21 Hours Ago - TechCrunch reports that Google is in advanced stage negotiations to purchase Yelp, the online local business review service. This is a deal that makes so much sense for Google, it makes me wonder why they haven't done it already. As I wrote yesterday, mobile is a big part of the Google strategy and... (Read More)

5 Days Ago - I came across an interesting post today by the Kansas City Star's Eric Adler suggesting that technology is robbing us of serendipity, those playful moments of spontaneous discovery. For example, he wonders when the last time a young person went into a library or book store and just found a book... (Read More)

10 Days Ago - Google announced Google Googles yesterday, an application that uses the camera in your Android-powered phone to take a picture, conduct a visual search, then return results. Google admits that it's very early, but this is extremely intriguing technology and it has the potential to take visual... (Read More)

33 Days Ago - Mark Cuban, the eccentric owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, has a post in his blog this week suggesting a way to kill Google by paying the top one thousand most popular sites $1M each to leave the Google Index. He wonders if Rupert Murdoch's plan to leave the Google Index could mark the... (Read More)

25 Days Ago - If the new Google interface design is any indication, it appears that Google might actually be feeling a little heat, or at least some influence, from Bing. Danny Sullivan, who has been covering search for years, had a post in his Search Engine Land blog last week about the new interface overhaul... (Read More)

Nov 10th, 2009 - You can always count on Rupert Murdoch, the cantankerous News Corp. chairman, for a good laugh and he didn't disappoint this week during an interview on Sky News Australia in which he boldly stated his sites would pull out of Google Search. In fact, he once again accused search engines of outright... (Read More)

11 Days Ago - A new search engine officially launches today, the same day as the World Climate Summit in Copenhagen commences. According to Ecosia you can help battle climate change by switching away from Google and here's how. Not only will the new guy on the search block give 80% of the advertising revenue... (Read More)

Mar 14th, 2008 - That is the general thrust of an interesting article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times this week. It starts by describing how the offices of one of the world's most popular websites is a rented space stuffed with furniture bought off of eBay and with a printed paper sign taped to the door... (Read More)

17 Days Ago - What might kill illegal downloading do you think? The long (and mostly ineffective) arm of the law perhaps, or maybe a sudden (and unlikely) feeling of overwhelming love for the poor music and movie industry? According to the Global Web Index the answer could be simple and obvious: why bother... (Read More)

25 Days Ago - Rupert Murdoch is not a stupid man, his business empire is evidence of that. For anyone to become a media mogul requires smarts, but those smarts seem to be deserting Murdoch as he continues to play the fool and deny that old monetisation methods do not work for the new online model that has so... (Read More)

Nov 1st, 2009 - If piracy and illegal downloaders really are killing the music industry, how come more singles have been sold this year than ever before and people who file-share spend more money on legal releases than those who do not file-share? I have to admit, it's not been a good week to be on the side of... (Read More)

Nov 10th, 2009 - Everyone seems to be talking about how first Facebook and now Twitter are being adopted by business users, as if the concept of social networking in a business environment was somehow new. Of course, the truth is that services such as LinkedIn have been providing just that for many years now. ... (Read More)

Oct 20th, 2009 - GigaTweet has been counting the total number of messages posted to Twitter in real time, and the rolling count is almost hypnotic. Overnight the 5 billionth Tweet was posted. So what was it? Perhaps someone speaking out against corporates trying to gag freedom of the press again? Nope. ... (Read More)

Oct 22nd, 2009 - Forget the Windows 7 launch, the real big news from Microsoft this week is that it has reached a deal with Twitter to include real-time tweet data in Bing searches. If that wasn't excitement enough for the Twitterati, just a few hours after Microsoft made its announcement Google joined in and... (Read More)

12 Days Ago - The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed suit against a number of government agencies for refusing to disclose their policies for using social networking sites for investigations, data-collection, and surveillance. The EFF is working with the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy... (Read More)

19 Days Ago - I was pretty sure I wasn't the only person who cooked Thanksgiving dinner in front of, not a propped-up cookbook, but a laptop. It turns out the New York Times agrees. In fact, the paper did an analysis of search terms by region and by time, to see what conclusions could be drawn. First of... (Read More)

11 Days Ago - An increasing number of cities in the United States and Canada are releasing data to developers to use in applications. While regions have released geographic information system (GIS) data for some time, such data required complicated software to use. Cities are now releasing all kinds of data,... (Read More)

30 Days Ago - Here's a switch. Instead of newspapers trying to protect the identities of the people posting to their websites, the newspaper is the one outing them. As described by editor Kurt Greenbaum of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, someone posted a vulgar word in the paper's online commenting system, and... (Read More)

22 Days Ago - Thinking of looking for a flu shot while you're out shopping this weekend but don't know where to look? There's an app (Google Maps) for that. Type in a location and it will show you locations in the area that offer flu shots, as well as their times -- and it will differentiate between seasonal... (Read More)

23 Days Ago - Ever wanted to see the International Space Station but didn't know when or how to look? There's an app (Twitter) for that. Start following @twisst and using the information in your profile, it will let you know when the International Space Station is scheduled to pass by you. "So, every... (Read More)

