This year, we've seen a lot of crazy things. But what's been popular though (Vanessa Ann Hudgens photos aside)? Yahoo! can probably answer that with their annual "Top Trends in Search" list for 2007.

While there are a lot of keywords being searched this year, what concerns us is the list of top 10 searches in technology. Who're the movers and shakers? You can probably guess already, but read more to see the full list!

The publicity on the whole Apple's stock option practices fiasco still hasn't died down, and now Apple CEO Steve Jobs is now fast becoming the target for further investigation. Now the question is, will Steve Jobs be graduating from the Apple board and walking down the hall of shame?

In previous interviews with Jobs, he claims that he doesn't know nor understand anything about the accounting implications. But IF the investigation finds that Jobs knew more about the company's practices than he's letting on, particularly about the accounting, recording, and reporting of grants, there's gotta be somebody to take his place right?

So who would be the possible replacements for Jobs? Over at AAPL, they have posted up a list of possible candidates to take the CEO position and they are:

• Phil Schiller - long-time head of global product marketing. He has been with the company since 1997 and has been critical in most product launches.
• Tim Cook - The company's COO, has had a long career at IBM and heads the Mac division.
• Tony Fedell - One of the fathers of the iPod; has an engineering background and is a former executive at Philips Electronics.
• William Campbell - One of Apple's leading directors. He has run a large public software company, Intuit.
• Jerome York - Although he is over 70, York has experience operating troubled companies. He was CFO of IBM and a member of that company's board. He is also on the GM board.
• Jim Allchin - Head of platforms and services at Microsoft, and plans to retire with the the launch of Vista. Also has an engineering background.
• Sue Decker - The highly regarded CFO of Yahoo! She has a Wall St. background and now runs several key divisions at Yahoo!
• John Thompson - The highly-regarded CEO of Symantec, has a background in running a large software company and is well liked on Wall Street.

How about you, who do you think would be the best replacement for Steve Jobs?

fcodc of Mac Recon made an interesting point in his blog about why he is going to stop using Apple's .Mac service. He cites the fact that the features that Apple gives you through the .Mac account are now being offered by other people, sometime at no cost. Plus there seems to be no new features for the .Mac in the coming weeks and months. In his post, he also gives some examples of these features that have alternatives.

• Mail - Gmail, gives you more that 2GB of FREE space (with POP3 access)
• iDisk - using software like gDisk you can store apps and the like in you gmail account
• Backup - there are free alternatives such a Silverkeeper
• Homepage - Apple is trying to sell people iWeb, which can upload your site anywhere, and  now, you can get a free web page from Google (not to mention that web space is cheap, much cheaper than that of .Mac's)
• Groups - Both Yahoo and Google have them

He also cites that Apple still has not delivered the .Mac exclusive widgets they promised with the release of Tiger. That's his argument for leaving, frankly, I've thought the same thing ever since I saw the price which is not worth it, in my book. Feel free to speak out loud through your comments.

Our article, "The Foundations of Fortress iTunes", covered what the entertainment industry sees as the challengers to Apple's dominance in the digital media download market: SpiralFrog, Zune, PSP and Connect, MP3 cell phones, MySpace and MTV Urge. We forgot to include one possible candidate: Sirius. As in the satellite radio. And just like the other upstars we covered in Part 1, a Wired.com reporter speculated that Sirius is looking like an assault on Fortress iTunes, too.

Remember Sirius' Stiletto 100 portable satellite radio and MP3 player that we featured last month? The company also announced an online subscription - "satellite-free" - service called Sirius Internet Radio (SIR). As mentioned in Part 1, iPod and iTunes were the perfect partners to capture an entire market for Apple. Yeah, well SIR isn't iTunes. The latter is an online media store. SIR's an internet radio service that streams CD-quality music and selected talk channels.

Enter Yahoo! Music, one of the partners of Stiletto's manufacturer, Zing. Stiletto 100 will reportedly work in conjunction with SIR and Yahoo! Music so that listeners can choose to purchase-download the song they're listening to. As announced by Bob Law, senior VP of Sirius, "The market for digital audio on-the-go is exploding. We are working with Zing to expand the availability of Sirius content on new platforms and bring the best in satellite radio programming to an increasingly mobile audience."

