When Business.com sold for $350 million, quite a few people did a double take.  Weather.com may have been tagged with an asking price of $5 billion, however, which puts that number to shame.  Although buyers will get The Weather Channel, too.

I think before the robots take over everything and use us for batteries, it will appear that humans have hyper-evolved into mechanically enhanced super-sapiens. But that’s really just to build false confidence in us. A recent Microsoft patent application is perhaps the next step toward that digitally created human battery soup dream.

I’m getting dozens of emails asking for my script. See, there’s a ton of people who WANT to be deleted from Facebook.

So far Facebook has been denying them, saying it’s impossible to delete everything you’ve ever done from Facebook. Well, if you go over to Rodney Rumford’s blog you can see that’s totally hogwash. Facebook CAN totally delete you from Facebook IF IT WANTS!

Online movie rental service Netflix and LG Electronics are partnering to develop a set-top box for people to watch video content from the Internet to high-definition TVs.

We’re in a quiet time of year – not much happens during the holiday season or for a short period afterwards.  Plaxo is reportedly trying to sell itself, though, and discussions about the company’s reputation and its asking price have stirred things up a bit.

In what could be a bad day for United Kingdom pen testers, stress testers, and other systems security folks, the UK is getting ready to ban the creation and distribution of tools that could be used by hackers. This generally unpleasant concept could make it not only impossible to create the next nessus or nmap by anyone in the UK, it could also send them to jail for distributing the tools they make as well.

This ought to set back UK computer security by decades.

Jimmy Wales and Wikia Search may be getting all the press this week, but there are resources out there you may not know.

Notable blogger Robert Scoble pushed the Facebook envelope a little too hard with an automated script and ended up with a disabled account.

Rich Skrenta has a new startup called Blekko in the works, and plans to make a run at the search engine world with it.

Growing its AdSense userbase will help Google maintain its edge against rival advertising server networks, and the company wants to make it as easy as possible for people to sign up for an account.

2007 was very good to Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, who parlayed Digg’s fame and fortune into Revision3′s on-demand Net video programming model.

People using mobile phones while driving contribute to traffic congestion, according to a University of Utah study. Regardless of whether they use a handset or Bluetooth, the conversation itself causes motorists to drive slower on the freeway and to be less likely to pass slower-moving vehicles.

At this stage, new social networks tend to get more of a shrug than a second look.  Badoo is fairly well established in some parts of the world, however, and may have a bit of an edge as it prepares to launch in the UK.

In 2007, the Japanese online advertising market was projected to be worth between $3.4 billion (Dentsu) and $4.1 billion (PricewaterhouseCoopers). By 2011, Dentsu estimates that Japan’s online ad market value will be $6.8 billion; PrivewaterhouseCoopers says it will be slightly more at $7 billion.

"Widget" is one of those words that your humble author may never be able to get past.  Like the name or not, though, the pesky-sounding things are here to stay.

They do, to be fair, go by a number of other designations – outside of social networks, Google Desktop Gadgets is what they’re called at one major company, and Google Desktop Gadgets have been at the center of several recent promotions.

A lot of predictions were made about 2007, just like every other year. Some came true, some didn’t. Here’s a list of what didn’t happen.

Vertical search and niche social networks didn’t take off

Dennis Mortensen, COO of Index Tools and author of the blog Visual Revenue, has summarized the 18 most popular web analytics posts of 2007.

His list includes posts from 6 different authorities in the Web Analytics industry including: Occam’s Razor, Web Analytics Demystified, Web Metrics Guru, Visual Revenue, Web Analytics World, and Luna Metrics.

Toronto is the first North American city to have more than one million subscribers to Facebook according to Calgary based Zinc Research.

If you look at all the hype around social networking, you might think that it’s a fad that will soon fade. Advertisers don’t think so. After seeing how many teens and adults (40%) in the US are on social networking sites, they are upping their budgets for the new year.

Well, here’s something you don’t see too often: a bunch of red on various finance sites.  Actually, that’s an unfortunately common sight, but look closer, and you’ll notice the strange part: Yahoo’s name is in green.

The ball dropped for the 100th time in Times Square, so I suppose that makes it official.  It’s a new year, 2008 to be exact.  So what does this mean for the search engines? Simple, change the way it used to work, right?

SEO techniques typically linger long after their "good til" dates. 2008 should be no exception, but if you’re paying attention it’s time to move onto the stuff that works.

This useful review of techniques that Google clamped down on this year included: