Top Items:
Greg Sandoval / Crave: The gadget blog:
Qtrax off track with Warner Music, UMG — For weeks, Qtrax, an ad-supported file-sharing site, had promised to offer free and legal music downloads from all four of the major record labels when it opened for business. Turns out the start-up might be forced to go back on its word.
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Eliot Van Buskirk / Listening Post:
Major Labels Allow P2P Music Sharing on Qtrax — After years of fighting peer-to-peer file-sharing companies, the major record labels have decided that if they can't beat them, they might as well join them — in one case, anyway. At the Midem conference in Cannes, France …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Free (legal) P2P Music Downloads? Told You So. — I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but in case you haven't heard: The era of paid music downloads is coming to an end (despite the fact that online sales are growing). — Qtrax, which has signed all four major labels …
Peter Kafka / Silicon Alley Insider:
Warner, UMG, EMI: No Deals With Free Music Service QTrax (WMG) — QTrax, the free P2P music service, made a big splash today by announcing that it was launching with the support of all four big music labels. But at least three of the four — Warner Music Group (WMG), Universal Music Group and EMI - don't have deals with the company.
Ken Fisher / Ars Technica:Qtrax's free, ad-based P2P: Gnutella meets Zune-esque DRM
Discussion:
JupiterResearch
Victoria Shannon / International Herald Tribune:Mainstream music industry realizes the value of ‘free’
Mark Wilson / Gizmodo:Sony Ericsson Adds 5 Million New Tracks to PlayNow Arena
Discussion:
Mashable!
Dan Farber / Between the Lines:
Cisco delivers next-generation switch-Nexus 7000 — Cisco is rolling out its Nexus 7000 family of data center-class switches that Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of Data Center, Switching and Services at Cisco, said was the most significant announcement by the company in the last decade.
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Om Malik / GigaOM:
Cisco Swtiches 10G, Makes Play For Data Centers. — Cisco is getting really serious about data centers. Today, Cisco is announcing Nexus 7000 Series switching platform that is focused on what San Jose-based Cisco has dubbed Data Center 3.0. The company also added new products to its Catalyst line of switches.
Discussion:
CNET News.com
MG Siegler / ParisLemon:
Its Come To This: Hot or Not For Websites — Quite frankly I'm shocked it has taken this long for someone to come out with this - Hot or Not for websites. If Digg/Propeller/Reddit/etc is a little too heady for you and you just want to vote a site up or down based upon how it looks, Web Hot or Not is for you.
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Michael Barbaro / New York Times:
Target Tells a Blogger to Go Away — Target to the blogosphere: you're irrelevant. — That was the message the cheap-chic retailer seemed to convey in an abrupt e-mail message to ShapingYouth.org, a blog about the impact of marketing on children. Early this month, the blog's founder …
Frederic / The Last Podcast:
How I Use Twitter — Dave Winer today asked for advice for Twitter newbies. I'm not sure I have a lot of advice for newbies (given that Twitter is still a young product, aren't we all newbies and figuring out how to use it anyway?). However, I can write about how I use it. — I never use the website.
Discussion:
Scripting News
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Ken Fisher / Ars Technica:
Blu-ray is smokin' hot; HD formats outpacing DVD — Although HD DVD appears to be in dire straits, the format battle between it and Blu-ray has had at least one positive ramification: pricing on players has fallen at a rapid rate, and sales are eclipsing those seen in the early years of DVD.
Discussion:
New York Times
Bob Tedeschi / New York Times:
Despite Housing Slide, Real Estate Sites Sell — TALK about an uh-oh moment. — It was late October, and Redfin, an online real estate brokerage firm based in Seattle, had received just three months earlier a $12 million investment led by the marquee venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
Discussion:
Clickety Clack
Rebecca Buckman / Wall Street Journal:
Cyclist's Foundation Links to For-Profit — Demand Media, Armstrong Team Up On Wellness Site — The charitable foundation launched by cycling legend and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong — which four years ago ignited a fashion trend by selling yellow bracelets stamped with the “live strong” …
Discussion:
paidContent.org
Kevin Heisler / Search Engine Watch Blog:
Souljah Boy to TellMe: Search, Listen and Obey — Machine translation from voice to text promises to be the grail of local mobile search. Michael Fitzgerald in The New York Times today highlights voice search and voice recognition software in gadgets that “Listen and Obey.”
Discussion:
Randy Holloway Unfiltered
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Michael Fitzgerald / New York Times:The Coming Wave of Gadgets That Listen and Obey
Discussion:
Life On the Wicked Stage, Mashable!, RyanSpoon.com Blog, Understanding Google … and GigaOM
The Boy Genius Report:
Get your Macbook Airs starting Tuesday! — Not that this is the biggest deal in the world, but for those hopin' and wishin' and prayin' to get a MBA as fast as possible, you'll be able to run down to your local Apple store to grab one on Tuesday! Here's the deal: stores have them, no question because they arrived Friday / Saturday.
Scott Karp / Publishing 2.0:
Simplicity Drives Technology Adoption — I was talking to a newsroom last week about adopting Publish2 as an editorial platform for creating news aggregation features for their website — there was a lot of excitement about sketching a big vision, thinking about all of the possibilities.
Reuters:
Amazon says will begin int'l roll-out of its MP3 store — NEW YORK (Reuters) - Online retailer Amazon.com Inc said on Sunday it will begin an international roll-out this year of its digital music store that offers songs without copy-protection technology known as digital rights management.
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