Google has updated it’s colorful logo with a dedication to jazz great Dizzy Gillispie on October 21, 2010. If Gillispie were alive today, it would be his 93 birthday.

Google Doodle of Jazz Great Dizzy Gillispie

I’ve been tough on Newsweek.com the last few weeks, so I’v actually found a great article on a technology project that originated in Kenya, and has found significant usage across the the globe in all types of crisis situations — Ushahidi.com.

Ushahidi.com

Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, is a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008

While the Newsweek article is a bit awkward for numerous reasons — it doesn’t focus on the development of the open source project, the grants that sustain it or much else really. However, the article does give the project much needed coverage in the United States, coverage that will help the developers gain both monetary support and more importantly usage and developers. So, here’s a brief bit of the article — and I think the whole article deserves a read, if only to show how technology developed in Africa can affect the world.
[...]

= Obama introduces Pay-Go — Pay as you go rules for congress and a deficit commission to try to reign in spending. Whitehouse.gov

=Amy Bishop, a neuroscientist denied tenure, murdered three faculty members at the University of Alabama. MSNBC.com

=John Mayer finally shuts-up about saying the N-word and ridiculous over-sharing about his sexual predilections. LA Times.com

=MySpace.com, the site that modeled itself after BlackPlanet, then slowed and inverted BlackPlanet.com’s growth seems to be entering a death spiral. [admin notes -- it couldn't have happened to a nicer company (Fox heh)] Wired.com

Update I:

= According the USA Swimming Tennessee Volunteer Diver Michael Wright became the first African American to win a diving championship in USA Diving history. CBS Sports

I’ve taken a look at Google’s new Buzz feature inside of Gmail. I think the core product seems to be a carbon copy  of slight step beyond friendfeed.com .  Given that friend feed failed, why would Buzz be able to succeed?

Well pure marketing muscle and installed userbase of course!

However, I don’t see Buzz as an innovative service, rather I see it as a copy of a failed service that couldn’t reach critical mass. Worse than a pure copy of an existing service, I see Google as beginning to leverage areas they are competitive in (mail, search) to get into areas they are not competitive in (social).  This sort of leveraging behavior is what got Microsoft into trouble — releasing half-baked products and then retracting them after the products didn’t quite get enough traction in the marketplace.

Rather than take long-term responsibility for developing top-notch products, Google is jumping around buying and killing promising ideas (Jaiku, Dodgeball), and developing internal competing products concurrently (Wave and Buzz).  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out you are going to have some crushed egos and pissed off engineers on the Google Wave team.  In addition, the Friend Feed team (made up of ex-google engineers) is probably wondering WTF?! Why didn’t you let us build Buzz?

I think it’s also telling that Buzz is attached to Gmail — basically it will have the ability to force gmail users to use Buzz as opposed to operation as a stand-alone service.  Sorry, even with all the marketing muscle in the world Google will not beat the focused teams at Twitter and Facebook.  I’m going to predict Google Buzz will become a interesting way to read your statuses in your gmail (and more importantly google’s white-label mail service for companies); however, it will not actually replace the popularity of any of twitter or facebook services.

And maybe that’s the point of Buzz — simply to kill Twitter and Facebook’s ecosystem; however, Google needs to begin to gradually release these new features as improvements to Gmail as opposed to the new google attempt at a social project and stand-alone projects.

Although, folks Nutshellmail.com have just been crushed by Google rolling over, they can’t feel good right now.

P.S. googlebot(s) please do not hate me because I do not like your little bro. buzz.