Boxee’s CEO, Avner Ronen, sent an email to users today announcing the Boxee Beta unveiling event Dec. 7 Music Hall of Williamsbur in New York. The event will also be viewable at online at blog.boxee.tv.

The event will mark the beginning of a 4-week early access program, prior to it becoming publicly available Jan. 7 at CES.

The beta release will have a redesigned look and is reported to have incorporated many of the requested and feedback. New features include:

- Improved navigation across the platform to quickly and easily access entertainment.
- Search for TV Shows and Movies on the Internet and on local hard drives/networks.
- Queuing functionality to let you save things for later from the web.
- Shortcuts for your favorite apps, movies, shows, etc.

Users can sign up for early access at http://bit.ly/boxeebetaea.

As we move full-force into the holiday season, even we geek-techs are looking for bargains. I am no different. This year money is tighter than ever, as we are now a one-income family. Kids don’t understand that, though, so I’m still trying to make the holidays special and give them a few things they want, and a few they need. So, I’m online doing some bargain-hunting, specifically looking for a decently-priced, dependable netbook for my 16 year old daughter. She hates the iBook she has, it is too slow, and she needs the portability a laptop offers. But her mama doesn’t have the budget to replace a Mac, or even add another laptop to the mix. A netbook would be perfect for her. But as a geek-tech, I also want something easy to work with, and sturdy. That pretty much knocks out the Acer brand, and I hate the Dell netbooks I’ve seen.

So off I go looking for sites to give me some online Black Friday deals, and Cyber Monday deals, because I am not one of those crazy people that will go to Target or Best Buy or Americas Electronics at 4 a.m. just to get a “deal.” No, I’m too lazy for that, and anyway, why go in a store at all if I can just buy online?

The first site I hit was one recommended by our local news television station. CyberMonday.com was touted as the place to go to find those Cyber Monday deals that we all keep hearing about. Cool, everything I need on one place! Well, sort of, maybe. Since I knew exactly what I was looking for (a netbook) I went ahead and drilled down through electronics, computers, to laptops, then asked it to show me prices from low to high. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a category for netbooks but I thought that by sorting by prices I’d like find the netbooks at the top of the list. Instead, the first item on the list was:

DVI-D M-F Dual Link Digital Video Extension Cable, 5m

Last time I checked, a cable is not a computer. On that same list of “search results (and I never typed a thing in a search bar), were alkaline batteries, power cords, RAM chips, and many other things. All, again, not anything like a laptop computer. I decided to go for broke and put “netbook” in the search bar, let it search, and then sorted by price low to high. I got netbook sleeves, wireless mice, external drives, and finally, on page 8 of the results, the first of the netbooks, all of which were out of my price range anyway.

Turns out the cybermonday.com is just a shop.com property, and is simply an ad-based link farm. So much for an easy search for the item I’m looking for.

There are plenty of other sites just like CyberMonday out there. Nextag.com is one of them, as is techbargains.com, and there are plenty of others. And worse, when I use these sites to search and compare prices, I know that not all retailers are being represented by the results. It’s a huge waste of time if I can’t see true results, linking me to the best bargains out there. And I aggravates me that my local news’ website is touting one of these locations as the “clearinghouse of cyber deals.” Not so much so, actually, as far as I can tell.

Looks like I’m going to spend considerable time doing real research to find what I’m looking for. I’m sure that’s time I could be using for other things.

A racially offensive photo of First Lady Michelle Obama recently appeared as a top search result under Google Images, leading to a handful of complaints by Google users and requests to remove the image from the search results altogether. Of course Google did not remove the image, and reminded users that sometimes offensive images appeared in search results. Their exact statement earlier was “Sometimes our search results can be offensive. We agree.” And a further update has changed that statement to “Sometimes Google search results from the Internet can include disturbing content, even from innocuous queries. We assure you that the views expressed by such sites are not in any way endorsed by Google.”

Either way, Google is doing the right thing. To remove the image, however offensive, is a form of censorship, and at what point do you draw the line? The image has been removed from its linked location now, and in its place appears an apology written in very broken English. This is not Google’s doing, but the owner of the site that put the image up. The image itself is likely to appear again, elsewhere, and will probably be seen by a lot more people just because of the controversy surrounding it.

Censorship is never the answer to issues like this. The very nature of the World Wide Web, and search engines, would make such a thing impossible to maintain. And one person’s idea of “offensive” is another person’s definition of “satire.” I, for one, am glad for the diversity of not only my country, but my travels on the Internet as well. While I might find something offensive or off-color, I can easily avoid or back out of things I find that bother me. So can everyone else. As an American, I value my free speech highly, and do not want to see those rights trampled. The cost of that right of free speech is that occasionally, other people’s free speech may be offensive to us. But I support their right to free speech as much as I support my own right to it. You cannot have one without the other.

This story is making the rounds on all the news sites, and I expect there will be more about this in the days to come. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the American Thanksgiving Holiday will distract everyone and we can move on.

Google is the messenger, not the message, and I applaud them for doing the right thing in this case, which was to leave the image alone.

(Kudos to anyone who gets the Star Wars reference in the title.)