Glenn Beck is certainly not thrilled with the successful revolution in Egypt. While on MSNBC, Chris Matthews and the field reporters in Egypt were giddily wondering whether other Middle Eastern regimes might fall, doom and gloom Beck was praying that it wouldn’t happen. All of this fear also turned the episode into another one of Beck’s classic “Young People Just Don’t Get It” shows as he tackled Google exec and Egyptian protest organizer Wael Ghonim as well as the terrors of social media.

Egyptian authorities have today allowed the release of Google marketing executive Wael Ghonim, who had been missing for a week. Ghonim has been a staunch advocate for change in Egypt as he’s been covering the ongoing protests via Twitter. The last time Ghonim Tweeted before his disappearance was on January 27th. Today, however, he jumped [...]

Sarah Palin may be known as “Mama Grizzly,” a political lightning rod, a published author, and a reality TV star, but tonight on Hannity she was a woman scorned. Pupils shaking and voice struggling to remain steadfast, the former Alaska governor gave defending herself post-Tucson (and post-”blood libel”) to Sean Hannity the old college try, but at some point it was hard to remember whether it was Palin or Rep. Gabrielle Giffords who took bullets two weeks ago.

So you got AppleTV for Christmas and you really, really hate your cable company. You can watch 30 Rock via Netflix streaming, but you can’t cut the cord with cable or you lose access to AC360 on CNN and Monday Night Football on ESPN. What the Hell, right?

What the Hell indeed. And that’s exactly the question pondered–and, surprisingly, answered–by FORTUNE‘s Jessi Hempel who asks “What the Hell Is Going on With TV?” in the latest issue, on newsstands today.

There is no doubt both Google and Facebook are fantastic and wildly innovative companies that have changed consumers’ lives and consumption patterns. What they have not done is changed the rules of investing or altered the limitations posed by a finite economy.

Yesterday was a big day in the tech world as the number rolled in: Google had offered $5.3 billion – with a $700-million earnout – to buy Groupon. Whoa. Groupon, as you probably are by now aware, is exactly what it sounds like: a daily-deal site offering group discounts. Maybe you’ve seen that done before, [...]

Google recently added a caustic warning message when users attempt to export their Google Contacts to Facebook: Hold on a second. Are you super sure you want to import your contact information for your friends into a service that won’t let you get it out? Facebook allows users to download their personal information (photos, profile info, [...]

Google is fighting battles on almost every front: social networking, mobile operating systems, web browsers, office apps, and so on. Much of this makes sense, inasmuch as it is strategic for them to dominate or commoditize each layer that stands between human beings and online ads. But while they are doing this, they are leaving their core business vulnerable, particularly to Amazon.

I never had the opportunity to invest in YouTube but I have to admit that if I did I probably would have passed (which of course would have been a huge mistake). I’d been around the web long enough to remember the dozens of companies before YouTube that tried to create crowdsourced video sites and failed. Based on “pattern recognition” (a dangerous thing to rely on), I was deeply skeptical of the space. What I failed to appreciate was that the prior crowdsourced video sites were ahead of their time.

Many singles bars have “ladies’ night” where women are offered price discounts. Singles bars do this for women but not for men because (heterosexually-focused) bars are what economists call two-sided markets – platforms that have two distinct user groups and that get more valuable to each group the more the other group joins the platform. This applies to singles’ bars – and startups.

Are you there, God? It’s me, Google Street View. Gawker thinks they may have found an image of “God and His only begotten Son” hovering above a lake in Switzerland. The picture is on the grainy side (we demand HD, Google — HD!), and Gawker’s close-up of the potentially holy blur (below) is equally inconclusive. But if it really is you-know-Who in the picture, one can’t help but wonder: Where does that highway lead?

Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” user needs. This does not mean every product that looks like a toy will turn out to be the next big thing. To distinguish toys that are disruptive from toys that will remain just toys, you need to look at products as processes.

Americans are facing one of the toughest economies of their history, and finding a job just isn’t what it used to be. In a move that appears to indicate a hiring freeze in the reality TV and Elvis impersonation industries, former Illinois governor and America’s sweetheart Rod Blagojevich has landed a gig as a panelist during Advertising Week 2010, discussing his “unique take on trust.”

