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But it’s not just individuals: dozens of cities and 829 world landmarks, including the Eiffel Tower and the Great Pyramids of Giza, will be dark for one hour as well.

Started in Australia two years ago, the event is mushrooming thanks in part to the Internet and social media.

One day before the start of the event in Asia, “Earth Hour” is the top search item on Twitter. A 30-second clip about Earth Hour on You Tube has gotten almost 59,000 views. Facebook groups count hundreds of thousands of members.

This week, a published study calculated that $2.8 billion is wasted from office PCs that aren’t shut off properly. Perhaps people who participate in Earth Hour could unplug their home electronics as well.

The goal for this year is to get 1 billion people to turn their lights off for an hour. In 2007, 2.2 million homes and businesses switched off their lights for an hour and in 2008, it went to 50 million.

The whole point of Earth Hour is to cast a vote and make a visible statement by turning off the lights for an hour. But it’s worth pointing out that that a few watts will be saved along the way and that people waste a lot of energy in their daily lives.

Earth Hour is a sort of open-source movement against global warming. On Saturday, March 28, at 8:30 p.m. in each time zone, millions of people in thousands of cities are expected to turn off the lights for one hour to raise people’s consciousness about the link between global warming and energy use.

I did find the new version of the software somewhat more responsive, though data transfer speeds still impose a fair amount of waiting.

Update 1:56 p.m. PDT: The Google Mobile blog now has some details and an explanatory video.

The new features work on BlackBerrys with color screens and on mobile devices with Java abilities. Sorry,
iPhone users. Visiting the Google site with an iPhone produces this message: “Sorry, Google Maps does not work on your Apple iPhone.”

The Street View option is enabled when you click on an area; after a pause the software tells you whether Street View is available, and clicking the option overlays a pretty small Street View window atop the map. Using the scroll wheel pans the view left or right, again with some waiting on the network.

I downloaded, installed, and ran (once I figured out the new icon) the software fine on a BlackBerry. Launching it shows a start-up screen with the Street View person icon with brief instructions.

Street View endows Google Maps with a driver’s-eye view of the world, and now people actually on the street will be able to use it, too.

Google demonstrated Street View on an Android mobile phone in May. Now it’s available for BlackBerry phones and several others. (Click on the image above for an Android slide show.)

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News/Google)

The company announced a new version of its Google Maps for Mobile software that includes support for Street View, as well as walking directions and reviews of businesses. Google said the new version is faster too.

The move isn’t a surprise. Google demonstrated Street View on a phone using the company’s Android operating system in May, hooked into the phone’s hardware so the view would change according to which way the user oriented the phone. The Android phones are due to be announced Sept. 23.

Spectra is the service’s new headline viewer. You select the categories you want to see, and it throws them up in an orbiting view for you. Each category has a color associated with it, which presumably gives you some subliminal clue as to where each headline fits in your consciousness. Unfortunately, you cannot select the stories in the orbital view directly to learn more about them.

If you like your news straight up, just the facts, gray lady style, skip this story. MSNBC is launching some new toys for its news service that let you scan headlines in creative (and goofy) ways, and even play games with them. They’re all part of the MSNBC NewsWare service.

Other developments: The NewsBlaster game, where you have to shoot like-colored orbs that release headlines, which you also have to shoot for points. What fun!

Obviously, when I hold up my yellow mug it means I want yellow journalism.

The color coding also gets used in what may be the dumbest news gizmo I’ve ever seen: The application can connect to your Webcam and throw headlines up on the screen based on the color of what the camera is seeing. Wear a red shirt and you’ll see a lot of Top Headlines. Green: Travel or sports (depending on the shade). Want to see latest videos? Hold an orange up to your camera. Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

I completely support experiments in data visualization. Because by trying more things, we learn what not to do.

The most sober of the new products is the NewsScroller widget, which lets you select which categories of news you like (using the same GrrAnimals colors of Spectra) and which you can then embed in your social site, blog, or start page. The widget does, though, let you select the importance to you of each news category, and will give you more or fewer stories per category to match. That’s pretty smart.

Just like the carousel at the park! But with famines, wars, and elections.

The 10 nonprofits receiving donations from the I’m Initiative are the American Red Cross, the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, the Humane Society of the United States, the National AIDS Fund, the National MS Society, NineMillion.org, the Sierra Club, StopGlobalWarming.org, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, and UNICEF. Windows Live Messenger users who want to participate are asked to choose which organization they want to receive their click funds; the precise amounts netted by each one were not disclosed, but Microsoft has said that each one has received a minimum of $100,000. The I’m Initiative has also sponsored Cause Effect, a program about social action on the MTV Networks channel MTVU, which is syndicated on college campus broadcast networks.

