by Mike Krumboltz Celebrities do more than make gobs of money, go to rehab, and complain about paparazzi. Sometimes, they help save lives. Such was the case this week, when big-time Hollywood director Doug Liman helped  rescue some boaters out of the Hudson River. It's a story that resembles an action sequence from Liman's " The Bourne Identity ." The director and his friends were on a sailboat, celebrating the recent completion of a film. Cue the dramatic music!

Have you noticed anything new with the way Google is displaying its paid search ads on its SERPs lately? According to the Periscopix blog , Google may be testing a new layout of its SERPs with the paid search which is used to be located at the far right end of the SERPs now closer to the organic search results. The new SERP layout appeared while James Carswell was using Firefox 3 as he later found out that it is not showing in IE8.

The Wall Street Journal Online is one of the great success stories in paid news content, and yet what's worked for it won't necessarily apply on News Corp.'s other properties. At least that's the view of Alan Meckler, CEO of MediaBistro parent WebMediaBrands, and I'm inclined to agree. In a tweet earlier today , Meckler criticized the News Corp.'s planned move to charge for content on Web properties operated by News Corp.'s television and print news holdings.

About six months ago, we started shifting large numbers of blogs over to our new crawler starting in February and finishing things up in March. The new crawler brought many advantages, among them is that it does a much better job of focusing on post contents. As part of the switch, we intentionally stopped indexing links outside of posts, including blogroll links, which don't signify the relevance of an author's intent to link to specific content.

Microsoft is reportedly now the owner of the domain Office.com. This could be a key component of Microsoft staying competitive with Google as they amp up their quest to get businesses and consumers to use Google Apps. One can only assume that Microsoft's cloud-based version of Microsoft Office will be residing at Office.com. This is only speculation, mind you. The previous owner (or "operator" rather, according to Robin Wauters ) of Office.com was ContactOffice. At Office.

More people are paying bills at bank or credit union websites than at individual biller websites, according to a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research. "For the first time, more consumers paid bills via bank sites in the past month rather than biller-direct sites," James Van Dyke, President and Founder of Javelin Strategy & Research said. "But many banks and credit unions have been slow to upgrade,

In case you were in search of one, here's another good reason for Eric Schmidt to have stepped down from Apple's board of directors: devices relying on the Android operating system are about to take a run at the iPhone in China. Beijing-based Kathrin Hille reported, "China Mobile, the world's largest mobile operator by subscribers, will fire the opening shot in a battle for high-value subscribers with the launch of the 3G OPhone, which runs the Android source code.

by Claudine Zap John Quincy Adams . The sixth U.S. president. Son of the second president, John Adams. And now, Twitterer. That's right, Ashton Kutcher and our forefather have something in common: They both keep their updates to 140 characters. That's the limit for the microblogging website, which got the Massachusetts Historical Society thinking: JQA could get in on this new-fangled Twitter thing.

As announced earlier this summer, I'm excited to let you all know that we're rolling out an early beta version of Digg Ads. A recap of how it works: your Diggs, buries and clicks influence a quality score that determines how often the ad gets displayed, and ultimately how much the advertiser pays per click. The more you Digg an ad, the less the advertiser will have to pay; the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged,

by Mike Krumboltz Town hall meetings, in which locals are encouraged to share their thoughts on government issues, have always had an air of barely controlled chaos. But now, with health-care reform the hottest topic in town, these meetings are devolving into shouting matches. The Web is buzzing over several local get-togethers in which the supposed person in charge tries his or her best to explain President Obama's health-care package,