I am always a late adopter of technology. I worked at IBM, a technology innovator. Yet, I still didn't get the technology bug. I thought the Internet would never amount to anything. And look what happened! Ebay - my original thought was no way! Free software, what another dumb idea! Chat rooms - give me a break! On-line poker - who would gamble on-line?

You get my point - I am always on the wrong end of most of my technology prophesies. Well two companies have caught my eye in the past week - digg.com and ask.com. I started to do a little digging (pardon the pun). ask.com is the fastest growing search engine, according to the Nielsen NetRatings, growing year-over-year by 66%, to the number five most popular search engine. What brought ask.com to my attention? You did - the readers of Sacramento Executive. Recently, I noticed a lot of traffic on our site originating from ask.com searches. It caught my attention. The thought never occurred to me that there might be any legitimate search engines out there other than google. But, once again I am wrong. I think I will use ask.com for a while...just to prove that you can teach old dogs new tricks.

Oh, and digg.com - look out, this website will hit the top 20 most popular sites soon. digg.com is a technology focused news site where the stories are chosen by community members rather than editors. I like that approach. For a change, we get to say what is news and not Hollywood. What a novel idea. I think I'm going to really dig digg.com.

What about myspace.com you ask? Don't ask. I've missed that one too - it is now number 1 in page views, ahead of Yahoo! and google. Of course, the only reason why I even heard about it was the breaking news on CNN about all the "bad" things going on over there. Well, it turns out it's not all that bad after all. And besides, if it's on CNN, it's probably not news anyways - just more Hollywood hype (since when is it OK to present news with a music score and sound effects playing in the background?) and editorializing. Check it out, all the major TV news outlets do it. I think digg.com and my iPod will be just fine for me. But wait, I don't own an iPod. I guess it's time.

Pierre Cutler
The Sacramento Executive