Google got some serious gold, promotion-wise: Olympic cyclist and Gold Medalist Kristin Armstrong wrote that Google Earth was "invaluable" in helping her find a training route in Boise, Idaho similar to the Olympic course in Beijing.

Armstrong tipped the hat (helmet?) in a guest post in the Google Lat Long Blog, which covers Google Earth and Maps. In it, she describes how at her husband's urging, she took one of his GPS units on her time trial ride back in December. After exporting the GPS and elevation data and loading it into Google Earth, she "was then able to trace the entire course from the comfort of my home half a world away and find a similar route to train on back in Boise."

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StartupNation, a Web site for entrepreneurs, has begun taking applications for its 2008 Home-Based 100 contest. If you have your own company, the competition affords an opportunity to market yourself - and of course, be marketed to.

I found out about the competition from one of my own home-based business service providers, RingCentral. While there's no material prize for winning, the free advertising from a good ranking could be worth plenty.

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Hulu.com, a well-made site offering free, ad-supported streaming TV shows and movies through a Web browser, now tops CNN and Turner in U.S. video site rankings, according to Nielsen stats relayed by Silicon Alley Insider.

Despite an official launch only five months ago and a relatively small library of shows and movies, the site offered up 105 million streams in July, just behind ESPN's 106 million streams.

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Sure, Yahoo Finance rocks. But plenty of other, smaller sites offer good data for the online investor. Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle outlined seven of them.

In Harry Domash's piece, most of the seven were new to me, though I had written about one of them (tickerspy.com) here previously.

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With the constant flow of me-too social networking sites these days, it's nice to see a well-made site that identifies a real need and meets it. For solar power planning, that's Roofray.com, which just launched this week. 

For your own custom plans, head to the site and start with a satellite view of an address you enter.  Then define the solar panel coverage area by adding successive points around space where you'd put panels. 

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Creative types have a new option for turning their efforts into income online. Open Salon, now out of private beta, allows anyone to post their work after a quick registration.

Those posts can earn money, but unlike Google's new Knol, income doesn't come from ads. Instead, readers can click a small button to tip the writer through a system called Tippem.

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The Mozilla Labs, which acts as the idea wing for the organization behind Firefox, is expanding its call for open-source contributions to those outside its base of community-minded coders and techies.  Now, they want to get designers and creative types in on the deal.

When I chatted with Chris Beard, Vice President of Mozilla Labs, he talked about how the basic browser UI really hasn't changed much. In part, that's intentional - when I've talked with other folks at Mozilla, the people with their sleeves rolled and their fingers typing as they get new versions pushed out the door, they tend to say that they and Firefox users are content with the basic browser design.

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Typosquatting, that seedy practice of registering domain names similar to legit sites but with typos in the name, has a new twist.

At a Black Hat presentation last week on a Symantec long-term research on the practice as it cropped up in the 2008 election campaign, Oliver Friedrichs found an interesting tidbit. A typosquatting domain registered to someone in China had no Web page, but it did have a record that allowed it to receive e-mail.

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Attack details on how to quickly take over a vulnerable DNS server - essential for every network to guide Internet traffic - are now officially public after researcher Dan Kaminsky's BlackHat presentation. If you want to make sure your company is safe, here's what you need to know.

1. It's real.  While some have charged that the risk has been overblown, it's clear that the flaw allows for hijacking an entire network's Internet traffic. All e-mails sent outside the company could be intercepted.  Any attempt to visit any external Web site from a company PC could be forced to run an attack page instead. Similar flaws have been hit before in just such ways.

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Cloud computing, which offloads applications from local PC installations to the Internet or company networks, stands poised to free business from many uncomfortable tethers.  For one thing, those local PC installations, and the operating systems they require, can be a royal pain to manage and update. Not to mention the potential for data loss with local storage - sure, you can create good backup policies and train users to store files on network drives, but you're still going to run into situations where a drive blows and someone loses a critical document.

Software-as-as-service and network-hosted applications are going gangbusters precisely because they stand to do away with those limitations.  A new special report section from BusinessWeek on cloud computing, with articles such as How Cloud Computing Is Changing the World and Cloud Computing: Small Companies Take Flight cover the benefits of systems like Google Apps and Salesforce.com for businesses large and small.

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