Because it's a slow news week, and because it's always fascinating to see what manages to catch on as a viral Internet sensation, but mostly because we love the muppets -- we bring you Bohemian Rhapsody. Fun for the entire family!

Gary Reback is the Silicon Valley attorney who fought Microsoft on antitrust issues back in the '90s. He's also one of the folks who created the Open Book Alliance, the coalition of Microsoft, Amazon, the Internet Archive, and others who are fighting the Google Books settlement because they believe it violates antitrust rules.

In an interview with Litigation Daily, Reback says he expects the settlement, which was recently revised, will go back to the drawing board for a third round.

Reback says he thinks the changes in 2.0, which were submitted to Judge Denny Chin on November 13, haven't satisfied the issues raised by the Department of Justice.

Litigation Daily: Was this, then, a calculated gamble that Judge Chin would approve the settlement over the Justice Department's concerns?

Reback: They just tried to shoot for the moon. When they don't get that, we'll get version three. You have to remember that Google is continuing to scan. What's the downside for them if this drags on?

Joining the Pope, the Royal Family, and numerous world leaders, the Iraqi government today launched a dedicated YouTube channel to air video of speeches, meetings, and special reports.

"The government sees in this video technology an opportunity to show our achievements," said Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in the channel's inaugural video.

"The world has not seen what the Iraqi government has been able to achieve in regard to security, economy, politics and building."

It's not clear who the content will be aimed at. The BBC cites United Nations statistics as saying that only one in every hundred Iraqis have access to the Internet.

Given that the many of videos currently posted are in Arabic without subtitles, the prime targets might be Iraqis outside the country and the rest of the Arab world.

Writing on the YouTube Blog, Director of Product Management Hunter Walk says that, during a visit to Iraq earlier this year, he "routinely heard the desire to connect with fellow citizens, Iraqis outside the country's borders, and cultures across the world."

Walk also said he'd heard from regular Iraqis about how they use the Internet to stay informed. "One young student," he says, "told us she uses YouTube to understand what is really happening in her country based on the variety of opinions, citizen journalism and news reports uploaded to the site."

Sweet. Just in time for Thanksgiving, three guys from the center of the country have set up TurkeyTwitter, a site that aggregates tweets with the hashtag #thanksgiving (and #turkeytwitter). And, if you prefer, they've created a tweet box right on their site where, instead of answering the question "What's happening?" (remember, that's the new Twitter question), you can answer the question "What are you thankful for?"

As it turns out, of course, a lot of people are using the #thanksgiving tag for purposes other than expressing their gratitude, like touting the "wackiest kitchen gadgets," making plans with friends, and marketing their shows.

The creators are also tracking the most commonly used words in Thanksgiving tweets ("happy", "love", "everyone") and have set up @turkeystats to broadcast the results. Which, as you can imagine, doesn't always works as well as planned: Some of the top terms are "u" and "cuz". Which reminds us of one thing we've always been thankful for: People who can use the English language correctly.

(Other interesting note: The site was thrown together by a Denver-based IT internal auditor, an Ohio-based IT audit and security consultant, and a third guy who, if our Web sleuthing did us right, is a Chicago-based Web specialist at the Society of Actuaries. Criminey, who knew auditors and actuaries could be so fun?)

There was a lot of grumbling, of course, when the New York Times announced it was going to start a Bay Area edition. (Interestingly, not so much about the Wall Street Journal.) But now comes the Virginia Quarterly Review with an incisive assessment of the venture a month after its launch. And, unfortunately, it's not laudatory. In fact, if we were closer to Christmas than Thanksgiving, we'd be reaching for metaphors involving lumps of coal.

The core problem, says VQR, or, rather, San Francisco-based writer Michael Lukas, is that the Bay Area section "acts like a foreign desk, treating the region like a surprisingly cosmopolitan colonial outpost, covering perennial stories that Bay Area residents have long known about."

"To the newspaper's many east coast readers," Lukas says, "the Bay Area is little more than a far-flung province at the other end of the country, a great place to vacation, drink some wine, have a mud bath. But this is not, of course, how Bay Area residents see their home."

