A judge on Monday refused to restore Britney Spears’ right to visit her two sons, a court spokesman said, after the troubled pop star showed up outside court but never made it into the hearing.

Superior Court Commissioner Scott Gordon left in place a ruling that barred Spears from visiting with her young sons at least until another hearing on February 19, lawyers for her ex-husband Kevin Federline said outside court.

Gordon issued the original order earlier this month, after police were summoned to the troubled pop star’s home when she became distraught and refused to return the boys to Federline’s representatives.

Spears, 26, was taken away on a stretcher and hospitalized for two days.

She arrived hours late for Monday’s hearing and was mobbed by photographers as she stepped out of a sport utility vehicle outside the downtown Los Angeles courthouse.

But instead of heading into the building where the hearing was under way with Federline in the courtroom, Spears climbed quickly back in the car and drove off again.

“Move back, I’m scared. Stop it. Stop it. I want to get back in the car. Just stop it. Let me get in the car, please!” Spears shouted at photographers, according to the celebrity Web site TMZ.com.

It was the latest in a series of strange episodes involving Spears since she divorced Federline in late 2006. She lost custody of their two sons, 1-year-old Jayden James and 2-year-old Sean Preston, last year.

The incident in early January that led to Spears’ hospitalization prompted Gordon to suspend her visitation rights with the children until Monday’s hearing — which legal experts considered critical for Spears to attend.

She did not show up for a morning session, and made her brief appearance outside the courthouse after a noon break.

The hearing was closed to the press and public, but Federline, his hair styled into a Mohawk, was seen coming and going.

His attorney, Mark Vincent Kaplan, said outside court that Federline’s wish was “that he could one day parent both of these children with the mother.”

He said Spears was not required to attend the hearing and her brief appearance outside court did not affect the ruling by the judge, who took testimony from five witnesses.

Spears became a teen pop phenomenon nine years ago, and enjoyed a brief comeback in October with her new single, “Gimme More” and an album, “Blackout,” which briefly hit No. 2 on U.S. pop album charts before falling off.

(Additional reporting by Justin Kroll, editing by Alan Elsner)

Spicebird is a new open source organizer mash-up from Synovel that uses Mozilla technologies to combine the e-mail and contact tools of Thunderbird with the calendar and scheduling features in Sunbird to create a slick new integrated communications application.

Spicebird is still in its infancy, currently 0.4 beta, but already the first public release offers an impressive set of features, including e-mail, calendaring, instant messaging and other communication tools.

Synovel first demoed Spicebird a few weeks ago and there’s a video of Spicebird in action on the site which showcases some of the applications finer points, like automatic event detection in e-mails and ability to add those events to your calendar with a single click.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the basic interface for Spicebird is a series of tabs holding each primary element of the app — e-mail and news, contacts, calendar and tasks. The homepage of Spicebird looks a bit like an iGoogle or NetVibes page with little preview widgets for selected e-mail folders, RSS feeds, calendar events and more. All the widgets can be customized to suit your work habits.

Despite subdividing the interface into tabs, working Spicebird remains a seamless process. For instance, if you get an e-mail where Spicebird detects an appointment or meeting, it will offer a link to add that event to your calendar. Clicking the link will automatically switch over to your calendar tab and add the event to your schedule.

Spicebird also offers an integrated Jabber chat client, which means you can connect to GTalk and other Jabber-based services out of the box. The interface itself is pretty barebones at the moment, but it gets the job done.

So far Spicebird probably sounds more or less like Outlook, Evolution or even Gmail since all these info organizers offer similar features and indeed that’s more or less what this first release is — a proof of concept.

But Spicebird has big plans and the next revision (0.7 according to the roadmap) promises some even more interesting features like an integrated blog publishing tool, stored IM transcripts and support for more protocols, as well as a new tabbed e-mail interface (also in the works for Thunderbird 3.0).

The final version of Spicebird hopes to deliver CMS integration (via Drupal), a document manager, Microsoft Exchange support and eventually some variation on the the “inbox as an organizer for social networks” idea that seems to very popular of late.

In the mean time, if you’re interested in checking out Spicebird, you can download a version for Windows or Linux from the website (Mac users, it doesn’t look like Spicebird currently has any plans for Mac OS X).

I tested Spicebird on Windows XP and found it to be quite stable and very usable, even in its current beta form. Although it doesn’t yet have some of what could be its killer features, like the Songbird music player, Spicebird is definitely one to watch.

