It's easy to blame other people in order to hide one's own shortcomings, as happened with O2's MMS leak.
Matt Cutts explains to those, who still don't know, why the suggested explanation making the rounds now has no merit, thus why it's O2 and not Google who's at fault.
In his posting he mentions a hexadecimal string commencing with "F1AB". If you do a search for the complete string you'll also find pages with slightly rephrased copies - and one lifted verbatim - naming different authors. Will they blame Google for that too?
Linus Torvalds has more than one talent. Here's how he fabricates publicity.
Techcrunch show a video [for people able to squint] demonstrating some first observed features of Google's experiments with personalising search results.
Btw: what most publishers of instructional [and Youtube quality] videos seem to miss is the fact that the user, or viewer in this case, can't underline words on video. Printed words still rule for lots of people.
Philip Greenspun has an interesting list of Parallels between our current economic times and the Great Depression. Missing is, that now and then politicians weren't necessarily interested in the long term.

Twing is an interesting search engine for "communities" - virtual ones, these days there are very few real ones, and they do not like to be searched - that could be an alternative for when price comparisons and other noise is not good enough.
If I would have coded this I'd ignore all those posts which just ask a question without having elicited an answer. There's is enough of those already in the mainstream search engines.
Google now offers a way for you to see who can access your Gmail. What can one say...
The Register explains it like nobody else can:
AJAX browser vote exceeds 'wild' expectations.
Google just open sourced ratproxy, a browser proxy analysing traffic between a user and a site to check for nasties not detected by many people. Not something for the point and click crowd though.
Wet summers have their own risks:
What to do if the inside of a grill gets wet.
Are these people all related to each other. Or do we have a list of fabricated names as a new for of spam?
In a just published patent application Google can be seen to be considering the monetisation - what an ugly word - of your friends. You still can't buy friends. But soon, thanks to Google, you may be able to sell them.

Somehow Adobe and Google, followed by Yahoo, got around to working together on an improved Flash parser. It's now able to extract text and links and index those - as long as the flash file is not referenced by Javascript only. Some people thinks this is cool. That's cool. They still don't get semantics because there aren't any. And their sites will probably be even less usable now that they see no need to provide alternative content.
If one believes The Register, some of the motives are advertising driven.
The Independent this fine morning:
Some presidents get carved into Mt Rushmore; others have airports, motorways, and even entire cities named in their honour. But when George Bush leaves office, his most visible memorial may be a mouldering patch of human effluent.
© Copyright 1998 - 2008 Klaus Schallhorn.