For software developers, live product demonstrations are a way of life, and that means that "live product demos gone horribly awry" are also a fact of life. But what if the world's most disastrous software demo was faked, foisted on a set of unsuspecting computer science students as a piece of performance art?

That thought is what led University of California-San Diego student Tristan Newcomb to produce a half-hour of surreptitious theater that he calls "The Last Lecture." Students stare at the stage in disbelief, amusement, and horror as a software developer comes to class with his two assistants and proceeds to demonstrate a new videogame in spectacular fashion—software crashes, lag problems, puppet videos, and falling computers all coincide with the presenter's personal breakdown in which he questions his life's work and worries ceaselessly about his death (a death in which no Kermit the Frog will welcome him to the afterlife).

Google has launched a new service called Sidewiki that allows users to associate additional information or commentary with any webpage. It was launched today following an official announcement at the Google Blog.

Sidewiki is integrated into Google Toolbar and uses a popout sidebar interface to display page notes. When the user loads a page that has annotations, a thin blue strip will show up along the page's left edge. The user can expand the strip to display the sidebar, which will show a list of annotations and messages. In some cases, it will also show excerpts of articles about the topic displayed in the page.

Today is OneWebDay, started in 2006 as a time to celebrate the many ways that our lives have been ensnared in improved by the Web. Events are scheduled throughout the world, including:

• A documentary and discussion on copyright in Milwaukee
• A broadband policy panel on Capitol Hill in Washington
• A New York City rally with an Iranian political activist
• Elected officials and a Cajun band in Lafayette
• A public forum with Mitch Kapor in Berkeley
• A panel on the city's federal broadband grant in Philadelphia.

While those events certainly sound exciting, let's face it—the Web's greatest single contribution to worldwide culture has been its ridiculous capacity for meme construction, elevating time-wasting pictures and videos to an art form. So on this OneWebDay, we offer a Salute to Recent Internet Memes, starting of course with Kanye West.

Indie music haven Amie Street is going bigtime with its first deal with a major label. The company announced today that it had inked a deal with Sony Music Entertainment to sell songs from Sony's artists through its online store, beefing up Amie Street's offerings with a number of major artists. Sony won't be following Amie Street's usual pricing structure, however, indicating that the major labels like Amie Street's exposure to the indie crowd but aren't so fond of one of the major things that makes Amie Street unique.

Under the agreement, Amie Street will begin selling both current and classic recordings from Sony Music at tiers of 69¢, 99¢, and $1.29 per song. Although Amie Street has enjoyed quite a bit of success in recent years with numerous well-known artists, this deal will bring an even larger smattering of popular musicians to the table, including Beyoncé, Michael Jackson, Journey, Britney Spears, T-Pain, and American Idol alums Daughtry, David Cook, and Jennifer Hudson.

The latest Firefox nightly builds now include Mozilla's implementation of WebGL, an emerging standard that aims to bring 3D graphics to the Web. Although the standard is still at a relatively early stage in the draft process, it is rapidly gaining momentum and has strong backing from a growing number of browser vendors. It's yet another sign that standards adoption is accelerating as the need to bring richer content to the Web drives forward browser evolution.

The WebGL working group was formed earlier this year when Mozilla teamed up with the Khronos Group, the organization behind the OpenGL standard, to define an open standard for native browser 3D. The goal is to develop low-level JavaScript APIs that will provide comprehensive support for OpenGL ES 2.0. High-level third-party libraries, such as C3DL, will be built on top to give Web application developers a more expressive and convenient way to leverage WebGL's 3D capabilities. Mozilla believes that the flexibility inherent in this layered approach will be advantageous in the long term and that the trend towards faster JavaScript engines will make it practical for real-world usage.

As quickly as it swooped into Facebook users' lives and revealed their secret purchasing habits to the world, Beacon has now been shut down as part of a lawsuit settlement. Facebook revealed late Friday that its controversial "advertising" feature would be shuttered, saying that the company had "learned a great deal from the experience." Facebook also plans to donate $9.5 million to an organization that fights for online privacy, though the settlement proposal still awaits approval by a judge.

Facebook's Director of Policy Communications Barry Schnitt said in a statement that the whole Beacon ordeal "underscored how critical it is to provide extensive user control over how information is shared." He said the company also learned how to communicate changes to users (you know, instead of just dumping things like Beacon on them without a peep), and that the introduction of Facebook Connect allows for much greater user control over how their Web antics get shared back to friends on Facebook.

"The Cloud" may not mean what you think it means, but the White House is hitching a ride on this fluffy bandwagon with Apps.gov. The site is essentially a White House-sanctioned App Store of social media services approved for government agencies, made possible largely because of some unique TOS amendments.

Run by the US General Services Administration (GSA), Apps.gov arranges quite a few social media services under categories like Business, Productivity, Social Media, and Cloud IT, with the latter listing services like storage, Web hosting, and virtualization as "coming soon." Almost every commercial and free service that you have (and have not) heard of is here, ranging from Facebook, Scribd, Vimeo, and Google Apps. The site also offers a market-speak crash course in the cloud's advantages of reduced cost, less overhead, going green, and adopting modern technologies and trends more quickly.

Wave 4 is the next update to both Windows Live's Web services (like Hotmail) and client applications (like Messenger). The new version is supposed to focus more on the applications than the services (unlike Wave 3). The first taste of Wave 4 that we're getting is for Windows Live Hotmail (unless of course you count the Office Web Apps Technical Preview that made its appearance on Windows Live for select testers yesterday).

Microsoft says that everyone should see the new features by the end of the month. The Hotmail team has confirmed the following updates coming to the service: more keyboard shortcuts, a new buddy list for when you sign into your Web Messenger from within your Hotmail inbox, improvements to help you pick contacts for your messages, auto-save for your e-mail drafts, and the ability to download all files in a message as a zip file (versus one by one). The full changelog is as follows: