A study by Southeastern Louisiana University professor David Wyld for IBM’s Center for the Business of Government found that government blogging “does take dedication and a bit of bravery.”

The Internet company’s continued efforts at addressing environmental concerns received a positive mark from the Climate Counts project.

You can get in trouble for embedding someone else’s wife, but embedding someone else’s YouTube upload? (Waiting for the rim shot. Jerks. I get no respect).

Companies always claim to be leading in this or pioneering in that.  Google Scholar is less boastful, but still says it “provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature.”  And so Marilyn Christianson, a librarian at Auburn University, put that assertion to the test.

SAP subsidiary TommorowNow is in trouble. A lot of it. In a late-night announcement, seemingly designed to be lost among the boom of Independence Day fireworks, SAP admitted TN had inappropriately downloaded files from its competitor Oracle.

Just try to read this without feeling like you’re sitting in the back of the classroom, snickering with your buddies at the slightest hint of double entendre – you know, she said jacket, heh heh.

Google’s Public Policy Blog has been home to discussions about censorship, net neutrality, and national security.  Now it’s promoting Carhenge, Nebraska’s “whimsical recreation” of England’s famous stone ruins.  Ah, well.  “All work and no play . . .”

It’s not elegantly named, but it’s here nonetheless: eBay Toolbar Featuring Yahoo! has been released.

Bad news for Google in Germany after a court denied any further action against Daniel Giersch in order to wrangle the rights of the GMail trademark from him. Giersch began using the GMail mark in 2000, four years earlier than Google.

Fast Search & Transfer has worked with AOL, Dell, and Vodafone, and calls itself “the leading global provider of search technologies.”  And now Fast Search & Transfer has acquired AgentArts, which is a self-described “leading provider of recommendation and personalization solutions for music, video, games and mobile entertainment.”

Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington had accounts on Yahoo, Verizon Wireless, and PayPal compromised by an audacious fan who now faces federal sentencing on multiple counts.

People have debated whether content is really king for some time, and for content producers, it seems a no-brainer: create quality content and the audience will come. That’s the way it’s always been, that’s how it will remain. A survey about blog readership conducted by Vizu confirms that mantra, and reinforces the importance of good writing.

Yahoo Philippines has launched a new community site, and it’s announced the site’s presence with a hearty, “Mabuhay, Pinoys!”  The goal: to allow “Filipinos across the globe to connect to their communities and the world’s knowledge.”

Publishing power Reed Elsevier will have its scholarly journals crawled and indexed by Google, under the terms of the Google Scholar program.

According to some people, global warming may have catastrophic effects on the world around us.  But in the meantime, it’s doing Wikipedia a lot of good – the site is receiving tons of traffic from that term.

AOL France scored a deal with Neuf Cegetel to provide content, marketing, and advertising for its portal websites.

There’ve been some fine lines walked lately by Google’s Webspam team. Not too long ago, it was paid links reporting, and now the line is between startpages and doorway pages. The definitions are quite similar, but Google says it’s all about intent, which makes the argument reminiscent of the art versus indecency squabbles of the past.

There are a number of reasons that Baidu has beaten Google (in terms of Chinese market share), but one of them involves entertainment-related queries; the Chinese company’s MP3 search function is wildly popular.  And that function will soon get better, as Baidu has announced a partnership with Rock Music Group.

Google Book Search has, up until now, provided images of text; these were fine for reading, but not so great for anything else.  So the service is taking a step forward and offering true “text layers” of many of its out-of-copyright books.

Candidates for the 2008 Presidential election have been vying for the attention of Internet users, with Barack Obama and Mitt Romney gaining the most.

The latest concerns come from the European Consumers’ Organization (BEUC), which found plenty of reason to worry about DoubleClick and Google merging their consumer databases and mining them.

If opening the Kijiji classifieds site to American users draws business away from Craigslist, eBay stands to lose a little bit too.

Belgium becomes the focal point for a heated confrontation between Google, and the news management organization that beat it in court.

More bandwidth, not bandwidth manipulation, has been one of the technical solutions offered as an answer to the growing capacity demands of services like VoIP and video. It’s also been used as a rebuttal to telecom industry arguments against Net Neutrality, a rebuttal, um, rebutted in a new study sponsored by…