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Here is a public service announcement from your friends here at Astawerks.net

IF You are thinking about Eating Sushi or Raw food for your Christmas meal here is what can happen to you.

You can have a Big Ole Nasty Tapeworm grow inside of you and have to be removed. This is so nasty I dry heaved the first time that I saw this.

Just when you thought that Google owned everything they are now going after DoubleClick.com. Businessweek.com reports that the FTC ruled in Google’s favor today 12/20/07 but they still need approval from EU’s anti-trust commission. Google is prepared to shell out $3.1 Billion to close this deal.

Now it seems that Google is starting to feel the heat from other advertising agencies in this Billion Dollar industry. Microsoft is really trying to get their head back in the game since they suck so bad and from what it looks like they are leaving software behind. Microsoft already has their Ads running on Major sites such as Digg.com, Facebook and Newscorp ” FoxNews”.

So Lets see what happens.

You can read more on this article at Businessweek

Just the other day while surfing Myspace out of all places I missed the ‘O’ and typed Myspace.cm by mistake. After doing that I saw Passion.com suddenly appear. I was confused for a minute and asked my self did I just type Passion.com instead of Myspace.com? Then it hit me that Passion.com purchased Myspace.cm for people like me who typed Myspace.cm instead.

Now this is a great idea and something that I really think is worth looking into. I did a little bit of Digging and found that .cm is a domain name for the African country of Cameroon. I Did a bit more digging after that and found that .CM domain names can be purchased at this website at the low price of only $799!.

The price might be a bit steep but just think of how much traffic you can grab from people who forgot to put the letter O in!. Of course most of the traffic might  be worth less then Stumble Upon traffic which is just come and go users. I mean if you are going to a travel site and ended up at a dating site why would you stay for?

One company who manged to grab Google.cm was Netflix. I can only imagine  how much traffic and customers Netflix gained from this but I am sure it is enough to pay for their funky commercials.

Just tonight I logged into Google reader to take a look at my RSS feeds and I was invited to use ‘ shared items ‘. I am not sure if this is something new or I was just blind and did not see this ever. So I checked this out and looked a little further into this.

It seems now that Google has added a new feature into the Google reader which will allow you to flag individual post from your RSS feed and dump them into a shared folder. This shared folder is then made public so that the world may see them. When you want to view others you would simply select ‘ friends shared items ‘. Inside of that option you can select who’s reader you want to view.

Its that simple just one more way of getting your story out!

Google has kicked off a project to create an authoritative store of information about any and every topic.The search giant has already started inviting people to write about the subject on which they are known to be an expert.Google said it would not act as editor for the project but will provide the tools and infrastructure for the pages.Many experts see the initiative as an attack on the widely used

Wikipedia communal encyclopaedia.

‘Knol’

Writing about the project on the official Google blog, Udi Manber, one of the heads of engineering at the search firm, said it was all about sharing useful knowledge.

By indexing the web, Google strives to make information more easily accessible. However, wrote Mr Manber, not all the information on the web was “well organised to make it easily discoverable”.

By getting respected authors to write about their specialism Google hopes to start putting some of that information in better order.

The system will centre around authored articles created with a tool Google has dubbed “knol” - the word denotes a unit of knowledge - that will make webpages with a distinctive livery to identify them as authoritative.

Mr Manber wrote: “A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.”

The knol pages will get search rankings to reflect their usefulness. Knols will also come with tools that readers can use to rate the information, add comments, suggest edits or additional content.

Revenue from any adverts on a knol page will be shared with its author.

Industry commentator Nicholas Carr said the knol project was a “head-on competitor” with Wikipedia. He said it was an attempt by Google to knock ad-free Wikipedia entries on similar subjects down the rankings.