Mehta wrote in his blog post that Microsoft is considering adding other charities to the list.

Last year, Microsoft launched the “I’m Initiative,” which donated nibbles of advertising revenue to 10 selected charities each time a Windows Live Messenger user started an instant message with the word “I’m.” On Tuesday, after a year of the gimmick, Microsoft representatives announced that $1.3 million had been netted so far.

“Because of your enthusiasm, we’re also excited to announce that we will be continuing this program,” Windows Live Messenger product manager Dharmesh Mehta wrote in a blog post. “And with no set limit on the amount donated to each organization, the more ‘I’m’ conversations people have, the more money that goes toward addressing some of the world’s most urgent social issues.”

Bill Gates would be proud.

TwitterFone also posts the audio of the messages it transcribes, which makes it a bit like Twittergram.

I tried it and found voice recognition surprisingly good. It got my name wrong, but I’ve been called worse. I suspect that TwitterFone is using human-assisted voice recognition (see ReQall), which would not be an untenable strategy if the product actually generated revenue. And on that part of the equation, I’m stumped, unless TwitterFone is getting a per-call bounty from phone carriers.

TwitterFone is in private beta. Click here to get on the waiting list.

Who needs it? God only knows. But there it is.

Let’s say you are so busy, you don’t even have time to type in your Twitters. Then you might want to take a look at TwitterFone, which lets you, literally, phone it in. You talk. It Twitters.

Not bad. Click image to listen to the recording that generated this Tweet.

The service doesn’t let you preview its transcription of your voice before it posts your Twitters. That means, in spite of its good transcription performance, you may be surprised to see the words showing up in your name. Still, putting an approval loop into the process would defeat the purpose.

That said, I can’t imagine that Microsoft would want to have any more reasons out there for people not to use its search technology.

I was hoping that Microsoft might clear up the matter, but its response was “no comment.” (It said it’s possible that it’ll have more to say, and I will post more when and if that comes.)

It’s unclear whether there is a stumbling block and whether it might be Adobe that is uninterested in Microsoft or the other way around. Clearly, there is no love lost between the two around Flash–Microsoft is trying to take Flash head-on with its Silverlight technology, which was designed to be searchable.

Adobe Systems announced on Monday that it was taking steps to make Flash content on the Web more easily indexed by search engines. It touted deals with both Yahoo and Google, the top two search engines. Curiously absent was any statement about whether Microsoft would do likewise with its Live Search.

Icahn wants to know what’s up with Yahoo’s ridiculously expensive new severance plan. So do a lot of other people. From the outside looking in, it sure looks like a poison pill. You dislike that description? OK, let’s instead call it a stupendously silly employee entitlement designed to repel any potential acquirer of sound mind. Like that any better?

Carl Icahn

But let’s not quibble over semantics. I’m more curious why Yahoo blew off Icahn after he pressed you to dump the plan. He posed a fair question, one that I’m sure other investors wonder about.

Jerry Yang

There’s good reason Yahoo failed to disclose the dollar amount. In a recently disclosed document, Tim Sparks, a compensation expert who worked on the Yahoo plan, nailed it in a e-mail to colleagues when he described the contents as completely “nuts.”

Dear Roy,

•  Keep Jerry in a gilded cage. Rope him to a GameBoy and lock him in your basement, anything–but don’t let him appear any more in public, at least not until there’s a final yay or nay on the Microhoo negotiation. Let Sue Decker do the talking. She walks and talks like a real CEO.

Yang’s a nice guy. He bleeds purple but he doesn’t ooze leadership or inspire confidence outside of Yahoos campus. His recent appearance at the D conference didn’t convince anyone that Yahoo’s commander in chief had the upper hand.

Best,
Coop

To Roy Bostock
Chairman of the board, Yahoo

Beats me how the offer of golden parachutes galore adds to shareholder value in a takeover negotiation. Truth be told, if I’m Microsoft, you don’t come off as someone very eager to deal, let alone sell the entire company on a friendly basis. If that’s a misconception, then you’ve confused a lot of people. Maybe it’s time you cleared the air.

•  Everyone knows that Icahn’s a nudnik and doesn’t know much about technology. I’m convinced the guy’s as savvy about the Internet as Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, he of cybertubes fame. Llittle doubt that Icahn is in this for a quick buck, as are the other institutional shareholders supporting his gambit. When it came to greenmail, he wrote the book. But so what? Remember the Gordon Gekko “greed is good” shtick in the movie Wall Street? Here’s an instance when greed does have a clarifying effect.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

Roy Bostock

•  You and Jerry Yang keep waiting for a possible “alternative deal.” From who, Godot? The chronology is just too confusing. As long as you’re batting your eyes at Google, there’s no real reason Microsoft should bid for the company. Eric Schmidt’s just messing with you to make Steve Ballmer miserable. You’ve been doing this long enough to know how this works. Ballmer’s a crazy boy but he’s not insane. He either gets a chance to acquire the entire kit and caboodle, or he walks.

