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Why, of course the Vancouver Olympics torch would resemble a big fat spliff. (via Clayton Cubitt)...

Here's Suzanne Nolen singing about a casket sale at Walmart....

I've posted before about my illustrator pal Dustin Amery Hostetler, AKA UPSO. His psychedelic, bold, graphic style has been featured on Burton snowboards, Chuck Taylor sneakers, Kid Robot Munnys, and in a slew of magazines. Dustin just created the art for this delightful animation in the FUEL TV Sig ...

You won't find vibrators like these at a Rite-Aid store, but Rite Aid's online store sells them. What happens if you live in Alabama and order one?...

Speaking of blacklight posters from the 1970s, Jim Leftwich recently came across his beautiful Peter Max inspired 3-ring binder. When I was back at my family farm in Missouri this past September, following a circuitous 3,000 mile motorcycle ride through the Southwest from my home in Palo Alto, Calif ...

Government workers inadvertently leak a "sensitive" Transportation Security Administration manual detailing airport screening procedures. The full text of the security document is viewable by the public because the workers bungled the PDF redaction.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a VHS player in today's all-digital media world. That's why it's high time to transfer those old VHS cassettes to a pure digital format before they're rendered completely obsolete.

A species of monkeys in Africa seem to be combining sounds into various sentences with different meanings. It's the closest thing to language yet discovered in animals.

Top Google engineers show off new search features and give their account of the evolution of search. Report from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

A federal judge is finalizing a $675,000 verdict against the nation's second file sharing defendant to take on the Recording Industry Association of America. However, the Massachusetts judge ruled against the RIAA and is declining to gag the defendant from promoting piracy.

Government workers inadvertently leak a "sensitive" Transportation Security Administration manual detailing airport screening procedures. The full text of the security document is viewable by the public because the workers bungled the PDF redaction.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a VHS player in today's all-digital media world. That's why it's high time to transfer those old VHS cassettes to a pure digital format before they're rendered completely obsolete.

A species of monkeys in Africa seem to be combining sounds into various sentences with different meanings. It's the closest thing to language yet discovered in animals.

Top Google engineers show off new search features and give their account of the evolution of search. Report from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

A federal judge is finalizing a $675,000 verdict against the nation's second file sharing defendant to take on the Recording Industry Association of America. However, the Massachusetts judge ruled against the RIAA and is declining to gag the defendant from promoting piracy.

The search engine's initiatives include ways to find information by taking a photo and results that stream on to a Web page continuously.

Former eBay CEO Whitman testified she was never aware of any plans by the company to steal Craigslist secrets while eBay was a minority stakeholder.

A spacecraft designed to rocket wealthy tourists into space as early as 2011 was unveiled Monday in what backers of the venture hope will signal a new era in aviation history.

Apple acquired online music company Lala Media, possibly signaling an expansion of the computer giant's music strategy.

News Corp. is joining a consortium of magazine companies that are working on creating a digital store to sell their titles on electronic readers, mobile devices and other digital devices.

Google has introduced a tool that lets you search the web by using a picture rather than words on an Android-based device.

Pop-up windows have a big impact on a person's efficiency and concentration when using the web, according to research.

You can now examine geological maps for the whole of Great Britain for free with the release of the OpenGeoscience service.

Social-networking site Facebook has joined Bebo by announcing plans to add a 'help' button to its site which aims to prevent cyberbullying.

Slow page loading times can cause 'web rage' for more than 70 per cent of British surfers, according to a survey.

You know what you'll be doing in 2011? Everything that you've ever wanted, that's what, 'cause the world as we know will unquestionably end in 2012. Amazingly enough, one of those bucket list items that you'll be able to achieve is to change the channel on your tele without ever slipping a battery ...

Ready for yet another way to watch TV? Sezmi has just gone on the air in Los Angeles, offering its unique blend of premium OTA and internet delivered video to a few limited trial users. $5 a month brings whatever local networks you can pull in, basic IPTV (YouTube, OnNetworks , podcasts) and intern ...

Good news for folks who against all odds don't have a home theater Netflix streaming option yet, and yet inexplicably own an internet-connected Sony BRAVIA TV: Netflix just went live. It just takes applying the latest software update and you're in business. BRAVIA owners were promised the update bac ...

