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Earlier this month talk-show host Ellen began following me (and other tech people) on Twitter. Did her move display something more than just a simple follow?

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CERN's Large Hadron Collider ("LHC") restarted this morning without a hitch, after a year of kludgy delays and nutty rumors that time travelers had sabotaged it. It's time to ratchet up the quack science.

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Atari and Cryptic Studios are going to launch a MMORPG based on the Star Trek universe in early February, and reading about it has made me rather teary-eyed for the old days of Empire.

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It seems the hot Twitter news these days is that the service might be slowing in U.S. traffic growth. More importantly, is Twitter continuing to creep closer to FriendFeed's feature set?

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HP announced its takeover of 3Com Corp this week, and the media covered it as 1) a battle in the war with Cisco Systems, and 2) further evidence that tech giants are consolidating to provide "one stop shops" for corporate clients. Are you buying it?

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In perhaps unwitting participation in the publicity campaign for Columbia Pictures' upcoming doomsday flick "2012," NASA has posted a promise on its web site that "nothing bad will happen to the Earth." Gulp.

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A new player has entered the Intranet and collaboration space. OfficeMedium aims to help small businesses with their team business and communication needs.

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt is out making the media rounds in support of the Android launch, and during a Fox Business interview he touched on the issue of data privacy and control. It got me thinking that the subject was the real reason he's out and about.

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Ever since Avis made it respectable for a brand to be #2, there have been many really good examples of trailing entrants into product markets that achieve success, especially in the technology world. Is Motorola's new Droid the latest example?

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In a moderated discussion at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Booz Allen Hamilton VP Art Fritzson and senior associate Walton Smith shared their experiences integrating social and collaborative software into their consulting business.

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Now there's a way to read bedtime stories to your kids without actually being there. Jason Kottke calls the system "slick." I call it sickening.

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Highlights from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference from San Francisco will be available live, via streaming video, beginning at 8:30 am PST on Tuesday. We kick off with keynote speaker Tammy Erickson, president of the nGenera Innovation Network. Watch by clicking here.

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Internet Explorer is slowly losing market share to its biggest rivals, Apple and Google, for reasons as disparate as they are significant.

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The news that WhiteHouse.gov relaunched this week running open source Drupal software raised eyebrows and hackles among knee-jerk anti-Obama types and a small cadre of ignorant bloggers.

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The Internet turned 40 yesterday, and it got me thinking about its relationship to the time and place in which it was invented. The happenstance of its first message belies why it wasn't just an innovation or improvement, but a truly disruptive technology.

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We've seen how social media like Twitter and Facebook can be used as part of a winning election strategy, but the same tools don't seem to influence elected officials or public policy.

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I've read that most of the plug-in electric vehicles under development have been designed to mimic the "feel" of driving a combustion engine car. I'm not sure that's even possible, and I don't know why they'd try.

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Maybe folks are simply trying to talk themselves out of the recession (which would be a good thing in itself), but it seems like the conversation around cloud computing is shifting from cost-cutting to unleashing innovation.

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I knew things had really changed when I came across a homeless man sitting on the ground at Columbus Circle last weekend, panhandling for $15 million to fund an "electronic Democracy project." One thousand dollars would go towards an iBook and $5 for lunch. He wouldn't tell me about his project in detail unless I put up some "serious money," but his request drove home how much has changed in our society since even the recession of 2002-2003, never mind 1991.

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The pilots of Northwest Airlines Flight 188, which overflew the runway at Minneapolis-St. Paul airport last week, told investigators from the National Transportation Safey Board that they used their laptop computers -- a violation of company policy -- while discussing airline crew scheduling procedures.

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Every week I read about another company that has closed its doors. Many news outlets are quick to report on the closures but rarely there is an analysis on why they failed.

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Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chad Ochocinco likes to boast that he can't be covered. Now he says he's the one who'll be doing the covering. Of news.

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This week's O'Reilly Web 2.0 Summit yielded the usual detritus about technology reinventing the laws that govern time and space, but Facebook's revelation that people spend 8 billion minutes a day on its service really cut through the clutter for me.

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Much has been made of the premature obituaries for Second Life, but while the virtual world manufactured by Linden Labs has prevailed long beyond its presumed expiration date, the business model seems too arcane and forbidding to inspire many imitators.

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CNN.com unveiled a new site design to reporters Thursday that it will launch on Monday that includes more prominent use of video and a radical change in how it incorporates so-called citizen journalism.

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Like most CEOs of public companies, Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, isn't the most compelling interview subject because he's too guarded about what he says.