In other words, they're making Sirius and the Stiletto into an iTunes-iPod teamup of sorts.


And there's more after the jump: guess where the CEO of the Stiletto's manufacturer worked before.

With all the news of Dell laptops blowing up, you can't help but wonder if Dell is going to get back up from all the problems it's facing this year.

Well, this isn't the news that's going to turn the tide of bad press they're getting. In fact, it doesn't look good for Dell on both the laptop AND desktop side of the business.

In an Associated Press review on Yahoo by Robert Weston, the Mac Pro defeated a Dell desktop PC with similar specs on both price and functionality.

According to the review, there is more than a $900 difference between a low-end Mac Pro and a Dell Precision 490 with identical configurations, and the difference in price gets even better for Apple with more upgrades.

Borrowing a high-end Mac Pro with a pair of 3 gigahertz processors, an Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 graphics card with 512 megabytes of video memory and four 500 gig hard drives and 4 gigs of system memory, Weston compared the Mac Pro setup to a Dell Precision 690 with the same specs. The result? $7449 vs $8534 in Apple's favor.

Not only that, but there is a large amount of easy customizability. As Weston notes, "It comes with two optical drive bays, four PCI Express expansion slots and four hard drive bays. The computer also can handle up to 16 gigabytes of system memory." The changing of hard drives is also a breeze with the Mac Pro - just pull out a tray, take out one drive, stick another one in, and push it back! No cables and a ton of ports for different uses makes it versatile, with the ease of use only making it more enticing.

Dell has a lot of catching up to do, or they may just get completely decimated by the competition. First, they have to stop their products from blowing up, then they have improve their tech and their pricing scheme. Then they have to pray for a bigger miracle. Let's hope something good happens for Dell soon, before the final nail gets driven into their coffin.

Speaking of nails and coffins... You may want to know that the Mac Pro can just as easily run Windows as a Mac OS. Another point to Apple.

We all know that most of us keep at least two different email accounts - one for work and one for personal use, then there's others who also keep emails for groups, community newsletters, website, for stalking, and so on and so forth. We also all know how tedious it can be to have to log in to each of these accounts separately. That was then. Now, say hello to the ability to access all your mail, all at once.

This is made possible by, first and foremost, having the WebMail extension installed in your system. This extension integrates website-based email accounts into Mozilla Thunderbird, and allows Thunderbird to download and to send emails using the website. The extension is known to be slick, as itÂ?s just a case of downloading the core package plus the package for the particular service youÂ?re using, installing them, restarting Thunderbird, and then setting up the account.

To get started, you will need to install WebMail first and at least one of its optional components. Once WebMail is up and running, the next thing to check for is if the the status of the enabled servers are "running". This can be viewed in the Options menu. This is also the menu that should display the list of supported domains.

From there, you can move to creating a POP account by going to the main menu and opting to create a new account. You may then set your name and email address in the Identity Page. Then, just enter the appropriate server information and the domain name, follow the instructions until you reach "Finish", and you're all set!

Support is currently available for Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail, Libero, Lycos, AOL and Mail.com accounts.

Apple's MacBook was put to the test by Yahoo! Finance's Robert Weston, and it's passed with flying colors. He's found that it looks sleek, runs very fast and should give manufacturers of Windows- based notebooks cause for concern.

Weston loved the MacBook's versatility. With extra software, it can of course run Windows and OS X - and with Parallels it can even switch between them at the press of a button. The 'BlackBook' he tested was a speed demon, too (when running software optimized for OS X it "felt significantly speedier than the PowerPC-based system it replaced", although older software designed for PowerPC Macs was relatively slower).  He also thought its dimensions were well-nigh perfect; the MacBook is only over an inch thick, a whopping 20 percent thinner than the iBook it replaces.

Weston also praised the laptop's display (the first glossy display on any consumer laptop from Apple), the machine's ability to display music, photos and movies when connected to regular TVs, and the sensitivity of the Wi-Fi antenna.

Just about the only things Weston didn't like were the MacBook's heft (it's 5.2 pounds, a little heavier than he'd like) and the lack of a dedicated graphics card for the gamers. But that didn't appear to give him pause at all; he says, "Overall, the MacBook is a well-priced laptop that fits the needs of most consumers... Combine [its] ability to run Windows at native speed with Apple's renowned knack for elegant hardware and software, and it's a formula that should give other PC makers nightmares."

