Top Items:
Robert Scoble / Scobleizer:
The elephant in the kitchen — Dare Obasanjo, of Microsoft, just pulled the ad hominem card. In debate class in high school the teacher would instantly award the other side a win if you ever pulled that card. Why? Because it demonstrated you lost your cool and couldn't win through sheer logic …
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Robert Scoble / Scobleizer:
Is Microsoft really the largest blog vendor? — Microsofties take it on face value that they host the most blogs. They even love shoving it in your face. Yesterday someone who works on the Windows Live team was taunting me with "influentials don't matter, we got to be #1 and we don't care …
Discussion:
Download Squad, Guardian Unlimited, Labnotes, Microsoft News Tracker, UMBC eBiquity, MSTechToday and duncanriley.com
Robert Scoble / Scobleizer:
"Where's the blog?" in Windows Live Spaces? — Remember those old Wendy's commercials where an old lady yelled "where's the beef?" — Well, let's play "where's the blog?" — First, let's pull up a list of the most recently posted Windows Live Spaces. I did at 8:29 p.m., which is where this list came from.
Marshall Kirkpatrick / TechCrunch:
FeedCrier, another way to act fast with RSS and IM — Adam Kalsey, a founder and former CTO of RSS vendor Pheedo, released a new service last night called FeedCrier that makes it easy to receive rapid notification of new items in an RSS feed by IM. The service currently supports only AIM but Kalsey says that will change soon.
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Robert Scoble / Scobleizer:
Why my ego never gets out of control... Cause if it does get out of control everyone jumps on it and kicks it in the groin. Like this: — Jeff Sandquist: "Seriously Robert, get over yourself already. A blog that is private is still a blog." Well, that might be true …
Discussion:
Digital Common Sense
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Jeff Sandquist:
A Private Blog Is Still a Blog — I've been wondering when the day would come after Scoble left Microsoft that I'd disagree with him enough to bring it up here. There have been many days that I've disagreed with him, but today is the day that I need to jump into the pool.
Bob Tedeschi / New York Times:
Now the Music Industry Wants Guitarists to Stop Sharing — The Internet put the music industry and many of its listeners at odds thanks to the popularity of services like Napster and Grokster. Now the industry is squaring off against a surprising new opponent: musicians.
Olga Kharif / Business Week:
A Quantum Leap for Cell Phones — A new no-buttons handset by Pilotfish and Synaptics signals that mobiles as we know them may soon be a thing of the past — It's likely to evoke the children's song inquiring, "Where's the button?" On Aug. 21, designer Pilotfish and sensor maker Synaptics …
Nathan Weinberg / InsideGoogle:
THE ADSENSE GAME — Joel Comm has created a pretty nifty AdSense game, a colorful Flash game that asks you to create, market, and optimize a website to earn money off AdSense ads. While I like the game, which is reminiscint of Lemonade Tycoon, I feel like I must be missing something …
comScore:
Yahoo! Sites Register a Moderate Share Gain for the Second Consecutive Month — comScore Releases July U.S. Search Engine Rankings — comScore Networks today released its monthly qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines. In July 2006, Yahoo! Sites posted modest market share gains …
Associated Press:
Holdout Bands Give In to iTunes — DETROIT — Bob Seger turned the page, and Metallica finally found justice for online fans. Now, only a few remaining big-name musical acts refuse to make their songs available on Apple Computer's popular iTunes Music Store.
Cory Doctorow / Boing Boing:
Google launches free, kick-ass word-processor — Google has re-lauched Writely, the online word-processor they recently bought, in public beta. Writely does everything Word does, for free — and saves its output as PDFs and even RSS feeds (subscribe to a word-processor doc!).
Discussion:
Scobleizer
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Garett Rogers / Googling Google:Need a Writely invitation? No you don't
Discussion:
Semantic@BlogMatrix
Gizmodo:
Box Pics, Specs of Sprint's Treo 700wx Leaked, August 31 Release Date — The world is holding its breath waiting for more details on Sprint's version of the Palm Treo 700w, and, lo and behold, we've got some more info on the little wundergadget. Due to arrive on August 31 …
Discussion:
broadbandreports.com
Digital Music News:
Cut-Rate Downloads: A File-Sharing Fix? — Ever since Napster hit the scene several years ago, the music industry has been confronted by a radically new - and uncontrollably free - distribution platform. Most efforts to tame file-sharing volume have been unsuccessful, including direct lawsuits against uploaders.
Jeff Smykil / Infinite Loop:
Finally a practical use for a thumb drive! — Whatever your opinion on Classic Mac OS is, chances are you hold a certain bit of nostalgia for the days of yore when a grayscale display and 128k of memory was all you really needed. I already know that some of you are going to argue …
Gizmodo:
Textable iBall, the Big Ball That Displays Text Messages — Spacewriter's Textable iBall is poised to change the way you read text messages, since, apparently, reading text messages on a cellphone is passé. Once you've inserted the proper SIM card, the 11-inch iBall can display text messages …
Liz Gannes / GigaOM:
Farecast Goes Coast to Coast — Farecast, the plane ticket price predictor site, is now live in 55 U.S. cities, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago, and Atlanta. — The company is building a direct competitor to travel-oriented vertical search engines Kayak …
Mark Wallace / 3pointD.com:
Mitch Kapor on the Power of Second Life — The Second Life Community Convention, the second annual gathering of residents of the virtual world of Second Life, kicked off on Saturday with a fascinating speech by Mitch Kapor, creator of Lotus spreadsheet application (often credited with helping …
David N. Goodman / Associated Press:
Recycled cell phones help drive Third World wireless boom — DEXTER, Mich. - With the number of cell phones in use worldwide hitting 2 billion and rising, recycled phones are playing a crucial role in the spread of wireless communications across the developing world, where land lines can be costly or unavailable.
