The Daily‘s one blog, which will be hosted at blog.thedaily.com and powered by Tumblr. Like the Tumblrs of several established news media organizations, Jones will deconstruct stories covered by the publication, conducting interviews with staff about the reporting process on a particular story to entice the platform’s users to subscribe to The Daily in the App Store for a rumored $0.99 per week, or $4.25 per month.

Researcher’s at IBM are preparing a supercomputer called Watson to compete on Jeopardy. Watson has already won a practice round on the show against two top contestants, showing artificial intelligence has come a long way in simulating how humans think.

Skype is widening its sights on the burgeoning video-calling market. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Thursday, the Internet phone service announced the acquisition of Qik, whose expertise in mobile video-streaming and storage is expected to polish areas where Skype was lacking.

The amount of junk e-mail being sent across the globe has seen a dramatic fall in recent months. The volume of spam has dropped steadily since August, but the Christmas period saw a precipitous decline. One security firm detected around 200 billion spam messages being sent each day in August, but just 50 billion in December. While the reasons for the decline are not fully understood, spam watchers warn the lull may not last. Around the Christmas holidays, three of the largest spam producers curtailed their activity, Paul Wood, a senior analyst at Symantec Hosted Services told BBC News.

“But it’s hard to say why,” he added.

Google recently held a Chrome event in which it showed off some new things they are doing with their popular web browser (not to mention the opening of the Chrome Web Store and the introduction of Chrome OS). Now, some of the things Google showed off are available in a beta release of the browser. For one, you can turn on Chrome Instant (Google Instant for Chrome’s Omnibox). If turned on, web pages you frequently visit will begin to load as soon as you start typing. Search results and “in-line predictions” will also instantly appear.

Fox News is reporting that U.S. soldiers are now being equipped with iPhones and Androids to fight wars on the modern battlefield. Army officials expect smartphones to be part of future military success as soldiers will use them to access real-time intel, according to Army Times. They hope to issue one to every soldier and even pay their phone bill.

The Navy has tested an electromagnetic railgun that can shoot a projectile at mach 7 and hit a target 100 miles away. That is so cool!

A new Twitter attack advertising acai berries has hijacked thousands of Twitter accounts and turned them into spammers.The attack is spreading at a rapid pace — within a minute, more than 10,000 tweets related to the attack have popped up on the microblogging service. These tweets link to domains containing “acainews.” We recommend that you don’t click these links.

Netflix was added to Standard & Poor’s S&P 500 index, which lists large-cap public companies, mostly from the U.S. Netflix was previously a constituent of S&P MidCap 400 index, which roughly covers mid-cap U.S. companies. Together with F5 Networks and Newfield Exploration it will move into S&P 500, while The New York Times, Office Depot and Eastman Kodak drop from S&P 500 into S&P MidCap 400.

The next iteration of Apple’s iPad might have a front and a rear-facing camera, Reuters reports, citing multiple sources.

Hackers took down a number of websites in the name of WikiLeaks for several hours Wednesday, including those of Visa, Mastercard, Swiss bank PostFinance, PayPal, Senator Joe Lieberman and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. All sites appear to be up and running at this time.

Mark Zuckerberg to Donate Most of His Wealth to Charity

Following his $100 million donation to Newark Public Schools, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has agreed to give more than half his wealth to charity by signing Bill Gates’s and Warren Buffet’s “Giving Pledge.”

Twitter Explains Why #WikiLeaks Isn’t Trending

Twitter has more fully responded to numerous accusations that it has been purposely keeping #WikiLeaks and related hashtags out of its Trending Topics list.

Google announced the long-awaited arrival of its operating system, Chrome OS, as well as the Chrome Web Store. Many companies have already released apps for the store, including The New York Times and MOG. Devices running the new OS are scheduled to debut in mid-2011.

Verizon’s 3G network is down across various parts of the nation, claim numerous reports that are pouring in on Twitter this morning.

According to a survey of almost 60,000 people — more than half of them iPhone owners — AT&T was rated the worst wireless service provider in the United States. AT&T was the only wireless carrier to show a significant decrease in satisfaction ratings in the survey, which was conducted by Consumer Reports. Verizon and Sprint are neck-and-neck for many points of satisfaction, but for contract service, U.S. Cellular was the top-rated provider.

Salesforce.com is getting into the cloud database business with a new on-demand service, Database.com, set to be announced Tuesday at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. Database.com is partly powered by Oracle’s flagship database, which has long been used by Salesforce.com. But the service contains dozens of other supporting technologies that constitute Salesforce.com’s cloud infrastructure, which now supports some 87,000 customers around the world, said Eric Stahl, senior director of product marketing.

DNS service provider, and the site itself has been battered by DDoS attacks for more than a week now – ever since it first started releasing secret embassy cables. However, when highly coveted information once spreads on the web, there’s no stopping it. Case in point: WikiLeaks currently has several hundred mirrors, and although some of these mirrors are incomplete, slow or perhaps even completely unavailable, it’s highly unlikely that any effort will be able to exterminate them all.

Google has launched its long-awaited e-bookstore, Google E-books, bringing more than 3 million books — many of them free — to any device with a web browser. The initiative, previously known as Google Editions, offers an alternative sales model from the dominant players in the space, such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple.

Verizon Wireless officially announced the roll-out plans for its 4G LTE high-speed wireless data network today, and none too soon: The LTE era starts this Sunday in thirty-eight metro areas.

According to a post on Quora, Emerald City is the code name for Google’s social project which is thought to be a layer that will be spread across all of its properties. Emerald City has been integrated into numerous products and is being actively used internally. Emerald City is the project name for what people outside of Google refer to as “Google Me”. Lots of existing projects like youtube, google docs, search, calendar, groups, picassa, etc have had significant social integrations added to them. This is an ongoing project that will launch as a major initiative across multiple services at once and many of the hooks endusers will see are currently being tested internally. It is by no means done and is extremely ambitious in nature