Community college classes in the old mall movie theater. A DMV office across from the Starbucks. Maybe a local library between the Victoria's Secret and the Gap.

France's central bank announced Friday that it has fined Societe Generale $6.3 million for "serious shortcomings" that led to nearly $7.8 billion in trading losses announced earlier this year.

To marketing majors everywhere: There's a six-figure job waiting for you at the casino.

Times are certainly tough for GM, which saw its stock fall to a 54-year low. But while one analyst said bankruptcy is a possibility, others said that outcome is unlikely.

To Wild Turkey master distiller Jimmy Russell, the piercing sounds of a warehouse rising in the Kentucky countryside are the sounds of prosperity.

The growth of PBR – the bull riding league founded in 1992, not the beer – has thrust it into the public consciousness, even if it’s not yet center stage among pro sports.

General Motors is considering a new Chevrolet mini car for the United States as it reworks its product lineup to cope with a dramatic shift from trucks to cars linked to high gas prices.

If you want to drive and talk on the phone you must use a hands-free device. A headset can set you back $100. But you don’t have to pay anywhere near that if you know where to shop.

A French judge ordered Continental Airlines and five people to stand trial on charges of manslaughter for the 2000 crash of a Concorde jet that killed 113 people, a prosecutor said.

If economic woes continue, some say things could go from bad to worse for Starbucks, which this week announced plans to close 600 U.S. stores.

If you want to annoy web denizens, ask them to join a new social network. It’s the middle of 2008, it’s obvious the web has gone social and there’s no going back. However, recreating a social network person-by-person, click-by-click is already a point of fatigue for most web professionals. Thankfully, some very smart people are working on that problem as fast as they can, with notable progress. Ben Ward joins Digital Web Magazine this week to guide us through distributed social network strategies in Portable Social Networks, The Building Blocks Of A Social Web. If your own projects involve social networking, keep distributed social network standards in mind. Not only does it benefit users, but it also helps solidify identity and credibility on the web.

Secondly, don’t forget we’ll be launching our Web Directions South conference contest soon! Final details are assembled, so check back early next week. We’ll be on break, but I’ll post the specifics about the contest in place of a new issue.

p.s. Um, yes, I accidentally pre-published this news item last night, which astute web readers (and more than a few RSS subscribers) might have caught. Sorry about that. Free sneek peak—can I call it that?

Mashable’s traveling U.S. tour is coming to Seattle, the first city of their seven-city tour! Join the Mashable crew (including Pete Cashmore) and other Seattle geeks for an evening of “drinks, food and connecting at SummerMash”, coming up quickly on Saturday, July 12 at Showbox SoDo! DJ El Toro, snacks, drink tickets and more… I’ll be there, too, so say hi if you see me. Full details:

SummerMash
Seattle, WA
Saturday, July 12
7pm-10pm
Showbox SoDo
1700 1st Avenue South
Tickets
RSVP

Upcoming cities on the tour

• San Francisco, July 15th at Mighty SF
• Los Angeles, July 18th at Rubicon Project HQ
• Austin, July 30th at Buffalo Billiards
• Miami, August 2nd at Opium Garden
• Boston, August 5th at The Roxy
• New York City, August 7th at Touch
• more info

JavaScript wizard and accessibility advocate (and occasional DW writer) Christian Heilmann has announced plans for a two-day conference/workshop in London this September.

Scripting Enabled will focus on the idea of “accessihacking” — creating mashups of social media and Web 2.0 applications to make them useful and accessible to disabled people. The conference is looking for a venue at the moment, so if you might be able to help, get in touch.

Digital Web is happy to welcome back Britt Parrott this week, with a very helpful post about breaking the concept of social media’s good side to reluctant organization in Integrating Social Media into a Web Content Strategy. Ever tried to explain the social appeal of Twitter or Flickr to those unfamiliar with social websites? Or how to integrate social aspects into key components of your site(s)? Try a different approach that emphasizes the value of openness, transparency and customer engagement. Get started on your organization or project with Britt’s thorough guidance.