The panel, named “Advertising Week Trust Forum,” will also include representatives from Facebook, Google, and Yahoo! Organizers have provided the scintillating proposition that, among all the tech darlings, Blagojevich will offer “his experience and unique take on trust. A must-see event.” Meanwhile, his publicist told the AP (via NBC’s Ward Room Chicago blog) that “The Rod Blagojevich brand was completely attacked and he went about restoring it – and did so successfully.”

Oh Google, you did it again. The number one trending topic on Google right now is a search for “nag a ram.” What could that strange term mean? Is it some strange 4chan stunt or just a weird glitch? Turns out its neither – it appears to be a fun little “Easter egg” surprise planted by some programmers at Google.

Vanity Fair has released its 16th annual ranking of the 100 most influential people of the Information Age. Spoiler alert: They are all white men. Other than that the top five is full of the usual suspects, though further on the list gets more interesting.

A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal published an interview with Google‘s CEO Eric Schmidt. It delved into a number of things like the Verizon deal and Schmidt’s excitement for Minority Report-style “targeted advertisement,” but the folks at the Telegraph noticed a truly interesting quote nestled unto the discussion. Schmidt apparently believes that, as time goes on and we reach a point where every single person has embarrassing information and pictures from their adolescence posted on social media sites online, it will become commonplace for people to automatically change their name once they reach adulthood.

On Wednesday, The Danger Room blogger Noah Shachtman profiled a young information services company called Recorded Future, which monitors the web in real time and, to be perfectly honest, sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi film. Recorded Future uses a collection of futuristic-sounding analytical tools like a “temporal analytics engine” and “sentiment analysis” to “find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents—both present and still-to-come.”

In the past few weeks, the Pakistan government has been doing everything in their power to keep anti-Islam content from getting seen on the internet. Their latest step, announced earlier today and reported by the Associated Press, will be to begin monitoring seven major websites including Google, Yahoo and Amazon as well as all out banning 17 smaller sites.

Remember the golden days when people watched Daily Show clips on YouTube (for that matter, remember when you could watch them on Hulu)? Well, those clips (and 100,000 others) led to a lawsuit between Viacom and YouTube owning Google that had its ruling today. In the end, the judge ruled in Google’s favor which means the company won’t have to pay Viacom the hefty $1 billion worth of damages that Viacom was asking for.

Type in the words “oil spill” on Google– or “oil leak,” “Gulf oil,” or “oil slick.” See any recurring themes? BP has bought prime real estate on the search engine for all of those search terms, such that their company’s site (and message) are the first thing a user finds before they run into, say, the day’s news, or sites they have no control over. It’s simple advertising, technically, but some people are calling it manipulation of the media to protect their image.

Last Tuesday, Rachel Maddow dedicated a segment to comparing Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan to failed Bush era nominee Harriet Miers; yesterday, she pointed out why many prominent Republicans should have gone through the trouble, as well. Taking on Sens. John Cornyn, Jim DeMint, Jeff Sessions, and Mitch McConnell– all of whom supported Miers despite her similar lack of judicial experience.

B-list celebrities better keep a sharp eye out today, Twitter is celebrating its first April Fool’s Day as a full blown mass media force and killing off the ‘where are they now’ famous among us is just the sort of festivity Twitter revels in. To that end, I feel obligated to tell you that Chuck Norris is not dead. And you are not in Kansas.

Because logging on to your Facebook app from your smartphone wasn’t easy enough already, now Yahoo (slogan: We’re still pissed at Google about YouTube) has teamed up with Mark Zuckerberg‘s social-networking site so you can update your status from your email. Synergy!

After 3 years of back-and-forth court battles of Viacom versus YouTube after the media conglomerate was unable to purchase the video sharing site (and was outbid by Google), the court documents that were previously unavailable to the public are finally ready to be seen by America…and they aren’t pretty.

The kinds of people who get giddy about the C-SPAN archives going online came together in Washington to launch an effort to encourage the public to become more involved in advocating for greater transparency in government.