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The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has a crack group of analysts tracking the Internet, including tweets and Facebook messages, that takes the pulse of the world. Located in McLean, Virginia analysts at the CIA Open Source Center are known as the "vengeful librarians" according to a report from the Associated Press. These librarians are tracking up to five million tweets a day from places like China, Pakistan and Egypt.

It is sometimes disconcerting to know what the U.S. intelligence complex is doing, right in your backyard. McLean is a beltway city in Northern Virginia that is best known for Tysons Corner, one of the shopping hubs of the East Coast. On the outskirts of the city limits there is also the George H.W. Bush CIA complex, on of the agency's main hubs in the D.C. region.

The next edition of Windows Server, still code-named "Windows Server 8," will have vastly expanded integration with Windows Azure, the company's cloud platform that started out as simply a .NET application provider. Not only will Azure become (as expected) a platform for providing data and services to Windows enterprise applications, but an identity manager for federating identity across multiple Web services, including client-side Metro apps.

Tracking is a big word right now. iPhones were found to be tracking your location and storing it, prompting Apple to release a quick fix. Google's offices in Seoul, South Korea were raided over AdMob tracking. Any way your electronic activity can be traced and stored, there are several companies trying to figure out how to monetize that data.

Sen. John Rockefeller (D-W.Va) will introduce a "Do Not Track" bill that would allow consumers to opt-out of online tracking and block websites and marketers from tracing their Internet activities. The "Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2011" would build on recommendations by the Federal Trade Commission which would govern enforcement of the act, according to the Washington Post.

Apple is said to be quick at work to release a new version of iOS, its mobile operating system, to fix the "bugs" that began in iOS 4.0, which track your device's location and store it in a file on your device and on your synced computer.

If you're anything like me, however, the idea of a file with all of your location sounds really cool and you might not want to lose that information. If so, here's a bit more about Apple's proposed fix and what you can do to save that information before it disappears.

So much for bathroom passes and hall monitors - these days it's technology that is making the art of skipping class much more difficult for students, and we're not just talking about security cameras. A forward-thinking school district in Connecticut is looking to crack down on wayward students, faculty and even equipment by making use of radio frequency identification (RFID) in its schools.

Not every click is created equal. While publishers know exactly how many visitors per day their sites get, this aggregate data doesn't say much about the actual value of the individual visitors and what they do on the rest of the Web. Social media analytics and monitoring firm Sysomos wants to bridge this gap with its latest product: Sysomos Audience. Using proprietary technology, Audience can automatically assign a certain value to individual visitors, based on the other sites they visit and other factors users can tweak in the service's scoring engine.

Tuesday night Google announced the creation of the Google Apps Marketplace, a place for third-party applications developers to share their work with the community of Google Apps users. Currently, businesses can use enterprise versions of Google's popular suite of web apps, and with the new Apps Marketplace, they can integrate outside applications into these services. One of the applications launching in the App Marketplace is Expensify, an online tool for gathering and reporting expenses.

Do you like social aggregation and tracking services like FriendFeed, Google Buzz and Cliqset? If so, there's another startup launching today that wants your attention: Strings. This service is focused less on social content sites like flickr and YouTube (although supported) and more on traditional online activity like clothing purchases from JCrew or Saks, groceries from Amazon Fresh, beauty products from Sephora and a slew of other purchases from web-based shopping sites.

But before you rush to sign up with yet another activity aggregation service, it may be time to pause and think. Do the benefits of seeing your friends' purchases on sites like Strings and the online shopping tracker Blippy outweigh the risks of handing over login credentials to these third parties?

The problem with most analytics platforms is that we can't see the forest for the trees. Instead of looking for daily spikes in a traffic rating, it's more important for us to know what trends are spiking over time. From there we can make decisions to improve our businesses. In an effort to make a more useful analytics dashboard, the makers of database tool Dabble DB created Trendly.

If you're an adventure seeker with a penchant for storytelling you'll be happy to hear that Google is giving you the visuals you need to illustrate your tales of bravery. In a blog post written by Google Earth Product Manager Peter Birch, the company has updated its iPhone application. While we've always been big fans of the Google Earth desktop version, the company released its iPhone app in 2008 with new attention to the mobile accelerometer and touch features of the iPhone. Users pinched, tapped and tilted their way to stunning satellite views of mountain ranges and far away terrain. The application update builds on these features but adds a touch of the personal.