The Martha Graham tribute Doodle had problems yesterday. Seems Internet Explorer browsers had problems rendering the script that created the animation and crashed or froze the browser. Amid the praise for the artistry of Ryan Woodward, the nod to Martha Graham as a pioneer of modern dance and Google showcasing its browser scripting skills - there were complaints of its drain on computer resources, slowing of systems and in many cases the freezing or crashing of IE browsers.

Martha Graham was born 117 years ago today and Google called on "motionographer" Ryan Woodward to honor the event with an animated Doodle. I was hoping for a Monty Python theme, but this logo could be a classic. Click to read the rest of this post.

The Wall Street Journal reported Microsoft has offered $8.5 billion for Skype in a move that would be the biggest acquisition of the company's history. "Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, though, sees the Internet as an essential battleground for Microsoft, a company that still makes the vast bulk of its profits from Windows and Office software systems.

David Mihm noted that Google Maps listings for businesses now include overlays asking if they are still operating, in the case of unclaimed or Places pages that may no longer be operating. Interesting they do not have a program to check if 0the phone number is working. But this method of having users provide the answers is not a new one for Google and its new CEO Larry Page who decided to create a forum for users to help one another instead of manning help stations.

The Friday prior to Mother's Day, the New York Times reported on the flower industry and link buying. The article titled "Trying to Game Google on 'Mother's Day Flowers'" was another in what now seems to be a regular column on major advertisers also using 'black hat' methods to game Google. JC Penney's and Overstock had been previously investigated by the New York Times for their link building methods.

Many adCenter users have long disliked the need to set both monthly and daily spends for their PPC spends, and now it seems Microsoft has listened and are changing that. The email received today maps out their planned changes though they did not disclose all of the changes. "To help make managing your campaign budgets easier than ever, we're planning a series of improvements to the Microsoft Advertising adCenter budget options.

During an informative interview , Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, warned people that their Facebook, Yahoo and Google information is very accessible to the US government. "Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented. Here we have the world's most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and the communications with each other, their relatives,

Google reported it lost money in Australia last year despite a 50% increase in their revenues compared to 2009, ZDNet noted . "The Australian division of search giant Google has filed its financial accounts with the nation's corporate regulator stating it made a loss of $3.08 million in 2010, resulting in a payment of just $7.4 million in taxes off local revenues of $151.39 million," ZDNet added, but noted not everyone believed in the numbers.

Despite the changes Google has made over the years to reading various forms of information, video and audio still do not get as much play as text-based information in the search results. So to improve their search rankings, PBS has transcribed thousands of hours of their video content. PBS used Ramp's MediaCloud to do the initial transcriptions and then went through the results checking names and other industry-specific terms. Nieman Journalism Labs reported.

Google is celebrating the 226th birthday of John James Audubon, the French-American ornithologist, artist, and naturalist with a special logo. Fitting that Google is honoring Audubon, considering that in his day Audubon had a Google-like mission to paint every bird species in North America )Google's mission today is, obviously, much larger: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful(. Click to read the rest of this post.

While Google launched their new Offers service last week - a coupon product similar to Groupon, the company that turned down a $6 billion offer - Groupon reached out and hired Margo Georgiadis, the VP of Global Sales Operations at Google, as their new COO. Groupon reported Georgiadis "drove sales operations across regions and channels and the global technology teams that commercialize Google's products such as AdWords, AdSense and display among advertisers and publishers.

Wael Ghonim, the Google Middle East employee who was detained during the revolt in Egypt announced he will be taking a long-term leave of absence from the company to start a non-governmental organization in Egypt, Wired reported. Ghonim became a rallying point during the protests in Tahir Square after he was detained , and his subsequent release foreshadowed the stepping down of the despotic Egyptian ruler Hosni Mubarak. Click to read the rest of this post.

I received an email this morning from the Google Video team explaining how to transfer my videos from their hosting to YouTube and the closing of this product on April 29 will not be happening. The email was a followup to a previous one detailing how to download the videos to my computer. Apparently a large number of user had asked Google for a quick way to transfer them to YouTube.

Walmart announced the purchase of Kosmix - "a social media filter aggregating information by topic from Web sites, Twitter messages and other sources in real time - a potentially important new way to give shoppers information, and get it from them," the New York Times reported. Kosmix, a start up based in Mountain View, California, was founded in 2005 by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman whose work in the ecommerce space is well known.

The debate about the legitimacy of news bloggers has been settled. ProPublica, a web-based independent investigative news organization, has received the Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on Wall Street leading to the financial crisis. The judges praised the way journalists Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein used online tools "to help explain the complex subject to lay readers," the UK Guardian reported.

The Federal Trade Commission announced a major crackdown against a number of sites using the appearance of a news site to promote acacia berry weight loss products. "The FTC seeks to permanently stop this misleading practice and has asked courts to freeze the operations' assets pending trial," the FTC website stated. Ten websites "that are meant to appear as if they belong to legitimate news-gathering organizations,

If you are an online poker player using PokerStars.com, you would have found the site had been seized Friday and a Department of Justice notice was there in place of your normal access page.

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr )D-Il.( told Congress Friday iPads were to blame for thousands of US job losses because of its ability to stop book and newspaper printing. Speaking in Congress, Jackson - son of Rev. Jackson - said Steve Jobs was doing okay but what about all the people in industries tied to paper. Sure technology has changed the use of various items and created job losses, but Jackson did not take in to account the numerous jobs it generates.

Last week Google started rolling out their new email suggestion feature - put in one recipient and they will make suggestions of others that you may want to include in the email being sent. While handy, this service shows that Google is collecting information from the emails - to make the suggestions they have to keep track of who you email. Click to read the rest of this post.

Google announced it is dropping the Tags feature for its Places product - a feature they were selling to small businesses to promote their location and products or services through Google Maps. The unfortunate thing is the disconnect did not show any Google team unity and has left people wondering what to do.