Top Items:
Jacques Steinberg / New York Times:
Censored 'SNL' Sketch Jumps Bleepless Onto the Internet — The nearly three-minute digital film, shown on "Saturday Night Live" last Saturday, was a parody of two boy-band singers (including one played by the real Justin Timberlake) crooning a holiday song about making a gift to their girlfriends …
Alex Veiga / Associated Press:
Record Labels Sue Web Site Operator — LOS ANGELES (AP) — Several major record labels sued the operator of the Russian music Web site AllofMP3.com on Wednesday, claiming the company has been profiting by selling copies of music without their permission. — The lawsuit was filed …
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Trae McNeely / SlashPhone:
Vertu's Signature Cobra Cellphone Cost $310,000 USD — Views: 374 — Vertu's Signature Cobra Cellphone can be yours for only $310,000. Cheaper version sells for $ 115,000. Created with various diamonds and 439 rubies. — I am honored to introduce our next cellphone; Vertu's Signature Cobra.
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Nick Bradbury:
Desktop Software is Paralyzed by Fear — Despite the power and rich UI that desktop applications offer, it's obvious that the move to Web applications is accelerating. For many people, the ability to access your data through any browser clearly outweighs the benefits of desktop software.
Discussion:
JD on EP
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Michel Marriott / New York Times:
At the Heart of the Wii, Micron-Size Machines — EVEN before its release last month, Nintendo's latest video game console, the Wii, was getting a lot of attention for its wireless motion-sensitive controllers. Swing the controller and — crack! — hit a virtual home run in a virtual ballpark, for example.
Don Box / Don Box's Spoutlet:
Google Search API? — Several people have forwarded me pointers to Google's move from a SOAP-based access mechanism for search to an AJAX-based one. — The O'Reilly coverage starts to detail what's going on, but I think there's more here than meets the eye.
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Deusx / del.icio.us:
tagometer: badges badges badges badges BOOKMARKS BOOKMARKS — Being a blogger, one of my long-standing wishlist items for del.icio.us has been to find some way to get more of what's going on here to show up out there. Instead of just simple links, I've wanted to get a bit of peek through …
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Jacqui Cheng / Ars Technica:
Google drops beta tag from Blogger — The beta version of Google's popular blogging service, Blogger Beta, quietly shed its "beta" tag today. The switch came without much fanfare, only noted by the loss of the "beta" tag and the introduction of "the new Blogger" on the main Blogger web site.
Brady Forrest / O'Reilly Radar:
OpenID on the Upswing — OpenID is a lightweight, decentralized identity system that has been gaining prominence. I expect this upcoming year to be a big year for OpenID — and not just because of the Google trend chart with the recent uptake in search query share.
Richard MacManus / Read/WriteWeb:
GoogleOS II: Starring Linus Torvalds — Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus — Did the above image shock you? No, this is not a real Google advert! But something similar may well turn into reality. In this sequel to our original GoogleOS blockbuster …
Discussion:
loose wire blog
Mike / Techdirt:
Google Misses Another Chance To Be The Web Platform — from the strategic-errors dept — A few people have submitted various stories on the web about how Google has killed off their SOAP Search API in favor of their AJAX API, which is much more limited. Some are saying that this is more …
Inside Google Desktop:
Holiday Gadgets — We've released some very fun and festive gadgets just in time for the holidays! Try these out: — Christmas Tree by EK Chung and James Yum [USA] — A tree that you can decorate. Choose lights, bows, stockings, and ornaments for your tree to add distinctive holiday cheer.
Discussion:
Download Squad
Fred / A VC:
Web 2.0 Is A Gift, Not A Threat, To VCs — It's Christmas time and I've been thinking about gifts. In this case, I've been thinking about what a gift the evolution of the web from its first generation to its second generation has been to the venture capital business.
Jon Stokes / Ars Technica:
EFF taps e-voting security guru Ed Felten for board — Princeton's Ed Felten will be joining Lawrence Lessig, John Gilmore, Brewster Kahle, and other prominent technology activists, researchers, and scholars on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Richard MacManus / Read/WriteWeb:
FeedSky, China's Version of Feedburner - But With Bigger Numbers — By Read/WriteWeb's China correspondent, Gang Lu — FeedSky is the largest Chinese feed management provider and has just launched its Beta 3. CEO Xinxin Lv described it to me as "mainly a UI update with some performance enhancement".
David Pogue / New York Times:
Cellphones That Track the Kids — Let's face it: we're in love with the idea of secret location trackers. In "The Da Vinci Code," the bad guys slap a location-tracking button onto Tom Hanks's clothing. In "The Matrix," a location-tracking scorpion robot crawls into Keanu Reeves's abdomen.
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GigaOM
