Yahoo! and Altavista #
As far as I can tell, Yahoo! own Altavista. This is almost certainly old news, but slightly embarrasingly I'd never spotted it before. Altavista is owned by Overture, which is in turn owned by Yahoo!
Only happened to spot this when I saw that Altavista.pl is hosted within Yahoo!'s IP range.
Nuts #
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4749507.stm
Pretty soon, you could be talking into a squirrel's ear to take your calls.
People's Network #
http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/enquire.html
The idea is that you submit a question to 'the system' and somebody from the UK or international library system will try and answer your question in real-time. Jolly neat idea, but I'd love to see a log of previous questions to see exactly what people have been asking (I'm nosey like that...)
Blogging in the mainstream #
Last night at the cinema, a trailer was played for a movie called The Perfect Man. Remarkably, the trailer started with lead Hillary Duff writing an entry into her blog (the voiceover/narrative of the post began 'Dear fellow bloggers...'). Yet another confirmation that the word blog has entered mainstream media.
I went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by the way... quite good. Better than I thought it could be, but still basically a kid's movie :-)