The mission of the U.S. Department of State is to create a more secure, democratic, and prosperous world for the benefit of the American people and the international community.

Through its websites and other online resources, the Department offers broad public access to a wide range of information. Blogs.state.gov offers the public an alternative source to mainstream media for U.S. foreign policy information. This blog offers the opportunity for participants to discuss important foreign policy issues with senior Department officials.

Initial response to the blog was mixed. "John from Oregon" wrote, "It's great to see some extra sunlight coming into the State Department's long dark corridors with the launch of the new blog today. My hope is that this tried and tested 'disinfectant' can help restore some of the luster to the reputation of the U.S.A. here at home and among our friends throughout the world."

However, "Cynthia from California" noted that, "This new blog seems to be an effort at transparency, but given the U.S. State Department's warlike actions, I'm skeptical that this will actually encourage dialogue. I'm curious to know if this will be a two-way conversation, whether postings will reach people in positions of authority at the State Department. In other words, [will] the public's opinions and concerns be considered and [will] they will have any influence? [Will] the Bush Administration's viewpoint will be promoted here to the exclusion of independent and humane thinking and to the detriment of our country's standing in the world? [Is] this blog simply a PR tool for the Administration disguised as a dialogue? I'm not optimistic for a real exchange of ideas, but I hope I'm wrong."

However, before we could add photos to the site, we had to give considerable thought to the best way to integrate photos into a professional site. Privacy is an incredibly important issue to us, and we wanted to make sure we had the right controls in place. As a result, all members will have the option to control whether their photo is visible to their connections, their network, or everyone.

We know that people take their professional reputations seriously, and as a result we expect LinkedIn profile photos to be professional in nature. However, we also hope that the wisdom of the millions of LinkedIn users will help us identify photos that violate that. Similar to LinkedIn Answers, members will be able to quickly and easily flag photos that violate policy for review.

Two years to the month after launching its large podcast search and listening site, Yahoo! has announced that Yahoo! Podcasts will cease operation on Halloween, October 31st. The site never came out of Beta before the plug was pulled. There's not much information available beyond an underlined non-link now at the top of the site reading "Yahoo! apologizes deeply, but we will be closing down the Podcasts site on Oct. 31, 2007."

Zenner's page-inexcusablebehavior.spaces.live.com, which she refers to as her "daily mental vomit"—is essentially an online diary. She rambles about lunches with friends, smoking, old movies, and boob jobs. Zenner's former job as a technical recruiter at Nintendo-although she's technically a contract employee through Parker Services-was not directly referenced on her site. She also mentions several of her coworkers, although not by name, which is what Zenner thinks got her fired.

One post on Zenner's blog—titled "The Daily Weed"-begins with her disputing her friends' perception that she is a pothead. She digresses into a wry tirade against one of her bosses: "One plus about working with [a] hormonal, facial-hair-growing, frumpy [woman] is that I have found a new excuse to drink heavily," Zenner writes. "My gut tells me that this woman hasn't been fucked in years."

"We get a lot of calls from people who have been accused of defamation when they're blogging anonymously," says Rebecca Jeschke, a spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "In most cases, these charges of defamation are pretty weak. There's a very strong tradition of anonymous speech in America and it's protected in the First Amendment."

Nintendo of America's Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Affairs Perrin Kaplan stated that blogging was not banned by the company but "we generally don't encourage them. [Zenner] was expressly discouraged from doing what she did. I've seen everything that she's written and it's really not work appropriate."

But don't hold your breath. That impassioned young fellow is Chris Crocker, a 19-year-old from Tennessee whose 15 minutes (seconds?) of fame just might not quite be over: Variety is reporting that a television production company, 44 Blue Productions, has inked a deal with him for a potential TV show. It's not totally serendipitous, as the entertainment site explained that Crocker has actually had a sizeable MySpace following for some time now, and that he's been on 44 Blue's radar for almost a year.

Still, the hour-long meeting in the Roosevelt Room offered Bush another opportunity to break through what he sees as the filter of the traditional news media, while also reaching out to the providers of a new source of information for soldiers, their families and others who follow the conflict in Iraq closely.

"More and more we are engaging in the new-media world, and these are influential people who have a big following," said Kevin F. Sullivan, the White House communications chief.

