With all of the furor about Google and Microsoft it is easy to forget that the fabulous search engine giant started as a Stanford University PhD research seedling in 1999 and is a classic case of unbridled academic IP.

In 1998 Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin co-authored an academic paper entitled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" for journal Computer Networks. The rest, as they say, is history.

What do you get when you mix the UK's leading "bad science" columnist, an intrepid blogging professor, a lecturer and herbal medicine practitioner, the husband of a lecturer and herbal medicine practitioner, a classic blog-fearing university, and the angry voices of the multitudes in the blogosphere?

If it isn't obvious already, the answer is pure entertainment. So Blogscholar brings you a brief summary of the tale of this combustible mix.

In 1996 Singapore was one of the first countries to require political and religious content providers on the Web to register with the state while simultaneously launching Singapore Inc online, the first national-level initiative in the world to use online resources to market and solicit global investment. It is a country of contrasts but Singapore has always been a leader in the Internet and network technologies so it is no surprise to see the East-Asian economic dynamo drafting innovative ways of educating the next generation. It is even less surprising that the focus is on functional IT literacies when you consider the strapline for the city-state's Ministry of Education - "moulding the future of our nation".