Top Items:
Adrian Covert / Gizmodo:
Confessions: The Meanest Thing Gizmodo Did at CES — CES has no shortage of displays. And when MAKE offered us some TV-B-Gone clickers to bring to the show, we pretty much couldn't help ourselves. We shut off a TV. And then another. And then a wall of TVs. And we just couldn't stop.
Discussion:
CenterNetworks, mathewingram.com/work, Joe Duck, Loic Le Meur Blog, Silicon Alley Insider, Techmamas, Valleywag and Gadget Lab
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Rafe Needleman / Webware.com:
BLOGGERS BEHAVING BADLY: GIZMODO MESSES WITH CES FLAT SCREENS — The Gizmodo kids pulled a good stunt at CES: they fired TV-B-Gone remotes at walls of shiny new monitors on display and during press conferences, much to the displeasure of booth staffers. — The video is funny.
Discussion:
Ewan Spence's All New Musings
Shel / Global Neighbourhoods:
Gizmodo Prank at CES. Victims may be bloggers — The clever hacks at Gizmodo pulled a prank at CES making all those TV screens go blank all at once, then filming and posting it, I assume very much to their own sophomoric satisfaction. As Webware Rafe Needleman put it:
Heather Hopkins / Hitwise Intelligence:
Wikia Launch & Mahalo Growth — This week's launch of Wikia Search is the latest example of a human powered search engine. Mahalo and Cha-Cha are two other recent entrants. This week we've seen a spike in daily visits to Wikia Search, as you'd expect. In my digging the thing that stood as interesting to me is Mahalo's growth.
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Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
Believe it or not, Mahalo is Growing — Human-built search engine Mahalo appears to be shooting past the traffic numbers it got when it launched, according to Heather Hopkins at traffic analyst firm Hitwise. — Mahalo pages are collections of the most useful links regarding a wide variety of timely topics in popular niches.
Greg Sandoval / CNET News.com:
Trent Reznor: Why won't people pay $5? — UPDATE at 8:55 a.m.: The headline of the story was changed to reflect more broadly what Trent Reznor said during the interview. As some readers noted, the original headline put too much emphasis on one of Reznor's statements.
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
The Music Industry's Last Stand Will Be A Music Tax — It is becoming more and more difficult for the music industry to ignore the basic economics of the their industry: unenforceable property rights (you can't sue everyone) and zero marginal production costs (file sharing is ridiculously easy).
Mathew / mathewingram.com/work:
Hey Trent — a music tax is a dumb idea — There's a great interview with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails up at CNET, in which he talks about his experience with the Saul Williams album he recently released as a “pay what you want” download (which I wrote about here).
Discussion:
CNET News.com
Microsoft:
Microsoft Announces Retirement and Transition Plan for Jeff Raikes, President of the Microsoft Business Division — Company announces it has hired Stephen Elop from Juniper Networks; Raikes will continue at Microsoft through September 2008. — Microsoft Corp. today announced that …
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Bruce Schneier / Wired News:
Steal This Wi-Fi — Whenever I talk or write about my own security setup, the one thing that surprises people — and attracts the most criticism — is the fact that I run an open wireless network at home. There's no password. There's no encryption. Anyone with wireless capability …
Discussion:
Boing Boing, Wi-Fi Networking News, Techdirt, DSLreports, Network World, Techmamas, Computerworld Blogs, Cathode Tan, Slashdot and Digg
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Amazon Completes DRM-Free Roster With Sony-BMG — For anyone who was bummed about the hoops they were going to have to jump through to get DRM-free songs from Sony-BMG artists, by the end of the month you will be able to download those songs at Amazon's MP3 store.
Discussion:
WebProNews, Profy.Com, Bits, mathewingram.com/work, paidContent.org, Brier Dudley's blog, Electronista and PC World
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Allison Braley / PR Newswire:
CondeNet Announces Change for Flip.com — Flip.com will be reshaped as a flexible web application designed to live on social networking platforms, starting with Facebook, the site's owner, CondeNet, announced today. — The site will continue to operate at www.flip.com, however, moving forward …
David Wurtz / Official Google Checkout Blog:
New on the hot list: Google Checkout Trends — Many of you are aware of Google Trends, the handy tool that enables you to track and compare what Google users are searching for. Now imagine a similar tool that can give you some insight into what people are buying and selling online.
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Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
LinkedIn, SixApart and Flickr People Join DataPortability.org: Is This Stuff For Real? — The Data Portability Working Group is announcing today that key people from LinkedIn, Flickr, SixApart and Twitter are joining the group. These new names are just the most visible part of a groundswell …
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Josh Catone / ReadWriteWeb:What is Google's Plan for Jaiku?
Discussion:
TechFold, loose wire blog, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, The Social Times and The All New Musings …
Dave Linthicum / InfoWorld:
Budget Cuts and SOA — There seem to a few companies that are cutting their SOA efforts due to the softening of the economy. No matter if you think its oil prices, the mortgage crisis, or other factors, in many organizations capital budgets, including IT, are being reduced. — Thus, what gets cut first?
Robby Stein / Official Gmail Blog:
Create personal mailing lists through contact manager — I have about eight friends from high school I like to keep in touch with frequently. We all email updates or the occasional funny YouTube video to the group, but every once in a while I'd forget to include one of them or I'd accidentally use …
Discussion:
Mashable!
Caroline McCarthy / Webware.com:
FACEBOOK TOPS ONE LIST OF ‘SLOW AND INACCESSIBLE’ SOCIAL NETWORKS — On Thursday, Web site-monitoring firm WatchMouse released the results of a study about the performance of 104 social-media sites—social networks, blogging communities, bookmarking sites, and the like—and boldly deemed them to be overall “slow and inaccessible.”
