Top Items:

Weblogs.com Sold, Ping Outlook Bleak — Verisign, which does not have a particularly good history in the blogosphere, has purchased Weblogs.com. This leaves Ping-O-Matic as the only large-scale and independent ping relay service left. (Blo.gs was sold to Yahoo earlier in the year.)
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Google ETA? 300 years to index the world's info — It could take 300 years to index all the world's information and make it searchable, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt predicted on Saturday at the Association of National Advertisers annual conference in Phoenix.

First Fast Impressions of Google Reader — I haven't had much time to "play" with the new Google Reader from Google Labs (beta) but here are a few VERY fast impressions, things I'm suprised not to see from the outset, and other things I would love to see in future releases.
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Google Introduces Feed Reader
Discussion:
InsideGoogle, Kevin Burton's Feed Blog, tecosystems, The RSS Blog, PaidContent.org and Search Engine Roundtable

Sphere, the Relevant Blog Search — Blogs are big. There are 19 million blogs, and a few thousand will go online by the time you get done reading this. To paraphrase a popular disco ditty - so many blogs, so little time. Technorati, Feedster and Icerocket do a good job of searching the blogs …

To Bundle or Not to Bundle: That's the Microsoft Security Question — Microsoft Corp. has not yet launched a paid anti-virus product, but questions about software bundling and unfair competition are already swirling in Europe. — Rival Symantec Corp. acknowledged late this week …
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Symantec complains to EU anti-trust officers over Microsoft
Discussion:
Neowin.net

The orange icon... It's great that a discussion of icons has recently restarted in the RSS community. We are in the process of figuring out what icon to use on our toolbar in IE7 to represent feeds. — There are five parts of the experience for feeds in IE7: discovering if a webpage has a feed …

Internet becoming part of life for Chinese — Lu Li, a 23-year-old working with a foreign firm in East China's Shanghai, has found surfing online indispensable in her daily life since she first accessed to the Internet seven years ago. — "It has unfolded a new chapter in my life," …
Discussion:
Smart Mobs

Dutch smash 100,000-strong zombie army — Dutch police have arrested three people for building a worldwide zombie network of more than 100,000 PCs used to launch internet attacks on companies and to hack into bank and Paypal accounts. — The main suspect, a 19 year-old man …
Discussion:
Infectious Greed

Palm Linux mobile phones coming this year? — Palm will ship Linux-powered mobile phones this year, say sources claiming to be close to the company. The devices will be powered by Wind River Linux, and pending carrier reaction, may well be the first Linux-powered handsets distributed widely within the US.

Microsoft warns, don't use "Windows XP Service Pack 3 Preview" — This is not the first time that Windows fanatics create their own "Service Pack" by collecting all available hotfixes in to one installable pack. I have posted articles about these packs over the years because I find …

Intel leads Wi-Fi chipmakers in new forum — Leading Wi-Fi chip manufacturers will be announcing a new industry forum on Monday to help accelerate efforts to create a new, faster Wi-Fi standard, says a source close to the companies. — Intel, Broadcom, Marvel and Atheros have sidestepped …
Discussion:
Wi-Fi Networking News

Broadband Around The Planet — Folks, I am undertaking a big project for which I need your help. A lot of help. I have an idea to do a "broadband profile" of the planet. What I would like to do is find contributors who are kind enough to write 250 words about the broadband situation in their country.

Less as a competitive advantage: My 10 minutes at Web 2.0 Jason — I was invited to present a 10 minute "High Order Bit" at the Web 2.0 Conference. I decided to talk about the concept of less as a competitive advantage. Here's the rough text (from memory) of my presentation. — Less.