Top Items:
Gary Rivlin / New York Times:
Wallflower at the Web Party — JONATHAN ABRAMS was in a spot. He could take the safe bet and accept the $30 million that Google was offering him for Friendster, the social networking Web start-up he began only a year earlier, in 2002. Saying yes to Google would provide a quick …
Discussion:
Mark Evans, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, IP Democracy, O'Reilly Radar, Screenwerk, Texas Startup Blog, Mathew Ingram, Clickety Clack, TikiRobot!, Listics and ben barren
Steven Levy / Newsweek:
'Good for the Soul' — With iPod's fifth birthday around the corner, Steve Jobs discusses the MP3 player's design, the cool factor and the impact on how we listen to music. — Paul Sakuma / AP — Holistic: Jobs at an Apple media event last month — Oct. 23 marks the fifth anniversary of Apple's iPod.
Fred / A VC:
Who Should Buy Yahoo! — I got this comment on my Buying YHOO post last week: … My first thought was that I had sold too soon. My second thought was "no, not a carrier". And the next thing I did was send the comment around to some of my friends who are active in the market.
Richard Menta / mp3newswire.net:
iPod Killers for Christmas 2006 — We have run the iPod Killers for Christmas/Summer series since 2004. In that time we reported on 149 portable players and NOT one iPod killer from the bunch. That said, we may actually have a couple of genuine challengers to Apple.
Discussion:
The Unofficial Apple Weblog, I4U News, Gizmodo, details of a global brain, Slashdot and digg
Newlaunches.com:
McDonalds gives MP3 players infected with spyware as prizes — If it is not lawsuits then there is virus infected MP3 players, the fast food giant is always in the news. It all started in August when McDonalds Japan in association with Coca Cola announced a contest, where a MP3 player …
Daniel Terdiman / CNET News.com:
'Second Life' to begin selling real names — For anyone who has used the virtual world "Second Life," the last names Gjellerup, Godel or Stapovic probably mean a lot more than their real last names. — That's because historically, "Second Life" users have had to choose names from an ever-changing …
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Brady Forrest / O'Reilly Radar:
Second Life to Start Selling Names — Second Life is going to start selling "real" names to people (just like they do with virtual land). CNET is reporting that Linden Labs, the creators, have decided "to charge individuals who want a real last name a $100 setup fee and a $50-a-year maintenance fee.
Discussion:
Clickable Culture
Jeff Jarvis / BuzzMachine:
Paid popularity — Inspired by the success of blogging journalist and former staffer Om Malik, Business 2.0 is paying staffers to blog, rewarding them on the basis of traffic. My newfound friend Dan Shanoff objects at HuffingtonPost, arguing, with merit, that this may cause writers to …
Discussion:
Smalltalk Tidbits …, Good Morning Silicon Valley, iwantmedia.com and Netscape.com Hot Stories
blog.holtz.com:
Edelman and the one-sided conversation — The first inkling I had that Edelman PR had stumbled again in its social media efforts on behalf of client WalMart came early yesterday when Laurel English emailed me a copy of the MediaPost story. Shortly after that, Donna Simmons …
Discussion:
Deep Jive Interests, Scobleizer, Mathew Ingram, NevilleHobson.com, JD on EP, Smalltalk Tidbits …, WebMetricsGuru, PR Squared and raving lunacy
Haydn / What Will You See Next?:
Well Said is Not Always Well Written — Dave Winer has been the focal point of a discussion on blogs and journalism these past few days. — Dave's point is that the reader is now the writer and in ten years time all news will be blog based. — On mediangler I've been trying to work some of this out too.
Ismael Ghalimi / IT|Redux:
What I learned at the Office 2.0 Conference — With over 450 participants (375 iPods only, sorry...), 105 speakers, and 56 sponsors, the inaugural Office 2.0 Conference was a success. Eating our own dog food, we used as many Office 2.0 tools as we could to organize the event, and most of them worked.
Steve Lohr / New York Times:
Is Windows Near End of Its Run? — Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, has his hands full. The next version of the Windows operating system, Vista, is finally about to arrive — years late and clouded by doubts that it might violate antitrust rules in Europe.
Jonathan Riddell / KDE Dot News:
KDE Celebrates 10 Years of the Free Desktop — Yesterday at 10:00 AM the president of the KDE e.V. Eva Brucherseifer welcomed the audience of the presentation track at the KDE anniversary event at the Technische Akademie Esslingen (TAE) in Ostfildern near Stuttgart, Germany.
Discussion:
Slashdot
Jim Courtney / Skype Journal:
Sony Mylo — First Impressions... Thursday I received, as an evaluation unit, a Sony Mylo via the folks at Trinity Convergence whose voice engine software is embedded in the device. The Mylo has turned out to be an interesting personal companion and nothing has changed my opinion …
Niall Kennedy / Niall Kennedy's Weblog:
The current state of image search — A picture is worth a thousand words, especially to search engines trying to match a brief search query to a set of appropriate visual results. How can a web search engine collect enough data about a particular image to provide a user with relevant results?
Richard Siklos / New York Times:
A Loopy Deal That Actually Makes Sense — IS Google's $1.65 billion acquisition of the video Web site YouTube another milestone in the annals of the Internet? Or is it evidence of a second silly season? The answer to both questions: Yep, you'd better believe it.
Discussion:
BuzzMachine
Mihai / persistent.info:
Google Reader Redux — The new version of Reader has been out there long enough (and is now stable enough) that I have some time to catch my breath and make this post (my post-launch post last year came only a couple of days after the big announcement). I've jotted down some of my thoughts …
Ernesto / Torrentfreak:
How to use RSS & BitTorrent to download TV shows — Are you tired of scanning several BitTorrent sites for the latest episodes of your favorite TV-show? You should definitely try using RSS feeds then. RSS and BitTorrent are a perfect match. — What the heck is RSS?
