Om Malik / GigaOM:
The New iPhone’s New Winner  —  Depending which iPhone rumor you believe, the 3G version of iPhone has either been delayed or already landed on U.S. shores and is on its way to being announced at Apple’s WWDC in San Francisco next month.  The interest in the 3G version of the […]

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life:
Google Gears as the Next Flash  —  When Google Gears was first announced, it was praised as the final nail in the coffin for desktop applications as it now made it possible to take Web applications offline.  However in the past year that Gears has existed, there hasn’t been as much […]

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable:
Google’s New Blue Fav Icon ::  Google Updated Their Favorite Browser Icon  —  Such minor things as changing a favorite icon is noticed immediately by people.  Google, sometime over night, updated their favorite icon to a new icon.  The favorite icon is the little icon that is displayed in […]

John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Mobile Me?  —  Poking around the updated files in 10.5.3, the Russian-language site Deep Apple noticed that iCal’s “Localizable.strings” resource file now contains placeholders for the name “.Mac”, with the following comment: … This is new to 10.5.3; in 10.5.2, the name “.Mac” was hard-coded, not a localizable string.

blog.codingrobots.com:
.Mac re-branding is coming  —  I’m not in Apple rumors business, but… hell… why not?  —  Apple will rename their .Mac service soon.  Hints are everywhere in Mac OS X 10.5.3 update.  —  iCal’s Localizable.strings file contains the following string: … Safari has the following lines in its Localizable.strings:

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land:
Outing Google Merchant Search  —  A reader sent us an example of the new Google Merchant Search live and in the wild.  What’s Google Merchant Search?  After a little poking around, it appears to be a new but unannounced program in beta where people can comparison shop services like […]

Brian Caulfield / Forbes:
New iPhone Is Already Here  —  The launch of the next-generation iPhone promises to be Steve Jobs’ greatest stunt yet.  —  Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ), Jobs’ secretive computer and gadget company, has been quietly positioning millions of units of a mysterious new product …

Kevin Poulsen / Threat Level:
Comcast Hijackers Say They Warned the Company First  —  The computer attackers who took down Comcast’s homepage and webmail service for over five hours Thursday say they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into.  —  In an hour-long telephone conference call with Threat Level …

Kasper Jade / AppleInsider:
Sources: Apple planning biggest back-to-school promo yet  —  Apple as early as Monday is expected to announce its 2008 back-to-school promotion, which will encourage students to purchase a new Mac through some of the biggest incentives in the company’s history, AppleInsider has learned.

MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
Twitter: Don’t blame Ruby, blame Scoble  —  Micro-messaging site Twitter has gone from zero to transparent in a hurry.  That is to say, it has gone from keeping users in the dark during its downtime to explaining the problems it is having in detail.  Tonight, developer Alex Payne wrote a Q […]