The rules are simple: I put the self-timer on 2 seconds, push the button and try to get as far from the camera as I can.

Tens of days ago, The New York Times decided to expand its coverage of personal technology. Gadgetwise is one of the first products of that decision. A new personal-tech blog, Gadgetwise is currently organized around four product categories (digital photography, home entertainment, mobile technology and personal computing), each with a dedicated contributor.

Gadgetwise's mission is to help make people smarter about, well, gadgets–both the gadgets they're thinking about buying and the gadgets they already have. Every day, the blog will feature product news, analysis of tech-industry issues that affect consumers, and a growing database of tips, tricks and hacks that help people get the most out of their hardware and software.

We'll be adding more features to Gadgetwise in the coming weeks, but we wanted to get the conversation started sooner rather than later. Poke around, take a read and let us know what you think.

And thanks for coming to check us out.

For the past fifteen months, CBS News and CBSNews.com have been delivering all the campaign and political news, developments, and analysis on our Horserace and From The Road blogs.

The Horserace is over, and the time for governing is about to begin for a new president and a new congress. Today we're launching the Political Hotsheet, a new blog which will combine the best Washington reporting, analysis and observations from the correspondents and producers at CBS News and CBSNews.com, and partners like the Washington Post and Politico. We'll also point you to the must-read stories across the Web. The Hotsheet will bring it all together in one place.

From the transition to the incoming president's first 100 Days in office and beyond, we'll keep you up on the very latest happenings in what’s about to become one of the busiest and most closely-watched towns in the world. Hotsheet will chronicle the news from the White House, Congress and all the institutions in Washington during these historic and uncharted days.

As Offworld lifts off over the coming weeks and months, I'll be bringing to it a focus on the overlooked, the underappreciated, the rise of the independents and, in general, the games that are bringing genuine excitement and innovation (in both gameplay and design) to the industry.

Offworld will also be home to a number of guest appearances by and regular features from people outside the games industry proper and those that have had only marginal influence but deserve more, because it's when those influences come in that the results have been some of the most magical and memorable, from illustrator Rodney Alan Greenblat and Masaya Matsuura's unforgettable Parappa the Rapper (the face that would launch the rhythm gaming genre proving so profitable today), to studio artist Toshio Iwai's musical Electroplankton, to Keita Takahashi's Katamari Damacy.

That's not to say that Offworld won't also be exploring and featuring gaming's blockbusters, powerhouses and the history of its respected decades-old institutions, but in general we hope to chase away a lot of the industry's cynicism and myopia that's set in and bring the joy of discovery and a fresh breath of playfulness and wonder back, because we're all in this to have fun, aren't we?

Now? DVF.com is launching a blog tomorrow, called Inside DVF, to be part of DVF.com.

The blog will be updated daily and will include news, shots of new items, horoscopes, cultural advice, and personal photos and posts by the Diane herself so you can die of envy over her travels and day-to-day life.

It's called "Tower Ticker," which from December 1948 to October 1981 was the name of the Chicago Tribune’s popular people column. This isn't that. It's more an expansion of the Tribune column I have been writing for the last 3½ years (and, in some ways, the Chicago Sun-Times and Los Angeles Daily News columns I wrote for two decades before that). But I liked the name, the handle was available and worth dusting off for a revival.

Brash.com is commemorating its launch with the release of the first annual Brash Hall of Fame and Brash 100 lists honoring the bold and brave men that have created and stood for positive change in the world across sports, politics and entertainment. Honorees include: Sir Winston Churchill; Mahatma Gandhi; Sir Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Bono and many others. The complete list of the Brash 100 can be found on brash.com. Glam is also launching a "Change the Game" campaign, targeting the bold, brave, big, blunt and brash qualities that have helped create positive change in the world. This hip, aspirational point of view with attitude is the hallmark of the Glam Style and Brash further embodies that style.

Obsessable covers the latest in the world of technology, including cell phones, cameras, and HDTVs - obsessively, of course. Obsessable is powered by the rapid content development engine, Crowd Fusion.

Like Weblogs Inc before it, Crowd Fusion is being built on a custom built content management system (at Weblogs Inc it was BlogSmith). The angle is that the new CMS allows the team to do things they think are important in a better way, without relying on an existing platform such as MovableType (which powers Gawker Media sites among others) and WordPress.

