Remember Diary-X, the ill-fated journalling site? Back in the day it had many thousands of users, all enjoying a slightly more enlightened diary experience than could be found on the likes of blogger and elsewhere - but then one day in 2006, Stephen Deken, DX's webmaster, had the horrible job of announcing that everything had been lost, in one catastrophic disk crash.

Stand back everyone, the new search engine that will topple Google from its lofty perch has arrived. "Cuil" (pronounced "cool", or perhaps "kewl") has been created by ex-Google programmers, and claims to have improved technology behind it which better understands the context of results it delivers, and all that kind of thing. Of course, being better than Google and actually replacing Google in people's bookmarks are two very different things, but there are murmurs that this one might be in with a shot.

xox

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
I've been reading webcomics for a long time now.

The history of webcomics is quite involved. The field's been around for over 10 years now. They range from newspaper comics with an online presence, to online comics with a newspaper presence, to comics which should never see print, and comics which could never see print.

One good way to get to find good comics is to read the review / critisism sites out there.

Self publishing means that it's never been easier to launch your own comic. Even if you can't draw, you can always write, shoot, play, or clip art your comic into existence. Or you could form a team, someone's just announced a new experiment to find artists, authors and techies and make a comic with a little bit of work from everyone. I'm signing up. There's a story inside all of us.

I've discovered today that our broadband will be switched off on Friday and won't be coming back on in the new place for ages - probably not till around the middle of February

I've never left the internet on its own for so long before. How will it cope??

Please, somebody, post at least one little bit of news before I'm back...

I'm trying to kick a new site into life to celebrate the fabulous richness and diversity of the Petersfield life (www.myPetersfield.co.uk). Probably aimed at a rather more ageing hipster than this excellent site (that's certainly where it's coming from) but, I venture, perhaps worth a look anyway. Comments welcome, either through the site or here. When I get my links together, I'll certainly be referencing Boinng - maybe Boinng could return the favour (he wheedled)?

Google is buying muppet website Planet Boinng for $1.65 (88 pence) in shares after a weekend of speculation that a deal was in the offing. The two companies will continue to operate independently, Google said as it announced the news on Monday.

Planet Boinng, launched in April 1999, has grown slowly into one of the most pointless websites on the internet. It has 100 pages viewed every year and an estimated 7 individual visitors each month.

'Natural partners'

"The Planet Boinng team has built a burgundy and cream media platform that complements Google's mission to inherit the earth," Google chief executive Eric Schmidt barked in a statement.

Microsoft have released a patch for the Vector Markup vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which hackers used when exploiting Hostgator's servers last Friday.

The patch fixes a vulnerabilty which allowed malicious code placed on a web page to install software on any visitor's computer - and has been used to install trojans and spyware on large numbers of PCs in recent days.

So, the majority of my my Livejournal is marked as friends only ok? But I seem to be included in 'In Orbit'? Whilst I'm extremely flattered to be linked, I am somewhat concerned. This would mean that not just those people within LJ whom I have selected to view my life can now read my restricted journal, yes? No, this doesn't mean you guys are not my friends, but anybody can enter my Livejournal via Boinng now yes? I may be wrong, maybe it blocks you, I can't tell obviously because it recognises me.

If this is the case, I don't think I like it. I wasn't told about it and now I'm scared. Cheers.

There's already a thread on this in the forum, but the more I think about, the sadder it all seems - and I think it deserves some front page attention.