"The link brokers are going great guns," Leake said.

One such firm is TextLinkBrokers.com, which started in Phoenix three years ago by brokering paid links between sites with high Google ranks to those with low Google ranks. But Google's changing formulas have made it harder to boost a site's ranking just through paid links, said Jarrod Hunt, chief executive of the 60-person firm.

"Editorial links are more valuable now than the paid ones," he added.

Hunt said his firm still brokers text links for sale from thousands of independent Web sites, but it also develops original editorial content to help get links Google might consider to be of higher quality. Often the articles are given away or sold to sites in a program he calls "hosted marketing pages," basically online advertorials with embedded links.

There are shady ways to get Google juice, too, but be careful -- it could get your site booted completely out of the Google index. If you break the search-engine rules, the juice can turn to poison and lead to the Google death penalty.

I should not have been surprised. Survey after survey shows that whether you measure your productivity in facts researched, alien spaceships vaporized, or articles written, adding an extra monitor will give your output a considerable boost -- 20 percent to 30 percent, according to a survey by Jon Peddie Research.

So now, while I am editing this article on my main screen, the screen beside it shows the outline or earlier draft I am working from -- and, sometimes, Web sites or other documents I keep referring to.

When I edit photos, the second screen lets me compare the copy I am working on with the original, or shows tool palettes and thumbnails of other images, and I can blow up panoramic shots for closer viewing (though with a bar down the middle, like the central pillar of an old car's windshield). When I am shopping on the Web, my two screens let me compare products. When I work on tables or spreadsheets, I can see all the columns at once. When I expect important messages, I keep my e-mail program open on the side monitor while I work on something else.

With a single monitor, I could jump between applications with a mouse click or a keyboard command (Alt-Tab, in Windows), but not nearly as fast -- and small delays add up when you repeat them dozens or even hundreds of times a day. With my dual displays, I simply sweep my mouse from one screen to the other.

The domains are so hot that domain squatters are making more profits than some of them real estate speculators. About 2.2 million new domains are being snapped up every month in the US alone, according to some estimates. Marchex, a Seattle-based public startup which has built up a massive portfolio of domain names claimed in a Business 2.0 article that it was nearly 10 percent of the global paid search market, about $9 billion or so. Another proof, Donald Trump is no money-genius.

The madness is going global it seems. IPWalk says that new .eu domain, when opened to all European Union residents last week (aka Landrush) has zoomed past the .biz domain and will lap .info in about four months. EURid, the registry of .eu, received 346.218 applications, in comparison with approximately 800.000 applications within the first 24 hours. Today there are 1.454.128 active .eu domain names, a number that surpasses 1.352.984 active .biz domain names.

The beta version of Google Calendar, which can be accessed without a Gmail account, enables users to search for and add events from within the program or through Web sites that use open standards for calendars. Such sites are invited to add Google Calendar buttons next to events they list.

Users of the new Google application can also access events from friends' shared calendars and import events from Microsoft Outlook. Once they add events, they can use a "Search My Calendars" searchbar to find them. Events can also be created by typing simple messages like "Lunch with Kate 11:30 a.m. Wednesday" in the program's "Quick Add" bar.

Taking a page from sites such as InterActiveCorp's Evite, Google also built invitation management into Google Calendar. Users can create event invitations to be sent to anyone with an e-mail account. They can also send event reminders via e-mail or cell phone text message, and keep track of RSVPs from within the program. People can see their schedules by day, week, month and four-day views, highlight any period from a monthly calendar for a customized view and display only certain events at a time on their calendar view.

Advertisers determined to resist paying for ads skipped with DVRs can find new ammunition in Nielsen's new minute-by-minute ratings. An analysis of the so-called "commercial ratings" obtained by MediaDailyNews reveals that virtually no one stops to view a commercial when watching a program in time-shifted mode.

For top network programs, the data reveals that "commercial ratings" are practically the same when shows are viewed "live" as when they are viewed via DVRs ("live plus seven day"), meaning that people are making good use of the fast-forward functions during the ads.

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"American Idol" posted a 12.1 in "live" numbers during commercials and a 12.2 in "live plus seven day," meaning that less than 1 percent of DVR viewers stopped for the ads. The same tiny increase goes for "Desperate Housewives," which saw a 10.2 during commercial breaks in "live" viewing and a 10.3 in DVR viewing.

Podcasts are to bloggers what MySpace sites are to teens: All the cool kids have one. So Forrester probably expected a big reaction with a new report that claims podcasts are not exactly taking the wired world by storm.

The research firm's new study claims that only 1 percent of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts.

Forrester analyst Charlene Li says on her blog that while there's definitely a business case for podcasts, companies "shouldn't be dashing out to create expensive original content for a small audience--unless they gain value from being seen as innovative."

Offensive rootkits, which are used hide malware programs and maintain an undetectable presence on an infected machine, have become the weapon of choice for virus and spyware writers and, because they often use kernel hooks to avoid detection, Danseglio said IT administrators may never know if all traces of a rootkit have been successfully removed.

He cited a recent instance where an unnamed branch of the U.S. government struggled with malware infestations on more than 2,000 client machines. "In that case, it was so severe that trying to recover was meaningless. They did not have an automated process to wipe and rebuild the systems, so it became a burden. They had to design a process real fast," Danseglio added.

Danseglio, who delivered two separate presentations at the conference-one on threats and countermeasures to defend against malware infestations in Windows, and the other on the frightening world on Windows rootkits-said anti-virus software is getting better at detecting and removing the latest threats, but for some sophisticated forms of malware, he conceded that the cleanup process is "just way too hard."

"We've seen the self-healing malware that actually detects that you're trying to get rid of it. You remove it, and the next time you look in that directory, it's sitting there. It can simply reinstall itself," he said.

If you look at this office, there isn't much paper in it. On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you'll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.

The screen on the left has my list of e-mails. On the center screen is usually the specific e-mail I'm reading and responding to. And my browser is on the right-hand screen. This setup gives me the ability to glance and see what new has come in while I'm working on something, and to bring up a link that's related to an e-mail and look at it while the e-mail is still in front of me.

Apple is said to have wanted to develop its cell phone from the ground up and not merely redesign or re-brand an existing phone with a different interface. In the process of doing so, however, sources say the company has run into problems making the various cell phone components work together. Issues also have cropped up with the chip Apple was using that receives the cellular signal.

Timelines had originally called for a possible third-quarter release of an Apple cell phone, but these issues have delayed any roll-out indefinitely. Those waiting for an Apple phone, rumored for a number of years, may find themselves waiting into at least 2007.