Network World Staff

Apple, AT&T, Microsoft, Google and others are givens for being among the top newsmakers of 2011. Others will no doubt surprise us as we go along.

While it's so much easier to look back at the end of the year and reflect on the newsworthiness of a technology industry event than to do so as the event is happening, Network World this year is daring to make our picks for the top technology stories of the year as we go along. We'll update this article regularly -- as news dictates.

Overall, the upcoming Royal Wedding between Prince William and Catherine Middleton doesn't seem to be igniting the same degree of creative frenzy among Android developers as with their Apple iOS brethren.

The Android Market seems laden with gussied-up countdown apps (The Wedding equivalent of a flashlight app) and apps that just link up with media websites filled with videos and news about Prince William's receding hairline, his "former flings" and the couple's portrait-in-a-pizza (by the Papa John's Pizza chain).

A 17-year-old Australian who goes by the Twitter handle @zzap says he exposed the cross-site scripting flaw that led to Tuesday's widespread Twitter worm, dubbed onMouseOver.

A full account of Pearce Delphin's mea culpa is reported by the AFP news agency, which quotes the teen saying: "I did it merely to see if it could be done ... that JavaScript really could be executed within a tweet."

Network security problems are part of daily IT life these days. There are myriad issues, from patching Windows machines to stopping worms and protecting your assets from nasty insider threats. Here's a round up of the hottest recent network security news.

More essentials: Network routers, desktop virtualization, IPv6, 4G

A day after Google revamped its search results page, the company has revealed similar changes to the search results available to Android and iPhone smartphone users.

The most obvious change is a button to the left of the search box that opens an options menu listing categories such as "News," "Products," "Past 24 hours" and more. Clicking on those category links can further refine a search.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is no longer the world's richest man according to the annual Forbes magazine list released Tuesday, but it's not like he's going to have to go crawling back for his old job either.

Mexican telecom tycoon Carlo Slim Helu beat out Gates, last year's top billionaire, with a fortune worth $53.5 billion. Slim's rise this past year was fueled by growth in mobile telecom giant America Movil, which saw a 35% share price increase over the past year. Slim owns a $23 billion stake in the company, according to Forbes.

Having trouble keeping track of who is suing whom among smartphone and mobile technology players over the past few months?

Here's a quick rundown:

Google has conceptual images for what a Chrome OS-based tablet computer user interface might look like at its open source Chromium Projects site.

Carnegie Mellon University researcher Tom Mitchell says that privacy risks "on a scale that humans have never before faced" hinder real-time data analysis that could be used to solve health, traffic and human behavior problems.

Mitchell outlines his ideas in a column in a recent edition of the journal Science.

A UK researcher has compiled what he is calling the first album of Twitter music, that is, music squeezed into Twitter's signature 140-character messages.

Dan Stowell, a composer and computer scientist at Queen Mary, University of London, compiled the album – called sc140 – from Tweets sent from around the world. As much as five minutes of music can be jammed into a Tweet using programming tricks.

Microsoft has its work cut out for it in the mobile operating system market given the strength of Apple iPhone among consumers, RIM BlackBerry  among businesses and Nokia/Symbian in Europe (not to mention Google Android coming on strong). But with Windows Mobile 7 set to debut in 2010, Microsoft isn't giving up on the smartphone OS market. Here's a collection of recent stories, opinion pieces and more to get you up to speed or keep you current on Windows Mobile:

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