Japanese athletes competing at the upcoming Winter Olympics won’t be able to blog about their experiences because their posts could be construed as journalism and disqualify them from the Games.

419 scam emails coming from IP addresses belonging to Google’s Gmail service landed in SpamCop spamtrap accounts, leading SpamCop to blacklist those addresses.

A lot of buzz in the SEO community lately has been focused on the value of creating compelling content as if it’s a new idea.

Slate’s editor-at-large, Jack Shafer, has a great piece discussing the “collapsing cost of media creation.”

Sparked by a survey that Brian Oberkirch at WeblogsWork is getting underway, an interesting conversation has been taking shape on the Naked Conversations Blog (see comments thread) about blog monitoring as an emerging service/business opportunity among PR and marketing firms:

Kudos to the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD).

IBM put forth new terms and conditions regarding its iSeries resellers in an effort to bolster that avenue of VAR in what many suggest may be a plan for future channel programs.

Sergey Brin intimated to Israeli news source Haaretz that Google “is in the process of establishing an R&D center in Israel.” Brin made the statement during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The San Francisco Chronicle has a big piece on Web 2.0 that gets to a fundamental question.

Among the most visible companies in America, Google has become the most recognizable brand in technology too.

Interesting article in New York Times today about Microsoft’s efforts to bring computing to the poor.

After all, as Cory Doctorow et al at BoingBoing point out, if there is no personally identifiable information in the data, there is no reason to keep it from being posted for review.

Google just announced an upgrade to its search toolbar.

At the upcoming SES New York, there’s a session called Searchonomics: Serious Fun and Stats. Cool moniker.

A floating rectangular object near a Perth, Australia parking lot looks a bit like an airborne automobile.

I got VERY close to plunking down $2,000 for one of those new MacBooks that Apple came out with.

It’s funny how some services scream their inadequacy at us, yet we continue to use them.

Another beta version of Google’s Toolbar arrived on the company’s servers, just waiting for download and testing by its user base.

People can get a strong impression of your website within one twentieth of a second, according to a new study. But it may not be a lasting impression.

Robert Fripp is a famous guitarist. He’s in the audience aggregation business.

Check this out. Someone has built and AJAX powered version of mytop, the little console based MySQL monitoring tool I wrote years ago.

Miel Van Opstal has posted an awesome array of RSS tools.

The confounding success of the famous Super Bowl economic indicator, where the winning team’s conference seems to correlate with the coming year’s economy, is spilling over into other areas of voodoo economics. This time it’s reversed as eBayers are predicting the outcome of America’s time-honored obsession based upon the going price of each team’s merchandise.

Google is about to release a new version of its toolbar.