Top Items:
Nilay Patel / Engadget:
RIAA not suing over CD ripping, still kinda being jerks about it — Okay, so we've done some digging into the RIAA's lawsuit against Jeffery Howell, in which the industry is claiming that ripped MP3s are “unauthorized copies,” and it turns out that Jeffery isn't actually being sued for ripping CDs …
Discussion:
Pocket PC Thoughts, bub.blicio.us, Slashdot, Doc Searls Weblog, odd time signatures and Digg
Robert Scoble / Scobleizer:
“What's your audience size?” is wrong question — I'm reading my feeds this morning and see a few people talking about audience size for videobloggers and other content people. Here's a sample: — Henry Blodget points out that Perez Hilton has a huge audience, but hasn't yet been able to sell much advertising to it.
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Allen Stern / CenterNetworks:
Sorry Robert, Advertising is About Audience Size First, Brand Sponsorships Later — Robert Scoble posted a message on Twitter this morning mentioning something about how audience size doesn't matter. Tonight I noticed a full post from Robert on the subject and I'd like to provide my thoughts on the topic.
Discussion:
HipMojo.com
Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Online Video Auteurs: Keep Your Day Jobs, Part 2 — Perez Hilton tells TVWeek his videos on Google's YouTube generated 25 million views over the past three months and netted him a whopping $5,000 in revenue. That's a 20-cent CPM. (It's an even lower net CPM for Google, by the way, assuming a payout ratio of more than 50%.
Scott Karp / Publishing 2.0:
Email And Cellphone Contacts Are The Real Social Graph — Google has been quietly rolling out social features across all of its services based on Gmail contacts. While Google still has to overcome some of its social tone-deafness (e.g. automatically adding contacts without asking), this move makes perfect sense.
Andru Edwards / Gear Live:
iPhone 1.1.3 firmware feature gallery — Looks like the soon-to-be-released iPhone firmware 1.1.3 has quite a few surprises. We were able to get a look at it, and here is what we found: — That is all we have found for now. We also know that is you used AnySIM to unlock your phone, you can expect the 1.1.3 update to brick it.
RELATED:
Janet Rae-Dupree / New York Times:
Innovative Minds Don't Think Alike — IT'S a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.
Mathew / mathewingram.com/work:
What are we doing when we Twitter? — I came across a post by J.P. Rangaswami, whose blog I quite like, and he was talking about Twitter and what he gets out of it. You can read the full post, but in essence he says that he gets something different from the people he follows on Twitter …
Dsifry / Sifry's Alerts:
Announcing Hoosgot: Resurrecting the Lazyweb — Today I'm unveiling a new service that I put together over the last 48 hours. It's called hoosgot.com. Hoosgot (pronounced “who's got...") is a simple way to ask who's got what you're looking for. Just put “hoosgot” in a blog post or a Twitter tweet and it'll show up on Hoosgot.
Randall Stross / New York Times:
How to Lose Your Job on Your Own Time — WERE Henry Ford brought back to life today, he would most likely be delighted by the Internet: the uninhibited way many people express themselves on the Web makes it easy to supervise the private lives of employees. — In his day, the Ford Motor …
Rebecca Buckman / Wall Street Journal:
VC's New Math: Does Less = More? — Thiel Seeks to Change Old Habits by Investing Small on Start-Ups — Three years ago, Peter Thiel, who runs a small venture-capital concern called Founders Fund, plowed $500,000 into a little-known social-networking Web site called Facebook Inc. Later on, his company invested a bit more.
Discussion:
Mark Evans, HipMojo.com, Best Engaging Communities, The Stalwart, Furrier.org, Texas Startup Blog and broadstuff
myfoxdc.com:
Girl Gets Bizarre Surprise Instead of iPod — A little girl thought she was getting an iPod for Christmas but ended up getting a rude surprise. She got the box but when she opened it up, she found a surprising switch: the iPod had been replaced with a bizarre note.
Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Holiday eCommerce Falls Short — U.S. eCommerce spending in November and December (through the 27th) was up 19% year over year, falling slightly short of Comscore's estimate of 20%. In its latest release, the rose-colored Comscore blames the shortfall on warm weather in early November …
Discussion:
PR Newswire
Long Zheng / istartedsomething:
Microsoft takes Vista advertising to YouTube — If you've been wondering where all the advertising for Windows Vista has disappeared to, look no further YouTube. Starting from last week, Microsoft has begun uploading a series of original short videos showcasing a combination of Windows Vista, Windows Live and Office 2007 experiences.
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Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
Cell phones quickly becoming portable entertainment devices — All of the entertainment options that are hot on the PC—social networking, web video, user-generated content—are downright torrid on the smallest of screens, the cell phone. New research from Deloitte & Touche finds that 47 percent …
