Top Items:
Nick / Rough Type:
The business case for TimesSelect — Last month, the New York Times discontinued TimesSelect, the program that required readers to pay a subscription fee to read popular columnists and access the paper's archives. The news was greeted with whoops and hollers from the members of the web's hallelujah chorus …
RELATED:
Tim Harford / The Undercover Economist:
Undercover Economist column: Did you pay to read this? — Until recently, there were two types of newspaper website: those that made you pay to read many of the articles (The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times) and those that didn't. — That is changing.
Nick / Rough Type:
For Wal-Mart, too, IT is a commodity — "I never viewed computers as anything more than necessary overhead," Sam Walton once said. Nevertheless, after I wrote "IT Doesn't Matter" back in 2003, critics would routinely present Wal-Mart as the killer counter example to my argument …
Bharat Mediratta / New York Times:
The Google Way: Give Engineers Room — GOOGLE engineers are encouraged to take 20 percent of their time to work on something company-related that interests them personally. This means that if you have a great idea, you always have time to run with it. — It sounds obvious …
Susan Crawford blog:
Comcast Is Pretending to be You — This AP story makes clear that Comcast is pretending to be part of online conversations in order to frustrate users who want to use particular online applications. This happens all the time in the name of "traffic shaping" — it's the kind of thing that China does to interfere with internet use.
Judith Chevalier / New York Times:
In Search of Wireless Wiggle Room — I RECENTLY watched a YouTube clip of a young man removing the memory chip from his iPhone with his teeth, in an attempt to "unlock" the device for use on a network other than the AT&T system for which the phone was exclusively sold.
Discussion:
Slashdot
Katie Allen / Guardian:
Major pirate website shut down — One of the world's most-used pirate film websites has been closed after providing links to illegal versions of major Hollywood hits and TV shows. — The first closure of a major UK-based pirate site was also accompanied by raids and an arrest …
Todd Cochrane / Geek News Central:
Why Tech Blogging is Broken — Last night I attended a book launch party here in Honolulu. At that party I met a marketing person from a SEO startup who told me a little about what they are doing in the search optimization space. I found it very intriguing and as competition is very tough …
Terry Heaton / Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog:
RESTING MY CASE (AGAIN) — The company that wrote the book on the "walled garden" variety of web experience, AOL, laid off another 1,200 employees this week, a bloodbath by anybody's standards. And for those media companies out there that continue to cling to the assumption that YOU provide …
Discussion:
Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim
Mark Boslet / Mercury News:
UN telecom panel endorses Intel's WiMax technology — ITU'S SUPPORT COULD HELP OPEN DOOR TO ITS USE IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES — Intel's wireless technology WiMax got a boost Friday when a United Nations telecommunications panel approved its use as a third-generation mobile technology.
Discussion:
DSLreports
Duncan Riley / TechCrunch:
CSI:NY Comes To Second Life Wednesday — Second Life is bracing itself for an influx of new members this coming week with the long awaited episode of CSI:NY does Second Life to be shown in the United States on Wednesday. — The episode will see Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise) …
Nick Gonzalez / TechCrunch:
YieldBuild Will Try To Optimize AdSense, Pay You More — Simply slapping AdSense on your site is one of the easiest, but not necessarily best, ways to monetize your website. There are a lot of factors that go into getting the most out of your ad units. They range from placement, color, ad network, or even time of day.
Discussion:
CenterNetworks
Chris Pirillo:
Christmas Music Parody - Blue Vista — Every year, I enjoy making a tech-themed parody out of a Christmas song. This year is no exception. Welcome to "Blue Vista". — We were talking about Christmas and Vista both in the chat room today. Someone laughed and mentioned "Blue Vista Christmas" and inspiration struck.
MacNN:
Canada to tax legal digital music downloads — Canadians may soon pay a small tax on every legal music store download, says a new measure (PDF) sanctioned by the Copyright Board of Canada. Requested by the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) …
