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Reader now pulls up your friend's personal feeds, as long as they've filled out their Google profiles.

These changes have not been carried over to the mobile version of Reader, however mobile Reader users can now choose to open up directly to their feeds list, which has quick links to items from friends and items they’ve shared. It’s likely some, like the new “mark as read” and sharing options will be added soon.

(Credit:
CNET)

Google has also implemented a more granular system for clicking the “mark all as read” button, which would originally just restart your read count back to zero. The new system lets you pick to mark everything as read for items older than a day, week, or month. This means you can go without using the service while you’re on vacation, and still begin catching up on items without disturbing the flow, and feel of using it on a daily basis.

New features in Google’s Reader product make it easier for users to share, manage, and discover content. Reader users can now pick certain sites they want to share to. It’s very much like the drop-down sharing tool we have here at CNET, although Google is giving users the option to pick which ones they want to see from the drop down, as well as add their own. This may seem like an extra step, but for people who are really going to use the feature, it cuts down on both how fast the menu appears, and how much of your screen it takes up–two things Google obsesses about.

Though what may be more important than both these features, is the way Google Reader now finds feeds from people you’re friends with on the service, and lets you subscribe to them one at a time. Previously it just showed you what items they were sharing.

When I tried this new system out on my CNET colleague Rafe Needleman, one of his feeds was FriendFeed, which meant I only needed to subscribe to that one since all of his other feeds were wrapped up into it. I could also just grab his personal blog, Twitter account, or Delicious bookmarks. One thing to note though, is that Google is using its own profiles system to do this, which means you’ll only see these extra feeds if that user has filled out their profiles there.

The software giant announced on Thursday a new collaboration with consumer measurement firm ComScore to design a digital media-planning service dubbed the Reach and Frequency Planner (RF Planner).

Microsoft said closed beta testing of the RF Planner will start immediately, with a select number of advertisers coming aboard.

Digital-ad campaigns have proven stubbornly challenging to plan and track. Microsoft hopes to change that.

By teaming Microsoft’s ad data with demographics from ComScore’s research, the companies want to provide advertisers with the same tracking information they would have with an offline campaign.

Microsoft says online advertisers have been stymied by the inability to measure digital-ad campaigns with the same metrics used for offline campaigns. The company points out that ad budgets for brand advertisers account for about two-thirds of the $186 million U.S. ad market. But only 5 percent of those dollars are spent on Internet advertising.

The goal of the RF Planner will be to help brand advertisers better measure and track their online-ad campaigns. Advertisers would be able to more easily determine and predict how consumers will respond to their digital ads.

“The perception that traditional branding metrics are not possible or meaningful for digital media is misguided,” said Scott Howe, corporate vice president of the Advertiser and Publisher Solutions group at Microsoft. “We believe online advertising won’t maximize its appeal to brand marketers until the basic metrics they’ve relied on for years are available in digital-media plans.”

Microsoft has been pushing for a greater foothold in the online-ad game. Thanks to Wednesday’s agreement with Yahoo, the company gains a bigger chunk of the search market, potentially translating into healthy advertising dollars.

I know you’ll be wondering what astronauts normally do with their soiled undies. Firstly, they take them off. Then they pack them up with the trash, which they shoot into outer space on human-less Russian cargo ships. On the way, the dirty undies are cremated.

Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, who returned to earth Friday, had been on the International Space Station since March. And, well, I don’t know quite how I am to put this, but he didn’t change his underwear for a month.

Not even in the the darkest, most slovenly days of our student youth did we wear the same pair of knickers for 30 days. Around seven days was our limit. Then we’d at least manage a hand wash in a sink.

But here was the intrepid Wakata, prepared for the sake of all our futures to don anti-static, flame-resistant, odor-eating, bacteria-killing, water-absorbent underpants. Yes, water-absorbent.

I know science thinks it can do everything.

But I am gravely concerned about an experiment that has been going on up there in space.

Which makes two pulsating thoughts thud around my cranium.

One: what if the anti-static, flame-resistant, odor-eating, bacteria-killing, water-absorbent qualities didn’t work so well? Especially the last two. What effects might imperfect performance have on poor Mr. Wakata’s inner well-being?

Well, now, in polite society one doesn’t normally comment when a fellow worker suffers something of a digestional malfunction, so how can Wakata be sure that his fellow astronauts weren’t furtively making sniffy remarks about certain odors emanating from his person?

