Speak your mind to Google

Amnesty International has started a campaign to convince the major U.S. search companies to stick to their better principles and not aid China in their extensive Internet censoring over there.

irrrepressible.info outlines the situation and gives you a direct way to contact Google, Microsoft, Yahoo... take a look.

Google may post higher income on search, ad surge - MarketWatch

Google's earnings come out after today's market close, and with an article lilke this, who wouldn't go buy a few thousand worth of shares and make a few hundred bucks in the process?

However, I can recall times just like today (when Yahoo came out with flat earnings the previous day) and everyone thought that it was because Google stole their ad market share, when in reality the overall Internet advertising market was just flat, and Google had flat earnings, and the stock went anorexic and dropped sixty in a day.I'm just staying put.

Read more at www.marketwatch.com/new...

Dobbs: Not so smart when it comes to the Middle East - Jul 19, 2006

Lou Dobbs always seems to have a good take on complicated issues. Here's his commentary on the current Middle East situation:

Read more at www.cnn.com/2006/US/07/...

Google's doodle artist

I think this has been public for some time, so I'm not sure why CNN is calling him an "unknown artist". But anyway, now we know a little bit more about the guy responsible for this questionable 4th of July 2006 cats drawing.

Read more at www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/i...

Anti-penny, pro-rounding bill introduced in Congress

This article about halting production of the penny sounds like a good idea. Apparently something similar to this is done in Europe.

Read more at money.cnn.com/2006/07/1...

Writer Shore growing pains

A few weeks back I began posting on a writing web site called theNextBigWriter.com in an effort to network and interact with other Internet writers and to promote the new Writer Shore project (at least indirectly). Apparently people on a blog called SelahWrites noticed my link to this blog in the profile I created. At the time it had a small blurb about what the Writer Shore project, with one part reading: 'Writers come here and we aggressively promote the best talent to the reading, writing, and publishing communities.' In some ways this is still part of our goal. My profile alias was (still is) TheNextBigReader, and there was some speculation / confusion about what Writer Shore actually is.

This all happened before writershore.com launched, and I'm hoping the mission and intent are more clear now with the new site. As it stands this is still an experiment, and adjustments will be made as it moves along and grows.

Some questions they asked:

- am I a banned former member of TheNextBigWriter.com? Nope. No skeletons like that.
- am I an agent? Not really. But Writer Shore is what me make it.
- am I working in connection with theNEXTBigWhackO? Haha ... ask people who know me. The answer is most likely "yes".

Read more at selahwrites.blogspot.co...

...

Another more technical sort of growing pain showed up when I noticed that some of the design elements of the site render in annoying ways with Firefox. This disappoints from the standpoint that I was previously so excited about switching to FF, but there's no going back now. The site will adapt.

My Firefox extensions

This space is intended as a supplement to the Writer Shore community generated literary magazine web site, and as such the content of it will be pretty broad. I see that as a positive necessity.

The great part about this post, in particular, is that I've finally found the fix to tear me completely away from Internet Explorer. Previous to only a few minutes ago, I had wanted to use Firefox because I knew that everything about it was better than IE. The only thing keeping me faithful to IE was the fact that the Google Toolbar (BETA) didn't have the Bookmarks functionality (a petty reason, I know). Maybe I'm a slow Internet user in terms of geekiness and the ability to find all these things, but today I found a Google Bookmarks Button FF extension. It should accomplish exactly what I seek.

Great stuff, let's see how it goes. Check the thing out yourself.

Read more at www.menjatallarins.com/...