January: PC Pro talks about Microsoft being the 'partner' digitising the entire 19th Century stock of the British Library – "Microsoft and Google have both been digitising books from US libraries and adding them to their rival online services for some time, and the British Library opted to partner with the former. Choosing Microsoft as a partner for any archiving project brings not only a wealth of experience and financial clout, but also a degree of controversy…"

May: Microsoft abandons the entire 'Live Search Books' project (and 'Live Search Academic'). But hey, they will start to "offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers", i.e. split ad revenue. If you're in the US.

Found during a search for something else…

"We do hate to rain on a high-profile corporate love-fest, but we have to point out that in addition to the much trumpeted $100 million Billg has donated to India's fight against HIV, he's funding the Microsoft jihad against Linux to the far more impressive tune of $421 million. That means that Linux is more than four times worse than AIDS to Billg…"

More here.

I don't think I've spotted this on the UK bits of my friends list: the producers of Expelled, the bilge of a film about how 'intelligent design' is being cruelly treated by people with a brain, paid someone to do a video, Beware the Believers, dissing Richard Dawkins.

It looks like they went to the wrong person. The video is here, and so much of it is funny because it's true.