1 “Leaked” online: Whitney Houston’s comeback single, “Like I Never Left,” a wispy, adult contemporary thing performed with the rapper Akon. Now parked outside Akon’s house: Bobby Brown.
2 A group of big softwaremakers is considering suing eBay over the many examples of allegedly pirated software sold on the auction site. To put that in eBay terms, a lawsuit is kind of the ultimate negative feedback.
3 Former Google engineers launch Cuil, which its founders claim is a more comprehensive search engine. My first search was “how to pronounce cuil,” and — uh-oh — it turned up zero results. (A news story explains that it sounds like “cool.”)
4 Google, meanwhile, opens Knol, its rival to Wikipedia, to the public, with the promise of more authorial control over articles and cash to the authors based on ad sales. (Also a pronunciation challenge, the name is a coinage for “unit of knowledge,” and it rhymes with “all.”) It’s nice to see Google acknowledging that the creators of the content people search for deserve compensation.
5 WashingtonPost.com is now partnering with Predictify, a service already on the San Francisco Chronicle’s and New York Times’ sites that lets users vote on possible outcomes for certain stories. Here’s one: I predict (OK, I hope) this service will finally kill off the daily horoscope.
