The U.S. government announced today it would soon release $4 billion in loans and grants to help bring broadband service to rural communities across America.

This is the first round of Recovery Act funding aimed at expanding broadband access to help bridge the technological gap and create jobs building out Internet infrastructure.

“Today’s announcement is a first step toward realizing President Obama’s vision of a nationwide 21st-century communications infrastructure - one that encourages economic growth, enhances America’s global competitiveness and helps address many of America’s most pressing challenges,” said Vice President Biden.

The Recovery Act provided a total of $7.2 billion to the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) to speed broadband deployment in areas of the country that have been without the high-speed infrastructure.

Of that funding, NTIA will use $4.7 billion to deploy broadband infrastructure in un-served and underserved areas in the United States, expand public computer center capacity and encourage sustainable adoption of broadband service. RUS will invest $2.5 billion to facilitate broadband deployment in rural communities.

NTIA and RUS will be accepting applications for loans, grants and loan/grant combinations to be given by each agency under a single application form. The complete details are available here.

Online retail sales in the U.S. (excluding travel) will reach nearly $132 billion in 2009, down 0.4 percent from 2008, according to a new forecast from eMarketer.

The forecast says that if the recession ends this year, as many economists expect, online sales will begin to rebound in 2010 and hit double digit growth by 2011.

“Everyone focuses on the downturn in the overall economy, but the recession has only accentuated the gradual decline in online sales growth over the past few years-the decline would likely have occurred even in normal economic times,” says Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Retail E-Commerce Forecast: Cautious Optimism.

“It’s just simple math: The bigger online sales become, the harder it is to maintain high levels of growth.”

Increased spending by existing online buyers is the key to continued ecommerce growth. About 152 million individuals ages 14 and above will shop online in 2009.

“That means almost nine out of 10 Internet users will browse, research or compare products online this year,” says Mr. Grau. “This rate will grow slightly by 2013, since most Internet users predisposed to online shopping will already be doing it.”

Forrester Research estimated that store sales influenced by online research are higher than retail ecommerce sales. For 2009, projected cross-channel sales are $758.8 billion, while online sales will reach $235.4 billion.

In April, Ohio State University rode the publicity wave provided by news outlets everywhere reporting the school’s finding that Facebook users had lower grades than non-Facebook users. A new study contradicts the first and the authors declare the opposite correlation while ripping on the first author’s methods.

An academic catfight ensued, and those are guaranteed as interesting as a solid round of knitting.

Un-academically,  here’s the thesis and conclusion together:

Facebook can’t give you bad grades. It can’t give you good grades, either. Video games, shopping malls, bars and clubs, keggers, iPods, the Internet, YouTube, Hulu, television telephones, texting, church, sports, sex, boyfriends, girlfriends, and porn can’t give you bad grades either, just like cookies can’t make you fat but eating cookies can, just like books can’t make you smart but reading them can.

Professors and teachers can give you bad grades but more often people give themselves bad grades because they spent too much time on Facebook/MySpace/YouTube/WOW, at the shopping mall/parties/boyfriend’s place, on and on and on.

People choose their behaviors, their addictions, their obsessions, not the other way around, and students choose whether to study or screw around on Facebook. End of story, no need for research. Something else we don’t really need a study to know: Social students don’t do as well in school as non-social students.

Personally, I did well in school despite blowing off studies to go to movies or whatever, but my engineering major roommate who hardly left the dorm room except to go to class, did even better. Go figure, huh?

Mega-thanks to BusinessPundit for naming Twellow one of 10 essential Twitter tools for business. We’re mighty proud of our creation and encourage our readers to give Twellow a go.

You can find Twitter users in any city, doing any profession, talking about just about any topic. You can search profiles or categories, or even see who’s tweeting in your “twellowhood.”

A kind of yellow pages for Twtter, we agree Twellow is an indispensable tool for business-minded people looking to expand their networks.

Nice grab by Vallegwag illustrating how our sensitivity training—and our automatic sensitivity filters—can make for some amusing untended bleeping. In this case, Digg.com’s automatic naughty word filter thought homo erectus sounded as dirty as it, well, really sounds.

If you didn’t pay much attention in science class, homo is the same unfortunately humorous prefix as the one in homo sapien, which refers to you and me—hey! Don’t swing at me, brudda. Blame the Greeks. Homo erectus is considered the earliest the human species.

Even funnier is that when Digg edited out the word homo in this instance, it made the headline dirtier and funnier than before:

Erectus Crosses the Open Ocean.

Oddly, that reminds me of my teaching days in Japan. Find a group of native Japanese speakers and get them to tell you the story of the attempted assassination of the President of Taiwan.