Backed with $3 million from investors including Marc Andreessen and Ross Levinsohn, the list of team members reads like a walk down Weblogs Inc memory lane. Along with Alvey, Barb Dybwad was a former producer at Engadget, CTO Craig Wood was formerley a member of the Blogsmith team, COO Judith Meskill was at one time COO of Weblogs Inc, and CMO Steve Friedman was on the Weblogs Inc sales team...and that's just the ones we know about so far.

After letting them gestate in beta for a while, AOL has formally launched two new "lifestyle" sites: entertainment blog PopEater and quirky women's lifestyle title Lemondrop. They're the latest in a series of original blogs that AOL has rolled out, from men's site Asylum to Web meme blog Urlesque, adding to the titles it absorbed when it acquired the Weblogs Inc. network.

Lemondrop is cute, fluffier than Jezebel but a little bit edgier than anything you'd see in the squeaky-clean Sugar Inc. blog network. When I loaded it up, the top story was a rant called "I Miss Making Out," and further down was a gallery of sexy fictional murderers in conjunction with the recent news that the slasher flick American Psycho will be adapted into a stage musical.

As for PopEater, AOL already owns a phenomenally successful entertainment site, TMZ.com, so a new one may look a bit redundant. PopEater, however, looks like it's more Entertainment Weekly than Us Weekly, focused more on how the fall TV season's faring than which celebrity is staggering drunk out of which West Hollywood nigthclub.

SearchFuel is powered by Outrider, an award-winning, leading global, integrated search marketing agency and direct-to-client division of GroupM Search, the world's largest search marketing specialist. "We see search as a shift in the advertising space. Consumers' expression of intent signifies a change that gets lost in Google's dominance and the tactical discussion of how to be relevant in search results," stated Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search -- The Americas, in the kick-off post on SearchFuel. "The ability to provide a point of view and commentary on the impact this has for our clients, some of the largest buyers of media in the world, is a unique voice brought to the marketplace." SearchFuel will feature regular, relevant posts in categories across paid search, organic search, emerging trends and technologies (mobile search, local reputation management, etc.), and social media marketing (SMM). It will also have regular features, including monthly Q&As with Chief Marketing Officers from market leading advertisers; and in short order will incorporate global perspective from international search experts and posts from guest bloggers across the media expertise.

"I think he would have been a blogger," said Jean Seaton, a professor at the University of Westminster in London who administers the Orwell writing prize and thought up the idea of the blog.

Though as prolific as any blogger (his collected writings occupy some 20 volumes), Orwell, who died in 1950, never had the chance to spontaneously publish his thoughts to a waiting public. Now — with some lag time — they are being made available that way at orwelldiaries.wordpress.com.

The Webmaster has included hyperlinks, including a definition of blackberries (no, not the kind you operate with your thumbs) and a Google map of the sanitorium in Kent in southeast England where Orwell was recuperating from tuberculosis and observing the weather so closely.

The entry from Aug. 10, for instance, is offers this report: "Drizzly. Dense mist in evening. Yellow moon."

Welcome to our first post on a new blog from Microsoft—the Engineering Windows 7 blog, or E7 for short. E7 is hosted by the two senior engineering managers for the Windows 7 product, Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky. Jon and Steven, along with members of the engineering team will post, comment, and participate in this blog.

Beginning with this post together we are going to start looking forward towards the "Windows 7" project. We know there are tons of questions about the specifics of the project and strong desire to know what's in store for the next major release of Windows. Believe us, we are just as excited to start talking about the release. Over the past 18 months since Windows Vista's broad availability, the team has been hard at work creating the next Windows product.

The audience of enthusiasts, bloggers, and those that are the most passionate about Windows represent the folks we are dedicating this blog to. With this blog we're opening up a two-way discussion about how we are making Windows 7. Windows has all the challenges of every large scale software project—picking features, designing them, developing them, and delivering them with high quality. Windows has an added challenge of doing so for an extraordinarily diverse set of customers. As a team and as individuals on the team we continue to be humbled by this responsibility.

We strongly believe that success for Windows 7 includes an open and honest, and two-way, discussion about how we balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows. We promise and will deliver such a dialog with this blog.

The new NielsenWire blog, accessed via the nielsen.com homepage, currently features, among other offerings, a special section devoted to the Games -- from historical ratings data on the most-watched opening ceremonies of all time to a feature on Chinese Olympians becoming product endorsers.

NielsenWire's content is supplemented by information culled from major newspapers, Web sites, and blogs.

