Ford Motor Company has announced that it is adding Wi-Fi networks to some of its models in 2010. We’re just curious when the first accident will be caused by this.

It was announced today that Ford will be adding the ability to plug a mobile broadband modem into some of its cars next year, and that this will create an in-car Wi-Fi hotspot.  “While you’re driving to grandma’s house, your spouse can be finishing the holiday shopping and the kids can be chatting with friends and updating their Facebook profiles,” said Mark Fields, Ford president of The Americas. “And you’re not paying for yet another mobile subscription or piece of hardware because Ford will let you use technology you already have.”

While Ford is promoting this as others in the car beyond the driver using it, you know perfectly well what is going to happen.  Some idiot is going to set up his laptop in his passenger seat and go on a site like Facebook or Twitter while trying to drive at the same time.  They’re going to try to read the screen and drive at the same time.  And, in short, someone is going to end up dead.

According to a new study reported by MSNBC, people who send text messages while driving are six times more likely to have an accident.  What will the number be while sending a message to Twitter via a laptop?

This certainly won’t be Ford’s fault as they have no control over what a person does with a car once they buy it, but it is something I wonder if we really need.  There are already ways to have Wi-Fi in your car and no accidents have been caused by it that I know, but once you build something into a vehicle and make it easier to use, all bets are off.

All this being said, I would love to have a car with Wi-Fi in it, but I also know I would be smart enough not to use it while I was behind the wheel.  Can you say the same for other people on the road?

I never knew a laptop could get so dusty.

The past few nights my laptop fan had been running a lot more than usual, and it was also running at the faster speeds meaning that the system was getting way hotter than it should.  I took a look at the bottom side vent holes on Friday night and saw some dust build-up, but nothing horrible.  I decided I would take canned air to it on Saturday before I turned it on.

… yikes.

I was right, it was dust, but the amount of dust was staggering.  I blew on to the actual fan and dust came shooting out of the side vent holes.  I blew out the side vent, and dust came out the fan.  It took several rounds before no dust was coming out, and then I opened my laptop lid and discovered dust had shot up through the keyboard onto the screen.

Again … yikes.

So, just because a laptop fan doesn’t look bad from the outside doesn’t mean it isn’t dusty where it counts on the inside.  Always make sure the computer is off before you do this so the fan is not running at all as it will move with the compressed air hitting it and you don’t want to fight the motor.  After I did this last night, my laptop ran smoothly all night and I didn’t hear the fan kick into high even once, so it was definitely all of the dust that had built up inside of it.

Keeping your computer physically clean is monumentally important for the longevity of your system.  Don’t neglect it, and if you hear it doing something unusual, investigate it!

The OnlineFamily.Norton site has published the results of what children searched for online this year, and it is sobering to say the least.

OnlineFamily.Norton’s list of searches by children is disturbing and only goes to prove that computers should always be in a communal space where parents can monitor the computer usage.  First, the top 100 searches combines for all age groups under 18 years of age:

1. YouTube
2. Google
3. Facebook
4. Sex
5. Porn
6. YouTube.com
7. Yahoo
8. MySpace
9. eBay
10. You Tube
11. Wikipedia
12. Michael Jackson
13. Taylor Swift
14. Gmail
15. Party in the USA
16. Miley Cyrus
17. Club Penguin
18. Miniclip
19. Fred
20. Games
21. Facebook login
22. Google.com
23. Hotmail
24. Lady Gaga
25. Amazon
26. Yahoo Mail
27. Justin Bieber
28. Addicting games
29. Facebook.com
30. Webkinz
31. Yahoo.com
32. Boobs
33. MSN
34. Hannah Montana
35. Dictionary
36. Walmart
37. Selena Gomez
38. Dictionary.com
39. MySpace.com
40. New Moon
41. Runescape
42. Lil Wayne
43. Google Maps
44. Down
45. Google Earth
46. Norton Safety Minder
47. Mapquest
48. Boom Boom Pow
49. Craigslist
50. Twilight
51. Megan Fox
52. Sesame Street
53. Poptropica
54. Target
55. Eminem
56. Music
57. Fireflies
58. Disney Channel
59. You Belong With Me
60. Utube
61. Weather
62. iTunes
63. Beyonce
64. Pokemon
65. Britney Spears
66. Twitter
67. Hotmail.com
68. Demi Lovato
69. Funny
70. Black Eyed Peas
71. One time
72. Cartoon Network
73. Jonas Brothers
74. Halo
75. www.youtube.com
76. Watcha Say
77. Family Guy
78. Taylor Swift You Belong With Me
79. Best Buy
80. Taylor Lautner
81. Rihanna
82. Pussy
83. Gmail.com
84. Lego
85. Gummy Bear Song
86. Thriller
87. You’re a jerk
88. Nigahiga
89. Girls
90. Free online games
91. New Moon trailer
92. Translator
93. Disney
94. Ask.com
95. Paparazzi Lady Gaga
96. Poker Face
97. Chris Brown
98. iPod Touch
99. Photbucket
100. Bing

Sex being in the fourth slot isn’t too surprising with teenagers in the mix, but lets take a look at the top 25 broken down by age group:

Porn was in the fourth position for children under the age of seven, and sex was in the same position for the 8 – 12 age group.  Both terms are in the top 25 for all age groups.  The chart for gender had “sex” as the fourth term for boys and the fifth spot for girls.

