FLASHBACK: Sarah Palin, Have You Changed Your Email Password Lately?

Each Friday, we follow up on tech and media stories we covered a year ago.

Sarah Palin: Have you changed your email password lately? A year ago, Gawker got ahold of the VP candidate's personal Yahoo email account, posting family pictures, emails, and a contact list.

Since then, Palin lost the election, quit her job at Alaska governor, and has been invited to speak at a Hong Kong investor conference next week -- almost certainly a Borat-like gag. Meanwhile, the original Gawker post by Alex Pareene has passed 1.3 million pageviews.

Remember when Sergey Brin was a blogger? A year ago, the Google co-founder started a personal blog called "too." He wrote:

Welcome to my personal blog. While Google is a play on googol, too is a play on the much smaller number - two. It also means "in addition", as this blog reflects my life outside of work.

Since then, he has written two longer posts (and one post that just contains a link). They're both personal, revealing, and well-written. One is about his mother's Parkinson's Disease and his wife's startup, written a year ago; the second, written this past June, about the death of his teacher and good friend, Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani.

Happy birthday, AOL Time Warner! Six years ago today, AOL Time Warner said it would drop the "AOL" from its name. In the past year, Time Warner announced it would spin off AOL as a separate company -- and shares have dropped 29% to $29.58.

Should have just called it "Deadly." A year ago, Google was trying to position its Lively virtual world at a virtual arcade, telling reporters that it would open the site to third-party game developers.

Heh, right. Since then, Lively has long been shuttered -- a piece of Web 2.0 roadkill at Google that never should have even seen "beta."

Last week's Flashback: When algorithms attack! Cablevision's TiVo in the clouds still M.I.A., Apple's iPod event just as boring last year, and the gaming bubble that popped fast and hard. Read on →

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