The opening post of its MobileMe blog revealed that the information updates had been ordered by Apple boss Steve Jobs.

It blamed a "serious problem" with one of its mail servers which blocked some members' access to their MobileMe accounts.

It admitted that it had fixed over 70 bugs but that 10% of messages received between July 16 and July 18 had been lost.

"In the 14 days since we launched, it's been a rocky road and we know the pain some people have been suffering," it read.

The last MobileMe update was posted on July 29th. At that time, Apple advised users they completed restoring Mail service and also discovered a syncing bug, which apparently magically disappeared. Apple promised "next post later this week."

It's been 11 days since... It turns out they forgot to post an update #4 for the second week in a row. It's Sunday - 3 o'clock in the morning; no updates from Apple, yet. MobileMe status page still features old news. No wonder Steve Jobs was so upset with MobileMe development team. It seems they are understaffed. They can't even post updates regularly.

It doesn't take a company or a government to save the world (though, admittedly, it helps). People - individual people - are making a better future right now, and we've got a passel of the best. Brilliant minds from art to science, entertainment to architecture, government to technology and points in between are writing for SCI FI's new online blog, "How You Can Save the World". This blog site will bring you amazing ideas from the frontiers of innovation and help set forth first steps in helping solve some of the challenges we face today. Read it and join the conversation.

But it doesn't take a company or a government to save the world (though, admittedly, it helps). People-individual people-are making a better future right now, and we've got a passel of the best. Brilliant minds from art to science, entertainment to government to technology and points in between are writing for SCI FI's new online blog, howyoucansavetheworld.com. SCI FI has called upon each contributor to share his or her unique perspective on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. The blog will draw upon their distinct and visionary reflections - voices that represent the choices that we as a society will be making to help shape our own future choices.

Howyoucansavetheworld.com will serve as a platform for some amazing ideas from the frontiers of innovation and will, hopefully, help set forth some first steps in helping solve some of the challenges we face today. Check back here often, catch up on some unique visions of tomorrow, and then go forward to bring your own visions to life.

The LAT hopes to put Goldstein's knowledge and sources to work in a blog that brings responsible journalism to the faster-than-pulp pace of 24/7 online entertainment reporting.

The Big Picture is one of our favorite columns at the paper, and we're excited to see what it evolves into as a longtime journo wades into the world of full-time blogger. No word yet on whether he'll be reporting in his underwear (we highly recommend it).

That's the idea behind launching the Big Picture blog. As much as I've loved writing a once-a-week column, the world of entertainment and pop culture is moving so fast that it's become impossible to keep up with all the action without weighing in more often than once a week. Over the past few years, I've found myself addicted to reading blogs. The best ones offer a wonderfully brainy, personal and irreverent way of seeing the world. You'll see the paper now has 40-plus blogs, with more being launched all the time.

My guess is that someday soon our blogs will be the backbone of the paper. Journalists have discovered, to our chagrin, that information is everywhere these days. But readers still crave informed analysis and lively writing, which is something we can focus on as newspapers make the transition from mass circulation entities to niche-oriented publications. So while I've got lots to learn about the blogging life--and will surely stumble many times along the way--I'm eager to be a part of that new conversation.

The blog will offer a fresh perspective and will include quotes, the candidate's schedule and photos not available anywhere else. As a part of our continual effort to reach voters, allow unprecedented access and bring greater transparency to American politics, our blog 'The McCain Report' will provide a sounding board for all.

This morning started with an egg-less quiche. I thought I wouldn't be able to handle it, but it was actually okay. I'm not rushing to the breakfast table, but the caramelized onions made it almost tasty.

Lunch was delicious lentil soup and some lovely lettuce leaves and shredded cucumber.

Dinner...mmmmmm good. Asparagus "cream" soup, portobello mushrooms, white beans and spinach and sweet potato chips. A feast!

Oprah says she was inspired by the book Quantum Wellness by spiritual counselor Kathy Freston. Ms. Freston suggests trying a 21-day cleanse as a way to jump-start an inner makeover. You have to eliminate caffeine, sugar, alcohol, gluten and animal products from your diet for up to 21 days. Just the thought of this diet is horrifying. No caffeine? We don't think so.

Rings is dedicated to the full range of topics surrounding the summer Games in Beijing, from the competition itself to the social, political and economic issues attached to them. Rings brings together analysis and perspectives from sports, foreign and business reporters at The New York Times and in its bureaus around the world.

