500 million and rising also makes it clear to anyone not paying attention that Facebook is no fad and that it is a cultural force shaping our collective culture. Even if you have no desire to ever set up a profile, you can’t ignore it and you are now oddly defined in the negative and left out of the zeitgeist.

A service of that size won’t disappear anytime soon, even if Facebook has hit its plateau in the U.S. But net users are fickle and the web’s short history includes dozens of sites that were once high-flying that have either since died (Geocities), lost their luster (Yahoo) or faded into irrelevance (Friendster).

So how could Facebook lose its place at the center of the web?

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

via The Creativity Crisis – Newsweek.

via Official Google Blog: Life in a Day.

If you search for flights on Google today, all you get is links to results from the big online travel sites. Bing, on the other hand, offers a much richer Travel experience, complete with comparison prices for the same flight from the different travel engines, as well as predictive charts and graphs from Farecast which was acquired by Microsoft for $115 million in 2008. Bing also gets a lot of its flight and fare data from ITA.

via Google Pays $700 Million In Cash For Flight Info Provider ITA.

via Starbucks Free Wi-Fi Now Available in U.S. and Canada.

via YouTube – Introducing Google TV.

Development on the product is most definitely full steam ahead. Is your TV screen the next battleground in the platform wars? Survey says: hell yes.

via The next Apple TV revealed: cloud storage and iPhone OS on tap… and a $99 price tag — Engadget.

Musicians, and those who toil in the radio, TV or film industries may find life today sounding quieter, a little less crisp, even. Dr. Fritz Sennheiser, the founder of the eponymous family engineering firm, has died a few days after his 98th birthday. The good doctor leaves an enormous legacy, having been the driving force behind the creation of some of the best products in the audio industry, including a mic that won h

via The Man Who Changed the Ears of the World: R.I.P. Dr. Fritz Sennheiser | Fast Company.

Would You Pay $5 To Upgrade an Old DVD to Blu-ray?

Warner Bros. has an interesting program that they’ve recently expanded a bit—mail in an old DVD movie along with $5 to swap it for the newer, Blu-ray version. After mulling it over, I think I like the idea.

It’s $5 to upgrade most titles (some run a few bucks more)—titles I really would rather rewatch in HD because, to be honest, all of my SD DVDs have looked a lot less appealing since upgrading the old home theater system. There are shipping charges and up to a two-month turnaround, but if you exchange 7 or more movies, at least the shipping is free.

via Would You Pay $5 To Upgrade an Old DVD to Blu-ray? – Dvd2blu – Gizmodo.