Top Items:
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.
Discussion:
Bits, Wired News, Digital Daily, Electronista, BetaNews, Market Wire, Ted On Flex, InfoWorld and Ryan Stewart
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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 …
Tom Spring / Today @ PC World:
Go Ahead Google Yourself, Everyone is — (PC World contributor Scott Nichols looked into a study that says people are increasingly turning to Google to find out about themselves. Here is what he found.) — Have you Googled yourself lately? According to a survey (PDF) …
Discussion:
Search Engine Watch Blog
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Vanessa Fox / Search Engine Land: PEW Survey Finds Most People Don't Google Themselves That Often After All
Ben Worthen / Business Technology:What the Internet Knows About You — We often wonder …
Discussion:
Valleywag
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 …
PR Newswire:
Verizon Wireless and Palm Announce the Arrival of the Treo 755p Smartphone — Verizon Wireless and Palm, Inc. today announced the immediate availability of the Palm(R) Treo(TM) 755p smartphone online and through business sales channels in exclusive deep blue-green.
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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.
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, IP Democracy, NewTeeVee, paidContent.org, WebProNews, Silicon Alley Insider, Reel Pop, rexblog.com and Mashable!
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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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.
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" …
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David Chartier / Infinite Loop:
New URL features can make your e-mail productive again — Alt: Link to your e-mail from external apps, get productive again — One of the incredibly useful things about Mac OS X in general is the potential for integration between applications. Type the name of an Address Book contact …
Discussion:
AppScout
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Erik Kennedy / Infinite Loop:Apple brings Mac OS X closer to UNIX standards (Updated)
Discussion:
MacUser
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.
Discussion:
CNET News.com, The Apple Core, CrunchGear, support.quickbooks.intuit.com, MacUser, Macsimum News, Apple Gazette, O'Grady's PowerPage and Digg
Garett Rogers / Googling Google:
GOOG-411 isn't what you think — Google's free 411 service (1-800-GOOG-411) lets you find and call local businesses, but the service isn't exactly as it seems. On the surface, it looks pretty straight forward, but spending lots of money advertising a service that has no clear potential …
Bob Driehaus / New York Times:
Ohio Elections Official Calls Machines Flawed — CINCINNATI — All five voting systems used in Ohio, a state whose electoral votes narrowly swung two elections toward President Bush, have critical flaws that could undermine the integrity of the 2008 general election, a report commissioned …
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 …
Blake Robinson / CrunchGear:
Xbox 360 HD DVD holds one-third of market — The Inquirer today writes that the 360 makes up one-third of the HD DVD player market. A recently released report speculates that 750,000 HD DVD players are currently in homes and that 269,000 of them are of the Xbox 360 add-on variety.
Discussion:
Gizmodo
John Leyden / The Register:
Sys admin admits trying to axe California power grid — A sys admin last week pleaded guilty to attempting to disrupt the power grid in California by shutting down a data centre that managed the state's electrical supply. — Lonnie Charles Denison, 33, of South Natomas in California confessed …
Discussion:
UPI