Sony and Panasonic are both hellbent on convincing us their forthcoming super-duper 3D television sets are the future, but before we all start selling off the children and re-mortgaging our homes, how about a little taster of what it might be like? Channel 4, the British answer to a question nobody ...

Yamaha seems to be pushing its newly unveiled yAired technology pretty hard, with the second system to sport it unveiled just weeks after the first. The $399.95 MCR-140 is far from being the most stylish mini stereo we've seen -- in fact, it's probably one of the ugliest -- but it is available in a ...

AP - A graduate student who must pay four record labels a combined $675,000 in damages for downloading and sharing songs online has been ordered to destroy his illegal music files — but a judge declined to force him to stop promoting the activity that got him in trouble.

AP - Amazon.com Inc. will add two features to the Kindle e-book reader to make the gadget more accessible to blind and vision-impaired users.

AP - The Associated Press is inviting Facebook users to vote on the 10 top news stories of the year, marking the first time the public has been invited to weigh in since the news cooperative began its annual survey in 1936.

AFP - The Pulitzer Prizes, the most prestigious US journalism awards, announced on Monday that a member of a primarily online news organization had been named to the Pulitzer Board.

PC World - A year ago, I wrote a similar Blu-ray blog with a nearly identical title--simply swap out "2009" for "2010." At the time, sales of Blu-ray players had been disappointing, although falling hardware and disc prices were inspiring some analysts to predict a brighter '09 for the high-def movi ...

The sheer size of Apple's app store makes it difficult for independent developers to stand out from the crowd. Some developers come up with creative concepts to get the word out, others rely on scamming and gaming different iTunes policies. Fortunately, Apple has decided to kick the scammers out of ...

On the consumer side of things, Google has just released a bevy of new features like Google Goggles and real-time search. But the search giant hasn't forgotten about its business users. For you they offer up a holiday present. Now Google Analytics users can add annotations to dates in order to ...

With the announcement of Google real-time search, the world's most popular search engine has thrown down the gauntlet in a battle it was already winning. Clearly recognizing the threat that the instantaneous nature of Facebook and Twitter represented, Google was smart to sign search deals with both ...

Josh Warner is president and founder of Feed Company, which promotes and distributes brand videos, including campaigns such as Levi's "Backflip," Ray-Ban's "Catch" and Activision's "Bike Hero." In three years, Feed has seeded more than 100 videos across the social web. 2009's crop of top viral vide ...

On Friday, we learned that Apple had acquired streaming music service Lala. While the terms of the deal were undisclosed, Peter Kafka at All Things Digital speculated that Lala was sold at a "fire-sale" price. Today, however, Kafka is amending his story, reporting that multiple sources estimate tha ...

Tomorrow, the makers of Firefox will be launching the third version of Thunderbird, its open source and free email application that is produced out of Mozilla Messaging, which is a subsidiary of Mozilla devoted to producing innovation around communication and the internet. Thunderbird 3, which is ...

We've just gotten our first look at Assistly, a new startup that's looking to provide businesses with a robust platform for engaging customers on everything from Email to Facebook and Twitter. We first caught wind of Assistly back in October when its founding members left AOL in tandem, ...

Ned Desmond has gone fishin' and he wants you to Go FISHn too. Today, Desmond launched a fishing site for the Facebook age. You can sign in with your Facebook ID, share fishing stories and photos with your friends, ask questions to fishing pros and the community, and ...

When Microsoft laid off Microsoft’s Director of Business Development Don Dodge last month we called it a huge mistake. He was Microsoft's "ambassador" to startups and largely responsible for the success of the Bizspark program (the Bizspark program gives Microsoft products for free to startups, an ...

With all of the news surrounding Google's newest additions to its search technology, Google's latest upgrade to Google Analytics has been overshadowed. Analytics is the search giant’s free software product that allows website owners and publishers to get detailed statistics about the number, whe ...

When Tiger Woods was brought to the Health Central Hospital in Ocoee, Fla., his condition was more serious than previously reported. According to a person with knowledge of Woods’ hospital admission, the star golfer had to be admitted directly to the hospital’s intensive care unit, where he was ...

It’s time to address one of the recurring tragedies of the season. (No, not your Aunt Sadie’s annual fruit cake). Today I’d like to address the calamity of those millions of frequent flyer miles that people forgo each year because they forget to buy from their favorite online merchants via lin ...

