The old adage that was once attributed to a Chinese proverb tells us, "A picture is worth a thousand words." But John McCarthy , a noted mathematician and computer science pioneer, stated conversely, "As the Chinese say, 1001 words is worth more than a picture." Perhaps McCarthy was also a pioneer of search engine optimization (SEO)!   The use of interesting and relevant images and animations on a website can certainly elevate the user experience.

The Associated Press has announced it is taking measures to protect its online content with a creation of a news registry to tag and track all AP content "to assure compliance with terms of use." The AP says the system will register key information about each piece of content it distributes as well as terms of use of that content, and feature a built-in beacon to alert the AP about how the content is used.

Although, for the sake of your eyesight, this article hasn't been written in red ink, financial types might want to just go ahead and imagine it that way. The earnings report Microsoft released this afternoon contained all sorts of bad news. The second sentence of the official release pretty well summed things up: "Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $3.99 billion, $3.05 billion and $0.34 per share,

Hi Osama Bedier again, VP of platform and emerging technology. The PayPal leadership team just hosted an event where we officially announced the opening of our payment platform to third-party developers, the beginning of an exciting road ahead for PayPal. By releasing new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), PayPal is challenging .

Facebook has milked the vanity URL deal for all its worth until this point so why not try to get a little more mileage out it, right? Over the past few months Facebook has been allowing individuals to choose their username but has put the rather strict caveat on the practice that it is a one and done proposition. In other words, when you make that fateful decision to make your vanity URL something that was something funny but not very practical you were stuck with it. Well,

On a day when the stock market rose above 9,000 and everyone but the short sellers were in good spirits, Microsoft provided reason for pause. Their quarterly earnings were painful. Recently, Google and even Yahoo! earnings plus non-search and non-tech earnings seemed to show that perhaps the we've-seen-the-bottom pundits just might be right after all. Quarterly revenues declined 17% to $13.10 billion. Quarterly net income declined 29% to $3.

Somehow the Bing team ended up spread practically equidistant across the country tonight, so we thought we should warn all of you. First, here at home, Bing is sponsoring an epic Ping Pong tourney at the sold-out Tech Flash event where VCs, startups, journalists and people who like BBQ will all congregate and be merry.

by Vera H-C Chan Now at least one rumormongering movement has a name and a leader. The fringe: birthers, a fringe collective who question the president's national origins. The leader: A  lawyer who does cavities. A few recent developments in recent weeks (also just summed up on The Daily Show): CNN host Lou Dobbs gave a sympathetic hearing to two birthers on his July 15 show,

Yahoo may be willing to part with more than we originally imagined in its search for extra cash. A new report indicates that Yahoo Games could change hands if a large enough offer gets made. Rafat Ali wrote, "While it is not for sale officially . . . they will consider it if they get the right offer for it. This would be a decently big one - until last month when its 19.2 million uniques came in slightly lower than EA, according to ComScore,

Just last month, Facebook announced that they would allow users to choose a custom username , a.k.a. vanity URL, for their Facebook profile. A post on the Facebook blog warned users to: "Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it's been selected, you won't be able to change or transfer it." Well, that's not true anymore . You can now change your username, but only once.