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A South Florida teenager who sued her former principal after she was suspended for creating a Facebook page criticizing a teacher can proceed with her lawsuit, a federal judge has ruled. The student, Katherine Evans, is seeking to have hr suspension expunged from her disciplinary record. School officials suspended her for three days, saying she had been “cyberbullying” the teacher, Sarah Phelps. Evans is also seeking a “nominal fee” for what she argues with a violation of her First Amendment rights, her lawyers said, and payment of her legal fees.

The former principal, Peter Bayer, who worked at the Pembroke Pines Charter High School, had asked that the case be dismissed. But Magistrate Judge Barry L Garber denied Bayer’s petition and rejected his claims of qualified immunity. Lawyers of Evans, 19, now a sophomore at the University of Florida, said that they were pleased by the ruling and that they hoped to bring the case to trial in the spring. One of the lawyers, Maria Kayanan, associate legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, said the judge’s decision had clearly extended the protection of First Amendment rights to online writings of a non-threatening manner.

“This is an important victory both for Evans and Internet free speech,” Kayanan said, “because it upholds the principle that the right to freedom of speech and expression in America does not depend on the technology used to convey opinions and ideas.” Evan’s suspension first came to the attention if the civil liberties union in 2007. Then a high school senior and an honor student, Evans repeatedly clashed with Phelps, her English teacher, over assignments, Evans has said. She turned to Facebook to vent her frustration. At home on her computer, Evans created a Facebook page titled “Ms Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I have ever had” and invited past and current students of Phelps to post their own comments.

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Google Buzz is facing flak from critics over what they have dubbed as the biggest privacy breach in its history. Google had introduced Buzz, which is similar to social networking sites like Facebook, to its email service Gmail, but in doing so it automatically made public its users’ most frequently talked-to contacts. The tool is now facing an avalanche of complaints, as it has given an easy access to user information.

Some of those who complained included a woman whose abusive ex-husband was able to find sensitive information about her, after signing in to the Buzz. Journalists whose confidential sources were revealed to other sources by Buzz, and political activists who contacts were made public and potentially open to analysis by government investigators. To make matter worse, the system selected which contacts were made public, with some users reporting that people they had only spoken to once appeared on the list.

Google at the weekend apologized for the error and announced it would make changes to the system. “Since we launched Google Buzz four days ago, we have been working around the clock to address the concerns you have raised,” News.com.au quoted product manager Todd Jackson as writing on the Gmail Blog. However that is unlikely to satisfy critics, who view the mistake as a sign Google does not take the privacy of its users seriously. Articles criticizing Buzz have flooded popular social news sites like Digg, with headlines including: “And you thought Facebook had privacy issues?”

The story that has attracted most interest describes how one blogger’s details became available to her abusive ex-husband and is titled: “F— you Google”. “You know who my third most frequent contact is? My abusive ex-husband,” wrote the author. “Which is why is is so exciting, Google, that you automatically allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I have made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had no reason to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did. “F— you, Google. My privacy concerns are not trite. They are linked to my actual physical safety,” she had stated. Meanwhile Tech Crunch said the idea of linking private communications - email - with social networking was “just asking for trouble”. “Google is-deservedly-getting a lot of heat for the fact that its latest social product has a number of privacy flaws baked in to it by design,” it said.

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Forget astrology and star signs. Your favorite coffee reveals unspoken things about your personality. According to a new book, The You Code, a cup of coffee not only has froth and sugar at its bottom but personality traits as well. Body language experts Judi James and James Moore decipher what caffeine preferences can reveal about a person’s self esteem, stress levels and even sex life in the book. Now, take a look for yourself -

Espresso: James and Moore describe the espresso as “the unfiltered cigarette of the coffee drinking world”. Espresso-drinkers tend to be moody, hard-bitten and hard-working. They are also into leadership and fast goals. The espresso drinker can be an experienced, exciting and consummate lover, but is not known for reliability or unswerving loyalty.

Black Coffee: This type is about minimalism and takes no-frills, direct approach to life. The black coffee drinker can be quiet and moody but prone to brief bursts of extroversion. A difficult, but potentially rewarding friend, colleague or partner.

Latte: Typically metrosexuals or cuddly-toy collectors, latte drinkers are pleasers with an overwhelming compulsion to be liked. Latte drinkers reveal that while they may want to come across as hot shot contenders, they have an immature side.

Cappuccino: Like their drink, cappuccino drinkers are all froth and bubble, bored by detail and liking, but not obsessed with material objects. She/He enjoys sex, but is easily bored by an unimaginative partner.

