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I sat down with my colleague Fritz Nelson and we talked about some of the big headlines this week: the release of a new version of Firefox, why the Snow Leopard operating system is more important to Apple than the iPhone 3GS, Steve Jobs's return to work after six-month health-related leave of absence, and Windows 7. Watch after the jump.

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Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether we really need real-time search, I'd like to dispense with the notion that Bing is now providing real-time search of anything relevant on Twitter.

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New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced a competition for developers to create apps out of 80 data sets from 32 city agencies. He wants to improve government transparency and accountability, and stimulate development of the digital media industry.

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The latest version of Firefox is a solid upgrade, adding performance improvements, geolocation, better tab-handling, and a new privacy mode to help keep your addiction to Cute Overload a secret. Take a look at this video, where we put Firefox 3.5 through its paces.

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Vice President Joe Biden is in Pennsylvania today to kick off the Administration's $7.2 billion broadband stimulus program, announcing the release of the federal agency regulations, also known as the Notice of Funds Availability (NOFA), that set eligibility rules.

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Later this year, Dell is reportedly going to sell a pocked-sized gizmo that can access the Internet, but won't offer telephony. In other words, it's working on inventing its own version of Apple's Newton.

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One of the most compelling attributes of Web 2.0 is that it transformed the static Interweb from something pushed at us to something that includes our inputs. The coincidence of Howard Dean's intelligent use of the Web, the rise of Facebook in public consciousness and Barack Obama's very technologically-savvy campaign has led to the expectation that Government 2.0 would quickly follow.

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Right on schedule, Mozilla Corp. shipped Firefox 3.5 about a minute ago, at about 11:20 am Eastern time. The new version adds performance improvements, privacy features, support for embedded video, and more. It comes into the world facing a more crowded and competitive market than before, as alternatives such as Google Chrome and Safari have emerged as viable alternatives to both Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

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Oh, sure, you may be a high flying enterprise architect, DBA, infrastructure engineer, or coder, but your friends and family all think: you work in IT. You love IT. And, "you must want to take care of my consumer grade tech needs because you love IT so much." Riiiight. How can you satisfy them and still have time for summer fun?

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The ball might finally get rolling tomorrow for the $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus funds, not a moment too soon where operators and Internet-starved rural communities are concerned.

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Audio podcasts haven't seemed to take off like some expected. Video is great as a broadcast medium but it too hasn't taken off for conversations. Is text the only way to hold a conversation online?

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Those geniuses in Redmond seem to have decided that we'll pay just about anything to get rid of Vista, even if that means spending $119 to upgrade to Windows 7. By the way, that's $119 per user, not per household.

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With Microsoft's IE8 and Mozilla's Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 2 both publicly available, there's been a fair amount of conversation about whether the functionality of these new versions will cause consumers to change browsers.

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An influential technology lobby wants President Obama to create an Office of Innovation Policy (OIP) to help spur innovation in the U.S. It sounds like the making of a new alphabet soup, but the idea has some merit.

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danah boyd, a social media researcher for Microsoft and all-around brilliant person, switches off e-mail entirely when she goes on vacation. She directs all her incoming mail to the trash, and sets her vacation auto-responder to let people sending mail know that she won't read it, and they should contact her when she returns from vacation. Could you do that? How do you handle e-mail over vacation?

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Netflix CEO Reed Hastings believes his core business of DVD rentals is doomed, somewhere around four to nine years from now, so he wants to migrate his brand to the transmission of digital content. Is he right?

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If all you've heard is business complain that increased taxes and government regulation is driving investment and innovation abroad or is otherwise bad for business, you haven't been listening to IT vendors.

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If once is a coincidence and twice is a trend, then I can confidently attest to the fact that if you're going to lose your Jesus Phone anywhere on earth, make it New York City.

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Apple says Steve Jobs will return to his position as CEO at the end of June. That ought to be enough to quiet rumors to the contrary. But ghoulish reporters, abetted at times by others shedding crocodile tears, are fixating on Jobs' ongoing health crisis like nobody's business.

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While many of us are holding our collective breaths in the hopes that Web 3.0 (or, as Robert Scoble would have it, the 2010 Web) will help drag us out of recession, some remain intent on blowing dot-com-like bubbles.

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Where possible, Microsoft's new Bing search engine provides categorized search results. The concept appears to be a good for users but what about for advertisers?

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At first it seemed like Amazon had released the source code to the Kindle -- although, as it turns out, they haven't. Not really, anyway. One would think they've got nothing to lose by doing so, since the real value of the Kindle isn't in the device itself anyway.

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TweetDeck, the popular Adobe-based client that enhances your Twitter experience partly by, well, keeping you off the Twitter.com site, is now available as an iPhone app.

