I have to admit, I’m still on the fence as to really believe that Google would actually release a phone but hey, stranger things have happened!

This is not your typical rags to riches story, but an interesting rant from Jason Calacanis over at calacanis.com about what people did before they hit the A-List in blogging.

The new pricing model offered by Google to its AdWords clients means those advertisers will only pay Google when a customer converts in a specified way.

It’s a mixed bag of good news, bad news, and just plain “news” news for Google in India this week.  One piece from the region describes the company’s expansion in glowing terms; another reports that its site ranked low in terms of usability.  Lastly, there’s a new man in place to deal with all this: Shailesh Rao was appointed managing director of sales and operations for Google India.

Well, it seemed bound to happen eventually. Politicians have officially transitioned from YouTube campaign speeches to YouTube soapboxes – sorry, Microsoft owns Soapbox, it’ll have to called something else.

Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) is the latest US Congressman/presidential candidate to take his message to YouTube. Only this is isn’t a plea to "chat" or to vote for him in 2008, it’s a call for Americans to get behind impeachment of George W. Bush.

The public satisfaction with federal government Web sites dropped from last quarters all time high and stayed relatively unchanged over the last seven quarters. The first quarter 2007 special report on E-Government Satisfaction from the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) shows that customer satisfaction with federal Web sites declined 0.7 percent from last quarter to an overall score of 73.4.

Even with the drop in satisfaction, e-government faired better than the federal government, which had a score of 72.3 on the ACSI.

Lobbyists, on the whole, have a pretty bad reputation.  They’re regarded as a rather shady group of people; one of the main headings in a Wikipedia article is “corruption concerns.”  Draw your own conclusions, then, about this bit of news: Google wants to hire lobbyists throughout Europe.

YouTube’s explosion onto the Internet scene was no accident. It was timing – timing so fortuitous that you might compare it to an alignment of the planets. YouTube didn’t rise in a vacuum, but it rose in the House of MySpace, to continue the astrology analogy, with a number of other forces in play.

ShopFactory.com (by Steffan Klein & Michael Veith, according to the About page) is a system to help you create online shops.

World of Warcraft, Second Life, Final Fantasy Online, Everquest and a whole slew of other online environments are booming as broadband access has continued to proliferate throughout the United States and beyond.

PreFound announced today that they are releasing a new version of their "community-oriented" search engine. New enhancements to PreFound include: