[eBay]

Maybe one of these students didn’t want to go to school so her or she planted the message so others will do the same. Instead of the school suing MySpace they should be after the student for making the false statement. We all know the school would also be blaming others if there was indeed a shootout at the school.

[Tech Dirt]

Give this a try the next time you want to cover your tracks and don’t want to pay or wait for pages to load like the other anonymous surfing sites.

So what did we learn so far, you can save your ass here and hide your ass over here.

[Uber Gizmo]

Before you go and get your own cardboard computer case make sure you also get a fire extinguisher. And remember to keep the computer away from water and don’t put anything on top of it. Better yet, you should put the cardboard case inside a case of it’s own.

Via

This is nuts and I thought Nick Cage naming his son Kal-el was out of this world. Maybe baby Kai will be the official mascot of King Google. The Google kingdom can now rest assure that there is an heir to the almighty Google throne. This is if the future King of Google doesn’t get his butt kicked at school.

Baby Google’s website and blog.

Google Earth, an Internet site launched in June this year, allows users to access overlapping satellite photos. Although not all areas are highly detailed, some images are very high resolution, and some show sensitive locations in various countries.

[AP]

Via Daily Kos

In a show of unity, five unions representing actors, writers and directors issued a joint call for talks to make sure their members get a cut of revenue generated by the sale of TV shows on Apple’s iTunes software.

Under the WGA contract, writers are entitled to 1.6 percent of the license fee paid by networks to the producers of a show. The ABC hits “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives,” are produced by Touchstone Studios, Disney’s TV production arm.

Actors are entitled to 3.6 percent of the license fee.

A conflict could arise if studios decide to treat the Internet downloads the same as a DVD sale, which might result in lower payments.

[AP]

Can this be another dot com bust 2.0 situation, where internet company go on a buying spread and wind up crashing and burning up? Can we see another dot com bubble in the making? Or can AOL be a curse that no one knows but Time Warner?

Yahoo and Microsoft will now command upwards of 44 percent of the market, according to research firm Radicati Group, putting new pressure on market leader AOL, which holds around 56 percent market share with AIM and ICQ. And according to recent comScore Media Metrix numbers, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger together reach 33.5 million unique users each month, more than the 23 million running AIM.

[BetaNews]

The laptops will be encased in rubber to make them more durable, and their AC adaptors will also act as carrying straps.

The Linux-based machines are expected to have a 500MHz processor, with flash memory instead of a hard drive which has more delicate moving parts.

They will have four USB ports, and will be able to connect to the net through wi-fi – wireless net technology – and will be able to share data easily.

It will also have a dual-mode display so that it can still be used in varying light conditions outside. It will be a colour display, but users will be able to switch easily to monochrome mode so that it can be viewed in bright sunlight, at four times normal resolution.

When Professor Negroponte saw the benefits of donated notebook PCs that Cambodian children could carry around with them, he immediately set about planning the sub-$100 machines.

In this role, you will provide leadership on product vision and execution of projects that enable using Google’s search and advertising technologies to enhance users’ Television viewing experience. [...] You will identify key market trends that are shaping user behavior when watching Television. These include but not limited to the intersection of Internet and Television technologies, Video-On-Demand, Personal Video Recorders and emergence of next generation set-top-boxes with IP connectivity. You will then identify areas where use of Google’s search and advertising technology can enhance this user experience and define appropriate products to deliver these user benefits.

You can read more of the excerpt here at Search Engine Journal.

This is so good, I get to see Everybody Hates Chris without any commercial interruptions. I wonder if they will be doing this each week for this show.

“With Google Video, our mission is to make the world’s video content accessible and useful. The show debuted last week; now we’re making this accessible to users,” said Peter Chane, a senior business product manager with Google.

Chane indicated that other deals for television content might be in the works. “We’re not announcing anything at this time, but we are working with rights holders to bring more and more video online,” he said.

But search remains our heart and soul, so I’m especially pleased by this latest expansion of our index, which makes Google more than 3 times larger than any other search engine. See for yourself how effective the new Google search index can be. Come up with a search query that’s special to you (your name, your elementary school, and your favorite animal, for example) – a combination of words that is likely to exist on just a few web pages out of the billions we’ve indexed, a few needles scattered in the Internet’s endless haystack. Ready?

I can say I do all my searches with Google, about 15-20 searches a day. Only on occasion do I use Yahoo or MSN, mainly to see how many pages are index there. Keep improving the searches to keep it relevant and we’ll keep using it.

Happy Birthday Google. So is your real birthday really on September 7, 1998?

This is great news given that FireFox is have a few problems with vulnerability. Seems like I am patching up the FireFox like every few days, hopefully this new and free Opera can help out with my browsing needs.

I have downloaded and used Opera and I have to say I like it. Only thing that needs attention is there is no plugin to show the Google PageRank, other then that its real nice. Some of the fancy things I see is that I can now talk to my browser and tell it what to do, time to get a headset. Now I just need to get use to the setup of the browser and I will be fine.

Now only if there was a good tutorial on how to create your own Google Map mashup because I have an idea for one but haven’t figure how to make one yet. This mashup is the next hot thing since plain old Google Map. I think Google Map is the better map to use compare to the Yahoo one, the only reason is that Yahoo require you to host it on the Yahoo server. This is good if you don’t want to pay for the bandwidth when your map becomes popular but bad because you don’t get any kind of traffic or page views from your work.

I can see with so much popularity of the map mashup out there and that there are so many maps in development that ads will be place on the maps eventually. The term to use the Google api even states that they reserve the right to place advertisement on your mashup map in the future.

Link: business2blog and Business 2.0