But here’s the thing with Wakata’s undergarments: the Japanese space agency, Jaxa, which designed them, has no firm idea just how well they performed their task.

I know what you’re thinking. We’re both thinking the same thing.

I know robots will soon be ordering us around like wait staff at the Ritz.

And two, I must do the washing.

The London Times quoted Wakata as saying, pre-landing: “I haven’t talked about this underwear to my crew members.”

This is quite understandable. I rarely talk about my underwear to my clients. Not even my underwear clients. However, wasn’t just the occasional merest stink caused by this novel eco-friendly fashion show?

I know that there was a lady astronaut a little while ago who wore diapers on a long
car journey, but this is surely couture from another realm.

Will we only have two pairs in the drawer one day? Or even one?

(Credit: CC Mike52ad/Flickr)

“I wore it for about a month and my station crew members never complained, so I think the experiment went fine,” he said.

In the meantime, Microsoft is encouraging users to download any photos or documents they have stored in their events, either to their hard drives or to Windows Live SkyDrive. The service has also long had a way to export events to other services including Outlook, Google, and Yahoo calendar, as well as Apple’s iCal.

Windows Live Events was launched as part of the Windows Live rebranding back in late 2007. Designed as an Evite competitor of sorts, it let users create events that could be shared publicly. It also made use of other Microsoft services like Live Spaces and Live Messenger to let party goers and planners alike communicate.

Microsoft has decided to close down Windows Live Events and will be focusing its development efforts on building event planning and management tools for Windows Live Calendar instead. Beginning next month, users of Windows Live Events will be unable to create new events. And sometime next year, the site will simply redirect to Live Calendar instead.

Microsoft said that it is trying to remove the functionality found to infringe on I4i’s patents, but unless it can do so, it would be forced to stop distributing Word in the U.S. market. “Already, Microsoft is expending enormous human and financial capital to make its best effort to comply with the district court’s 60-day deadline,” Microsoft said in the appeals court motion.

In its “emergency motion,” made Tuesday, Microsoft asked an appeals court to halt that injunction and also to speedily hear the company’s appeal, once it is filed.

Updates:
In a statement Tuesday, Owen added that the appeal was “fully expected given the significance of the case and the flagship status of Microsoft Word to the defendant. I4i will continue to vigorously enforce its patent,” he added. “We firmly believe the jury verdict and judgment were both fair and correct and we have been vindicated through this process.”

This story was updated with comment from I4i Chairman Loudon Owen and Microsoft spokesman Kevin Kutz.

Microsoft spokesman Kevin Kutz added the following statement:

Earlier this year, in the same patent case, a federal jury also awarded I4i $200 million in damages in the case. That amount, in part, was reached by determining that a reasonable royalty for the XML feature was $98 per copy of Word, a figure that Microsoft noted in Tuesday’s court filing is more than the retail price of some editions of Word.

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Microsoft)

As noted in our earlier coverage, Microsoft has several options, including seeking remedy from the courts, creating a technical workaround that ensures Word is not infringing on I4i’s patent, and settling with I4i.

A judge last week issued an injunction that would force Microsoft to stop selling versions of Word with a custom XML function that a jury found infringes on a patent held by Canadian software maker I4i. The judge had ordered the injunction to go into effect 60 days after the ruling.

The software maker said the injunction could potentially keep Word and even Office off the shelves for months. “Unless Microsoft is able to redesign Word and push that redesigned version through its entire distribution network by October 10th…Microsoft and its distributors (which include retailers such as Best Buy and OEMs such as HP and Dell) face the imminent possibility of a massive disruption in their sales,” Microsoft argues in the court papers.

Microsoft on Tuesday asked an appeals court to halt an injunction that would force the company to stop selling Microsoft Word in its current form.

For its part, I4i chairman Loudon Owen said last week that his company isn’t seeking to crush Word, but rather just to get Microsoft to stop infringing on his company’s patents. Owen declined to say what, if any, settlement talks have been taking place between the two companies.

Today, Microsoft filed a motion with the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to seek an expedited review of its appeal and to stay the permanent injunction while the appeal is pending. These filings are not unusual in patent cases. As we’ve maintained throughout this process, we believe the evidence clearly demonstrates that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid. We look forward to filing our appeal and to Court of Appeals review.