It was Election Day. They had to apply pressure to stop the bleeding.

A couple of transposed r’s and l’s and you’ve got hilarity for the rest of the day.

Well, if you can’t bomb terrorists directly, Google-bomb them I guess. Reportedly, the British government will be training sympathetic Islamic groups to use SEO in order to drown out extremist voices popping up in the search results.

In a different, saner world, we used to call that “government propaganda,” even if it seems used for a good end in this case. But imagine government officials in the future returning googlebomb volley to citizen googlebombers. You think the SERPs a are warzone now, just wait!

Matt McGee at Search Engine land is happy to note how Fox News’ describes SEO as “arcane strategy.” Yeah, Fox thinks it’s some kind of computer geek voodoo. No wonder Rupert Murdoch is gunning for Google lately. He thinks search is one of the dark arts!

Even the music industry is aware of its unsustainable business model; the RIAA & co. is just trying to squeeze money out of the old system as long as possible. Luckily, indie artists are experimenting all the time, trying out new deals that don’t alienate and criminalize their biggest fans.

Josh Freese, a drummer whose been playing for offbeat bands since the 70s—Devo, Offspring, Nine Inch Nails—released his second solo album this week and demonstrated the limitless possibilities for those willing to be creative.

Fans can get a single for free, download the whole album for $7, or get a CD/DVD for $15. Those are the conventional offers, obviously. But from there, the packages get extra special. For $50, fans get autographed discs and tees, and a thank you phone call. Freese is sold out of the $250 package, which includes signed drumsticks and lunch with Freese at the Cheesecake Factory, providing the fan will be in the LA area.

There are $500, 1000, $2,500, $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 and $75,000 packages. The big one wins the signed memorabilia, a 5-song record about their life, one of Freese’s drumsets, a shrooms cruise of Hollywood in a Lamborghini that belongs to a guy from Tool, and Freese will be their personal cabana boy.

Now that’s innovation. No suits needed.

A super interesting blog post by Greg Linden details a Googler keynote address that presents some staggering statistics.

Staggering statistic #1: Google uses 1,000 machines per search query. This is what makes Google fast.

Staggering statistic #2: Google crawls the Web—all of it, what used to take months—in nearly real time.

Staggering statistic #3: Google’s machine translation models use a million lookups and multi terabytes to translate one sentence

Sometimes good ideas are way overdue. PMSBuddy.com allows people to set up online reminders about that time of the month.

Other than the fact they have a way to add it to your facebook profile, that’s all I have to say about it because I’ve learned to keep my big, insensitive mouth shut.

Here’s the pitch: “we will not only keep you informed, but will give you some free advice on what to do about it. With PMSBuddy.com, there is no reason to ever be blindsided by PMS again.”

If you know what’s good for you, you’ll check it out. Cheers.

Who knew when socialism came to America it would be wearing a Brooks Brothers suit?

Before I complain, I guess I have to say a bailout of the Big 3 seems necessary and suddenly fair. After all, the gov’t (Bush, Bernanke, Paulson) was more than willing to throw money, lots of it, even if we have to print it, no questions asked, no oversight required to their buddies in the banking industry–the same buddies whose greed caused the problem to begin with. The executives at the Big 3 placed their companies at the top of a giant Plinko board and let them fall to zero. In a real free market, they’d fail and be bought by some (likely Japanese) company that had some actual foresight regarding things like, I don’t know, how customers like quality, how you shouldn’t need more than a decade to prove you make quality products again, how in an increasingly costly energy environment it might be a good idea to focus on more fuel-efficient autos. Yet these executives act like they were blindsided and not at fault. And just as they go begging for money from Congress, they launch expensive ad campaigns on TV asking people to contact their legislators.

They’ve also taken their cause to the Web: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, asking people to support them.

Truth is we don’t have a lot of choice but to support these idiots. Not supporting them means lots and lots of American workers and communities suffer, which is why it’s so surprising the gov’t has been so reluctant. Seems like when a bailout could benefit the working class, suddenly socialism is just plain evil instead of being a necessary evil like when corrupt bankers take down the entire planet’s economy. I say let the gray-suit, short-sighted executive class fall into their self-generated greed-holes and learn what it’s like to make a living like the rest of us. I say secure those mortgages from the renegotiated bottom up, suspend property taxes, and let that money trickle up for a change. I say if we’re going socialist–are we really?–then go socialist where it counts, where it was meant to help, amongst the proletariat.

But then again, nobody’s put me in charge of anything, have they?

PS. Might want to actually level the playing field in Asia, especially Japan, where we still can’t export American cars.