Have you been spending the week trying to convince your friends and family that you're not only staying in the race so that you can have some leverage in your campaign for the vice presidency? Then here are a few stories you might have missed. Don't worry, it's happened to all of us at one point or another.

• Microsoft: Would you use our search engine for a shiny new nickel?
  This week could go down in history as the week when Microsoft finally gave up on trying to get people to use its search engine because it's good and just decided to start bribing users. But we're guessing most people will probably forget about Microsoft's cash back offer for items found using the company's product search offer and go back to using better known product search sites.
• VLC's latest version:81,297,899 and rising
  Need a video player? Try VLC. How about an audio player? Try VLC. Need something that will open almost any format and has browser plugins for Firefox and Internet Explorer? Yeah, you know the rest.
• Hungarian student throws eggs at Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
  Honestly, we're still not entirely sure why this guy was throwing eggs at Ballmer and not, say, the government officials he's accusing of wasting money on Microsoft products. But the video's fun to watch. And isn't that what really matters?
• Flipping the Linux Switch: Switching, literally, with Ulteo Virtual Desktop
  Want to run some Linux apps, but aren't ready to give up Windows? Ulteo's got you covered with a new virtual desktop product that runs Linux applications inside of Windows. And much to our surprise and delight, Ulteo Virtual Desktop does this quite seamlessly.
• Tag Galaxy: Spacy way to browse Flickr
  Tag Galaxy makes browsing Flickr a whole new experience. Just enter a search term, and watch as related keywords float across the screen. Zoom in and you can see a series of thumbnails. But honestly, words don't do Tag Galaxy justice. Just check it out for yourself. It's that cool.
• 10 Fresh NetNewsWire styles
  If there's one thing we love more than nifty visualizations, (see above), it's nifty skins. And OS X RSS reader NetNewsWire is fully skinnable, so we went on a skinning binge this week and found 10 themes that completely change the look and feel of one of our favorite desktop applications.

There are plenty of attractive visualizations for Flickr images. But Tag Galaxy is certainly the spaciest. Enter a keyword and Tag Galaxy will search Flickr for related images. You can either click the big ball of gas at the center of your screen to see some of the images, or you can check out one of the little related-tag planets orbiting the center of your tag galaxy (or solar system, really).

The picture doesn't really do Tag Galaxy justice. Each planet is in motion, and you can navigate by dragging and dropping various parts of the screen. When you actually click on a tag to view the images, you can spin the ball around to find more images, and click an image to enlarge it.

Be forewarned, Tag Galaxy can make your web browser go Supernova if you're not careful. Firefox froze up on us a couple of times while we were playing with the web page. We also had a bunch of other tabs open, but Tag Galaxy certainly seemed to take a toll on our CPU and RAM usage.

thanks Sascha!