Blog Report: "Quote" Unnecessary, Indeed.

Blog Report is a periodic look at what's happening in the blogosphere. A means of sharing fun, interesting, and noteworthy blogs and the bloggers that post them.

You've seen the emails from your friends, coworkers, and perhaps even family members -- excessive and/or unnecessary use of quotation marks. One blogger has made it her personal mission to highlight the silly and unusual use of quotes. With nods from the Associated Press and a "Site of the day" designation from Yahoo! recently, it seems others are taking, ahem... "notice".

The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks: http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/



Know of a "blog" you'd like to see highlighted here? Email: blogreport (AT) brianwestbrook (DOT) com. I might even "quote" you in the post (couldn't resist!).

Microsoft's $240 Million Facebook Profile

Settling a bidding war between software giants Microsoft and Google, Facebook sold 1 1.6% stake to Microsoft for $240 million. The deal, announced today is the latest of high-stakes banters for dominance in the online advertising space.

What does this mean for Facebook users?

Hopefully... not much. Longtime Myspace users recall the plastering of FOX property ads for their TV shows and movies after that social networking site was picked up by the same parent company. Will Microsoft influence Facebook beyond banner advertising? Will today's news stunt Facebook's growth? Stay tuned...

California Wildfires: "On Fire" (per Google)

While we send our thoughts and well-wishes to those affected by the Southern California wildfires, Google has something of an (incidental) ironic observation. The search engine tracks popular search terms and presents a relative scale (using phrases from "mild" to "volcanic") of their popularity for a given day.

On Monday 22 October 2007, "california wildfires" was ranked on the "hotness" scale as On Fire.

Check it out here (or click the screenshot above).

View the current list of Hot Trends using the Google Trends tool.

Nightclub Powered by Dancing -- Literally.

Did you know that the average nightclub consumes 150 times the power of a typical 4-person household? This and other energy conservation observations serva as basis for a dance floor that will turn the kinetic energy of those dancing into electricity to fuel the lights, sound, and other power-guzzling needs of a nightclub. It'll take a spin in Rotterdam, Netherlands soon and you can read all about it and check out the photos on the PopularMechanics site. Happy (green) dancing!

Picnik Update: New premium features and Flickr support

If the camera adds ten pounds, there's a new way to give your digital photos a diet. You may recall my review of Picnik a few months back on Portland's Morning News -- well now the online photo editing site has gone big-time! Launching its 1.0 product (no more beta!) and adding a set of Premium features that for most users will rival the functionality of Adobe's Photoshop -- the guys at this Seattle-based startup aren't wasting any time.

TechCrunch has a review of the Flickr / Picnik integration. Now Flickr users can do more than crop and rotate images stored on the Yahoo-owned photo sharing site.

I'll be reviewing Picnik Premium in the coming weeks, and posting an interview with head picniker Jonathan Sposato soon, but for now, take a peek at Picnik and let me know what you think. The new tools will give you, like me, a new excuse to put off a trip to the gym and with the holidays just around the corner -- sign me up! ;-)

Microsoft Takes Office Online, Answers Google

KXL Tech Expert Segment for 1 October 2007

Microsoft earlier this morning announced plans to offer users an online add-on for its popular Office productivity suite. The service, Office Live Workspace, gives users the ability to post 1000 documents online and is expected to be released into beta later this year.

In February Google released an enterprise version of its free applications Docs & Spreadsheets. Many are seeing today's announcement as a response to the Google Apps product.

For more information, check out this story from today's NY Times. To compare Office productivity suites, I recommend this chart over at Wikipedia.

Comcast kicks off high-bandwidth users

Residential users of Comcast cable internet who hog the service's bandwidth may find themselves being dropped for excessive use. Reports from users disconnected have been trickling in for the past few months, and some have taken their frustration to an online blog.

Comcast has declined to comment on whether or not any Portland-area customers have hit the undisclosed ceiling. For perspective, today's Oregonian quotes Comcast as classifying these extremely high users as cosuming, "As much bandwidth as if they were sending 256,000 photos, or 13 million e-mails, every month."

More on this story from:

• PC Magazine: "Comcast Cuts Off Bandwidth Hogs "
  
• The Oregonian: "Comcast cuts off big Internet users"