Barack Obama has made great strides in utilising technology and social media to his advantage. But it seems that in at least one field of Web advertising, John McCain is beating him.

Music piracy is bad, illegal, evil, a crime, yadda yadda yadda. If you listened to the RIAA and organisations like it, that rhetoric is all you’d ever hear. But forget them, what do the artists being pirated think about it?

GM’s Bob Lutz may not come out and say it directly, but his opinion shines through clearly in his response to Toyota’s announcement that a plug-in Toyota Prius will be on the roads at the end of 2009. Both companies are vying for squatters rights on who distributed the first mass-produced rechargeable car, and GM is still smarting from Toyota’s current domination in the hybrid car market.

Toshiba announced technology that could bump standard-definition media to near high-definition quality. Certainly an interesting development to come out of the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray war.

Google announced plans to open the Android Market as its way to distribute applications for Android handsets that are rumored to be released next month. Rather than Apple’s review process required to upload applications, developers can upload their work and make it available for use and ratings by Android users.

A US District Court Judge threw out a case filed in 2006 against the online video site Veoh which has far-reaching implications for online video. At issue was whether or not Veoh violated copyrights by automatically converting videos to Flash, even though the company removed content whenever it received takedown notices as prescribed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Navigon will begin to offer free real-time traffic updates for life on all of its GPS units starting this fall.  The company is looking to shatter the subscription model all together to offer traffic updates in 95 North American markets free of charge, effectively giving some 200 million Americans the opportunity to avoid a traffic situation via their navigation system.

School’s back in session, and it’s perfect timing for a facelift to Ask.com’s popular kid and tween search engine; Ask Kids.  The site has been upgraded and extended with a variety of new features, and now boasts the most graphically vivid display of any search engine portal available. 

Microsoft is actively looking for a way to make itself more relevant in the web world. With that in mind it makes good sense that the company is building a browser single-mindedly focused on satisfying the needs of its end users. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is supposedly ready for the average user to test and it comes with host of compelling new features.

If there were any computers on the planet capable of being invulnerable from a computer virus, it should be the laptops on the space station.  Unfortunately for NASA, it seems that one has managed to sneak onboard the station and plot the overthrow of mankind cause a nuisance for both the astronauts and mission control.

Record companies may be getting increasingly tight-fisted and insistent that their business model is viable, but technology is moving ahead of them at quite a pace. A new venture called Bandstocks is hoping to offer new artists an alternative route to the charts.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the most sought after religious documents in the world, is to be made available to all on the Internet. The process, which will see every one of the thousands of parchment fragments digitally photographed, will take between one and two years.

The Linux Foundation on Wednesday is planning an event geared especially for end users. Lucky participants will get to engage with high-level devs in the Linux community.

The Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that an iPhone ad claiming access to ‘all of the Internet’ is misleading and must not be aired again in the UK. This comes as part of the continuing backlash against Apple since its release of the iPhone 3G.

Klausner Technologies, the so-called inventor and patent-holder for visual voicemail, has launched yet another patent-infringement lawsuit aimed at any and all companies using the technology behind visual voicemail.  Since successful settlements with Apple and AT&T over a similar matter, the inventor has now set its sights on the likes of Google, Verizon, LG, Comverse, Citrix, and Embarq.

With the advent of graphical user interfaces, many people drifted away from the command line, and navigating an operating system morphed into a point and click experience. There are some signs that the command line is making a comeback though, particularly as web mashups become commonplace. Mozilla is driving that trend forward in a big way with its new Ubiquity plug-in for Firefox, which is essentially a command line for the web.

There’s very little as beautiful as witnessing the birth of a newborn (not in the literal sense, as I don’t really have the stomach for it). Maybe the next best thing is learning that HTC is rounding out the Touch line with yet another variation, this particular one having now two (count ‘em, two) keyboards for those who won’t settle for one flavor…they want the whole menu!