Is that a half-smile? Nope, it’s just some sticks of of RAM and a PCI card. The Computer part Mona Lisa is titled: Technology Smiling, and is on display at a tech exhibit in Beijing.

Taking the customization of Wikipedia and the mapping ability of Google Maps, the new Wikimapia lets anyone anywhere put location specific information on a map of the world. Similar to just about any wiki, information can be tagged and edited by anyone visiting the site. To add something to the wikimap, just zoom to the area you want, and draw a box around the section you’d like to write about.

Mosaic zoom mosaic zoom mosaic zoom getty image mosaic zoom mosaic zoom…

Flickr is finally out of beta (which they’ve been in since their launch in Feb ‘04) and now in gamma! With their gamma release, they’ve added some nice new features to the site.

There are now nice drop-down on many of the menu items and site elements. A nice new search has been added to the site and will dig through all titles, tags & descriptions in the system. Organizr has some nice (needed) improvements allowing you to do a lot more with your photos (batch edits, tagging etc.). Organizr seems a bit snappier too, but that could just be me.

If you’ve never tried Flickr… now would be a good time to check it out!

Today Apple quietly released the MacBook, their new version of the iBook with an Intel chip inside. This is the fourth in their computer line to switch to the Intel chips, leaving only one machine left still using their older PowerPC processors.

The new Macbooks include the Intel Core Duo chips running 1.83 - 2.0 GHz with prices from $1099-1499. They’ve added the built-in iSight camera similar to the new MacBook Pro’s and the iMacs. One other nice touch is a black version at the high end of the line-up that looks pretty slick. All the machines (in their default configurations) are still a bit short on RAM with only 512 included, but shorting you on RAM seems to be pretty standard for Apple.

By and large, this looks like a pretty nice laptop, especially with the availability of BootCamp letting your run both OS X and Windows on it.

Google Trends was released today along with a few other new tools. Trends is a bit like Google Fight that I blogged about last year except the data is probably a little more detailed and accurate since it’s coming straight from the source. You can type in several terms and Google will show you a nice graph comparing the ratings of the search terms in Google.

Just so you know, Mentos rates way above Certs, Altoids and Breathsavers. I’d like to think that I’m somewhat responsible for that.

Ever wondered what a map of your neighborhood looked like in ASCII text? Well, wonder no more - ASCII Maps is now available to provide an ASCII text version of Google Maps. It isn’t very useful at all since you can’t really tell what you’re looking at. But for you die-hard text-lovin’ ASCII art fans, you can now view maps in clean pure black and white text!

Apple released a new set of ads recently that are pretty funny. Good ole Justin Long (Warren Cheswick from Ed) and John Hodgman (I think that’s who it is) make a pretty funny pair.