Each year Technology Review dot com releases a list of young innovators in technology. Technology Review is part of MIT. The list was previously known as the TR100, but it is now known as the TR35 because it recognizes those innovators who are under 35 years of age. These are some of the best and brightest young people.

Want to know what is hot in technology? Check out the list.

Each recipient will receive an award at MIT on the 28th of this month.

Opera has finally removed the banner advertisements and license fee for it’s popular web browser, presumably to become more competitive with Firefox. Yippee, it is free.

Time to get a copy and compare to see which of the several free browsers you like best. At under 4 megabytes, the Opera Browser is a lean mean browsing machine — that is very standards compliant.

Last Winter/Spring there were a rash of thefts of laptops from colleges that contained students personal information. One at Berkley was solved, in part, recently when a man in possession of the laptop was arrested. Of course who knows how many copies of the data may have been made before it got to this chap. We also read about several other similiar thefts about that time including one at Grand Rapids Community College (see other news for this one). To our knowledge that one remains unsolved at the present time.

Or does it? Some argue that the availability of too much information will overwhelm us. We are constantly bombarded with information – web pages, emails, chat rooms, satellite and cable tv, bill boards, pod casts, walkmen, ipods, etc. etc. etc. In an interesting article, CNET discusses the effects of so much information at ones fingertips.

What’s undeniable is the Internet’s democratization of information. It’s providing instant access to information and, in a sense, improving the practical application of intelligence for everyone.

You decide the answer … if you have the time and aren’t too busy reading.

According to a report in the Idaho Statesman, the xxx domain will not come into play for some time, if ever. Again the name was not approved as a top level domain extension today when considered in New York via teleconference. They did however approve .cat for sites using Catalan language.

In a fascinating turn of events, a guy alleges he was getting a ton of SPAM (hardly unusual nowadays). Claiming he’d had enough, he sent an opt out request as is legal in his area. His opt out request was promptly ignored and after detailing the problem on his site, he had a lawsuit filed against him by the spammer, and all the while he says they were sending him yet more SPAM. They sued him for 3.8 million because he called them spammers. You need to read this folks, at the very least you’ll get a laugh at the spammers sheer audacity. www.SpamDVD.org is where you need to go for more information.

[update: We have been contacted by someone claiming to be a lawyer for the other side of this dispute. We invited them to submit their side of the story so we can present their side of things as well.]

Not long ago Google launched a beta service enabling web site owners / developers to create and submit a sitemap. The aim of this is to assist Google / Googlebot with the indexing of every page in your web site, using a standard XML format that lists every URL.

Popular reaction was undoubtedly to embrace this opportunity and start creating sitemaps straight away. Call me simple if you like, but when I started reading Google’s instructions I found it very confusing and very daunting. I consider myself to be highly competent in (x)HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, but like many have had no exposure to XML format. The link to the Sitemap Generator looked promising (I was hoping for “Sitemaps for Dummies”) only to find that you need to have / understand Python to use it. It all looked too hard when I first saw it, so I shelved the idea for another day.
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