Let me second Jeneane Sessum in offering well wishes and good luck to Shelley Powers who is about to be deployed by the Red Cross to points unknown to people who need help. Like Jeneane, I am very proud to know Shelley (well online at least :)). She’s taking the compassion she shares online to help in the most direct way possible. It takes guts and heart.

Matt Raible continues his evaluation of open source CMSes and centers in on Joomla and Drupal/CivicSpace.

Jeremy Zawodny writes about how three year plans at Internet companies are a bit of a stretch and links to a great presentation on planing and design by Adam Bosworth.

Rollyo lets you roll your own search engine, and the results, I think, exemplify the utility of a Memeorandum seeded with a specific set of feeds. Rollyo looks like to be another great webservice. One to watch (and to use!). In fact, a long, long time ago, Philly.com hosted a search engine – Philly Finder – that was seeded with only high quality sites reviewed by its editorial staff – I miss that search engine. RSS search at Philly Future will solve a similar problem once I have it up and running.

Corruption surrounds White House and GOP leaders this week. First David Safavian, President Bush’s top procurement official – was arrested. Now, in what will overshaddow that news Tom Delay is indicted in the Texas Finance Probe. From the comments comes a link to the Smoking Gun and the actual bill of indictment.

An officer seeks clarity in codes of conduct for the handling of prisoners – and is attacked (Rumsfeld was heard to have said “Either break him or destroy him, and do it quickly.”). via rc3.org. Read his letter to Sen. John McCain.

And now for something more lighthearted – read Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon’s interview in Time.

GoogleBlog ushers in the launch of Google Video: “The era of the couch potato is so over. We’re rooting for the desk (and laptop) potato”. Speaking of Google Video check out the “everybody hates Chris” premier. The quality is good (not great), but it is very easy to use, and since it is Flash, no new plugin to install or some external app to load. Nice. Another great example is Google’s Recruiting Video – no really!

Rafe Colburn and Ted Leung (who deleted my comment while cleaning out spam – I can relate – did that myself quite a few times), second a thought I’ve had on improving Memeorandum – feeding it a group of RSS feeds that you care about. They are thinking in terms of a personal aggregator – I would like to make that personalized page public as as service.

Microsoft is taking radical steps to beat itself back to life. It’s facing facts – Windows was broken – and Longhorn wasn’t going to fix it – and taking bold corrective measures that should pay off down the line. The folks at the Register aren’t very optimistic.

Jason Calacanis gives his thoughts on recent moves by Microsoft and Google, Fox, Yahoo, and AOL.

Speaking of Microsoft, Steven Sinofsky gives us a behind the scenes look at MS’s dev team management structure.

And look at this – Internet ad revenue climbs 26 percent.

Did you know it’s Banned Books Week. Check out the discussion at Metafilter and buy one.

Oh, and a Saudi Prince Buys a 5% Stake in Fox how ironic is that?

Ummmm… Michael Brown, former head of FEMA, is still getting a paycheck there – as a consultant.

Bush wants to expand the role of the military on domestic soil, giving authority over to the Pentagon in disaster response (Washington Post), overturning the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 that baned the armed forces from participating in police-type activity on U.S. soil. John Scalzi calls it the mother of all bad ideas.

Speaking of bad ideas… read “Bush administration threatens veto against Geneva Convention” at Metafilter.

Rest in Peace: Don Adams, TV’s Maxwell Smart, Dies at 82.

I’ve been ‘bit-blogging’ a a little too much these past few days…must step away from the keyboard…