Markus Renschler sent this in: “We bought a new external hard disk (WD MyBook). What I was completely fascinated by is the fact it’s not only compatible with Vista, XP, MacOS and USB2.0, but, according to the package, with Google as well.”

Old media is epitomized by no news source more than the Associated Press. Literally thousands of journalists are employed around the world to bring current event coverage to readers of thousands of newspapers and their online sites.

In my world, this time of year is always crunchy, it’s an endurance race to the holidays. It means unfortunately that I don’t get to read as much, blog as much, breathe as much, etc., but oh well, so be it. I figure I can either put my head down to cover ground and get some creative stuff in the works for ’08 or stand still debating the finer points of bad PR vs. ugly PR vs.

Yahoo has announced it is shutting down Yahoo 360, its never-popular social networking service. 360, which launched on March 29, 2005 (apparently the last time I was ever hopeful about Yahoo), never caught on the way Microsoft’s Spaces did, having a less-appealing interface, and bad decision to start as invite-only, and a lack of promotion and integration from its host company.

Call it the latest in castoffs of a litigious society, or maybe a lesson in the new transparency the Internet allows. Simpler, if you want to keep a legal threat quiet, make sure your threat is a) valid and b) not made to a blogger with a history of telling everybody about legal threats.

Last week, I wrote an article about the new Yahoo Poker site, and while researching it, I sent an inquiry to yahoopoker at pokerresponse.com (the address provided by the “Contact Us” page).  The next day, a reply directed me to a certain Yahoo employee.  But the email had passed through several people’s hands, and one individual had – in his own words – “googled” me.

Go Figure: A Yahoo Partner Googled Me

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been involved in a notorious legal dispute with Patti Santangelo for the past two years. In a decision handed down from the presiding judge in the case today, the RIAA was dealt a severe blow that could have far-reaching implications.

If you are lucky, your parents have taught you to always be honest with people. Or you want to do that on your own. Nowadays, being honest in business will always mean that you will get better business in the long run.

Why be honest?

In business, being honest means that you will inform anyone you are communicating of an objective, true state of things about you. This will not only set the right level of expectations with the other person (hopefully), but will consequently make it clear for you, whether the person is ready to do business with you.

The Google Research blog has announced they will be holding a conference on scalable systems on June 23 in Seattle. They’re soliciting speakers and offering free food, all in an effort to spread knowledge about systems that scale in order to handle big jobs for huge amounts of people.

Link Building Blog expounds a good way of increasing ranking. It suggests that getting links from trusted sites like .edu and .gov sites will help in useful link building.

The first step is obviously to search for links
Although there an tons of educational and government sites, a lot don’t link out. The key to getting these links is to find sites that link to your competitors because they will probably be willing to link to you. You can do this by using Yahoo.

If you’re a hardcore hardware geek, then the work compiled in the 13-page paper by some Google engineers on the failure patterns of disk drives will be like a belated Valentine from the little red-headed girl.

Hard drive titan Seagate says that increasing hard disk densities could mean 4,000 hours of video on your PC, or TiVo, by 2009.

Scientists at the University of Rochester have stored an entire image-worth of data within a single photon, promising unsurpassed quantities of data storage for the era of quantum computing that lies before us.

All companies really want to hire the best and brightest; the best ones that they can find that meet the criteria of the job, would seem to fit into the organization, and has the ability to actually do the job.

Engineers at Sony are developing a set of wireless headphones that use a person’s skin to transmit a signal between the headpiece and music source.

As I’ve been telling friends and family, I’m working on a new book. A very easy one to write, it will be, as the content is entirely user-generated.

Not too long ago, Amazon released their Simple Storage Service (or “S3″ for short). It provides a hosted storage platform which developers can build all sorts of applications on top of. Smugmug, a popular photo sharing web site, is using it to store and host pictures.

A new wave of mobile phones equipped with tiny yet powerful hard disk drives is threatening to put an end to the meteoric rise of the iPod as the public’s favourite portable digital music player.

Mike McDonald found himself in a room with a larger A-list than a Nathaniel Hawthorne character sketch. San Jose (or thereabouts) is where the big search engines and their famed bloggers live. The only thing better than this, says Mike, would be Danny Sullivan in lederhosen.

Some ado was made recently about Google AdSense sensitivity filters blocking revenue-generating ads based on the nature of the content, and replacing those spots with public service announcements. There is additional concern that publishers will refrain from hard-hitting content to protect that revenue. We got in touch with Google to their side of it.

Day two of ad:tech Chicago rounded up with a sigh. With all the parties Monday night, I think some of the attendees were looking forward to the end of the day.

AOL is testing closed captions for streaming news content from CNN aimed at enhancing the online media experience for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. The captioned content will be available through all AOL channels, which includes its network, service, Web portal and video portal.