Top Items:
Marc Andreessen / blog.pmarca.com:
Ning news: new investment round — If you follow such things, you may have seen a report that my new Internet company, Ning, has just raised a new investment round. — To date, Ning has been mostly internally financed by me and a small group of angel investors who are close friends and colleagues of ours.
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Big, Big Round of Funding For Ning — This is just a rumor at this point, and I haven't confirmed it with the company (update: this is now confirmed, see below), but I'm hearing that Ning has closed a very large round of financing, led by Legg Mason - $44 million total on a $170 million pre-money valuation.
Anick Jesdanun / Associated Press:
Nielsen scraps Web page view rankings — NEW YORK - A leading online measurement service will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites. — The move by Nielsen/NetRatings, expected to be announced Tuesday …
Discussion:
ProBlogger Blog Tips, MYBLOG by Ouriel, Publishing 2.0, WebProNews, Lost Remote and HipMojo.com
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Heather Havenstein / Computerworld:
New Web metric likely to hurt Google, help YouTube — Nielsen/NetRatings to use total time spent by users of a site as its primary measurement metric — In a nod to the success of emerging Web 2. technologies like AJAX and streaming media, one of the country's largest Internet benchmarking companies …
Richard MacManus / Read/WriteWeb:
Tyranny of the Page View Nearly Over? — An AP report today states that Nielsen/NetRatings, one of the leading Internet stats services, will "scrap rankings" based on page views and replace it with how long visitors spend at websites. The reason is that online video and technologies such as Ajax …
Reuters:
Apple plans cheaper, Nano-based phone: JP Morgan — NEW YORK (Reuters) - Apple Inc. (Nasdaq:AAPL - news) plans to launch a cheaper version of the iPhone in the fourth quarter that could be based on the ultra-slim iPod Nano music player, according to a JP Morgan report.
Discussion:
CNET News.com, Gadget Lab, GracefulFlavor, ParisLemon, Infinite Loop, The Register, Engadget, hypebot, Product Reviews Net, Macsimum News and The Next Net
Wall Street Journal:
Facebook Names Ex-AOL Official Marketing Chief — Social-networking company Facebook Inc. has hired a young Web veteran to fill its top marketing role in a bid to bolster its management ranks and find new ways to make money. — Chamath Palihapitiya, a former executive at Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit …
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Bay Partners Launches Facebook-Apps-Only Fund — Here's another indication of the importance of the new Facebook platform: Silicon Valley VC fund Bay Partners has earmarked millions of dollars for investments in startups creating applications for Facebook. The new program, called AppFactory, will be officially launched on Tuesday.
Valleywag:
Facebook: "F— you, Yahoo, they're going IPO!" — "F— you, Yahoo, they're going IPO!" — Just in case you had any remaining doubts that Facebook is going public — a fact that Mark Zuckerberg's sister, Randi Jayne, profanely sings about in a video that's since been taken down — check out this job listing:
Discussion:
Insider Chatter, bub.blicio.us, WebProNews, Webware.com, Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab, ParisLemon, VC Ratings and digg
Darren Rowse / ProBlogger Blog Tips:
Buy Blog Comments - A Sick New Comment Spam Service Launches — I just had a rather disturbing email from a company advertising a new service called Buy Blog Comments (no follow tags used) promoting a new service offering to leave comment spam on blogs for those wanting to increase their SEO ranking.
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Associated Press:
TiVo Users Can Get Amazon Movies From TV — ALVISO, Calif. (AP) — Users of TiVo Inc.'s digital video recorders will be able to order movies from Amazon.com Inc. directly from their TVs starting Tuesday. — The two companies partnered in March to deliver Amazon's Unbox download service to TiVo machines …
TASER:
TASER XREP — Introducing the TASER XREP - the eXtended Range Electronic Projectile. XREP is a self-contained, wireless projectile that fires from a standard 12-gauge shotgun. It delivers the same Neuro-Muscular Incapacitation (NMI) bio-effect as our handheld TASER X26 …
Matt Marshall / VentureBeat:
Quantcast becomes latest widget traffic tracker — More and more publishers and retailers rely on so-called "widgets," little boxes placed on other web sites, to deliver their news, entertainment and product advertisements. — So measuring Web traffic to those widgets is important …
Anna Haynes / Wired News:
Open-Source Journalism: It's a Lot Tougher Than You Think — Editor's Note: This story is reprinted from Assignment Zero, an experiment in open-source, pro-am journalism produced in collaboration with Wired News. This week, we'll be republishing a selection of Assignment Zero stories on the topic of "crowdsourcing."
Discussion:
Once More unto the Breach, NewAssignment.Net, mathewingram.com/work, PressThink and digg