Google announced that they were sponsoring free WiFi access at 47 participating airports. In addition, they're providing it for Virgin flights. The free Internet access will last from now until January 15, so if your flight is delayed due to weather, at least you won't have to pay to email your family and let them know.

When you log on, you'll be asked for an optional charitable donation to Engineers Without Borders, the One Economy Corporation or the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.

Free WiFi is a popular gift this year. Yahoo! is giving away free access at New York's Times Square for an entire year. eBay is sponsoring WiFi on Delta flights.

Microsoft started offering airport Wifi in September in a promotion that will also last through the holiday season. I ran into Microsoft WiFi as I was leaving NYC out of LaGuardia. I was offered twenty minutes of free Internet access in exchange for performing a single Bing search.

It makes me wonder of Rupert Murdoch really understands how the Internet works, but he's threatened to block Google from searching his Web properties in favor of a pay model for  content. Murdoch is the founder and CEO of News Corp,  which owns  multiple media companies, including The Wall Street Journal, Hulu, MySpace, and Fox.

Google has always had the position that any webmaster could block Google. All they have to do is use the industry standard robots.txt protocol, and Google will pretend that the site doesn't exist. However, charging for content and being found in search are not mutually exclusive ideas. Google is even working on a micropayment system to make it easier for newspaper and other publishers to charge small fees for accessing content.

Even so, convincing visitors to pay for your content is the second hurdle. They have to find your site first. Murdoch said in a recent Australian interview that he'd rather have fewer paying customers than more non-paying visitors, but he may be disappointed in exactly how well his wish is granted. Such a move would likely cut off  25% of their traffic. The long-term loss would likely be greater as fewer new users discover the sites.

Then there's the second hurdle. The value of the content. The Wall Street Journal has been experimenting with a pay model, but it seems silly to think this will translate well to other sites like the New York Post or Fox.com.

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Google introduced a new tool to let you more transparently see exactly which Google services you're using.  The Google Dashboard shows most Google services, including your Web history, Gmail, Blogger, Google Health, and Latitude. You can also see snippets of recent activity and nicknames.

Google is presenting this as a method of transparency they hope becomes an industry standard, but I can see this spawning another wave of complaints that Google knows too much.  At the same time it is very cool to see how many Gmail messages I've sent and where my last Web search took me.

Take a look at your Google Dashboard at: www.google.com/dashboard and then tell me what you think. Is it cool or creepy to see everything Google knows about you?

We live in a technology world with too many passwords. Earlier this year, Twitter's corporate email and Google Apps accounts were hacked by someone that took advantage of psychology instead of brute force. The problem is that most of us cope with all of our passwords by re-using the same password on multiple sites. If you can find or guess someone's password, you can manage to unlock email, bank accounts, shopping carts, and sensitive corporate data.

One solution is to force everyone to use multiple unique and hard to remember passwords. That's not really very practical. A better solution is to make a single password secure and seldom necessary to type out. Google would like to see us use a method called hybrid onboarding.  (For the geeks in the crowd, the "hybrid" is the combination of OpenID and OAuth standards.)

They developed the method with Plaxo and Facebook. It means that some services will never require a password at all. If you're logged into a "trusted' email account, such as Yahoo! or Gmail, you can log into websites using hybrid onboarding with two mouse clicks and no typing.

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