NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Groupon left many, many mouths agape last week, as the daily deals site walked away from a $6 billion acquisition bid from Google.

While news of the failed deal ensured that the last person under the last rock is now aware of the Chicago-based social-commerce startup, it also means more eyes are watching to see if two-year-old group-buying site will stumble as it walks away.

Meebo -- which facilitates the integration of multiple services like Facebook and AOL Instant Messenger in one interface -- has launched XAuth (Extended Authentication), which automatically recognizes active social platforms and lets users connect with ease on participating publishers' sites.

Meebo has distributed a toolbar on thousands of sites, enabling visitors to log in and communicate via various social networking or instant-messaging platforms. Now, publishers that elect to incorporate XAuth will instantly alert users which services are available; no log in is necessary to begin communicating and connecting with friends.

A Jordanian mayor is considering suing a newspaper over an April Fools' Day report saying aliens had landed nearby.

Al-Ghad's front-page story on 1 April said flying saucers flown by 3m (10ft) creatures had landed in the desert town of Jafr, in eastern Jordan.

Accounts of alcohol and drug use to stimulate creativity are apocryphal and anecdotal. For example, Samuel Taylor Coleridge reportedly composed much of his unfinished poem Kubla Khan while in an opium dream. In ancient Greece, however, the Pythian priestesses of the oracle at Delphi inhaled medicinal fumes to facilitate revelatory trances—as did the priests and peoples of most ancient societies. The institutionalized twentieth-century Native American Church continues to use the Peyote of their ancestors to promote profound religious experiences.

Psychedelic drugs, such as Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD), Mescaline, Psilocybin, and methylene dioxyamphetamine (mda) have been used—both legally and illicitly—to increase aesthetic appreciation, improve artistic techniques, and enhance creativity. Marijuana has been used to heighten the sense of meaning, foster creativity, and heighten perceptions (also both legally and illicitly); and Alcohol has been employed by countless people worldwide to relieve inhibitions, increase spontaneity, and stimulate innovation and originality.

Have copyright laws outlived their usefulness in the digital age?

That was the question I harbored as I joined some of the most prestigious copyright lawyers last week for a conference sponsored by the CCC (Copyright Clearance Center) called "The Collision of Ideas 2010." I fully acknowledge that my understanding of copyright law is basic at best, so I wanted to attend because as a marketer I honestly don't how to apply best practices when it comes to copyright issues in the digital world. How do I know, for instance, that when I contract for a small project via a freelance site they are not giving me copyrighted material? Or, what content can I reuse on a site as reproducible content versus what content is protected? But mostly I was anxious to understand how the copyright system can possibly reconcile people's instinctive desire to share content with digital technology and content creators' right to get fair compensation. I walked in wondering whether copyright laws are the buggy whips of the digital age.

Everyone in the blogging industry has heard of the word RSS, but do they know what it actually stands for? I bet a lot of people don’t know what the real meaning behind RSS is. They just see it as a simple address to use for reading the blog in a feed reader, that’s as far as it goes. In this article I will explain to you what the meaning of RSS is and the benefits there of.

The Definition of RSS

Activision Blizzard is shifting U.S. creative duties on its Guitar Hero franchise to TBWAChiatDay from Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the client has confirmed.