I've heard about version number jumps for marketing purposes, but this latest move by browser producer Opera, springing 81 releases, verges on the ridiculous.

The former technical news forum Slashdot, currently masquerading as a repository for duplicated posts, has adopted HTML 4.01 and CSS.

The move comes as flying porcine creatures were seen being ejected at speed accompanied by clouds of dry ice from a deep shaft signed "to Purgatory" near Andover, Massachussets, USA.

"Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs.": blogsearch.google.com

Another Google product celebrating the Decade of the Beta Web Service.

Hmm, interesting. More info from Google here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html and there's also a Google group.

Webmaster World has a thread in its Supporter's Forum.

This bot or website spider has been sniffing around various sites, or rather snorting them down in copious amounts. It looks like this in the webserver logs (Apache):

GET /file.html HTTP/1.0" 200 12345 "-" "aipbot/1.0 (aipbot; 
http://www.aipbot.com; aipbot@aipbot.com)

The site www.aipbot.com is just a domain registry service's default catchall page with no information about the bot - grounds enough for a complete block of the IP address (currently 24.177.134.6). I don't have the time to experiment whether it will respect any entry in robots.txt.

The only other information available about this bot is from WebmasterWorld.com, which indicates the bot has also masqueraded under the name of abot.

Just when you thought it was safe to surf the Internet again - up pops another worrisome browser "feature" , this time in Mozilla-based browsers including Firefox.

This feature goes by the name of prefetch, and it's been around for several years but has never got much attention until Google announced the introduction of "Enhanced searching with Firefox".