Google Docs down for more than half a day

update 19:15– Ok I got Docs back. back to full work of blogging:)

Am I the only one? Nobody around me uses Google Docs frequently. Most of my blog post drafts are kept in Google Docs and in fact, nearly all my writings:) I have never seen such a long time of disruption in the service…

By right clicking… That doesn’t work, too…

TIME Names Gadget of the Year: Droid

TIME has published its top 10 of everything 2009, and the winner in the gadgets category is a relative newcomer: the Droid.

Google’s “Living Stories” News Experiment

Google has partnered with the New York Times and the Washington Post news organizations to create an experimental type of news page they call ?living story?. In a blog post announcing this move, Google says that Living Stories try a non-traditional approach of presenting news:

Google’s ‘Living Stories’ organises articles by topic and follows their development

Exploring a new, more dynamic way of reading news with Living Stories

There’s been no shortage of talk recently about the “future of news.” Should publishers charge for news online? How do they replace lost sources of revenue such as classified ads? How will accountability journalism endure? And, even more fundamentally, will news survive in the digital era? These are questions we’re deeply interested in, and we’ve been exploring potential solutions. But what’s often overlooked in these debates is the nature of the news story itself and the experience of how it’s read online. We believe it’s just as important to experiment with how news organizations can take advantage of the web to tell stories in new ways ? ways that simply aren’t possible offline.

Bye, bye Beacon? and other bad ad ideas

There are ideas that, when you first encounter them, you say, ?That can?t possibly be a good idea.?

That?s how I and colleagues at the Berkman Center felt when we saw a preview of Facebook?s Beacon ?feature? in November of 2007. Introduced in time for that year?s Christmas shopping season, Beacon used a cookie set on one website (Overstock.com, for example) to display information on Facebook (information that you?d just bought a DVD on Overstock) in your events stream. The geeks in the crowd were nervous because the new feature looked a lot like a cross-site scripting attack, while user advocates like David Weinberger thought the feature represented Facebook either trying to change the nature of privacy or misunderstanding user privacy norms.