1. From Myspace.com – about 181,000,000

2. From americanidol.com – about 744,000

3. From AskMen.com – about 159,000

4. From Fox.com – about 83,300

5. From FoxSports.com – about 594,000

6. From GameSpy.com – about 824,000

7. From Hulu.com – about 225,000

8. From DrownedInSound.com – about 235,000

9. From PhotoBucket.com – about 77,500,000

10. From RottenTomatoes.com – about 3,990,000

11. From Scout.com – about 978,000

12. From SpringWidgets.com – about 45,200

13. From WhatIfSports.com – about 40,300

14. From WSJ.com (The Wall Street Journal) – about 939,000

15. From Sky.com (Sky News) – about 1,250,000

16. From TheSun.co.uk – about 1,120,000

17. From TimesOnline.co.uk – about 1,540,000

18. From NYPost.com (The New York Post) – about 457,000

19. From MarketWatch.com – about 1,140,000

20. From Barrons.com – about 411,000

21. From NationalGeographic.com – about 171,000

And that’s just a small sampling of the amount of News Corp content indexed in Google.

Imagine if or when all those high profile sites and content suddenly disappears from Google. Millions of people will be bewildered that they can no longer find anything from MySpace, the Wall Street Journal, Fox Sports, Sky News, National Geographic, the New York Post, PhotoBucket, Hulu, etc., etc. Users will have to either:

A. Stay loyal to Google and no longer be able to easily find the content they once happily consumed.

B. Move over to an alternate search engine, like Bing.com (who would no doubt jump at the chance to exclusively serve them that content in exchange for millions of new users and ad revenue).

C. Pay News Corp a small subscription or user fees to get the content they crave.

Many will pay, which will offset the lost ad revenue News Corp properties gained from the free google traffic. But most will move over to Bing.com where they’ll still be able to get most of, or all of what they got from Google.

How does Murdoch and News Corp benefit? By shoving aside the biggest search engine on the web, he now eliminates the competition for views of his content for the other search players. They now have a very compelling reason to actually pay to index News Corp content because Murdoch is offering them a chunk of the market share once dominated by Google. Murdoch makes the cash by selling that market share, and so does the new search engine that gets exclusive access to something they can offer current and new users who are loyal to News Corp brands, without the competition from Google.

The implications of the above are staggering, but what’s even more staggering is what Jason Calacanis talks about in the video below. Will other large content and media publishers follow suit?

Is this the beginning of an upset in the balance of power in search?

Murdoch doesn’t care about bloggers ranting that he may or may not be an idiot. He doesn’t care that by removing his content from Google will make way for their content to show higher in search results. He doesn’t care. He has the leverage to sell something that was once free because he’s now creating his own demand and fulfilling that demand at the same time. He’s a business man. Most bloggers are not.

List of News Corp web properties from Wikipedia.org

Pieces of content in Google – Google.com

Thanks Mashable!

2. Sign out of Twitter’s site using the ‘Sign out’ link on the upper right hand corner of the page. See this article at PCWorld for the the detailed reasons why.

In short, for your convenience, Twitter lets you stay signed in to your account by asking you to check a little box that says ‘Remember me,’ and when you check that box, the site places what’s called a Session Cookie on your computer. That Session Cookie contains your login info so the next time you go to Twitter’s site, it logs you in automatically.

If that cookie is present, and there’s malware or a worm on your computer that ended up there from a maliscious link you clicked on, the scammers don’t even need your username and password to access your Twitter account. The worm simply logs in with the Session Cookie.

Logging out of Twitter, clearing all cookies then not accepting the ‘Remember me’ thing whenever you log back in keeps that cookie off your computer. Sure, it’s inconvenient to have to type your username and password every time you log into the site, but it’s just a bit more inconvenient to have to clean up the mess after your account has been hacked.

3. Never use the same password and/or email address on Twitter (Or Facebook for that matter) as you use for things like your online banking, online credit card management, PayPal account, or any other important personal accounts.

Scammers know that most people are careless and use the same email address, username and passwords for a lot of their accounts. So if they get access to your log-in info on one account, they may try logging in to your other accounts as well.

USE DIFFERENT LOGIN INFO FOR ALL YOUR ACCOUNTS, NO MATTER HOW INCONVENIENT IT MAY BE.

4. Always use a good antivirus scanner on your computer and make sure it’s always up to date. Some good ones are (Google them) Norton, McAfee, AVG, NOD32 or Avast for Windows. ClamXav or Sophos for Mac OS X and ClamAV and Firestarter firewall for most flavors of Linux, like Ubuntu, Debian, Kubuntu, etc.

