A big change has come in the way we receive financial news from Google (GOOG). The company recently announced that it was doing away with financial newswire releases, in favor of distributing company financial news through its own website(s). Google spokesperson Jane Penner stated it this way: "We felt it made a lot of sense, given that we're a technology company and that we announce virtually all of our company news on our blogs."

The change is almost insignificant, really, when we consider that Google is a glass-walled corporation anyway. What news happens at Google comes out of Google and gets splattered every which way. There's almost no escaping it.

A recent piece in The Wall Street Journal had a grim headline: "Extinction Threatens Yellow Pages Publishers." As should be no surprise, consumers are moving away from traditional yellow-pages and instead using the internet, going to places like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). In fact, it looks like spending on yellow pages advertising will plunge by 39% over the next four years, according to research from Borrell Associates.

This makes it all the more important that you have a strong web presence.

These days, there are good hosting services, such as Web.com, that help you take care of the basics. But it can be expensive to add dynamic elements to your website. Often, it means hiring a web consultant.

But there are alternatives. Take Caspio, which provides a web-based system that makes it easy to create your own web applications. Its latest offering is called the "Website Marketing Suite." With it, you can add such capabilities as:

Countrywide Financial (NYSE: CFC) has joined an elite class of companies headed by Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) -- corporations whose behavior has rendered them the target of so much controversy that their critics have launche websites for the express purpose of trashing them.

DontDepositAtCountrywide.info is, as the name suggests, calling on people not to deposit money with the company until "until it ensures that all subprime borrowers with interest rates that have reset in 2006 or 2007 can keep their homes!"

Obviously that request is insane -- there are always foreclosures and it's unlikely that people who bought homes they couldn't afford will -- or even should -- be able to keep their houses.

However silly the site's message may be, it does have some good resources for those looking into Countrywide: links to news stories critical of the company, lawsuits against it, and resources for homeowners having trouble with their mortgages.

For the record, I'm as critical of Countrywide and super-tan CEO Angelo Mozilo as just about anyone -- but the idea that all subprime borrowers are entitled to keeping their homes is ridiculous.