Instant Coffee: These are cheerful, straight-forward types, who like a laugh and live by the maxim “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But instant coffee drinkers can be unadventurous in their careers and need to let others see the hidden depths in their personality. The no-nonsense instant coffee drinker is allergic to pretentious behavior and are likely to keep their socks on during sex.

Decay soy milk: A self-righteous eco-worrier and attention seeker with a tendency to be picky, fussy and squeamish in the bedroom. What’s more, this faux choice implies a pretentious, high-maintenance type who wants what they can’t have and is disguising their true personality.

Frappucino: Flightly and shallow, the frappucino drinker will try anything once - especially if a celebrity has done it first. They fancy themselves as trendsetters. The frappucino drinker’s relationships often last as long as their drink choice.

Non-coffee drinker: Frightened of coffee equals frightened of life. If the taste of coffee puts you off, you really are a child, they say.

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A sculpture by Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti has smashed the world record for an art work at auction, selling in London for 65 million pounds ( $104.3 million), Sotheby’s said. “L’homme qui marche I”, a life-size bronze statue of a man, was expected to go for up to $29 million at the sale Wednesday - but an anonymous telephone buyer paid almost four times that amount. It beat the previous record for a work at auction set by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso’s painting “Garcon a la Pipe” which was bought for $104.2 million in New York in 2004, said the auction house.

Bidders at the auction snapped up a string of other sought after art works, bringing in more than $235 million and making it the highest value sale ever staged in London, according to Sotheby’s. The auction house hailed an “exceptional” result after a dramatic bidding battle forced up the price of Giacometti’s work. “L’homme qui marche I” (Walking Man I) fetched exactly $104,327,006, which included the buyer’s premium, said the auctioneers. The 1961 metal figure, by the leading 20th century artist known for his stick-thin sculptures of the human form, was sold by German banking firm Commerzbank, said Sotheby’s.

The auction house said Wednesday’s sale opened at 12 million pounds, but after eight minutes of “fast and furious bidding” between at least 10 prospective purchasers, it went to the anonymous telephone bidder. “The price is a reflection of the extraordinary importance of this exceptionally rare work,” said Helena Newman, of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art department. Georgina Adam, editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper, attended the auction and hailed the “astonishing” price paid for the “one in a lifetime opportunity”. “There were so many bidders chasing to get it that even before it was put up for sale somebody had started bidding,” she told the BBC.

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What is it about Buckfast Tonic Wine that makes it so alluring to consumers and yet so repulsive to politicians? Perhaps, it is its special caffeine-and-sweet-wine recipe, which allows overly enthusiastic consumers to be tipsy and bouncy at the same time. Perhaps it is its array of snappy nicknames, including “Wreck the Hoose Juice” - hoose being a Scottish pronunciation of house - or its exotic provenance as the product of wine-making Benedictine monks at an abbey in England.

Whatever the cause, Buckfast has emerged as a symbol of Scotland’s entrenched drinking problems at a time when it is urgently debating how to address them. “For a large section of the Scottish population, their relationship with alcohol is damaging and harmful to individuals, families, communities and to Scotland as a nation,” the Scottish government said in a recent port.

Buckfast does not seem to help. In a survey last year of 172 prisoners at a young offender’s institution, 43% of the 117 people who drank alcohol before committing their crimes said they had drunk Buckfast. In a study of litter in a typical housing project, 35% of the items identified were Buckfast bottles. And the police in the depressed industrial district of Strathclyde recently told a BBC programme that the drink had been mentioned in 5,638 crime reports between 2006 and 2009 (the bottle used as a weapon in 114 of them).

A spokesman for J Chandler & Company, which distributes the drink, said that Buckfast accounted for less than 1% of the alcoholic beverage market in Scotland and was being unfairly singled out. Nor, he said, is wine-making a sign that monks of Buckfast Abbey have strayed from the teachings of St Benedict, an accusation recently leveled by an Episcopal bishop. “It is always wise to remember that Jesus turned water into wine,” the spokesman, Jim Wilson, said in an interview.

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The website that gave the term “six degrees of separation” new meaning is celebrating its sixth birthday! Yes, on February 04th 2004, Facebook was launched by a group of students at Harvard University and last week on February 04th 2010, Facebook completed 6 years of its journey. Today, it is the world’s largest social network, having outstripped rival MySpace some time in 2008. Most experts agree that 2009 was a breakthrough year for the social networking site: not only did it hit 150 million active users in January 2009 (the number is 350 million today), but found a much wider base than the usual suspects of college students and young professionals.

