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PC World – With the launch of CloudFormation, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is hoping to make it easier for enterprises to put together stacks of applications and resources for its cloud computing service, the company said on Friday.

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PC World – With the launch of CloudFormation, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is hoping to make it easier for enterprises to put together stacks of applications and resources for its cloud computing service, the company said on Friday.

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Mashable – Google has introduced several new features to its mobile search for iPhone and Android, including the ability to filter results by star rating, distance and businesses that are open.

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PC Magazine – Google on Thursday announced a change to its search algorithm that reduces rankings for low-quality sites.

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Mashable – Google has announced a major algorithmic change to its search engine, subtle in nature and perhaps unnoticeable to many users, but one that should dramatically improve the quality of Google’s search results.

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PC World – Alcatel-Lucent and Taiwan’s main fixed-line telecom provider will build a gigabit passive optical network by the third quarter of 2011 to merge high-speed Internet with other services.

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PC World – The social networking site LinkedIn has been blocked in China, a move that analysts say is tied to Chinese government efforts to suppress mention of a “Jasmine Revolution” on the Internet.

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AFP – Google has began cooking recipes into its search menu in a way that lets people easily find instructions for whipping up dishes in the kitchen.

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Reuters – A single lock of Justin Bieber’s newly-shorn hair is being auctioned off for charity and bids had reached $6,700 on eBay early on Thursday.

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AFP – Figures released Thursday by Internet tracker eMarketer indicated that more than half of US Internet users log in monthly to Facebook while about 20 million US online adults “tweet.”

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PC World – If you’ve ever used Google to search for recipes online, you know there’s an awful lot of sifting and straining involved. Too often the top links aren’t relevant to your culinary needs. Enter “chili” in the Google search window, for instance, and the first two matches are for Chili’s Restaurant. Unless you’re hankering for some baby back ribs, this won’t cut it.

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NewsFactor – Google is bringing the cloud to office productivity tools — Microsoft’s Office tools, that is. On Thursday, the search giant announced that it’s releasing Google Cloud Connect for Office, which was initially shown as a preview last fall.

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AP – Google Inc. thought it was doing a good deed last month when it opened an annual art contest to more kids across the United States. The gesture instead has turned into another opportunity for Google’s critics to question whether the Internet search leader is overstepping privacy boundaries by seeking too much information from its users.

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Reuters – The 1992 hit movie “The Bodyguard” is to be remade and updated to the world of celebrity stalkers in the Internet era.

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Reuters – The 1992 hit movie “The Bodyguard” is to be remade and updated to the world of celebrity stalkers in the Internet era.

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AP – Celebrity watchers won’t need to dress up to feel like they’re at the Oscars this year.

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AP – Celebrity watchers won’t need to dress up to feel like they’re at the Oscars this year.

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AFP – The Walt Disney Company on Thursday confirmed that it has bought Togetherville, a family-oriented version of online social network Facebook.

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AFP – The Walt Disney Company on Thursday confirmed that it has bought Togetherville, a family-oriented version of online social network Facebook.

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Mashable – Tunisians filled the streets with the help of Twitter. Egypt’s protests were coordinated on Facebook pages like that of Internet activist Wael Ghonim. Libyan dissenters spread the word about their “day of rage” last week the same way. And yet, in these heady days when the entire Middle East seems to be inspired to organize online in revolt against autocracy, it has become fashionable for experts to dismiss the role of social media in 2011′s revolutions.

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Mashable – Tunisians filled the streets with the help of Twitter. Egypt’s protests were coordinated on Facebook pages like that of Internet activist Wael Ghonim. Libyan dissenters spread the word about their “day of rage” last week the same way. And yet, in these heady days when the entire Middle East seems to be inspired to organize online in revolt against autocracy, it has become fashionable for experts to dismiss the role of social media in 2011′s revolutions.

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PC World – The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has accepted and published Microsoft’s proposal for a standard protecting consumer privacy. Acceptance by W3C–the governing body responsible for HTML5–is a significant hurdle for Microsoft as it works to give users more control over their own online privacy and the tools necessary to block unwanted Web tracking.

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PC World – The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has accepted and published Microsoft’s proposal for a standard protecting consumer privacy. Acceptance by W3C–the governing body responsible for HTML5–is a significant hurdle for Microsoft as it works to give users more control over their own online privacy and the tools necessary to block unwanted Web tracking.

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AP – China filed subversion charges against Internet users who reposted a call for protests as the authoritarian government enforced its crackdown against any Middle East-style democracy movement, activists said.

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Reuters – Access to the networking site LinkedIn was disrupted in China on Thursday, following online calls on other sites for gatherings inspired by protests against authoritarian regimes across the Middle East.

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AP – Some technology-savvy venture capitalists are making a big bet on a promising Internet company run by a 26-year-old college dropout in Palo Alto, Calif. Only this time, the object of their financial affection isn’t Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

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PC World – It looks like all those rumors about a MacBook Pro refresh coming Thursday instead of in early March are true. The online version of the Apple Store was down this morning and, just in time before the big reveal, a photo has leaked online showing the specs for the new 15-inch version of the refreshed MacBook Pro.

