Battles Brewing: Red vs. Blue Judge, Google vs. Microsoft?

Battle lines are being drawn today on several fronts: continued conservative hand-wringing vs. liberal confusion over President's Bush's nomination of his lawyer friend Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court (still today's most blogged-about personality), and Google's decision to take on Microsoft's Office suite. That's right, let's get ready to rumble!

But before we get into the meat of the issues, let's take a time out for this Internet first (today's No. 24 top blog post): the first Internet marriage proposal via search engine. Will Ask Jeeves will put its now-unemployed butler to work at the wedding reception?

In this corner, Google...
So is Google really putting together the services and brains to offer its own version of Microsoft Office? Navel Contemplation is just one blogger looking forward to the possibility. Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble describes the move as "interesting times" and offers a video link to the new MS Office 12. "Huge news," says The Stalwart. How do the two computer/search giants compare in blog buzz?



Technical briefs
Other techie news today: the introduction of a social-networking tool called Ning, (today's No. 2 top link) and Jakob Nielsen's Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005. (Granted, usability is his forte, but perhaps he should consider this Design 101: "too much text and no graphics makes for a dull page.")

The Miers thing
There's plenty of teeth-gnashing and head-scratching over the Miers Supreme Court nomination, and we'll just assume it'll go on for a loooooooong time. Reactions today range from Patrick Ruffini's "Coalition of the Chillin' (Supreme Court division)" campaign to David Sirota's Huffington Post essay on cronyism gone amok, from George Will's reasons for Congress to say no to Miers' nomination to plenty of blog citations of Alexander Hamilton No. 76.

Passings...
Heaven must be turning into a funny place, what with Get Smart's Don Adams, who died Sept. 25, now joined by comedian Nipsey Russell, who died this week at 82 from cancer, and British comedian Ronnie Barker, who died Monday at age 76.