Stanza, my favourite e-book reader on the iPhone, has been downdated. It’s hard to call this newest version of the app an update when all it does is remove one feature. Granted, I’ve never actually synced a book over USB (wi-fi is fast enough), but that option will be gone for new users from here on out. Existing users don’t have to update, but since there’s no “ignore app update” button in iTunes, they’ll have to deal with the app update badge always teasing them about one more update.

TechCrunch tried to do a bit of follow-up with Stanza about why the change was made, but they hit up a legal brick wall pretty quickly. Stanza can’t seem to talk about anything that goes on behind the curtain. This news could simply be Apple being a little grumpy about USB syncing (they don’t really like apps doing this), but when you consider that Stanza is now owned by Amazon, it does sound a little fishier. Then again, there’s also the John Gruber school of thought, which argues that Apple is in this for the hardware game and doesn’t really give a hoot who is selling the books – as long as they’re being read on iPads. Amazon does make the Kindle, but they also have a Kindle iPhone app.

Honestly speaking, most of this is just news to me. Little bits of info to post about. As long as they don’t mess with Stanza’s amazing wi-fi syncing and great in-app bookstore, my Pitchfork of Righteousness and Ranting is going to stay in the shed.

I’m used to having my articles copied without permission but seeing Google ranking a useless automated blog, instead of ranking my blog. That did heart a lot and I was really upset about it all day.

I complained about the issue on webmaster forums, I left a comment on the automated blog asking the owner to remove my article from his blog, I also contacted/reported all the blogs that have copied my content without permission. Guess what, no results came from all of this and it was a big waste of time.

When all hope was lost and I was ready to let go of the issue and move on. I remembered that Google always has a tiny url on every results saying: Dissatisfied? Help us improve.

So, I went on and sent my complain. I did not expect much and I really did not expect a real human to read it.

Today, I searched again for “How to upload files to your virtual private server” and I was surprised that the automated blog, was removed from the results pages !

This whole issue wasn’t really that important but I learned from it something important, Google does care after all!