It's October 31st, which can only mean that while the kids go door to door to get candy, we're going from Web site to Web site to find out which Web companies are embracing Halloween in the true tradition of logo modification!

Google, which has a very long history of this thing, is of course participating. So is Google's subsidiary, YouTube, and Google competitors, Yahoo! and Technorati. Even Friendfeed, started by some ex-Googlers, has debuted a great Halloween logo.

Can you find any notable Halloween themed logos out there that I missed, and hopefully some that have absolutely zero to do with Google? Post them in the comments, and we can update the picture.

With no scheduled appointments or meetings in the morning, Kristine and I took advantage of our evening and caught a double feature at the movie theater here in Denver tonight, catching George Clooney in "Michael Clayton" and Steve Carell in "Dan In Real Life" back to back - the first show at 8, and the second starting just after 10 local time.

Of the two, Michael Clayton was better designed, in my opinion. Of the many hundreds of actors who have tried to make the jump from television to the big screen, George Clooney has been among the best to pull it off. He's become a must-see actor, and has chosen some aggressive roles, such as that in "Good Night and Good Luck" and "Syriana", which were both quite notable. Carell seems to be working on his role as the next Jim Carrey, alternating slapstick humor with oddly fitting serious roles. Though he was fantastic in "Little Miss Sunshine", "Dan In Real Life" didn't feel like a modern-day classic by any stretch.

Michael Clayton dealt with Clooney's acting the part of a bagman for a top legal firm, whose job it was to clean up messes, only to get embroiled in one larger than he ever expected, which threatens to cost him his life. Though a subplot of his getting in money trouble due to a wayward brother was weak, it did serve to distinguish him from the high-rolling jet set lawyers who surrounded him.

Dan In Real Life followed a typical storyline of a lonely author seeking companionship, but finding it just out of reach. Though the plot was augmented with his being a widower with three young daughters, and sibling rivalry over a mysterious woman, it floated along surreally, with the occasional joke, while we all waited out the inevitable finish. Of course, the fact we lost video in the theater on three occasions didn't do the film any good. If I were more punitive, I'd have demanded a refund.

We haven't taken the time in recent months to be caught up at the big screen. I'm glad we took the time today and didn't have to rush home to feed the dog or get up early enough to keep our schedule normal.

Spokeo, the social networks and RSS feed aggregator who I first covered in September, is continuing to expand its product, with the goal of becoming a one-stop destination to get all updates from your friends in multiple social networks, rather than visiting each of them one by one. Like Friendfeed (covered here), Spokeo is looking to transcend the diversity of vertical social networks and provide users with one destination to not only get alerted to the latest news, but see exactly what friends are doing.

Tonight, as mentioned on the company's blog, Spokeo enhanced its services to better find friends' hidden MySpace pages or Flickr accounts, effectively helping you to sleuth out their content, rather than waiting for it to come to you.

While that was the banner headline of the announcement, I can already see some more under the hood changes. The site's main feed, where I have a few hundred RSS subscriptions, now shows more than just the headline, but often excerpts of a paragraph or so (like Google Reader's expanded view).


The site also added a tweak so that instead of viewing your feeds at www.spokeo.com, you're now redirected to www.spokeo.com/user - not to be confused with your user name or real name. Just "user", which obviously means an engineer chose that directory and not the Marketing team. Engineers always call users users... and it takes marketing to recognize we're actually people. (For example: My Friendfeed URL is http://friendfeed.com/louisgray -- a real name!)

Existing Spokeo users also can now invite up to five friends to the service. The whole idea of a limited beta is to drive up demand and show scarcity. After all, it worked so well for Google with GMail, didn't it?

If you want a Spokeo account, either leave a comment with your e-mail address, or send me an e-mail directly, and I'll be happy to invite you. While Spokeo doesn't yet have all the features of Google Reader, I have seen many cases where I get the RSS feeds fetched more quickly on Spokeo than from Google. More on that later.

Wouldn't you know it? Just yesterday, I was joking with my wife that the one thing about California I'm missing by being in Colorado this week was the potential for an earthquake. Seriously. It always seems the "interesting" earthquakes take place when we're out of town, so the next time we're traveling, we'll be sure to warn you, as this evening the Bay Area was hit with a 5.6 magnitude event, the strongest in nearly 20 years.

How do you think I found about it? I certainly didn't feel it here in Denver. And nobody called to see if we were okay, as anybody who would care already knew we weren't in the danger zone.

I found out because while thumbing through the referrals to my blog on the Blackberry during some downtime, an odd string of searches from Google started popping up: "recent earthquake in silicon valley", "earthquake hits bay area", "was it an earthquake tonight in sf bay area?" and "sf earthquake tonight" for starters...

That of course got me curious. First, it turns out a note from early March (Yet Another Small Earthquake Hits SF Bay Area) is #2 worldwide in Google for "recent earthquake in Silicon Valley" and #1 for "was it an earthquake tonight in sf bay area?". People from around the Web were looking for answers, hoping I could help.

A few clicks later, and I too was finding out the news. I've talked about earthquakes before on the blog, in December 2006 and June 2006, and I actually see them as a unique bit of California, something to be respected but not feared.

We don't get home until late Monday night, but we don't expect anything to be different. The flat-screen TV better be right where we left it, and the house better be in the same level of disarray we saw when we closed the door Sunday. And maybe the next time there's a good-sized earthquake, I'd like to not find out about it from my Web log statistics.