You must check out A9.com Maps. Google's Maps are awesome, but A9 has some great tricks too.

Is Google developing their own browser? Those who think so might note a new google employee.

PHP in the news: Why PHP 5 Rocks!

Adam Trachtenberg wrote a nice article on the benefits of PHP5. If you use MySQL/PHP based technologies, it's worth the read.
Excerpt:

In this article, I highlight seven of my favorite PHP 5 features. These features allow your PHP 5 code to frequently be shorter, more elegant, and more flexible than ever before.

Google Labs has come out with something new: Site-Flavored Google Search.

Google has launched Google Blog, with posts by Evan Williams, Google's Blogger Program Manager. Welcome Evan.

Google in the news: Google has filed with the SEC to go public!

Google Seen Announcing IPO Plan Within Days

Excerpt:

The announcement is related to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rule that says a private company must make public more information about its business once its passes a certain size in terms of assets and number of shareholders, the Journal said.

Google, which has enough assets and shareholders to trigger the rule, is expected to make those disclosures as early as next week, the Journal said.

Nutch is the Open Source search engine I've spoken about before. Well Yahoo! Labs has opened up an open source Nutch Search Demo. They have some interesting features in the search result pages. While right now the "cached" links don't work for me, the "explain" and "anchors" link are very interesting! Search experts might want to take a look.

Not getting the results you want from archive.org? Try out Search Engine Ay-Up.com.

Small search engine company Eurekster has launched their search engine into beta. I'm not thrilled with their results from a cursory look at it, but then again, Google's results are filled with spam these days too. I do really like their bar on the right listing popular searches and letting you navigate topics. Give it a try and drop a comment on how you like it.

After dealing with a bunch of comment spam tonight, I decided to take a different approach to dealing with it. While others point out some features that will come up with the next version of MT, I had another idea MT can use, as well as one all bloggers can use. For the MT developers, I'd suggest instead of just offering a user sign-up for commenters, or moderated comments, they can offer moderated urls. Since some comment spammers are looking for "google juice" as Joi Ito calls it, just moderating the urls allows you to choose whether to accept the link or not, while allowing free commenting.

Another idea which is my new policy here, is to subvert their goals of using link text to get a high ranking on google, for any money keyword. If all the blogger victims of spam were to simply erase the urls of comment spammers, then the spammers themselves would subvert their very own targetted keywords. Instead of pointing to their url, they would wind up creating a ton of competition for their money words! If this got to be popular, targetting keywords in blog comment spam would die overnight.

Update: Instead of just deleting the url, I am now borrowing a page from Google and linking to charity organizations.

Sir Richard Branson is the first customer of the Aquada.

The New York Times discusses the possibility of Google going public.

Charlie Demerjian at The Inquirer has written an interesting article claiming that Microsoft is on the decline. A worthwhile read.

The whispering wheel is a brilliant new idea for improving fuel efficiency and pollution.

Microsoft has come up with the best anti-spam concept I've ever really heard. As long as they make it open source, this will be a tremendous help for the scourge of spam. Can't wait to see it implemented.

Check out Google's new Google Print.

Excerpt:

What exactly is Google Print (BETA)?
Google's mission is to provide access to all the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible. It turns out that not all the world's information is already on the Internet, so Google has been experimenting with a number of publishers to test their content online. During this trial, publishers' content is hosted by Google and is ranked in our search results according to the same technology we use to evaluate websites.

Try a search for Diamonds

Minox has released a fashionable digital camera with synthetic diamonds.

This Slashdot article on Moore's Law has some interesting discussion about how synthetic diamonds may affect chips in the future.

I just found my next laptop, the Ferrari 3000.

There is an excellent article in Wired Magazine of the upcoming Amazon venture, Search within the Book. This will be a tremendous innovation and rival Google when searching for information.

The Financial Times reports: Google is considering holding a massive online auction of shares early next year in an initial public offering that investment bankers predict could value the internet search-engine company at more than $15bn.

You thought Kazaa was bad for the music industry? Wait till you hear about Skype. Verizon must not be very happy! You will definitely hear more about this soon!

There's a new search engine out there for Acronyms: Find out what over 317,000 acronyms & abbreviations stand for.

Microsoft is launching self-destruct e-mails. An idea whose time is overdue. Hopefully their protocol will be "open" so that other systems can incorporate the feature. I have to imagine it won't be hard to reverse-engineer.

I learned something rather surprising from this article on the BBC...the U.S. Government does not allow destruction of email?? I wonder who is obligated to keep the email, for how long and other details.

