Let's climb aboard the way-back-machine and take a trip to 2005. Carrie Underwood was rocking American Idol, Batman Begins made us believe in prequels again, and Google was buying a 1 billion dollar 5% stake in AOL. According to a Washington Post article on December 17, 2005,

Data center and hosting provider The Planet is in the process of trying to recover from a fire which has crippled their H1 data center in Houston, TX. According to an Intology article , nearly 9,000 servers at the facility are currently off line. The Planet engineers are working with the Houston fire department to get clearance to restore emergency backup power and get servers back online.

Ahhh. The time killing game of beer pong. For those of you who have never played beer pong )or have so severely lost that you no longer remember playing(, this is truly a game of whit and fortitude. All you need to play is a ping pong ball, plenty of beer, and a few cups. Team up, take turns throwing the ping pong ball at your opponents cups )filled with beer of course(, and every time you land in the cup the opposing team drinks the beer. As a favorite game among techies,

In a May 6th article published by the Associated Press, Bill Gates was quoted as saying "The Internet has been operating now for 10 years,"' "The second 10 years will be very different." Being a bit of an Internet history buff, I cringed to read such a powerful figure in the world of computing being quoted as effectively saying that the Internet has been operating since 1998. Since I started my first Internet job in 1996, I was pretty sure Bill was wrong.

Google's recent post about " Adsense for Conversations " is my favorite April Fools antic this year. The fictitious Adsense for Conversations is powered by an "unobtrusive screen above your head" where "Anyone taking part in the conversation can hit the ad with their hand to immediately take advantage of the product or service being offered." While the thought of monetizing conversations about dinner plans, appointments, and general office banter is awesome,

You might have noticed Google's recent announcement regarding support for category exclusions within content campaigns. This announcement basically said that you have two new ways to exclude sites from your content campaign, the "Topics" and "Page Types" tools. The Topics exclusion tool provides you the ability to exclude your ads from pages displaying information on certain types of topics like Death & tragedy and Juvenile, gross & bizarre content.

If you've been following Matt Cutts' blog over the last few days you may have seen his March 3rd post " My 2008 Predictions ". In this post Matt claims' 2008 will be the year that hacking and search engine optimization )SEO( collide in a major way. By the end of the year, a nontrivial fraction of blackhat SEO will involve illegally hacking sites for links or landing pages.

Framed redirects are one of my biggest pet peeves on the web. You click on a link to visit a site, the site loads, and the URL in your address bar is different than what it should be. Technically, a framed redirect works by loading a hidden framed page on top of a second framed page which displays the target content. Imagine clicking on a link for Amazon, pulling up the Amazon website, but seeing the URL amazonblackhataffiliate.com in your address bar.

Could Microsoft's push toward speech based data entry bring natural language search to the forefront? According to an AP article : People will increasingly interact with computers using speech or touch screens rather than keyboards, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said. "It's one of the big bets we're making," he said during the final stop of a farewell tour before he withdraws from the company's daily operations in July. In five years,

According to an Associated Press article , top Chinese search engine Baidu has landed afoul of the Beijing Association of Online Media over sexually explicit photos available through their search engine. The photos featuring Edison Chen and several other stars, seem to have originated in Hong Kong. Formerly a British colony and subsequently transfered to Chinese rule in 1997, Hong Kong enjoys a slightly-less-aggressive brand of Internet censorship than the rest of China.