According to the monthly Media Metrix report from Internet market research firm comScore, Google in May became the first web property to pass one billion unique visitors worldwide.

Even as the most popular web property in the world, Google still managed to grow its audience by 8% between May 2010 and May 2011. According to comScore, this increase was common among all of the top web destinations, with Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Wikimedia sites all trending upward over the year.

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I'm involved in local government in my town (Maplewood, NJ) and I'm always looking for ways for the town to save money in order to keep our outrageous property taxes under control. So I was heartened by a proposal for a state law permitting municipalities and individuals to publish legal notices on the town web site instead of in a local newspaper.

Legal notices are one of the main things keeping small, local newspapers in business. They're big, easy money. My dinky town has budgeted $20,000 for legal notices this year. The paper just has to reproduce the exact text provided to them; no sales, no editing, pretty much pure profit.

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Microsoft's Kinect 3D motion controller has hit a harmonious chord among both game consumers and interface developers, selling over 10 million units since it launched last November, and inspiring a whole movement of amateur developers to devise innovative new uses for the peripheral. Though Kinect is being applied to everything from Augmented Reality to education, one of the main areas where Microsoft is hoping to inspire developers, consumers and investors is interactive television.

Yesterday at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, Microsoft unveiled Kinect NUads, an advertising platform that adds voice and gesture control to advertisements.

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Protecting a website from hackers is no easy task, as even big names like Sony and Sega will confirm. But making use of a vulnerability scanner like Websecurify may be able to help.

The idea is a simple one. Just point the program at your website, it'll scan it and then report on any security holes, so hopefully you can fix them before they're noticed by someone else.

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Finnish-phone maker Nokia could learn something from director J.J. Abrams and producer Steven Spielberg. They deliberately released only a teaser trailer, short on information and long on suspense, for movie "Super 8". The cryptic title evoked mystery, too. Had the trailer told the story, the movie might not be as successful.

Nokia marketing is good to a fault. Product advertising and marketing is among the best in techdom. The adverts and promo videos are often clever, funny, provocative and moving. Nokia knows how to motivate people to buy its products, in part because the marketing is memorable or truly aspirational -- that buyers lives will be better for being this Nokia phone or that one.

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Sony Erricsson debuted two new mid-range Android smartphones at CommunicAsia 2011 in Singapore on Wednesday, the Xperia Ray and Xperia Active. Both devices feature touchscreens in the 3" range, utilize a 1GHz processor and run Android 2.3 (Gingerbread).

While Xperia Ray is designed for more typical smartphone use, Xperia Active takes a very different approach and targets the more athletic user. It includes a handful of unique features that make it stand out in the ever-growing Android crowd, especially as we enter the summer months.

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Brasil.gov.br and Presidencia.gov.br, two sites belonging to the government of Brazil, were the latest victims of anti-security hacker group LulzSec on Tuesday.

The now-familiar cry of "Tango Down!" came across Twitter from LulzSec and another account named LulzSecBrazil on Tuesday evening, signaling that the hacker group had successfully brought down another website. The group initiated a DDoS attack against the U.K.'s Serious Organized Crime Agency this week, and called for a rally to pillage government data stockpiles for secret information.

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Apple only released the software today, but Final Cut Pro X already is a hit. Perhaps that big price reduction -- to $299.99 -- has something to do with buyers' enthusiasm. Motion 5 and Compressor 4, which also released today for $49.99 a piece, rank second and fourth, respectively. Too bad so many of buyers' give the software a 1-star rating.

But there's more, and it's a wonder anyone else other than Apple is profiting from Mac App Store. Today's introductions put Apple products as the top-7 paid apps. There's an eighth, with iPhoto as No. 9. T-boneapps.com's iSplash, which is on sale today for 80-percent off -- that's 99 cents -- is No. 8, while Angry Birds is tenth.

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Two-thousand votes and 93 comments later, we have an answer to the question I posed late last month: "Could 70 percent of you be running Windows 7?" The answer is no. Three quarters of respondents are running Microsoft's flagship operating system. Well, so much for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion coming out next month.

That 76 percent of Betanews readers -- well those of you responding to the poll -- run Windows isn't surprising. Most people do. But the number of Windows 7 users is simply astounding, which says much about Microsoft's success courting developers, IT folks and techies -- among other Betanews readers.

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It seems as though every type of software imaginable now exists in the cloud, and this is even extending to security software. Panda Cloud Antivirus has just been updated to version 1.5, offering a number of important improvements over previous releases of the program. Most of the improvements are to be found in the area of performance but there are also a few new features to look out for.

The first thing that you will notice about the updated software is that scanning times have been reduced. The fact that a great deal of processing is done on remote computers helps to take the strain off your own, and the new Background Scan helps to further reduce CPU usage.

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What legacy will Vivek Kundra, the first Federal Government CIO, leave when he goes to academia? For all the grand plans to modernize, rationalize and streamline IT, so far he's mostly taken the government out computer shopping at Best Buy.

Most of the news stories about his recent resignation have focused on his plan to move the government into cloud computing and whether it would survive his departure. But Kundra also modernized government in other ways, with a flare for adopting some consumer technologies.

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Proficient use of keyboard shortcuts is a hallmark of the diehard PC user. By using these commands, the hands don't have to ever leave their position on the keyboard, and general PC use becomes much faster.

Now think about what these users are doing with their feet. Probably nothing, right?

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Finding your way around online as quickly as you can is becoming more and more important. Current net users want to zip from site to site without worrying about remembering addresses or working out where they're stored in bookmarks.

SiteLauncher for Firefox and SiteLauncher for Chrome are browser extensions that provide fast access and keyboard shortcuts to your most popular sites. It's already chock full of useful  bookmarks, but you can add your own and customize all the existing ones too.

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Nitro PDF Software has released version 2.0 of its popular free PDF editor/creator software, Nitro PDF Reader. Available in separate 32-bit and 64-bit builds, Nitro PDF Reader 2.0 is actually the first stable release of the software -- previous 1.x versions were classed as beta.

PDF Reader 2.0 offers PDF conversion, creation and editing tools in addition to its basic viewing capabilities. Nitro markets the software as "no strings attached" software because of its extended functionality and lack of registration nags or ad-supported components. Version 2.0 includes some notable performance improvements, particularly in the field of PDF creation -- as well as a number of new features.

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Microsoft this week is upgrading its free consumer cloud storage and collaboration service SkyDrive, making it faster, cleaner, and more competitive with services such as Amazon Cloud Drive, Apple iCloud, and Dropbox.

"While we have always focused on improving the performance of our websites, it was clear that we had reached a point where the kinds of performance gains we were hoping for would not come without an assessment of our entire experience from the ground up," Omar Shahine wrote in the Windows Live Blog yesterday. "SkyDrive has been around since 2007 and was simply not built for the modern web."

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