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Before leaving for the office Tuesday morning, I left a note for my housemates on top of our television. "Won't be home till late. I'm DVRing TMZ TV and the new Perez Hilton show. Please do not delete the recordings. This is for work, not a joke."

I'm not one for celebrity gossip. I try to stay on top of what's being talked about, but I don't keep up with Britney's latest epidermal exposures or whether Jessica Alba is single, and the only time I watch the E network is when it'… Read more

Well that was quick. Just a few days after Netscape's announcement that it was shelving its social news service away from the hallowed Netscape.com domain in place of what is essentially AOL's front page, the service has already been given a new name and URL. It's called Propeller.com (link dead ends right now), and that's about all Netscape's Director Tom Drapeau was willing to divulge about the rebranded site in his announcement post on the official Netscape blog.

The new logo is arguably well done, but what's missing here are some details … Read more

This morning, Apple unveiled the iPod Touch, this year's latest must-have gadget that's the first bona fide iPod to have built-in Wi-fi, the Safari Web browser, and the YouTube app iPhone owners have come to love. That's not the most groundbreaking aspect, though--this thing's got a full version of the iTunes Music Store that you'll be able to use for shopping right on the device. You can preview and buy songs that will sync up to your iTunes library when you plug it in back at home. The idea is similar to the Music Gremlin, … Read more

I'm a big fan of simple search tools, and one of the areas that's been booming lately is video search. There are dozens of popular services for hosting video, but few for crawling all of them at once. Video search service Truveo, which was quickly gobbled up by AOL after launching in late 2005, has been fairly quiet for the last year or so. Their technology powers video search for AOL, Windows Live Search, Metacrawler, and CNET's own Search.com tool, along with many other services you're likely to recognize. Today they're re-launching Truveo.com, in hopes to compete with Google, Yahoo, and Blinkx's video search tools.

Truveo's claim to fame is that they crawl and index both user-generated video sites, along with ones that put out professional media content like NBC and CBS. For example, searching for an episode of The Office will pull up results from YouTube and Google video (what hasn't been taken down at least), along with links to "official" video hosted on NBC's various video pages, and links to various episodes for purchase at online stores like iTunes. It will also list videos from other video services like BBC News, Blip.tv, and Metacafe. The key emphasis, however, isn't on user generated content, as much as professionally produced video content.

A good number of the videos indexed through Truveo will play right in the engine, except for ones that have rights usage restrictions. A big change old Truveo users will notice with the re-launch is that videos play much larger than they used to--many now appear twice as big. There's also an increased emphasis on sharing, and community features--including a way to build your own widget containing a hit list of clips you've bookmarked.

A great use for services like this is for finding recent video clips from news stations. Google's video search is great for finding the most popular content on YouTube and Google Video, but head-to-head, Truveo did a much better job at finding recent clips, and avoiding the "backyard" handicam videos you tend to run into. Blinkx on the other hand was just as capable at finding similar content, although I prefer Truveo's static result pages to Blinkx's visual overload of moving thumbnails and auto-playing videos.

I've embedded an example of the video playlist widget after the jump. There are also several more screenshots. To see them, click the "read more" link below.… Read more

Using the Internet to research medical information isn't new. We've all been typing our various ailments and symptoms into search engines for a while; it's so much quicker than calling the doctor.

And the major search sites are gearing up to bank on this trend, treating health and medical information as an important specialized vertical that merits its own treatment.

Ask.com released a survey this week that found that of more than 3,000 adults who participated in the online poll, 70 percent rely on the Internet as a primary source of health-related information, just two … Read more

Amid the growing group of instant-messaging solutions for the IM-less iPhone, Mundu (a Webware 100 winner) has just released a new contender that handles four of the most popular chatting protocols with a fantastic interface. If you're an iPhone user, just navigate your Safari browser to http://iphone.mundu.com, which takes you to a log-in screen with access to your AIM, Yahoo, MSN, .Mac, and Google Talk accounts. You can log into all of them simultaneously, although there's no master password system like you get with Meebo.

Each client gets its own buddy list, and any additional … Read more

Office time-waster alert! AOL's AIM Network has launched an interesting new service, CircaVie, which allows you to create a timeline of just about anything--your kid's life, your job, your backpacking excursion in Southeast Asia, or the chronicle of last week's party's devolution into debauchery. You can then embed your timelines into your blog, share them with friends, I played around with it, and I like the concept (a lot), but this is the kind of service that's left me wishing there was more you could do with it.

It's clear that CircaVie is trying … Read more

Dell has repeatedly said there would be more to its new retail sales strategy than just Wal-Mart. Though the PC maker still hasn't made a complete commitment, it's at least talking to more retailers about potential tie-ups.

Starting in the fall, Dell will be giving away a free base-model Inspiron notebook to British customers who sign up for a year of AOL broadband service from Carphone Warehouse Group, according to The Wall Street Journal.

If you haven't heard of Carphone Warehouse, no worries--it's a mobile phone and services company with 800 stores in the U.K. … Read more

Pageflakes has just updated their service this morning with a handful of new features. The company is calling this latest release "Blizzard." Users now get their own profile page and can link up with other Pageflakes users as friends. They can also browse through users by interest, based on items they've put together on their customized Pagecasts. The goal is to make the service feel like less of a solitary experience and make it easier to share user-created Pagecasts.

Also new is the option to completely customize a page. There are themes and simple color arrangements for users to pick from, and a tool to create your own. In the same vein, there are now media pages from third-party content providers and sponsors, nearly identical to what competitor Netvibes rolled out with their Universes feature in mid-April. Pageflakes is launching this feature with themed content pages from CNN, AOL, Rolling Stone, and the Washington Post, among others.

To help users find content to add to their pages, Pageflakes has also redone their widget gallery, which they call "flakes." There are about a quarter of a million widgets, which is about twice that of Netvibes.

The Blizzard release also opens up the door to users of Apple's Safari browser, who up until now have been unable to access the site. However, there's no news on whether an iPhone-friendly version of the start page service is in the works. To see more shots of the new features, click the read more link below.

Previous Pageflakes coverage: Pageflakes community gets traction Roundup: single page aggregators Pageflakes CEO wants to take on Yahoo Start here: Pageflakes meets the metagators

… Read more