I swear, Google and Yahoo! should just merge, all they do is copy eachother. I’ll still take Google over Yahoo! anyday.

Yahoo! has launched a system to show the “Web Rank” popularity of pages viewed by those using its toolbar. It’s similar to Google Toolbar‘s long-standing PageRank (PR) meter, and it brings with it some of the same potential problems.

The Google Toolbar PR meter reflects how popular Google believes a page is, based on the number and quality of links that point at it. Sounds great. But adding this meter was one of the worst things Google ever did.
[The Unofficial Google Weblog]

The topic of Thursday’s meeting of the House of Representatives’ consumer protection subcommittee was a bill intended to require that programs like Kazaa and Grokster obtain parental consent before installation. Peer-to-peer software is starting “to lure our children from the perceived safety of the family living room out into the dangers of the Internet wilderness,” subcommittee chairman Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., warned.

[read the article]

c|net reports: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued Apple a patent for its media player software interface on May 4, along with several other features of the company’s high-profile products. Other parts of the iTunes software, including the ability to stream songs over a network to another copy of the program, had been the subject of earlier patents.

A very cool Flash application:

“Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.”

There’s a perverse relationship between the software developer and the soapbox jerk software reviewer that needs little explanation. Developer wants publicity, thus he seeds his software amongst reviewers/bloggers/journalists and waits for the links to roll in. Developer gets free marketing, reviewer gets free software, audience gets free advice, everybody wins.

It looks like AOL will get to cash in on part of Google’s IPO, according to News.com. It was revealed this week by Time Warner in a filing with the SEC that AOL had purchased 7.4 million shares at a set price of about $3 per share as part of a 2002 investment in the now set to go public Internet search engine. The total value of the investment is now worth around $22 million. [The Unofficial Google Weblog]

The FOAF (”Friend of a Friend”) project is a community driven effort to define an RDF vocabulary for expressing metadata about people, and their interests, relationships and activities. Founded by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, FOAF is an open community-lead initiative which is tackling head-on the wider Semantic Web goal of creating a machine processable web of data. Achieving this goal quickly requires a network-effect that will rapidly yield a mass of data. Network effects mean people. It seems a fairly safe bet that any early Semantic Web successes are going to be riding on the back of people-centric applications. Indeed, arguably everything interesting that we might want to describe on the Semantic Web was created by or involves people in some form or another. And FOAF is all about people.
[read the article on XML.com]

This is from march, but i just found it:

The Miami Beach, Florida board of education reassigned a high school science teacher after he bet one of his students twenty bucks to jump out a second story window. I am shocked. Shocked that gambling is going on inside our high schools.

Florida Teacher Bets Student To Jump Out Window

csteinle writes “Looks like the major labels are getting their own way again. The New York Post reports that the price per track may be going up to $1.25, … [Slashdot]

Welcome to the Google domain speculation gold rush!!

Got some spare cash lying around? Want to get in on the biggest thing since the last dot-com revolution? Buy yourself a Google domain! Force Google to pay you money (more likely sue you) as they expand their reach across the Internet after becoming flush with cash from their IPO!

Check the list of what’s already been taken (over 400 gone so far!!) and then head to your favorite domain registration site today!!

For anothering entertaining spin on this, check out WebProNews’s own Garrett French and his musings on this insanity.

Thanks to ResourceShelf for finding this interesting tidbit of Google-cash mania.