Could a Wikipedia backed search engine take down Google?
Jimmy Wales, the man behind Wikipedia, has laid out plans to create a new search engine that focuses on quality results, rather than complete and total crawling.
According to Reuters, "The new Wikia search service will combine computer-driven algorithms and human-assisted editing when the company launches a public version of the search site toward the end of 2007"
It's not likely that Wales efforts will make a short term dent in Google's stronghold but, never forget that Google's prowess came originally from it's ability to return better results. As scammers and Google bombers have continued to find ways to hit the top of searches they aren't entitled to, Google's competence has come into some doubt. If Wales and Wikia can build a better mouse trap, the world just might beat a path to their door.
During the last week, highly anticipated fall TV pilots have made their way on to Bittorrent trackers in record numbers. Shows like NBC's "Bionic Woman," ABC's "Pushing Daisies," The CW's "Reaper" are popping up like wildflowers, and network executives are tight-lipped about the matter. 
The United Nations rarely agrees on anything; They do however seem to find common ground when it comes to kicking bloggers, and any non-traditional media without a hierarchical editing process, out of the public discourse. 
It's no secret that Jason Calacanis -- founder and former head-hancho of Weblogs, Inc. -- and Kevin Rose -- that Digg kid -- have a mild feud between them. After Calacanis re-launched Netscape.com as a competing social news portal, albeit with a different target market, Rose and Calacanis fought publicly on their respective blogs in the public eye. 
Love him or hate him, you know he's worked hard to be where he's at. Bill Gates is getting close to making his big exit into retirement, and 
When you signed on for your job, you likely signed a hefty stack of paperwork as well. Do you remember signing something called a non-compete agreement? It's a fairly standard doc which limits your ability to strike out on your own in your employer's line of business, and also may limit your ability to switch jobs and work for a competitor. A California court has ruled that Non-Compete agreements may not be so universally enforceable. 
It's your worst digital nightmare, apart from perhaps a full system recovery, the losing of digital photos. We've all been bitten by a memory card or computer itself ruining a set of pictures at some stage, however well-renowned 
Sure, any time you stick "Child Beating" in a headline, you're sure to raise an eyebrow. In fact, beating works pretty well on it's own to drive traffic, and adding "child" to the equation only gives it longer legs. 
How much would you pay for a blog template? $49.95, $29.95? Or how about free with a little homegrown modification? That's what most of us would opt for. There is a market for pay templates, but we wonder quite seriously if there is a solid market for this one. This 
Online group buying is not a new idea. Dogs made entirely out of pasta that regenerate themselves after you eat them is a new idea. Unfortunately, this post is about group buying. Pasta dogs (Oodles of Poodles) will hopefully come up later. 
Not only can 
Lots of people don't find micro-blogging tool 
Speaking of Twitter bots and SMS reminders, when you want to text message your future self in 45 minutes to remember to feed the parking meter or put the laundry in the dryer, skip the more verbose GCal SMS format and direct message the Twitter timer bot instead. Message timer like this 
Another useful personal tracking tool with SMS support is the newly-hatched 
Keyboard shortcuts are the bread and butter of application productivity, and Photoshop is no exception. The Digital Photography School weblog highlights 18 useful Photoshop shortcuts for beginer, intermediate, and advanced users. The 18 shortcuts listed are far from exhaustive, though, so share your favorite Photoshop shortcuts in the comments. If you don't want to move to the keyboard every time you need to change tools, check out how I 
Unfortunately, there's not a spellcheck program out there that will catch all the potential mistakes you can make while writing. That's why it's so imperative to proofread.
Taking good pictures at a birthday party - whether a child or adult - is made a little bit easier with photography blog Digital Photography School's thirteen tips. One of the best tips is this:
Sometime in your life, you're probably going to have to walk away from a bad job situation. Financial blog Wise Bread has written up a nice article on how to make this into an opportunity instead of a catastrophe.
XTimeline, a tool for making timelines about pretty much anything that tickles your fancy, also offers users the opportunity to create timelines from RSS feeds. All you need is the RSS feed URL and you're good to go. 
