Top Items:
Michael Barbaro / New York Times:
Wal-Mart and Studios in Film Deal — Wal-Mart Stores may have lost the online DVD rental battle, but it has no plans to lose the higher-stakes video downloading war. — Today the company will introduce a partnership with all of the six major Hollywood studios — Walt Disney, Warner Brothers …
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USA Today:
Wal-Mart to launch video downloads — NEW YORK — Hollywood's love affair with DVDs will face its biggest test beginning Tuesday as Wal-Mart unveils a movie and TV-show download service with participation by all major studios. — The retailer that accounts for 40% of all U.S. DVD sales …
Gary Gentile / Business Week:
Wal-Mart to sell movies, TV shows online — Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is launching its long-awaited online movie download store, entering a market that has yet to catch on with consumers but is expected to grow rapidly. — A "beta" version of the online video store, set to debut Tuesday …
Discussion:
NewTeeVee
Thomas Ricker / Engadget:Wal-Mart signs big 6 studios for movie downloads
Discussion:
PSFK Trend: PSFK
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 — For years, Google's link: command (and see here) has deliberately failed to show all the links to a website. This came out of Google's fear that site owners simply wanted the data to try and manipulate rankings — which was pretty true.
Ian Kallen / The Technorati Weblog:
Breaking the Chains — We all have an old friend from high school or a cousin who sends us obnoxious chain e-mails (you know, the ones that end with "Please tell everyone you know, so that people can be aware ..." or some such). Perhaps you find these to be a nuisance but of limited harm.
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Zoli Erdos / Zoli's Blog:
2000 Bloggers Gaming Technorati and Google — There's a crazy meme going on which has the potential of turning Technorati ranks upside-down. Now, that may sometimes be good, giving fresh views more visibility, like Seth Godin or Steve Rubel's recent initiatives.
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Brilliant New Startup: Useless Account — The trick to any good humor or hoax site is an attention to detail and a seriousness about your work. Useless Account is the best recent example I've seen. It's clear, for example, that more work has gone into this joke than many of the startups we see every day.
Jeff Jarvis / BuzzMachine:
The need for a measurement summit — Comscore and Federated Media (which sells some ads on this blog) have teamed up to try to improve measurement in the long tail of social and niche media online. And that's good. — Except I argue that the panel means of measurement is doomed to miserable failure in the mass of niches.
Kristopher Kubicki / DailyTech:
New AMD Opterons, Price Cuts Tomorrow — More high end server components on the way — Tomorrow AMD is expected to release its new x220-series and x218 HE-series Opteron processors. Both series are 90nm revision "F3" stepping dual-core processors. — Like other Opteron families …
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 …
Tim O'Reilly / O'Reilly Radar:
What We Really Sell to Our Customers is Control — Back in the early days of Red Hat, Bob Young, one of the founders and the first CEO, used to say, "What we really sell to our customers is control." His argument was that one of the benefits of open source software is freedom from vendor lock-in.
Discussion:
All Points Blog
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Jackson West / NewTeeVee:
Bud.tv Tastes Stale, Flat — So what do you get when you bring a macrobrewer's mentality to the microcontent world? How about tired sketch comedy cliches, prehistoric treatment of women and more product placement than one can reasonably stomach. — In a desperate attempt to be edgy …
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Krista Wierzbicki / TiVo:
User Generated Commercials for Doritos Break into the Top 10, According to TiVo — Bud Light Reclaims Throne with Top Two Commercial Spots — TiVo Subscribers Able to Download The Big Game's Most Popular Commercials Immediately Following The Game — TiVo (NASDAQ: TIVO) …
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Stace / Unwired View:
Asus Aura -iPhone like concept — While not widely acknowledged, introduction of Apple iPhone seems to have sent a shockwave throughout cellphone industry and left major vendors scrambling to produce their own answer to it. — Only LG seems to have had something at least a little bit similar …
Tropical SEO:
Andy Hagans' Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing — Is anyone else sick of link baiting yet? I sure am. It's dominating talk on all the SEO forums and conferences; it's gumming up the works of all of my favorite social bookmarking sites; and it's forcing me get off of my lazy rear and make good content.
USA Today:
Kodak plans to sell inkjet printers with cheaper ink — Struggling photo giant Eastman Kodak is launching a new line of inkjet printers aimed at luring digital shutterbugs back to Kodak paper. The pitch: cheap ink. — Kodak's ink will sell for about $25 when the printers hit stores in March.
Discussion:
Techdirt
Thomas Crampton / International Herald Tribune:
Microsoft declines to intercede in Russian software piracy case — PARIS: Microsoft on Monday rebuffed a public appeal by Mikhail Gorbachev for its chairman, Bill Gates, to intervene on behalf of a Russian school principal charged with software piracy. — The case of Alexander Ponosov …
Discussion:
M-Dollar
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Mike / Techdirt:Gorbachev Asks Bill Gates To Save Russian Teacher From Siberia …
Discussion:
Channel 9
Donald Melanson / Engadget:
Polymer Vision unveils "Cellular-Book" with rollable display — Phillips spin-off Polymer Vision looks to be making fast work on its most recent promise to commercialize its foldable display this year, with the company set to officially unveil the first product to use the would-be paper killer at next week's 3GSM conference in Spain.
Felix / blog.plazes.com:
Plazes secures A-Round — This is how the official press release goes: … Why are we taking funding in a world where everything is viral and marketing and user acquisition costs tend to go towards zero? Well, Plazes is a brave undertaking. We have in the past and we will in the future try and pave the way for something new.
Roger Ehrenberg / Information Arbitrage:
Microsoft Revisited: Vista, Apple and the Sony/Nintendo Phenomenon — Overview — Microsoft on stage. Bill on The Daily Show. It's Vista time, baby. Survey says - thud. It is a hard thing to watch. A cranky, defensive and inarticulate Bill. Trends in the data …
Ryan Stewart / TechCrunch:
Social Music Overview — Keeping with the theme of Mike's Online Photo Editing Overview, I wanted to cover some of the entrants into social music. Music was probably the first type of rich media to really go "Web 2.0″ and it's become a pretty popular place for startups.
