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Pretty much every website you go to tries to provide you with a customizable experience. Amazon suggests other items you may be interested in – based somewhat on what others buy but also on what you’ve bought, what sites you’ve visited, any cookies your browser may have, etc.

Facebook takes into consideration which links you click on and which posts you like, and then displays more updates from those friends and fewer updates from other friends. This may be good or bad, depending on whether you want to stay in touch with everyone or you want to just see what you care about most. (Compare this to Twitter, which may suggest users, but leaves it up to you to manage your actual feed.)

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Recent employment trends have begun to show that many employers are no longer put off by online degrees or certifications. There was a time when an online degree carried a sub-par reputation, but today's online courses are more in-depth and provide real training that can compare favorably with the education you would receive through a traditional college program. Now that several universities have begun to offer online degrees, it is possible to attend classes online and receive a diploma that isn't any different from the diplomas received by students who attended classes on campus.

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In a break from typical Apple style, the California-based company has pre-announced some details of its new cloud service, iCloud. Apple plans to reveal product details at its Worldwide Developer Conference. In addition, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, taking a break from his medical leave, will provide details on two existing operating systems, iOS5 and MAC OS x 10.7 or Lion. Cloud-based services are quickly becoming a big part of the world of technology, but Apple has not been strong in this particular area. Industry insiders generally agree that Apple needs to compete effectively with cloud technology in the same way the company does with software and hardware.

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In recent times, the Obama Administration has remained on a complete-court onward spiral to sell Americans on the ideas concerning bailouts for auto dealers, begun by its forerunner however augmented into politically schemed insolvencies by the present White House Administration. In the previous week, President Obama welcomed Chrysler’s declaration about the fact that the bailouts had been paid back – devoid of mentioning that the payment derived from additional Government loans to Fiat, and that the Presidential Administration has before now pardoned four billion dollars’ worth of loans to the auto dealers. In the recent days, Tim Geithner, the Treasury Secretary for the Government, did some additional spiraling in a thesis paper for the Washington Post, asserting that each bailout had resulted in a rebirth of Detroit jobs:

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On May 25, Google released Google Correlate – and statistic nerds everywhere spent the weekend playing with it.

            Google Correlate is the math-nerd cousin of Google Trends. With Google Trends, you can input and compare any given websites or keywords and phrases. You can see spikes in search and web traffic, see where the most traffic is coming from geographically, and other details. But you’re not really working with any raw data and you certainly don’t need to know what r is.

            Google Correlate, however, is a more statistical analysis of keywords and trends – telling you the correlation between your keyword and other keywords based on either time or geography. You still don’t have to be a stats junkie, but it might help.

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A third party client for access Twitter is now becoming part of Twitter. Rumors have been surfacing for weeks that Tweetdeck was going to be purchased and now the rumors appear to be true. Unnamed sources at several technology/money websites including CNNMoney and The Next Web have reported the price will be near $40 million when the sale is finally announced. This price will include a combination of private stock and money.

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In some ways, technology can make it easier to control your finances.  However, some people fall into the tech trap and use whatever programs and applications that they come across to keep a tab on their finances. Unfortunately, new and cool does not necessarily mean useful and time saving.  Some programs and services offered by banks, credit card companies or third parties can actually make things more confusing and complicated.  Truly streamlining your banking process and gaining greater control over your finances and information about your finances requires a bit of planning and choosing those few programs, services and smart-phone applications that can work together to make your financial life easier.

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Apparently it seems that Comcast has blocked access to the PirateBay, which is a well known and still defiant bittorent site. There is a battle going on here but for the moment the rules regarding net neutrality still hold. Although as a writer this person does not submit to the iron hand of Comcast, many publications are free to make their strong statements. For example Doug Aamoth claims he is being actively denied as a Comcast subscriber. In Boston where he is located he can not get access to the site.

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Did you ever feel the need to tag the picture of a coke can which you are holding on your picnic on Facebook? It is now possible to tag the pictures as the social network allows tagging Pages in Facebook photos.

Starting from Wednesday, Pages for Brands & Products as well as People can now be tagged by the users in their Facebook photos.

Instead of the Page’s Wall, the tagged photos will be shown in the Photos tab of a Page, and a page can be tagged by anyone even if the user has not liked it. Photos from the tab can also be disallowed by page admins by going into Edit Page > Posting Options > and unchecking “Users can add photos.”

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In what is likely to cause increased doubts in the viability of cloud-based servers and systems, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) crashed last week. This in and of itself is not a bad thing. Which is to say, computer systems have crashed before. Web servers have gone down and web sites have become inaccessible. Email servers have gone down and customers have been without their electronic mail for extended periods of time as a result. In fact, in the days of network television (as in ONLY network television) broadcasters had their signal go out and the channel would go dark for a period of time. So the idea that a company might suffer an outage and we would lose signal for a time, that is not new.