotypes like the PhD genius who is completely oblivious to the world around him come from.
5. Enjoyment. I find it genuinely interesting to know about some of the things that are going on in this world. The news media places under my nose topics that I would never actively seek out myself, such as the discovery of a new cancer cure or a NASA space mission.

I should also not forget to mention that I’ll know when the planet is evacuating long before Steve

It all comes down to expanding your horizons intelligently, and regardless of its flaws the news media is a highly valuable tool when its user knows of its limitations. Do not forget that other sources of information have their own human-induced faults and should all be scrutinized carefully. The moment a source of information becomes trusted blindly it automatically becomes a source of propaganda.

Google has officially released their new checkout product, allowing them to finally provide payment processing services. Following the standard Google model they have linked the technology back to AdWords and added some extra twists. The major news right now is the pricing - the fee is 2% + 0.20 and can be knocked down to free by spending money on AdWords.

Needless to say this competes directly with PayPal and could lead to some positive changes in the online payment process. I’ve long been frustrated with how difficult it can be to accept money from willing customers online, and the amount of sales that are lost to imperfect verification systems and fraud. I’m not sure if I’ll ever end up using Google’s product itself (currently it’s only availabe in the US, so it’s not even an option at the moment), but I expect the entrance of a major competitor to make the other processing comapnies work a little harder to attract merchants.

Why is Google launching a payment processor such a big deal? Aside from the brand name, this establishes a very important piece of the Google strategy. With so many diverse yet highly complimentary services, they are slowly but steady building their own user internet and all the benefits that come with. Let’s recap the major Google services:

• Search
• AdWords
• GMail
• Maps
• Froogle & Base Services
• Checkout

Summing the above up, we now have a location-aware online “brain” (for lack of a better word) that can find and intelligently relate a vast database of information, facilitate communication, suggest all manner of related products along the way, and now complete the process by allowing users to buy items without ever venturing off Google. Each of the above is in itself a service, but it’s also a building block for other services. Nowhere is this more evident than Google Base, a “classified ads” database that takes advantage of Google’s massive map database to display location-based results and it’s excellent search for highly accurate searches. How long do you think it’ll take for Google Checkout to appear there as well? I’m sure e-Bay has taken note.

It’s going to take time to really know the effects that Google’s increasing powers will have. History hasn’t shown encouraging results from companies having such a large scope of control. Once the world is fully hooked into Google we might see the emergence of a host of new micro fees for services that we once took for granted. A very interesting internet-based monopoly might develop as few companies will have the capital to hope to build up the kind of infrastructure Google has to be able to compete with the functionality of its services (unless you can license the use of the data and technology from Google… hmmm).

On the other hand Google has done a lot to advance internet technology and unleash an amazing wealth of information to anyone with internet access. It’s hard to imagine that search, mapping, and commerce would be so integrated without it, particularly looking at Yahoo and Microsoft’s attempts to get search right or Hotmail charging for the ability to search your 250MB e-mail account. Google is definitely a positive presence today, and I hope that their contributions to advancing information accessibility continue to match the tremendous power that they yield.