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Flickr, Yahoo's popular photo sharing site, just released a nice update of its mobile site. If you have an Android phone or an iPhone (updated to the 3.0 firmware), you can now see images that were taken close to your current location. The new mobile site makes good use of some of the new APIs in the iPhone 3.0 update. Specifically, it looks like Flickr's mobile site now hooks into Apple's Core Location service right from Safari. Typically, developers could only access this from their own, native apps, but now, web apps are also able to access location data.

As we reported earlier this week, the retrial of Jammie Thomas-Rasset, who was accused of illegally sharing 24 songs on Kazaa, was about to come to an end this week. In an earlier trial, Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay $220,000 to the music companies, but today, a different judge and a different jury came back with a new verdict that was surely not what Thomas-Rasset was looking for. A federal jury, clearly unconvinced by Thomas-Rasset's defense, awarded the recording companies $1.92 million - which comes out to $80,0000 per shared song.

Wikipedia, the free web-based encyclopedia used worldwide, will be adding video to their online repository in a matter of months. When the new system launches, you'll find a new button labeled "Add Media" on Wikipedia articles. Upon clicking this, you'll be prompted to search through three online repositories for relevant videos which can be added to the article. You can even select particular portions of the video instead of embedding the entire clip.

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These are glorious days for networking. The social Web is richer and wider than ever before, and it offers a myriad of services and platforms to help us connect with each other, share our likes and dislikes, etc. Some people even say that too many such services exist, that many of them will plunge in dot-com bubble-like style.

Tonight, the bored and lonely segment of Twitter users banded together to push three sexy, raunchy, and totally inappropriate terms into the trending topics leaderboard.

Within minutes (as far as we could tell), both terms were removed from the list on the web interface at Twitter.com. However, they still showed up on third party services such as TwitScoop and Hashtags.org. We feel this blog's cachet and provenance do not allow for the repetition of such phrases, so you'll have to check out the screen shots below and gasp in mock horror along with us.

As of tonight, Facebook has launched a new beta version of the site in Persian, in order to further enable the flood of news that has poured out of Iran in the wake of that country's contested election last week.

As Twitter became the star platform for Iranians to convey breaking news from on the ground, Facebook has been quiet by comparison. Now, by releasing an edition in the official language of Iran (also colloquially called Farsi), its attempting to capture some of the revolutionary self-expression that has thus far passed it by.

Today's 1.3 release of IBM's free Lotus Symphony productivity suite may not be the most innovative of improvements, but it's a product that addresses core needs of the enterprise as it exists today.

The flagship addition is full support for importing Microsoft Office 2007 documents. Other new features include the ability to drag-and-drop plug-ins, and the export of the files you've imported to either PDF or ODF.

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.

Fear of VCs is a common problem for first time entrepreneurs. It is a natural fear. You are going to be negotiating with somebody who is older, richer, and way more experienced in this than you are. You have heard a bunch of horror stories. They have the one thing you need to turn your dream into reality.

But chill out. Read this eight-step guide, and keep going.

Don't you hate it when someone attractive asks you for an imaginary light, and your iPhone Zippo crashes? ZenDesk is offering a new embeddable drop box solution to give iPhone and Android developers customer support directly in their apps. With the current influx of application development, and the need to serve international mobile audiences, subscription-based service ZenDesk is providing another pipeline for company support. And the demand it certainly there as support sites like JustAnswer and FixYa move increasingly into servicing users in the mobile space.

Real-time search outfit OneRiot announced today some updates to their search algorithm, which parses data in real-time social streams to index and rank links.

Although results based on freshness alone are available through the search engine's real-time firehose setting, the results returned through the Pulse Rank setting are weighted based on several factors that riff off similar considerations for the static web and Google's PageRank system.