Yahoo has gone open source, in a way. The brain trust behind the second biggest search engine in the world announced the creation of BOSS, a service that will allow perspective search moguls to roll their own search engine. BOSS users will able to perform a wide range of functions, from re-ranking search results to removing all traces of the distinctive Yahoo logo. Yahoo will eventually allow BOSS users to advertise their specialized engines on the Yahoo site. At press time, Yahoo’s web, images, and news engines are available for tinkering, with video search coming soon.

Anyone who has used the Internet in the past ten years should be familiar with the concept of “mirrors” - one website located on several different and independent servers. Doing this with blogs, however, can be the very definition of “headache inducing.” Copying and re-copying the same data on several different platforms is not the easiest thing in the world to do. This is where switchAbit comes in. SwitchAbit takes away the frustration of blog mirroring by automating the entire process. Copying your WordPress blog into your Facebook account is as easy as logging into a website. While the service is still working through a few bugs, the switchAbit team promises that everything will operational in the first stable.

Hot water is for squares, man! Well, not really, but it isn’t a necessity when washing your clothing. According to the lovely people at Seventh Generation, ninety percent of all the energy used in one load of laundry goes to heating up the water. If facts such as that bother you but still aren’t keen on giving your boxer shorts an ice bath, have no fear. They are here to help. All you have to do is take their “cold water” pledge and you get a copy of their book Naturally Clean: The Seventh Generation Guide to Safe and Healthy, Non-Toxic Cleaning absolutely free. Free reading material telling you how to save both money and the environment… sounds great to me.

Believe it or not, your cell phone can do more that take calls, send text messages, check emails, download music, and surf the web. It can now also record and stream video online. Qik is a handy little service that turns your average looking Windows or Symbian-based cell phone in miniature HandyCam. Just connect using your cell number and within seconds, you will be recording and streaming video for the world to see. The video output will then be available from either the Qik website or from previous Free Line all-star PicLens. A bit of warning though: Qik can eat up its fair share of bandwidth. So unless you subscribe to unlimited data plan, I’d think twice before starting production on the cell phone remake of Gone With the Wind.

To finish up the week, we have Plurk. Now on the surface, Plurk seems to be just another Twitter clone. Look closely, however, and you will see that it is much, much more. Utilizing a horizontal layout and cute graphics, Plurk is perfect someone who enjoys microblogging, but wishes to have a little whimsical fun while doing it. And honestly, everyone needs a little fun in their lives, even those towing the Free Line.

The founder of Microsoft is stepping down today. That’s right- Bill Gates is retiring from Microsoft. According to Gates, he going to use his newly accquired “free time” to peruse his philanthropic interests. Love him or hate him, he completely revolutionized computing with his products. From DOS to Windows and from QuickBasic to Visual Studio, he’ll leave a lasting footprint on almost any computer in the world.

To commemorate the event, we’ve got a few links celebrating the big man’s leave of absence. Here’s a video from Wired, mashing up his greatest hits. And to show he has a sense of humor, here’s a video spoof starring the man himself, making fun of his last day in Microsoft.

Now that Bill Gates has officially “left the building,” who will step in to take his place? And in what direction will he or she steer Microsoft?  ZDNet does some quick speculation, and tells us that two people will replace Bill Gates- Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundy. As of yet it is uncertain as to the future of Microsoft, but lets hope things get better with time.

Of course, one of the biggest thorn’s in Microsoft’s side the last few years has been the free Operating System, Linux. Ubuntu has been making great strides, taking a once archiac and unfriendly architecture and making it sing. There is even a video comparing Vista and Linux, with the special effects of both taking center stage.

Just because Bill Gates is going away doesn’t mean that Microsoft will stop being a player in the tech sector. We’ve talked about Powerset off and on here at the Freeline. It’s the next big thing in search engines, allowing for an almost natural language search. Some people are even speculating that it might topple Google, once it works out all the kinks. It looks like Microsoft has been paying attention to all the buzz as well - Redmond has officially bought up Powerset. Many analysts predict that Microsoft will use the new technology to compete against Google. The deal should be completed by the end of the year.

Well, that’s it for today. So long Bill Gates, and good luck in the future!

Mint has co-branded a website for Motley Fool Users. This is a great boon for Mint, and will only get better in the near future, since it plans on doing more partnerships like this one soon.

Adobe started public trials for ad-supported subscriptions to popular television shows, using Adobe’s new Media Player.

Some of the more popular Linux distros have strange names, like Ubuntu and Mandriva and Red Hat, and this article clears up any confusion over what exactly Slackware or Freespire means.

ImageShack will download any torrent file of your choice to their servers and then allow you to download it to your hard drive in one big chunk rather than using Torrent technology. It’s completely free to use, the only limitation is you 15gb of space per month.

Powerset launches in the next few weeks and will offer a  natural language search, rather than keyword based searching. Currently it only uses Wikipedia and Freebase, but expect it to expand in time.

