Top Items:
Wall Street Journal:
The Wizards of Buzz — A new kind of Web site is turning ordinary people into hidden influencers, shaping what we read, watch and buy. — This winter, many parents across the country are sitting on the floor with slabs of cardboard, box cutters and special rivets, and building pirate ships for their kids.
Discussion:
UMBC eBiquity, The Jason Calacanis Weblog, The Blog Herald, Trends in the Living Networks, Webomatica and digg
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Fred / A VC:
That's Not How You Do It Obama — I had high hopes for Barack Obama's net savvy. But today his campaign blew it. I heard that he announced his candidacy for President today in Springfield, IL, where Lincoln did the same thing almost 150 years ago. I decided to go see the video.
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Steve O'Hear / The Social Web:
Barack Obama launches social network — Barack Obama, the Democrat presidential hopeful, has launched his own social network which he's calling MyBarackObama.com. The site invites supporters to create a profile, blog their campaign experiences, plan and attend events, find other supporters, and help raise funds for the campaign.
Conrad Quilty-Harper / Engadget:
Vista successor "Vienna" planned for late 2009 — Now that Microsoft has freed Windows Vista from the shackles of a five year development process, the company is attempting to [the] wow [starts now] us by revealing that it plans to have its next major operating system ready within the next …
Vikas Bajaj / New York Times:
In India, the Golden Age of Television Is Now — GHANSHYAM P. SHAH, an 82-year-old widower, spends up to eight hours a day in front of his television watching prayer services, soap operas and financial news. But one afternoon last December, he was completely disconnected from his favorite pastime …
Scott Karp / Publishing 2.0:
The Rapid Transformation Of Publishing Economics — The death of print publishing is coming, it's just a matter of whether it happens in 5 years, 10 years, or 15 years. I'm betting it happens sooner than anyone expects. Colin Crawford, the SVP of online for IDG, posted some stunning figures:
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Deep Jive Interests
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Conrad Quilty-Harper / Engadget:
VMWare video hints at full DirectX virtualization in OS X — Mac users, listen up: a video has appeared on YouTube that shows an internal beta version of VMWare running Windows games at full speed from within Mac OS X. Accompanying this intriguing video is a blog post from Regis Duchesne …
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Steve Yegge / Stevey's Blog Rants:
The Next Big Language — There seems to be a long period of initial obscurity for any new language. Then after that comes a long period of semi-obscurity, followed by total obscurity. —Paul Bissex — People are always asking me to comment on their new programming language they're designing.
Discussion:
Scobleizer
Consumerist:
Comcast Customer Uses "Unlimited Service" Excessively, Gets Disconnected For A Year — Comcast asked Frank to cut back his unlimited internet usage. Frank was confused. He thought unlimited meant, well, unlimited. Frank was wrong. Very wrong. — Comcast replaced Frank's faulty cable modem in November.
Discussion:
digg
Jason Calacanis / The Jason Calacanis Weblog:
Wikipedia's got 3-4 months to live?!?! (and Wikipedia's technological blocking of consensus) — Very strange stuff going on in the Wikipedia world... first I get beat down by all kinds of Wikipedia folks for suggesting that Wikipedia place an OPT-OUT advertisement on the Wikipedia …
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Miguel Helft / New York Times:
Google Encounters Hurdles in Selling Radio Advertising — When Google acquired dMarc Broadcasting, a company whose software allows marketers to place ads on radio stations, for up to $1.24 billion early last year, it was seen as a clear sign of Google's ambitions to extend its dominance over Internet advertising to other media.
Discussion:
Lost Remote
Conrad Quilty-Harper / Engadget:
RIM applies for triangular keyboard layout patent — Big, tactile, and fast QWERTY keyboards are the Blackberry's defining characteristic: why then is RIM showing signs that it's going to mess with their tried and tested formula? In the second patent application to surface from the United States Patent …
Allen Stern / CenterNetworks:
Walmart in bed with Microsoft? Walmart says NO to Firefox — Last week, Walmart launched their online video download service. Immediately there were posts that the service did not work with the Firefox or Safari browsers. There was a collective, "WTF" when this happened as this is 2007, not 1997.
Jason Calacanis / The Jason Calacanis Weblog:
Google can I please pay you $20 a month for GMAIL!? — I've been using GMAIL for a couple of years now and for the past year I've been over 90% in my mailbox usage. Every week or two it fills up and I go on a hunt to kill attachments, delete spam, etc. — Adam Curry is having …
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Rakesh Agrawal's Blog
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
The Second Life Census — Second Life has done a good job being transparent with their statistics. Key metrics are available on the home page, and additional information was released last December. Today the company got even more granular, releasing detailed information on the Second Life population …
