Now that I've "upgraded" my Blogger account, my Gmail account seems to control everything. If I sign out of Gmail, I'm signed out of Orkut and Blogger as well. Yet signing into one doesn't necessary entail automatic access to the others. It just strikes me as a little odd that Google, which tried so hard to justify the creation of Gmail as being linked somehow to their search functionality, is now acquiring an increasing number of services that are of genuinely no consequence to their lives as a search engine business.

Does no-one else detect some serious mission creep?

Occasionally I wonder whether my opinion of the movies I watch is compromised by even a vague knowledge of their contents. Is it better to begin a movie knowing nothing more than its title? Does that somehow allow the scriptwriter and the director to take me down every twist and turn with the full extent of the intended surprise?

Or would I just end up watching a lot of bad movies?