A billion dollar plan backed by Google and healthcare investment firm OrbiMed Advisors will sequence the genes of 100,000 people in the biggest effort of its kind.

We’ve written about Google drawing universities’ books, bit by bit, out into the open – that’s what the Google Books Library Project is all about.  Harvard’s charging ahead in a slightly different area, though, with its move to make research available online for free.

Three thousand people may not sound like a lot, but it is relatively early in Google’s book scanning endeavor, and that number of Harvard students may be the vanguard of scanned book readership.

The last decade brought two related surprises: the rise of social media and the rise of search media, says a new study from the Harvard Business School. Marketing is struggling to find its place in these new communication pathways, says the report. 

While doing some RSS feeds catchup, I actually bumped again into a weblog post that I have been meaning to share a thought or two for a little while now since it has been out there in the open for a few weeks already.

Social networking site Gather.com has partnered with three publishers and a record label to provide exclusive content for the site. The partners are Harvard Health Publications, Publishers Weekly, McGraw-Hill Professional and Columbia Records.

When capitalizing on the social networking explosion, it’s best to not be too obvious that you’re ripping off somebody else – especially when everybody knows that somebody else and the high-priced lawyers that come with. For example, a site called “MySpace for Midgets” is wrong for two reasons, but we’ll just focus on one.

It seems Facebook.com founder Mark Zuckerberg stepped on a few toes on his way to the top, and those toes are swinging back around to catch him in the pants. The young CEO (22) was recently chastised by an old rival, who doled out some backhanded advice while he was at it.

Socialtext released an update to the Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) case study on enterprise wiki and blog use.

My dad taught me many lessons growing up and one that stands out as relevant to lead generation went something like this:

The former Microsoft chief financial officer will join the database company as its new president.

Last month, 119 applicants to Harvard Business School followed a link on a Business Week message board to access a website containing confidential information about their admittance, a Financial Times report says.

The Harvard Crimson reports that Harvard’s liberal blogging policy has gotten a few students in legal hot water.

The February issue of Harvard Business Review, available only for sale online, lists the breakthrough ideas for 2005.

A group of Harvard’s top money managers are leaving the university to start their own firm.

While some may wonder what the next step for the search engine industry to take, Google may have already answered that question. Ever evolving, Google has their eyes set on the future with news of their newest innovation, Google Print. Not only will the search engine’s newest entity allow room for an exponential amount of growth, Google’s written word department may also open new avenues for search engine marketers to pursue.

Harvard Law’s Beekman Center is taking a hard look this week at the blogosphere’s influence on politics during its biennial Internet + Society 2004 conference.

Google’s SafeSearch porn filter was found to exclude non-porn sites such as the American Library Association, in a recent test conducted by the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.