Stories by: John Brandon

Innovation is not just about cool new products. In technology, the best ideas require a) really smart people and b) lots of funding. For the past 33 years, Microsoft has had both in spades.

Leetspeak, Internet shorthand, computer jargon for instant messaging -- whatever you call them, initialisms like BRB, LOL and BTW have now entered the public lexicon. (I know a few teenagers who actually say LOL to each other in person!)

A personal diary, the latest tech gossip, new Web sites of note, hypertext links to upcoming Apple products -- there's a blog for just about every topic under the sun, and the quality of these daily journals is all over the map.

Have you heard this story?

Techdirt.com posted many weeks ago about the charges against Lori Drew related to the suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier in 2006. In the post, which has the subhead that being a jerk isn't illegal, Mike Masnick argues that there is an attempt to prosecute Drew for "something, even if there's little evidence she actually broke the law." In the case, the prosecutors say Drew is responsible for Internet fraud by using a fake MySpace name. It got me thinking: what should be the consequences for Internet use in this way?

I'm continually amazed at how the premier Web properties are willing to share what they are doing. We get to peek behind the curtain routinely. Google and Yahoo both have good lab pages, but there's some seriously experimental stuff on the Mozilla labs page. Here's what they're up to.

WAN optimization in a large enterprise is a nascent and headline-grabbing market. Still, IT managers are faced with the burning question: Is it really worth the investment?

What responsibility does Google have in terms of your "visual privacy"? Meaning, should they be "privy" to the junk that is laying about my yard, the car in my driveway, the cat in my lawn?

Twitter is broken, but that's okay -- every time it breaks, it makes news. Every time it makes news, it squeezes out the competition and makes them look like a pale imitation. Even sites like Plurk just can't keep pace with the Twitter surge: 12 million users and counting.

With a skyrocketing stock price, fanboy hysteria and -- most importantly -- really useful products, Google is the prima donna of tech for the new millennium.

A tech-support call starts it all. Why is my application running slow? What happened to my spreadsheet data? Is HQ using a 56K modem to handle traffic for my branch office -- again? The number of calls suddenly increases, and network analysis reveals unforeseen usage spikes at a new marketing location. The dream of data-center consolidation turns into a nightmare.