BW: Vonage raises $200M in venture capital.  This makes over $400M total.  Man, and I thought PayPal raised a lot of money.  Well, I guess they're thinking big, overthrowing the world's telecom industry is going to take some money :) 

I've been messing around with Skype.  Pretty cool.  Like they say, "Internet telephony that 'just works'".  It does.  I've found that the voice quality is highly dependent on the mic you use - no surprise.  A crappy desktop mic from Radio Shack doesn't cut it, but a quality headset works great.  The best thing is that they've really wired the echo cancellation, you cannot hear yourself at all, even if you put the mic right next to your speakers. 

Have you noticed that Google has become slower?  Noticably, for me.  They've added too much crap, and are no longer a skinny fast search engine. 

I don't know what to make of Google's Web Accelerator.  Yeah, it might be faster.  But I really don't want all my web traffic passing through their site.  Same reason I haven't even tried their desktop search.  If this was offered by a small third-party, I'd try it in a heartbeat, but I do not trust Google anymore.  [ Xeni notes it is an anonymous proxy, too.  Yeah, anonymous to the sites, but not anonymous to Google. ] 

John Battelle says this is evidence for Google's Web OS.  I don't know about that.  I don't see people writing applications for Google.  Yet. 

I have about 20 domains that I maintain, for myself, my companies, and some charities.  I've been using register.com for about four years, after having used Network Solutions since time zero (remember interNIC handles?).  I thought register.com was a great improvement.  But now I've switched to GoDaddy.  The difference between $35/year and $8/year is pretty compelling.  Also register.com's site is slow, probably because of all the ads clogging their pages. 

Slashdot notes searching by image instead of by keywords.  I need to tell you about a project I'm working on which intends to do exactly this - content-based retrieval of images.  This is a hard problem - I do not fear other approaches as competition, I fear my own inability to execute.  Anyway stay tuned and I'll tell you about Picton. 

OMG they're starting to cast Blog, The Movie.  [ via Dave Winer ]  Who would play me?