"We expect the Rings blog, which draws on The Times's talent and resources across all departments, to become a must read for those interested in all aspects of the Beijing Games," said Sandy Keenan, deputy sports editor, The New York Times. "The blog will serve as an engaging platform for continuous sports and news coverage during the Games."

The Games in Beijing are already generating worldwide attention, and Times journalists have begun to post about issues such as the controversy surrounding the torch relay, the intricacies of the Olympic trials in the United States and discussions of Web censorship by China's government.

I want the Fast Lane to be a true on-line community, and I encourage you to submit your comments and thoughts. After all, if I'm going to insist on twenty-first century solutions for our transportation system, I better communicate in a twenty-first century way!

The blog has received about 11,000 site visits since 10 a.m. compared with 13,000 daily visits to the main DOT Web site, the agency said. Comments are reviewed to make sure they're free of personal attacks, slurs or inappropriate language. If a topic attracts hundreds of comments, an agency spokesman said a representative sample of them may be posted instead.

The agency also plans to start hosting Web chats with Peters and other senior DOT officials as well as building a YouTube.com video page some time this year.

In Peters' second post, she announced from Chicago that the city was awarded a $153 million federal grant to reduce traffic congestion and pollution. Guest blogger Mayor Richard Daley followed with a post of his own thanking the department.

Darrell West, a public policy professor at Brown University, said that government blogs represent an opportunity for officials "to shape and be shaped by public opinion."

"Blogs inherently are interactive and help agencies learn what is on people's minds," he wrote in an e-mail. "I see this as a plus for agency responsiveness."

Unlike eBay's existing blogs and forums, which focus on more traditional (and sanitized) corporate communications, eBay Ink aims to give readers a peek inside eBay's internal operations. Brewer-Hay has pledged to write unbiased entries about what he observes as an all-access employee of the $7.7 billion dollar company.

Though eBay Ink is not a direct response to the recent seller boycott and frustration over ongoing changes, eBay's communications team says that a forum for frank discussions is long overdue. "There hasn't been one place where investors, industry analysts, employees, [eBay] buyers and sellers, and PayPal and Skype users can talk to someone from the company, or listen to someone from the company discuss what changes mean from a high level," said company spokesman Jose Mallabo.

Brewer-Hay was hired in January and has spent the past two months learning the ins-and-outs of the corporation. Fortune Small Business got first crack at him; below are edited excepts of our conversation about his ambitious mission and why he believes eBay Ink, launching in April, will change the dynamic between eBay's top executives and its user community.

eBay will launch a new blog in April that it told Fortune Small Business would be an unfiltered link between users and the company. Two things just jump out at me. First, the newly hired blogger has never sold anything on eBay. And secondly, while he says the first thing he did when he got to eBay was to meet with industry bloggers to find out "how we can work together," he has never reached out to AuctionBytes.

Other industry bloggers who linked to the FSB article do not mention having heard from him either: Randy Smythe, PowerSellers Unite and Tamebay, for example.

FSB: Your blog will be linked from eBay's PR webpage. How much influence will eBay have on what you write?

RBH: My words go straight up onto the blog, unedited.

It's got to be transparent. There's got to be an authenticity to it, an honesty to it, otherwise there's no point in doing it in the first place. I'm going to open up my e-mail to questions from folks. People can comment, too, and comments are going to be open. You're going to get the good, the bad, and the ugly.

It kind of goes back to what I was saying at the beginning. They hired from outside the organization. I have no prior agenda with any of the execs or people in the company. I'm still in the process of getting to know them. I haven't met a lot of them yet. That's a big, important thing.

The other thing is, this is my job. There are no other jobs that I'm doing. Some corporate blogs are just side gigs for existing employees, but I'm doing this 100%, day-to-day.

When we launched the Google Grants program, we set out to harness the power of Google search to support organizations that share our philosophy of community service. Through the in-kind advertising awarded to grant recipients, organizations have been able to reach a wider audience for free with their messages. Since our debut early in 2003, the number of grant recipients has grown steadily, and we're excited to help even more of your good causes make a bigger impact on the world.

With more and more people looking for information and joining the program all the time, we want to make sure that we can answer your questions quickly and give you what you need to make your group more successful. So we're starting this blog as a place to read about the latest Google Grants news and information - whether you're a 501(c)(3) organization looking to join, or a current recipient who wants to learn how to make your campaigns more effective.

