Great Bolt of Lightning Strikes Olympics

Credit: hannahspanna


Credit: hannahspanna


The man they love to call Lightning Bolt became just the ninth man in modern Olympic history to complete the 100m and 200m sprint double, shattering the world records for the two events.

Usain Bolt now joins an exclusive club following his two victories at Beijing's Bird's Nest.

The 21-year-old Jamaican knocked 0.03 seconds off his own record in winning the 100m title with a sensational 9.69 run on Saturday.

Then Bolt stormed to victory in the 200 metres final at the Bird's Nest on Wednesday with a new world record. He clocked 19.30secs to crack American Michael Johnson's 12-year-old record of 19.32 secs.

He is the first man since Carl Lewis at the Los Angeles Games in 1984 to complete the feat.

World: Conflict in Georgia

2008 Olympics: A Spectacular Show in Beijing, China

China kicked off the 2008 Olympic Games with a spectacular show in the Bird's Nest stadium in Beijing on Friday - considered an auspicious day for the Chinese because of the date 08-08-08.

Athletes from more than 200 countries took part in the opening ceremony. Chinese basketball superstar, 7ft 6in Yao Ming carried the Chinese flag leading the national contingent which is the biggest among the competing nations.

China's 1984 Olympic gold medallist, gymnast Li Ning, had the honour of igniting the Olympic cauldron to close the dazzling ceremony in spectacular fashion by completing a lap of the arena, suspended in mid-air.



> Beijing's big moment

Big Plan for Friendster in the Asia Pacific Region

Forget MySpace and Facebook. In the Asia Pacific region Friendster is the king of social networking sites. Numero uno.

Last Tuesday, Friendster appointed a new CEO - Richard Kimber, the former regional managing director of South Asia at Google.

Along with Kimber, Friendster will get an injection of $20 million in funding from IDG Ventures which, according to the social networking site, will be used to push Friendster's presence in the Asia Pacific region.

In retrospect, for those short on memory, Friendster was once the leading social network everywhere but it slipped up along the way and allowed MySpace, Facebook and some others to steal its thunder.

Dumped mainly by U.S. audience, Friendster had quietly remain active in the Asian region and, according to new chief Kimber, it is growing strongly in Asia-Pacific. So far, Friendster has built up a 75 million user base. That's not bad for a social network site ignored in the West but loved by many in the East.

Now You Can Say They Are Truly Delicious

It's about time, too. Wonder why it took this social bookmarking service so long to make their site "the tastiest bookmarks on the web"? At last, users can truly say that it's NOW Delicious -- and NOT Del.icio.us.

We couldn't remember how to spell the word when it was interspersed with a couple of dots. It was so confusing that a gadzillion of users have misspelt it over the years. Try "de.licio.us" or "deli.cio.us" or "del.licio.us" and everyone ends up banging heads.

Well, it was a clever play of the word but in the end it was an idea that was just not on.

Thank goodness, the delightful folks at Delicious.com (that's in plain English now) have wised up to the situation and they have done a lot of background work to give us a new-look web site and some new features while retaining the uniform blue throughout.

Delicious.com has an updated user interface, overhauled its search engine to make it faster and more powerful, and moved its new infrastructure to a new platform to keep up with traffic growth.

Now it shouldn't be a problem for you to key in the word and get to the site.

Try New Search Engine Cuil for Size

A search result by Cuil

Size does matter for the folks at Cuil.com. If being the "biggest search engine on the planet" with an index of more than 120 billion pages is not cool, then who else is cool?

Cuil (pronounced as COOL) is the new search engine that was launched on July 28 with great fanfare and, according to some pundits, it has the potential to nudge market leader Google down a peg or two. Google has seen off a long line of search challengers and it will be interesting to see whether Cuil will pose a real threat this time.

Cuil is an ancient Celtic word for Knowledge, reflecting the background of co-founder and CEO, Tom Costello, who hails from Drogheda, Ireland.



The other co-founders of this exciting new search engine are former Googlers Anna Patterson and Russell Power of the TeraGoogle Project.

According to Cuil, their goals are to index the whole Web which has been growing exponentially in the last 15 years. Cuil scour the Internet, indexing more pages than anyone else, Google included. They are doing it with a new approach in search, creating an entirely new architecture and breakthrough algorithms.

One good aspect coming out of Cuil is that they don't collect data of users unlike Google.


Of related interest:
Google is Goog but Cuil IS Cool