I was just over at Don Park’s blog and saw that Kevin Marks, a familiar face to those of us in the tech blogging world, has left Technorati and gone to Google to work on blog search.

Microsoft, Google, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Intel and Philips are petitioning the FCC to allow them to create a handheld internet device that uses vacated TV airwaves to establish wireless internet access.

I’m not exactly sure what the point is, except maybe to use all the now-useless TV rooftop antennas to create a new way of connecting homes to internet service providers, without laying tons of new cable. It’s all confusing, but the main thing is that a certain gadget blog embaressed themselves by prematurely assuming this was all about a Zune phone.

The dubious honor of being the state with the highest rate of identity fraud goes to New York, and New York City tops other US metropolitan areas.

Andy Beard has an interesting article about Akismet’s spam deletion service (I use it here – if I didn’t, you’d have thousands of pieces of spam get through to my comment area every day).

I have noticed that the numbers of false positives (comments of yours getting deleted) are going up. But I’ve been going through and adding those back in.

Word came out last weekend that brothers Chad and Ryan Steelberg, who founded radio advertising company dMarc and then sold it to Google, have left Google just a year after the deal. Google bought dMarc for $102 million, with as much as $1.13 billion extra coming if certain revenue targets were met.

I was a supporter of the nofollow link, which told search engines not to count that link in their popularity ranking algorithms.

But, after seeing Loren Baker’s post about how lame nofollow is, I find I’m changing my mind.

Some of Google’s products are about to become available through an entirely different company, thanks to a new deal with AAPT. The Australian telecommunications carrier “will be offering Google’s new enterprise search solution to its customers,” according to the terms of the agreement.

Ok, maybe you have … and it just might be Flixster, a social network dedicated to film, actors, Hollywood and movie fans.

The obvious question you could be wondering is how it can be "the ultimate" when there are so many other social networks that have been around longer, pull more traffic, have more users and generate more buzz?

If a YouTube user feels one of their videos was an unfair casualty of Viacom’s recent war on copyright infringement, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wants to know about it. The nonprofit organization has posted its call to the user-generated disenfranchised on their home YouTube turf.

On Tuesday, Mathias Schindler reported how easy it was to access the site of German Google Book Search competitor in progress, VTO (full text search online).

Mark Malseed, co-author of The Google Story, takes an in-depth look at Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his family, mother Eugenia (NASA research scientist), father Michael (mathematics professor), and brother Sam. Here’s what Mark saw when he entered Sergey’s spacious Googleplex office 211, shared with Larry Page:

Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc. a media, entertainment and technology company, announced that it has purchased a number of television-focused Websites; TVShowsOnDVD.com, TV-now.com, and Fansof RealityTV.com as well as certain assets of eVoke TV.

The goal of the company is to broaden the reach of TV Guide Online’s network. In June, of 2006, they purchased JumptheShark.com and plan to redesign the site for a February 28 launch.

Vanessa Fox has reported on Official Google Webmaster Central Blog that Google is taking webmaster tools out of beta and allowing webmasters and others to comment on the blog.

Vanessa says on bidding farewell to beta:

Everyone’s aware of Google’s old “do no evil” motto, but not as many people know about the company’s good works. Some folks were very surprised by the extent of one recent charitable act: the Google Grants program essentially dumped $10,000 into a non-profit organization’s AdWords account.