He ends, though, on a charitable note: "Granted, The New York Times' Bay Area section is still finding its footing.... If the Times is going to beat out the Journal in the race to dismember the Chron and the Merc, it's going to have to start reporting on the Bay Area from the inside."

Beyond the question of whether or not Ruppert Murdoch (or Dean Singleton) will pull their news organizations' listings from Google in exchange for payments from Microsoft's Bing comes the question about whether or not they even can.

It was asked by DailyFinance this morning, and the answers probably weren't what News Corp., Media News or Microsoft wanted to hear.

As explained in the article, there are several potential hangups:

So it's not just Ruppert Murdoch's News Corp mulling a possible boycott of Google. This morning, Bloomberg reported that Media News boss Dean Singleton is weighing the possibilities for similar plans.

While Google listings aren't an issue for Media News holdings at the moment, they will be once the chain starts charging for online content next year. At that point, said Singleton, Google News -- which displays headlines and story excerpts -- will be working counter to the purpose of pay walls.

"The things that go behind pay walls, we will not let Google search to, but the things that are outside the pay wall we probably will, because we want the traffic," Singleton told Bloomberg.

Locally, Media News owns the San Jose Mercury News, the Oakland Tribune and the Contra Costa Times, among other newspapers. The company will begin the process, however, by blocking Google from its newspapers in Chico and York, PA, in what can only be assumed to be a test run to see in real-world terms how traffic is affected.

Also, reported Bloomberg, publishers of the Dallas Morning News are considering a similar move once they implement planned pay walls.

A little while back we reported on rumblings down south that NBC was canceling the San Francisco-based paramedodrama Trauma. Turns out the rumors of its death were greatly exaggerated.

Not only has NBC decided not to cancel the show, but, according to Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood, it's actually ordered more episodes.

Om Malik is one of the original bloggers (Bay Area and otherwise) who actually made a business out of this new media thing, and his longevity—and success (his network now includes seven blogs)—is due in no small part to the fact that he never stops evolving.

Though GigaOm went through a redesign just two years ago, that didn't stop Malik from launching a completely new design again on Monday. The goal, Malik writes, is to "strike a fine balance between what is a blog and what would be an online magazine."

To that end, content from the network's individual blogs (including TheAppleBlog, jkOnTheRun, and NewTeeVee) is increasingly being integrated into the flagship GigaOm site, for the main purpose of helping readers discover great content on the other sites. "While I remain a big believer is specialist niches," Malik writes, "I feel it's also important to surface more of the quality work being produced across these properties."

Here's another thing Malik does well: listening to his users. The site's product designer got feedback from nearly 1,000 GigaOm readers about what they wanted out of the site. Among other things, they asked the GigaOm team to point them to great content elsewhere out on the InterWebs. Malik says that feature will be rolling out later this week.

Why? "It's pretty simple," Malik writes. "We don't have a monopoly on ideas, and since our business is based on your attention, it's our job to make sure that your attention is being put to good use. And that means helping you save time and finding you stuff that you might find useful."

You probably know that, on the Web, advertising is hardly the one-size-fits all model we came to know in print newspapers and network television. You know, for example, that if you're a thirtysomething and you're mom's a sixtysomething, and both of you are on Facebook, you get ads for Hawaiian vacations and Volvo station wagons while your mom gets ads for wrinkle cream and Florida condos. Because Facebook knows who you are (remember all that profile information you entered?) and serves up ads accordingly.

A new company Google just announced it's acquiring shows us how even more fine-tuned the ads that leap onto our screens are going to be in the future. San Mateo-based Teracent makes display ads for the Web (and mobile devices). But not just any display ads. Teracent's systems actually build the display ads on the fly, based on what it knows about the specific person it'll be shown to. So, for example, assuming both you and your mom have indicated you're interested in home hardware (perhaps you both did Google searches for Home Depot?), it might build the ad on top for you (since you also were searching for lighting fixtures) and the one on the bottom for your mom (because she lives near Colchester, VT). Automatically. In real time. Using what are called "machine learning" systems.

So the bad news is that the machines are, in fact, coming for us. The good news is they know what we like.