And across the world, people are discovering that Facebook is just not a cool tool to help you stay in touch with friends, as you have no time to meet for a cup of coffee or to get back in touch with people you left behind in high school. Facebook’s potential as a powerful networking tool, and not just of the social kind, as a platform for marketing your company, product or yourself as an employee and for building PR bridges were released fully in the last one year of its existence.

“As somebody who works in the PR industry, I have found Facebook invaluable,” says Saina Jayapal, a PR professional. “Initially, I used it to connect with friends, but I realized that it could be a very helpful professional tool.” Facebook helped Jayapal touch base with clients and media professionals and create a network of mutually beneficial relationships. It also bagged her a job offer - all because someone was impressed with her friends’ list.

Debarshi Das, who runs his own HR company, has also found Facebook to be a huge human resource database. “Facebook helps you expand small businesses in unprecedented ways,” says Das, who feels it is a “pretty good for promoting your brand as well.” His words find an echo in the various small business organizations as well as not-for-profit ones from the NGO sector that create awareness about themselves through Facebook groups and fan pages.

Yet, the overwhelming number of Facebook users continue to be the ones who turn to it to find friends or air their views. “I moved to the US last fall for undergrad studies and the only way I have been able to stay connected with my friends back home is through Facebook,” says 17-year-old Advait Shah, who has a suggestion for Facebook. “I would like Facebook to have an age limit, because my mum just got on to it and sent me a friend request! says a bemused Shah. “They could perhaps have special privacy settings that will block certain info for some of your Facebook friends,” he adds, clearly unwilling to let his mum know exactly what he was up to last night.

Rummana Ahmed, who works for an international web portal, says the best thing about Facebook is its ability to connect you with your past. “My best experience with Facebook was finding my childhood crush 10 years after I had last seen him,” she says, adding that the notifications on Facebook keep you updated even when you have not had a chance to personally connect  with your friends. She does have a small gripe through: “The quizzes and some applications, especially the Farmville updates, are annoying,” she says, and wishes there was a way to personalize one’s Twitter background. Something for the social network giant to look in the next year?

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Google has taken the unusual step of using realworld advertising to promote its Chrome web browser in Europe ahead of a regulatory change that will make it easier for consumers to switch Web browsers. In a departure from its usual dependence on viral and word-of-mouth marketing, Google is running a billboard and newspaper ad campaign for its Chrome browser in the streets and underground train stations of London, Paris and Amsterdam. The campaign comes as the European Union is gearing up to implement its so called browser ballot, which will allow users to actively select the program they will use to surf the Internet when they use their computer for the first time.

It is also a sign of Google’s increasing willingness to engage with traditional media - in this case ad agency Omnicom, which is managing the campaign - many of whom are upset at what they see as Google’s profiting at their expense. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has said recently Google wants to help publishers survive the transition online. “Two years ago, I think there was a Google way. You either took it or left it,” says Chris Hayward, head of UK trading at media buyer Zenith Optimedia. “My personal opinion is that now they are becoming much more commercially sensitive.”

The browser ballot was proposed by Microsoft as part of a settlement of a European Union antitrust dispute that was initiated by browser maker Opera and entered by Google as an interested third party. “Consumers think that the “e” you see on your desktop is synonymous with the Internet. That is a position that is very good for Microsoft and difficult for Google,” said analyst Ross Sandler of RBC, referring to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer icon. By pushing its Chrome browser, Google is trying to change consumer perceptions, and mount a real challenge to Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop computer.

“We think browsers are really important, in fact perhaps the most important part of your computer,” said a Google spokesman. “Our recent marketing campaign is a part of this overall investment in browsers, through which we hope to help make the Web faster, more useful and more secure.” In Paris, one billboard lists what a person does with Chrome as he impulsively decides to book a trip to the soccer World Cup: watching videos on YouTube, chatting with friends, looking for plane tickets to Johannesburg, then tweeting his decision. “Twenty-one tabbed windows open, zero bugs, one web browser,” the ad reads.

But despite Chrome’s superior performance in many aspects such as speed of loading pages, it failed to gain meaningful market share since coming out just over a year ago. According to NetMarketShare statistics published on Monday, Chrome had just 5.2 per cent of the global browser market in January, behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer at 62.2 per cent and open-source Mozilla Firefox, which had 24.4 per cent. Under the measure to take effect in mid-March, European users of Microsoft Windows, which runs nine out of ten of the world’s PCs, will be given an explicit choice of 12 browsers.

