Historic American newspapers dating all the way back to the turn of the twentieth century from states like California, Utah, and Kentucky to name a few, will be available for free online. “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers”, is a site featuring more than 226,000 pages of public domain newspapers that are accessible for Americans to research and learn about American history by reading actual accounts from the time period. The National Digital Newspaper Program, which produces the domain, plans to have newspapers and historic documents from all states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922 available on the site in the next 20 years.

Just days ago, a Google executive confirmed that the search engine company would be coming out with a mobile phone. Now, another Google executive, Vinton Cerf, is denying this claim. Cerf, who is one of the most credible members of the company, admitted to Google’s interest in the “mobile revolution”, but he denounces all rumors suggesting that the mega search engine has any actual plans to produce a mobile phone.

Online high school sports network, MaxPreps has become a part of College Sports Television, also known as CSTV, after CBS purchased the site. The database covers close to 80,000 football and over 500,000 high school basketball games every year. There are more than a million high school athletes registered with Maxpreps. Andy Beal, president and CEO of the company says “This new arrangement will open up many new ways to inform and entertain millions of people who are involved in high school sports.”

Video blogger Amanda Congdon is the centerpiece of a new series of video ads by DuPont. The short documentary type videos called ‘DuPont Science Stories’ describe products using DuPont materials like Kevlar and Nomex. Forrester’s Josh Bernoff praised DuPont for not trying to deceive people by taking a fake grassroots approach with their promotional efforts.

Another account of the Google phone has emerged, this time from their representatives who talked about it during the CeBit show in Germany. The Times Online cited Nomura researcher Richard Windsor, who said the in-development Google phone “is not going to be a high-end device but a mass market device aimed at bringing Google to users who don’t have a PC.”

Google is ranking your blog on a combination of relevance and quality scores. ‘SEO by the Sea’ blogger Bill Slawski reviewed a patent filing by Google regarding blog ranking, and found that Google Blog Search looks at several positive and negative factors that could affect quality scores. One interesting point from the application: Google thinks one component of all blogs is the presence of a blogroll on the site.

Rumors about a possible Google Phone received another boost as photos of the new gadget began to circulate on a mobile phone forum. Garett Rogers speculated that the pictures of the Samsung built mobile have probably been manipulated even if they are of a real prototype. Google reportedly has about a hundred people working on software for the device.

Microsoft has opened a social networking site for the finance industry. The Dynamics Live Community beta site recently opened during a San Diego conference, where Microsoft staffers have been calling it a ‘MySpace for financial pros.’ The new site offers articles and expert columns as content, and blogs and forums for its users. Networking features are listed as ‘coming soon.’

News aggregator Topix.net paid one million dollars to purchase the Topix.com domain January. Topix CEO Rich Skrenta told the Wall Street Journal the two domains have been running side by side since then, and plans to switch to the dot com address. But Topix could face a loss of search engine traffic during the changeover, and Skrenta’s plea for help from Google received a canned response to post his request on a support message board.

“This can’t be the process,” Mr. Skrenta says. “You’re cast into this amusing, Kafkaesque world to run your business.”

Defense contractors have been big players in crawling audio tracks for online video. Beet TV said Podzinger, a subsidiary of BBN, has crawled one point five million YouTube clips since December. Podzinger’s Alex Laats said they crawl thousands more each day. Beet TV also claimed that the same technology has been used by government agencies for a variety of other tasks since 2001.