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It's that time of the year again. In time honored tradition, the giants of the internet announce the most stupendous projects imaginable on April 1st. Just don't take their announcements at face value.

Popular Web hosting-oriented community WebHostingTalk (aka WHT) has suffered a severe outage since yesterday, followed by the loss of all data posted since October 2008. Site administrators state they are working on restoring failed backups and hope to have things running smoothly again in the very near future.

Web hosting company Rackspace will be added to the NASDAQ Internet Index, according to an announcement from the The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. Fourteen companies will be removed from the index. The annual evaluation of the NASDAQ Internet Index is traditionally issued every March, and this year it will become effective with the market open on Monday, March 23, 2009.

The Index is designed to track the performance of the largest and most liquid U.S.-listed companies engaged in internet-related businesses.

Today Microsoft and Red Hat announced a visualization interoperability deal. Red Hat is the most popular open source brand on the server and a leading Linux distro; Microsoft needs no introduction. The two companies will cooperate based on an open set of standards, and stay away from restrictive patents--the detail that is said to have torpedoed Novell with the open-source community.

Recent news publications and industry events have revealed important details about IBM's cloud platform. IBM's Blue Cloud Initiative has enlisted new clients and will partner with Juniper to develop new technology for its 13 global cloud centers.