In Tuesday’s filing, Microsoft noted that, in the period since the jury’s verdict, the U.S. Patent and Trademark office has provisionally rejected the patent in question upon a reexamination and said that the company meets the standard for staying the injunction because it is likely to win its appeal, will be irreparably harmed by the injunction, that i4i won’t be harmed by the stay and that the public will “face hardship” if Word or Office is absent from the market for any period of time.

Microsoft’s motion is expected to be assigned to a three-judge panel that would consider the request. The software maker is also expected to file its full appeal shortly. On Friday, Microsoft made a motion to the trial judge in the case to allow the company to appeal the verdict without having to post a bond.

Trend Tracker can give you a visual analysis of when each trend became popular, as well as its decline.

The map view gives you an hourly playback of the popularity of multiple trends at once.

To add to that, there’s also a map layer that shows you an animated view of where tweets in any particular trend originated. Again, in the case of “sleep” and “night” you could play back an entire day of activity and see a huge cluster of when the word or phrase gained its prominence.

For most people I’m guessing Trend Tracker will be something they play with a few times and forget, but there’s some real value here over Twitter’s own trend highlighting offerings. If you want to see when and where something originated, as well as how popular it was at any given time of day, this offers both sets of data and in a very easy to use format; you don’t even need to do any detective work in Twitter’s search engine to find that out.

Related: Sites that help you find hot topics across the Web

Along with the top 30 trends, Trend Tracker includes a “Pre Trend Watch” (emphasis mine) which tracks five up-and-coming trends that are about to break into the top 10 based on their velocity–the speed in which tweets on that particular topic are gaining in popularity. These are also marked in the trend archive with a little blue flag.

The system is a mix of tools that can help spot popular URLs and trending topics before they hit it big. But it’s more about organizing that data in a simple-to-parse format.

But 24 hours doesn’t tell the full story, which is why the tool will soon expand to keep an archive that covers the last 10 or 30 days.

When I was looking at the tool last week, one of the most interesting things this picked up on was the cyclical nature of trending. Words like “sleep” and “night” picked up speed and prominence depending on the time of day. Using Trend Tracker’s frequency graph, you’re able to look at the last 24 hours, and see what time of day they began to rise or fall in use–that’s not something you can see through Twitter proper.

Finding the hot conversation keeps getting easier, but predicting what the next big trend will be continues to be a crapshoot. Palm and Federated Media have teamed up to create a new tool called Trend Tracker that does its best to figure out, what in fact the next top trend will be by analyzing items that are gathering buzz.

(Credit:
CNET)

(Credit:
CNET)

Included are the current top 30 trending topics on Twitter, which can be stacked up against each other to see what’s pulling in the highest percentage of tweets. Each trend is represented over a 24-hour time line, where you can see how each particular trend has gone up or down in popularity.

I took MyCopernic on the Go for a test spin to see how it fared.

MyCopernic on the Go is available at Copernic’s Web site and at certain mobile vendors, such as BlackBerry App World.

MyCopernic on the Go found every file I threw at it, so the service performed well. The main drawback for me: I don’t typically leave my desktop turned on when I leave the house, so the service wouldn’t help me in that event.

From my iPod Touch, I could search for all files or narrow it to such categories as e-mails, music, or pictures. Each category offered me advanced search options. For e-mails, I could plug in the subject and the names of the sender and recipient. For music, I could enter the song title, artist’s name, and the name of the album.

The service requires that either Windows Desktop Search or Copernic’s own desktop search app be installed on your source computer. (Copernic offers three variations of its search app–a free Home edition with basic features, a $50 Pro version, and a $60 Corporate edition.)

MyCopernic on the Go boasts that it can find just about any file type–document, image, e-mail, attachment, contact, or calendar item. You can search for files by name or category and even run advanced searches to include options like date and file size.

How does it perform?

MyCopernic on the Go lets you remotely search for and access files on your home or office PC.

The MyCopernic on the Go search screen

But if you want to download and open a file, that file’s application would need to be installed on your remote device. So, for example, you’d need a music player to download and play an MP3 file.

By subscribing to the $9.95-per-year service, you can find and view files on your PC from any remote device–desktops, laptops, or smartphones including Apple’s iPhone, Palm’s Pre, or BlackBerrys.

One potential drawback: the service connects directly to your PC to search for files. That means your source computer needs to be powered on and connected to the Net when you run a search. Dion points out the upside of this. “You are literally searching your desktop in real time,” he said. “This means no data is ever copied to the MyCopernic servers, which is more privacy friendly, and there is no need to spend time selecting the content to sync and performing the synchronization beforehand.”

