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.
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Digg Rock Stars — A Wall Street Journal article called "The Wizards of Buzz" focuses on the power of the top users on Digg, Netscape and other "social bookmarking" sites. The article highlights 16 or so of these users, along with their real name, screen name, areas of interest and other information.
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 …
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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 …
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 …
Discussion:
Things That, Scobleizer, Deep Jive Interests, Disruptive Thoughts, ballpark.ch and TechAddress
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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 …
Ccoc / Colin's Corner:
The transformation of IDG — For over four decades we've had print blood running through the veins of the corporate body. But over the last few years we've seen dramatic change. Today the absolute dollar growth of our online revenues now exceeds the decline in our print revenues.
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
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.
SacredFacts:
We Media - Groundhog Day? — In 2005 I went to the We Media Conference in New York and thought it was pretty interesting, made some good contacts and formed some new ideas. So in 2006 the BBC, with Reuters, hosted the We Media conference in London. This was less good - although not as bad as some fulminating bloggers alleged.
Discussion:
Publishing 2.0
Andy Abramson / VoIP Watch:
Sprint Is Getting It Right — As many readers know Martin Geddes and I both have had our share of issues with T-Mobile on different sides of the Atlantic, so it's somewhat ironic that the exact opposite type of customer service experience occurred with his former employers, Sprint in my life.
Ryan Block / Engadget:
Mega hands-on: Virgin America's Airbus A320 with Red in-flight entertainment — Not-yet-airborne Virgin America invited us to check out the way-decked Airbus A320 with Red prototype in-flight entertainment system that's parked at SFO right now. (Naw, we didn't get to take it up …
Rafat Ali / PaidContent:
Google Potential Deal To Buy AdScape Hits Dead-End; Looking At Others — We reported last month on Google's serious talks with AdScape Media, the in-game advertising firm, in an attempt to buy it and enter the lucrative market. Now, the talks have hit a dead-end and possibly fallen through …
Discussion:
TechAddress
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 …
Joe McKendrick / The FASTForward Blog:
Will Search Replace Relational Databases? — At least two of the end-user customer presentations at the FASTforward conference involved deployments that invoked search-based querying that got around what would have been more onerous structured database projects.
Discussion:
Enterprise Web 2.0
Seth Godin / Seth's Blog:
Please don't buy this book — Anders wrote me a note and wondered about this email in his inbox, from Amazon. — I didn't authorize this book to be published, I have no idea who the publisher is and I certainly didn't ask Amazon to email anyone. — You can get the ebook right here for free.
