A set of five Google-coloured clay balls spring to life on Google's home page as a tribute to Arthur 'Art' Clokey, a pioneer in the art of stop motion clay animation.

Past Doodles have at times been interactive such as The Muppets and its creator Jim Henson, what would have been Freddie Mercury‘s 65th birthday, Les Paul the guitar hero and so on.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Art Clokey began experimenting with stop-motion clay animation in the 50′s. He and his wife created the Gumbasia project, which morphed into the Gumby series. Gumby has remained popular more or less ever since, even spawning a movie as recently as the mid-90′s.

Art Clokey died in 2010 and is remembered today as one of the key figures in American animation. His influence extends to many of the 20th century’s key animators, ranging from the likes of the Czech Republic’s Jan Svankmajer to Britain’s own Tony Hart.

The Gumby Google Doodle features a wooden block for the "G," with clay balls following the Google color scheme sitting in a row, just waiting for you to click and bring them to life. Gumby, in place of the "L," gives a wave when you land on the page, pointing to the clay balls. At the top of the screen, "Art Clokey’s 90th Birthday" links to the search results page for Clokey.

Hovering over each clay ball causes it to compress; moving away releases it to full shape... but when you click on them, they come to life.

Google doodles have gained immense popularity over the past few years and the Google team has put out commemorative doodles on events ranging from news events, civic milestones, birthdays, death anniversaries and important dates in history.

Google estimates it has created more than 900 doodles since 1998, with 270 of them running in 2010 and about 200 in 2011.

On September 24, Muppets creator Jim Henson would have been 75, had he been alive. And in his honor Google has rolled out its latest amazing Doodle a little early.

James Maury Henson is best known for ‘The Muppets’ and memorable shows such as Sesame Street, The Muppet Show and films such as The Muppet Movie and The Great Muppet Caper.

Internet search giant Google has created a new interactive doodle that allows users to control digital puppets to celebrate what would have been the 75th birthday of the Muppets creator.

"Become a digital puppeteer today and tomorrow with our homepage tribute to Jim Henson!" Google tweeted.

Google posted a message on its official blog, in which Brian Henson, the chairman of The Jim Henson Company, described his father as a playful, happy, forgiving, visionary and creative figure.

The Doodle is fully interactive with five different muppets on show. Simply use the buttons below each of the muppets to activate their individual animations.
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The Doodle allows users to become puppeteers through the Google homepage. Six original characters include their own animations including ‘bonus/hidden’ animations which can be discovered by patient Google puppeteers.

The characters were designed at the Henson Company and modeled into a digital puppet in Jim Henson's Creature Shop before being handed over to Google.

The 112th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges, the famed Argentinian author known for his works that explored dreams and unreality, has been celebrated with a colourful Google Doodle

Google doodles have gained immense popularity over the past few years and the Google team has put out commemorative doodles on events ranging from news events, civic milestones, birthdays, death anniversaries and important dates in history.

We see many different GOOGLE DOODLEs now which can vary to interactive creations or actual playable games.

Before there was the World Wide Web, the Internet, hypertext markup, or even a digital computer, there was Jorge Luis Borges’ idea of "forking paths." The Argentinean writer who envisioned "a massive branching structure as a better way to organize data and to represent human experience," was born 112 years ago today and is the subject of a special Doodle on Google home page on 24-Aug-2011.

On June 14, 1986 Jorge Luis Borges died of liver cancer aged 86.

His 1941 short story 'The Garden of Forking Paths' is viewed by many as the basis for what we know today as the World Wide Web.

Over the years Google doodles have been commemorating important dates in history. Some of these, including the most recent one for Les Paul was an interactive video.

Today's teens and college students are what researchers call digital natives, or the iGeneration, a generation constantly connected to the Internet and Facebook, texting and instant messaging.

Parents, who are thinking of ways to secretly monitor their child's social networking, are wasting their time, a new study has suggested.