I have talked many times on many different blogs about how children should not be allowed to have computers in their bedrooms, and these search statistics just go to prove that fact.  When you have 7-year-olds and younger searching for porn, you know you have a problem.

WordPress, the software that powers the vast majority of blogs in the world, has released version 2.9 of its software.

It’s been six months since WordPress 2.8 was officially released, and now the crew is back with 2.9.  Why is this new version exciting?

• Trash – Deleted posts now go to the “Trash”, meaning you can recover them if you delete one accidentally.
• Image Editing – You can edit images inside of your blog.  Sure it isn’t as fancy as say Photoshop, but it gets the job done.
• Batch Plug-in Updates – YES!  So much nicer than select-update-return to the plugin page-repeat.
• Built-in Video Embeds – Just copy the address of the video, WordPress will handle the rest.
• Many more things!

If you’re using WordPress, get the to the updates!

We had another one of those “real world” moments today that reminds you why you do certain things.

While at my office today, working away without a cloud in the sky and … the power goes out.  Not your normal power blink, but the hour long variety.  Luckily I have my two main computers on a battery back up and it gave me enough time to save all my work, close my programs and shut my computers down in the proper fashion so that there was no damage.

Considering what a vital part of our lives computers have become, at home and at work, an uninterrupted power supply (UPS) should be a part of anyone’s setup.  You don’t need a huge one as all you need is a few minutes of power to get your work saved and the computer shut down in the proper fashion.  If you’re on a laptop,  this is of course not an issue, but if you are using a desktop, this is a must.

As with any major purchase you need to research your options, check reviews and remember, one of the most important aspects, is remember the more you plug in to the device, the faster the battery will drain when you need it.  Make sure that you have at least five minutes of time, so divide the amount of time the device will provide by the number of items you will plug into it and make sure it comes out to at least that long.

Now, what are you waiting for?  Start looking for one before your next power outage!

Google is once again riding to your rescue by helping you clean up your contacts.

It happens to everyone at some point.  That unfortunate muddling of your contacts where you end up getting multiple entries, and then you have to go through trying to merge them and clean it all up.  Well, Google is now going to help you with this by allowing you to do it automatically.

You simply need to log in to your Gmail account, click on “Contacts”, and then click the button that says “Find Duplicates”.

You will then be presented with a list of all the contacts there is more than one entry before and the number of times they appear in your Contacts to the side. By default all of them are checked off for merging, but if there is someone you don’t want to merge you simply uncheck the box. Once you click the box it all happens pretty quickly, and viola, no more duplicates in your contacts!

Seeing as I sync my contacts with my iPod Touch and my BlackBerry, this is just what I needed!

Apparently there is nothing that happens on the Internet that Google doesn’t want some sort of involvement in, and with the announcement of its own URL shortener.

If you are unfamiliar with what a URL shortener does, you can take a Web address, also known as a URL, from this:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/02/25/galaxy.planets.kepler/index.html?eref=rss_tech

into this

http://tinyurl.com/ahjs53

They are an especially handy tool when you are trying to tell someone on a service like Twitter, which restricts your messages to 140 characters, about a Web site they should visit.

Up until now the services have all been services that do nothing but this activity, companies such as Bit.ly, TinyURL and so on, but all of that has now changed with the announcement of Google entering the space.

The new service, named Goo.gl, will work both from the Google Toolbar for the various Web browsers from their FeedBurner service.  Why should you use it over the other services out there?  There are three reasons that Google lists as good reasons to use their service over others:

• Stability: Google’s scalable, multi-datacenter infrastructure provides great uptime and a reliable service to our users.
• Security: As we do with web search, shortened URLs are automatically checked to detect sites that may be malicious and warn users when the short URL resolves to such sites.
• Speed: At Google we like fast products and we’ve worked hard to ensure this service is quick. We’ll continue to iterate and improve the speed of Google Url Shortener.

In our opinion, a URL shortener is a URL shortener, although if a service ever shuts down, the links will go dead.  While Google has killed off some services over the years, there is a good likelihood this one will last for some time.  Seeing as I have a friend that owns his own service, I will probably stick with his, but the Google one sounds like a good alternative to most to me.

The government has inadvertently confirmed the NexusOne, also known as the Google Phone, by showing its FCC approval.

Before any cell phone is released in the United States it must go through approval of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  As the FCC is an open body, all approvals are posted to its Web site, and thanks to this little trick, the FCC approval for the NexusOne, the official name of the Google Phone, was revealed this morning.