Known for its desktop search application, Copernic has a new service for the remote crowd.

I tried MyCopernic on the Go with Windows Desktop Search. Before I could use the service, I had to make sure Windows Search was already indexing the files I wanted to find.

After installing and loading the MyCopernic connector on my desktop at home, I opened the MyCopernic site on my iPod Touch and started searching for files.

And certainly there are other applications I can use to connect to my PC remotely. But I liked the way I was able to quickly and easily find files on my home desktop from nothing more than an iPod Touch.

A preview feature lets you view files without having to download them. Dennis Dion, Copernic’s vice president for sales and marketing, described in an e-mail the preview option as allowing “you to view a mobile-friendly version of your document without even downloading the file. This way, you are able to get the needed information (view your pictures, for example) without having to install anything on your device.”

(Credit: Copernic) (Credit: Copernic)

Copernic has created security measures for its new service: your PC is protected by a secure log-in, and the connections themselves are encrypted.

The preview mode worked surprisingly well. I could view the contents of Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PDF files. They were unformatted, of course, but the data was all readable. I could view JPGs, GIFs, and other images. I could even grab the URLs of Internet Explorer Favorites and other Web pages. The preview won’t play music or videos though; for that, you’d need to download the files onto your remote device.

To get started, you set up your subscription at Copernic. You install and load the MyCopernic connector on your source PC. From there, you open the MyCopernic on the Go site on your remote device and log-in to your account. And then your source PC is ready to be searched.

(Credit: Copernic)

MyCopernic on the Go also searched the contents of my files. I searched for several text strings that weren’t part of any filename but were in the contents of certain files, and the service found them all.

But there’s a difference between criticizing pure competitors and those companies, like Oracle, that Red Hat both competes with in some markets and partners in others.

Red Hat announced a range of cool new products and technologies last week at Red Hat Summit, but the most potent message emerging from the conference may well have been ‘Diplomacy be damned!’ Red Hat has generally opted to publicly ignore competitors, but not anymore. The company singled out Microsoft and Oracle, in particular. Is this a new, combative Red Hat?

But for me, it was Red Hat’s swipes at its competitors that are possibly more momentous. It’s not that Red Hat never criticizes competitors: in 2006, for example, Red Hat declared the imminent death (wrongly, as it turns out) of Novell.

Is this a sign of a new Red Hat, one that will not only talk down competitors but also be willing to take them down by entering competitor-partners’ product markets?

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Red Hat’s DeltaCloud was the big technical news, offering a “common API to blend public and private clouds.” It also announced a new Catalyst program to corral a partner ecosystem around its infrastructure products.

This second critique has more sting because Red Hat and Oracle partner as much as they compete. Oracle first caused waves in the partnership by cloning Red Hat Enterprise Linux and undercutting Red Hat’s pricing, but Red Hat’s response (”It’s a fork and not a particularly good one”) was relatively muted. It had to be: Oracle’s database certification for RHEL has long been a driver of RHEL sales.

Do you want to buy into Larry Ellison’s vision of what your IT infrastructure should be and what functionality you should provide to your customers, or should you listen to your customers and be flexible?

Hence, when Red Hat’s executive vice president of products and technologies, Paul Cormier, singled out Microsoft Azure for its potential to lock in customers, this was an easy jab at a company that drives no Red Hat revenue.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst’s scorn for Oracle’s technology strategy, however, has the potential to damage the companies’ partnership:

I hope so. There’s no way for Red Hat to grow without stepping on partners’ toes. I’m not suggesting Red Hat should declare war on its partners, but it certainly needs to be willing to make partners uncomfortable, as it did by acquiring JBoss. It’s a sign of a more competitive Red Hat.

Kurzweil’s contemplations, first published in The Sun, offer us these vast nuggets of hope: “I and many other scientists now believe that in around 20 years we will have the means to reprogram our bodies’ stone-age software so we can halt, then reverse, aging. Then nanotechnology will let us live for ever.”

This charmingly optimistic view is but another string hanging from the nano-forecasting bow he’s been wearing for years, along with his rather singular vision of the way men and machines will cohabit happily ever after.

And I am not entirely sure I am persuaded by the concept of virtual sex. Perhaps worse would be the concept of some Googleperson-like hologram talking one through virtual sex. And whispering to one after it.

Still, Kurzweil’s passionate certainty offers us all hope for a very different future from the one we might have imagined.

They say Kurzweil is 61. He doesn't look a day over 43 to me.

