When it rains, it pours…Google News! In case you missed any of the latest news, here are all the stories you need to know about:

• Go to Google.com, type the words make google logo black and white, click "I’m feeling lucky" (via)
• Google Sky lets you explore the heavens
• Google Maps get embedded
• YouTube launches ads
• VideoEgg Complains: YouTube Ads are Just Like Ours!
• Google CEO says mobile option bid "still probable"
• Due to complaints over privacy concerns, Google is now blurring faces and license plates on Google Maps’ Street View

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PassPack is a free online privacy and password manager service that allows you to login to websites, as well as organize and store logins & private notes. The service is available 24/7 on the internet, with no USB keychain needed. Instead, it offers AES encryption and other security techniques, including disposable logins for use on public computers, two-factor authentication, an anti-phishing welcome message, strong pass phrases, https connections, non-permanent account information, and a "packing key," which works with the AES algorithm to encrypt your data before it leaves your PC. With your PassPack account enabled, you can then securely login to all your online accounts, with no need to remember your myriad of passwords - PassPack will remember them all for you. Using PassPack is likely to be more secure than if you were left to your own devices to manage your own passwords; with so many websites, the temptation to use the same password for all your online accounts is hard to overcome. To be more secure online, you could set up complex passwords for your various online logins, then allow PassPack to manage your logins for you. Using PassPack is easy - the PassPack It! button is just a bookmarklet which you drag the bookmarks bar of your browser. Once stored there, you just click the button and login to your PassPack account.

Grooveshark is a new, alpha service that encourages users to upload their mp3 collections to the Grooveshark P2P (peer-to-peer) network so other users can then download the shared mp3s for the price of 99 cents each. The kicker is this: Grooveshark is promising that all artists will be fairly compensated for these downloads. But artists won’t be the only ones compensated…so will the users! The company claims that profits will be split with the users 50/50 (profits being what the company makes after the royalty payments are made). As some users contribute more to the Grooveshark social network by offering recommendations, verifying ID3 tags, and offering bandwidth, they will, in turn, be compensated more. Since Grooveshark will only be indexing and sharing DRM-free music, the idea of purchasing tunes without copy protection for only 99 cents, as opposed to iTunes’ $1.29, is very attractive. However, the question of quality remains. The collections of mp3s that are stored on file sharers’ hard drives are often not of the best quality and may not be even worth the 99 cents. Still, the idea sounds intriguing, although I think it might be a longshot to get the music labels to go for such a revolutionary idea. (via R/W web)

Microsoft has just released a new, experimental search service called "Tafiti," which is Swahili for "do research." The service is designed to help you when using the web for research projects. With Tafiti, search queries and sessions can be visualized, stored, and shared. To use Tafiti, you begin by entering your search term in Tafiti’s search box and clicking "go;" you will then arrive at the search results page. Here, the user interface has three general areas: the "search type selection carousel" on the left, the results pane in the middle, and the "shelf" on the right. The search type selection carousel lets you easily alternate between web results, RSS feeds, images, book results, and news results by clicking on the icon for the type of result you want to see. As you change the type of search, the middle pane changes to display your search results. The various types of results are presented in easy-to-read, intuitive formats - web results appear as links along with abstracts of the pages and news results display as if in a real newspaper.

However, it’s the "shelf" on the right side of the page that is the most useful feature. Using the shelf to save your search results sets so that they are accessible from any computer on the internet requires you to sign into Tafiti with your Windows Live ID. On the shelf, you are provided a place to store associated results from any of the search categories. To add items to the shelf, you simply drag and drop the search results to the right side of the page. The results stack up on top of each other, resembling an actual stack of papers or photos. There are actually five "shelves" on the right where you can make "stacks" of your saved search results. These stacks can be labeled for easy reference. To view the contents of a particular stack on the shelf, you just click on the stack and your results appear in what’s called the "stack view," where you can delete items, post the stack to your Windows Live Spaces account, or email the stack to someone else. Another less useful, but fun feature is the "tree view" which displays your results as leaves on tree.

Tafiti uses both Microsoft Silverlight and
Live Search and works in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari on Windows XP (SP2), Windows Vista , and Mac OS X. To use Tafiti, you must first follow the prompt to install Silverlight.

You can see a walk-through of Tahiti here:

or visit Tahiti.com to try it for yourself.

Facebook has recently introduced a new feature that allows you to send messages to your friends who have yet to join the rapidly growing, popular social network.  Now when you go to send an email or share an album, your non-Facebook friends can see the content you shared and reply to you without having to sign up for Facebook. Anyone you email will then be added to your "friend selector," so you won’t have to remember their email address in the future. Additionally, if you email someone who is on Facebook, but you used their email address instead of name, Facebook will forward the email to their Facebook inbox. So yes, this now means that you will never have to email anyone ever again from your *normal* email account again, because really, what are you emailing besides stuff you posted on Facebook?