The blog is getting a rather "blah" response from aviation analysts and passengers advocates who say it will do little to improve process or perception. http://www.tsa.gov/blog

"This will just make it easier for them to receive complaints for them to ignore in the name of national security," said David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association.

In the blog's initial post, TSA Administrator Kip Hawley said the goal is to provide a forum for the agency to explain why travelers must go through certain steps at checkpoints since interaction at airports is often harried and halted, resulting in "feedback and venting ... circulating among passengers with no real opportunity for us to learn from you or vice versa."

"We will incorporate what we learn in this forum in our checkpoint process evolution," Hawley wrote. "Our postings from the public will be reviewed to remove the destructive, but not touch the critical or cranky."

Terry Trippler, a Minneapolis-based airline expert, applauded the idea but said TSA "was in the right church, just not the right pew yet."

The plan is to bring in news feeds from other sources, and build a reputation for good industry analysis from regular contributors including marketing guru Guy Kawasaki, venture capitalist Fred Wilson, and blogger Matt Marshall. The site will also contract with freelance journalists to write 300-to-500-word posts on Web companies and technology topics. Each contributor will be limited to three posts a week, to make sure no one writer dominates the conversation. "It's like the Huffington Post," says general manager Derek Butcher, "with the key difference that we will actually pay our contributors." Breaking news will be included too, but mostly as feeds from other sources.

Aside from tech news, the San Francisco-based site will also feature a "prediction market" where users place virtual "bets" to forecast events in the industry, such as mergers, or how many of a certain gadget might sell by year's end.

For instance, when news breaks that Microsoft wants to acquire Yahoo, betters can begin voting on whether Yahoo will accept the deal.

Users will have profiles and be able to bet against a group of friends or the whole market.

Those with the best track records will accumulate the most net worth and be able to wager more virtual cash on their next bet, Butcher said.

"Page Six" has made a new move in its aggressive push to take over the world and make it canoodley. They've launched the new version of PageSix.com! The site is slick, a little bit more glamorous, and a lot more bloggy. They've got feeds from other gossip sites, a running blog (which, so far, seems to have mostly party pictures and items from the print version of the column), and even Gawker Stalker Maps.

I wonder if that is what makes us so fussy and impatient when it comes to the rare occasion - such as getting on a plane - when we have to leave the controls to someone else and are at the mercy of forces (other humans) who haven't been bookmarked in advance.

This holiday season we're going to hear endless stories of travel nightmares from our families, friends and the press. So I'll start with a contrarian statement: Air travel is in fact as comfortable and reasonable today as it's ever been.

42 Surfboards, one of the world's few builders of traditional chambered wood surfboards, has a brand new website. In a nice synergy of old and new, you can now check out the latest wood fishes, single fins, longboards, and big-wave guns without getting covered in wood chips and sawdust.

At 42 surfboards.com, you can see some of the more common custom shapes that 42 Surfboards has been turning out. And at 42surfboards.blogspot.com, you can see some of Lars Bergstrom's clients' unique wood boards as they make the transition from log to longboard or from sapling to singlefin.

The boards you see posted are the ones that are available. There were 21 boards available between October and December. All of those except the 5'10 Fish that was finished on 11/23/07 have now been sold. If we are able to finish anything else between now and the end of the year, it will be posted here. If you see something you want for Christmas, it is first come first serve as the boards are posted.

DVICE - formerly SciFi.com's Tech Blog - is the latest extension of the Sci Fi brand. It has a staff of writers and contributors who will aim to keep readers current in the ever-changing world of technology. The new site will feature innovations that make their lives less complicated, not more, and only the hottest and best will be featured. Peter Pachal, who edited the Sci Fi Tech Blog, will be DVICE's content editor.

DVICE's strategy is to combine entertainment and information when reporting on the latest gadgets. The site will also produce an original weekly broadband show.

In the show, host Vanessa Rae (MTV.com) will try out some of the more adventurous gear, such as the speed and height-enhancing Power Risers; and offer on-the-street product tests and opinions from unsuspecting passers-by. The show is produced in conjunction with NBC Universal's Peacock Productions.