Yes, you can be 28 again. You can drink yourself stupid and let those nano-nano folks just slip you a new liver. You can have sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and still be able to perform Whitney Houston karaoke better than Whitney herself can these days.

(Credit: Null0/Flickr)

And, thankfully, so does celebrated large brain and, who knows, maybe “Kids from Fame” aficionado Ray Kurzweil.

One can only hope those hologram-like figures don’t resemble the chaps from Google too closely.

“If we want to go into virtual-reality mode, nanobots will shut down brain signals and take us wherever we want to go,” said Kurzweil. “Virtual sex will become commonplace. And in our daily lives, hologram-like figures will pop in our brain to explain what is happening.”

I can’t wait. No, really. I can’t.

Extraordinary nanotechnological secrets should allow us, according to Kurzweil, to replace our kidneys, livers, hearts and, hey, what about minds, with functioning vital organs made by human hands.

I want to live forever. I want to learn how to fly. High. I feel it coming together.

In an article reported by the Telegraph, Kurzweil says that our technological and genetic know-how is marching at such a furious pace that in 20 years’ time we should be holding in our sweaty, excitable hands the nanotechnological secrets of our existence.

Take Microsoft. Microsoft used to be able to conveniently label open source as “un-American” and “an intellectual-property destroyer.” Now that open source is a core part of its strategy, however, Microsoft’s soundbites on open source won’t be nearly as potent or pithy.

But with all this past and projected merger of the open-source world into the proprietary world, should we be concerned that “open source” will lose its meaning?

The 451 Group’s Matt Aslett suggested 2009 was to be the year of open-source mergers and acquisitions. While that hasn’t yet materialized, it’s just a matter of time before the best open-source vendors are scooped up by proprietary vendors.

Customers win in the process. IBM’s Savio Rodrigues writes: “It was/is inevitable that any software vendor with a budget to worry about will choose to consume open-source components versus building from scratch when the customer value point is higher up the stack.” This means less money spent reinventing the wheel, and more on customer value.

Unfortunately, for the next year or two, we’ll remain in transition. I’ve called it “commercial open source’s awkward teenage years,” but it’s awkward for more than just traditional open-source vendors.

Take Microsoft’s announcement about a new bridge it built between open-source PHP and .Net. No talk of “the American way” or anything cool like that. All the talk was about technology working together.

This is the model going forward. It doesn’t fit into convenient taxonomies, but it’s arguably the right way to think about an “open-source company.”

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

If you’re an enterprise CIO, this is what you’ve been waiting for: the war between open source and proprietary software to end and simply work together. CIOs can’t afford to be dogmatic. They like open source for its flexibility, low-risk evaluation, etc. They couldn’t care less about open source as a religious coda.

I don’t think so. Gartner’s Brian Prentice is absolutely correct to suggest that “we are rapidly moving to the point where all software companies will, to some extent, be an open source company.” It’s simply a matter of degree (Red Hat sells more open source than Microsoft) and revenue model (Open core versus open complements versus…).

Take Zenoss, for example. The company recently registered its one-millionth download, with an active community and user base. If you’re a proprietary network management vendor stuck in the old model of high-cost sales, why wouldn’t you buy into Zenoss’ success? Sure, you will generally pay a premium, as it’s not cheap to build successful open-source companies, but I’ve yet to hear a company complain about an open-source acquisition.

It’s likely to get even lonelier.

Indeed, I suspect that IBM is really the best model for an “open-source company” going forward. IBM has invested heavily in open source and uses it throughout its product line, but also competes aggressively with open source (Ask a member of IBM’s Unix team whether a customer should use Linux or Unix).

IBM, in other words, understands that open source is not “one-size-fits-all” when it comes to meeting customer requirements and ensuring its business is sound (so that it can scale its ability to meet more customer requirements). IBM is an open-source advocate without being an open-source polemicist.

In 2007 Tim O’Reilly predicted that “virtually every open-source company (including Red Hat) will eventually be acquired by a big proprietary software company.” Red Hat still stands independent, though there is good reason to believe it could make an attractive target, but it increasingly stands alone as a pure-play open-source company.

As open source has become big to businesses, it has also become big business, with Gartner predicting that vendors will increasingly maintain the leading open-source projects. Vendors, and predominately “proprietary vendors,” dominate open source today. Given this assimilation of open source into the proprietary software fabric, has open source won? Or lost?

How boring is that?