A humanitarian plea was made today for the Muslim world to follow Google’s do-gooder example. This is remarkable enough on its own, but a separate report notes how Al-Qaeda has successfully used Google-owned YouTube to raise funds.

Why pay to attend a pricey tech conference when you can chill outside the doors to a presentation and work the crowd as they head for the free lunch?

If it’s really the thought that counts, then users are likely to be grateful for an upgrade to Google Desktop for Linux.  But in terms of practicality, it appears that the search giant may have partially misdirected its efforts.

The timing’s a little vague, but according to one of the company’s executives, an official YouTube.in site will go live within the next six months.

Yahoo cited a study that found only 15 percent of searchers find what they want with the first search they perform.

Google’s stock closed last week at $637.39, Wall Street thinks Google’s third quarter earnings announcement may come in 50 cents higher per share than last quarter, the company gets two-thirds of the web searches and 40 percent of the ad revenue. They’re screwed.

Another tidbit of information about feeds on Google Reader emerged, showing how easy it is to find out how many Reader users have subscribed to a particular feed.

After blowing away ads aimed at criticizing MoveOn.org by name, Google’s public policy wonks fired back and asserted that trademarks, not politics, played a role.

A 25 percent premium for BEA in an all-cash offer from Oracle elicited a mild chuckle from BEA’s VP of business planning and development, William Klein.

Close to one- half of new vehicle buyers using the Internet in their shopping process go to an independent Web site when researching a new vehicle, while 46 percent visit a manufacturer site first, according to J.D. Power and Associate’s "2007 New Autoshopper.com" study.

Yoink’d Mediabox goes a ways beyond your standard video player; in addition to displaying clips, it lets you search for them and share playlists with others.  The Yoink’d product is quite new, though, and still needs some polishing.

Even as everyone’s eyeing Facebook, LinkedIn intends to let third-party developers make applications for its site.  And here’s where, in my opinion, it’ll have an edge: LinkedIn intends to keep out silly crap.

It took me maybe a year of writing on the Internet to understand that any new online business created in a space where similar formats existed would be labeled "[current leader] + killer" and that that was probably, in my grandmother’s language, horse feathers.

 Today, I was driving in San Francisco with a couple of other SEO-types and we spotted a prominent billboard for Google’s 411 service.

Some Google employees are leaving Google for social site Facebook. Well, “some” isn’t a trend, but a couple of the remarks of those that left offer insightful perspectives.

Job hunters are continuing to increase their use of the Internet as the main part of their job search according to a new report from the Conference Board.

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of addressing 100 marketers from the Pittsburgh chapter of the American Marketing Association.

As I began to speak, I found that the PowerPoint file was corrupted on the conference’s laptop. And so was the copy on their flash drive. I was faced with doing my presentation with no slides. That experience was enough to put me in a mind to talk about fear today.

No, not the fear of public speaking, although that is a common fear. I want to talk about fear and marketing.

Kara Swisher, who writes for All Things D, had a couple of posts on Facebook recently that got me thinking again about the social-networking site. In the first one, Kara said that using Facebook often seems like “children’s hour,” because of all the goofy applications and widgets that your friends and acquaintances are constantly adding (and trying to get you to add as well).

One of the themes of Web 2.0 (if there is such a thing) is that all of the data that gets aggregated by Web applications and social networks can be a very powerful thing, and can in some cases justify giving services away for free — provided people who use those services agree to let their data be sliced and diced and parsed in various ways, whether to generate ads or whatever.

Sure, there are privacy issues.  And yes, the company sometimes looks like a monopoly.  But it has now made a cake weighing at least 125 pounds, which leads me to ask: how can you not love Google?

Yahoo’s going to Bellevue, but it’s Bellevue, Washington, and not New York’s Bellevue Hospital Center, in which the search company will open an office.  You may still have to question Yahoo’s sanity, though, as this move puts it in Microsoft’s territory.

Random House maybe closer to joining Google’s book search project, something the world’s largest publisher has been opposed to in the past.