Blogger comes out of Beta! - I use blogger for my work blog, Spies Like Us, and actually noticed that the ‘beta’ had been crossed out yesterday. Not knowing how long it had been like that for, I decided not to investigate it further for a post, but don’t ignore the significance - I think this may be the only property of Google’s that has left beta testing and become an official public release.

The Facebook Worth $8Billion - I’m not sure what’s worse, calling it ‘The Facebook‘ or a member of the board suggesting that the site is worth as much as MTV. I thought about reaching Mr. Thiel for a comment but quickly realized he was out to lunch.

Microsoft Tries to Patent RSS - Although I’m not really up-to-date on the history of RSS, you can check out the entry on Wikipedia for a good run-down. The patent is almost 2 years old already. Although Microsoft doesn’t seem to be the inventors of RSS, Lego wasn’t the inventor of their now-famous building blocks, and they still have the patent (country by country, an individual is having the patent overturned, but still, you can’t blame MS for trying).

Tech IPO’s - Paul Kedrosky obviously knows his markets and mentions this for 2007, and some of use pay attention, but when you get a couple other tech heavyweights like Michael Arrington and Om Malik talking about the same thing, it’s enough to get the entire tech community excited.

The 100 Most Useful Websites (from Britain): It’s an interesting list to review. There are so many differences between the North American online experience and what the rest of the world is used to. It’s interesting looking at what would be the same and what is different.

Originally, I was looking to take each of the special guest questions from Yahoo! Answers, link to the chosen answer, and provide my own answer. However, in trying to keep with the theme of the blog, I will take a different approach. Click here for the Best of Yahoo! Answers 2006.

Yahoo! Answers has been able to thrive while Google chose to shut down their version of QnA several weeks ago. Yahoo! provided a service for the masses, with almost no limits to what could be asked or what someone could answer. This free service targetted the general population and provided two platforms: one for inquiring minds with virtually no where else to turn, and another for those with either their own opinions or a wealth of knowledge that needed to be shared. Providing answers for a range of topics, from the practical “How do you clean a fishtank?” to something more abstract, like Dr. Deepak Chopra’s “What do you think happens to your soul when you die?“. This is definitely a service that provides one of the services that is expected from the Internet. People can come to a single source to get an answer or several answers to a question from a wide range of sources. I definitely recommend reviewing the special guest questions. It just goes to show you, everyone has problems, and any of us can have the solution. All you have to do is ask.

An interesting article by David Sifry from a month or so back looks at the state of blogging. As the individual creditted with creating Technorati four years ago, he is obviously one of the individuals that truly understood the blogging revolution and how important it would be to the Internet and the way people obtain their information. It was interesting that he addressed the issue of Spam blogs, something that obviously inflates and diminishes the value of the blogosphere, and something that I would compare to spam pages on MySpace, something that probably doesn’t get the attention that it deserves. While pages/profiles on MySpace are designed to help propogate spam, a site like Technorati, which is considered to be a more credible site, cannot benefit from the efforts in the blogosphere that are analogous to commericial MySpace profiles.

Although it is long, the article is quite thorough and definitely worth a read, or at least a browsing.

Another week gone by and still no new server. It does seem to be quite a bit faster today, but having been spoiled for so long, it’s tough to handle this normal service.

Yahoo! - From their Battle over the net victory to the release of Video 3.0 from Yahoo! Music and finishing off with their Talent Show, it’s been a better week for Yahoo! sans peanut butter - there’s even this bold prediction from Paul Kedrosky.

Bebo Widgets - The site is often touted as a major competitor of MySpace. 100,000 widgets in 12 hours suggests that might be a reasonable statement.

StumbleVideo - Being a former Canadian company, this might be making the cut for the wrong reasons, but none-the-less, it’s a techFiver this week.

iPhone - What more is there to say? Well, there probably is more, so check this post by Om, too.

Microsoft - The Zune is struggling and Vista isn’t compatible with MS SQL Server, but I’ve been assured by my boss after a day-long conference about microsoftables that there are good things with their newest releases.

Honourable mention this week goes to Google. They lost the Battle of the Net and are predicted to be out-performed by Yahoo!, but they released a patent search.

Terrorists may try cyberattacks - Not that we should ignore the idea that terrorists may try cyberattacks, but where do we draw the line? Anyone can try cyberattacks for whatever reason they choose, but we obviously cannot live in fear. Russia has been targetted by significant terrorist attacks, and one could probably argue that on some level, much like attacks directed towards the United States, these attacks are warranted (I for one would not make that argument - how can you slaughter innocent people and use your cause as justification for your actions?). With more Russians starting to depend on the Internet and computers, and more critical aspects of the country coming online, it does become more conceivable for this type of attack to occur.

Class president changes student grades - An interesting story. How can any right-minded school administrator give password access to any student?! Since Adam and Eve, humans have been corrupted by temptation, and with so much pressure on students to post top-grades, it seems like an obvious temptation to avoid. Not to knock American politics, but how did this young lad win the vote, anyway?

Operating Systems - Start with 20 things you won’t like about Windows Vista, move on to 15 things Apple should change in Mac OS X, and finish the morning by finding out why research firm Gartner Inc. is predicting Vista will be the last major Windows release.