Top Items:
Dean Takahashi / Tech Talk with Dean Takahashi:
Ribbit debuts as "Silicon Valley's phone company" — I met with the top executives at Ribbit last week and found their strategy to be eye-opening. The Mountain View company, which bills itself as "Silicon Valley's phone company," is making it easy to embed web phones in just about any kind of web site …
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Om Malik / GigaOM:
Can Ribbit Finally Bring Web & Voice Together? — For a long time, I had this belief that the worlds of web and voice would converge, unleashing upon us a whole new class of voice-web mashups. Instead all we got were some marginal ideas and rarely-used widgets. Voice, in particular, remained too difficult for web developers.
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
MacWorld rumblings: Expect a 11- to 13-inch screen on Apple ultra-portable — With Apple expected to deliver a new ultra-portable Mac at its Macworld conference Jan. 15 prognosticators are busy handicapping the device's features. — In a research note Monday, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster …
Paul Miller / Engadget:
Palm Treo 755p goes live (at last) on Verizon, costs more — Here's a special present to those Palm diehards out there that've been sticking with their Verizon service for the past months, hoping against hope that Palm will notice them hanging out over on the largest CDMA network in the States …
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Scott Karp / Publishing 2.0:
Can Blogs Do Journalism? — On the face of it, the question of whether blogs can do journalism is absurd — like asking whether sites published on Vignette can do journalism. A blog, after all, is just a content management system — revolutionary because it made web-native publishing free …
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Dan Tynan / PC World:
The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007 — These much-ballyhooed products, sites, and services, it turned out, left much to be desired. — Recommend this story? — Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do? — It's not that Vista is awful.
Discussion:
Electronista, Gizmodo, CrunchGear, TECH.BLORGE.com, Macsimum News, Podcasting News, Hardware 2.0, TechBlog, Engadget, MacDailyNews, GottaBeMobile and Digg
Joseph Menn / Los Angeles Times:
Striking writers in talks to launch Web start-ups — MOVING TO NEW MEDIA: Aaron Mendelsohn, a Writers Guild board member known for the "Air Bud" franchise, is in a group that plans to produce programming for the Internet independently of Hollywood studios at odds with the union.
Discussion:
Techdirt, WebProNews, Silicon Alley Insider, NewTeeVee, paidContent.org, IP Democracy and rexblog.com
Erik Kennedy / Infinite Loop:
Apple brings Mac OS X closer to UNIX standards (Updated) — It didn't receive nearly the same amount of attention as most of the other 299 new features of Mac OS X v10.5, but Leopard adds even more Unixy goodness to Apple's post-Classic operating systems. Specifically, Leopard is now UNIX 03 compliant …
Discussion:
MacUser
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David Chartier / Infinite Loop:New URL features can make your e-mail productive again
Discussion:
AppScout
John Markoff / New York Times:
Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust — REDMOND, Wash. — When he was chief executive of Intel in the 1990s, Andrew S. Grove would often talk about the "software spiral" — the interplay between ever-faster microprocessor chips and software that required ever more computing power.
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
A Few Thoughts On Google Knol — News of Google most recent project, Knol, came out late last Thursday without, as far as I can tell, much in the way of press pre-briefings. All the major publications were late to the story. Blogs hit it fast, but had nothing to go on other than the brief blog post put …
Christina Warren / The Unofficial Apple Weblog:
QuickBooks users be cautious of recent update — At the risk of spreading unnecessary FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt),] It's not FUD, we want to caution Inuit's QuickBooks users of installing the most recent update, without proper back-ups - especially if you typically store lots of important files on the desktop.
John Leyden / The Register:
Facebook sues Canadian smut firm over hacking — Facebook is suing a Canadian skin-flick firm for trying to hack into its website. — The porno outfit, which trades online under the name SlickCash, along with a number of individuals in Toronto allegedly tried to access Facebook's servers …
Discussion:
TechSpot News
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Pew Internet:
Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency — Mary Madden Susannah Fox Aaron Smith Jessica Vitak — Internet users are becoming more aware of their digital footprint; 47% have searched for information about themselves online, up from just 22% five years ago.
Discussion:
VentureBeat, Rough Type, broadstuff, Silicon Alley Insider, The Buzz Bin, apophenia, WebProNews, ResourceShelf and Boing Boing
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BBC:
Weblogs rack up a decade of posts — The word "weblog" celebrates the 10th anniversary of it being coined on 17 December 1997. — The word was created by Jorn Barger to describe what he was doing with his pioneering Robot Wisdom web page. — The word was an abbreviation for the "logging" …
Wendy Tanaka / Forbes:
Help Wanted: A Vacancy In Google's Top Ranks — Everyone wants to work at Google. It's a money machine with a stock price bouncing around $700. The employees are brilliant and free organic meals are served every day. — But there is one job the search giant seems to be having a hard time filling: chief financial officer.
Nick Wingfield / Wall Street Journal:
Start-Up to Create Market For Trade of Virtual Goods — A start-up plans to help game companies get a grip on the booming illicit market for virtual goods, including everything from currencies to magical swords that help players advance in online games. — Live Gamer Inc. is developing …
David Carnoy / CNET News.com:
Waterfall Audio to introduce glass speakers to American market — If you're not supposed to cast stones at glass houses, it's probably not a good idea to throw them at glass speakers, especially when they cost $5400 a pair. No word on whether these superslick towers are shatterproof …
Discussion:
Gizmodo
