Top Items:
Paul Miller / Engadget:
Sony hates you, offers $50 “Fresh Start” option to build your laptop crapware-free — Sony has quite the history of crippling excellent, beautiful hardware with horrible, useless software. The company's UX UMPC bluescreened on us the first time we turned it on, and crashed the first time we tried …
Discussion:
Ed Bott's Microsoft Report, Download Squad, TechConsumer, Electronista, Out of the Box, CyberNet, The Boy Genius Report, Dan's Tech-n-Stuff Weblog, Mark Evans, Gearlog, OhGizmo!, p2pnet, Gizmodo, michael parekh on IT, Guardian Unlimited, Michael Gartenberg, jkOnTheRun, Boing Boing Gadgets, 9 to 5 Mac and Hardware 2.0
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Peter Sayer / IDG News Service:Sony Removes Bloatware—for a Fee
Discussion:
Good Morning Silicon Valley, TechSpot, Ryan Naraine's Security Watch, MacUser and Digital Trends
Rob Beschizza / Gadget Lab:Breaking: Sony Won't Charge $50 To Remove Bloatware
Discussion:
Download Squad
Dan Ackerman / Crave: The gadget blog:Sony charges fifty bucks for a crapware-free system
Discussion:
Alice Hill's Real Tech News
Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Facebook Toast? Hot Today, Dead Tomorrow—Like AOL? — For now, Facebook continues to take over the world. Its global traffic is about to blow past MySpace's, its image (and Mark Zuckerberg's) has recovered from the Beacon fiasco, and it has raised a big enough cash pile that it should be able to power through any downturn.
Tom Krazit / One More Thing:
Think before you install — Look, people, it's 2008: You're responsible for what you install on your PC. — The outrage is spewing forth over Apple's move to include Safari 3.1 as part of its Software Update program. The new twist is that Windows users who never had installed Safari …
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Farhad Manjoo / Salon:
The Wall Street Journal's Web site is already (secretly) free — Late in January, Rupert Murdoch put an end to speculation that he would set free the Wall Street Journal's subscription-only Web site. — While he planned to “expand” the site's free offerings, “the really special things …
Discussion:
Epicenter, Valleywag, Silicon Alley Insider, Technology Evangelist, TeleRead and Boing Boing
Stefanie Olsen / CNET News.com:
Q&A: Battelle talks blog roll-ups, Google, and Federated Media's future — John Battelle knows tech booms and busts. He's been at the forefront of them for nearly two decades. — In 1993, he co-founded Wired, a print magazine that set a standard in technology coverage and spawned popular sites …
RELATED:
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch: Federated Media's Battelle Slams Rival, Hints At Investing In Publishers
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
CBS Sports Facing March Madness Backlash on Facebook. “This App Blows.” — Don't mess with March Madness. CBS Sports is learning that lesson the hard way on Facebook, where a major backlash is happening over its NCAA basketball bracket application. Yes, this is the same application …
Sarah Lai Stirland / Threat Level:
Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig Bets ‘Wikipedia’ Approach Will Transform Congress — Stanford law professor Larry Lessig plans to use collaborative software to change Congress. — Courtesy Larry Lessig — A prominent Stanford law professor on Thursday launched an ambitious project …
RELATED:
Lawrence Lessig / The Huffington Post:Fix Congress First — Though “change” is the dominant rhetoric …
Discussion:
VentureBeat, Computerworld, Ars Technica, The Drama 2.0 Show, p2pnet, open and techPresident
Doug Aamoth / CrunchGear:
Firefox 3: So easy a caveman could do it — Firefox 3 won't be out of beta until the end of June but Mozilla told Reuters yesterday that anyone can go ahead and download the most recent version and run it without worrying too much. It's now stable enough for everyone, not just developers.
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Caroline McCarthy / CNET News.com:
Gibson turns volume up to 11 with new ‘Guitar Hero’ lawsuit — Legendary guitar manufacturer Gibson Guitar has sued six major retailers—Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, Amazon.com, Gamestop, and Toys-R-Us—for selling Activision's Guitar Hero video game series, MarketWatch reported Friday.
Discussion:
E-Commerce Times, CrunchGear, Engadget, Gearlog, paidContent.org, Associated Press, Geek Gestalt and Kotaku
Danis Dayanov / The LinkedIn Blog:
The Engineering component | LinkedIn Company Profiles — Over the course of the last years there were several important features that we've brought to you. The past few months in particular has seen the rapid deployment of features such as these: Profile photos, Redesigned Homepage …
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Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Breaking: FCC Confirms that Big Winner in Spectrum Auction is Verizon. So Why Is Google Smiling? — The big winner of the FCC's $19.6 billion auction of wireless spectrum that ended yesterday is Verizon. That was pretty much everyone's guess. — At a press conference today …
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Jacqui Cheng / Ars Technica:
Report: 95% of Internet video stuck looking longingly at TV — Video content online may be growing in popularity, but the vast majority isn't getting anywhere near a TV screen. New survey results from Macrovision (commissioned by Harris Interactive) say that only a small number of adults …
Philipp Lenssen / Google Blogoscoped:
Creating a Googleshare Map With Google Spreadsheets — The new gadget feature of Google Spreadsheets makes it easy to add heat maps. This can be used to create a world map illustrating the Googleshare for a given keyword across different countries; now-Google employee Douwe Osinga called this “Land Geist” a couple of years ago.
Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
Little old lady suing Sony, Samsung, Nokia and everyone else for infringing on her laser patents — Oh sure, she looks friendly enough. But don't let her matronly, argyle looks fool you. Retired Columbia University Professor, Gertrude Neumark Rothschild, is looking to extract some cold …
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Nivi / Venture Hacks:
Getting Recommended … On April 1st, we started publishing the best damn term sheet hacks we could find. Why? Because a lot of entrepreneurs ask the same question: … We're trying to make everything we've learned—from other entrepreneurs, investors, and lawyers—readily available.
Discussion:
HipMojo.com, FoundRead, Brij's One More Idea, VentureBeat, TechCrunch and MYBLOG by Ouriel
Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:
Swotti - A Semantic Opinions Aggregator — Swotti is a new semantic search engine that aggregates opinions about products to help you make purchasing decisions. With Swotti, you can learn from the good and bad experiences of others as the site gathers together reviews and feedback from across …
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Do you have to be in every conversation? — Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb has a good post about how the conversation is leaving blogs and going to Twitter, FriendFeed and other services. More importantly, she touches on a big question: How do you keep up? — Perez then dutifully notes …
Discussion:
bub.blicio.us
RELATED:
Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere
Discussion:
Good Morning Silicon Valley, CenterNetworks, Andy Beard, SmoothSpan Blog, Lifestream Blog and WinExtra
Nicholas Deleon / CrunchGear:
Emirates becomes first airline to allow cellphone calls while in flight — Arsenal FC sponsor Emirates became the first airline to allow cellphone calls while in the air. The Dubai-based airline uses an AeroMobile technology that prevents cellphones from interfering with an airplane's electronics.
