Before Google unveils its beta products, they appear to utilize some early beta testers close to home, or more to the point, close to their employees’ homes.

USA Today reports AOL is planning to launch a whole host of new services as its shift from a subscriber model to an advertising strategy.

A Hungarian techie has created a mashup of Google Maps that doesn’t just have a night and day difference, but a dusk one as well; HBO has created a mashup to promote its Mafia-inspired series The Sopranos.

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) leapt into their first foray of the small-business channel business in a global distribution deal with Ingram Micro Inc. The distribution deal will cover small business units with fewer than 200 users and four to 20 servers.

According to CBP Career Consultants Co., Ltd., a leading career consulting firm in China, 52% of white-collar workers now keep blogs.

The research company thinks that corporations should utilize the Enterprise version of Google Desktop if they permit the product in their operations.

Does your blog provide link bait?

Steve Gillmor calls Office 2007 “Office Dead.” Oh, yeah Steve?

Beer, senseless nudity and cavemen. As football fans remember the glory days of human development, these images made their way from computer screen to brain to conditioned response voting on AOL’s Super Sunday Ad poll. Homo Inteneticus viewed the Super Bowl ads some 42 million times and two-thirds of the time hailed beer as the winner.

Speculation abounds about the future of search and the dominance of Google, as rivals Microsoft and Yahoo ramp up their search engines and consider incentives for people to use their search.

Problem: You want to automate the creation of a menu page for a directory of files and make it look like any other page on your site.

Advertisers are hitting News Corp. where it hurts by looking for escape clauses in their MySpace contracts. As negative press mounts for the phenomenally successful young blogger website over an apparent rash of sexual predation, News Corp. plans to appoint a “safety czar” to help assuage the fears of parents and educators.

A poll conducted by Harris Interactive shows that most consumers would be willing to give up their cable or satellite TV subscriptions if an acceptable IPTV alternative were offered. Also, while a switch to IPTV may prove challenging for networks and cable companies, it offers a better TV experience for the consumer.

DVD quality videos and the integration of visual crawling technology from AOL’s recent purchase of the Truveo video search engine will be unveiled in AOL’s video search this week.

The oft-rumored removal of the iconic butler Jeeves from the Ask.com search engine has arrived, with the well-dressed embodiment of discreet and exemplary service contemplating his post-search engine life.

Buzz-o-phone is aggregating opinions about products, services, brands and companies via an 800 number (1-800-591-5375 to be exact).

A survey of which major search engine results in the best conversion rate puts AOL as #1, and Google dead last.

I had the pleasure of sitting down via Skype to talk with the esteemed Steve Gillmor and Dan Farber last week for a Gillmor Daily podcast.

Listening this morning to a BBC World Service radio interview with Peter Robertson, vice-chairman of the Chevron oil company, I was struck in particular by his commentary about a website where the public can join Chevron in an online discussion about the future of energy.

If you’re interested in seeing the future of the Web, look no further than this gigundo list of Web apps developed using Ruby on Rails.

In what could be a landmark moment for citizen journalism, four newspapers plan to syndicate bloggers’ content on their own sites through a new program called Blogburst.

And he’s found that TailRank is sending him more links than Memeorandum is (although Memeorandum is sending more traffic).

Blogs evolve over time. They change even when we aren’t thinking they are changing in any way.

From the popular journal, Nature, an interesting article on how biologists are using Google Earth to support their efforts.