Top Items:
Washington Post:
AT& T Completes BellSouth Takeover — The Federal Communications Commission yesterday overcame a seven-month deadlock and approved AT&T's $85 billion purchase of BellSouth, creating a new corporate giant that will stand astride the telecommunications industry like none other in the generation since …
RELATED:
Tkarr / Save the Internet Blog:
AT&T Yields to Neutrality, Paves Path to Congress — In a striking victory for Internet freedom advocates, AT&T officials agreed on Thursday night to adhere to strict Network Neutrality conditions if allowed to complete their $85 billion merger with BellSouth which was approved today.
Marguerite Reardon / CNET News.com:
FCC approves AT&T-BellSouth merger — update The Federal Communications Commission approved the roughly $86 billion megamerger between AT&T and BellSouth on Friday, ending a partisan standoff. — The commission, which had been split between Democrats and Republicans for months on what …
Discussion:
Technically Speaking
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Google's Tipping Point — Taken in a vacuum, a fairly trivial thing happened a few days ago. The co-founder of Firefox, Blake Ross, wrote a post criticizing Google called "Tip: Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose". He takes issue with a new Google search feature that promotes certain …
RELATED:
Wired News:
Wild Predictions for a Wired 2007 — Here are some predictions for 2007: — Google Stock Hits $1,000 per Share — Internet Traffic Doubles ... to 5,000 petabits per day by the end of 2007. And 80 percent of it is peer-to-peer file sharing, mostly Skype video and BitTorrent.
RELATED:
Steve Rubel / Micro Persuasion:
Tagging Site Raw Sugar Tanks, Put Assets Up for Sale — RawSugar, a social bookmark site, has let all of its employees go and has put its core assets up for sale, Haaretz reports. The Israeli startup, which is similar to del.icio.us, digg and other link sharing sites, ran out of resources.
New York Times:
Apple Panel on Options Backs Chief — Apple Computer said Friday that a special committee of its board had found that its chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, was not responsible for improper dating of stock options at the company. To account for the backdating, Apple restated its financial reporting …
Major Nelson / Xbox Live's Major Nelson:
Top Xbox Live Games of 2006 — Here are the top games for 2006, based on Xbox Live connectivity. — The following rankings are based on data collected from 1/1/06 - 12/29/06: — 2006 Top Xbox 360 Titles (UU's) — 1 — Gears of War — 2 — Hexic HD — 3 — Call of Duty 2
Associated Press:
NASA's vision lost on Web generation — CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) — Young Americans have high levels of apathy about NASA's new vision of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2017 and eventually on to Mars, recent surveys show. — Concerned about this lack of interest …
Hugh Macleod / gapingvoid:
BLOGGING DELIVERS FIVE-FOLD INCREASE IN STORMHOEK SALES IN LESS THAN TWO YEARS? — It's been a busy year for Stormhoek. — December 29th, 2005 [one year ago exactly]: "Blogging Doubled Stormhoek Sales In Less Than Twelve Months." — When I first started working with Stormhoek in May …
Jeremiah Owyang / Web Strategy:
Social Media not fully Adopted and Blowing the smoke away — Claim: Social Media is Dead — Steve Rubel of Edelman (who's firm has been the posterboy of how to botch up Social Media this year) proclaims that Social Media is no more. (many a juicy comment) He suggests that Social Media is moot …
Search Marketing Gurus:
Barack Obama Doesn't Know What a Widget Is - Internet Marketing Meets Politics 101 — Barack Obama doesn't know what a widget is, neither does John Kerry, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and I highly doubt Hilary Clinton does either. I know, the next question is "what about John Edwards?"
Google Blogoscoped:
AdSense Blacklist to Increase Revenue — Oliver Gassner pointed me to AdsBlacklist.com, a service which generates a list of URLs based on a URL and a set of keywords you provide. You can then copy & paste this list into your Google AdSense competitive ad filter* to (supposedly) …
Sion Touhig / The Register:
How the anti-copyright lobby makes big business richer — Comment We're continually being told the Internet empowers the individual. But speaking as an individual creative worker myself, I'd argue that all this Utopian revolution has achieved so far in my sector is to disempower individuals …
Discussion:
digg
Stephen Shankland / CNET News.com:
Virtual reality to get its own network? — A nonprofit group says it plans to build a network called Neuronet purely to support virtual-reality game and business applications. — Neuronet, which is planned to be separate from the Internet, "will evolve into the world's first public network capable …
Richard Waters / MSNBC:
YouTube software threat to Google plans — YouTube's failure to complete a key piece of anti-piracy software as promised could represent a serious obstacle to efforts by Google, its new owner, to forge closer relations with the media and entertainment industry.
Discussion:
Mashable!
Pete Mortensen / Cult of Mac:
Ten Questions Apple Must Answer in 2007 — We're down to the last two-and-a-half days of 2006, and Apple CEO Steve Jobs is 11 days from taking the wraps off a shiny new product line at MacWorld San Francisco. Other former Apple figures might be a few weeks from being indicted.
Discussion:
digg
Steve Rubel / Micro Persuasion:
The Last Blog Meme of 2006 — With any luck, What Super Hero Are You should be the last big blog meme of the year. Jason Calacanis is the Green Lantern, Dave Winer is Iron Man and I am suuupa .... Your results: — You are Superman — Superman — 95% — Spider-Man — 85%
RELATED:
Jason Calacanis / The Jason Calacanis Weblog:I'm Green Lantern... but you knew that already.
Discussion:
10e20, Christine.net, Technically Speaking, Eric Rice, Teblog, everybuddy.org, TechCrunch and digg