Post this, comment on that. Social media are a part of the daily routines of many adults and children. And the identifiable pros and cons of social networking among kids are beginning to emerge, according to a presentation at the American Psychological Association meeting.

The new research suggests that overuse of media and technology can negatively affect health of children and teens, especially with psychological disorders- making users more likely to experience anxiety and depression.

How does a parent best raise a teen growing in a culture of constant communication they just don't understand?

"Kids are still kids, and kids need parents. Good parenting is linked to everything good all the way though your life," says Larry Rosen, a researcher at California State University and author of "REWIRED: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

The news is both good and bad, according to Larry Rosen who's been studying the effect of technology on people for more than 25 years. Recently, he's done several studies on how the social networking site affects children.

While teens who use Facebook more often show more narcissistic tendencies, they also have chances to learn how to socialize, particularly shy teens. And while Facebook can be distracting, negatively impacting teen grades, social networking can also provide tools for teaching in compelling ways that engage young students.

America still loves Lucille Ball and is celebrating her 100th birthday by remembering her. Google celebrated the occasion by dedicating an interactive doodle to the world famous comedian.

Visitors to Google.com are met with the boxy, vintage television set and a short video that features the word "Google" scrawled over a black-and-white heart that mimics the opening of Lucy. Following that, a play button pops up, inviting visitors to use the television's dial to choose from several iconic clips from the show, which ran on CBS from 1951 to 1957.

In a blog post, Google doodler Jennifer Hom explained: "Lucy's creativity, absurdity, and ever-changing facial expressions (especially when she was scarfing down candy, stomping on grapes, or touting a new energy drink) have brought joy and laughter to generations of viewers.

Five-time Emmy winner Lucille Ball died in 1989 in Los Angeles, but her legend lives on, most famously via her iconic TV show, I Love Lucy. The show ran from 1951 to 1957, but can be seen in syndication around the world, introducing generation after generation to Ball's comic stylings.

Google Doodles are now an established part of Internet culture.

Apart from the static image doodles Google also puts up animated and interactive doodles. Interactive and animated Google doodles have now become a regular feature on the Google home page.

Google has more than 50 domains in 50 different countries, and it creates Doodles specific to many of them.

An American guy charged with sending more than 27 million spam messages to Facebook users has turned himself in. Sanford Wallace, who is known as the Spam King, surrendered to FBI agents in California.

Sanford Wallace, 43, was indicted in July by a San Jose, Calif., grand jury on three counts of intentional damage to a protected computer and two counts of criminal contempt, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Northern District of California. Wallace allegedly compromised approximately 500,000 Facebook accounts during three separate attacks on the social-networking giant between November 2008 and March 2009.

Wallace gained fame as one of spam's most vocal defenders back in the 1990s and he has faced numerous civil actions over his activities, including lawsuits from MySpace and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

However this is the first time he's facing criminal charges.

Wallace appeared in federal court on Thursday (04-Aug-2011) afternoon and was released on a $100,000 unsecured bond. He was again ordered not to access sites like Facebook and MySpace. He is scheduled to appear in court on August 22.

If convicted of all charges, Wallace could face nearly 40 years in prison and fines of more than $2 million.

In the biggest ever series of cyber attacks uncovered to date, hackers were found to have broken into networks of the Indian government, United Nations and US defence companies, with security experts pointing to China as the culprit.

The security company has said it believes there was one "state actor" behind the attacks but declined to name it, though one security expert who was briefed on the hacking told Reuters that the evidence points to China.

Beijing has always denied any state involvement in cyber-attacks, calling such accusations "groundless,"

The company, McAfee, said it had alerted the 72 targets it identified and also informed law enforcement agencies, which it said were investigating. The 14-page report calls the attacks highly sophisticated and says they appear to have been operated by a government body, which it declined to name.

McAfee said that it had come across the extent of hacking in May and had dubbed the uncovering of the plot as ‘Operation Shady RAT’.

