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8:20 PM ET, April 14, 2008

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Waxy.org:
Exclusive: Google App Engine ported to Amazon's EC2  —  One of the biggest criticisms of Google's App Engine have been cries of lock-in, that the applications developed for the platform won't be portable to any other service.  This weekend, Chris Anderson, the Portland-based cofounder …
RELATED:
Tim O'Reilly / O'Reilly Radar:   Is Google App Engine a Lock-in Play?
Charles Jade / Infinite Loop:
Company claims to sell Mac clone for $399  —  Source: Psytar (at least until Apple Legal has their morning coffee)  —  Personal technology enthusiasts yearning for the Mac Experience without the Apple Tax—that huge markup that Mac users pay for off-the-shelf PC hardware with OS X—your days of gnashing teeth may be over.
RELATED:
Arnold Kim / MacRumors:
‘OpenMac’ Promises $399 Headless Mac... But Not From Apple
John Murrell / Good Morning Silicon Valley:
Get your Mac clone now and beat the big cease-and-desist rush
Discussion: PC World
Stephen Shankland / CNET News.com:
Google mapping spec now an industry standard  —  Members of an industry group called the Open Geospatial Consortium have approved Google's KML technology as an open standard for describing some geographic data.  —  KML is used to manage the display of geospatial information in Google Earth …
RELATED:
Michael Weiss-Malik / Official Google Blog:   KML, the HTML of geographic content
Michael Weiss-Malik / Google LatLong:
KML: A new standard for sharing maps
Discussion: ReadWriteWeb and InformationWeek
John Timmer / Ars Technica:
Google's KML map markup language now an official standard
Discussion: opengeospatial.org
b2i.us:
Blockbuster Proposes Combination With Circuit City  —  Blockbuster Inc. (NYSE: BBI) today announced that it has offered to acquire Circuit City Stores, Inc. (NYSE: CC) for at least $6.00 per share in cash, subject to due diligence.  The offer was made in a letter sent to Circuit City Chairman …
RELATED:
Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:
Content Is Becoming a Commodity  —  Over the weekend, it seemed that everyone in the tech blogosphere contributed to the discussion around fractured blog comments; Robert Scoble even went so far as to say that the “era of blogger's control” is over.  What all these discussions hinged …
RELATED:
Electronista:
Verizon adds unlimited smartphone plan
Discussion: DSLreports and Engadget
Yahoo! Search Blog:
Yahoo! Slurp 3.0  —  Over the past few weeks, we've been preparing for the latest version of the Yahoo! Search crawler with some infrastructure updates, which recently caused a variance in our crawl behavior.  —  With everything now in place, the rollout has officially begun.
Peter Kafka / Silicon Alley Insider:
Nick Denton “Pruning” Gawker Media, Ditching Three Sites  —  Gawker Media boss Nick Denton is “rationalizing” his blog business by spinning off three underperforming sites: Wonkette, Gridskipper and Idolator.  The sites will find new homes/owners as follows:
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
TwitLinks: Not Useful, Not A TechMeme Killer  —  It's clear that Twitter is the place that a lot of news breaks first (example), hours before blogs and days before mainstream media.  No one has created an application yet that harvests that information and presents it as breaking news …
RELATED:
Jesus Diaz / Gizmodo:
Latest iPhone Firmware Saves Pictures from Safari  —  At last!  The latest beta version of Apple's iPhone 1.2.0 firmware gives you the possibility of saving pictures straight from Safari and into the Photo Album.  We tried and it works: just hold your finger against an image for a longer …
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
Hitwise: Google Hits New High; Microsoft & Yahoo New Lows  —  Last week, Hitwise released the latest statistics for search engine share in the United States for March 2008, showing Google at an all-time high while Microsoft and Yahoo hit all-time lows.  —  The four major search engines stack up as follows:
Xssniper / Billy (BK) Rios:
Google XSS  —  Now, normally when I find an XSS vulnerability on a popular domain I just report it to the appropriate security team and move on, but this one is interesting...  By taking advantage of the content-type returned by spreadsheets.google.com (and a caching flaw on the part of Google) …
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Amazon's cloud computing will surpass its retailing business  —  Amazon on Monday announced persistent storage for its EC2 service and what's notable is how quickly the e-tailer is running ahead of the competition.  In fact, Amazon's real business down the line will be its cloud services.
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
Another Windows veteran to leave Microsoft  —  Will Poole, a Microsoft Windows veteran — and most recently, Corporate Vice President in charge of the company's Unlimited Potential group — is retiring, according to sources who asked not to be named.  —  Poole, who has been at Microsoft 12 years …
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
Report: YouTube Dominates Video More than Google Dominates Search  —  Traffic analysts Hitwise released new numbers today indicating that while online video sites as a category have seen a 7% drop in traffic year over year since March 2007 - YouTube has seen a remarkable 32% growth in visits during that period.
Discussion: NewTeeVee and WebProNews
Saul Hansell / Bits:
Newspapers Argue For First Amendment Right to Snoop on Readers  —  Usually, when people talk about the trade offs between privacy and freedom of the press, the argument is about whether the public has the right to know some fact about an individual's personal life.
Discussion: paidContent.org
 
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 More Items: 
Erica Ogg / CNET News.com:
HP and DreamWorks unveil color display technology
Discussion: Electronista
Jacqui Cheng / Infinite Loop:
Apple, Sony agree to pay out over battery fire lawsuit
Discussion: MacUser
Steve Lohr / Bits:
Enterprise 2.0: A Computer Security Nightmare?
Laura M. Holson / New York Times:
Hollywood and Silicon Valley Try Again to Bridge Their Divide
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Taking The Books-On-Demand Business Quite Literally
Discussion: Got Ads?
Eric Eldon / VentureBeat:
Social network Hi5's developer platform is more successful …
Discussion: The Social Times
Matt Kapko / RCR Wireless News:
Changing the channel in less than a second
Dawn Kawamoto / CNET News.com:
Analysts: Yahoo and Microsoft likely to synch up this week
 Earlier Items: 
Dennis Sellers / Macsimum News:
Stan Flack, a pioneer of online Mac journalism, has died
Shumeet Baluja / Official Google Blog:
Building software tools to find child victims
InfoWorld:
Microsoft reveals new content partners, DRM for Silverlight
Katie Marsal / AppleInsider:
Apple acknowledges graphics glitch with latest notebooks
Michael Kanellos / CNET News.com:
GE confirms that wind turbine supply is getting worse
The Boy Genius Report:
Sony KDL-XBR6, KDL-XBR7, and KDL-XBR8 specs, and release dates!
Jeff Jarvis / BuzzMachine:
The press becomes the press-sphere
Dan Primack / PE Hub Blog:
That's Rich: FM Publishing Gets Big Valuation
 

 
From Mediagazer:

Alex Sherman / CNBC:
Analyzing Comcast's spinoff of cable networks, purposefully structured with low debt: the move might be a signal to the industry that it's time to consolidate

Daniel Thomas / Financial Times:
James Harding says the Tortoise-Observer deal could create a profitable media group and there isn't a guaranteed future for the Observer with the Guardian

John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Substack, very deliberately, tries to have it both ways by saying publications on their platform are independent while presenting them all as parts of Substack

 
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