A summary of the more interesting blog posts to come across my desk recently...

• The most bizarre post this week was about an iPhone application that has you violently shake your phone to stop a virtual baby from crying. For some reason, Apple decided to take down "Baby Shaker" after complaints. Another strange post on ars technica involved a vacationer in Mexico watching Pixar's Wall-E over his PC data card. The original roaming bill was for $62,000 but the carrier offered to discount it to $17,000. What a deal!

• eWeek reports on Adobe's launch of an open cross-platform video runtime player under the "Strobe Framework" banner. Adobe has a pretty good track record (think PostScript and PDF), so this might be something to keep an eye on.

• A TechCrunch post documents a  search for family members lost flying over Arizona, with Google Earth playing a role in discovering the crash site.

• Webware offers a rather comprehensive overview of the implications of Google's Native Client technology which we have previously posted about, as well as a new technology that similarly harnesses the GPU on the local PC, all within a safe browser sandbox. The implications are that there soon may be no performance differentiation between desktop and web based applications!

• PCworld documented a tech support call involving a Mac user trying to solve a printer problem. The narrative is hysterical.

• I liked this ReadWriteWeb post on the historical and future transition of the web. They envision an entrepreneur driven, user content generated, main street focused online world funded by subscriptions and transactions rather than advertising.

• With the Swine Flu scare and my past experience with a couple of major earthquakes in Southern California, this TechCrunch post on Microsoft's Vine beta product really struck a chord. It is designed to keep family and friends connected when disasters strike.

• This ReadWriteWeb post has some fascinating web usage statistics from the folks at Neilson. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit was that becoming a new mom is a huge inflection point that drives women to the web in search of advice and a desire to connect with others. Another chart showed a precipitous drop in twitter traffic regarding MySpace, perhaps forecasting rough times ahead.

• Finally, machine guns and iPods would seem like unrelated topics, but ZDNet reports the army is using iPods for a variety of tactical purposes, including as ballistic calculators.

I'd enjoy reading any comments you have on these items!

Jim