Free software is finding fans

The social networking site comes under fire for planned changes to privacy settings.

Bill Thompson on mixing art and technology

Details emerge of why billions in virtual cash disappeared from a virtual bank in Eve Online.

Japan considers adding noise-making devices to quiet hybrid cars to improve safety for blind pedestrians.

US anti-trust regulators are to examine Google's $125m deal with book publishers to settle copyright issues, reports say.

Brussels aims to help net shoppers

A woman accused of "cyber-bullying" a 13-year-old girl who later committed suicide sees her conviction provisionally thrown out.

A majority of tech workers in the public sector do not know about the emission reduction targets they face, says a survey.

Will Twitter alienate users if it becomes too corporate?

Ever since the new Google Blog Search homepage launched, we've been fielding requests for a myriad of different features. Today we're happy to announce the launch of our most requested feature: RSS and Atom feeds. Simply click on the links under "Subscribe" in the left-hand column of the Blog Search front page to subscribe to any topic or story in any feed reader, like Google Reader.

If you don't use a feed reader, we're also offering an iGoogle gadget that lets you embed the Blog Search front page right inside of your iGoogle page or any other page where iGoogle gadgets are accepted. You can browse topics and drill into stories from within the widget, and you can customize the gadget to choose which topics you want to follow.

With these new ways to read Blog Search stories, you might think our homepage was going unloved, but not to worry. We've also added two new features to the Blog Search homepage to better help you discover what people are talking about right now on the web: Hot Queries and Latest Posts.

Hot Queries lists searches currently popular in Blog Search — it's an easy way to quickly dive into the trending points of conversation on the web. Latest Posts, on the other hand, shows new posts from popular blogs. While Hot Queries highlights what people are looking for, Latest Posts lets you find out about stories even before people start searching for them.


There's a lot of great, fresh content being published in blogs every day. We hope these new features help you discover more of it, faster.

Posted by Akshay Patil, Software Engineer, & Dylan Casey, Product Manager

Reports from Iran say SMS text messaging services have been unblocked for the first time since disputed presidential elections.

Carphone Warehouse is to restart selling Vodafone mobile phone contracts, three years after Vodafone pulled the products.

Twitter users can now buy followers to boost the audience for the messages they send via the micro-blogging service.

The number of people visiting Twitter has soared over the past year, according to an internet monitoring company.

The crackdown on illegal file-sharers is catching innocent people alongside the pirates, according to a report.

Blended threats. Payload viruses. Spam. If you're one of the more than 15 million people whose work email is protected by Postini's email security products, we hope you don't spend a lot of time thinking about these things. And if we're doing our job right, they certainly shouldn't be showing up in your inboxes. But we process more than 3 billion business emails per day for our customers, culling the spam, viruses, and other threats out, so we do think about this stuff. A lot.

On occasion, we like to share some of what we've learned, so that those of you who are interested can see what spammers are up to. If you're one of those people, head over to our Enterprise Blog for an update on spam trends over the past few months.

Posted by Ellen Leanse, Google Enterprise team

I love labels in Gmail. Most email programs use folders, which only let me put mail in one place at a time. With labels, I can organize mail in multiple ways. Combined with filters to automatically label incoming messages, Gmail offers powerful ways to organize email.

When I joined the Gmail team, I was surprised to learn that only 29% of Gmail users had created any labels. At first, I thought perhaps conversation threading and search made the need to organize our mail less important. But when we talked to people who use Gmail, we got a different story. People often asked us to add folders to Gmail, assuming no system of organization existed. As one person said in a usability study, "What are labels... and where are my folders?"

We realized that if you didn't know about labels, it would be easy to assume Gmail had no way to organize your mail. Not only were "labels" unfamiliar, they were kind of hidden. So, we set out to make labels more accessible, as well as more powerful. Most of the changes have been in Gmail for a while, but we're adding some new features today. We thought you'd enjoy a peek at the method to our madness.

The first thing we did was make labels look more like the sticky notes you use in real life. Making the interface mimic things you interact with outside the computer can sometimes improve ease of use.


We also made it easier to remove a label from an open conversation:


Then we worked on the actions you take to apply and remove labels. Before, to put a label on a message, you had to look under "More actions> Apply label." Not only was this option hidden in a generic menu, but the language wasn't what people are familiar with when it comes to organizing mail. We explored several alternatives:

The world's biggest commercial telecommunications satellite - to offer a terrestrial/satellite phone service - is put into orbit.

FFDirect 0.7.0 is out. Most notable new feature is the automatic polling of friendfeed for post “likes” and comments. The results are included in the HTML body of the post (unlike other similar solutions, that use javascript). If you like the way ffdirect shows up in this blog, try adding the following lines in your CSS: .ffdirect [...]

Wired magazine's editor talks open software

Video surveillance offers insight into baby babble

The Californian origins of home computing

New owners of file-sharing website The Pirate Bay say users will be paid for sharing files.