Google joined another wireless alliance this week, the Wireless Innovation Alliance, a coalition of technology companies and public interest groups devoted to opening up "white spaces" for broadband use.

Both Google and Yahoo! have decided to provide website owners with a "holiday season treat" by updating their respective search results (SERPs) – simultaneously!

Both the major search engines have been executing some algorithm changes causing the usual ranking turmoil for webmasters and site owners over the last week.

An updated version of Yahoo Messenger arrived in a pre-beta preview for Vista users, who can install it in parallel with their existing Yahoo Messenger client.

I like Adobe Acrobat Connect. The Professional version has a lot of advantages for enterprise conferencing use. I even appear as a frequent guest speaker on Adobe’s public educational webinar series.

But fair is fair, and it is time for Adobe to face up to a glaring deficiency in its offering. Technical support for the product is woeful.

Mind you, what is available is pretty good. The online documentation for how to accomplish common tasks is clear and well written. The problem comes when that documentation doesn’t satisfy your needs as a user.

First, it isn’t called site targeting any longer, as Google said changes to what advertisers can do with ads means ‘placement targeting’ works better as a name.

A sample of a spam message making the rounds demonstrated how someone used a Google URL, with advanced search operators, to send people to a fake retail site. It could be much worse.

Hot on the heels of Gmail’s introduction of IMAP support comes upgrades to its interface. Google Operating System has details of what’s being rolled out and Sam Harrelson is one of the first to see the new features.

During a live dialogue with MTV viewers, Presidential candidate Barack Obama pledged to support Net Neutrality if elected president, and to appoint a pro-neutrality Federal Communications Commission.

Comedian Stephen Colbert’s fictitious bid for the presidency has created a pretty big buzz on social networking site Facebook.

Gmail seems to be rolling out IMAP support. IMAP is short for Internet Message Access Protocol and allows you to access your Gmail emails from other clients, like Outlook or Thunderbird.

If Wikipedia’s users get to determine the next president, it seems like we’ll be seeing Ron Paul in the White House; according to an analysis of four different factors, the Republican candidate is popular in just about every way.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have tossed quite a bit of money at Tesla Motors, but they did so as private individuals.  Now there’s word that Google itself could get behind another automotive effort.

Yahoo Shopping’s comparison-shopping listings will now display ScanAlert’s Hacker Safe seal. Online shoppers will be able to make decisions about merchants based on more than pricing and ratings.

Eighty-nine percent of American adults believe that sending text messages or emails while driving is dangerous and should be banned according to a new survey commissioned by mobile messaging service Pinger and conducted by Harris Interactive.

More bad news for YouTube/Google, the Football Association Premier League (Premier League) and Bourne Co. (Bourne) said today that more parties are joining the fight for content protection against YouTube/ Google citing wide scale copyright infringement.

The Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) said they would consider Microsoft’s HD Photo file format, tentatively titled JPEG XR, for open standard status. If standardized, Microsoft says the new format will usher in the next generation of digital imaging.

If Novarra had received Qualcomm’s endorsement and nothing else, the company would deserve a round of applause.  But Novarra, a provider of mobile platforms and services, has received Qualcomm’s endorsement and $50 million in funding.  Somebody find the gold-flake confetti!

Two new features added to the protocol will help webmasters govern when an item should stop showing up in Google’s web search, as well as providing some control over the indexing of other data types.

Google Israel made an interesting gesture today on its home page: it posted (in Hebrew) the phrase “thy children shall come again to their own border,” which refers to two kidnapped Israeli soldiers.  Some have called this “moving,” and it’s definitely unusual.

On July 18th, Google plans to remove the old version of Analytics in favor of the updated edition.