In his 14-page report on McAfee's findings, Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee's vice president of threat research, asserts that Operation Shady RAT may have cost its victims billions in terms of lost revenues and stolen secrets.

"What we have witnessed over the past five to six years has been nothing short of a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth," he said.

If you are yet to ditch Internet Explorer 6, a web browser released in 2001, now is the time to do it. Unless you want to be called dumb.

Here comes the flame war. According to a new report, dumb people are more likely to use Internet Explorer than smart people.

A survey used tests offered through Web searches or in online ads to measure the IQ of browser users.

• Internet Explorer users scored lower on online IQ tests than users of other browsers
• Report says people on the old IE 6 browser scored lowest; Opera users the highest
• The survey, by a consulting company, wasn't conducted scientifically

It’s also interesting to note that average IQ scores of IE6 users were significantly higher in 2006, and that the IQ scores get better with newer versions of IE.

A company called AptiQuant, a self-proclaimed “world leader in the field of online psychometric testing,” tested the IQs of users and grouped the results according to which browser respondents used.

The survey findings were reported by Jared Newman on PC World with the headline "Internet Explorer Users Are Kinda Stupid" and as his story spread AptiQuant started to receive hate mail from IE users.

Hacking group Anonymous is asking PayPal users to "immediately close their accounts and consider an alternative," as a way of protesting the arrests of 14 people tied to a denial-of-service attack on PayPal's website last December. That attack, which brought down the site, was said to be retribution against PayPal for dropping WikiLeaks' donation account.

"PayPal continues to withhold funds from WikiLeaks, a beacon of truth in these dark times," the groups said in a statement.

"We encourage anyone using PayPal to immediately close their accounts and consider an alternative," they said.

"The first step to being truly free is not putting one's trust into a company that freezes accounts when it feels like, or when it is pressured by the US government," they added.

Various Anonymous Twitter accounts are making a call for action. Anonymous Press tweets: "Paypal suspended the closing of accounts online, so call in and close ur account 1-888-221-1161 make sure 2 quote #OpPayPal via@odotm"

Wikileaks is showing support by tweeting: "We support the work of #Anonymous in drawing attention to the economic blockade of #Wikileaks by corrupt financial institutions. #OpPayPal"

So far, however, the campaign may not be having much effect.

"We haven't seen any changes to our normal operations (including account opening and closing) overnight," a PayPal spokeswoman told CNN via e-mail on Wednesday (27-July-2011).

Anonymous wants PayPal users to switch to other similar services.
"Get yourself a slice of MyBitCoin, Liberty Reserve, WebMoney, Neteller, Moneybookers, and start using prepaid credit and gift cards," tweeted allied hacking group LulzSec.

The latest Google Doodle celebrates the 113 birth anniversary of Alexander Calder, the American sculptor and artist famous for inventing the mobile sculptures and mobile art.

Two days ago, it was an arrangement of peas. Today (22-July-2011), it's an interesting looking kinetic artwork that has replaced the Google logo, to celebrate the 113th birth anniversary of American artist and sculptor Alexander Calder.

Friday's Google doodle shows a mobile, a type of kinetic sculpture that was invented by Alexander Calder. Mobiles take advantage of the principle of equilibrium and have objects hanging from rods. Kinetic art uses motion for an artistic effect.

Mobiles are usually brightly coloured free-moving creations in abstract shapes made from sheet metal. The mobile Google doodle sways on its own and can also be controlled by mouse gestures.
The Google doodle shows a mobile, a type of kinetic sculpture invented by Alexander Calder.

Google in a blog post confirmed that the Alexander Calder Google Doodle today is the first of its kind, not only because it’s the first Doodle to flaunt a shadow below the search input bar, but the technique used to create it is the modernist way that only an advanced web browser can support all of its hidden and obvious features.

Google regularly replaces its corporate logo with so called Google doodles which celebrate special occasions.

Recently the search engine celebrated music legend Les Paul’s birthday by featured an animated guitar which could be strummed.

