Top Items:
Ronald Grover / Business Week:
Wal-Mart and Apple Battle for Turf — The retail behemoth isn't happy about the iPod maker's plans to offer movie downloads through iTunes. Has Wal-Mart met its match? — The guy from Bentonville, Ark., surely isn't on any of Hollywood's leading man lists.
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Arik Hesseldahl / BusinessWeek Online:
Exclusive: Movie Downloads on iTunes By Mid-September — Coming soon to a Mac or PC near you: Movies on iTunes. My BusinessWeek colleague Ron Grover has exclusive details about how how Wal-Mart, as the largest seller of DVDs — it sells about 40% of DVDs produced — is unhappy at the prospect …
Mathew Ingram / mathewingram.com/work:
Social software is not a fad — Ryan Carson says he doesn't have time to use all those social apps like del.icio.us and Flickr and Digg, although he thinks they are cool, and Phil Edwards says that he likes them too but sees the phenomenon as appealing to a relatively small niche of Web geeks …
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DesktopLinux.com:
Firefox 2.0 beta 2 boasts enhanced look, features — Mozilla released Beta 2 of its upcoming Firefox 2 browser for developer review Aug. 31, emphasizing that it is being made available for testing purposes only. The release contains a number of new features, as well as some enhancements to look and feel.
Discussion:
Niall Kennedy's Weblog, TechBlog, TeleRead, CyberNet Technology News, Slashdot and TechWeb
Gavin Clarke / The Register:
Berners-Lee calls for Web 2.0 calm — Analysis Five years after the first internet bubble burst, we're now witnessing the backlash against Web 2.0 and a plethora of me-too business plans, marketing pitches and analyst reports exploiting the nebulous phrase.
Discussion:
Publishing 2.0, Dead2.0, John Furrier, Mark Evans, Labnotes, Open Culture and Voidstar: blog
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Marshall Kirkpatrick / TechCrunch:
MySpace driving more retail traffic than MSN search — New Hitwise findings indicate that MySpace sent more US traffic to online retail sites last week than MSN search, the third largest search engine on the web. That's big news, as it's tangible evidence that youth oriented online social networking …
Dan Frommer / Forbes:
America's Most Wired Cities — With most of the U.S. technology industry focused on the East and West coasts, you'd think the best place to get online would be San Francisco, or perhaps New York City. But Atlanta tops Forbes.com's survey of America's most wired cities.
telekom3.de:
Deutsche Telekoms offering new rate packages consisting of Internet, fixline telephony, mobile communications, and entertainment — T-Com now offering single-, double-, and triple-play - Price reductions of up to 30 percent - T-Mobile introduces inexpensive minutes and flat-rate packages …
Larry Angell / iLounge:
Reports: Apple to hold special event on September 12th — Based on reports from European Apple enthusiast websites and last night's YourMacLife radio broadcast, Apple is in the process of inviting members of the press to a special event for new products, to be held on September 12, 2006.
Gizmodo:
Samsung YP-K5 MP3 Mini Boombox: First Unboxing, Review, and Video. — Here it is. You might have seen some fuzzy flyby images of this MP3 player with speakers built into its backside. But we've got it in our hands. And we love it. — For a 4GB player, its kinda chunky.
Ravi / All about Linux:
Transcript of talk with Richard .M. Stallman on the sidelines of 4th International GPLv3 Conference held at Bangalore — Various governments in the developing world are slowly but surely waking up to the advantages that free software can provide both in terms of monetary savings as well as otherwise.
Major Nelson / Xbox Live's Major Nelson:
Over 50-Million Marketplace downloads served — The Xbox PR team just released some interesting data that I think some of you may find interesting. Check these numbers out! — The Xbox Live Marketplace just passed 50 million downloads. That is double the 25 million mark from just three months ago.
Google Blogoscoped:
Google Image Labeler — Google released the Google Image Labeler game. The idea is that you will be labeling images along with a random partner, in real-time. When you both find the same keywords, you score points and advance to the next round. A high-score table shows who scored the most points.
Fred / A VC:
Social Widgets — I've spent a lot of time thinking about the MySpace music player and the YouTube video player. I believe these two "widgets" (if you can call them that) have been very significant parts of the success of those two services. — In the case of MySpace, the ability to simply click …
VoIP & Gadgets Blog:
Paris Hilton hacks voicemail using Asterisk — Celebrities Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan are in a well-known feud that now has entered one of my favorite realms, namely VoIP. According to an InfoWorld article, (which Asterisk VoIP News reminded me about), it is alleged that Paris Hilton used …
Joel Spolsky / Joel on Software:
Language Wars — An old friend emailed me to ask: … Ah, an excellent question, simultaneously impossible to answer and very easy to answer! — Sorry, I should stop speaking in riddles. A while ago I wrote an article called Lord Palmerston on Programming in which I claimed …
Discussion:
Smalltalk Tidbits …
Techworld.com:
It's here: the 16GB USB dongle — Toshiba has announced the world's biggest USB dongle - an impressive 16GB. — The TransMemory line of flash memory sticks range from 512MB up to 4GB, but with a special "limited edition" 16GB version, presumably just for showing off.
Evan Blass / Engadget:
Pioneer planning BDR-103 HD DVD/Blu-ray combo drive — Samsung got our hopes up and then dashed them. Same with LG. But ever since Ricoh announced its "smart" blue laser diode that can recognize what type of disc has been inserted and adjust the beam accordingly, we've been cautiously optimistic …
Todd Bishop / Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog:
Microsoft executive stock bonuses, by the numbers — Back in 2003, when Microsoft stopped giving employees stock options and instead started granting actual shares, the company also announced a new executive bonus plan called the Shared Performance Stock Award Program.
Discussion:
Microsoft News Tracker
Jeremy Reimer / Ars Technica:
ISPs fight against encrypted BitTorrent downloads — The advent of BitTorrent was a cause for celebration for people who wished to share large files very quickly, but Internet Service Providers did not see the technology in quite the same positive light. ISPs soon found that the majority …
