razib ahmed

"Here’s something that quite surprised me; there are nearly 3,000 islands in the Mediterranean. "
If you love Islands then Indonesia should be your favorite destination. Another place is Maldives. The country is so small in size but has many Islands.

"Sure would like to see more mapping mashups use Yahoo maps, since they have better coverage of the Global South. Try looking up anyplace in Africa on a Google Map. Pretty frustrating. Not so with Yahoo."
Yes, you are right. Google map is not still up to the mark about the thirdworld countries.I hope that Google bosses pay attention to this matter and do some thing significant very soon.

"By slowing the production and delivery of commodities like oil and bandwidth, the price is forced upward.In the case of oil, the cartel which controls the lion's share of global oil production is OPEC"
WEll, in the case of oil, it is not as simple as that. The demand of oil is increasing world wide because of the fact that huge economic growth is taking place in Asian countries like China and India.
Because of rapid industrial development china compared to other developed countries requires higher energy consumption per unit. In 2006 the import will increase by 900 million(http://asianbiz.blogspot.com/2006/04/rising-energy-worry-of-china.html) barrels.

"Personally, I am not overly impressed with the tool. It is nice that they provide up to 7 lines of copy from the related blog in search results, but I did not find that the posting were relavant enough."
I agree with you and I did some searches there but was completely disappointed. I think that Google blog search is much much better. however, I noticed one good feature of Sphere and that is they index comments. So, I could find some of the comments that I made in different blogs.

Slick.com has an article on the release of 66,000 peoples' personal information being passed around on a Japanese P2P network called "Share".
This is simply outrageous and I hope that there is some sort of system to fight against this kind of bad people. Please, write about this issue more in your blog.

"What I don’t understand is why there’s this fascination with making a digital experience as close to the analog one as possible?"
It is because most people still love the old way of reading a newspaper. For a person like you it does not make any difference because you are habituated to digital way. Most people still get buying and reading a newspaper when they can read it free from internet.

This is a good inititative taken by South Dakota Office of Tourism. If other states follow it then soon we will have a huge number of drivers willing to turn to more environment friendly fuels.

Well, This is a serious problem for google because most people use IE and the market share of Firefox and Opera are still very small. So, it seems that Google should either create a browser or acquire Opera and Firefox.

" Given this, it's not all that surprising to hear that they are regarding lobsters with the same feelings most reserve for cats and dogs."
I am happy to hear that in this world there is atleast one country that puts value to the life of lobsters this way. I wish that other countries come forward. Lobsters are so beautiful.

Well, it is still early days and I am sure Yahoo will make the software better in the coming days. So, I am not frustrated. If you remember Yahoo messenger in 2001, you could hardly talk with it but now Yahoo messenger has so good quality audio and video facilities.