Hasta La Gadget!

“It’s great to smell fresh air again,” Julian Assange told a crowd, greeted by camera flashes and enthusiastic cheers. After eight nights in jail, the Australian-born founder of WikiLeaks founder had a small but detectable smile on his face.

Assange had been kept in solitary confinement in a Victorian British prison after being charged with sexual assault by two women in Sweden. The Internet activist used the opportunity to thank a list of people (though none by name), including his supporters, lawyers, and members of the press.

He also thanked the British justice system, stating, “If justice is not always an outcome, at least it is not dead yet.” Freed on bail, Assange is expected to stay at the home of journalist Vaughan Smith.

Video of Assange’s address after the jump.

It would have pretty tough for Yahoo to have had worse timing on this one–just a week out from Christmas. It’s a subject that Carol Bartz doesn’t really broach in her internal memo. Rather she chooses to focus on what the changes at the company mean for the coming year.

Bartz’s internal layoff memo surfaced this week, explaining away the recent four percent staff cut the company underwent. “You’ve heard me say before that I didn’t come to cut Yahoo! to greatness. That’s still true,” Bartz explains in the memo, going on to explain that the cuts were “about more than cost savings.”

Its not a particularly empathetic letter, but these things never are. Bartz tells her staff that “we need fewer Yahoos in some areas, and different types of Yahoos in others.” The company is cutting “underperforming and non-core product,” to focus on stronger properties “like e-mail, the homepage, search, mobile, advertising, content, and more.” All in all, it’s sounding a bit reminiscent of the whole peanut butter thing from a few years back.

Bartz then shifts for “one last thing before I go,” a focus on the “growth” and “turnaround” the company is experiencing.

All in all, it’s a pretty bummer end for what’s been a pretty quite year from the once-dominant search company.

This June 16th tweet from Stephen Colbert about the Gulf oil spill is 2010’s most retweeted: “In honor of oil-soaked birds, ‘tweets’ are now ‘gurgles.’ ” Twitter presented the talk show host with the first-ever Golden Tweet, the site’s co-founder Biz Stone appearing on the show to hand it off.

Rapper Drake took the number two spot (“We always ignore the ones who adore us, and adore the ones who ignore us”), followed by fellow musicians Lil Wayne (“Aaaaaaahhhhhhmmmmm baaaaakkkkkkkkkk!”) and Justin Bieber (“Te quiero mucho mi amor”).

Tweets from a fake Al-Qaeda account (“Just noticed Twitter keeps prompting me to “Add a location to your tweets”. Not falling for that one”), Kanye West (“I’m sorry Taylor”), and Rianna (“Justin Bieber just flashed me his abs in the middle of a restaurant! Wow! He actually had a lil 6 pack! Sexy, lol! #Beliebersplzdontkillme”) made the list as well.

You can check out the top ten over at Twitter.

Business social networking site LinkedIn today released its list of the “top 10 buzzwords” for 2010. The company’s analytics team pulled the most “cliched and overused phrases” from the site’s 85 million profiles.

“Extensive experience” tops the list in the US, followed by “innovated,” “motivated,” “results-oriented,” and “dynamic.” Hey, while you’re online changing your Gawker password, why not hop on to LinkedIn and freshen up your profile a bit?

Buzzwords, it turns out, are surprisingly universal. “Extensive experience” also topped the list in Canada and Australia. “Dynamic” was the top pick in Brazil, India, and Spain. “Motivated” popped up more than any other in the UK, and “innovative” was the most popular in France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.