And what of the Internet? It was supposed to allow us to stay at home and work. But now, we use the Internet to plan our trips and buy our aeroplane tickets.

Rupert Murdoch’s rumoured plan is to make much of the Wall Street Journal's content free. he inexorable trend in finance and news is that information and data have no monetary value. They are ubiquitous.

The Nigerians are still in business. Apparently, there are people who fall for their scams. They send a letter or an email explaining that they have a huge amount of money that they need to transfer to the United States…all they need is the help of an ordinary person with a bank account.

What is this Bit torrent thing that everyone talks about and how do I use it and how does it work?

Class was supposed to disappear with the modern world- particularly with the internet. It was supposed to usher us into a world where we all talked to each other and the technology was supposed to create a classless society... but it hasn't quite been like that.

For class has not gone away at all- and even on the internet class persists as a factor in the way that people use the net. Its interesting to note that as the Guardian reveals according to research done by Danah Boyd at the University of California the working class make use of different social networking sites from the middle class. In the States, Facebook (thanks in part to its origins as a site for students) attracts middle class professionals whereas My Space attracts working class and minority groups.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have once again broken Internet speed records, and this time twice on consecutive days.

While working on the high-speed Internet 2 network, an experimental system set up and managed by a consortium of more than 200 universities in the US and elsewhere, researchers have announced that back on December 30 last year they successfully transmitted data at 7.67 gigabits per second over 30,000km using only standard equipment and communications protocols.

Then, the next day, on New Year’s Eve, over the same pathway and using the same equipment and standards, the team achieved a data flow rate of 9.8 gigabits per second, which is very close to Internet 2’s theoretical speed limit of 10 Gbps.

I wouldn’t say no to getting that kind of download speeds, but it’s highly unlikely that my ISP will offer that kind of speeds in the near future.

Wikia the company behind the encyclopaedia Wikipedia is planning to launch its own search engine in a bid to take five per cent of the search engine market, and by this move taking on the mighty Google.

The news was announced by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales at a news conference in Japan, Wales condemned the practice of secrecy in search engine ranking, and explained that an online community could develop the future of search engines.

"The idea that Google has some edge because they've got super-duper rocket scientists may be a little antiquated now," he said.

Wales describes Google and Yahoo as "black boxes" that won't disclose how they rank search results, and that collaborative search technology could transform the power structure of the Internet.

Early in January, Senator Ted "Tubes" Stevens introduced Senate bill number 49, this bill would require that any library or school that gets federal Internet subsidies would have to block the Tubes to all interactive Web sites.

This means that they’ll have to block the Internet Tubes to sites like MySpace and Wikipedia and possibly also Blogs, it sound crazy, but Senator Ted Stevens thinks that all interactive Web pages could be a major threat to American children.

Last year a similar bill was introduced, the Deleting Online Predators Act, also called DOPA. That bill passed through the Tubes of the House, but got clogged in the Senate.

This new bill is being called the "Son of DOPA" due to the similarities of these two bills.

It limits access to social networks in schools (only those receiving Federal subsidies via the E-Rate Program ) and seems to encompass the same sites as DOPA, everything from MySpace to Wikipedia; additionally the schools would be required to monitor, or perhaps track, the online activities of students if not supervised by faculty. Also included in this section is a mandate for the FTC to set up a site to warn of the dangers of social networking and interactive sites.

It's difficult to point to one reason in particular why, out of all the sciences, people seem to find archaeology the most fascinating.

There is of course the aesthetic quality, which fields like say, physics and chemistry seldom can equal. Greek statuary and ancient Chinese bronze vessels are undeniable works of art to rival the best humanity has ever produced. The appeal of dinosaur fossils need no explanation to any young boy. And mummies, hidden for millennia, elicit that Gothic frisson beloved by the early Romantic writers.

But most of all, archaeology probably appeals to the part of us that wishes we were Indiana Jones or Lara Croft, "tomb-raiding" for some priceless artifact.

Some times that jolt of caffeine from the morning coffee or Red Bull just doesn't cut it to get you going. The rain is pouring down. The engine of your car is making coughing noises that didn't sound healthy when you heard something similar from the wino living in the alley around the corner. There's a ton of dreary paperwork waiting for you in the office. It's Monday.

That's when you have a very real physical need for that certain fix that you can only get by reading that Britney Spears is pregnant again and looking like something dredged up from the Mississippi, to bring the bounce back in your step. And you need it right now. That's when you log on to GossipURLs.

Once again Viacom is requesting YouTube to remove 100,000 pirated video clips from Viacom-owned television networks, including MTV, Comedy Central, and VH-1.

"After months of ongoing discussions with YouTube and Google, it has become clear that YouTube is unwilling to come to a fair market agreement that would make Viacom content available to YouTube users," Viacom said in a statement. "Filtering tools promised repeatedly by YouTube and Google have not been put in place, and they continue to host and stream vast amounts of unauthorized video.

