Steve Bryant

Hugh Hefners infamous lad mag, Playboy, responsible for jumpstarting the careers of many a buxom lady, announced that bunny avatars will be setting up shop in the popular virtual world beginning in June. Details on how exactly Playboy will appear in Second Life are scarce, though one can imagine a virtual Playboy mansion and grotto […]

A California company has created a map overlay for Google Earth that embeds animal sounds into the relevant locations in Google Earth. “Bernie Krause has spent 40 years collecting over 3500 hours of sound recordings from all over the world, including bird and whale song and the crackle of melting glaciers. His company, Wild Sanctuary […]

Three federal judges recently upheld a decision by the Merit Systems Protection Board that says a fired federal employee wasn’t harmed when an official used Google to research his prior work history. “The decision by the federal judges stemmed from the 2005 firing of David M. Mullins, an employee of the U.S. Commerce Department. Mullins […]

Google has launched a new blog, this time for Google Maps and Google Earth. The blog’s name: LatLong. Sounds Cambodian. Or an obscure exercise, also possibly Cambodian. The latest entry is pretty devastating: Satellite imagery from the Greenburg, Kan. tornado, which destroyed the entire town. The imagery is now available as a map overlay in […]

The latest numbers from Hitwise show that Google is continuing a slow but seemingly inexorable climb in popularity. Google accounted for 65.26 percent of all U.S. searches in the month of April. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 20.73 percent, 8.46 percent and 3.69 percent, respectively. That’s a 1.13 percent rise for Google […]

The director of a little-known U.S. spy agency that analyzes satellite imagery says that the increasing availability of those photos may require the government to restrict distribution, according to komotv.com in Seattle. “If there was a situation where any imagery products were being used by adversaries to kill Americans, I think we should act,” said […]

MySpace will pay $300 million to acquire Photobucket, one of the Web’s largest photo- and video-sharing sites. Photobucket boasts about 14.7 million monthly unique visitors, compared to MySpace’s 55.9 million. There’s a lot of overlap in userbases, though, meaning MySpace will only gain a few million extra unique visitors. But the uniques aren’t the point. […]

Let’s clear one thing up right now: NBC is NOT suing YouTube, nor have they joined Viacom in that company’s litigation against the vid-sharing site. Rather, NBC and Viacom have both filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of plaintiff Robert Tur, who sued YouTube in 2005 for hosting video copies of the […]

Now that YouTube is going to pay its top producers, can we drop the neo-hippie, Blithedale Romance, wash-my-back-hair-I’ll-wash-yours pretense? The Web stopped being a commune for naked dudes on the late shift a long time ago. Now we’re all just trying to get paid. So raise your hands: Who here remembers July 2006 when Jason […]

A Belgian newspaper agency that sued to be removed from Google News recently agreed to be indexed by the search engine again.The Belgian agency, Copiepresse, issued a joint statement with Google explaining the turnaround.“The websites of the Belgian French and German-language daily press will now appear without a ‘cached’ link in the search results of […]