massive DNS or connectivity problem May 26?

Not sure what is up but starting around 3:45 a.m. this morning, most but not all of the pages I tried to access at different sites came back with errors.

The best example was when I typed in:

www.google.com

In one case, I got back an error message from my web brower (Firefox 2.0.0.14) saying it could not connect to the site.

In the other case, I got back an error page from Verizon (my ISP at the moment) sadly informing me there was no such site and offering helpful (?) advice about what I might have meant to say.

Here is the URL. As you can see, www.google.com is indeed what I typed in and what it indeed thought did not exist.

http://wwwz.websearch.verizon.net/search?qo=www.google.com&rn=eLg2xDr0Wmy5PnK


Had problems getting to other sites as well. The problem seemed to clear up after a few minutes.

It was kind of uncanny. I wonder if something really big went wrong for a few minutes on the Internet.

It is 4 a.m. now and the problem(s) seem to have gone away.

New Google Talk chat widget added to web bling in sidebar of this blog

Google Talk has a new feature which is a little chat widget that can be added to web pages, weblogs, etc.

It uses the most basic standard web technology: HTML.  So it should work fine in any modern web browser.

I am trying it out to see if it helps my friends stay in touch with me.  If demented webvertisers start pointing 'bots and sub-minimum wage flunkies at it to try to sell me services/products, then I think I will unplug it.

In the meantime, it will be an interesting an hopefully useful experiment.