Can you imagine being fined for deleting Junk Mail?? Since the government is so interested in email, why can't they stop child pornography from being emailed to millions of people including children?

Excerpt:

Microsoft says Office 2003, which is to be launched on Tuesday, will allow users to "time stamp" e-mails, ordering them to be deleted on a set date.
But any organisation planning to install the new software may run into opposition from regulators.
In the United States, destroying e-mails is a federal offence, regarded in a similar light to shredding documents.
Earlier this year, brokers Morgan Stanley were fined $1.65m for failing to keep e-mail records.

Although I don't agree with most of what David Gelernter says about spam in his article: Apres Spam, the next email crisis, the following paragraph definitely resonates:

You get an email (maybe longer or more complicated than average, or from someone you don't know); you have no time to respond right now, but you mean to answer--but other emails stack up, and you answer those first--but you still plan to reply--but more emails keep arriving. . . . Meanwhile the sender is wondering: Is he ignoring me on purpose? (I'll cross him off my list and forget about it.) Did he mean to reply, but has since forgotten? (Resend my message.) Or does he still mean to reply and just hasn't gotten around to it? (Don't get mad or resend.) All three possibilities are real, and happen all the time.

Just found this fabulous page which will help to secure your computer against all kinds of vulnerabilities. I highly recommend trying out the programs written by the Gibson Research Corporation.

TechNewsWorld has an article on the upcoming Open-Source search engine called Nutch. It will take a while, but I bet this will be a big player one day.

Google Labs has released a new feature called Search by Location. Try searching for Diamond websites in your area by typing in the area code below and drop a comment here to let us know how the search results came out:

About a week ago Verisign started to resolve all unregistered ".com" and ".net" domain names to itself, redirecting it to an Overture affiliate program. Commentwire has a discussion on the financial windfall to Verisign as a result of this action. By the way, you may have very likely come across this verisign page without even realising it. Just type in any domain name that doesn't exist and you will see it. Try this one: www.thisdomainnamedoesnotexistactuall.com.

God bless Dave Barry. His column on telemarketers gave out the phone number of a telemarketing association so that people could discuss with them what they thought of telemarketing. They weren't amused. How shocking, who would have thought that having people you don't know call you would disturb anyone? I'm sure Dave Barry meant no harm...

A soon-to-come Japanese import will be the reusable aluminum can. Definitely a product whose time has come.

How do you fight a monumental problem such as spam? Italy is jailing spammers. Bravo! Now they just need to bring that to America and conservatively a good half of the spam that plagues us will be gone.

Sergey Brin on an eventual Google IPO.

Overture is the latest to offer a Toolbar.

I find this memo a little hard to believe. It is allegedly a memo from eBay management saying things like "It has come to my attention that several employees are talking at their desks during scheduled work hours. I must convey the importance of NOT talking at your desk, or to your desk partner. Talking greatly decreases work productivity, and company morale." Company Morale??

I know the blogger community is talking about it, but I'd like to see more evidence that Jody Rivers is the Safeharbor Manager and really wrote that. It's just too outrageous to be true. Although Dilbert has made a career out of these types of incidents so who knows...

From USA Today: Microsoft keeping eye on employee blogs.

Thomas Friedman of the NY Times visited Google headquarters and reported on it. Not sure why a political Op-Ed Columnist would write about Google, but he does bring up some good points. Especially about how wireless devices hooked into Google and the Web will only increase web use in a big way. An interesting read.

Check out the new Google Toolbar!

I don't know. This whole thing seems fishy to me.

Excerpt:

Several US biotechnologists are working on cloning pets. However, customers could get a shock. Last year, scientists in Texas created Cc, for Copy Cat, but the resulting kitten looked nothing like its originator.

It's getting pretty heated.

Excerpt:

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday he favors developing new technology to remotely destroy the computers of people who illegally download music from the Internet.

Even better than this article on spam, which details some efforts made by Yahoo to reduce spam, like forcing you to identify a picture when sending out email, is this comment about creating fake open relays to fool spammers. I hope there will be a major solution soon. It's just getting too crazy.

OK, enough is enough. Maybe there aren't that many laws specifically attacking Spam. But between all the porn and wasted time and personal hassles and port scanning etc done by spammers, they must be doing plenty to be sued in court. If any class action lawyers are reading this, how about a Class Action Lawsuit?

Let's identify the top spammers, we'll definitely get help from plenty of spamcop people. Then let's start the largest class action lawsuit in the history of lawsuits ever. You'll probably get just about every American to testify for you. Let's pick em off, one at a time and sue them. Anyone who wants part of the lawsuit, add your comment here and say AYE!