The weekly link roundup - 7th Jan to 13th Jan

Google Reader has definitely been a great resource for me to aggregate and read some really amazing content. Since most of my blog seems to be a collection of links for posterity, I am planning to add links on Thursdays every week. Here's the first edition.

The week was dominated by the stories that happened more at the end.

The Haiti earthquake is probably the worst possible way to start this year. It was a 7.0 on the richter scale - possibly the worst in 200 years. Here are some photos .

Google has a permanent url linked to the search pages here in the US : http://www.google.com/relief/haitiearthquake/

Remember to click the buttons and provide aid. The continuous coverage on CNN has been tremendous but heartbreaking. The Daily Beast has a list of good charities here. There might be atleast 50,000 people dead in the tiny Caribbean country and any words I try to bring up fall short of the enormity of this disaster.

This almost suppressed the news that really rocked the tech circles. Images of the tanks on Tienanmen Square  in the horrible student suppression, again turned up on the google.cn website results as Google openly challenged the rules by which it has had to play in China. Prompt analysis and cynicism ensued. There are quite a few points of view here, here and here and a good summary here.

There is tons of coverage and I might keep adding onto these two topics more.

The International Consumer Electronics Show dominated the beginning of the week. There were tablets, game rooms and tons of e-readers.

Microsoft wants to bring the arcade room back into our lives and also came up with some not-so unexpected headlines.

Sony came up with this odd maybe-tablet, personal internet viewer - the dash.

One of the many eBook Readers is reviewed here.

Facebook wants to pour money into PhD programs researching data mining and social networking.

In the anthropology department, an interesting story on a possible hominid path from Africa to the Aegean.

Microsoft atlast jumps onto the SVG standards bandwagon. This might mean a lot for actual standardized support for SVG in all browsers. Or could just be a smoke screen. Coverages here and here.

Netflix keeled over to the big Hollywood, BUT atleast it will now add support to the console I <3 and own.

VMWare added another arrow to its arsenal of enterprise ready products. Zimbra, the email client which is *the* pioneer of all the ajaxy and dynamic browser-based email clients was sold by Yahoo - here and here.

An interesting anecdote about typography and how Al Gore really, really cares about fonts.

And of course, the joke of the week - software engineering is the second best job all around.