Top Items:
Duncan Riley / TechCrunch:
In Japan Half The Top Selling Books Are Written On Mobile Phones — With all the talk about Amazon's Kindle, there's a bigger revolution taking place and those who studied classic literature will be horrified. In Japan, half of the top ten selling works of fiction in the first six months of 2007 were composed on mobile phones.
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Justin Norrie / Sydney Morning Herald:
In Japan, cellular storytelling is all the rage — It seems improbable, even at this early stage, that 21-year-old Rin (a nom de plume) might one day be granted a place alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky in the pantheon of literary giants. — The nursery school teacher from Kokura, in Japan's south …
Ginger Tulley / Six Apart News:
Six Apart Announces New Home for LiveJournal — Acquisition of LiveJournal, creation of new operating company and investment fund by SUP promise new innovation and expansion for pioneering online community — San Francisco, CA - December 3, 2007 - Six Apart, the world's leading independent …
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Six Apart Sells LiveJournal To Russia's SUP — Six Apart has sold its hosting blogging platform LiveJournal, which it acquired in January 2005, to Moscow-headquarted SUP (pronounced "soup"), the company said this evening. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
LiveJournal News:LiveJournal & SUP — Six Apart Announces New Home for LiveJournal
Discussion:
VentureBeat, Business Week, LiveJournal 2008, CNET News.com, The Blog Herald, apophenia, Valleywag, paidContent.org, O'Reilly Radar, Data Mining and Slashdot
Wall Street Journal:
Deal Set to Make Vivendi Big Player in Videogames — French entertainment and telecommunications group Vivendi SA plans to acquire a controlling stake in U.S. videogame maker Activision Inc., a move that could transform the competitive landscape in the fast-growing gaming industry by joining …
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Mike Masnick / Techdirt:
Does ActiBlizsion Make Sense? Can A Merged Activision And Blizzard Really Work? — The big news in the tech world this weekend, of course, is the slightly complicated merger between video game firms Blizzard and Activision to form the not-particularly-creatively- named Activision Blizzard.
Rory Cellan-Jones / BBC:Video game giants in $18bn deal
Discussion:
Newlaunches.com, Joystiq, Neowin.net, WOW Insider, Howard Lindzon, MarketingVOX, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, GamePolitics.com and Digg
Staska / Unwired View:
NEW NOKIA 6 OR 8 MEGAPIXEL IMAGING SLIDER IN THE WORKS? — It's been a while now since Nokia came up with an interesting phone form factor innovation in an actual phone, instead of patent applications. — You know, something along the lines of Nokia 7380 "lipstick", Nokia N92 TV phone or Nokia N93 Camcorder/imaging phone.
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Addy Dugdale / Gizmodo:
Nokia's Patent Reveals Innovative Six- or Eight- Megapixel Slider Phone [New Slider] — Nokia's Patent Reveals Innovative Six- or Eight- Megapixel Slider Phone — Cell phone sites are speculating that these rather fascinating images from Nokia could mean an interesting addition to the Finnish company's N-Series.
David Kaplan / paidContent.org:
Internet Ad Spend Set To Overtake Radio In '08, Magazines By 2010: Report — Despite growing pressures on global advertising dollars in general, ZenithOptimedia's optimistic outlook for online ad spending is undiminished, projecting that the category will surpass radio ad dollars in 2008 and the amount spent on magazines by 2010.
Discussion:
Times of London
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Eric Eldon / VentureBeat:
RockYou climbing past Slide, to be number one widget-maker? — RockYou, the company behind popular Facebook applications and Myspace Flash widgets, may soon pass its arch-rival Slide to be the largest widget-maker in the world. — Some have accurately called such Facebook applications …
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Richard MacManus / Read/WriteWeb:Facebook App Developers Square Off: RockYou! Overtakes Slide
Discussion:
TechCrunch
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
TeXtra's Natali Del Conte Leaves Podshow For CNET TV — TeXtra, a tech news video show hosted by former TechCrunch writer Natali Del Conte, may be shutting down well shy of its first birthday this upcoming February 13. That's because CNET has poached Natali away from Podshow, which owns TeXtra.
Richard MacManus / Read/WriteWeb:
JotSpot to Spawn Google Sites - Can it Make Intranet CMS Dinosaurs Extinct? — A well linked to post over the weekend was Andrew Miller's notes on a Google Apps presentation. The main presenter was Scott Johnston, former VP of Product Development at JotSpot - one of my favorite Web Office apps …
Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
Roll over, Beethoven: Deutsche Grammophon ditches DRM — Universal has been one of the two major labels to drop DRM (along with the UK's EMI), but its support of the MP3 format has been experimental. Should the experiment not go well, Universal has always reserved the right to slap the padlocks back on its tunes.
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Elinor Mills / CNET News.com:
Oops! Yahoo dumps Britney — You've got to give Yahoo credit for trying drag the collective mentality out of the celebrity gossip gutter. — Every year, the company releases a top 10 list for Web searches. Last year, Britney Spears was the No. 1 most popular search term.
Discussion:
TechCrunch
Zephoria / apophenia:
Who clicks on ads? And what might this mean? — Advertising is the bread and butter of the web, yet most of my friends claim that they never click on ads, typically using a peacock tone that signals their pride in being ad-averse. The geekier amongst them go out of their way to run Mozilla scripts …
Richard Pérez-Peña / New York Times:
Facebook Founder Finds He Wants Some Privacy — Social networking Web sites can seem dedicated to the idea that nobody's personal life is worth keeping private, but when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg — the founder of Facebook, one of the largest networks — Facebook disagrees.
