Credit the Google PR machine with this much; They know how to stir up media froth without serving up any real products. Android and the OpenSocial initiative showed that much. Of course, the process is often as simple as leaking "scoops" to the Wall Street Journal. Today, for example, the Journal reports that Google is working on an Internet storage service that will work like just another hard drive. This would be a scoop, of course, if the software, codenamed "Platypus," hadn't been out for a year already. The paper cites "people familiar with the matter," but you can safely describe them as product managers eager to test the market without accountability. Remember the Journal's big Googlephone scoop over the summer? Same thing.

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