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7:20 AM ET, January 16, 2008

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Devin Coldewey / CrunchGear:
MacBook AirHead: why Apple's new laptop is basically useless  —  First, let me just say that the Air is an extremely impressive piece of technology.  The miniaturization, the optimization of space, the blatant disregard for current standards — it's everything a revolutionary machine should be.
RELATED:
Forbes:
Jobs Fails To Wow At Macworld  —  SAN FRANCISCO -  —  You could hear the collective sigh from the crowd.  When Steve Jobs unveiled the newest member of the Macintosh fold, the skinny MacBook Air laptop, the Mac-faithful sighed with pleasure.  But it was just a momentary exhale.
Duncan Riley / TechCrunch:
Will Apple TV Take 2 Take Online Movie Rentals Mainstream?  —  An extraordinary thing happened today (well at least given who it was), Steve Jobs admitted that Apple had screwed up with its Apple TV product.  Never one to take the rap alone he threw in Microsoft and a few others as well as examples …
Jason Chen / Gizmodo:
MacBook Air Hands-on  —  Here's our take on the MacBook Air.  It's super light, super fragile, and super small.  If you just tap the screen lightly, the whole thing closes because it's so light.  The keyboard looks a little weird because it's black on the aluminum, but the keyboard feels great.
John Markoff / Bits:
The Passion of Steve Jobs  —  Even more than when he's performing on stage, Steven P. Jobs's passion for personal computing comes through when he talks about the years he spent cajoling his designers to build what he presented today as the world's “thinnest” computer.
Eliot Van Buskirk / Wired News:
Apple Reinvents Film Biz With iTunes Movie Rentals  —  Apple is about to turn the movie rentals business on its ear.  —  The new iTunes movie rentals service, announced Tuesday by Apple CEO Steve Jobs during his Macworld Expo keynote, is powered by deals with all the major film studios …
Discussion: Cult of Mac
Nilay Patel / Engadget:
MacBook Air doesn't have a user-replaceable battery
Ryan Block / Engadget:
MacBook Air: plenty more details
Discussion: Podcasting News and Valleywag
Andy Plesser / Beet.TV:
Robert Scoble to Launch Online Video Network At Fast Company  —  Robert Scoble, who pioneered tech videoblogging at Microsoft with Channel 9 and produced hundreds of segments during his tenure at PodTech, is launching a new business television network for Fast Company.
RELATED:
Robert Scoble / Scobleizer:
Why we're going to FastCompany.tv  —  Ahh, Andy Plesser broke my career news again (he was the guy who broke my news about leaving Microsoft too).  Louis Gray got the story first, though, I think, although I told dozens of people at the BlogHaus last week at CES.
Allen Stern / CenterNetworks:   Scoble's New Job Revealed - Video Guy At Fast Company
Mathew / mathewingram.com/work:
Hey, Steve — you broke the Internet  —  Thanks for all the great toys, Uncle Steve, but did you have to go and break the Internet?  I and about 7,000 other people were all signed up to get Twitter updates from MacRumors, but I never saw a single one — and in fact the entire Twitter.com network …
RELATED:
Josh Jones / DreamHost Blog:
Um, Whoops.  —  Hello.. how's your morning going?  —  I hope it's been a little better than mine.  —  We had a teensy eensy weensy little billing error last night... my first clue something was up when I saw this morning's daily billing report (so far): $7,500,000.
RELATED:
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Dreamhost Overbills Customers $7.5 Million; Uses Homer Simpson To Deliver Apology
Discussion: Demand Satisfaction!
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Stevenote In 60 Seconds  —  Too lazy to watch the entire Stevenote video stream on CrunchGear, or read Duncan's real time notes from the event?  No worries.  Mahalo's Veronica Belmont distills all the important stuff down into just sixty seconds.  —  See all of our coverage from Macworld here and at CrunchGear.
RELATED:
Matt Hickey / CrunchGear:
Macworld 2008 Keynote: Watch it beginning to end, right here
Discussion: Guardian Unlimited and TechCrunch
Miguel Helft / Bits:
Another Media Exec Leaves Yahoo  —  As Yahoo narrows its focus on a few key priorities, it's not surprising to see those whose projects fall outside those areas leave the company.  And Yahoo's media group, whose once lofty mission to produce original, Hollywood-style content has been scaled …
Nate Westheimer / innonate:
Freebase's $42M!  Can the top-down semantic web scale?  —  I just read this:  —  MetaWeb, the folks who power Freebase, a semantic database, got another $42 million in funding.  —  This shows a very serious investment in the semantic web... but instead of a distributed semantic web …
Discussion: VentureBeat and bytes|genes
Andy Plesser / Beet.TV:
Nick Denton Runs a “Slave Shop,” Oxford Chum Jason Pontin Declares  —  Gawker Media chief Nick Denton is “profoundly talented....kind of bitchy"....and gets by with things he shouldn't.  But he does it in a sufficiently Oxonian way so “you don't feel too dirty,” says Jason Pontin …
GigaOM:
700 MHz Auction Update  —  So 214 bidders have been approved for the forthcoming 700 MHz spectrum auction, which starts on Jan. 24.  The big bidders include AT&T, Verizon and Google.  These bidders will go after 1,200 licenses.  —  The bidding will conclude on March 24; down payments will be due by April 11.
Discussion: Ars Technica
Dan Dickinson / The Primary Vivid Weblog:
HOWTO: iPhone Webclip Icons  —  I remember, years ago, I was baffled by the little 16x16 icons that were showing up in my URL toolbar, and it took a surprising amount of searching to find out how to create one.  I refuse to let this happen again.  —  So: if you want to make a custom icon …
 
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 More Items: 
Alice / w3.org:
SPARQL Query Language for RDF
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Application Developers: Don't Be Surprised If Facebook Changes …
Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post:
In Child Porn Case, a Digital Dilemma
Scott Karp / Publishing 2.0:
Future Of Digital Media: Perfecting Existing Technologies For People On The Web
Oracle:
Oracle Critical Patch Update Advisory - January 2008
Discussion: The Open Road
Allen Stern / CenterNetworks:
TubesNow Service to be Discontinued on January 31
Discussion: Mashable!
Tanya Irwin / MediaPost Publications:
Striking Writers Plan Online Channel
Garett Rogers / Googling Google:
New iPhone update will confuse and upset many Gmail users
 Earlier Items: 
Josh Catone / ReadWriteWeb:
Happy Birthday: Wikipedia Turns 7 Today
Discussion: Voices
InfoWorld:
Weak memory pricing hurts Intel revenue
Steve / The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs:
Macworld party report
Saul Hansell / Bits:
Video Podcasts: The Sleeping Giant on AppleTV
Discussion: MacUser and TechCrunch
Wall Street Journal:
Facebook Gets Big Investment
Duncan Riley / TechCrunch:
Google Developing Mac Version Of Picasa, Due To Be Released This Year
Clint Ecker / Infinite Loop:
Macworld.ars: iPod touch users to pay $20 for iPhone applications
GigaOM:
Google's Achilles Heel
 

 
From Mediagazer:

Caitlin Huston / The Hollywood Reporter:
Internal memo: Hearst Magazines president announces layoffs as part of a decision to “reallocate resources” to “continue our focus on digital innovation”

Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced she will leave the agency on January 20; she was the first woman to be confirmed to lead the agency

Lachlan Cartwright / The Ankler:
Sources: MSNBC renewed Rachel Maddow's contract early this fall, but with a pay cut; MSNBC bosses' plan to shake up daytime and weekend programming

 
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