Top Items:
Om Malik / GigaOM:
Are Social Networks Just a Feature? — Social networks are now cropping up like mushrooms after a monsoon, most of them slight variations on the MySpace-Facebook model. Unfortunately that trend has pigeonholed the notion of social networks into a web-page paradigm, a virtual Rolodex …
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Robert Young / GigaOM:
Facebook - Smart or Stupid? — As we all know, one of the biggest stories in 2006 was about a deal that never happened. Despite multiple rumors of buyout offers from various suitors, Facebook rejected them all and decided to stay independent. Now, whether that was a smart decision …
Miguel Helft / New York Times:
A Long-Delayed Ad System Has Yahoo Crossing Its Fingers — Starting around 3 p.m. Pacific time on Monday, a group of Yahoo executives will begin shuttling among three "war rooms" at the company's search marketing unit here. — They will be scrutinizing an array of moving charts …
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Gizmodo:
Super Bowl Ad Watch: Top Spots — Yeah, we know, the commercials were better than the game again this year, even though it was a pretty good Super Bowl for Colts fans at least. There were a lot more HD spots in this year's game compared to last year's, too.
Discussion:
splashcastmedia.com, michael parekh on IT, Cymfony's Influence 2.0, Zatz Not Funny!, VoIP & Gadgets Blog and digg
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BBC:
Deal ends Beatles' Apple battle — Technology giant Apple has reached a deal with the Beatles to end the dispute over the use of the Apple name. — Apple Inc will now take full control of the Apple brand and license certain trademarks back to the Beatles' record company Apple Corps for continued use.
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Brad Stone / New York Times:
Study Finds Security Flaws on Web Sites of Major Banks — Internet security experts have long known that simple passwords do not fully defend online bank accounts from determined fraud artists. Now a study suggests that a popular secondary security measure provides little additional protection.
Discussion:
27B Stroke 6, New Web Order, ha.ckers.org web …, Jeffrey McManus, Pito's Blog, UNEASYsilence and Slashdot
Peeyush / Official Google Webmaster Central Blog:
Discover your links — You asked, and we listened: We've extended our support for querying links to your site to much beyond the link: operator you might have used in the past. Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web.
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Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:Google Releases New Link Reporting Tools
Discussion:
ResourceShelf
Charlie Brooker / Guardian:
I hate Macs — Unless you have been walking around with your eyes closed, and your head encased in a block of concrete, with a blindfold tied round it, in the dark - unless you have been doing that, you surely can't have failed to notice the current Apple Macintosh campaign starring David Mitchell …
Gizmodo:
Oh The Hubris: Microsoft's Xbox 360 Asks Asians What's Wrong With Them — If you're in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan or Korea, Microsoft wants to know what's wrong with you. That's right, your tepid response to their console isn't their fault, it's yours. Which leads Microsoft to launch the website …
Business Wire:
Publishers Take Back Control of Their Ad Revenue with FAST AdMomentum — With FAST AdMomentum, publishers now have a private-label contextual advertising platform, eliminating the need for third-party services — New product was developed in consultation with publishers who are looking …
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David Barboza / New York Times:
Internet Boom in China Is Built on Virtual Fun — SHENZHEN, China — When Pony Ma, the 35-year-old co-founder of China's hottest Internet company, sends a message to friends and colleagues, the image that pops up on their screens shows a spiky-haired youth wearing flashy jeans and dark sunglasses.
doughtyhanson.com:
Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures invests in Plazes — Plazes raises €2.7m from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures to develop its community and mobile channels. — Munich/Zurich/Berlin, 5th February, 2007 - Plazes, the geo-community platform and worldwide leading web service …
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Oatmeal / SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog:
Web Developers: 13 Command Line Tricks You Might Not Know — Below is a list of command line tricks I've found to be very useful in web development that a surprising number of web developers don't know about. — 1. ln -s /some/destination name_of_link — This is pretty straightforward …
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Google Office vs. Microsoft Office: What's the end game? — Google is prepping a PowerPoint-ish presentation tool to finish off what Paul Kedrosky coined an anti-Office suite. The big question is what's the end game here? — I'll leave the code and intricacies of the file conversions to the folks much better equipped.
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alarm:clock:
Israel's Gigya Raises $4M From Benchmark For Rich Email — E-mail start-up Gigya has raised $4N from Benchmark Capital in its first round. Gigya was founded in November 2006 by several former employees of big league adware company Hotbar, which was bought by 180solutions.
Jeff Young / akamai.com:
Akamai to Acquire Netli — Contacts: — Media Relations — Akamai Technologies, Inc — 617-444-3913 — jyoung@akamai.com —or— Sandra Smith — Investor Relations — Akamai Technologies, Inc — 617-444-2804 — ssmith@akamai.com
Ben Arnoldy / Christian Science Monitor:
Bloggers can make money, but most keep day jobs — The rise of 'contextual advertising' has created a 21st-century version of royalties. — BOSTON - A penny for your thoughts? Kevin Vahey has done a good deal better, turning a personal gripe into $1,000 a year of supplemental income.
Phil Windley / Between the Lines:
Glimpsing the future with Amazon's Web services — Doug Kaye, the CTO at GigaVox Media has posted an interesting post on using Amazon's Web services as a platform for his new podcasting system. (Disclosure: I'm the Executive Producer for IT Conversations which is a GigaVox production.)
Ben Ames / InfoWorld:
Update: FTC forces Rambus to license memory chips — Government regulators will cap the royalty fees Rambus can charge DRAM manufacturers — U.S. government regulators will require Rambus to license its DRAM (dynamic RAM) chips to other vendors, and will cap the royalty fees Rambus …