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The network neutrality forces are trying to make the case that regulations will be good for business -- even for the likes of AT&T and Verizon, which are quite frankly the targets of the Federal Communications Commission's rulemaking proposals.

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Barnes & Noble has unveiled "Nook," its own proprietary electronic reader, and the headlines breathlessly wonder if it's a Kindle killer or whether Apple is about to announce its own. I'm still wondering if anybody wants an e-reader to begin with.

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Identity management, from both national security and personal security standpoints, could well be the next big policy debate we have in the United States.

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Verizon's recent TV ad comparing its national wireless coverage to that of AT&T's is a double-barreled attack on both AT&T and, by mocking the iPhone's "there's an app for that" slogan, AT&T's partner in smartphone domination, Apple.

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When Friendfeed launched, it was supposed to be the ultimate sharing service that was going to beat Twitter. So why is traffic to the service down post-Facebook acquisition?

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Yesterday, Facebook said 90% of the ad demand market not served by Google was ripe for its profits, and Sony debuted a PlayStation 3 with twice the storage previously available. There's a common theme to both news stories:

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My recent post about BadCompany.com, which blacklists customers who claim refunds from their credit card issuer rather than directly from the retailer, raised a number of interesting questions: have any retailers actually signed up for this, how does BadCustomer even get a hold of those names, and isn't it a violation of customer privacy for retailers to reveal customer names to third parties?

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Earlier this year, Heartland Payment Systems announced a major security breach that sent a few shockwaves through the financial world, not just because of its impact on Heartland, but also because of what the incident revealed about the sophistication of the Russian hackers who perpetrated this fraud. Heartland's CSO Kris Herrin talked to me about it at our recent Bank Summit in Pasadena, CA.

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Privately-held Twitter has been closely linked to three incidents that we know of in which the Internet service worked closely with official United States agencies. The first was in Iraq, then Iran, and the most recent in Pittsburgh.

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How's this for a new customer service angle? If retailers get tired of your returns history, you might be out of luck next time you shop for something online.

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Twitter may have to find itself a new business model, if recent numbers are any indication.

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Users of Sidekick mobile phones have had their first bad weather experience: Microsoft's Danger subsidiary has lost all of the customer data stored on its servers.

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Acid-tongued Tweets are eating away at the fabric of our national conversation 140 characters at a time. Meanwhile, regrettably to my mind, "Twitter is emerging as a new and powerful political tool."

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Finding content about a topic can sometimes be difficult. Valley-based startup Kosmix aims to help you find related content quickly and accurately.

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It appears that the Federal Communications Commission isn't immune to industry pressure after all.

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FCC Chair Julius Genachowski told a wireless industry conference this week that "the biggest threat to the future of mobile in America is the looming spectrum crisis." We're running out of airwaves.

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How much has changed online in the past three years? My family and I just moved to a new apartment, and much of the move was facilitated by aspects of our digital lives that either didn’t exist or weren't ubiquitous enough three years ago to have made a difference.

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The healthcare debate in the America has been driven by cable news and other old media, rather than new technologies, according to White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod, adding that cable news networks focused on a small number of angry people at town hall meetings in August, and ignored the larger debate.

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Executives from Cisco, EMC, Dell and Symantec gathered at the United Nations today as a sort of coda to the climate summit held here last week, to talk about the role IT can play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and reversing catastrophic climate change.

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Every time I'm at an airport and I see one of those giant SAP ads claiming that the world's best-run companies run SAP, I wonder how many of the executives those ads are targeting choke on their Dramamine at the reminder of the ungodly implementation cycles, which are matched in gruesomeness only by the dreadful 22 percent maintenance fees charged by the vendor. I wonder if they worry whether they'll lose their jobs over the cost overruns or the fact that the software doesn't allow them to innovate as effectively as their competitors.

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Rumors have been rampant that Apple Computer is poised to introduce a new tablet computer, thereby reinventing the way consumers experience books and newspapers. My bet is that a device won't do the reinventing.

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The reputation of crowdsourcing as a way of generating new ideas got a recent boost from the $1 million Netflix prize, which was awarded to a group of people who invented an algorithm for suggesting movies to users of the online movie subscription service.

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Hunch aims to help you make the right decision about questions in your life. I wanted to learn more about this new service so I met with co-founder Chris Dixon.

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I started a Facebook fan page for myself yesterday. The reason I did it was (take your pick): (1) As a workaround for limitations in using Facebook for business communications with groups of people you don't know or (2) To feed my unreasonably large ego. Well, actually, probably both reasons apply.

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