Yahoo has a distribution agreement in place with DivX that will offer the Yahoo Toolbar and a Yahoo-optimized version of Internet Explorer 7 to DivX downloaders. You’ll have to wait until November for that, though.
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Author and Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow has picked up plenty of attention for his story, “Scroogled,” which tells a tale of the Department of Homeland Security being especially effective at using Google to police the citizenry.

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Blake Jorgensen took the reins just as a corporate reorg was breaking loose in Sunnyvale.

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This humorous look at tiered pricing illustrates a possible future, where the telcos hold all the cards, charge what they please, and cheerfully continue to monopolize broadband access while viciously lobbying against municipal Internet access across the country. See here.

Via Reddit

The big search engines missed an opportunity today, but classifieds search site Oodle didn’t.

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Once upon a time, AltaVista was the best search engine on the Internet. Then they got sloppy, and Google blew past them.

We’ve been hearing forever, it seems, that Powerset will do to Google what Google did to AltaVista. How that’s going to happen, we’re not really sure.

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Google’s best contact with the Internet at large, Matt Cutts, slipped into the DigitalPoint Forums to drop a juicy tidbit about PageRank into the discussion, says Search Engine Roundtable.

Sayeth Matt on DigitalPoint:  “Here’s what I’ve said about directories recently:

“Q: Hey, as long as we’re talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?
A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.
_
Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.”

As far as the toolbar PageRank, I definitely wouldn’t expect to see it in the next few days. Probably not even in the next couple weeks, if I had to guess.

Webmasters should be glad that Matt comments as often as he does. Think about Google without him. Recently I’ve found it impossible to get a comment out of their press people at all; I can only imagine the Apple-like lockdown that would take place on webmaster-relevant information that Matt dispenses if he moves on from the Googleplex.

Politicos inside the Capitol Beltway will be assailed with the latest report from the lobbyists at the Computer & Communications Industry Association. (more…)