Wired magazine's How To Wiki has an interesting article on how to teach your kid to program. Since I have a budding twelve year old hackerino, I was intrigued by this information. 
Productivity site DIY Planner has written up a tidy little article on how to use index tabs - simple index tabs - to get things done. In a word, index tabs turn out to be awesome. 
Getting to done site Lifehack.org has written up ten tips for developing your powers of concentration. If you're tired of being distracted and need some help, these are well worth a rea -look, a penny! 
Financial mag Forbes.com has postulated this question: when is it time to give up that great idea? Not to be Debbie Downer or anything here, but yes, sometimes it's actually a good thing to cast aside your hopes and dreams...just make sure you replace them with something better. 
I'm a big fan of OMSI, the science museum right in my neck of the woods, and while browsing their site this morning in order to renew my membership, I found recipes. SciencTIFIC recipes, mind you.
The Nature Conservancy has an interesting article on how to identify invasive plants in your yard. These are plants that once let free to propagate themselves tend to overpower everything..and I do mean everything. 
Web Worker Daily brought up an interesting question near and dear to my work from home heart in a recent article: is the isolation experienced working from home helpful or harmful? It's a bit of a paradox. 
Anyone with school age children has probably struggled with the problem of what to do about allowances. More and more these days there seem to be legitimate (and not-so legitimate) reasons for kids to be spending money, but you probably want your children to start learning about money management a bit themselves as they start becoming little consumers. 
Now you may not recognize the name Steve Wozniak. He never really did anything important. He had a hand in starting some little company, 
We've long been big fans of using WinDirStat on Windows computers to determine where all of our hard drive space had gone. But DLS reader Brian commented on our recent 
Mac's OS X operating system has a number of system caches where it stores information that may be of use in the future, to speed up the process of looking it up. The trouble is, there appears to be no limit to how large these caches can grow to be. At a certain point, a huge cache can be just as bad as no cache at all in terms of performance. Plus, all it's really doing is storing "nice to have" information in case it needs it. But if you didn't have your cache populated, your machine would go and seek out the information from its original source. 
While you might love or leave OS X's Dashboard, if there's one thing it's good for displaying it's lookup information. 
If you're running the latest version of Parallels on your Mac (version 3.0, build 4560), you might have noticed that when your Windows virtual machine is running, your Mac's CPU is almost exactly 50% utilized even when Windows is idle. If you're on a MacBook or MacBook Pro, you'll notice this pretty quickly since your fan will be running basically non-stop. 
10. Transfer your clipboard over the internet
9. Paste your clipboard to cell phone or email
8. Reformat your clipboard 
7. Deformat your clipboard text
6. Manage your clipboard's history
5. Copy Windows error messages to clipboard
4. Create a new file from clipboard in one step
3. Auto-insert the clipboard into text snippets
2. Bypass Ctrl+C in Firefox with AutoCopy
1. Share the clipboard between computers with Synergy
One of my favorite features is "Hunter Mode," which lets you drag a cross-hair onto any application—from the actual window to a system tray icon or shortcut. When you release the cross-hair, you can perform all of the uninstall tasks. For system tray icons, you can even tell the program to stop autostarting. The cross-hair is especially handy if a rogue application is running and you don't know what the hell it is (think cleaning crap from a friend or family member's computer).
Windows Vista only: Freeware utility Vista Battery Saver extends how long you can use your Vista laptop between charges by killing a couple of Vista's unnecessary energy hogs when you unplug your laptop, namely Aero (Vista's fancy new interface) and the Windows Sidebar. Plug your computer back in and these features are automatically re-enabled. It's unclear how much battery life this will save (the Windows Vista blog suggests 
RSS filtering service AideRSS promises to determine a web site's most popular posts and deliver only the best to your feed reader. AideRSS bases a post's quality on a metric they call PostRank, which factors comments, social bookmarks, and trackbacks (among other stats) to determine a site's best content. The ease of subscribing to a new RSS feed has also made it very easy to overwhelm our feed readers, especially for sites that post a lot of content (...what are you looking at?), so it naturally seems like a really good idea. 
