In the first day of the Obama Administration, the tech world’s heart skips a beat. Elsewhere:
- Jason Kottke throws out a point that WhiteHouse.gov has a robot.txt file — the informal handshake between website owners and search engines to determine what can and can not be indexed — that’s shorter, significantly, than the previous administration. Although, the tiny fact that when George W Bush’s website first started, his website’s robot.txt file was equally as clean shouldn’t let you stop loving Obama though.
- Hitwise is very happy to jump and down to let you know that according to their advanced computational metric analysis techniques, they’ve determined Digg and Twitter now have equal amounts of traffic. This might possibly mean that all those Twitter grading sites, Twitter link shortcut sites, Twitter friend spamming sites, Twitter stock tip sites, and Twitter marketing sites work. Or, something.
- Over the past week, Apple CEO Steve Jobs waffled back and forth on wanting to let you know about his health. It culminated to him finally taking medical leave for a few months, letting Apple COO take charge as the iCEO for awhile again. The Internet has collectively agreed that we shouldn’t poke into someone’s personal business. The SEC, however, didn’t like any of the shenanigans and has decided to start a probe into Apple’s disclosures to stockholders. To all other CEOs out there: no one still cares if you’re sick or not.
- Salary for tech workers in 2008 actually went against common perception of a recession and rose 4.6% compared to 2007. Software engineers took home on average $90,000, while IT managers were able to finagle $100,000 a year.
- Friendster — the social network so old that your mom was probably in it — is switching gears and finding a second life in Asia. They have mostly setup operations in Australia with $20 million in funding to better take care of the 28 million users based around the Asian Pacific region.
(Banner photo by Omar Omar)
