Top Items:
Liz Gannes / GigaOM:
DVD Jon Fairplays Apple — DRM-buster DVD Jon has a new target in his sights, and it's a big piece of fruit. He has reverse-engineered Apple's Fairplay and is starting to license it to companies who want their media to play on Apple's devices. Instead of breaking the DRM …
Rob Hof / Tech Beat:
Unrepentant PayPerPost Gets Funding — Three months after getting slammed by BusinessWeek's Jon Fine, TechCrunch's Marshall Kirkpatrick, and a gazillion bloggers, PayPerPost is crying all the way to bank. The Orlando-based startup, which matches advertisers with bloggers willing to write …
RELATED ITEMS:
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Controversial PayPerPost Raises $3 million — We first covered PayPerPost when it launched three months ago. — The service is a marketplace for advertisers to pay bloggers to write about products for a fee. Commenters to our original post wee polarized into those violently for and those againt the product.
Terence O'Hara / Washington Post:
Hard-Learned Lesson: Don't Try to Censor A Blogger — Memories fade, but the Internet is forever. — Murry N. Gunty found that out the hard way this summer. Well known among Washington financiers, the head of Milestone Capital Management LLC ran afoul of bloggers for an attempt to censor …
RELATED ITEMS:
Brad Stone / Newsweek:
The Battle Over YouTube — The video-sharing site is the hottest start-up since Google. Is it worth a billion dollars, or is it just another company in need of a business model? — Warner Music, the fourth largest music company in the world, has every reason to wage business and legal warfare …
RELATED ITEMS:
Jeremy Caplan / Time:
Google's Growing Grasp — To fend off Microsoft and other foes, the search giant is bulking up on partnerships — What does Google search for? Over the past few months, the Web titan has been looking for new partners. It has teamed with Intuit to enable small-business owners …
Katie Hafner / New York Times:
And if You Liked the Movie, a Netflix Contest May Reward You Handsomely — Netflix, the popular online movie rental service, is planning to award $1 million to the first person who can improve the accuracy of movie recommendations based on personal preferences.
Discussion:
TechCrunch, Valleywag, MIT Advertising Lab, O'Reilly Radar, Genuine VC, TechEffect, UMBC eBiquity, Tony Gentile, unmediated, Dan Blank, BGSL, Slashdot, Hacking NetFlix and digg
RELATED ITEMS:
QuadsZilla / SEO BlackHat:
10 Steps to Guarantee You Make the Digg Front Page — As I sit here writing on the world's greatest personal computer (The Mac Pro Quad Xeon 64-bit workstation with dual 30 inch monitors): — I can't help but pity you Wal-Mart shoppers who still use software from the Antichrist (Microsoft) …
Richard MacManus / Read/WriteWeb:
Digg Blackmarket … I guess this is a sign of the times - a site dedicated to gaming digg, called User/Submitter. But there's no reason such a site couldn't exist for del.icio.us, or stumbleupon, or netscape - or any site that relies on voting. Needless to say, I hope this site gets squashed ASAP …
RELATED ITEMS:
David Caulton / Zunester:
Zune Sharing explained — Some of the comments below indicate that the details of Zune sharing aren't completely clear. Let me walk through the Zune does and Zune doesn'ts... Zunes have wireless built in. Zunes can thus set up "ad-hoc" (Zune to Zune) connections to one another.
RELATED ITEMS:
RON / Rondam Ramblings:
Top ten geek business myths — Since I've started my new career as a venture capitalist I have become keenly aware of some of the classic mistakes that geeks make when trying to raise money for a new business. Instead of writing the same comments over and over again I thought I'd try …
Discussion:
Slashdot
Frank Barnako:
Rocketboom's ad price: $80K a week — Andrew Baron seems to have shaken off the heartbreak of separation and gotten down to business. While Amanda Congdon, with whom he co-founded Rocketboom, is on a coast-to-coast trip in a Ford Hybrid, Baron is newly-focused.
Discussion:
Paul Colligan's …
Paul Stamatiou / PaulStamatiou.com:
Introducing PhishTank — Thanks to some great PR information from Allison Rhodes at OpenDNS, I have learned that PhishTank has launched today, at the beginning of National Cyber Security Awareness Month. PhishTank as you can probably guess from its spelling has something to do with online phishing, phishers and malware.
Nick / Rough Type:
Beyond question — It's funny how a set of instructions - an alogrithm - written by people can come to be granted, by those same people, a superhuman authority. As if a machine wrought by man should, upon trembling into motion, shed its earthly origin and assume a god-granted imperium, beyond our small-minded
Michael Liedtke / Associated Press:
Google buys garage that launched Internet's top search engine — SAN FRANCISCO - Internet search leader Google Inc. has added a landmark to its rapidly expanding empire - the Silicon Valley home where co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented a garage eight years ago as they set out to change the world.
Discussion:
Valleywag, Zoli's Blog, Search Engine Watch Blog, VentureBeat and John Battelle's Searchblog
Steve Rosenbush / Business Week:
Why Online Video Sites Are Hot Targets — As TV viewing habits change, media companies—and advertisers—are looking elsewhere: They've set their sights on a new breed of startups — As the Internet snaps to life with homemade movies, TV shows, and other forms of video …
Kotaku:
411 On PSP GPS — ITmedia Games has shots, as well as new info, on the upcoming PSP GPS attachment and the software that will take advantage of it. The (pictured) MAPLUS navigation system will ship in December and have GPS mapping and navigation functions tailored for folks walking, biking …
Jake Ludington:
Zune and iPod Photo Comparison — I got face time with a Zune this weekend and decided to look at how the form factor compares to the 80GB iPod I picked up a few days ago. The Zune weighs considerably less than the iPod, although I didn't have a scale on hand to get exact comparison.
Softwarepirate / The Software Pirate:
The PS3's worst enemy — Sony's had a lot of problems stirring up excitement with the PS3. Manufacturing problems, launch shortages, high prices, lackluster launch titles (Metal Gear Solid 4 isn't worthy a $660 investment) are just a few of the issues that have made gamers pretty nervous about getting Sony's Grey Goose of a console.
Bob Tedeschi / New York Times:
Wanted: A Way to Profit by Simplifying Web Classifieds — Web sites that list classified ads have proliferated, but so far they have mostly made life easier for buyers rather than sellers. — First there is the technology hurdle: many people who want to post a classified ad may feel daunted by the mechanics.
Discussion:
paidContent.org
