Since the release of the newest version of Digg, v4, launched last week, the less-than-warm reception has caused a massive influx of traffic to their rival – Redditt.

If you visit Google New Zealand today, you will see a special animated logo.

If you visit Google on Saturday, September 4th, or visit a Google property where it is already September 4th such as Google New Zealand, you will see a special Google logo. The logo is of a buckyball or fullerence, which is any molecule composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, *** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***

In June Google started beta testing it’s Local Shopping inventory feature which allows merchants to submit a list of products that they currently have in stock so that users can easily locate these goods when performing a search. They have since received a lot of positive feedback from searchers and have an influx of retailers that want to participate.

Have you ever stumbled upon a web site that was legally seized by the U.S. government?

A WebmasterWorld thread has webmasters complaining that Microsoft is cloaking their MSNBots again, soon to be named BingBot. It has been going on recently since early August and continues throughout today.

The Isreali start-up AOL bought three years ago to compete in the Q&A market has been rebranded as AOL Answers this week. The site is similar to Answer.com, Yahoo Answers and Ask Answers.

Only two years ago, the Associated Press tried to stop bloggers from using their content. Threatening to charge sites that used their content and demaned that The Drudge Reports pull headlines and story briefs from their site. But now AP is singing a different song – saying this week that they will credit bloggers for any stories they break.

Seems the privacy advocates see Google as ‘evil’. Or at least the animated cartoon aired by Watchdog on the Times Square jumbotron suggested that yesterday. The clip below shows Google CEO Eric Schmidt gathering information from children as they attempt to buy ice cream from his Google truck.

I’ve said it many times and I’ll say this again: Excel if the ultimate SEO tool that can help you in any task (if you know how to use it right).