Google also marked the 30th anniversary of the arcade game Pac Man by hosting a playable game on its homepage.

Doodles are fairly common commemorating special days. Everyone loves a good Google doodle. Whether it is for something major like Christmas or trivial like Pacman's 30th anniversary, the Google doodle has been an everchanging and entertaining aspect to the search engine.

An assortment of peas welcomed users to the Google home page on July 20, 2011.

The search giant paid tribute to Augustinian friar and scientist Gregor Johann Mendel Wednesday, as it marked his 189th birth anniversary with one of its Doodles.

Gregor Johann Mendel (July 20, 1822[1] – January 6, 1884) was a Czech-German Augustinian friar and scientist, who gained posthumous fame as the figurehead of the new science of genetics for his study of the inheritance of certain traits in pea plants. Mendel showed that the inheritance of these traits follows particular laws, which were later named after him.

The significance of Mendel's work was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century. The independent rediscovery of these laws formed the foundation of the modern science of genetics.

Google has set up a team of designers dedicated just for creating wonderful works of art that make our internet browsing a bit more fun.

The first Google Doodle was in honor of the Burning Man Festival of 1998. The doodle was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed.

Subsequent Google Doodles were designed by an outside contractor, until Larry and Sergey asked then-intern Dennis Hwang to design a logo for Bastille Day in 2000. Hwang has been designing the Google Doodles ever since. Clicking on a Google Doodle links to a string of Google search results about the topic, which can drive a lot of traffic to unsuspecting sites.

So far, Google has created over 300 doodles just for Google.com, if we were to include international doodles… it’ll be more than 1000 incredible doodles altogether!

Google Doodle is back with a new celebration, internet search giant Google on Tuesday (12-July-2011) marks the 450th anniversary of Moscow's Saint Basil's Cathedral with a commemorative doodle on its home page.

Visitors to Google's home page will see an image of the cathedral integrated into Google's familiar logo.

Clicking on the logo will take the visitor to Google search results for St. Basil's Cathedral.

The Russian Orthodox church sits on Moscow's Red Square just yards from the Kremlin, and its distinctive onion domes have been a backdrop for military parades, concerts, New Year celebrations and Muscovites' wedding photos.

This is not the first time that Google featured the St. Basil’s Cathedral in the search engine’s patented Google Doodles. One of the best St. Basil’s Cathedral Google Doodle was featured on December 24th, 2010 alongside other Christmas-centric buildings, natural wonders and places around the world.

Internet search engine giant Google on Tuesday (22-June-2011) announced the expansion of its translation services to include five more Indian languages -- Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu -- thus increasing its reach to a potential half a million population.

With the inclusion of new languages, the total number of languages supported by Google Translate has risen to 63. Google says these languages are presently in experimental phase, noting that Indian languages are pretty different from English language. It also highlights that the new languages supported by its online translation service are spoken by over 500 million people in India and Bangladesh.

According to Google research scientist Ashish Venugopal, Indian languages often use the Subject Object Verb (SOV) ordering to form sentences, unlike English, which uses Subject Verb Object (SVO) ordering.

"This difference in sentence structure makes it harder to produce fluent translations; the more words that need to be reordered, the more chance there is to make mistakes when moving them. Tamil, Telugu and Kannada are also highly agglutinative, meaning a single word often includes affixes that represent additional meaning, like tense or number," Venugopal says.

Today (21-June-2011) marks the first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and as usual Google was one of the first to celebrate.

When clicking onto the world wide web, users at times will be met with a Google doodle representing a specific date on the yearly calendar, the latest being Fathers Day on Sunday just gone.

In honor of the Summer Solstice, the longest day of year, Google is celebrating with two homepage doodles from celebrated Japanese artist Takashi Murakami.

What is a midsummer night's dream like? Just ask Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, who's created a fantastical Google Doodle to celebrate the summer solstice.