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Did you know that NASA plans to launch two unmanned probes to the moon today, in preparation for the return of astronauts to its surface in a decade or so? Yup, I didn't either. How did the idea of exploring space get so uninteresting and irrelevant?

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Robert Scoble thinks that too many people, especially small businesses, aren't benefiting from the fruits of Web 3.0, or Web 2010, "or whatever you want to call it," as he said to me this evening at an event hosted by Rackspace (his blog's current sponsor) at the New York Stock Exchange.

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A State Department official asked Twitter to postpone scheduled downtime to keep a channel open for Iranians protesting the country's contested election, according to the NY Times.

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AT&T is responsible for the imperfections of iPhone user experiences, and has failed to take the steps to satisfy developers, according to recent news reports. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm not sure it's AT&T's fault.

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Twitter has proven once and for all that sometimes less is more, that David can beat Goliath, and maybe even that the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

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Twitter and Facebook can help us strengthen our real-world connections with each other. We see that in our ordinary lives, every time we use Twitter or Facebook to arrange to have a cup of coffee with a friend or business associate. More seriously, these connections are being drawn in blood on the streets of Tehran.

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Contrary to popular opinion, Twitter isn't reporting on Iran or the Swine Flu or calling people names. Twitter didn't cause Iran's supreme leader to call for an investigation of the election results. People did that.

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Microsoft sees itself as a boxer refusing to throw a match for the fixers -- or in this case, the EU Competition Commission. But in reality, Microsoft is a palooka throwing a tantrum because the boxing commission won't let him fight with a roll of quarters in his fists anymore.

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News broke this week that Yahoo has hired a cost-cutting specialist as its new CFO, with references that he'll help "...weed out the bureaucracy that has been dragging down its profits." Is that what Yahoo needs to fix?

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Watching Ashton Kutcher beat CNN to a million followers must have created a strain of Iago's green-eyed envy among mainstream media folks, which may be why they've been so quick to pounce Twitter's recent hiccup.

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Earlier this month Microsoft launched their updated search engine named Bing. Search startup Hakia claims they invented "categorized search".

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The shabby state of most enterprise content management implementations, combined with lady Justice's thirst for electronic documents, has made it so that "only the rich and Microsoft can afford to litigate," in the words of attorney Ralph Losey, who specializes in legal applications of technology.

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The Chinese government's recent requirement that its PC manufacturers add Internet filtering software to its machines has got free speech advocates pretty riled up, and with good reason. But I wonder if it matters, in the end.

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It's no secret that commercial airplanes are heavily computerized, but as the mystery of Air France Flight 447 unfolds, we need to come to grips with the fact that in many cases, airline pilots' hands are tied when it comes to responding effectively to an emergency situation.

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Sony, UMG, and YouTube have announced plans for a music video site, called "Vevo." It's bringing back memories of how MTV "killed" the radio star.

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Not only do we have to deal with human beings judging us (not to mention our superegos nagging us at every turn), it turns out that software is carping at us from the other side of the screen.

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The Obama Administration is set to introduce a "cybersecurity coordinator" to help the United States craft policies that will beat back hostile incursions into public and private databases and systems, but hasn't made his pick known yet.

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Sony Ericsson has revealed its new luxury phone brand, Satio, which will go on sale for $800 or so later this year. I'm not at all clear on who is going to buy it.

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Microsoft has let the Bing out of the bag a couple of days early (it is scheduled to go Live tomorrow), so I took it out for a test run, using a few search terms that came to mind, and then comparing that to results on Google.

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For months, we've heard that Twitter, the fastest-growing social network this side of Facebook, was at the tipping point of relevance. Well, maybe it's more like the fastest growing social network this side of MySpace.

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If you think how you look is the only issue to worry about during a video conference call, you haven't even scratched the surface. Here are seven common mistakes to avoid.

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Palm's last, best gasp may be in fact a lifesaver. The Pre drew early rave reviews, and the news keeps getting better as the device nears launch date.

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There's been a lot of coverage exploring questions about the functionality of Bing, Microsoft's new search engine. Before the company blows $100 million trying to give consumers the answer, I thought I'd give it two branding ideas.

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Time Warner's decision to spin AOL back out as an independent company is the closest thing we'll get to an admission that the marriage between old-world Time Warner and new world order AOL never worked out.

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It's hard to see where Microsoft thinks it's going with Zune, part of the Entertainment and Devices Division that continues to tread water as the also-ran of the company's five main divisions.

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A company called Siri decloaked within sensor range earlier today, promising test drives of its intelligent virtual assistant as an iPhone app this summer, and predicting that most every Internet user will have something like it within five years or so.

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The economic mess has come home to roost. I mean literally come home, as in vendors are trying to worm their way into every available keyhole and Internet connection to squeeze more dollars out of our kids.

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