Operating in over a hundred countries means Google has to juggle a lot of laws and cultural differences as they try to present information as openly as possible.

A lackluster reception for Windows Vista in the enterprise and some hard work by Linux vendors could be the harbinger of greater Linux adoption on desktops.

A school board member failed to convince a New York State court that Google should hand over details about anonymous critics on a Blogger-hosted blog.

Democratic Presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama will be speaking at the Googleplex tonight to outline his plan to ensure not only an open Internet, but also an open government that utilizes technology to solve pressing national issues.

European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes isn’t quite ready to rubber-stamp Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick.

Whether it’s from reading reports or scoping out the sites ourselves, most of us have a pretty good feel for various social networks – how big they are, who’s joined them, and so on.  New statistics from Rapleaf don’t really shake things up, but they do provide some interesting insights.

Social networking site Going.com said it would begin allowing its users to buy event tickets directly from the site starting with a Moby concert this week.

According to a post at MacUser, the chairman and co-owner of Warner Music Group — Montreal’s own Edgar Bronfman Jr. — made some comments at a recent mobile conference about how music companies spent too long pretending that the industry’s business model wasn’t being threatened, and “went to war with consumers.” Here’s the money quote:

I previously questioned Red Hat’s apparent lack of love for Hyperic. Today, Stacey Schneider, Senior Director of Marketing at Hyperic, tipped me off to a joint Hyperic & Red Hat announcement.

At ad:tech last week, fellow PR/new media marketing practitioner and blogger, Rohit Bhargava and I were talking about his new book, “Personality Not Included – Why Brands Lose Their Authenticity and How Great Companies Get it Back”, and he mentioned that I should send him a list of recommended reading for a new bookstore feature he’s adding to his blog.

Gas prices aren’t as bad now as they have been in the past, but they’re certainly not good.  And as usual, search trends have mirrored real-life events, and queries for “cheap gas” and the like have skyrocketed.

Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo announced today that Yahoo will feature a blog on the Yahoo Developer Network focused on Hadoop.

Searchboth.co.uk is a new site that allows you to search both the Google and Yahoo search engine at the same time.

If this were a car race, TypePad would now be seeing WordPress’s taillights; Automattic’s creation just passed its competitor in terms of traffic.

CNN Worldwide said today it is expanding its news gathering resources including its international online services.

Windows Live’s excellent Translator service has now released a single line of code that you can add to any website to give visitors the option of translating your website into their language of choice.

Just head to translator.live.com/AddIn.aspx, select the language your website uses, and it’ll give you the code. If your site is in English, this will be the code:

How did I miss this post by Steve Rubel? Tired of doomsaying in the Web 2.0 bubble realm, he recently predicted an impending recession for poor old Google, based on several factors.

In a series B round of funding, the Indiana 21st Century Research and Technology Fund showed its confidence in ChaCha by tossing in $2 million.  Morton Meyerson must really like ChaCha, though – he gave the human-powered search company $8 million.

Users of widgets are more likely to receive them from friends than from companies that created them, according to a new report from JupiterResearch, "Widgets: Delivering Applications Users Want." User between the ages of 18-24 are six times more likely to receive widgets from friends than from a company.

Rupert Murdoch plans to make WSJ.com free to increase readership and generate far more in advertising. Right now the site gets 1 million viewers and Murdoch hopes to see it go to 15 million. For now a subscription just to the online edition is $79 for a year.

Two years ago next month, Google bought five percent of AOL for a billion dollars. Yeah, you might have forgotten that, but it was a really big deal at the time.

While Google’s main motivation was to keep being the search technology for fifth-place AOL Search, there was a lot of talk on both sides about the two companies working together. The big get, mentioned right in the press release: Google Talk and AOL Instant Messenger integration.

Google Maps now integrates ratings from CleanScores, a website which shows you which establishments have failed food inspections.