Anchoring the changes is today's launch of the "Readers' Representative Journal," a new blog (http://www.latimes.com/readersrep) aimed at bringing the public deeper into the process of how editorial decisions are made. Hosted by readers' representative Jamie Gold and assistant readers' representative Kent Zelas, the journal will feature a Q&A-oriented conversation to engage reporters and editors in addressing reader queries and observations. Among the rotating features will be "Ask a Staffer," a chance to get the story behind the story; "Whatever Happened to ... ," where readers can ask for updates on past stories; and grammar critiques. Users will be able to view a staff directory, peruse the L.A. Times ethics guidelines and get answers to frequently asked questions about newsroom practices, as well as outside-the-newsroom operations such as how to buy back copies. The Readers' Representative Journal will explore virtually anything readers want to know about the editorial operation of the Los Angeles Times, online and in print.

"The ongoing changes reflect The Times overarching goal of becoming a more transparent and integrated news organization," said Los Angeles Times editor, James O'Shea. "Most important, we're further opening the lines of communication with our readers and using new ways to make the newsroom more accessible."

Still no sign of baby #2 yet! I am having some contractions at night that make me think it may happen soon! I have been having a hard time getting out of bed… especially because I get up at least 4 times, either for the bathroom, or for Grace…

Perhaps driven to compete with former View cohost Rosie O'Donnell (long famed for her haiku-riffic stream-of-consciousness bloggery), Elisabeth promises "12 personal stories recounting her experiences and emotions both before and after the birth of her second child, due later this month, along with photos of the new baby."

Shelby Bonnie left the company he co-founded with Halsey Minor, CNET, just about one year ago. This morning he launches his next startup, PoliticalBase.

The site, which focuses on local, state and national elections and other political matters, is timed perfectly to take advantage of the 2008 presidential elections and the estimated $4.5 billion that will be spent on advertising to promote candidates and issues.

PoliticalBase is a structured Wiki that encourages research and debate. Users can edit most of the text but can't change the underlying database structure. That allows the site to slice and dice data for comparison purposes (something that can't be done with the free-for-all Wikipedia) but still gives the site's community the ability to create and edit content.

The site is broken down into interconnected categories, including money, people, issues, elections, etc. Clicking on, say Rudy Giuliani shows information on that presidential candidate, including the amount of money raised to date, his religion and party affiliation and biographical information. At the bottom of the page his position on key issues is also shown (for fun, register for the site and click that you do not support him - see how his picture changes).

Blog Cabin is DIY Network's newest hit series, featuring popular expert hosts who pitch in to bring the Kinzel Springs retreat to life. Watch us build the cabin one blog at a time, then enter daily for a chance to win it!

From February until early April, 2007, DIY Network.com invited visitors to vote each day on 13 design areas for a future cabin to be built in the Great Smoky Mountains. Thousands decided on such areas as the floor plan, roof, countertops, even the front door. The results are here, and so are the build projects.

What program viewers see is a structure designed, discussed and even tweaked by Internet bloggers. Thirteen parts of the building, from floor plan to front door, were voted on and blogged about on the channel's companion Web site, www.DIYnetwork.com, from February to early April this year.

The Web site's blog cabin section has had more than 2 million page views since February. More than 2,800 blog comments were posted and 4.2 million votes cast to select the cabin features.

"I was surprised by the sheer numbers, frankly," says Freddy James, DIY vice president for programming. "It's amazing how much having creative input in a home-building project really resonates with people."

The hip hop artist swore off MTV after losing out yet again at the channel's Music Video Awards, and since then, he's been working overtime to post on his site. Yesterday alone, Kanye posted five times. He's a regular Michael Crichton.

What's Kanye blogging about? Everything from his fave YouTube clips (he's a big fan of Feist and Brit indie band Bat for Lashes), to his favorite sneakers. But Kanye's favorite subject? Himself, of course. The blog is chock full of pics, videos and news clips confirming Kanye as "the king of rap."

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."

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.

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.

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.

Our third major change is the launch of a brand new blog: Gadgets.boingboing.net. While Boing Boing has always covered personal technology, the four of us (Cory, David, Xeni, and I) believed a critical, intelligent, optimistic, and selective blog about personal technology and consumer electronics would be a fine addition to Boing Boing. But who could we trust to oversee a tech blog that the four of us would want to read? Actually, it wasn't hard to find that person. We went straight to Joel Johnson, a former Gizmodo editor and founder of Dethroner. Joel is smart, funny, knowledgeable, and curious about technology. He was our first, and unanimous, choice to run Gadgets.boingboing.net. And we're grateful he agreed to come on board.

Office Snapshots shows you the inside of the offices you care about. This will generally be from Web/Tech companies, and perhaps larger companies that people will be familiar with.