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AP – Google Inc. asked a Swiss court Thursday to lift curbs on its Street View service that have prevented the Internet search giant from updating the popular ground-level pictures in Switzerland for more than a year.

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Mashable – MyBlogLog, a service that lets bloggers see who their readers are, will be shut down by Yahoo come May, the company announced this morning in an e-mail to users.

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PC World – China’s largest search engine, Baidu, is facing a potential antitrust investigation after the company was accused of blocking and degrading the search query results of a Chinese online encyclopedia website.

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Reuters – YouTube, the Google-owned video-sharing website, is banking on Bollywood and cricket to make its mark in the Indian market, looking at tie-ups with major studios to expand its movie library.

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PC World – So long, blogging, It was nice knowing you.

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PC World – The past several months have afforded several high-profile examples of how search engine optimization, or SEO, should not be done. Last fall it was DecorMyEyes and the case of the abusive business proprietor, and just recently it was JCPenney and the case of the short-lived black hat success.

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AFP – The New York museum dedicated to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on Wednesday launched an interactive, blow-by-blow album of the traumatic day.

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NewsFactor – Google on Tuesday released the software development kit for its tablet-optimized version 3.0 of Android, also known as Honeycomb. The SDK gives developers the tools and application programming interfaces, or APIs, needed to create apps for the platform. In addition, the search giant is rolling out 2.3.3 of its smartphone-targeted Gingerbread version of Android.

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Reuters – An interactive timeline chronicling the September 11, 2001 attacks hour-by-hour went online on Wednesday, with a fast-forward button to skip any video or audio accounts too disturbing for the visitor.

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PC World – It is fairly common knowledge that it makes good security sense to log out of a Web session with your financial institution rather than just shutting down the window–you want to be sure that nobody else comes along while your session is still live. You logged out last time you did online banking, right? Are you sure? A new malware threat makes it difficult to know if you are really logged out or not.

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Mashable – David Henry is a senior director of product marketing for NETGEAR where he works on high performance, dependable and easy home networking, storage and digital media products to connect people with the Internet and their content and devices. You can follow NETGEAR on Twitter @NETGEAR.

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AP – It will be “impossible” for a suburban Philadelphia teacher suspended for blogging derogatory comments about her students to return to the district after her maternity leave, the district superintendent said.

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AFP – The Washington Post Company reported Wednesday profit fell in the final quarter of 2010 as its newspaper division struggles with growing online competition.

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PC World – Casual gaming connoisseur King.com recently revealed plans to bring its online games and tournament system to Facebook. It’s a big move for King.com, hypothetically extending the company’s reach to Facebook’s roughly 600 million monthly active users.

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PC World – Amazon recently unveiled its Amazon Prime unlimited video streaming service, an offering that will compete with a similar service from Netflix. You can use Amazon’s new unlimited streaming deal to watch more than 5,000 movies and TV shows on your Mac or Windows PC, as well as select set-top boxes and Internet-connected TVs. The best part is Amazon Prime’s video streaming is free with your annual $79 Prime membership fee. So how does Amazon’s unlimited streaming service stack up against Netflix’s all-you-can-watch video buffet? Let’s take a look.

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PC World – Cisco Systems has decided to kill its cloud-based e-mail service Cisco Mail, only 13 months after it was introduced, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.

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Appolicious – Next time you’re looking for and easy way to find a flight fast, pull open Hipmunk, today’s top Fresh app. It’s got a simple-to-use interface and quickly finds all the information you need to book a flight on the go, without any hassle. There’s also MarketDash, a new app from Yahoo! Finance that lets you track stocks on your iPad, and Adult Swim, an app that lets you stream clips from the network’s shows. Get the skinny on all three below.

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AFP – An online campaign has urged people in 13 Chinese cities to rally every Sunday to press for government transparency and free expression, following a call last week for Middle East-style protests.

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Mashable – Aiming to raise funds for both the controversial website and leader Julian Assange’s legal defense fund, Wikileaks this month opened an online gift shop.

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AP – Online content manufacturer Demand Media Inc. made money for the first time in the fourth quarter, a breakthrough that follows an initial public offering of stock that investors have quickly embraced.

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PC World – The pro-Iran hacktivist group that defaced the Baidu and Twitter Web sites a year ago has hit another target: the U.S. Government’s Voice of America news site.

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PC World – Recalling all those AOL disks promising hundreds of hours of free usage (minus the disks), Microsoft is offering up to 750 free hours of use on its Azure service as an enticement for developers to try cloud computing, the company announced Tuesday.

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AP – In a key victory for television broadcasters, a federal court has ordered a Seattle start-up called ivi Inc. to stop distributing broadcast signals over the Internet without their consent.

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