Army Spc. Tony Carrasco Jr.

Lori Gutierrez had just finished putting up this year's Christmas tree and trimmings when holiday decorating took a sudden turn toward holiday disaster.

Dec. 7: The U.S. manufacturer of one of the UK's best-selling toys is insisting their products are safe after a consumer advocacy group found traces of a toxic substance on its toys. ITV's Sally Biddulph reports.  (Nightly News)

What makes great service? It’s something I’ve cared about a long time, since helping run consumer electronics stores in the 1980s to working at Rackspace (which regularly wins awards and praise for its quality of service). I keep hearing about six-year-old Tiny Prints and how awesome its servi ...

I still like listening to KGO Radio (AM 810 San Francisco) but on there they still make a big deal about having a traffic helicopter and a team that covers traffic. Every day they put on air someone caught in traffic too, mostly on the Bay Bridge, to report how long it takes him to [...]

When Salesforce copied Facebook a week ago and put social information into its service with a new service called Chatter it got me to look around at what else was out there for Enterprises. Companies like SocialText, Jive, Yammer and others are out there. But Blogtronix was showing up on my Twitter ...

If you attend a tech event or conference you will probably run into Brian Solis. He’s one of those rare PR birds: everywhere all the time. He’s always on Twitter and Facebook too. Plus he guest posts over on Techcrunch, which shows he’s gotten the respect of Arrington, which for a PR person is ...

Imagine you had an infinitely-long strip of paper that you, and your friends, could write on anywhere along the strip. Imagine that you could write anywhere along that strip anytime, or even all at the same time. That is exactly what Google Wave is. Except it’s not a piece of paper and using a Wav ...

Vic Gundotra / Google Mobile Blog : Mobile Search for a New Era: Voice, Location and Sight   —  Editor's note: today Google held a launch event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.  Fresh off the stage, we've invited Vic to highlight the mobile team's announcements, and the un ...

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo : Lala's Fire Sale That Wasn't: What Apple Really Paid   —  On Friday, I reported that Apple was buying Lala at a fire sale price, which meant that investors in the music service wouldn't get their money back.  I was wrong.  —  Apple ended up paying around $80 milli ...

Neil Hughes / AppleInsider : Apple's Lala purchase forecasts browser access to iTunes content   —  Apple's acquisition of the streaming music service Lala could pave the way for iTunes content and purchases to be accessed from multiple locations via a Web browser, one analyst has predicted.

Amit Singhal / The Official Google Blog : Relevance meets the real-time web   —  Search is a natural starting point for discovering the world's information, and we strive to bring you the freshest, most comprehensive and relevant search results over an ever expanding universe of content on the ...

MG Siegler / TechCrunch : Google Aims To Push The Speed Of Light With Realtime Results.  Seriously.   —  Today, at its Search Event in Mountain View, Google Fellow Amit Singhal took the stage to announce a big new feature for the search giant: Realtime.  “It's Google's relevance technology ...

ColdWetDog writes "Wired is running a story on DARPA's effort to stave off battlefield casualties by turning injured soldiers into zombies by injecting them with a cocktail of one chemical or another (details to be announced). From the article, 'Dr. Fossum predicts that each soldier will carry a syr ...

jvillain writes "The Canadian Recording Industry Association faces a lawsuit for 60 billion dollars over willful infringement. These numbers may sound outrageous, yet they are based on the same rules that led the recording industry to claim a single file sharer is liable for millions in damages. Sin ...

Michael Lato writes "I've been a speaker at several Information Technology conferences and I know that I use conferences as both an opportunity to gain new skills and to network with my peers. In hopes of assisting others, I've started my own conference in order to boost the soft skills of computer ...

adeelarshad82 writes to tell us that Fusion Garage seems to be ignoring the drama surrounding the "CrunchPad" and is planning to launch their "JooJoo" tablet this Friday at midnight. Unfortunately, the device will be a long way from the imagined $200 price point, weighing in at a hefty $499. "The Jo ...

davekleiman writes with news that former eBay chief exec Meg Whitman took the stand today to kick off the battle that has been brewing between Craigslist and eBay. The waters are further clouded by Whitman's upcoming bid for governor of California. "eBay wants to shed light on the 'coercive plan' th ...