When technology journalist Walt Mossberg asked him to define Yahoo’s business, he responded with an answer straight out of Stepford CEOs 101. “I think of Yahoo as we have to be incredibly relevant and useful to users. You have to start your day at Yahoo. We want people to come to Yahoo first thing in the day and multiple times a day. That is an incredibly powerful position, consistent with our roots and ripe for innovation.” Decker did the work of explaining why Yahoo thinks that Microsoft didn’t offer enough.

Well, you get the idea. Better to let Decker take the lead and return Jerry to the rank of Chief Yahoo to do whatever it is that Chief Yahoo guys are supposed to do.

And what’s with Yang’s latest missive to the troops? (”We believe the Yahoo board has the independence, knowledge, and commitment to navigate the company through the rapidly changing Internet environment and to deliver value for yahoo! and its stockholders….”). Pure corporate-speak.

Wondering whether you’ve ever read anything by Pierre Ambroise Fran?ois Choderlos de Laclos (that’s a mouthful!). He was the French author of the 18th century epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. After watching all the note-swapping between you and Carl Icahn, I have to confess that you guys sure have the hang of it–even though the “Dear Roy, Dear Carl” salutations are awfully phony. No doubt you two would prefer shotguns at 20 paces. Meanwhile, if you can break away from your writing desk, I’d like you to consider three questions relating to Microhoo.

And if that bugs you, well, you only have yourself–actually your eyeballs–to blame.

And while HP’s operating results have been strong in recent quarters, its tech support appears to be subpar. And since that makes HP neither a winner nor a loser–it seems to fall somewhere in the middle–that means no eyeballs. So HP gets a pass.

So what is it about the media’s experience that makes them love Apple, ride Dell, and cut HP slack? I guess the media has learned through experience how to get eyeballs. That doesn’t make them bad; it’s just how they get paid by advertisers.

As for Dell, it only has to worry about the perception of its customers and shareholders. But what if its customers and shareholders are also influenced by the media? Uh-oh.

So, the next time you read a blog that seems to be “piling on,” remember, that’s just the media doing its job. The media isn’t paid to reflect reality, it’s paid to get eyeballs. And if bloggers perceive that they’ll get eyeballs by dragging Dell through the mud while hoisting Apple on the highest pedestal they can find, well, that’s just what they’ll do.

Eyeballs seem to gravitate to winners and losers. Clearly, Apple’s hot these days, so it’s easy to understand why the media loves Apple. Apple’s a winner.

I’m not a big fan of surveys, so I don’t quote them often. But a recent Consumer Reports survey about PC manufacturers listed Apple as No. 1 in tech support, with Lenovo second, Dell third, and HP dead last. I should also say that Dell came in second in desktops.

But Dell, well, Dell’s another story. Dell has fallen on hard times lately. Its growth engine has stalled amid stories of executive dysfunction, battery problems, and degradation in tech support. Michael Dell has returned as CEO to fix the mess.

Because perception is reality. But aside from being a pithy statement, what does that really mean?

As it turns out, I have a great deal of experience with Dell. And while I think the quality of some of Dell’s computers seems to have declined in recent years, my experience with its tech support has been quite positive. That’s my experience.

Horror stories about Dell’s support are all over the blogosphere. Why is that? I mean, why does the media give Dell such a hard time?

These days the media loves to trash Dell, not because Dell’s a loser, but because it’s a former winner that, as of late, has fallen from grace. That, to the media, seems to be even better than being a loser. A winner that falls off a pedestal (that the media helped put Dell on, mind you) gets lots of eyeballs.

Well, according to Merriam-Webster, perception is “physical sensation interpreted in the light of experience.”

I thought the headline should be “Survey says leading PC maker HP dead last in tech support.” But that’s not what happened. The media hailed Apple, trashed Dell, and gave HP a pass.

Our site was taken down this morning as a result of extremely heavy traffic due to the Google glitch, which led many users to seek additional information. As StopBadware.org is mentioned on the Google warning page that users see when they click on a search result that Google has flagged as bad, many people associated the warnings with us.

Note: The sentences that Mayer removed in her update are noted with strike-outs and brackets. The sentences she added in her update are in bold. Here is Mayer’s explanation:

Here are Google's results for a search on 'Google' early Saturday morning. Click on image for a larger view.