Don’t let anyone tell you that if you have a Mac or Linux based computer you don’t need antivirus or a firewall. No, those systems are not as likely to become infected by malware, but when they are, you still need an antivirus software. Using Microsoft Office on your Mac? You’re vulnerable.

5. Even though you now have antivirus and a firewall installed, they may not catch or clean up everything lurking on your hard drive. It’s a good idea to install additional software that scans your computer for old files or bits and pieces of things left behind that may or not be maliscious or may just be slowing down your machine.

I recommend CCleaner and Spybot search and destroy. Run them often and you’ll be surprised (and maybe even a little horrified) at what those programs will find and get rid of for you, especially the first time you run them. Your computer may run noticably faster and they should help to free up a good chunk of space as well.

6. And most importantly, surf responsibly. Stay away from crap like Limewire, Facebook games, anything that wants you to install software on your computer or plugins in your browser, movies that say you need codecs or a special player to view them, toolbars, etc. Most or all of those are not needed and they simply want to get their software on your machine. They may just want to show you ads but many are more sinister and work in the background without you even knowing what’s going on until it’s too late. And by too late, I mean things like, your bank account has been cleaned out, your identity stolen, huge charges on your credit cards or at best, your reputation on Twitter or Facebook irrepairably damaged.

The above post was not meant to be a comprehensive guide to protecting yourself online, but it’s a good place to start. If you have suggestions for anything I may have left out, please leave them in the comments below.

Be safe.

Picture © Westley Hargraves/Barcroft Media via The Telegraph.

Digg Trends is a new feature on Digg that highlights active upcoming stories that haven’t yet hit the homepage. The concept is simple: stories that have received a lot of activity in a short period of time (Diggs, comments, etc.) will now appear in a special section at the top of the homepage for ten minutes. You can then Digg or bury the story, and depending on your vote recorded within those ten minutes, the story will either become popular or not. Here’s what it looks like in action:

You can follow Digg Trends on Twitter by following @digg_trends.

Digg founder Kevin Rose and his crew has been doing a video show for quite some time and in addition to the new trends service, they’ve also set up a new area of the site called DiggTV that you can access at tv.digg.com

The new Digg TV channel will include:

Diggnation: Hosted by Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose, Diggnation is a beer-fueled tech/web culture show dedicated to the discussion of the top stories on Digg, whether it’s the latest flame wars or thoughts on time travel.

The Digg Reel: Host Andrew Bancroft features the funniest, coolest, & most controversial Digg videos of the week.

Digg Dialogg: You ask, we listen. Submit questions to fascinating luminaries like Matt Damon, Trent Reznor, Sir Richard Branson and we ask the top ones during the video interview.

Lynn has an extremely informative link building series happening right now and if you want to learn about online marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Lynn is good people who practices what she preaches on a daily basis.

On October 8th, ’09, NASA ‘bombed’ the bottom of a permanently shadowed crater near a polar region of the moon by crashing part of a rocket into it. That crash sent up clouds of dust, rock, and whatever else that had been under the dust for billions of years. The orbiter still in the sky over the impact zone then analyzed the stuff that was ejected by the crash and sent the data back to earth.

After crunching all that data, NASA scientists today announced their findings:

“We are ecstatic,” said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “Multiple lines of evidence show water was present in both the high angle vapor plume and the ejecta curtain created by the LCROSS Centaur impact. The concentration and distribution of water and other substances requires further analysis, but it is safe to say Cabeus holds water.”

Source: NASA.

The visible camera image showing the ejecta plume at about 20 seconds after impact. Credit: NASA

Incredibly realistic chocolate brownie pie candle from SoyCandleMart.com

Would you believe that scrumptious looking chocolate brownie pie pictured above is actually a scented candle with three wicks? I can’t imagine the time and work that goes into making these candles look so realistic. And they’re also scented so they smell like whatever flavor of pie they’re made to look like. Amazing.

Our Candles are made with the benefits of soy wax, paraffin and gel. Each is individually hand made with the greatest of attention to details!. We ran out of words to describe our fruit pie candles, so we had to make new words. Have you ever smelled apple candles or blueberry candles? You can almost taste the warm apples and cinnamon melting in your mouth, just like homemade apple pie, with our handcrafted apple pie candles.

Valerie has dozens of other flavors of pie shaped candles over at her website, Soy Candle Mart, and they’re making me hungry, especially the cherry cheesecake one!