I’m a sports fan, I should be excited about the Sports Shortcut debuting on Yahoo Search. It appears some testing still needs to take place.

Like other Yahoo Shortcuts, the Sports Shortcut delivers a block of information about an athlete. Yahoo Search’s Ya-Bing Chu gives Dontrelle Willis as a search example. The shortcut…doesn’t show up in Firefox.

Strange. I tried it in Opera, Safari, and even IE, and there’s Willis, beaming out of his Shortcut over his 4.98 ERA. (Note to non-baseball fans: that’s an atrocious Earned Runs Average). Same thing happened when searching for Seattle’s dynamic leadoff hitter, Ichiro.

The Shortcut seems to be just for baseball players right now. A search for Peyton Manning didn’t bring up a Shortcut. Neither does a query for Eli Manning, but it’s not like he deserves one.

Omitting Firefox from the Shortcut looks like a strange oversight. We may have to blame Chu for this, as he is a Red Sox fan. Let’s hope Yahoo can get a New York fan to look into this.

Golf Club Company Takes A Swing At Google

This case’s lead plaintiff is a company called Vulcan Golf, and while a custom club manufacturer seems out of place next to Google, don’t think that this lawsuit is just someone’s get-rich-quick scheme.  Eric Goldman of the Technology & Marketing Law Blog writes, “The plaintiffs’ attorneys did extensive research and provide a lot of detail, so the complaint lacks some of the deficient elements we often see in lawsuits against search engines.”

Yet typosquatting is a tricky field, and Goldman continues, “[T]he lawsuit could be gutted if the judge rules that none of the parties engaged in a trademark use in commerce – an open legal question that has not been resolved in the domainer context.  “Further, the lawsuit could effectively fall apart if the judge rejects formation of a class.”

Other onlookers also feel that Vulcan Golf may be barking up the wrong tree (I’d have worked in a golf reference, but I’m pretty unfamiliar with the game – sorry).  “[I]t’s hard to see how Google can be blamed for a domain owner registering a typosquatted name, even if Google’s ads appear on the site,” states Techdirt’s Mike Masnick.

In any case, at least this domainer suit will provide some variety to Google’s lawyers – all those YouTube-related complaints were probably becoming a bit of a bore.

Visual development of Swing applications comes to the JDK, Sun Microsystems revealed along with other news about Java SE 6. Downloads of the second beta release of the Java SE 6 may be found online.

Form construction can be accomplished more rapidly through the use of the GroupLayout from Project Matisse in NetBeans. Sun said this would make “the design of a Java technology GUI as simple as using a WYSIWYG drawing program,” without needing to know the underlying Swing technology.

The Java DB, Sun’s supported distribution of Apache Derby, will be part of the weekly Mustang builds of Java SE 6. The 2MB Java-based database is fully transactional. Sun noted it can be embedded directly into a Java application, or used in client/server mode.

Java will receive more exposure on hardware as a pair of Chinese technology powers have agreed to distribute the Java Runtime Environment on their OEM hardware. Founder Technology Group and Lenovo both inked licensing agreements that should have the JRE on their desktop and laptop machines by the third quarter of 2006.

Other PC OEMs that wish to license the JRE may do so online. Sun has established an online application for those manufacturers to apply for JRE licensing.

A final release of Java SE 6 is on track for the fall of 2006.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Dave thinks there are two “barriers to brain-dead simplicity”:

Those two points are correct, but are not the real barriers to brain-dead simplicity. The two points above are the barriers behind the barriers that are behind the barriers. The first barrier is this, as identified by Fred Wilson:

“When the soccer moms, myspace kids, construction workers, and grandmothers can use RSS, commercial email will give way to RSS.”

I’d even take it a step further than that. When the soccer moms, myspace kids, construction workers and grandmothers can explain RSS to each other, then we’ll be on our way.

I was at a presentation of Richard Saul Wurman’s earlier this year, and the thing that I took away from the discussion was that understanding takes place when a person hearing a concept can connect it with something they already know, and understand the new concept in the context of the known one. The example he gave was explaining the concept of an “acre.” We can say “an acre is 43,560 square feet.” And that sorta gives an idea. On the other hand, we can say an acre is approximately the area covered by a football field. A-ha! Now I have an idea of what it really represents.

What is the football field analogy for RSS?

Christopher Carfi, CEO and co-founder of Cerado, looks at sales, marketing, and the business experience from the customers point of view. He currently is focused on understanding how emerging social technologies such as blogs, wikis, and social networking are enabling the creation of new types of customer-driven communities. He is the author of the Social Customer Manifesto weblog, and has been occasionally told that he drives and snowboards just a little too quickly.

Brent crude was also up $1.63 to 52.41 on trading in London at the International Petroleum Exchange. Heating oil prices as well as gasoline prices continue to climb as well.

Much of the problem today stem from the instability in the Russian market particularly since they are now the second largest petroleum producer behind Saudi Arabia and the Russian authorities have been freezing Yukos assets.

Many believe the Russian attempts to control Yukos is one major force behind the soaring prices.

The U.S. Department of Energy releases its petroleum stock report on Wednesday and the May contracts also end on Wednesday. The report will shift its emphasis from heating oil to gasoline for summer travel season.

Experts warn the bearish market is becoming more difficult to justify.

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.