The brightly colored cartoon, populated by smiling flowers and slightly sinister beasties, commemorates the longest day of the year. “Two super fun, superflat doodles today created by one of our favorite artists Takashi Murakami,” Google trumpeted this morning via Twitter. The other drawing depicts the winter solstice, with happy snowflakes and bunnies with frosty breath.

The summer solstice is the day on which the Earth's northern hemisphere leans closest to the Sun. In the southern hemisphere it takes place in December.

The term solstice is generally used to mean the longest day but it is actually the fleeting instant of proximity when the orbits align.

The time at which the Earth will be closest to the sun is 6.16pm (BST) today (Tuesday 21 June).

The solstice is a Pagan celebration day and believers gather at spiritually significant sites, such as Stonehenge.

Google put up an interactive Doodle on its homepage to celebrate the June 15 midnight lunar eclipse – the longest and darkest eclipse of the century – where one of its O's was replaced by an almost live image of the moon.

The lunar eclipse turned the moon blood red on Thursday (15 to 16-June-2011), yielding a rare visual treat for stargazers across a large swathe of the planet from Australia to Europe.

The first eclipse of the year — when the Earth casts its shadow over the moon — was seen in parts of Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.

To celebrate the longest total lunar eclipse in 11 years, Google has created this Doodle showing real-time footage of the Earth casting a shadow across the moon.

The live Doodle depicts the 100-minute-long eclipse with footage from around the globe and is reportedly updating every two minutes.

Announcing the new Doodle, a post on the official Google blog reads: "If you visit the Google homepage you’ll see a special interactive doodle, which will update throughout the day to show the latest state of the moon."

Sophos, the IT security and data protection firm, has released a new warning regarding a fake anti-virus attack. The specialty of this is that it masquerades as Microsoft's security update and tricks the user into installing malicious software.

According to Sophos, criminals are looking for increasingly convincible ways to persuade consumers to download fake antivirus and copying Microsoft's own security seems to be their latest trap.

"We are seeing the criminals behind fake antivirus continuing to customise their social engineering attacks to be more believable to users and presumably more successful," said Chester Wisniewski on the Sophos blog.

"This week they've started to imitate Microsoft Update." According to Sophos, the drive-by page is an exact replica of the real Microsoft Update page, but only appears on Firefox.

"It only comes up when surfing from Firefox on Windows," said Wisniewski. "The real Microsoft Update requires Internet Explorer."

The use of high quality graphics and professional interfaces means more users are likely to fall for the scam, says Sophos.

"Users need to be more vigilant than ever before, as bogus security alerts pop-up in their browsers," says Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.

Just like visiting one's bank one should only trust security alerts in the browser if one initiated a check with Microsoft, Adobe, Sophos or any other vendor for updates to their software.

Fake anti-virus attacks are big business for cybercriminals and they are investing time and effort into making them as convincing as possible, Graham Cluley says.

Les Paul, the electric guitar pioneer, has been celebrated on his 96th birthday by one of Google's most complex doodles – a playable and recordable 'guitar'.

Les Paul had one of the most colorful and diverse careers in the history of the entertainment industry. During his 80 years on stage and screen and in the studio, Paul was a solo performer, jazz bandleader, big band guitar chair, virtuoso sideman, pop tunesmith, radio personality, TV star, engineer producer, six-string eminence and inventor. In the latter role, the solid body guitar model that bears his name, multi-track recording and the harmonica holder are among his best-known creations.

In 1915, Les Paul, one of the most influential guitarists in pop music history, was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin. With his wife Mary Ford, he had a string of hits in the late 40's and early 50's including, "Mockin' Bird Hill," "How High the Moon" and "The World is Waiting for the Sunrise." Those recordings were among the earliest to use multi-tracking.

Paul also designed guitars which were marketed by the Gibson company and became the favourites of pop, rock and country musicians. He also built the first eight-track tape recorder, which helped pioneer multitrack recording. And he invented "sound-on-sound" recording, which has since become known as overdubbing. Paul was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005. He died on Aug. 13, 2009 of complications from pneumonia at age 94.