What seems to be Viacom’s biggest problem with having their content on YouTube is that Google is earning money from it and not Viacom.

At the time of Google's IPO in August 2004, many analysts and observers, myself included, argued that there was no realistic justification for the price level their shares subsequently shot up to. It all had that whiff of the recently dug grave of the Dot-com mania - "Irrational Exuberance Part II: ZombieCom".

Well, for some of us it's high time to eat crow. And this ain't your grandfather's Dot-com company.

Yesterday's results from Google's fourth quarter showed profits nearly tripling, to a hefty $1.03 billion.

BBC revealed Monday it is in discussions with Google to make some of programming available on the search company's video sharing site YouTube.

A BBC spokesperson confirmed Monday the broadcaster is indeed in talks with Google to offer content from its BBC Worldwide to be put on YouTube.

BBC Worldwide is looking at commercial options, which can be a share of contextual advertising that will appear along with the BBC Worldwide content.

Google welcomes its latest library partner, the University of Texas at Austin, to the Google Books Library Project. Known as the fifth largest academic library in the United States, the University of Texas Libraries house some of the nation's leading collections, including the world-renowned Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection.

Soon, researchers and history lovers all over the world will be able to search more than one million books and materials from the University of Texas, including selections from these unique works from early Latin American history.

Initially endowed with a unique set of rare books and manuscripts relating to Mexico, the Benson Collection now maintains a wealth of information from Latin America, with special concentrations on Brazil, Chile, Peru, and the countries of the Rio de la Plata and Central America.

Web encyclopaedia Wikipedia, which blocked anonymous Qatari editors from posting on its site for 12 hours yesterday, has confirmed that this policy was only temporary and not an intentional country-wide ban.

The 12-hour ban on unregistered Wikipedia users posting to the site via the IP address 82.148.97.69 was brought into effect as a result of internet vandalism and spamming by some Qatari users, according to Wikipedia’s official online explanation.

According to a related BBC News report, these problems related to specific web pages covering the US, sex and the birthday of the prophet Muhammad.

Google has launched a beta of a service that searches patent filings. The service will initially index seven million patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and Google plans to add additional sources in the future.

Patents can be searched for by number, the name of the person filing the patent or by keywords.

Google plans to build an index of patent documents, including images, by scanning the documents and using optical character recognition technology.
The process is similar to the method by which Google scans books for its Book Search service.

While Google Book Search has met with fierce resistance from copyright holders, information in patent filings documents is freely available. The USPTO currently offers online access to the patents through its website.

Google Answers is shutting down, Google Answers which was one of the first of its Labs projects ever unveiled.

Later this week, no new questions will be accepted in Google Answers, although questions posted over the last 4 and a half years will still be available for browsing.

In the Google Blog, Andrew Fikes and Lexi Baugher write that the project was based on an idea from Larry Page, and was then turned into a reality by a four person team, with the goal of responding to requests and finding out what questions were on people's minds.

The company that first put AJAX and Web 2.0 technologies on the map has once again acquired a small firm making a web-based spreadsheet application.

Israel based iRows was one of the better known of a stack of companies building hosted programs. These firms all have the same mantra, AJAX, ubiquitous access, share files and no disk needed.

Google already has its own word processor and spreadsheet offering. Presumably, the search giant feels the addition of iRows will make for a stronger product.

iRows is not accepting new customers and existing users will have to move their data to Google’s spreadsheet.

Google plans to start selling advertising space in 50 top newspapers, expanding the Internet search engine's efforts to provide services off the Web and making it easier for companies advertising online to also show off their products in print.

A group of more than 100 Google advertisers will be able to place bids for space in newspapers owned by The New York Times Company, Gannett, the Tribune Company, the Washington Post Company and Hearst during a three-month test period.

Many newspaper executives see the proposed system as a way to increase sales as they struggle with reader defection and competition from online advertising. They downplayed any risks of letting Google handle their relationships with advertisers.

Two days after announcing a top secret intelligence community website named "Intellipedia" the United States' top intelligence official took down a government website featuring captured Iraqi documents after concern was voiced it may provide too much information about how to make atomic bombs.

In a statement Thursday night, a spokesman for National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said his office has suspended public access to the website "pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing."

The website, which contains Saddam Hussein-era documents, was pulled after The New York Times raised questions about the contents of the government site, called the "Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal."

Condé Nast, the owner of Wired and other magazines and websites, has acquired Boston based Reddit earlier this morning, and will make the announcement later today. The price has not yet been disclosed.

Reddit is a social news service that was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005, they were later joined by Christopher Slowe and Aaron Swartz.

Reddit has always played second fiddle to Digg, although Reddit does have an active and loyal userbase of about 70,000 unique visitors and 700,000 daily. Now all the four Reddit employees will have to relocate from Boston to Wired’s San Francisco office and become part of Wired Digital.