The reason this is even remotely interesting is that all of the technical aspects of the phone must be revealed to get the needed approval.  So, what did we learn?  Well thanks to the information about its wireless bands, it looks like it will work on T-Mobile’s 3G network, but not on AT&T’s.  Thanks to its EDGE band, it should work on all carriers, but if you want true wireless high speed, you may be stuck with only T-Mobile.  That is not what a lot of us were hoping for, and it will severely limit how much of a dent this phone will put in the United States cell phone market.

We also learned it will have 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, which has been tricky for some phones to include because of the possibility of network interference.  It will also be sporting the ubiquitous Bluetooth connectivity and a microSD slot for memory expansion, both are pretty much a requirement in this day and age.

Without support for the AT&T 3G network this won’t be the threat to the iPhone we all thought it might be at first, but that won’t be fully decided until it is actually in the hands of consumers and we can see what this thing can do.

As you have undoubtedly heard by now, it appears Google is releasing its own cell phone next month called the Nexus One.  Why is everyone so hyped about this?  What does it mean to the average cell phone user?  Follow along.

Evidence has mounted all weekend to the fact the long rumored Google Phone is finally real and will be called the Nexus One.  While it appears from the photos that have leaked to just be the new HTC Passion that is due out on T-Mobile next month, it’s what under the hood that will make this a totally different beast, as well as how it is being sold.

The Nexus One will be running a copy of the Google Android operating system, which is nothing new since many phones now run it, but what will be different is that it won’t be fractured.  As Android has gone out to the various carriers, they’ve all made little tweaks to it that have caused it to act differently on different handsets, and in turn this has made it hard for application developers to make sure their products work across all the different versions.  So the copy that will run the Nexus One will probably be the truest version of the Android OS we’ve seen yet.

As for the way the phone is being sold, that is where things will get a bit odd.  The rumors currently point to Google selling it themselves via the Web as an unlocked phone.  If you are unfamiliar what this means in the term of phones, unlocked phones are not tied to any one carrier and you can walk in, sign up for their service, get a SIM card from them and your phone will work.  Most phones have a carrier logo on them meaning you can’t take a BlackBerry you buy from Sprint and expect it to work on the T-Mobile network and vice versa.

While companies such as Nokia have sold unlocked phones before, none of them have had the name “Google” attached to them which is going to make this a highly desirable device.

The one problem we may encounter is in the price.  If you have ever tried to buy a cell phone that isn’t attached to a contract, or before your upgrade is allowed, you know that smart phones cost more in the range of $500 – $600.  No matter what Google does, unless they find a way to subsidize this phone, people won’t be dropping that much on it.  One suspicion floating around the Web is that Google will sell it as a lower price with the expectation you will be clicking on ads on the phone.  It’s how they bring you services like Gmail for free, so the company is well versed in the business model.  Will it be enough to make the phone affordable?  Only time will tell.

Quite possibly the Nexus One could end up being a game changer for the cell phone industry.  A highly desirable phone not tied to any one carrier will make them compete for your business.  I could easily see the carriers running “Nexus Pricing Specials” where they try to out do each other to woo the most Nexus users to their network.  That is just my theory at this point, but if the phone takes off like I suspect it will, I can really imagine it happening.

My only regret is I got a new BlackBerry Tour in early August, but boy do I want to drool on a Nexus One.

[photo credit Cory O’Brien]

Social media can be a wonderful tool when used correctly, but then someone has to come along with an idea that is so outrageously silly that you have to wonder if we have all lost our minds.

Blippy is a new service currently in private beta that allows you to enter your credit card number and then every time you use that card it shares a message with your friends about where you used your card and how much you spent.  With services such as Amazon, iTunes and Zappos, it will even tell them what exactly you bought.  Your friends can then leave you comments about your purchases.

… What sort of illicit drugs were the people behind this site taking when they came up with this concept?

Social media, as we are told ad nauseam, is all about sharing information with one another and having conversations.  Fine, no problem with that.  However, the idea of letting a third-party service into my wallet, and then allowing the information from that sharing to go out even further to my friends is just beyond the scope of over sharing.

And what about the day you forget your card information and you accidentally purchase something you really don’t want the world to see?  MG Siegler of TechCrunch interviewed Blippy founder Philip Kaplan about the service, and Mr. Kaplan even suggested you have a “social” credit card and a “private” credit card.  You would only use the social card when you wanted your friends to see what you were buying, and you use your private card, which is not connected to Blippy, when you buy things you don’t want to share.  I have a better idea, how about Blippy simply doesn’t exist?

It’s easy to get caught up in all of the hyperbole that surrounds social media, and we only write up this story because we want to make sure you don’t get involved with sites such as this.  It looks all shiny and exciting, but this is simply a bad idea from the ground up.  There are zero redeeming qualities to this site.  Period.  My good friend Steven Hodson wrote up similar views over at Shooting at Bubbles, and you can hear Steven and I discuss it on the CobWEBs podcast from last night.  (warning, the podcast has rough language)

Just say no to services like this folks, it is just a bad idea no matter how you look at it.