This is an informational graphic from Intel showing some of the things that happen in a single minute of internet time. I was honestly surprised that some figures were as low as they were. Only 20 identities stolen? Those aren’t the Nigerian scammers I know! Not included on the list: 80,000 moms forward spam emails, 30 dudes sign into Chatroulette with the intention of showing their dongs, my roommate maxes out our bandwidth downloading porn and brings my internet connection to a crawl, enough Viagra to pop a 1,000-year boner is purchased, and like five million people read Geekologie. “Five-million, really?” You heard me, five-million — like a five with two zeros.

What Happens in an Internet Minute? [intel]

Thanks to Patty, who heard every four minutes on the internet a man signs up for a dating website as a woman with the sole purpose of seducing himself through his regular profile. Wow, that…sounds strangely erotic.

Source: Geekologie.

Face it: Google runs your life. The search giant turned web ecosystem owns your email, calendar, and even your voicemails. Your most important data lives on Google’s servers. What you may not realize is that, despite the quality of Google’s products, someone else is doing it better—and placing all your eggs in Google’s basket isn’t necessarily the best thing. Here’s a look at alternative services you can use in place of Google’s webapps.

Photo remixed from originals by Jan Kranendonk (Shutterstock) and Alfonso de Tomas (Shutterstock).

You might want to move away from Google entirely, whether you’re tired of things like the Google Plus-ification of your search results or the fact that Google’s mining ridiculous amounts of data and selling you to advertisers, or maybe you’re just plain tired of Google creating services it doesn’t actually improve over time. You may scoff at the idea of using Bing or other less popular competitors, but they’re quite good—sometimes even better—than Google. We’ve just become too entrenched to notice.

If you want to take a serious look at the alternatives, we did some digging and a lot of experimentation to find the best alternatives to Google’s most popular services (and we alsoasked you guys to share your favorites). Most of these services are still from big companies, like Microsoft or Yahoo!, but we’ve tried to include a few services off the beaten path as well. The fact of the matter is just that the highest quality services around are going to be from the companies with the most resources. Below, we’ve listed the best Google alternatives in each category, as well as a few runners-up we think are worth checking out.

CONTINUED at Lifehacker.

It’s unclear exactly why, but the Department of Homeland has been operating a ”Social Networking/Media Capability” program to monitor the top blogs, forums and social networks online for at least the past 18 months. Based on a privacy compliance review from last November recently obtained by Reuters, the purpose of the project is to “collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture.” Whatever that means. Either way, the list of sites reported by Reuters reveals in a Wednesday afternoon exclusive is pretty intriguing:

Social Networks

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Myspace

Blogs

• The Drudge Report
• The Huffington Post
• The New York Times‘s Lede blog
• Wired’s Threat Level
• Wired’s Danger Room
• ABC News’ investigative blog The Blotter
• “blogs that cover bird flu … news and activity along U.S. borders … drug trafficking and cybercrime”

Multimedia

• Hulu
• YouTube
• Flickr

In conclusion, the Department of Homeland Security is just like you. We’ve seen no reports of The Atlantic Wire being on the list. But if we are, hello Department of Homeland Security employees — thanks for reading!

Source: The Atlantic Wire.