Let's count the number of enemies Google might make with its new Google Chrome web browser.

(It's hard to tell with Google how much is coolly considered strategy and how much is the company hyperactively jumping from one interesting idea to another, but let's count 'em up anyway.)

Microsoft

A pretty obvious choice, given Microsoft's Google paranoia. It will see the browser as a threat to Internet Explorer, a way of promoting and improving the delivery of Google's other services, and ultimately another reason not to buy a Windows PC.

The last thing Microsoft wants is Google in a PC's application folder, attacking Microsoft from above AND below.

Mozilla

Mozilla makes most of its money from Google, via the search bar on the Firefox browser window. Every copy of Chrome that Google shifts is potentially a copy less of Firefox that users will use to access Google.

Fewer Firefox users means less funding from Google, plus the awareness of a new and voracious competitor in the room. Even though Google has its best open source face on, how will the community react to that?

Big ad supported websites

Chrome apparently has a feature that displays your nine most recently visited sites with search boxes for each. That's good for users but not perhaps so good for websites.

Google has already started including search boxes in its search results, for bigger sites. This has caused some angst as it means Google's ads get served against resulting pages, rather than the site's own, potentially reducing one of the few sources of funding available to a website.

Moving this feature up into the browser history window/search bar is going to be controversial.

For the internet watchers out there, especially the movie buffs among you, there is a fascinating argument going on over at movie site aintitcool.com – which perhaps marks the moment when a once subversive, funny and non-conformist site finally found itself at odds with its readership for becoming too successful and therefore mainstream.

The summary of what happens revolves around a Harry Knowles review of the Star Wars animated film The Clone Wars – which was posted and then taken down, prompting talk of a conspiracy.

One of the site's best know writers Moriarty penned an abrasive and, perhaps unwise response to the community's angry reaction explaining that the review had been pulled because it was under embargo, and if they ran it they would find their access to previews of films restricted by the film industry.

Aintitcool, of course, was created by using moles and rumour to get movie news (that was often under embargo) to its readers first.

Keeping 'the man' happy

But times change and what once was a site that fed off of the scraps and flourished, is now growing fat on the movie industry itself – and the threat of the industry removing its seat from the table is now big enough that the site will risk its relationship with its very readership in order to keep 'the man' happy.

Let's get this straight – Moriarty's response is honest and heart-felt and it makes a lot of sense to a site that needs advertisers and access to movies to flourish. But will it survive if it continues to piss off its readership by being seen as more beholden to the industry than their desire for knowledge?

As commenter Cedar-room says in the comments to Moriarty's piece: "The question is now - do you just not give a shit anymore about telling the truth? Do you prefer to live inside the studios pockets or is the shit they are threatening you with so damn apocalyptic that posting those reviews just ain't worth it? In all seriousness - the entire credibility of AICN hangs on this very question. So can you please explain?"

No longer a community site?

It's a view that may well represent a large section of the community that has made Aintitcool flourish. And in choosing to follow an embargo, Aintitcool may just have told the fans that it is no longer a site for the community, but a mainstream movie news website just like the press that it has pipped to the post for years by breaking the rules.

Indeed, that very same press have no doubt been frustrated for years that their adherence to the embargos puts them at a distinct disadvantage to the sites that are prepared to potentially cut off their nose to spite their face.

My first job out of university was as one of the original team of a site called planetfootball.com – which made its mark as a football rumour website. To my knowledge, even back when we started we never made up a story – but we would repeat stories that I have no doubt that, for instance, the Italian papers made up to fill their pages.

It was fun, exciting and ultimately successful – the site quickly grew in popularity and was part of the Sports Internet takeover by BSkyB.

Changes

For a few brief weeks life carried on as normal, but then we had Sky's legal teams tell us what we couldn't do, our access to football grew and so did our reluctance to risk our newfound contacts and invites by upsetting football clubs.

By the time planetfootball evolved into the football side of skysports.com, it was a very different beast from that fun-loving free-wheeling beginning. Not necessarily worse, but certainly less edgy.

I remember an email sent into the editor somewhere in the period of change that simply said 'planetfootball was my favourite site, but now it's just the same old shit.' I was angry, resentful and scalded by the criticism – but part of that annoyance was because I knew that the person had a point.

The quality was much higher, the site much better to look at, but it just wasn't planetfootball anymore.

Internet cycle

It's becoming an internet cycle; small site wins loyal audience by taking risks, becomes mainstream off the back of that success and stops taking those risks that made it big. Look at Perez Hilton – for instance – once an acerbic commentator on celebrity from the outside, he is now a celebrity in his own right.

Is he taking the same risks now he has a lifestyle of his own to jeopardise? I'll let you be the judge.

Aintitcool is and will remain a favourite website of mine, but it has evolved away from what it used to be and, I hate to say it, but although the quality is higher and the writing is more even, it's just not aintitcool any more.

TechRadar is looking for fresh freelance writing talent to work for us, as bloggers, news writers, news tipsters and more. And we pay!