If you like to keep an eye on the traffic patterns of your website’s visitors, then you may be interested in the cool, new traffic widgets from FEEDJIT.com. One widget shows a live arrival and departure traffic report, which is updated every minute. This widget shows where your visitors are located, which websites they’re arriving from, and what they’re clicking when they leave your site. The other widget is a live traffic map. Also updated every minute, the traffic map shows the last 100 visitors to your website and where they’re located in the world. The widget code is ready to cut-and-paste, completely free, and no registration is required. 

I just finished watching Napoleon Dynamite on DVD for the millionth time this morning, so when I stumbled across this video on the web today, I just had to share. It’s a Microsoft/Napoleon Dynamite spoof video from a 2005 trade show (via):

Bill Gates Goes to College

Posted Sep 15, 2005

The Microsoft bigwig teamed up with Napoleon Dynamite in this spoof video from PDC 2005.  The camera’s a little shaky, but you get the idea.

Last week, Universal announced that they will begin selling DRM-free music at several online stores (except at Apple’s). What they didn’t mention was that the DRM-free music is going to be watermarked…FOR TRACKING PURPOSES! OK, the tunes will not marked with personally identifiable user information, but mainly because that would be too much effort as this is only a trial. Instead, the watermarks will just identify what song it is and that it belongs to Universal. Then, over the next six months, Universal will watch the P2P networks to determine how many of the tunes are leaked. As Ars Technica points out, this is rather nonsensical since it only takes "one single "leak" of a track, from one single person, [to] result in a proliferation of shared copies on multiple networks among non-customers." This is one misguided experiment. If they really wanted to know about DRM-free’s impact, maybe they should just watch EMI’s digital sales climb instead.

Xohm is the upcoming WiMax service from Sprint/Nextel that will be coming first to the fortunate citizens of Chicago & Baltimore, and then to other major cities nationwide over the coming months. WiMax, despite it’s similar-sounding name, is not just another version of Wi-Fi - it’s a completely different technology. Whereas Wi-Fi is limited by both speed & distance (the farther you are away from the Wi-Fi hotspot, the slower the speed), WiMax is designed for long range communications; where Wi-Fi covers meters, WiMax covers kilometers. Another important distinction involves the quality of the service between the two. In Wi-Fi, every subscriber station trying to pass data through the wireless access point is doing so on a "random interrupt basis," with closer stations being given priority. Basically, it’s like a bunch of kids all clamoring at once for their mom’s attention and the ones closest to mom, pulling on her skirts, are getting the most attention. WiMax, though, uses a "scheduling algorithm," which means the subscriber stations are given time slots which leads to more stable, efficient bandwidth, even when overloaded. But what about cellular networks? Don’t 3G networks cover wide geographic areas? Sure they do, but Sprint executives said they expect their WiMax network to provide speeds at three to four times that of 3G wireless networks, somewhere in the range of 2Mbps to 4Mbps. You will hear the WiMax technology being referenced as "4G" in order to highlight this difference, even though technically, that’s not the case. Still, the term "4G" is bound to become synonymous with this WiMax technology since Sprint is even using it in its own press releases.

Now that you’re convinced that Xohm (pronounced "Zome" like "Home", by the way) is a better technology, here’s another reason why you’re going to want it: Google integration. Google will build Sprint’s WiMax internet portal, highlighting services like Google Apps, which combines Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Talk, as well as offering interactive communications, local and location-centric services,
multimedia services including music, video, TV and on-demand products. "Google and Sprint will optimize the Internet experience for the digital lifestyle," said Barry West, president, 4G Mobile Broadband for Sprint. "This collaboration brings what will be the best mobile Internet network together with the leading Internet search company. It allows us to capitalize on the powerful mobility and Internet trends, and create wireless services and applications that take advantage of each company’s history of product development innovation."

Some tech info for this article pulled from Wikipedia

Have you ever wondered how fast your internet connection was on your cell phone or other mobile device? Thanks to Mr. Mobile’s blog post yesterday, wonder no more. Apparently, the popular DSL Reports speed tests website has had a mobile version available for a while now. To use the mobile speed test, visit http://www.dslreports.com/mspeed?jisok=1 on your mobile device to test your speed and compare it to others. That URL is a little unwieldy, but it’s such a useful link that it’s worth bookmarking. Unfortunately, the test is not compatible with my Blackberry Pearl. Bummer.