In StopBadware.org’s defense, Weinstein added:

TechCrunch and CNET reported around 7 a.m. PST that every site found via Google search was flagged with this message: “This site may harm your computer.” As part of Google’s malware protection, clicking on a flagged site’s link would pull up an additional warning. Although a link could simply be cut and paste, Google’s warning was unnerving enough to keep some people from pushing their luck.

In an e-mail to CNET News at 10:08 a.m. PST, Weinstein reiterated that “Mayer’s explanation was inaccurate. She has informed me that Google is working on an updated statement to clarify the facts.”

After the initial problem was fixed, it took a couple of hours to iron out who actually was to blame–Google or a nonprofit known as StopBadware.org.

After Weinstein read Mayer’s initial explanation, he asserted that her posting was wrong.
At 9:31 a.m. PST, he wrote on the nonprofit’s blog:

Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers.

“I believe Google’s updated statement accurately clarifies that Google does not receive the URL data from us and that we were not involved in this morning’s glitch,” he wrote.

Twitter was awash in the news, with thousands of people posting about their kindred experiences on Google search.

We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.

[We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning.]

In a follow-up e-mail at 11:14 a.m. PST, Weinstein wrote that he was satisfied with Google’s corrected response.

Google is working on an updated statement. Meanwhile, to clarify some false press reports, it does not appear to be the case that Google has taken down the warnings for legitimately bad sites. We have spot checked a couple known bad sites, and Google is still flagging those sites as bad. i.e., the problem appears to be corrected on their end.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning.

StopBadware.org does not provide the data for these warnings. Our role is to use the data provided to us by Google for research/analysis, to support/assist webmasters in cleaning up sites and navigating the review process when their sites are clean, and to provide a third-party review when users hit roadblocks with Google’s own process.

Note: I am in no way related to Maxim Weinstein.

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message “This site may harm your computer” accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

Google has posted an update on their official blog that erroneously states that Google gets its list of URLs from us. This is not accurate. Google generates its own list of badware URLs, and no data that we generate is supposed to affect the warnings in Google’s search listings. We are attempting to work with Google to clarify their statement.

(Credit: Google, via Friendlybit.com)

Google scans websites to identify sites that may be dangerous to users. When it finds such sites, Google issues warnings in the search results. This morning, they inadvertently added these warnings to nearly all websites, causing user confusion.

Below is Mayer’s 9:02 a.m. PST posting, with her 10:29 a.m. PST update folded in. Her update acknowledges that StopBadware.org did not provide the wrong information and that it was solely Google’s fault. In her update, Mayer wrote: “This post was revised as more precise information has become available.”

[We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to get our list of URLs. StopBadware carefully researches each consumer complaint to decide fairly whether that URL belongs on the list. Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms.]

About 10 minutes later, Weinstein updated the post with this:

In a blog posting just after 9 a.m. PST, Marissa Mayer, Google vice president of search products & user experience, attributed the problem to “human error” and to a URL list provided by StopBadware.org. But about 30 minutes later, a blog posting on StopBadware.org disputed her explanation. An hour after that, Mayer posted Google’s mea culpa.

For about an hour on Saturday morning, Google listed every site on the Internet as malware.

Mayer’s update followed several blog postings from StopBadware.org manager Maxim Weinstein. StopBadware.org, which is coordinated through Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, doesn’t partner only with Google. Its other partners include PayPal, VeriSign, Trend Micro, and Consumer Reports WebWatch.

Updates at 9:10 a.m., 9:45 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 10:40 a.m., 11:25 a.m., and 12:15 p.m. PST: Google’s and StopBadware.org’s numerous responses added. Rewrites have been made throughout to sum up the issue.

What a way to start the weekend…

We’ve all heard it by now. Live streams of Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration broke records for the Web, with about 7.7 million streams flowing concurrently at its peak. Which, of course, makes us wonder: what will set a new record?

Choose your prediction, or leave a comment with your own theory.

View results

We picked a few possibilities: World Cup football (soccer), for example, has been a big draw for Web traffic in the past, and with the 2010 tournament taking place in South Africa, the geographic distance from Europe and the U.S. may mean that some football fans are tuning in remotely rather than on location. Or, hypothetically, what if a major TV show chooses to broadcast its finale online? (Yeah, yeah, we know, the networks would never let it happen.)

With broadband penetration, not to mention Web usage in general, still growing, it’s conceivable that some event of historic importance will surpass the inauguration in due time. Chances are, it’ll be some prescheduled event that people know to tune into, rather than a sudden occurrence–but you never know.

News.com Poll What will break the Obama inauguration’s streaming-video record?
Akamai reports that Tuesday’s inauguration shattered records for simultaneous live-stream viewing. What event will be the next record-breaker?

World Cup soccer
Another inauguration
Live performance
Natural disaster or emergency
Live-streamed “Lost” finale (We can dream!)