Bush told the group that, to his knowledge, it was the first time a president had met with bloggers for a chat at the White House, one of the participants wrote.

"Of course, everything on the Web is free, so it's understandable why they would want to do that," said Alan Mutter a former editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and proprietor of a blog about the Internet and the news business called Reflections of a Newsosaur.

"The more page views you have, the more you can sell," he said. "In the immediate moment it's a perfectly good idea."

The longer-term problem for publishers like the Times is that they must find ways to present content online rather than just transferring stories and pictures from the newspaper.

Most U.S. news Web sites offer their contents for free, supporting themselves by selling advertising. One exception is The Wall Street Journal which runs a subscription-based Web site.

TimesSelect generated about $10 million in revenue a year. Schiller declined to project how much higher the online growth rate would be without charging visitors.

Well that was quick. Just a few days after Netscape's announcement that it was shelving its social news service away from the hallowed Netscape.com domain in place of what is essentially AOL's front page, the service has already been given a new name and URL. It's called Propeller.com (link dead ends right now), and that's about all Netscape's Director Tom Drapeau was willing to divulge about the rebranded site in his announcement post on the official Netscape blog.

Mass High Tech reports the Charlestown, Mass.-based startup, which was launched by Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor, recently laid off 24 employees or approximately 35 percent of the staff prior to the restructuring.

MHT said the layoffs included some members of the executive team, but the company did not disclose specific names.

Eons, which has the slogan "Loving life on the flip side of 50," will focus on social networking going forward.

Toth dresses like Elvis, sings an employment law rock 'n' roll anthem and asks interactive questions in what he claims is an effort to encourage companies to pay more attention to employment law.

"Don't get me wrong. I like attorneys. I am an attorney," Toth said. "It's just that I'd like to help companies avoid paying lots of money to attorneys unnecessarily."

The blog is designed to "make employment law fun and engaging, but educational at the same time," Toth said.

If you thought the news feed was a threat to your privacy, be warned: Facebook is announcing Public Search Listings today, meaning profiles will be searchable through Facebook, and soon turn up on Google, Yahoo and MSN Search.

As of tomorrow, search will be available through Facebook; users will then have one month to change their privacy settings before profiles get indexed by the major search engines. These results will include, at most, your name and profile picture.

Obviously that's a move that could scare some users, and there are some restrictions: you must have your profile set to viewable by "everyone" in order to appear, and only your limited profile will be public.

We hear all the time that Burning Man participants want to feel in touch with their Black Rock City "home" year round. Blogs provide an ideal medium to offer a timely touchstone, while keeping our community informed about the latest goings-on, tips, hints, and ideas.

Google is playing host to articles from four news agencies, including The Associated Press, the company said Friday, setting the stage for it to generate advertising revenue from Google News.

The news agencies - the Press Association of Britain, Canadian Press, Agence France-Presse and The A.P. - now have their articles featured with the organizations’ own brands on Google News. The companies have agreed to license news feeds to Google.

The five-year-old Google News service previously searched the Web to uncover links to news articles from thousands of sources, and clustered links on similar subjects together.

Josh Cohen, business product manager of Google News, said his company would consider eventually running advertising alongside the agencies' articles.

Because of Google's campaign to simultaneously reduce duplicate articles, the original wire service article is likely to be featured in Google News instead of versions of the same article from newspaper customers, sapping ad revenue to those newspapers.

Welcome to a new blog from Microsoft. The focus of this blog is likely to be a little different from most other blogs you'll see on blogs.msdn.com. Microsoft employs some of the best hackers in the world and actively recruits them and develops them. They work on all kinds of projects, whether it be in development, research, testing, management and of course security. Of course, there is controversy even in the word "hacker" but I don't think that should stop us from using it in the manner I think is the most appropriate. At his or her core, a true hacker is someone who is curious and wants to learn how systems work. This can and of course at Microsoft is done in an ethical, legal manner. We employ "white hat hackers" who spend their time pentesting and code reviewing applications and software looking for weaknesses and vulnerabilities so that others don't once we've released that code into the wild. We employ many many smart testers who know more about some of our software then perhaps the architects who designed it. We also employ some of the top researchers in their industry, dedicated people working on the bleeding edge of whats going to be common place in the next 5 or 10 years of computing. So yes, Microsoft does have hackers, and its time to introduce you to some of them and show you what it is, exactly that they do.