It's one thing when a blogger or a journalist harps on Microsoft for one thing or another - but it's something else entirely when the president of the world's 
The buttonless iPhone, and the sleek styling of other apple products, has taken the Wall Street Journal to musing, "What's Steve's Beef about buttons."
We're always on the lookout for hot Google tricks. Marc and Angel have put together 
We love contests, and that goes double for contests that take skill and effort to pull off. Macthemes2 is sponsoring an all out battle to the death over Mac Themes, and they're inviting you to throw your well-Photoshopped hat in the ring.
Digg, boy king of all social driven media, announced today that they are dropping Google Ads in favor of advertisements served by Microsoft. Odd, that; Given Digg's user base leans heavily away from the Redmond giants, and the move is likely to irritate a generous portion of Digg's healthy surfer population. 
Ubuntu Studio has received a fair bit of attention. The multi-media production offshoot of the popular Linux distribution is worth a look for audio production but, according to Linux.com, leaves a lot to be desired for serious video or graphics production. 
Much of the world may still be dominated by Microsoft, with Apple running a distant but statistically significant second; That hasn't stopped Linux installs from growing at an outstripping pace in China. 
These days, the terms 'web 2.0 company' and 'API' seemingly go hand in hand, especially if the company has a climb up the market share ladder ahead of them. Unfortunately, Pownce must have missed this memo, as our own 
Have you ever wanted to check on your status in a Nike+ Challenge or you progress of a Nike+ Goal without having to go to the hassle of logging into the Flash-heavy Nike+ site? Well it seems the folks at Nike heard those cries. For some time now, these have been out for users to track their progress (or otherwise). The great thing is, however, that they're not limited to Mac OS X, for Nike have created 
Windows users: If you copy and move files around in Explorer a lot, a registry edit can add handy "Copy To..." and "Move To..." options to the right-click context menu. When you choose either option, an Explorer dialog pops, asking you for the destination directory. As always, back up your registry before you start making changes. The How-To Geek details the tweak. Thanks, Casey! 
Blogger Mark Fisher typically prints several documents at the end of the day, but rather than individually printing files the old-fashioned way, Mark uses Quicksilver with his printer to print docs in a few swift keystrokes. This method makes the most sense for printing multiple files from different directories using the 
Now you can schedule Gcal events with your collaborators directly from Google Docs, making it easy to organize meetings, deadlines, or goals surrounding a project and easily share those events with your fellow collaborators. To create an event from a doc, go to the Share tab and click on the "Create event with collaborators" link. Once you've created the event, fellow collaborators can confirm attendance status and comment on the event just like a normal shared event. 
Paint.NET is the best full-featured yet lightweight image editor for Windows, and weblog CyberNet introduces a few of its most basic features. Most of the features the post highlights can be found in nearly all image editors (like red-eye correction and auto-level), but Paint.NET's ease of use, speed, and more advanced feature set might be just what you're looking for. If you do mostly basic image editing and you'd like to move into more advanced territory but don't need the power of Photoshop or GIMP, Paint.NET is well worth trying out. If you're already a regular Paint.NET user, let us know a few of your favorite features in the comments.
Windows/Mac only: Freeware applications iSproggler (Windows) and iScrobbler (Mac) upload your iTunes and iPod listening habits to the popular music recommendation service 
Web site Walk Score rates neighborhoods for "walkability" based on their proximity to grocery stores, restaurants, movie theaters, schools, libraries, and more to give you an idea of how ped-friendly an address is. I was a little surprised at the walkability score of 69 I got for my neighborhood, but I suppose walkability isn't the only consideration for home hunters, and an address about a quarter of a mile away increased my walkability score 16 points, which means the criteria for walkability is very serious about tight proximity. Oh, and incidentally, Bill Gates' house has a horrendous walk score of 7. God, his life must suck.
The easiest way to create a local backup of your Gmail account is probably through POP access with a desktop email client. Since it's completely cross platform and comes with easy Gmail setup baked in, I'd recommend 
Finally, you can also 
On the other hand, if bi-directional sync is more than you want or need, you can just