There has been a ton of chatter this week over the DOJ’s request for search engine records, what they asked for, and who gave them what.

• Search Engine Watch has had great coverage of the happenings, along with some analysis.
• For those looking for just some background info see Boing Boing’s Archive or Wired.
• And Robert Accettura has one angle for the civil disobedient types – introduce noise into the system by searching for “George Bush Rapes America Porn”.

In an interesting addition to the ongoing discussion of the definition of a Web Professional Garret Dimon chimes in with a lengthy post titled The Time is Now for Front-End Architects.

While he says a lot we all already know, his attempt to outline some concrete skills and attacking the issue from both directions (designers and programmers) makes it a worthy read.

When it comes down to it, we have a bundle of technologies that are inter-related with very few people really digging in to understand the relationship between them all. Unfortunately, the real value of doing something correctly is the ease of maintenance and long-term adaptability, and in the heat of the moment, it's easier to just look the other way and slap something together. For some, that may be an acceptable way of doing things. However, for most of us, that's a poor decision, and generally unprofessional.

Also, if you missed it when it was going around last week be sure to read Joe Clark’s piece on Failed Redesigns—a must for both web professionals and business owners alike.

While none of these can touch the style of Malik’s shootout goal earlier this season, The Toronto Star writers have gathered together video of some of this year’s best regulation goals.

That Zherdev goal is great.

Its great to wake up and see something totally unexpected in my feed reader. This morning was one of those times.

The folks at the WebKit blog has just announced Safari Web Inspector which is a compact UI device to examine the structure of a web page in depth (element properties, styles, etc.) by clicking from element to element. Those familiar with Mozilla & Firefox’s DOM Inspector will know exactly what I’m talking about. (And those not, see here and here).

The Web Inspector has been checked into the open source WebKit project and is available now if you download a nightly development build.

I’m happy to announce the release of my first plugin for the Textpattern blogging system—pnh_mf—that allows for simple inclusion of common microformats including hCard, hCalendar and XFN.

The new tags can be used in page templates or page and post content or reused via forms. Here’s an example event entry for SXSW:

<txp:pnh_mf_hcalendar summary="SXSW" location="Austin" href="http://2006.sxsw.com/" dtstart="20060310" start="March 10" dtend="20060320" end="19, 2006" />