We're looking for people with a demonstrable passion for, and knowledge of, consumer digital technology, whether you're an amateur enthusiast or industry insider. That is, the sort of stuff we talk about on this site.

Perhaps you comment on a lot on other tech sites. Perhaps you have a blog of your own. Or perhaps you spend a lot of time talking about tech on forums. Or maybe you already write for other sites but feel you are capable of more. Either way, we want to hear from you.

Expertise and the ability to communicate it clearly, interestingly and accurately are far more important to us than previous experience of being published (although that will probably help).

Ideally you will be UK based or have a knowledge of what it's like to be a tech enthusiast in the UK.

So whether you are a blogger who fancies getting paid, an expert who wants to earn some extra money by putting their knowledge to good use, or an enthusiast who is aching to write and fancies earning some money, then email the Editor in Chief today at: eic@techradar.com

with the subject: Writing for TechRadar

So we can get a good idea of your capabilities, we'll want 300 words of opinion about the iPhone, or a URL of your stuff. If we like you, we'll get in touch.

Good luck!

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye; it's been a period of exits for Microsoft with the retirement of founder Bill Gates and now the uber-successful operating system Windows XP finally reaching its cut-off point.

And yet, unlike other Windows versions which have tailed away into oblivion, XP – far from fading away – has enjoyed a burst of popularity in what many thought would be its swansong.

I've already written hundreds of words on why that is; the failure of Vista to catch the public imagination and the proliferation of low-powered, low-cost sub-notebooks, but I suppose in all of that I haven't really focused on the most obvious thing.

The vast majority of people are happy with XP.

Foibles

Oh they hate all the foibles that the average technophile can list ad nauseum, and one look at an alternative might well make an impact on their opinions.

But for Joe Q Public XP does enough. It lets them look at the internet, do some word processing, have a gander at their photos or video clips. In short – without anything to compare it against since their last version of Windows, XP more than suffices.

I think as tech writers, and perhaps it's true of our audience as well, we sometimes get sucked into believing that everyone knows the qualities of Leopard, the openness and promise of Linux and the failings of XP.

I also think that technophiles – by and large – give very short shrift to the industry's 300 pound gorilla. It goes a long way to explaining the widespread glee over Vista's failure to become as stellar as Microsoft had hoped.

So while we often get dragged into that most heinous of journalistic crimes – assuming knowledge from our readers – we are aware that not everybody knows that SP2 was a virtual ground-up rewrite of XP or that key features have been appropriated.

Lies, damn lies and...

But to put things in perspective – although statistically, we have a lot more users of Linux and OS X than more mainstream and less tech-focused sites – the overwhelming majority of our traffic is from XP users.

A healthy percentage of that is work users who do not choose the OS that their business goes for, but there is a large amount who actively prefer Windows.

I still use Windows XP on my own home PC – it's, for me, a gamer, the easy choice and, although I'm aware of its problems, it more-than suffices.

Going forward – maybe that will change.

I've always been a big fan of Creative's Zen MP3 players. Back in the early 2000's, the NOMAD Jukebox range of Zen players were setting the bar in a very youthful MP3 player market.

However, since the brilliant Creative Zen vision M was released in 2005, the company seems to have lost its way somewhat. The new ZEN player hasn't been the roaring success Creative hoped it would be – it's just not as good as the iPod nano.

Extreme audio

However, I think (or more accurately, I hope) that things are about to change. Because while looks, interface and build quality are all important factors for an MP3 player, there's one feature which often gets overlooked… sound quality.

A lot of MP3 players produce a far from inspiring sound. In fact I'll stick my neck out and say that most of those products sound absolutely terrible. That's partly because MP3's are, by their very nature, mutilated versions of formerly awesome-sounding uncompressed audio.

Battery problems

But it's also because the audio chips inside a lot of the players aren't up to the job. They can't decode the music properly, and often you get a muddy, yucky mess clogging up your ears instead of wonderfully smooth, soothing soundwaves. For some people this doesn't matter – they use the terrible earphones that usually come bundled with the players.

But for those people with a more refined ear, and who like to listen with some quality headphones/earphones – a higher standard of audio is needed. And that's where the Creative Zen X-Fi will step in.

Equipped with Creative's awesome new X-Fi (extreme fidelity) chip, the new Creative MP3 player will be able to 'upscale' the bitrate of MP3 music files by restoring the highs (e.g. cymbal crashes) and lows (e.g. bass) that are eliminated when music is compressed.

Creative calls it X-Fi crystallisation. The rumour is that to go with this vastly improved audio quality, the player will come with a pair of decent earphones so you'll really be able to hear the difference.

A bright future?

The reason it's taken so long to develop this tech for portable devices is simple: the processing power involved uses lots of power. So over the last few years, Creative has been trying to work around these battery life issues – it would appear as though it's finally cracked it.

And suddenly, in the blink of an eye, Creative has a unique selling point which gives it a chance to claw back some marketshare from Apple. If you want the best looking MP3 player, you'll still buy an iPod.

But when this new player launches, if you want the best sounding one (and remember, most of the time the player just sits out of sight in your pocket) the new Creative Zen X-Fi might well be the one to get.