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Mint, 这个新的在线理财软件，正在开始与Motley Fool展开合做，并且联合建立 了一个新的网站。这对Mint来说是一个很好的机遇，而这种合作也只会使这个免费的服务变得更加完善。

Adobe目前正打算进军网络视频市场， 他们首先提供的是对热门电视节目的免费订阅。目前电视节目只来自于少数的几个电视台如CBS和Viacom，不过内容会逐渐丰富起来。另外你需要通过Adobe的媒体播放器来观看节目。

我们今天为Linux粉丝准备了一片文章介绍品种丰富的不同版本的Linux名字，和这些不同的版本是如何被命名的。那些热门的Linux版本的名字都很特别，比如Ubuntu，Debian，和红帽，而这篇文章解释了这些名字的寓意，你不会在为这些名字困扰了。

对于那些喜欢BT下载的人来说你可能觉得为了下载一个大文件而花上4天的时间把电脑搁置一旁很不方便，ImageShack可能会解决你的问题。ImageShack会把BT文件下载到他们的服务器，然后你就可以从服务器上整个把文件下载下来而不是使用BT的方式。你可以免费使用它，而每个用户每月有15个G的限额。我不确定它们如何解决盗版CD和DVD的问题却一直运营着，但是这个想法很有创意。

最后，Powerset将在几个星期后发布，并且宣称会提供一种革命性的替代现有的搜索方式。它将使用自然语言搜索技术，而不是关键字搜索，而前者通常会带来更精准的搜索结果。目前它只使用Wikipedia和Freebase，不过按照预期其它的自然语言支持将及时跟进。

Even though Time Warner has put AOL up for sale it looks like the web giant still has some power left in its punch. It announced the acquisition of Bebo, the United Kingdom’s premier Social Network, for a reported $850 million in cash. This will allow AOL to tap Bebo’s 40 million customers for money using web advertisement, a common tactic these days for web companies.

Rumors are flying that Yahoo plans on finally adding video to Flickr in the next three weeks. In order to compete in the very busy and very flooded web video battle field Flickr has been taking it’s time, planning on how to make their contribution unique and different from the rest. It seems like some design decisions have finally been made, and we should expect an announcement saying exactly what it’s going to offer users sometime later this week.

Evernote plans on taking all the data in your life and stores it in an online library, making it easy to search and retrieve every aspect of your existence with a click of the mouse. No matter how trivial or how important, Evernote wants to store it all, making their services like a backup for your own brain, stored conveniently on the web.

The executives from both Microsoft and Yahoo finally met last Monday to discuss the Microsoft’s bid on Yahoo. No banker’s attended the meeting, and raising of the original offer was not discussed. The whole plan of the meeting was to reason with Yahoo, to accept the current bid it had rejected. It seems like the meeting did not work, and Yahoo is still shopping around for ways to get around the Microsoft bid.

FlickrVision is a really addicting, free web application that gives you a map and image of the latest Flickr uploads in real time. Each second the page reloads, showing you where in the world the picture was uploaded and by who. Lots of fun, and completely free!

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首先，尽管美国在线已经挂牌出售，不过这个网络巨人依然存有自己的影响力。他刚刚宣布购买了Bebo，这个英国最大的社交网络，而且8亿5千万元全部为现金支付。这项交易将使AOL迅速获得Bebo的4000万用户以投放它的广告。

最近有消息说Yahoo将在三周之后为美国领先的图片共享网站Flickr，加入视频功能。为了和大量的视频网站竞争，Flickr花了很长的时间去考虑如何使他们的服务变得与众不同。显然的，一些设计上的问题已经被敲定，我们也应该期待Flickr将在下周给我带来什么样新鲜的东西。

另外有消息说，Flickr视觉足以使人上瘾。这个免费的网络程序会实时更新被最新上传的图片。这个页面大约每秒会刷新一次，并显示出最新被上传的相片和图片的作者。非常有趣，而且完全免费！

Evernote希望能记录你一生所有的信息并储存到网上，并它能把追溯你过去故事变得和轻点鼠标一样简单。无论事情的大小，Evernote都想把它记录下来，就好像对大脑的备份。你可以上传相片，文字，笔记或者更多，你需要做的只是把evernote发到你的特定邮箱里面去，并且通过视觉识别系统你的全部东西都可以被搜索到，甚至是照片上的手写笔记。目前他正在内测阶段，不如点击下面的链接注册一下。和往常一样，你需要每天在2.0分钟内了解Web2.0的最新咨资讯，欢迎访问Freelinereport.com。

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2.5.08 - The Super Tuesday edition of the Free Line Report.

First, a chance to win 500 bucks from StomperNet faculty member Dan Thies. He’s holding an SEO training competition. In this contest, the goal is not to get ranked for an esoteric keyword phrase like “sushi milkshakes,” but to make a video that teaches search engine marketing. The prize is $500 for the best SEO video and $500 for the best pay-per-click video.

Andy Beal, [Blooper Update: Not to be confused with Andy Beard], and also known as Marketing Pilgrim, has a great list of 26 free tools you can start using right away to track your company’s popularity and online buzz. He lists everything from the obvious sites like Google’s Blog Search, Technorati and Digg to some little known gems like Compete’s Search Analytics and KeoTag. If you’re interested in what’s being said about you or your company, or your company’s CEO, get all these tools up and running asap.

If you’re following Web 2.0 and you’re interested in HOW search engines will soon be able to pull up, say, everyone you know who lives in Europe, or any of your friends’ friends who made a blog comment on a given topic, check out the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project – It’s called SIOC or shock.

This is the kind of thing that will change the way we view the world. As they say, sometimes it’s WHO you know and sometimes it’s what…no it’s pretty much who you know.

And speaking of who you know, it’s Super Tuesday and while the presidential candidates are out stumping for votes, the U.S. House of Representatives has already announced that it will hold hearings as quickly as this Friday on Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo. And Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, telephoned Yahoo’s Jerry Yang to see if he could help fend off the bid.

Now there’s a call you want to get. The guy who’s been kicking the snot out of you for the last couple years now wants to help. Almost reminds you of the American political parties – after they choose a candidate. Forget all that stuff I said – I’d be a GREAT vice president.