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College senior Alyssa Ravasio gave up MySpace on the day she got a Facebook account and never looked back. She has already lost interest in Twitter. But how does Facebook know it can keep her loyalty? The brief history of the Internet is littered with the ghosts of websites that people have abandoned in their relentless pursuit of something newer, faster, better and cooler. Tech-savvy Ravasio, a 21-year-old UCLA student designing her undergraduate degree around the Internet’s impact on society and communication, is irked by changes privately owned Facebook has made. But for now, she says, Facebook is keeping her allegiance because of a concept called “technological lock-in”. In other words, the site has become an essential part of her life.

“I think Facebook is the most valuable Internet commodity in existence, more so than Google, because they are positioning themselves to be our online identity via Facebook connect,” Ravasio said. “It is your real name, it is your real friends, and assuming they manage to navigate the privacy quagmire, they are poised to become your universal gain,” she said. “I would almost argue that Facebook is the new mobile phone. It is the new thing that you need to keep in touch, almost a requirement of modern social life.”

Technological lock-in is the idea that the more a society adopts a certain technology, the more unlikely users are to switch. It is the reason why the QWERTY keyboard layout, devised for typewriters in the 1870s, is still the standard despite the development of several more logical configurations. And Facebook, which has more than 100 million users in the United States and 350 million worldwide, appears to have nearly achieved technological lock-in, according to Comscore.com, a web marketing research company.

In December, for example, Facebook recorded nearly 112 million unique visitors in the Unites States, compared to 57 million for MySpace and 20 million for Twitter, according to Comscore.com website. Users also spent much longer on Facebook, averaging 246.9 minutes in December, compared to 112.7 minutes on MySpace and 24.3 minutes on Twitter. “It is something that feels on itself,” Comscore.com director Andrew Lipsman said. “The more people who come in to the network, the more connected they become to each other and there actually becomes a greater cost to leaving the network. At some point it becomes a critical mass,” he said. “It becomes so strong that it is difficult to unlock and I think Facebook has reached that point.”

Sceptics might say that the same argument could have been made for MySpace just a few years ago, when it reigned supreme among social networking sites to the extent that few American teens would be caught dead without an account. But those who study web trends say that MySpace, while wildly popular, never quite reached the worldwide domination of Facebook, which then Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg started in his dorm room in 2004. Facebook initially limited membership to Harvard, then universities, a move that heightened the draw for teens. And once Facebook opened registration to anyone in 2006, it was flooded with members between the ages of 25 to 45.

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Here is a riddle: How do you make your book a best seller on the Kindle? Answer: Give copies away! That’s right. More than half of the “best-selling” e-books on the Kindle, Amazon.com’s e-reader, are available at no charge. Although some of the titles are digital versions of books in the public domain - like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice - many are by authors still trying to make a living from their work. Earlier this week, for example, the No1 and 2 spots on the Kindle’s best-seller list were taken by Cape Refuge and Southern Storm, both novels by Terri Blackstock, a writer of Christian thrillers. The Kindle price: $0. Until the end of the month, Blackstock’s publisher, Zondervan, a division of Harper Collins Publishers, is offering readers the opportunity to download the books free to the Kindle or to the Kindle apps on their iPhone or in Windows.

Publishers including Harlequin, Random House and Scholastic are offering free versions of digital books to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other e-retailers, as well as on author Web sites, as a way of allowing readers to try out the work of unfamiliar writers. The hope is that customers who like what they read will go on to obtain another title for money. “Giving people a sample is a great way to hook people and encourage them to buy more,” said Suzanne Murphy, group publisher of Scholastic Trade Publishing, which offered free downloads of Suite Scarlett, a young-adult novel by Maureen Johnson, for three weeks in the hopes of building buzz for the next book in the series, “Scarlett Fever,” out in hardcover on February 1. The book went as high as No3 on Amazon’s Kindle best-seller list.

The digital giveaways come as publishers are panicking about the price pressure on e-books in general. Amazon and other online retailers have set $9.99 as the putative e-book price for new releases and best sellers, and publishers worry that such pricing ultimately creates expectations among consumers that new books are no longer worth, say $25 9the average list price of a new hardcover), or even $13 (a standard list price for trade paperbacks). Some publishers have tried to take control of pricing by delaying the publication of certain e-books for several months after the books are made available in hardcover. Executives at some houses said that given such actions, offering free content amounts to industry hypocrisy.

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