I love that CNN's app on the iPhone immediately sent me an alert to let me know when Brittany Murphy died whereas 3 hours after a real story like this broke I still haven't gotten any sort of notification. Uninstalling CNN's app right after I post this.

It pains me to admit this, but I think that there are considerably more people who care about Brittany Murphy dying than care about this.

I suggest that you, instead, just subscribe to some RSS feeds.

I'll be honest. I didn't know who Brittany Murphy was until she went all over the news networks. Still don't really know -- didn't ready any of the articles.

Meanwhile, I've been consuming news about Google.CN for the past four hours. Ought to go to bed, but this is so fascinating!

nytimes.com sent out an email alert as soon as the story broke.

Historically speaking, those people haven't been the main engines of innovation. The well educated and necessity-fulfilled crowd has apparently lost some of their competitive appetite. China and India should close the education gap in a decade or so and things should get interesting.

I predict for AdMob's eCPMs for November to drop sharply against their numbers for October based solely on their yanking of the IQ quiz SMS subscription offers (although they do still run some SMS-billing ringtone offers, so their numbers might not fall too fast). Those types of offers, while perhaps morally challenged, subsidize a tremendous amount of free content and services for the rest of us that have enough common sense not to click on them.

should've been:

"Google acquires Gizmo5; Skype seeks fresh underwear"

Use the firebug net panel to check which items are taking so long to transfer and load.