Top Items:
BBC:
Study shows how spammers cash in — Spammers are turning a profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5m e-mails they send, finds a study. — By hijacking a working spam network, US researchers have uncovered some of the economics of being a junk mailer.
Discussion:
Ars Technica, ZDNet Government, CircleID, GMSV, TheNextWeb.org, Mashable!, Lockergnome Blog Network and Tech Central
John Mahoney / Gizmodo:
How To: Max Out Apple TV's Potential With Boxee — This is a guide that, if followed, will unchain your Apple TV from its cruel iTunes tether, turning it into the useful living room conduit of music, video and web-based content it should have been all along via the media center software Boxee.
Discussion:
MAKE Magazine
Google Watch:
Sun, Microsoft Search Deal Underscore Google's Growing Monopoly — Update: Funny how things evolve in high-tech, with some deals lasting what seems like ages and others, announced with so much enthusiasm, dying out. I want to talk about an example of the latter.
RELATED:
Microsoft:Sun Microsystems to Distribute Microsoft Live Search-Powered Toolbar …
Discussion:
Tech Beat, All about Microsoft, Associated Press, ReadWriteWeb, Microsoft Pri0, TechFlash, LiveSide, GigaOM and Port 25
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:Microsoft Does MSN Toolbar Distribution Deal With Java
Discussion:
L.A. Times Tech Blog, Clickety Clack, Reuters, Boy Genius Report, The Register, WebProNews and Inquirer
Adam Lashinsky / Fortune:
The genius behind Steve — The CEO is the heart and soul of Apple Inc. yet he's got a deep management bench from which to choose his eventual successor. — (Fortune Magazine) — Let's start with some uncomfortable truths. We wouldn't be publishing an article about the under-the-radar guy who's …
Discussion:
Between the Lines, MacRumors, VentureBeat, Valleywag, iLounge, MacBlogz, Silicon Alley Insider, Apple 2.0 and Macsimum News
Chrix Finne / Google Reader:
Is Your Web Truly World-Wide? — The Reader team is happy to announce that another 20% project has come to fruition: automatic translation in Reader! Post by 20% volunteer and glottology expert, Brett Bavar. — Believe it or not, the web truly is world-wide.
Discussion:
ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Googling Google, Mashable!, SitePoint, Lifehacker, Josh Bancroft's … and The Blog Herald
Electronista:
Study: new MacBooks likely 33% of US sales — Apple's recent MacBook lineup and the iPhone may make it one of the better-positioned companies to survive a likely steep drop in spending during the holidays, according to new data from ChangeWave. The analyst firm says that a full third …
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Anthony Ha / VentureBeat:
Yahoo's BrowserPlus continues to dismantle wall between browser and desktop — BrowserPlus, Yahoo's Google Gears competitor for allowing web applications to work with your desktop, rolled out two cool new features today: Drag-and-drop file uploads and desktop notifications. — These are smart additions.
Discussion:
InfoWorld
RELATED:
Jesus Diaz / Gizmodo:
MacBook Nano Looks Like It Came from Cupertino — I don't know if these MacBook Nanos are a custom hack or if they come from some kind of shady outlet selling retrofitted MSI U100 laptops made to look like shiny—and fictional—Apple notebooks with Mac OS X installed.
Discussion:
Guardian, JustinFlood.com, Gadget Lab, LAPTOP Magazine, 9 to 5 Mac, Liliputing, MacBlogz and TUAW
Eric Krangel / Silicon Alley Insider:
Rock Band Creators Score $300 Million-Plus Payday (VIA) — When Harmonix founders Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy — the guys behind mega-hit games Guitar Hero and later, Rock Band — sold their company to Viacom's (VIA) MTV for a reported $175 million in 2006, the deal didn't end there.
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Bill Gates' New Career? Patent Troll For Nathan Myhrvold? — from the kinder-capitalism? dept — Plenty of folks have been wondering just what Bill Gates is up to now that he's left his full-time position at Microsoft. Longtime rabble-rouser theodp has alerted us to one thing …
The Boy Genius / Boy Genius Report:
Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1a hitting Best Buy next month — Thanks to our Best Buy ninjas, we've just got some screen shots showing that Sony Ericsson's X1a (North American model) will definitely be hitting best buy early next month. The actual in stock date as of now is December 7th. The price?
