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From CNN: Thirteen-year-old Morgan Pozgar, of Claysburg, Pennsylvania, was crowned LG National Texting champion on Saturday after she typed “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from “Mary Poppins” in 15 seconds. “I’m going to go shopping and buy lots of clothes,” the teen said after winning her $25,000 prize from the electronics company LG. Morgan defeated nearly 200 other competitors …
From Forbes: Google owns the Internet advertising business, generates gobs of cash and can keep competitors at bay simply by opening its checkbook. None of this seems to impress Wall Street. Analysts expect the Web giant to post another quarter of go-go growth on Thursday afternoon: They are looking for the company to reports earnings …
From Red Herring: Technology will keep getting better and better rather than plateauing out, with the humble keyboard making way for speech recognition software as standard, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said on Thursday. “I’m often asked, is the technology revolution going to reach an end? Is the improvement in the chips and the software, will …
From USA Today: In the name of MySpace, YouTube and the holy Internet, amen. A number of religious websites are aping the names and styles of some of the Web’s most popular sites. Chief among them are GodTube.com, a video-sharing site for Christians, and MyChurch.org, a social networking realm. The explosion of niche social networking …
From USA Today: News Corp.’s MySpace social network launched on Thursday a service that scours the Web for news stories and lets users rate them, aiming to attract more advertisers to the Rupert Murdoch-controlled company. The service, called MySpace News, resembles a mix of Google’s Google News, which collects stories and arranges them based on …
From the New York Times: The cruel randomness of celebrity became clear to Tom Calver in February, when the cheese got a romantic Valentine in the mail and he did not. “What has he done?†Mr. Calver asked of the cheese in question, a 44-pound round of cheddar currently maturing on his farm in this …
From Guardian Unlimited: A hundred visitors to an internet chatroom last month witnessed a Shropshire father of two hang himself in front of his webcam. Some of Kevin Whitrick’s fellow chatters must have imagined he was play-acting, but others were happy to goad him into killing himself. As Whitrick’s face turned purple and he began …
From CNet News: A Pennsylvania school principal has filed a lawsuit against four former students, claiming they falsely portrayed him as a pot smoker, beer guzzler and pornography lover and sullied his reputation through mock MySpace profiles. Eric Trosch was principal of Hickory High School in Hermitage, Penn., at the time the short-lived profiles went …
From BusinessWeek: The World Wide Web makes Tom Pitoniak’s job harder. As an associate editor at Merriam-Webster, publisher of dictionaries and other reference books, Pitoniak must distinguish between words that legitimately should be in the dictionary and all that other matter sloshing around the English language: slang, industry jargon, onomatopoeic fillers, brand names, buzzwords, abbreviations, …
From CNNMoney: Tim Spalding was 9 years-old when he had the idea of using his first computer–an Apple II–to make lists of the books he owned, like the Adventures of Tintin series and Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective. Flash-forward to 2007. Spalding is now a programmer, and he’s still keeping lists, but on a far grander …