After the 14-hour plane ride from the Dominican Republic, it feels good to be on the ground again. I'm also delighted to be back in South Africa. It's been nine years since I was the first U.S. president ever to travel to this wonderful country. On that first visit, Hillary and I laid a brick at a women's center in Johannesburg, marking the beginning of my personal commitment to help rebuild a new South Africa. Since then, I've tried to return as often as I can. Almost a decade later, my Foundation carries on this commitment through its work here and throughout the continent, and I'm eager to see firsthand the progress we're helping to achieve.

Johannesburg is one of the cities partnering with my Clinton Climate Initiative to perform energy'saving renovations to their buildings. These simple, cost-effective measures, which we are working on in 16 cities around the world, will have a tremendous impact on lowering carbon emissions from urban areas while actually saving money for the buildings' owners and creating jobs.

Based on all the scientific evidence, it's impossible to deny that our planet is warming. Africa stands to suffer the most from global climate change, so it's only right that we partner with cities like Johannesburg to help them do their part to stop these alarming trends. By implementing eco-friendly policies and deploying green technologies, African countries have a remarkable opportunity to emerge as leaders in the fight against global warming.

Throughout our trip, my staff and I will be keeping an eye on what supporters like you are saying on our blog, so please share your thoughts with me. I look forward to reading your responses as soon as I have a chance. Until then, I hope you'll support my Foundation and the important work we have begun. It's a great day to be in Africa.

We are launching our latest blog - Earth2Tech, a site devoted to the business of clean technologies, its innovations and everything else. While there are many sites that help consumers live "greener," we are focusing our energies on the business of clean and green.

One part clean tech startup coverage - (a quick look at clean tech venture numbers shows the growing ranks of startups in hot areas like solar and biofuels); One part reviews of tech giant's eco-initiatives (is Google's carbon neutral initiative more marketing or responsible plan?); One part a resource page for entrepreneurs and Valley types looking for green tech [tools, rules, tips] - LBS meets ethanol?

It took a bit to convince Om to go GigaGreen - read his rendition here. But if investors and founders like Sunil Paul, and the oft-quoted John Doerr, and Vinod Khosla, are all aiming at energy over IT and the web, then he felt we're in pretty good company. It might be a bubble, even mainstream pubs like NPR and the Economist are now debating that fact. We're agnostic. As always, through bubble or boom we'll keep the same GigaOM skepticism on this new site.

I'm not denying that the thought that one of those bombs could have gone off, bringing Baghdad-style carnage to the streets of British cities, was playing in the back of my mind as well. As I suggested earlier, were that to happen, a blog, updating every 20 minutes or so, rather than a conventionally crafted news story, could well be the best way to do justice to such a disaster.

Thank God we haven't had to blog on that sort of news event. But we have launched "Making News" in an understated, sotto voce sort of way. It is, in that deathly phrase, something of "a work in progress". And, already, we've drawn some conclusions from the first few posts and made some changes.

For one thing, users shouldn't have to click to "read more". They should be able to read as much of the post as possible from the blog's home page. So brevity and minimum use of pictures, unless they actually enhance the story or there is relevant video to be embedded in the page, will be the order of the day.

From 1 pm - 5 pm EST, our bloggers will be at work, chatting about the action on the TV screens. Feeds will come in from around the world, and we'll throw some opinions out there. Who rocks harder, Foo Fighters or Fall Out Boy? Who has more stage presence, Madonna or Shakira? Figure it out and get back to us on Saturday.

The weblog, which is being run by Gamasutra and GameSetWatch writer Leigh Alexander, has been set up because "...the staff at Game Developer Research will be launching multiple reports on the state and future of online worlds over the next few months." Thus, the new blog will report on virtual worlds as the staff compiles information on this increasingly important market.

The importance of online worlds to the game industry is explained in a recent Gamasutra interview with Raph Koster, in which the MUD and MMO veteran notes:

"Consider the statistics. Webkinz, 2.5 million uniques in December; you buy a plush toy. Runescape: we still don't think of Runescape as being part of our industry, but it's probably the most popular MMO in the world, more popular than WoW. Toontown is up to more than 2.5 million uniques now. We never talk about Toontown because it's web deployed.

Then of course there’s was Club Penguin, with 4.5 million uniques in December alone...When you compare the numbers, all of those are larger than the number two MMO in the western world, every single one of them. So yeah, I think people are missing something."