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While that Microsoft-Yahoo business stole the show for a while, Baidu's found its way into the spotlight again.  The Chinese search engine company had an admirable second quarter, beating analysts' estimates in some important respects.

The metal gods tossed their management team under the proverbial bus after those managers demanded takedowns of positive reviews by bloggers of some rough takes of Metallica's newest project.

The more I dig, the more I’m convinced that a big part of a brand’s success is the quality of its customer touch points, specifically, the face to face ones. Consider this overwhelming evidence: The more emotion there is in an experience, the more vividly we remember it. It’s known as imprinting. So if we have very positive or very negative experiences, we remember them longer and more completely.

When Google’s U.S. market share changes by a percentage point or two, it doesn’t turn many heads - Google has been ahead, is ahead, and will presumably stay ahead, regardless.  But as Google’s Chinese share changes, a lot of eyes are watching to see what will happen.

Sixty-eight percent of staffing and recruiting professionals say they use social networks at least occasionally to source candidates, according to an online survey from Bullhorn, "Making the Most of the New Tools: How online resources impact placement ratios, time-to-fill and profitability."

Like many, I'm far enough removed from this particular conference & blog orbit that I don't really know that much about Kathy Sierra, or the motivations someone might have for writing noxious comments about her and threatening her. On the strength of the belief that what has transpired has been an act of misogyny in the professional world, hundreds have sent supportive comments and have published supportive posts. To that, I want to add: hey guys, it's OK to stand up against injustice (in support of anyone who is being dismissed or discriminated against) before the death threats kick in. But better late than never. To date, there are 1,165 supportive comments on her blog post about this matter.

It's important to present a balanced view of things.

IBM released its DB2 9 "Viper" database back in June with promises of a fundamental shift in how XML data is managed, as well as time and memory-saving functionalities. Early tests of the "hybrid database" have come back with positive results.