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/01/spicebird-offer.html

 Todd Lazarski - Celebrity News Service News WriterNew York, NY (CNS) - Experimental and controversial album-release tactics from Radiohead didn’t impede a phoenix-like rise up the standard sales charts this week.”In Rainbows,” previously released by the band on a choose-your-price package online, skyrocketed to #1 on Billboard’s Hot 200 album chart in just the second week of widespread release. The attached ‘Greatest Gainer’ label was an obvious understatement, as the album debuted last week at a very modest #156.Only time will tell as to how Radiohead’s monumental success with both a self-release and a standard issue will come to effect the much-maligned record industry.Meanwhile Alicia Keys took #2 on both the singles and album charts for the second straight week with “As I Am,” while Mary J. Blige’s “Growing Pains” showed first signs of adolescent regression, falling from the top spot to #3 in it’s third week.”Juno”’s wave of critical acclaim landed the film’s soundtrack, featuring an organic mix of classic and indie Rock, at the #8 spot in its debut week, which was also worthy of Billboard’s ‘Hot Shot’ distincti

Facebook isn’t ready for its close up.

In a television interview, Facebook’s Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said it was unlikely for the social networking site would go public this year.

“I think what I can announce is that it’s highly unlikely that we will go public in 2008,” Zuckerberg told CBS (nyse: CBS -news - people ) news program “60 Minutes” in an interview aired Sunday.

Instead, the tech-sector’s prodigy looked two or three years into the future.

“When going public makes sense to do, we’ll do that. Maybe that’s two years out. Maybe it’s three years out,” he said.

Despite Facebook’s high-profile, Zuckerberg’s comments were a non-issue on Wall Street.

“That deal wasn’t really on a lot of radar screens,” said Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Sal Morreale, “everyone’s talking about Visa and other deals.”

Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news -people ) paid $240 million in October for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, valuing the startup at $15 billion. Facebook reportedly has turned away offers to buy the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company outright, stoking speculation that it is preparing for an eventual IPO.

Shares of Microsoft were up 1.2%, or 47 cents, to $34.38, in late-afternoon trading on Monday.

Bankers are expecting 2008 to present a less welcoming environment for technology-sector IPOs than 2007. A survey of 100 technology bankers by research firm 451 Group shows they expect a median of 25 IPOs this year, down from 60 in 2007.

Despite starting as a simple social networking site on college campuses, Facebook quickly turned into true cultural and business phenomena.

For example, Facebook executives recently set up camp to offer a peek into how it hopes to answer that question with a new advertising platform that will let marketers track where the 50 million members of Facebook go online and what they buy. The goal of keeping track of all this activity is to help advertisers send the most “appropriate” ads to consumers–and ultimately sell more products and services (See“Facebook’s Big Play To Earn Money”).

“For the last hundred years, media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be part of the conversation,” Zuckerberg said. The company calles the new platform Facebook Ads.

Captured in those millions of pages of profiles on Facebook is exactly the kind of information that makes most brands salivate. Among the top 10 questions Facebook asks when you create a profile are where you shop and what you buy.

By KOMO Staff & News Services

Jessica Simpson did not attend the Dallas Cowboys’ game against the New York Giants on Sunday, but many thought she did. The “Jessica” many thought they saw was actually Lynsey Nordstrom, a 21-year-old Simpson look-alike from Bothell, Wash. She was hired by the New York Postto attend the game and pose as the pop singer-actress.The newspaper revealed the stunt its Web site on Monday with the words “you’re welcome, New York!”The post pulled off the prank one month after fans considered Simpson’s attendance the reason for a bad game by her boyfriend, Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo. On Dec. 16, Simpson proudly displayed her shirt to television cameras during the Cowboys’ game against Philadelphia. Romo injured his throwing thumb and had one of his worst games of the season that day. Following the loss against the Eagles, Cowboys’ Terrell Owens playfully told Simpson to stay away. ”Right now, Jessica Simpson is not a fan favorite - in this locker room or in Texas Stadium,” he said. On Sunday, a mere stand-in for Simpson proved to be enough to tilt the game against the Cowboys, who were upset 21-17 by the Giants. Before Sunday’s game, the Giants were 0-2 against the Cowboys this season. Nordstrom, who often makes appearances as a Simpson look-alike, told the Star-Ledger newspaper she was paid her usual fee — $500 for the first hour and $250 for each following hour. She says she has never had plastic surgery and just happens to look a lot like the famous blond. ”They say everyone out there has a twin. Mine just happens to be someone famous,” Nordstrom wrote on her MySpace page. Nordstrom says she once even fooled the celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton, who thought a photo of Nordstrom (pictured above) was that of Simpson. She was also picked out of a pool of Simpson look-alikes for a liquor advertisement. And Nordstrom looked like the real deal to the Giants fans, who were simply thrilled to see the blond show up sporting Romo’s jersey on Sunday.”I knew we were going to win when I saw her. I’m dead serious!” Anthony Triglia, 21, of Staten Island told the Post. And, it seems, his prediction came true