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Times are tight. Heck, college professors are having to sell ad space on exam pages to make up for budget cuts. It would make sense that Google would increase the number of ads on its search pages, too, except it’s hard to forget certain executive speeches about fewer ads with better targeting.

Rumors had floated for weeks Google was negotiating to buy Digg.com for purposes of enhancing Google News. But it looks like Google is already integrating Digg-like features in a surprisingly open round of testing in the search results. With Google's slate of engineers, one wonders why they would buy a site if they could replicate the same idea. Imagine results created by users voting them up or down, results users can comment on and rate the comments of others.

Fortune magazine has one of the most comprehensive "Google’s starting to fall apart" articles, I’ve seen in a long time.

You have to feel a bit bad for AOL and Goowy - here they are with a solid arrangement in place, and Microsoft's mammoth offer to Yahoo is all anyone can talk about.  Ah, well.  We'll try to toss a few paragraphs their way, and begin by pointing out that AOL acquired Goowy.

More than just technology companies and marketers are taking advantage of the widget concept. Political activist group MoveOn.org has released several of them for use on blogs and open platform social networking sites like Facebook.

We're in a quiet time of year - not much happens during the holiday season or for a short period afterwards.  Plaxo is reportedly trying to sell itself, though, and discussions about the company's reputation and its asking price have stirred things up a bit.

You’d think that at some point, Google would have so much that it couldn’t possibly grow any further, but despite having a lock on the top spot, Google continues to claim a larger slice of the pie month after month.

Public transportation doesn’t seem too tempting when you’ve got a car in the garage.  But if you’re on vacation in another country, those sorts of systems start to look quite nice, and so we welcome the introduction of Google Transit trip planner for Europe.