Tezzo's Technology Blog

The Internet is loaded with spots that broadcast during emergencies. You might consider saving this section of the newsletter, just in case. As you browse through these links, you'll see that some sites have standard fare -- news and weather, say. But they'll kick into action if there's a severe situation, usually gearing up with local TV broadcasts. For instance, during the Katrina fiasco, Weatherserver had three TV feeds on the air. The National Weather Situation also covered Katrina with six windows showing weather and satellite maps, and TV and radio feeds. Television broadcasts are fairly common across the Net. There's Joost and MyTVPal and a host of others. My focus is strictly news: You can watch Los Angeles stations KCBS and Fox in your browser; DMZ has multiple live Los Angeles video feeds. Ditto for LiveNewsCameras . Sometimes AM-FM radio is a better bet in an emergency, so try Live-Radio . I've been able to glean inside information by listening to

Grownups, take note! Here is what you need to know before "friending" your first Facebook connection. Recent news stories have reported a litany of Facebook horror stories from geriatrics—you know, people over age 30—who dented their dignities, if not their careers, through careless social networking . Some people think that the post-collegiate crowd is simply too fuddy-duddy for Facebook . Others insist that the site is now as essential as e-mail and phone service, if not air and water, and nobody of any age should be discouraged from squandering time on Facebook. Even Bill Gates is reported to have a half-hour a day Facebook habit. More at PC Mag

PC World blogger Rick Broida shows you how to customize Apple iTunes to make it easier to use and speed it up. From PC World

Sometimes the best way to ask a question is to get Google to 'fill in the blank' by adding an asterisk (*) at the part of the sentence or question that you want finished. Google will return results that fill in the gap. Try these searches: * was the first city with electric street lighting Isaac Newton discovered * * is the oldest restaurant in the world * is the capital of Estonia

Interesting article from Seeking Alpha : “I thought it interesting that Google’s CEO would refer to Twitter as the poor man’s email but did not address the growing threat to Google’s search system from Twitter’s real time search ability. I rarely use Twitter but use Twitter Search quite often and I admit probably more than Google and the other search engines. The content is a lot fresher than what one would find on Google News or Yahoo! News. I suspect as the word gets out about the growing reliance on real time search, Twitter will take share from the other search engines. I think this caught Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft off guard and I am sure all three are scrambling to find a solution to this growing threat to their business models. Twitter is essentially the answer for social search that Yahoo! and others have been seeking to master. The search engines should look to partner with Twitter to organize the real time search data, index it, and make it searchable