25 Days Ago - In 1968, a teacher named Jane Elliott performed a seminal experiment with her class of third-graders. Wishing to teach them about prejudice, she told them that kids with blue eyes were superior to those with brown eyes, gave the blue-eyed kids all sorts of privileges, and made the brown-eyed kids... (Read More)

28 Days Ago - We're already heard about people being fired for calling in sick and then posting on Facebook. Now a woman has lost her insurance. According to CBCNews, Nathalie Blanchard, 29, has been on leave from her job at IBM for the past year and a half after she was diagnosed with major depression.... (Read More)

26 Days Ago - If you've ever had Google Maps literally send you up the river or down a sidewalk, you may have wondered whether the company ever actually sees the areas it maps. Now, it does, through an increasing number of volunteers who make corrections and add more detail to maps, according to an article in... (Read More)

32 Days Ago - A lawsuit over a website's publication of a celebrity threesome sex tape is provoking some thoughtful discussion about fair use. Not to mention giving PBS, NPR, and the New York Times the opportunity to talk about sex tapes. The tape consists of Grey's Anatomy actor Eric Dane and his wife... (Read More)

Oct 30th, 2009 - Calling social media sites a "productivity black hole," the UK IT services group Morse said that staff who use Twitter and other social networking sites while at work are costing UK businesses £1.38bn every year, according to the BBC. More than half those surveyed said they used social... (Read More)

Sep 17th, 2009 - Far from being made superfluous by the Internet, a recent study by the American Library Association finds that the library is often the only source of free Internet access in a community. More than 71 percent of all libraries (and 79 percent of rural libraries) report they are the only source of... (Read More)

Oct 23rd, 2009 - Twitter, Inc., has shut down 33 fake Twitter accounts created by Republicans using the names of Democratic state representatives, but fake websites using the Democrats' names are still up. The story was reported in the Hartford Advocate, an alternative newsweekly. State Republican Chairman... (Read More)

Oct 3rd, 2009 - A company that has been attempting to obtain licensing fees from adult companies, as well as other providers such as Internet radio stations and leading satellite and cable companies such Echostar, DirectTV, Time Warner Cable, and CSC Holdings, Inc., has had its patent thrown out by the U.S.... (Read More)

7 Days Ago - Earlier this week I read a very interesting article written by my colleague Davey Winder about the new search engine Ecosia. After reading Davies article, I decided to do some research comparing Ecosia vs. the monster search engine Google. Ecosia claims that one search via Google uses around the... (Read More)

7 Days Ago - According to a Search Software Quality survey of 492 IT professionals, 22 percent struggle most with requirements gathering. Yet the same group said they spend less than 12 percent of their time doing it. Not so at LSI Corp., which probably made some of the storage silicon in the computer you're... (Read More)

27 Days Ago - You know you've established your brand when its name becomes a verb (for example to 'Google' something). A company called PostRank might hope the same holds true for adjectives, as in "What's your PostRank?" The company hosts an ingenious service that tracks the millions of Web postings that appear... (Read More)

11 Days Ago - The British Government's decision to throw £30 million on getting everybody online is of course laudable in its way. The idea is to save a lot of money - and as the last European country still in recession goodness knows we could do with it - by taking Government services online, and to do that you... (Read More)

11 Days Ago - No, really, genuine bricks and mortar things that you can walk into. It seems that soon in the UK you'll be able to order something from Amazon then go and get it. The only question is: why? I have a few theories. First, the novelty of getting everything delivered and not seeing anyone was never... (Read More)

19 Days Ago - The controversy over whether people will pay for content online is a vexed question internationally. Here in the UK we've heard much about News Corp/News International owner Rupert Murdoch and his plans to charge for archived material. We now have a small local newspaper poised to charge people to... (Read More)

23 Days Ago - Today even in the UK we have seen the news about the American First Lady, Michelle Obama, and the scandal over Google searches throwing out a racist image. Let's leave aside the revulsion over this - it's a daft schoolkid prank and should be treated with that sort of contempt. Google had a... (Read More)

25 Days Ago - My thanks to @girlygeekdom on Twitter for highlighting what must be the most surreal Internet marketing plan ever - British girl band the Sugababes are being used to promote Windows 7. There is a website called 'sugababeslovewindows7' to announce it. I'm as flummoxed as anyone by this. Let's... (Read More)

Nov 13th, 2009 - Twitter has suspended its new retweet function. Now, this takes me back. When I started writing about technology this stuff was commonplace. A software company would announce a new version or a new package, its target date would come and go and then it would be released as buggy as anything.... (Read More)

Nov 4th, 2009 - It's almost reassuring to see a large company make basic mistakes like this - UK toy store Hamley's (one of our best-known retailers, a tourist destination in its own right so I'm told although personally I find it looks a little dated) forgot to renew its domain for a few days. Inevitably it... (Read More)

Nov 8th, 2009 - What do you use Twitter for? Telling your circle of online friends what you are up to? As an alternative to email? Maybe a little bit of legal celebrity stalking? Perhaps, but if you are an Indian Twitter user the chances are you are treating it primarily as an online news source. That is the... (Read More)

Jul 4th, 2008 - It would appear that Ask.com, the search site which used to be known as Ask Jeeves, has purchased Dictionary.com Dropping the 'Jeeves' branding after 10 years, the search engine retained the same 'ask a straightforward question' approach to Internet searching. With the acquisition of... (Read More)