The Google doodle in honour of Les Paul is playable by hovering the cursor over the doodle.

Google has now become more frequent with animated and interactive doodles. Of the last 10 Google doodles, five included animations or were interactive.
The Google doodle had first gone interactive in May 2010 to celebrate the 30th birthday of the popular Pac-Man game.

For a dozen years, Google has been occasionally swapping its everyday logo for a doodle. The Google doodles, an artistic take on the Google logo, have gained immense popularity over the past few years and the Google doodle team has put out commemorative doodles on numerous events of international or national importance, ranging from news events, civic milestones, birthdays, death anniversaries and important dates in history.

Google estimates it has created more than 900 doodles since 1998, with 270 of them running in 2010. Some appear globally, and others are tailored for local markets.

Microblogging site Twitter has finally fulfilled users' longtime wish. The company has introduced an automatic URL shortner.

The social notworking web site has been missing this feature ever since it launched and, although many third party providers have stepped up to fill the void, some users have preferred the idea of staying within the Twitter environment and just posted shorter messages instead.

Hereafter, the users can paste a link of any length into the message composition box on the site, according to a company blog post.

Links of any length will be cut down to a tidy number of characters — 19, to be precise — and an ellipsis when the sender clicks the Tweet button.

Although each link is assigned a unique t.co link ID, the links will appear on Twitter as abbreviated versions of their originals so users always have some idea of where their next click will take them — a smart move on Twitter’s part given the number of URL-shortened spam or scam links that have made the rounds on the microblogging platform over the past year or so.

Still, you can expect to see plenty of other URL shorteners floating around Twitter — especially ones like Hootsuite that give their users a full analytics rundown for each link. Twitter said users can still use any third-party link-shortening services on Twitter.com.

Twitter's link service is only used on links posted on Twitter and is not available as a general shortening service.

The company emphasized the security aspects of its new service. URLs converted by Twitter's link service are checked against a list of potentially dangerous sites, and when there's a match, users will be warned before they continue, says Twitter.

Google and Facebook have warned internet users to expect 'teething pains' on Wednesday (08-June-2011) as leading internet companies test drive a new global numbering system for cyberspace.

Wednesday 8 June 2011 is World IPv6 Day, which means around 200 organisations, including Google, Facebook and Yahoo, will offer content over IPv6 for a 24-hour trial.

Many in the industry are seeing the trial, which is supported by the Internet Society, as a "wake-up call" for organisations to prepare for IPv6 to ensure a smooth transition as IPv4 addresses run out.

"The goal of the Test Flight Day is to motivate organisations across the industry – internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out," explained the Internet Society about the day.

The old system could handle several billion addresses. IPv6 has room 340 undecillion of them. That's 34 followed by 37 zeros -- enough for every human on Earth to have trillions of personal gadgets.

But the two systems aren't easy to integrate; they're essentially parallel, independent networks. Internet service providers, operating system manufacturers, browser developers and website operators have been working for several years on the extensive technical changes needed for the switch. Today's experiment is the first global road test of their work.

The transition from IPV4 to IPV6 will free up more than 4 billion new web addresses.

Search engine company Google and its competitors, Bing and Yahoo, have teamed up to promote a new indexing standard for websites. According to an AFP report, the companies hope to improve search results with the common format of tagging content.

When the top three Internet search providers work together on a project, the web pays attention. On Thursday (02-June-2011), Google, Bing, and Yahoo introduced schema.org, a resource for website owners and developers that want to add markup to their pages.

"We are announcing schema.org, a new initiative from Google, Bing and Yahoo to create and support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages," Google said in its blog.

With schema.org, site owners and developers can learn about structured data and improve how their sites appear in major search engines. The site aims to be a one-stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages.

By promoting the use of these common tags across the Web, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google expect that their search engines will be better able to identify, crawl and index structured data.