Sounds good enough for me - although I might just wait until Apple solves the discoloration problem first...

Yahoo! - which has been accused by Mac users as being totally PC-centric with its Ajax-enabled home page, viewable only by Internet Explorer 6.0 and Firefox 1.5 but not Safari - has updated its YM for Mac OS to Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 Beta 1. The YM for Mac has a "new look and feel for OS X" and features, Avatars, sounds, and display images. Coming with stealth settings, conferencing, and "New IM" indicator in the OS X dock, 3.0 beta 1 also promises to bring IM with friends that use Windows Live (MSN) Messenger. Max OS X 10.3.9 or later is needed to run the latest YM update. We guess Yahoo! finally realized its better to build bridges than burn them!

Remember those cute and overachieving bunnies tagged as the Nabaztag Bunny? In case you aren't familiar with it, this cutesy contraption has been tirelessly packaged as the world's first intelligent bunny which can teach you tai chi, read your e-mail, report the weather or stock market, pull RSS feeds and tell you the time.

Nabaztag can move his ears, play music, talk and whistle, and his body can show off hundreds of colors and special patterns of light, and could also "marry" other Nabaztag bunnies, so don't be too possessive.

With this cutesy thingamajig in mind, GravityGirl decided to make her first Dashboard Widget for Tiger 10.4.x. The product of her sweat and hardwork is the Nabaztag Dashboard Widget which would allow you to control your very own Nabaztag wi-fi bunny, or that of someone else if they give you their API serial number and Token.

According to her, "the first release (v1.0) appears to be stable, but some inconsistencies have been found when an invalid serial or token are used." Here are the list of controls and options.

• controls: on the front of the widget are the ear buttons, a text-to-speech window, and a "go" button to send your text

• on the back of the widget, you will need to enter your serial number and your token. You have the options to control:
• refresh: the amount of time between when it automatically checks your nabaztag to see if someone has moved its ears
• voice: your choice of two French and six English speaking voices.
• ear buttons: the transparency level of the ear buttons. They will still work when fully transparent, they are just not easy to find.
  

She also wants to give credit to Nyami's Widget, apparently this is where she got the idea to make this one. She borrowed the images from Nyami's widget, but had to re-code everything except the regexp statements "because Apple's dashboard uses different calls than the yahoo engine."

Download: [Nabaztag Dashboard Widget v1.0]

YahooÂ?s own Graded Browser Support may have rated Apple's Safari "an A-graded browser" for achieving the highest level of support with the Yahoo interface library. But  the company released a preview of its Ajax-enabled home page only for Internet Explorer 6.0 and Firefox 1.5. Not surprisingly, Yahoo's act was met with bristling hostility from Apple fans. One developer  in particular described it as "highly disappointing and disillusioning" and "just plain wrong."

"The only logic one can use to justify such a move is based on a totally PC-centric viewpoint, which argues that only Windows users are worth troubling with, since they comprise the vast majority of potential viewers," said Leland Scot in an article on the topic posted on Musings from Mars. "But this is precisely the viewpoint that must cease if Web 2.0 is to become the fertile melting ground for truly cross-platform interdependence that it wants to be. ItÂ?s simply not the viewpoint of any company that really cares about Berners-LeeÂ?s vision or about the millions of users on platforms other than the virus- and malware-riddled mess that is Microsoft Windows today."

By the way Sir Timothy "Tim" John Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium once said "Anyone who slaps a Â?this page is best viewed with Browser XÂ? label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.Â?

Furthermore, Scot said Web 2.0 sites "should be built to open standards, and any catering to specific browser extensions should be avoided. If proprietary extensions are utilized, they should have no effect on the siteÂ?s core functionality, and should not be even noticed by users of other browsers. For example, IÂ?ve employed a harmless extension to the HTML text input field that Apple developed in order to beautify search forms in Safari. ItÂ?s nice for Safari users, but has no impact on IE users or on Firefox users on any platform."

Looks like Yahoo stirred a hornets nest and the pissed hornets are not holding back on the sting!