I realize this news is a couple weeks old, but I just found out that you can now use Google to search for patents. Very cool!
Monthly Archives: December 2006
Digg Podcasts
Yep, now you can digg podcasts: Digg has released a new section of their site called Digg Podcasts, where you can vote for podcasts in a variety of categories, as well as the individual episodes. (Note: since it’s in beta, a Digg account is required to access Digg Podcasts.)
It’s a neat application of Digg’s methodology and member base, but isn’t this voting system already being done by the venerable Podcast Alley?
Download .NET Framework 3.0 Stuff
I’m just getting into .NET Framework 3.0 development (that is, I will be, as soon as I’m able to get the SDK to actually install 
), and I found Microsoft’s “Ready for a New Day” page (intended to help developers get started with .NET Framework 3.0, Office 2007, and ASP.NET AJAX development) very helpful.
It includes links to, among other things, download the .NET Framework 3.0 Redistributable Package (which is for running .NET Framework 3.0 applications), the Windows SDK (which is for developing them), and the Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (which is for integrating .NET Framework 3.0 with Visual Studio 2005).
This .NET Framework 3.0 stuff is very exciting, especially the XAML stuff.
By the way, considering that this post contains 7 instances of “.NET Framework 3.0″, anyone know if there’s some sort of acronym that I can be using? 
ICANN Approves ‘.asia’ as Top-Level Domain
From a CNET News.com article:
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers signed off on the .Asia Registry Agreement on Wednesday at its annual meeting in Sao Paulo, Brazil, meaning that businesses in the Asia-Pacific region will soon have the option of registering an “.asia” domain. The top-level domain will be overseen by the DotAsia Organization. The “.asia” domain will be used as a supplement to country domains like “.jp” for Japan and “.cn” for China.
Good-Bye, Google Answers
According to a post on the Official Google Blog:
Google is a company fueled by innovation, which to us means trying lots of new things all the time — and sometimes it means reconsidering our goals for a product. Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here.
They don’t give a specific reason, but from what I’ve read across the Internet it seems to be at least in part because of the explosive popularity of Yahoo! Answers.
It’ll be somewhat sad to see this product go. But it’s kind of like a floppy drive: you have a peace of mind knowing you have one in case you really need it, but you almost never end up using it.