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Nintendo Wii owners who have been enjoying their updated Web browser can now enjoy a special version of Google Reader designed exclusively for their Wii remotes and TV screens. Google has made the text a little bigger and changed the interface from a two-pane look to a simple feeds list.

One big change regular Google Reader users are bound to notice is the updated control scheme. To jump between feeds just hit the "1" button, which pulls up a slick looking pop-up with a listing of all your feeds. It's almost an easier system than the one … Read more

Some things never die, especially notorious photos on the Internet. Just ask Bill Gates, whose infamous pie-in-the-eye shot was posted by a hacker on a Web site hosting information on Microsoft distribution licenses.

The hacker posted the embarrassing 1988 photo on a sub-page of ieak.microsoft.com, which is designed to allow users to select a distribution license for an Internet Explorer Administration kit, according to a SANs Internet Storm report.

Microsoft is not alone in having its content defaced via a hosting partner's site. Take Kevin Mitnick, for example, whose hosted site was hacked and defaced last year. … Read more

In the wake of a tanker truck crash that caused a freeway collapse in the San Francisco Bay Area, Web sites are providing invaluable traffic information to commuters.

The crash occurred at 3:45 a.m. Sunday in Oakland, igniting 8,600 gallons of gasoline on the Interstate 80 interchange and causing a section of the I-580 overpass (Google satellite image) just east of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge to collapse onto the I-880 roadway below.

Witnesses reported fireballs reaching more than 200 feet into the air. The truck driver escaped with second-degree burns. There were no reports of fatalities … Read more

Coding a Web site once you get past the idea phase is a complicated process. You have to manage several files for each page of your site, you need a solid text editor for actual coding, you may need a CSS editor, an Internet browser for previewing your work, and an FTP client once you're ready to transfer your files. Though I've done little in the way of actual Web design, my efforts have always required running several programs at once while I switch back and forth.

Fortunately, our friends over at Panic realized that this was not … Read more

General Motors and MapQuest have teamed up on a new service enabling drivers of GM's OnStar-enabled cars to use the Web to select and store destinations for their turn-by-turn guidance when out on the road. The new service, called OnStar Web Destination Entry, will allow drivers to find up to five destinations on MapQuest's Web site, then send them to the OnStar system directly from their computers.

The theory goes that these destinations can then be accessed while out on the road by connecting to the OnStar service center and selecting a stored destination via OnStar's automated … Read more

Thanks to Webware's readers, there are now nearly 1,000 Web 2.0 services lined up for the Webware 100. That's enough to spot a few trends.

For instance: we have too many community-based startups. A full 23% of our nominations are in the Community category. There's a big takeaway from this for people building Web 2.0 companies: if you're thinking of launching yet another social network, please think again.

Of the 10 awards categories, the most underrepresented is Mobile. While it is true that it's much harder to create a winning business based … Read more

Is googling your best friend from preschool going nowhere? If you suspect that he might be lurking on a social-networking site, you can try to find him with YoName, a people-search engine that looks across MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, Facebook, Friendster, Match, and Xanga.

There are other social-site crawlers, such as Upscoop beta, which shows who in your Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, or AOL address book uses MySpace, LinkedIn, or other sites. There's a lot of buzz already around the unreleased Spock people finder. Loopster and ProfileLinker beta sift through various networks and let you see when friends update their pages. … Read more

First it was the Google Toolbar, then it was an integrated search box in the corner of my browser. It's no secret Google's been slowly attempting to take control of our computers for years. The desktop search is a testament to that. What's really creepy is the new Web History tracking service Google quietly rolled out last week. This new service doesn't go after items on your computer, rather what you're looking at online.

Google Web History archives everything you've searched for (while signed in to your Google account), and gives you a bookmarklet to bookmark sites you like. The whole idea is to make the browsing experience something you can search through and access from any computer, anywhere. Search history has items listed by time of search, with the most recent ones on a front page.

Searches are broken down by Google category like Web, Images, Maps, and (the now misnamed) Froogle. Users can also see how many searches they've done by month, day, and hour. Drilling down deeper, you can also go in and click on the number of searches and see the top sites and results. It's a total analytic overload.

The real creepy part in all this is the integration you get if you have the Google Toolbar installed on your browser. This will track every single site you're visiting, and apply the same aforementioned analytics so you can keep track of which sites or services you're using the most. Sure, we've had browsing history for years, but it's always been localized. It's a little alarming to see it online, regardless of the fact it can't be shared with others.

The good news is that users can opt-out of Google's Web History program, along with the capability to delete any item that's been archived. The bad news is that if you have a Google account, all your search activity has been tracked since last week.

For more shots of the service, keep reading.… Read more

Yoono is soon to release a new annotation tool for their recommendation-and-bookmarking service. Called Buzz It, the new functionality will be part of Yoono's installable toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Buzz It closely rivals the usefulness and functionality of Clipmarks, and Grouptivity--giving users a way to archive and share content they find on the Web. The company was showing it off in the exhibition floor at this week's Web 2.0 Expo.

Clicking the new Buzz It button displays a dialogue box that lets you pull in various pieces of media, from whichever page you're viewing, into what Yoono calls a "memo." You can share each memo with others either by posting the memo to your blog or by sending it via e-mail. If you don't already have a blog, Yoono provides all its users with their own pages, complete with an RSS feed, to keep track of all bookmarked and noted items

Users also get a contextual menu option on any Web page to add a link or entire story to one of their memos. This eliminates the need to use bookmarkets or the Yoono toolbar itself.

This new feature reminds me a lot of Grouptivity, which I looked at yesterday. What Yoono has done very well, however, is to give people the option to bookmark several items at once and send those all in a single e-mail. I was pleased to find that instead of having to dig up e-mail addresses, Yoono had integrated Plaxo-like functionality to let you grab your contact lists from a number of e-mail providers. There's also a neat "save to my computer" option, which will export your selections into an HTML file you can open in any browser.

There are a ton of these personal annotation and recommendation tools cropping up, including del.icio.us', StumbleUpon,, and share2me, to name a few. While it's unfair to say there can only be one, Yoono's effort is very user friendly. To get notified of the public launch of the Buzz It-enabled Yoono, there's a sign-up on Yoono's blog.

More shots after the jump.

… Read more