Last week I mentioned (incorrectly, sorry) that the deadline for early bird registration to Web Directions South was fast approaching. In fact, we all have until July 16th for $200 off conference passes, and a second less-early bird deadline after that. However, don’t get complacent, because the WDS folks are giving away an iPhone to one lucky attendee who buys a pass by July 11th!

Still resisting temptation? Web Directions South pulls some serious conference clout, not only for its Sydney venue but also due to the quality of speakers, sessions, workshop and camaraderie. This year speakers include Jeffrey Veen – Designing our way through data, Lynne D Johnson – New media – new business, Derek Featherstone – Web app accessibility, Jina Bolton – Creating sexy stylesheets, Daniel Burka – Interaction design case studies, Jeff Croft – Elegant web typography and Douglas Crockford – Ajax security amongst quite a few other top-notch speakers, many from Australia’s own geek community. The workshops look compelling, too, covering a wide range of topics from Django webapp development to Website accessibility for webapps & ajax.

Digital Web is proud to be a media partner for WDS, and we’ll be running a contest for our southern-oriented readers very soon. If you are familiar with our previous contests for Web Directions North (the Canadian counterpart), then you might have an idea of what we have in mind. Stay tuned; I’ll post more about it soon!

This week Digital Web is happy to introduce perhaps more thought-provoking fare. Our resident Flash video expert and all-around excellent contributor Tom Green poses questions about academia, technology and hiring in The Education of Geeks and Freaks. Tom brings up salient points about correcting the gap between self-education, school and employable technologists.

While we’re focusing on education, a number of websites recently put new attention to curricula, educators and whether academics hold value for web professionals. WaSP’s Education Task Force recently announced a new focus and task force members. The SVA in New York recently announced a new MFA in interaction design, along with their new design criticism program mentioned here previously. Meanwhile, Ajaxian gets to the heart of the issue by reconsidering the question, What’s the Value of a College Education for Ajax Developers?

Lastly (and as a nice counterpoint to academic settings), July 19th is the last day for early registration discounts ($200 off!) to Web Directions South! The southern edition of the widely respected Web Directions conferences kicks off September 25-26th in Sydney, Australia, along with solid pre-conference workshops. Digital Web has more information coming soon, but for more details visit south08.webdirections.org.

* Correction, 19June08, Tiff Fehr: I can’t read. The early bird deadline for WDS is July 19th, 2008.

Is web design and web standard thinking—formerly a self-teaching badge of honor—heading into academia? Today NYC’s School of Visual Arts announced a new MFA program in Interaction Design, to launch “fall of 2009”. The program plans to focus on “concepts central to interaction design, including design research, human-computer interaction, interface design, graphic design, information architecture, and ubiquitous computing.” While the curricula sounds solid enough, the potential faculty is the bigger news: “A portion of the faculty includes” Christopher Fahey, David Womack, Jason Santa Maria, Karen McGrane, Khoi Vinh, Paul Ford, Rachel Abrams and Jeffrey Zeldman, with Liz Danzico presiding as department chair.

In addition to SVA’s MFA IxD progam (acronyms galore!), Khoi Vinh recently blogged about SVA’s new Design Criticism MFA, too. The faculty features names readily familiar to web designers, with a specific program focus on expanding design criticism to “the broadest possible definition of design, the curriculum includes graphic, web and product design”. Outside New York, many conferences and seminars on calendars this year skew academic (or at least “teaching”) as well, with what seems to be a sign that web design conventions are patterned enough to round out a degree. It also indictes that academic departments believe they can keep up and stay relevant even with fast-paced technology changes.

Design is obviously the easier to nail down than development. Perhaps higher degree programs centered around web development aren’t far behind. Know of any other new programs that focus in part on web design and development? Post ‘em up.

