Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Apple's "1984" commercial which introduced the Macintosh, the computer that would popularize graphical user interfaces, debuted yesterday, 25 years ago during Super Bowl XVIII.
   
   
   
   


2. Three days ago, Senator Obama was inaugurated as President. According to a post on the Google Blog,

   "From President Bush's first inaugural address in 2001 to his second in 2005, the number of inauguration-related searches increased by more than a factor of ten. From 2005 to today's address, the number grew even more."

   Among the interesting search behavior from the day, the overall volume of search traffic from the US dropped significantly while Obama took his oath... we were all glued to our TV sets.
   
   


3. Having trouble remembering to wash your hands? After you see this you won't.
   
   


4. Even Google is not immune to the economy. This quarter they hired 99 new workers, the lowest number of new hires since going public in 2004. They even canceled their highly touted scientific data hosting service before it went live. Things aren't much better for Microsoft who plans to layoff 5000 workers. Despite the bad news, tech salaries actually increased 4.6% last year.
   
   


5. If you received a message via Facebook from your boss saying you were fired, would you believe it? Also, Facebook is now apparently twice the size as MySpace.