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A an industry group made of dozens of high-profile technology companies including Apple, Microsoft and Nokia, announced "significant progress" on its recommendations on how the Internet should be regulated.

It will be interesting to see in what ways how the recommendations from the Information Technology Industry Council will differ from the "policy framework" put forth by Verizon and Google last month that reaffirmed basic principles of an indiscriminate wireline Internet but made an exception for wireless.

You can watch a live stream of Apple's fall event tomorrow, the company has announced - but only if you're using an Apple device.

Apple will broadcast the event using its internally-developed HTTP Live Streaming Protocol, which requires either a Mac running Safari on Mac OS X version 10.6, an iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 3.0 or higher or an iPad. It's not because Apple only wants its fans watching, however.

The 2010 U.S. midterm elections are coming up. On November 2, 36 of the 100 Senate seats, 26 of the 50 gubernatorial and all of the House seats will be contested. As they did for the 2008 presidential elections, the Personal Democracy Forum is working with YouTube to ask voters to post videos of 10 Questions they have for the candidates in a race, or submit text versions.

10Questions is focusing on what they consider the 46 most competitive of these races. For each of them, viewers can, via their website or an embeddable widget, anyone can upload videos of their questions, view those of other users and vote on whose questions should be asked.

View uploading and voting widgets with videos after the jump.

Google has quietly launched a new feature: search for blogs on any topic. The company announced the new type of search in a weekly round-up of search updates last week, and respected SEO blogger Bill Slawski argues that the launch may be related to a new Google patent.

This has the potential to be a wildly useful service. How many of you have had professional or personal reasons to seek a list of the top blogs on a new topic? I know I, and many people I talk to, find themselves in such need frequently. How do you access the new search? How well does it work? Read on.

Next month, the federal government will launch a new .gov website with a big idea behind it and high hopes that there will be big ideas generated within it. Challenge.gov is the latest effort in the evolution of collaborative innovation in open government. Should the approach succeed, challenges and contests have the potential to leverage the collective expertise of citizens, just as apps contests have been used to drive innovation in D.C. and beyond.

Email is old fashioned, right? Not so fast - that rich source of data about your personal connections and interests is finally emerging as a platform for some really innovative services.

Yesterday we saw the launch of Gmail's new Priority Inbox, which automatically sorts inbound messages by priority. That's something we've been expecting since hints of it emerged 18 months ago. This Spring, Gmail began offering secure, programatic access permission for the contents of your inbox - a move we said heralded a new era of inbox applications. Now we're finally seeing that flood of services emerge. Here are three of the best new email apps that you don't want to miss. Following screenshots and a screencast, we discuss what it all means and how these are just the beginning of the coming era of email as a platform.

When social networking behemoth Facebook launched its foray into the location game with Places, some declared that apps like Foursquare and Gowalla would be rendered obsolete. The result, so far, has been quite the contrary, as the megaphone of Facebook has helped spread the word about location apps to the laypeople. Today, the mobile location app market got another big boost as iTunes launched "On the Grid," (iTunes Link) a special showcase featuring geosocial iOS apps on the front page of the App Store.

A third of all Internet users thinks that virtually every website poses a potential security threat. According to a new survey by German online security firm Avira, consumers are becoming increasingly aware of potential security issues online, but it looks like for quite a large population of Web surfers, this has turned into something akin to paranoia. Less than 5% of respondents suspect that big portals are especially vulnerable, while 27% (rightly) think warez sites pose major security risks, and 34.5% think that all websites are equally dangerous.

What's the best way to do one-time or recurring billing for your online business? That's an important question for the growing legion of independent service providers transitioning countless business transactions onto the web.

That which is most popular may not be the best, but it's a good place to start looking. Popular online invoicing service FreshBooks posted today two pie charts (below) quantifying the most popular services used by FreshBooks customers to bill their clients, both inside and outside the US. PayPal may be the winner in one-time billings, but not by much. In recurring billings, it's not even close to number one.

Controversial social news site Digg has hired Amazon.com's Matt Williams to be its new CEO, according to a scoop by TechCrunch this morning.

Williams has more than a decade of experience in online eCommerce and small business services, but little discoverable social media participation. He'll take the helm of a site that was groundbreaking just a few short years ago, still drives more traffic than any other technology news aggregator, but struggles to remain relevant as larger, more general interest ways to share and discover news have arisen.