Iran’s government has banned high speed internet in an effort to cut out influence from the west, according to reports from The Guardian.

This comes shortly after a clampdown on satellite dishes, which Iranians use to watch western TV.

The move restricts the country's five million Internet users to a mere 128k connection, and broadband has been strictly forbidden. Iranian bigwigs seem to think that western music, movies and TV shows are poisoning and undermining the country's proud Islamic culture among the little ones. The ban will make it far more difficult for kids to download such things.

The search engine giant Google is going to turn its massive 1-million-square-foot campus into a solar power plant. This will be the largest solar project undertaken by a U.S company.

Google believes the sun eventually can deliver as much as 30 percent of it’s energy needs. Once the solar panels are in place, they are expected to produce about 1.6 megawatts of electricity, or about enough to supply about 1.000 homes.

The ambitious project will require installing more than 9,200 solar panels on a high-tech mecca nicknamed the "Googleplex." After leasing the offices for several years, Google bought the campus for $319 million earlier this year.

Google has combined its online word processing and spreadsheet applications through a common interface, single sign-in and data repository.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets, launched today in beta mode, has been devised to make Google's personal productivity software simpler to use. The suite also brings some much-needed order to the burgeoning Google catalogue.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets unifies Google's Writely online word suite, purchased in March, and Google Spreadsheets, released by Google Labs in June.

The applications share a common, tabbed-based interface - meaning an end to the Writely look and feel. Users have the ability to make edits in realtime with others, while also specifying who is allowed to view documents. There's a joint list for all users' documents and spreadsheets and one help center. As before, users can save and export as Microsoft- and non-Microsoft file formats.

Search engine giant Google is in talks to buy popular Web video site YouTube. For an outrageous price of close to 1.6 billion dollars. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier today.

A spokeswoman for YouTube could not be reached for comment. A Google spokesman said, "We don't comment on rumors and speculation." Rumors of such talks were reported earlier on the TechCrunch blog.

YouTube, founded less than two years ago, has seen surging popularity, with users watching more than 100 million videos per day.

Back in 2001 Wikipedia began its life, founded by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales. The online encyclopedia earned its fame and popularity by allowing anybody to participate on an equal footing, but it certainly also received its share of criticism aimed at the flip side of the same distinguishing quality.

Sanger resigned from his role as "chief organizer" of Wikipedia in 2002. While still expressing support for the goals and ideals of Wikipedia, he has been singing along with the choir of critical voices since his departure. But in contrast to Wikipedia’s other critics, Sanger is not content with just sounding off.

Google, renowned for taking on the US Justice Department early this year over the integrity of its user data, has agreed to hand over a small portion of its data to Brazilian authorities under threat of hefty fines and possibly closure of its local office.

The data relates to information posted on the Orkut social networking site in Brazil, which involves pornography, pedophilia, racism and other criminal activities. The Brazilian federal prosecutor wants data that can help identify the perpetrators of the criminal postings.

Google, which was facing fines of US$23,000 a day plus a further US$62 million and possible closure of its Brazilian office, finally relented when it was clear that the Brazilian courts meant business.

Orkut has more than 15 million users and is Brazil's most popular social networking site.

Google maintains that the Orkut case is different from the US Department of Justice case because it only involves information for specific cases, and not Google's entire search index, billions of pages and two months' worth of queries, for a broad civil case.

Google has once again expanded its search territory, this time google offers books search. Google Books allows you to search through the content of books.

When we find a book whose content contains a match for your search terms, we'll link to it in your search results. Click a book title and you'll see, like a card catalog entry, some basic information about the book. You may also see a few snippets of text from the book showing your search term in context. If the publisher or author has given us permission through our Partner Program then you'll see a few full pages from the book and if the book is out of copyright, you'll be able to page through the entire book. In all cases, you'll see links that lead directly to online bookstores where you can buy the book.

Google has released a beta version of Google Earth 4, which runs on all the three major platforms.

"We got so excited around here about the first anniversary of Google Earth that we decided to celebrate a bit early. Beginning today, you can download a brand new version, Google Earth 4. Running on OS X? Feel the love. Prefer Linux? Ditto. Yes, we're releasing simultaneously for PC, Mac (universal binary for full performance on both Intel and PowerPC based Macs) and for the first time ever, native support for popular Linux distributions."

They have also seriously increased the amount of high-res images, so that now about 20% of the world's landmass is in high-res.

Google announced yesterday the official release of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-based platform for the development of AJAX web applications that work in all mainstream web browsers. Designed to simplify AJAX development, GWT generates consistent, browser-neutral Javascript from simple Java source code.

According to Google, the modularity of Java facilitates a higher level of code reusability. Google also claims that using Java for AJAX development is beneficial because powerful Java IDEs like Eclipse significantly increase developer productivity.

Follow this link to download the Google Web Toolkit.