by Vera H-C Chan The way Hollywood watchers are telling it, the Oscar showdown between directors Kathryn Bigelow (" The Hurt Locker ") and James Cameron (" Avatar ") is a UFC grudge match of the century. Ten movies and five directors are competing, respectively, for Best Picture and best director, but the gossips have their sites locked on these two, who once shared two years (give or take) of wedded bliss. Gawker's calling the battle an " Explosive Exes Oscar Deathmatch .

Team Manning and Team Brees, eat your hearts out. It's Team Romo that won the search bowl - at least on Bing. That's right, the Dallas Cowboys were the most searched NFL team on Bing this season. They beat out both teams that will play in the Superbowl this coming Sunday - the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints. If you're wondering why I keep writing Colts before Saints (I know you're not but humor me) - it's because this Sunday I'm a Colts fan. (Hey,

When the Nexus One was released, comparisons to the iPhone were unavoidable, and a respect in which the Android device came up short was multi-touch. Now, though, an over-the-air software update should allow Nexus One users to pinch and zoom to their hearts' content. Pinch-to-zoom functionality's will work when people are fiddling with the phone's browser, its gallery, or the Google Maps application.

See? Here's one of the many reasons why the Nexus One phone could become a better Google-centric smartphone than the iPhone. Being a Google property, it will always gets the first-hand at various Google mobile services. Take the case of the Google Maps for Mobile for Nexus One which just got a nifty feature - personalized suggestion and synchronized starring.

The majority (69%) of media planners and agencies now use online advertising networks as part of their digital ad buys, representing a 24 percent increase in the past 18 months, according to a new study by Adify Media. "Especially in light of the Dynamic Logic study that found that creative quality is 50 to 75 percent responsible for campaign success or failure, agencies must start evaluating the creative capabilities of networks," said Russ Fradin, president of Adify .

Last week, Google introduced personalized suggestions for Google Maps. This lets signed in users who have web history enabled find places faster as Google suggests places based on past searches. Now they have launched the feature for Google Maps for Mobile on Android. "If you often use both a computer and a mobile phone in your daily routine, it can seem like a hassle when they don't stay in sync," the Google Maps team says .

Over the last few years (in-fact year after year), website owners with traditional businesses have always felt that there must be "free" web traffic out there. Most have heard of the phrase "Search engine optimisation" (SEO) and probably even more fell into one or more of the snake-oil companies promising the earth. It is well worth the non-SEO expert, with a root in the real world, taking the time to read this article,

Fresh pictures of Google's Chrome Operating System running on a tablet computer are dominating high-tech talk today. Here's a glimpse: People are anxious to see what Chrome OS can do. Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google, said Chrome OS is slated to appear on netbooks first in the November-December 2010 timeframe. There's already talk of an integrated media player running in the Chrome Web browser and OS.

It's no secret that most people like having a measure of control, and today, LinkedIn gave it to them. Members of the professional network can now rearrange their profiles' sections in order to highlight whatever parts of their resumes make them proudest. Aaron Bronzan, an associate product manager, explained the change on the LinkedIn Blog . He wrote, "You will notice that the headers of each of the sections on your 'Edit Profile' page now have handles that can be dragged.

Moustafa Hammad and Mohamed Elhawary, a couple engineers in our search quality group, just did a nice post about improving Arabic language searches : Our algorithm employs rules of Arabic spelling and grammar along with signals from historical search data to decide when to leave out spaces between words or when to remove unnecessarily repeated letters. Now, when you type a query leaving out spaces or repeating a letter,