The idea that MySpace was responsible for an offline sexual assault fell on deaf judicial ears as a Texas judge dismisses a $30 million lawsuit filed by the parents of a 13-year-old girl.

The drama occurred last spring after a Texas girl, who misrepresented herself as a 14-year-old (the minimum age to use MySpace), arranged to meet 19-year-old Pete Solis, who also lied about his age, near the girl’s home. Solis was later arrested and charged with sexual assault.

Senator Ted Stevens has already achieved a certain kind of blogosphere and Internet infamy for his comments about teh Internets being "a series of tubes" (click the image for a dance remix of his address to the Senate). Now, he seems to want to compound that infamy by passing legislation that would block most social networking sites – including not just MySpace, but virtually any site that allows user contributions, including Wikipedia – from any school that receives federal education funding.

Dear Kalena…

Thanks,
Adam

Kalena’s Answer:

Dear Adam

Recently (I honestly don’t know when), MSN launched a Digg clone in the Netherlands, called MSN reporter.

You can submit your story, and others can vote for it or against it. The top stories go to the MSN.nl homepage.

Now the boys at MSN haven’t really thought this through, as they store what stories you’ve voted on in… your cookie-jar!

NetSuite, an on demand business management software provider has partnered with online auction site eBay. The pair is working together to provide businesses with a more effective way to sell items on eBay while running their businesses with NetSuite.

If you’re one of those people who’ve been waiting for somebody to create a tool that would let ordinary mortals without programming expertise mix and match applications and create their own mashups, today’s your big day.

Yesterday I said that I noticed that performancing.com was dead and now going to some Louisville blog.

A couple of days ago I came across this article – NBC Turns ‘Fresh Eyes’ to Its Ad Sales (subscription required). It talked about Michael Pilot joining NBC from GE to manage Ad sales without any prior media experience. Michael was hired in part it seems because he has been "focused on using statistical analysis of potential customers to figure out which are the best prospects". The article went on to say

For geeks and engineers The Network Effect is something approaching The Holy Grail. However, as is often the case with techies, they use complicated formulae to try and explain it, when in reality it’s best understood through the medium of.restaurants! When you walk past a restaurant that is empty and the waiting staff are sitting by the bar looking at their watches, it’s not so enticing. After all, it doesn’t matter how good the food is – who wants to eat alone?

A pair of opposing ideas have been occupying web surfers as they cruise the Internet: the desire to ditch the office for a week in the sun, and the need to pay Uncle Sam his annual due with the money you might otherwise use for that vacation.

Many users who have grown accustomed to the functionality of Windows XP have been reluctant to take the plunge and upgrade their operating systems to Vista. Users who are heavily involved in gaming, however, are beginning to find that the choice in operating system has already been made for them.

Eurekster released a set of Web 2.0 upgrades to its Swicki (search plus wiki) collaborative search engine to make search results more participatory and personalized.

The new "Community Features" allow swicki users to vote in favor of or against results that appear on the page. Or, if something’s missing that should be there, users can write their own search result and add it to the index.

One of my clients asked me to create an ‘image of the week’ page for them using whatever method I thought looked and worked best. I remembered seeing the JavaScript/Ajax tool Lightbox JS in another blog recently and thought that looked pretty cool, and had the capability of showing a slideshow as well, so I got it and installed it on my client’s home page.

As recently shown, people don’t read your terms of service. My stats also show that people don’t read my comments policy before posting a comment. Sometimes I am forced to delete comments from possibly well meaning people who don’t realise that their comment might be looked on as spam .

AskMeNow, a mobile search company has partnered with Merriam-Webster, publisher of print and electronic English language references to launch a mobile dictionary. Customers can access the dictionary by texting ASKME (27563). The service is available in the US and Canada.

Mobile users can also access interactive features such as Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day, which is designed to improve vocabulary and Open Dictionary, where members can create and submit their own new words and definitions.

So, Yahoo launches a new Suggestion Board format for visitors to browse suggestions submitted by users of properties such as Yahoo Autos, and it looks very similar to Digg.

Digg users get their underpants in a wad, and start screaming that the site is a blatant rip-off of Digg.

As Google grows and evolves, so does public perception of it. For those of us outside the Googleplex, Google has represented a broad spectrum of things. For a lot of people they’ve made the transition from fun-filled upstart to Evil Empire. We have always known Google for producing fast results, and their speedy evolution is no exception. They’ve run the gamut in less than a decade.

Hat’s off to Kelly Spors for helping to keep WSJ readers up to date on the latest marketing buzz. In today’s weekly roundup of news, she explains the art of link baiting…

Here’s a new catchphrase in search-engine optimization these days: Link baiting.