The last twelve months have been a busy year for the search engine giant Google.  We all heard about their big $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube in late 2006.  Most of us heard about their brow raising purchase of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.  What you don’t hear too much about is that Google has also been gobbling up real estate for data center space.

What’s intriguing is not that Google is building out its data center infrastructure, but where and at what expense to local communities.  Their latest expansion takes them to Lenoir, North Carolina.  Where?  Pretty much in the middle of nowhere.  Don’t get us wrong, we love the fact that we’re located in suburbia and not downtown.  There are plenty of advantages to being away from a city hot spot.  Two hours from the nearest commercial airport is a stretch though … even for us.

The controversy, however, rests with the tax breaks and incentives given to Google and how some local representatives felt “bullied” during the process.   In the end, Google agrees to setup shop with a package of tax breaks, infrastructure upgrades, and other goodies valued at $212 million over 30 years, or more than $1million for each of the 210 jobs Google said it eventually hoped to create in Lenoir.

Read the Business Week article for all the details.

A hot button item in web development the past couple of years has been security. Vendors seem to be implementing the network stack in a fairly secure manner these days, so the popular attack vector has been applications. If developers aren’t taught how to develop securely then it doesn’t matter how well they do the rest of their job.

If you don’t want your web site to involuntarily become an ad for <insert pharmaceutical here> then you want to make sure your web developers know how to code in a secure manner. If you think we are just being overly paranoid then check out this link that we found in a story over at the ISC (Internet Storm Center) . Remember, it’s only funny until it happens to you.

Use this Google Search for a list of vulnerable sites.

In conjunction with the deployment of our brand spankin’ new website, the SitesNow design and development teams have been hard at work worrying about this new blog.  We’re not copywriters but hope to provide some insight on interesting news and tech tidbits around the web.  The bigger challenge, of course, is pulling ourselves away on a regular basis to contribute.  We’re shooting for weekly updates.  Keep your fingers crossed, we’ll do our best.

What you will find here:

• Site deployments
• Trends and techniques from our design, development and data center groups.  Project management may even chime in on occasion.
• Industry related commentary

What you won’t find here:

• Results from our latest xbox 360 intra-office “team building” sessions
• What we had for dinner last night
• Wedding or newborn pictures

We know you really don’t care about the later.  We’re here to help your business grow online and hope this blog provides just another medium to contribute.