Top Items:
Caroline McCarthy / ZDNet:
'Second Life': The promise and paradox — CHICAGO—In Second Life, avatars can fly with the push of a button. Maybe that's why it seems like the virtual world's enthusiasts sometimes have trouble staying grounded. — At this weekend's Second Life Community Convention, Philip Rosedale …
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Wagner James Au / GigaOM:
A First-Hand Look at a Chinese Second Life, HiPiHi — Zhong Guan Village, Beijing - Last year, a mysterious YouTube video purported to demo a Chinese Second Life called HiPiHi (pronounced "high-pee-high") stormed the virtual world blogosphere. But with little English language commentary to go on …
Fred / A VC:
The Internet Is As Dead And Boring As You Want It To Be — I have friends who loved music in high school and college, would spend hours going through the bins at the record store, and would hang out all night playing music and talking about music. And some of these friends barely listen to music anymore.
Discussion:
Read/WriteWeb, Thomas Hawk's Digital …, broadstuff, WebMetricsGuru, SYNTAGMA, Life On the Wicked Stage, rexblog.com and Blog Maverick
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Dan Sabbagh / Times of London:
Business big shot: Vint Cerf — Vint Cerf is vice-president and "chief internet evangelist" at Google. If the internet needs proselytisers, Mr Cerf, 64, is more than qualified - he is considered one of the architects of the worldwide web, having developed the protocols that govern it.
Discussion:
Googling Google
Fred / A VC:
Twitter's Big Week — In addition to hosting the first board meeting since we invested, Twitter did two really big things this past week that I think are going to make the service a lot more useful to me (and hopefully you). — They are both in the area of finding other people you know on Twitter.
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Yahoo Mail Out of Beta; New Features — The new Yahoo Mail interface went into public beta in September 2006, although Yahoo was testing it long before that. Tonight Yahoo takes the "beta" label off of the product and makes it the default interface for all new Yahoo mail accounts.
Roi Carthy / TechCrunch:
Dapper to Launch Instant Facebook AppMaker — This Tuesday, Israel-based Dapper will launch the private beta of Facebook AppMaker, a new tool that the company claims will provide people with a dead simple way to create new Facebook applications. — At its core, Dapper allows users to create API's called …
Dean Hachamovitch / New York Times:
Minding the Meeting, or Your Computer? — BACK in 1994, when portable PCs started their descent from 15-pound luggables to today's 5-pound laptops, I started taking mine to meetings at Microsoft, and so did my colleagues. So novel. So useful. — We could type notes.
Sean P. Aune / Mashable!:
Twitter Adds GMail Contacts Import — Twitter has finally added the feature they've needed from day one: the ability to import your contacts from another service. For now it is limited to just Gmail, which should apply to a large proportion of the service's early adopter user base.
Discussion:
CostPerNews
Ken Fisher / Ars Technica:
Clearing the air: Bioshock does not contain a rootkit — This weekend news spread quickly that the PC version of Bioshock comes loaded with a rootkit. The only problem is, it isn't loaded with a rootkit, it's just your standard "let's punish our customers" anti-piracy tool.
Discussion:
DigitalBattle
technabob:
provia a1 gps navigator: way too sexy for itself — Those of us in the States tend to think of GPS navigators as relatively utilitarian devices that help us find our way when we're too afraid to ask for directions at the gas station. In Asia, GPS devices seem to be on the way to becoming much more.
Darren Murph / Engadget:
UniquePhones's iPhone unlock release 'slowed' by AT&T lawyers — Hope you weren't waiting in tense anticipation to get your hands on UniquePhones's iPhone unlock software, because things certainly aren't going as planned. Reportedly, the gurus behind the software unlock were contacted by …
BBC:
Teenage hacker unlocks the iPhone — A New Jersey teenager has unlocked the iPhone, opening the way to Apple's iconic mobile telephone being used by non-US networks. — The Associated Press news agency confirmed George Hotz, 17, had unlocked the iPhone and used it on T-Mobile, a rival to its sole US operator, AT&T.
Discussion:
Zohar Efroni's blog
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Gregg Keizer / Computerworld:
Massive Microsoft WGA meltdown fingers legit Vista and XP owners as pirates — 19-hour outage over, but users must revalidate to get back disabled features, says Redmond — Microsoft Corp. has blamed an unspecified server problem for a 19-hour stretch during which paying users of Windows XP …
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Duncan Riley / TechCrunch:
See All Sex Offenders In Your Neighborhood — Vision 20/20 offers a free web based mashup of sex offender data and Windows Live Maps. — Users simply add their address, city and/ or zip code to the Vision 20/20 site, and then the locations of sex offenders in the immediate vicinity are displayed over a map.
Aaron Rutkoff / Wall Street Journal:
With 'LOLcats' Internet Fad, Anyone Can Get In on the Joke — Eric Nakagawa was between jobs last January when he came across a funny picture while surfing the Web: a high-strung cat with an open maw making a garbled request for a cheeseburger. — Mr. Nakagawa couldn't really say why he found the picture so funny.
John Markoff / New York Times:
Chinese Seek to Buy a U.S. Maker of Disk Drives — A Chinese technology company has expressed interest in buying a maker of computer disk drives in the United States, raising concerns among American government officials about the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China.
Enigmax / TorrentFreak:
Anime Distributor Has No Legal Right to Threaten BitTorrent Users — Last week we reported on the Singapore-based anime distributor Odex Pt. Ltd and their campaign to track, find and threaten thousands of BitTorrent users which they claim infringe their copyrights. The demand - 'Pay us $3,500 - or else'.
