Top Items:
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
Sheryl Sandberg Will Become COO of Facebook — Facebook will announce that it will hire top Google executive Sheryl Sandberg as COO this afternoon, in a major hire that is sure to shake up the company and also deliver a blow to rival Google. — At Google (GOOG), Sandberg is the vice president …
Discussion:
Outside the Lines, Webware.com, The Social, GigaOM, New York Times, Bits, VentureBeat, Valleywag, Los Angeles Times, Network World, WebProNews, Silicon Alley Insider, Epicenter, Mark Evans, Tech Ticker, paidContent.org, HipMojo.com, All Facebook, Master of 500 Hats, Mashable! and TGDaily.com
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Eric Eldon / VentureBeat:
Q&A with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, on hiring, growth, and its platform — Facebook has just hired a new COO, Sheryl Sandberg of Google (our coverage). So I talked with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg today, to get some more context on her hire and how it fits in with the company's larger plans.
Peter Elkind / Fortune:
The trouble with Steve Jobs — Jobs likes to make his own rules, whether the topic is computers, stock options, or even pancreatic cancer. The same traits that make him a great CEO drive him to put his company, and his investors, at risk. — (Fortune Magazine) — In October 2003 …
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Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:Love Him or Hate Him, Fortune Cannot Make Up Its Mind About Steve Jobs
Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land:
Google Tests Additional Search Box Within Search Results — Tamar tipped me off to people seeing secondary search boxes in the Google search results. I see them myself now. For example a search on amazon returns this search box directly under the snippet but above the URL, here is a picture:
Discussion:
CenterNetworks, Search Engine Journal, Google Operating System, TechCrunch and Google Blogoscoped
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Duncan Riley / TechCrunch:
Google Offers Secondary Search Boxes — Google has started offering search boxes within their search results. In the example above, a search box is offered for Amazon. The new service seems to be restricted to larger sites with a slant towards retails sites.
Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:
Office Live Workspace vs Google Docs: Feature-by-Feature Comparison — Today, Microsoft announced that the Office Live Workspace beta is publicly available for everyone to access. The site, a free web-based extension of Microsoft Office, lets you access your documents online and share your work with others.
Nancy Gohring / PC World:
Microsoft Develops New Operating System From Scratch — Microsoft Research unveiled the new operating system, Singularity, as a prototype aimed at academics and researchers. — Microsoft showed off a new operating system on Tuesday, but don't get too excited.
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The Technium:
1,000 True Fans — The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches. — But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators.
Discussion:
BUZZYEAH
Matt / Photo Matt:
Backing BuddyPress — Some of you may remember when I wrote about Chickspeak, a WordPress MU-based social network. Andy Peatling, the fellow behind it, later decided to recreate the work he had done as an Open Source effort he called BuddyPress. And it was good.
Discussion:
mathewingram.com/work, Blaze New Media, Podcasting News, TechCrunch, GigaOM, Changing Way, Maple Leaf 2.0 and Mashable!
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Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Demand Media Buys Pluck for $75 million — Demand Media, a big buyer and operator of Internet domain name companies, completed negotiations to acquire Austin-based Pluck last night after about two months of negotiations. The price is not being disclosed but is rumored to be in the $50 million range.
Discussion:
Money Out Blog, HipMojo.com, CNET News.com, Epicenter, VentureBeat, Texas Startup Blog and Mashable!
Jessica E. Vascellaro / Wall Street Journal:
IAC's Ask.com to Cut 8% of Staff — Ask.com announced an internal restructuring that eliminates 40 jobs as well as plans to turn back the search engine's focus to better answering search queries posed as questions. — The job cuts, which amount to roughly 8% of the company's existing work force …
Discussion:
ResourceShelf, WebProNews, Reuters, Search Engine Watch Blog, Silicon Alley Insider and paidContent.org
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Elinor Mills / CNET News.com:
Warning: Your iPod may get you mugged — A friend of mine got her throat sliced in a daytime iPod mugging a year and a half ago. Even the police were amazed at the violent nature of the attack. Fortunately, the cut didn't go too deep and she is fine except for the scar and possibly some lingering post-traumatic-stress symptoms.
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Underwire / Wired:
Gary Gygax, ‘Father of D&D,’ Dies at 69 — Gary Gygax, one of the co-creators of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, according to Stephen Chenault, CEO of Troll Lord Games. — Gygax designed the original D&D game with Dave Arneson in 1974 …
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Andrew Orlowski / The Register:
When the music costs nothing, why do freetards prefer to leech? — As we reported yesterday, Nine Inch Nails has followed the Radiohead example and is giving the music away for free. Not all of it, but nine of the thirty six tracks from Trent Reznor's instrumental LP Ghosts I-IV are available for free, with a PDF thrown in.
Stuart Elliott / TV Decoder:
Firebrand Burns Out — The fire has been banked in an experiment to transform advertising into entertainment. — Firebrand, a television and online service that since October has been presenting commercials as content, is being shut down as its major investors decided to stop providing more money.
Bobby White / Wall Street Journal:
The New Workplace Rules: No Video-Watching — Carriage Services Inc., a Houston funeral-services company, recently discovered that 70% of the workers in its 125-person headquarters watched videos on Web sites like Google Inc.'s YouTube and News Corp.'s MySpace for about an hour a day.
Nick Heath / CNET News.com:
Windows-based cash machines ‘easily hacked’ — Security experts have hacked ATMs to show how easy it is to steal money and bank account details from modern cash machines. — ATMs, or automated teller machines, today face the Internet-born threat of worms and denial-of-service attacks …
