The creators of the online gift sharing community known as Drop Spot restore a little faith in the human race by starting a chain of giving, linking cities across the United States.

As we all head out to vote on our favorite candidates and issues on this Election Day ’06, a bigger question looms in the minds of many as we recall the well-documented disorder of elections’ past: Will my vote really even count?

The news aggregator owned by the three major US newspaper publishers accepted another chunk of cash in funding for its operations.

Mark Masterson highlights the need for Enterprise 2.0 to work with Enterprise 1.0:

ChaCha, which describes itself as “the world’s largest live search engine,” is now available in beta form. The interesting feature is the defining one – ChaCha can supply “a human guide who assists you in real-time via an instant-message chat.”

What they say is true. Search is such a highly granular, customized, long tail type industry, there’s an awful lot to talk about. I had about an hour to give a talk on Friday (interesting group – a college class learning about SEM – update shortly), and still felt myself running out of time. In a world where you now have whole college courses (the few, the proud) devoted to nothing but search marketing, it’s little wonder that I run out of time way before I run out of material.

Looks like Windows Live Product Upload has silently launched into beta, shame you need to pre-register to access the beta though, check it out: http://productupload.live.com/

I don’t know if you guys noticed, but Alexa redesigned the site widgets, offering a cleaner, more appealing web 2.0 face. This really had to come. The old widgets were designed in an 1984 trend.

Samba and Creative Commons, both with ties in the open source community, benefited from Google’s largesse, an early present to a pair of organizations for the holidays.

Google has released a new helper application for Gmail, located at gmail.com/app on your phone.

I recently graduated from college, and instead of taking a corporate programming job, my friend and I started our own web development company.

I recently built a JavaScript function in HeadLight that filled a textbox from JavaScript and then disabled the textbox to prevent the user to alter its contents.

Google has plans to test the concept of selling print ads in 50 major newspapers. Some of the companies involved in the 3-month test are Gannett, The Tribune Company, The New York Times Company and The Washington Post Company.

Microsoft abrubtly ends its popular year long endeavor known as the Codename Max project, leaving some users puzzled.

Blogs, RSS and Social Networking can be a minefield for PR practitioners.

Spotlight on Search – Interview with Google’s Adam Lasnik

ASP.NET ships with a SqlMembershipProvider and a ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider that makes user authentication and authorization very easy to implement, but for some reason those are the only membership providers provided natively by ASP.NET 2.0.

Microsoft to Offer Sales Support for Novell’s Suse Linux… Huh? Did I hear that right? Yep, there it is again: Linux to work with Windows.

There have been rumors of this occurring for a while now, and it finally looks like it’s coming to pass – soon Google will be offering another outlet for search marketers to display their ads in: print newspapers. Google will …

Recently I came across a customer, who was very adamant on making a cool looking homepage and putting all their promotions and one of the main lead generation links (sign-up for newsletter) only on the homepage.

So – in case folks are curious – I now have both a dishwasher and the Internet back at my house. I feel like I’ve returned to the modern world. (Yes, I’m spoiled.)

Step 1. Destroy your Checklist… Check.

The NBA has terminated its sale of game videos on Google Video, a partnership that would have been ten months old tomorrow. That would typically indicate either dissatisfaction with Google’s video store model, the NBA wanting more money, or something else entirely (like the YouTube deal).

Zango Inc., the Web 2.0 incarnation of bubble-era adware and porno-popup company 180solutions, settled up with the Federal Trade Commission to the tune of $3 million (about 23 cents per install). The FTC charged that Zango used unfair and deceptive methods to download adware to users computers and then block them from removing it.