Is it just me or are investors and analysts trigger-happy when it comes to forgiving so-called blue chip companies for their previous transgressions. Look at the fawning coverage given to Nortel Networks and Hewlett-Packard for their quarterly results recently. It's like investors have already forgotten Nortel's accounting scandal and HP's recent management changes. Instead, they look at results that show some year-over-year improvements, and decide both companies are definitely headed for better days. BusinessWeek and Silicon Valley Today were over all the work done by new HP CEO Mark Hurd, who has scored points with analysts since coming aboard four months ago by focusing on improving operations rather than the grandiose strategic visions of his predecessor, Carly Fiorina, who apparently still has bright job prospects according to the Wall Street Journal. Bill Cara provides some sober perspective on how HP is really doing. Nortel, meanwhile, still appears to be basking in its second-quarter results, which weren't nearly as stellar if you drill down a little bit into the numbers. Analysts and investors, however, seem to be focused on good news rather than issues such as strategic and technology challenges and money-losing contracts in India. The way investors are behaving suggests they're far too eager to pounce on good news and too anxious to forget about recent history.

For bloggers into the art/habit of pinging, you should definitely check out Pingoat, which made its debut a few weeks ago. Pingoat quickly and easily pings more than 50 services - making it a worthy rival to Pingomatic.com and King Ping. Pingoat is the creation of Kailash Nadh, who runs the boastMachine project. Nadh is an 18-year-old self-described "geek" who lives in Kerala, the southern most province in India. You can find his blog here. What is it about smart, young Indian software geeks who write cool Web-based applications? A couple weeks ago, I wrote about 21-year-old Anil Wadghule, a computer engineering student, who came up with Google Total - a new and improved Google. While Pingoat is free and a nice marketing tool for Nadh, I bet he could make a few bucks selling T-shirts featuring his cool but somewhat demented-looking goat logo.

In the enterprise router market, Cisco Systems is still the technology of choice but Juniper Networks is coming on fast. A poll by Infonetics Research shows Cisco leads in every category - except on price and value. Cisco still tops the short list for future router purchases but Juniper is now second as it scores points for value - putting it ahead of Nortel, 3Com, Enterasys and Adtran. From a Nortel perspective, the big challenge is closing the huge market share gap with Cisco. While Nortel CEO Bill Owens has talked about the company putting more strategic focus on the enterprise market to give customers an alternative to Cisco, how does he intend to do it? What role, for example, do acquisitions play? Does Nortel buy Enterasys Networks ($250 million market cap), for example, or hope that its much-vaunted but still-to-be-released Neptune router is able to save the day?