Artist T. Whid recently declared Google's 'Live Query' function, 'a net art masterpiece.' Years earlier jodi.org listed their 10 favorite sites as search engine queries for terms like "cccccccccc." From Christophe Bruno's GogolChat to Yoshi Sodeoka Prototype #38, search engines continue to be a source of net art experimentation. And recognized net artists aren't the only ones getting into the act. Some favorite search engine recontextualizations: googlism (http://www.googlism.com/), googlefight (http://www.googlefight.com/), googlewhack (http://www.googlewhack.com/), metaspy (http://www.metaspy.com/) and zeitgeist (http://www.google.com/zeitgeist/).

Where did the idea for a universal archive come from?

Technologists have promised the digital library for decades. In 1945, Vannevar Bush, who was technology adviser to several US presidents, wrote an article in The Atlantic magazine outlining how computers might one day augment libraries. Then in 1960, a young graduate called Ted Nelson got sidetracked from his masters degree in sociology at Harvard into writing text–retrieval software. He published his ideas, and coined the term "hypertext" in 1965. So in many ways the digital library is long overdue.

The Chinese government and associated network authorities are clearly continuing to experiment with different forms of blocking, indicating that -- unlike Saudi Arabia, which appears to have a single, declared method of blocking and a much more constant (and apparently smaller) list of non-sexually-explicit blocked sites -- Chinese network filtering is an important instrument of state Internet policy, and one to which significant technical and human resources continue to be devoted.

1. Get some information and communication under war's censorship
   
2. Do for blogs what the Persian Gulf War did for CNN
   

Just as the 1991 conflict was the testing ground for 24-hour cable channels like CNN more than 10 years ago, a second conflict there may serve as a trial by fire for the news and commentary sites known as blogs.