Top Items:
Matt Richtel / New York Times:
The Air Is Free, and Sometimes So Are the Phone Calls That Borrow It — Gary Schaffer looked out his window here last week to discover a reporter standing on his lawn, pirating his wireless Internet access to test a new mobile phone. — The phone, made by Belkin, is one of several …
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Cliff Edwards / Business Week:
Time to Rename the Cell Phone? — They're not just for making calls, and they don't have a lot to do with cells. Maybe it's time to name the ubiquitous gadget something else — You see them everywhere. The minute the plane hits the tarmac, someone whips one out.
Cynthia Brumfield / IP Democracy:Wi-Fi Piggybacking: Not Just for Laptops Anymore
Discussion:
Realtime Community
BBC:
Online video 'eroding TV viewing' — The online video boom is starting to eat into TV viewing time, an ICM survey of 2,070 people for the BBC suggests. — Some 43% of Britons who watch video from the internet or on a mobile device at least once a week said they watched less normal TV as a result.
Tim Arango / Fortune:
Beatles: only on iPod? — After years of refusing to make the move to MP3, the Beatles may give Steve Jobs' iTunes an exclusive, reports Fortune's Tim Arango. — NEW YORK (Fortune) — Click on the iTunes music store and punch in "Beatles" under artist search.
Jason D. O'Grady / The Apple Core:
Apple tablet coming soon? — It's no secret that I'm a big fan of the concept of an Apple tablet. It would be a great machine for commuting, allowing me to keep up with news and email on-the-go. New reports indicate that Apple may be close to releasing such a beast in 2007.
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Christopher Mason / New York Times:
Web Tool Said to Offer Way Past the Government Censor — Deep in a basement lab at the University of Toronto a team of political scientists, software engineers and computer-hacking activists, or "hactivists," have created the latest, and some say most advanced tool yet in allowing Internet users …
Valleywag:
Second Life hucksters — Linden Lab's online community, in which participants' avatars chat, and trade virtual goods such as artworks and real estate, has fed on the credulity of the press. Ooh, the world's first virtual Reuters correspondent! A virtual land baroness! Online marketers discover Second Life!
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John Battelle / John Battelle's Searchblog:
GOOGLE HAS MY CREDIT CARD NUMBER NOW — Herewith the story of my attempts to buy a Dora the Explorer Mr. Face Plush Backpack from ToysRUs using Google Checkout. In short, Google now has my credit card number. (It's one I use for testing, however). It feels kind of odd, to be honest.
Discussion:
Screenwerk
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Tom Oliveri / Official Google Blog:Happy Cyber Monday
Discussion:
CyberNet Technology News, The 360, WebProBlog, Google Operating System and Payments News
Om Malik / GigaOM:
Are VoIP Service Providers Making a Comeback? — Jon Arnold, unlike many of us naysayers has become increasingly bullish on competitive voice service providers (CVSPs) such as Vonage and Telio, and predicts sunny skies for them. Since then several others have joined the conversation.
Discussion:
The Flat Planet and a Phone!
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Kathy Sierra / Creating Passionate Users:
Why Web 2.0 is more than a buzzword — Many people hate the phrase "Web 2.0" even more than they hate what they believe it represents. No, that's not quite right... many people hate the phrase precisely because they think it represents nothing. Or they're annoyed by the idea of a web version number.
Discussion:
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life, Scobleizer, O'Reilly Radar, Mad Techie Woman and Enterprise Web 2.0
Erik Selberg:
General disarray at The Big 3 — As has been widely reported, the Big 3 search companies have been going through some organizational headaches of late. You've got Google's "focus on features" initiatives, Yahoo's "peanut butter manifesto," and some changes as the top here at Microsoft …
Seeking Alpha:
The Ten Best Internet Acquisitions Ever — Ashkan Karbasfrooshan submits: After reading the Ten Worst Internet Acquisitions Ever (my commentary) and Part 2, I could not help but come up with this list and offer you the following ten "best" Internet acquisitions of all time. — Criteria:
PRWeb:
Mobile Adult Content Market to Grow to $3.3bn by 2011, Driven by a Strong European Market and New Products for Casual Users. — The mobile adult content market is forecast to grow from its 2006 level of $1.4 billion to over $3.3 billion by 2011 according to Juniper Research latest study.
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Watch Blog:
Q&A On Google's Belgium News Agreements — This week, news emerged about an agreement between Google and two Belgian author groups that were suing it over copyright issues. Below, a short Q&A on what this means for Google. Highlights: The case goes on with three other groups taking part, but large damages seem unlikely.
Chris Anderson / The Long Tail:
THE RISE OF "FREECONOMICS" — It's a big day for Moore's Law. I'm not sure anyone else has noticed this, but by my calculations we have in the past few months reached the penny-per-MIPS* milestone. Intel's Core Duo running at 2.13 GHz now costs around $200 at retail (it's around $180 at volume), but can do about 20,000 MIPS.
Josh Pigford / The Apple Blog:
10 OS X Apps You Might Not Know About But Should — Over the past couple of years of running The Apple Blog, I've tried out literally thousands of applications. A lot have been great apps that I still use today, but infinitely more have just been plain bad. I know I'm not the only one who's experienced this.
Dean Takahashi / AEI:
An Interview With Robbie Bach — A couple of weeks ago, Mercury News staff writer Troy Wolverton and I sat down with Robbie Bach for a one-hour joint interview in San Francisco. I finally got around to transcribing all of the game-related questions as well as some of the Zune questions.
Rob Hof / Tech Beat:
Shoveling on Digg — As much as I like the idea of Digg—a site where a community chooses the most interesting or relevant news—I must confess that I just don't use it that much. The reason became obvious once I started using Google Reader, which streams new RSS posts from all my chosen feeds as they come in.
