Live From...Fallujah, Little Rock, Israel and Google

One of the cool things about BlogPulse is that it serves as a very quick summary of what's happening in the world, like a visitor who opens a door on the unexpected and says, "Come on in....."

Todays' BlogPulse takes us to:

The opening of the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Center, which garnered former President Clinton a No. 5 rank among key people. In addition, several references to the rain-soaked opening of his Little Rock library showed up among key phrases.

Thursday's 4th-rated link is the troubling but necessary Fallujah in Pictures blog, which graphically and very personally -- frame by frame -- exposes the hell of war for citizens, soldiers, cities and the simple concept of human decency. Yet, for every criticism of the horrors of war, there's something like this, a first-person account from soldiers on the front lines, A Marine Writes Home, featured in Power Line blog.

Out in California, Berkeley researchers led by Professor Michael Hout, (Thursday's burstiest person) have issued a report indicating that Florida's electronic voting machines may have given more votes to President Bush than he actually got. Hout and his team compared totals from electronic machines with those from non-electronic voting machines, looking for discrepancies, to the tune of 130,000-260,000 votes from electronic machines that can't be explained away.

Also appearing among Thursday's bursty people is Michael Koubi, an Israeli interrogator who describes what it's that kind of work is like.

And from deep in the heart of red-state land come these two opposing stories. One, from the Washington Post, details a small Oklahoma town's rise to the defense of an openly gay student and a neighboring church's attempts to engage in what can only be described as non-Christian behavior. Next door in Austin, comes Internet hunting, a web site that offers rifle-triggered Internet access that lets users shoot at real live animals with a real gun. That's right, shoot a real live Bambi from the comfort of your....cyber office chair.

On the techie scene, today's most popular topic is Google's newly anounced Google Scholar, a search interface (now in a test version) that brings scholarship research to the desktop in a way only Google can.

BLOGPULSE NEWS: Don't forget to check out this week's newly announced Conversation Tracker. It's a new feature that allows BlogPulse users to see threaded views of initial postings and subsquent links to blog entries.

BLOGPUSLE TREND OF THE DAY: Who grabs the heftiest blog traffic among the key non-Bush players inside the Oval Office?