Opera have released the final 9.5 version of their web browser, accompanied by a detailed write-up on their developers’ blog. This version includes aspects of CSS3 (text-shadow, media queries, nth-child, and background sizing are just some of the goodies you can play with) and HTML5 (Web Forms and canvas are supported). Finally, getElementsByClassName is supported natively too.

Just a short while ago Jeffery Veen, of Adaptive Path, MeasureMap and Google fame, announced a new conference called, simply, Start. According to the website, Start is a “one-day conference in San Francisco designed for smart, talented Web people to take hold of their ideas, follow their dreams, and start their own companies.” The speakers list is impressive, but eclipsed by the amazing price: $200, with full understanding that you might not want to tell your boss about it.

I’m sure it’ll fill up fast, so register soon and work out the travel and work-compensation side later. (I’m doing just that.)

Dave Greiner at Freshview tells me that they have put together A Guide to CSS Support in Email . If you are sending out newsletters via email (like we do with our Digital Web Magazine Newsletter) you may want to note this handy resource. The guide covers both desktop clients as well as web based email clients.

We’ve put together this CSS support in email clients guide to save you the time and trouble of figuring it out for yourself. With 21 different sets of results, all the major email systems are covered, both desktop applications and webmail.

While your on this site you may want to check out their blog, lots of great tips and articles for creating newsletters and dealing with bugs in email clients.

Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer for Google, says that piling links onto a competitor's site to reduce its search rank isn't impossible, but it's extremely difficult."

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I saw his last night its now on slashdot and search engine land.

Google Vs MS

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I guess this is the official reason

In summary:

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After taking a random sample of 600 Wikipedia articles, 96.67% are in Google's top 10 for their title.

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I hate to do this, but this Friday I am closing Threadwatch. I don't think the site died at any specific point, it has been more of a process, which I will outline below:

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Oh this is great shit. -- Google calls for more limits for Microsoft Enjoy the BS Full Story

More confusion about SEO, this time from NYT:

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EBay said on Friday the where going to start placing ad's on Google, but that it would rely on other sources to a greater degree.

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I don't even know where to start. MarketingExperiments recent article, "Harnessing Social Media - Web 2.0 Grows Up - Free Internet Traffic," has so many holes and is so off the mark, it makes me wonder if they've been sipping too much of grandpa's cough syrup over there.

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rumours are a foot : http://internet.seekingalpha.com/article/39120 that Yahoo and Ebay are to merge.

The big thing here for Yahoo is that
a) they get a massive user base
b) Paypal

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AP - A wildfire threatening thousands of homes in Southern California spread slowly through scenic canyonlands Saturday, straining resources as crews struggled to contain hundreds of other blazes around the state.

AP - Barack Obama celebrated "active faith" as an obligation of religious Americans and a chief agent of societal change while speaking Saturday to a nearly all-black roomful of churchgoers, but hoping to reach far beyond them.

AP - Military intelligence agents posing as aid workers and a film crew flew to the jungle aboard a white helicopter, staging a mock humanitarian mission that rebels were told would ferry their hostages to another camp for talks on a prisoner swap.

AP - Even folks in the Optimist Club are having a tough time toeing an upbeat line these days.

AP - Jesse Helms forever changed North Carolina politics and the conservative movement. The former senator did it without ever changing much about himself.

AP - Iran indicated Saturday that it has no plans to meet a key Western demand that it stop enriching uranium, a day after Tehran sent the European Union a response to an international offer of incentives for halting enrichment.

AP - The knock on Brian Hart's door came at 6 a.m. An Army colonel, a priest and a police officer had come to tell Hart and his wife that their 20-year-old son had been killed when his military vehicle was ambushed in Iraq.

AP - Riding a green lawn chair supported by a rainbow array of more than 150 helium-filled party balloons, Kent Couch succeeded Saturday in his third bid to fly from central Oregon all the way to Idaho.

AP - Mariano Rivera flashed his classic form just in time. The New York Yankees closer pitched himself in and out of trouble Saturday, escaping a bases-loaded, no-out jam in the ninth inning and preserving a 2-1 victory over the Boston Red Sox.