Here's some tech news that made the cut this week: • Professional social networking site Linkedin has seen its traffic spike over three hundred percent in the last year. I wondered why I started getting all those Linkedin invites recently. • Speaking of social networking, watch out for the Facebook backlash. And, in a related story, what's a site like Facebook worth anyway? • Intel has joined the $100 group (aka one laptop per......

Some interesting tech-related news from around the web this week. • Blackberry service had an outage this week in many parts of North America and for several tense hours, millions of users had to find something else to do with their thumbs. I feel their pain. But oddly, not in my thumbs. • Despite spending a boatload of cash to advertise Windows Vista, Microsoft has only managed to sell 244 legit copies of the......

- On his blog, Matt Welch often frowns on MLB teams giving huge sums of money to over-30-year-old baseball players (because they're fragile), so when 31-year-old David Beckham hurt his knee today, we thought of Welch cackling from his ivory tower - LA Times - For the second year in a row there was a fatality at the LA Marathon. This year a 50-year-old bicyclist had a heart attack and died at S. Catalina......

We'd like to start this week's run-down by wishing a very happy birthday to parent blog Gothamist, which turned four on Friday. If it wasn't for them, the rest of us wouldn't be here. They celebrated their birthday by nabbing an interview with Entourage star Adrian Grenier, who misses NYC public transportation when he's working in LA. They also reported on NYU students protesting a band whose name is also known as a slur,......

Six OC gang members charged for acting like Gang Members - LA Times LA will probably get the 2016 Olympic Games - NY Sun Judge says US paper money is Blindist - Fox News USC Daily Trojan Editor-in-Chief barred by USC for having the audacity to ask how much money the university makes off the paper - Daily Trojan (h/t LAO) Snoop Dogg should really just stay away from Burbank, arrested againzille - LA......

1. Engadget: Next Friday Circuit City will be selling $99 laptops, sorta 2. BoingBoing - Cemetery 2.0 links your real headstone to your Facebook Memorial page. 3. FC2: Windows Vista doesn't work with the Zune? 4. Gizmodo - Blender capable of blending 40 pens 5. Xujing Lei - still loves her cat 6. Huffington Post - Guest blogger John Murtha writes: "Iraq is key... Let's get to work." Hey John, don't quit your day......