by Claudine Zap The new, improved iPhone is finally out. Followers of the old one instantly developed major upgrade envy . But alas, many customers running out to make the switch were told it was gonna cost them. The cellphone agreement demanded long-term customers pay a higher price to purchase the new one. The unfairness of it all! Who, exactly, can get the iPhone 3G S? At first, it seemed only those who didn't own an iPhone at all.

In light of the recent events in Iran, we want to share a story from an Iranian-American colleague about his experiences using Facebook and his perspective on how much has changed in the past decade. I woke up Saturday morning to a surge of activity in my News Feed about the events unfolding in Iran. I had heard that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been re-elected, but I had no idea how the people of Iran were reacting to the outcome.

One of beautiful things about the Internet is that it frees us from the constraints of our physical existence. Want to rent a DVD and buy a new laptop? You used to have to drive to Blockbuster and then to Best Buy. More often than not, thanks to the mass consumerization in the U.S., you could so both in the same strip mall. But with the Web, you can get the video from Netflix in one browser window,

As the team rolls out the spring update for adCenter and the new version of the API, our adCenter API Live Meetings with the development team will resume on every other Wednesday, at 1 PM Pacific time. Below is a recording of our June 3 webcast. This has not been edited. I'll update it with an edited version soon. Meanwhile, please skip to the 14-minute mark where the presentation starts to avoid the setup phone chatter and dial tones.   Webcast sessions are scheduled at 1 P.

by Mike Krumboltz Searchers have a question they'd like answered: Who started Father's Day ? Who do they have to thank for the mandatory bonding time they're spending with dear ol' dad this weekend? Lookups on " father's day origin " and " who started father's day " inspired us to investigate. The results of our research shook us to our very core. OK, maybe not to our core, exactly. But the story of how Father's Day came to be is still pretty interesting.

Posted by rebecca "The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes-and ships-and sealing-wax- Of cabbages-and kings- And why the sea is boiling hot- And whether pigs have wings." We can talk about the temperature of the sea and the possibility of winged pork some other time; for now, I want to talk about one thing, and that's how ridiculously good Up is. Seriously, Pixar can do no wrong. Go see it if you haven't already. Oh,

Posted by great scott! This week's Whiteboard Friday addresses everybody's new favorite topic: Google's "new" treatment of nofollow and how it creates a massive reservoire of lost link juice. Everybody under the sun has written about this ( SEOmoz included ) in the last couple of weeks, so we decided to do a little roundtable (squareboard?) pow-wow on how best to deal with the problem. Rand is joined by Nick Gerner, Ben Hendrickson,

Faces may be blurred in Google Maps Street View but that's apparently not always enough to protect the identity of the people captured. Reuters reports: Dutch twin brothers who mugged a teenager in the northern town of Groningen were arrested after being caught on camera by a car gathering images for Google's online photo map service, police said. The pair stole the 14-year-old boy's mobile phone and 165 euros ($230) in cash last September.

In our last post , we showed you a few ways to add Bing to your browser whether you are using the latest version of IE, Firefox or Chrome. Today, we want to demonstrate how Bings integration with both IE8 and Firefox provides quick access to information, to make your search easier. I nternet E xplorer 8 When typing certain queries in the IE8 Search Box, Bing will return rich auto-suggestions, including Instant Answers,

Searching Google.com for keywords like gay , lesbian or sf pride currently shows a rainbow-colored stripe at the top of the results. While well-intended, I wonder if editorial messing with supposedly neutral-and-automated-as-possible result pages is the right way to go. Put differently, while I personally agree with the notion of promoting gay pride (much needed still in many to most countries of the world where there's no full acceptance or equality),