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A9 search engine, subsidiary of Amazon, unveiled new functionality Tuesday night by adding server-side bookmarks, Amazon-style recommendations based on previous searches and personal diaries. A9 runs on top of Google, so Web results might look familiar, but A9 tries to improve both on the interface (by showing results of image search along with the Web results) and by adding some functions like searches inside printed books, currently not available from competition. There’s also this New York Times article with more details on A9.

Engadget today broke the news of Yahoo! moving into consumer electronics and afterwards confirmed it. It will be a branding deal with Diamond Electronics. Yahoo! has been known to have its name on computer accessories before (I bought a Yahoo! optical mouse at a local store once).

Frequenty dismissed as vaporware, OQO palmtop computer is ready to ship, ExtremeTech claims. The device with 1 GHz CPU, 256 MB RAM, 30 GB HDD and FireWire/USB connectivity will carry an “under-$2000″ price tag (probably $1,999). Engadget has a picture of the product.

O’Reilly Network posts an update on Project Utopia that produced Hardware Abstraction Layer for Linux simplifying device changes. They also link to Driver on Demand project on SourceForge, whose goal is to create a central database to enable Linux desktops download the drivers automatically when the user plugs in her new hardware device.

IEEE Spectrum magazine runs a feature article on the state of music and current digital formats. They point to an interesting phenomenon in the digital music world that Steve Jobs emphasized as well: for the first time in music history, the next big format was not about better quality (SACD and such) but about better portability (MP3).

It was only five years ago that the music industry was facing a civil war over the next-generation disc-based music format—the successor to the wildly successful CD. At that time, hardly anybody doubted that the music would be encoded optically on a round plastic disc the size of a CD.

Researchers at UCLA are looking for easier ways to implement Web searches by using peer-to-peer techniques to decrease the workload.

Queries need to be passed along only a few links rather than flooded throughout the network, which keeps search-related traffic low.

The research paper is available at arxiv.

Boib Sullivan from MSNBC brings up America’s document problem. While simplifying the identification system, Americans are relying on easy-to-forge documents and numbers to authenticate themselves, and this brings up to the rise of identity theft.

There is little disagreement among experts that America’s identification systems are in shambles. Corruption, including the sale of forged documents by inside employees, is rampant. Driver’s licenses are easy to fake; motor vehicle agencies easy to fool. Passports and visas, both those issued by the United States and those by foreign countries, cannot be trusted. Whether screening airplane passengers, providing medical treatment, or trying to guard the border, experts agree: Today, there is no reliable way to identify people.

Keep forgetting to link to this good tutorial by Noah Coad on using the MSComm control (that’s not managed) with C# to write a serial port app. If you happen to dig MSComm, that, perhaps is the easiest way to go.

Jeremy C. Wright wrote a very detailed review of WordPress. Answering many newbie questions (since the article was solicited by the site that wants to feature reviews of similar publishing systems), he also points many merits of WordPress, mainly high customization and liberal licensing.

Obviously I’m biased. I chose WordPress and I feel like I would never look back. While I’ve had issues, the amazing developers and fantastic support community have always been there to help me when I’ve needed it. For me, that has been extremely important. I never expect software to be perfect, but when the community helps me get it as close to perfect as I need it to be, that to me is a good sign.

The Wi-Fi Alliance approved Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) technology that allows packet prioritisation to the multimedia data streamed wireless LANs. Broadcom already announced that one of their access points and one reference design are WMM-certified. Other news outlets report that WMM will accelerate Wi-Fi adoption in consumer electronics and mobile devices.