Discussion:
wmpoweruser.com, Unwired View, Cell Phones etc., Sony Insider, CrunchGear, Gizmodo, Engadget, pocketnow.com and WMExperts
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Spot.Us Experiments With Citizen-Funded Community Journalism — Newspapers are dying across the country. Local papers are shutting down, Gannett is laying off 3,000 people, the Christian Science Monitor will no longer put out a print edition, and even the New York Times is facing a serious cash crunch.
Greg Linden / Geeking with Greg:
Tasks, not search, at DEMOfall08 — Philipp Lenssen points to a video of a DEMOfall08 panel on “Where the Web is Going” that included Peter Norvig from Google and Prabhakar Raghavan from Yahoo. — What is notable in the talk is that (starting at 12:32) Prabhakar and Peter agree that …
Discussion:
The Noisy Channel
Tameka Kee / paidContent.org:
AT&T's VideoCrawler: Part Of A Bigger, Three-Screen Content Distribution Plan — A strange launch at a strange time, and from a strange source: AT&T (NYSE: T) rolled out a beta version of VideoCrawler, an online video search and aggregation engine. The public beta comes about three months …
RELATED:
Frederic Lardinois / ReadWriteWeb:VideoCrawler: AT&T Launches its Own Video Search Engine
Discussion:
Ars Technica, PR Newswire, CNET News, AppScout, BetaNews, Electronista, DSLreports, RotorBlog.com and VentureBeat
Priya Ganapati / Gadget Lab:
Google Fixes Embarrassing Android Bug — Google has fixed an a potentially devastating bug in its newly released Android operating system. — Some users of T-Mobile's G1 phone found that typing any word on the phone's keyboard — in any application — sent whatever they typed to the phone's command line shell.
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
Look Out Google Site Search, Lijit Says It's Right On Your Heels — Innovative search startup Lijit has done study of search widgets on pages around the web and says its widget is very close to becoming as popular as Google's own “site search”. We think Lijit is quite interesting and we're …
Discussion:
Venture Chronicles
Wayne Chang / Facebook Blog:
A Rush for Mobile — When we recently added the ability to comment on your friends' status updates to the Facebook mobile site, we didn't expect that we would receive nearly a million status comments in the first 24 hours. — This may not seem like much, but it was actually part of a really important change.
Claire Cain Miller / Bits:
Vacation Rental Site Raises $250 Million — HomeAway, the largest online vacation rental marketplace, announced Tuesday that it has raised $250 million in venture capital, an extraordinarily large amount of money for an Internet company. The new round, which is the biggest a tech company …
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
Van Natta Takes Playlist CEO Job, With New Investment By Pittman — Former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta will take the CEO job at a music discovery site called Playlist, a move that had been rumored, after he did not end up taking another position as head of MySpace Music.
Discussion:
TechCrunch
NEWS.com.au:
China's not important: Microsoft CEO — THE global head of Microsoft has dismissed China's importance to its business due to the Government's failure to curb rampant software piracy. — Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer also left the door open for a partnership …
Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
Video: China's wasteland of toxic consumer electronics revealed — Any self-respecting gadget hound knows that China is responsible for packing millions of shipping containers with the consumer electronics we crave. What you may not know is what we ship in return: our waste for recycling.
RELATED:
Martin LaMonica / CNET News:Activists launch certification for e-waste recycling
Discussion:
Business Wire
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Dapper MashupAds Turn Your Website Into Contextual, Display Ads — The most important ad for a company or brand is its Website. So why not use that Website to generate ads? Dapper, a startup that can create a feed from any Website, is applying its technology to generate contextual …
Darien Graham-Smith / PC Pro:
Windows 7: faster or just smarter? — If you've been following the PC Pro blogs, you'll know that we recently received a preview build of Windows 7. Useful work has pretty much ground to a halt as we've all set about nuking our Vista installations and upgrading our work PCs to this unsupported pre-alpha OS.
Discussion:
Gizmodo
Chris Ziegler / Engadget Mobile:
The better part of Nokia's smartphone roadmap goes on display — Okay, so maybe the N96 isn't your cup of tea. Perhaps you're disappointed that Nokia didn't blow out its inaugural entry into the wide world of touch with something just a little more superphone-ish than the 5800.
Discussion:
Mobilewhack.com, Mobile Industry Review, PhoneDog.com Cell …, Unwired View, Gizmodo and Engadget
Nicholas Carlson / Silicon Alley Insider:
Everybody's Underwater In Silicon Valley — As tech stocks plummet, more Silicon Valley workers find themselves holding worthless options — the kind that would allow them to buy company stock at higher prices than they are currently being publicly traded. — They're “underwater.”
