The mother of a U.S. speedskating champion has sued Google on April 9 over a three-year-old blog post hosted by Google's BlogSpot service. The post, published Feb. 22, 2006, by Sean Healy, claims that she called several members of the U.S. Speedskating federation nasty names, wore the colors of Holland, rooted against her son's teammates and is a "petulant, ill-willed, flame war-starting psycho bitch": Listen, I hear you have gone on record as calling members of the speedskating federation "KKK", "white ... read more

The 11-day-old web site ScottsMoneyBlog.Com is selling an amazing money-making work-at-home business opportunity for only $1.98. "Would you like to make $5,000 a month posting a link on Google?" asks Scott Hunter in an ad I spotted today on the Drudge Report. "Get paid $5 to $30 for every website link that you post on Google. No one needs to buy anything from you or Google in order to get paid." I'm not clear on what Scott means by posting links "on Google," but he's wearing a tuxedo, so he must be rolling in ... read more

For 30 minutes Saturday morning, Google displayed the warning "this site may harm your computer" with all search results, including its own home page. Normally, the warning only appears on sites that Google suspects to be infected with malicious programs such as viruses. A data error flagged every site on the web as potentially harmful, as thousands of people noted on Twitter. The situation became so desperate that people began using Yahoo Search. Even though the problem lasted just a half-hour, that was enough ... read more

Google has begun integrating FeedBurner, the service for publishing, tracking and promoting RSS feeds, into the rest of the Don't Be Evil Empire. As part of the move, FeedBurner users who are employing the MyBrand feature must make a change to the name service for their domain names. MyBrand makes it possible to host your feeds on FeedBurner without losing any subscribers if you decide later to quit the service. I'm using it to host four feeds, including SportsFilter's RSS feed, on my own domains. MyBrand ... read more

The Long Bet Foundation, the group that sponsored a five-year wager between blogging evangelist Dave Winer and New York Times executive Martin Nisenholtz over the journalistic value of weblogs vs. the media, announced today that it has declared a winner. The foundation used the same source I did to pick the top five news stories of 2007 -- a vote by Associated Press editors and news directors -- and reached the same conclusion: Weblogs won. Adding up page rank winners blogs win 4 to 1. Adding up page rank ... read more

The owner of the Utah coal mine where six miners are missing has used the new Google News comment feature to respond to news coverage. Robert E. Murray posted the following comment to at least nine stories: Comment from Robert E. Murray regarding trapped miners - 18 hours ago August 22, 2007 - We are totally focused on the recovery of these miners and in administering to the welfare of their families. The trauma from this natural disaster has been great for many, but we will not be deterred, and we will not ... read more

When things are slow on Workbench, activity on this weblog falls to the five subjects of enduring interest to visitors who make comments: Whether lottery winners should be able to hide their identities Whether Best Buy sucks Whether Target sucks Whether Art Bell sucks Whether Orlando Bloom dates outside his race On the first subject, people who support secrecy for lottery winners will enjoy a story from Canada this morning: A guy was caught planning to kidnap, rob and murder a couple who won $27 million ... read more