Top Items:
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
New York Times: November Was So Terrible, Even Our Internet Ads Were Down — Earlier this month, executives at the New York Times (NYT) warned investors that they had a miserable November. They weren't kidding. — The grim details are here, but I'll save you some time:
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Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Canary In The Coalmine: NYT Sees First Decline In Online Ad Revenues — In what may be an early indicator of broader Web advertising trends, the New York Times announced today that it saw total Internet advertising revenues decline 3.8 percent in November. This compares to a total decrease …
Discussion:
Webmetricsguru
Ezra Klein / American Prospect:
THERE IS NOTHING ANYONE CAN DO ABOUT IT. — Over at BoingBoing, Clay Shirky engages in a bit of self-congratulatory schadenfreude for predicting the collapse of the newspaper business model back in 1993. And no doubt: He was prescient. But like a lot of folks (many of them named Jeff Jarvis) …
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Timothy Lee / Techdirt:The Death Of Online Advertising Is Greatly Exaggerated
Discussion:
HipMojo.com
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
FriendFinder isn't likely to find any pals on Wall Street; Needs IPO to pay debt — FriendFinder Networks, the company formerly known as Penthouse Media Group, is filing to go public to pay off almost a half a billion in debt in an equity market that stinks. Simply put, FriendFinder is launching an IPO Hail Mary to stay alive.
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MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
iPhone fart app pulls in nearly $10,000 a day — Apple's App Store is currently experiencing a plague of fart applications. Last week, I detailed one day in which at least 14 new fart apps were accepted into the store. And now, just in a quick search, it looks like there are about 50 apps …
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Monica Chen / DigiTimes:
Intel insists Atom only for Intel chipsets, does not want to share Nvidia's Ion — Nvidia's recent move to try to extend Intel's Atom ecosystem to its recently announced Ion platform appears to have been knocked back by Intel, according to a response primarily directed at PC manufacturers as seen by Digitimes.
David / weblog.rubyonrails.org:
Merb gets merged into Rails 3! — It's christmas, baby, and do we have a present for you. We're ending the bickering between Merb and Rails with a this bombshell: Merb is being merged into Rails 3! — We all realized that working together for a common good would be much more productive …
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Serkan Toto / CrunchGear:
Sony Japan follows Sony New Zealand with mysterious new Vaio mobile ad — Following Sony New Zealand, Sony Japan today updated its dedicated Vaio website with a mysterious announcement. If you click here [JP], you can see a woman getting out a small UMPC-like object out of her hand bag.
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Facebook Folds In Face Of Massive Litigation, Bans Project Playlist — Just in is a statement from Facebook that they will ban the fast growing (but non-label-sanctioned) music service Project Playlist. Last Friday MySpace banned Project Playlist and removed all traces of the service from its site.
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David / TmoNews:
Blackberry 8900 release date... We've previewed this highly anticipated follow up to the uber popular blackberry curve. We've been gifted with a hands on video from our friends at crackberry.com who gave us a great walkthrough. Now, we have a HOPEFUL release date...February 18th.
Sean Fallon / Gizmodo:
9 Year Old Girl Becomes the Youngest Microsoft Certified Professional — Today's crushing blow to our self confidence comes to us from India, where a 9 year old girl has become the youngest person to ever pass a Microsoft Certified Professional examination.
Karl Bode / DSLreports:
Lafayette Unveils FTTH Pricing - Symmetrical 10Mbps for $29, 30Mbps for $45, or 50Mbps for $58 — The other day we noted that Lafayette, Louisiana was finally getting close to offering municipal fiber to the home, after years of opposition from local incumbents.
Discussion:
Electronista
James Kendrick / jkOnTheRun:
Netbook enthusiast web sites getting C & D using term “netbook” — This is very preliminary but we are hearing that some netbook enthusiast sites are getting “cease & desist” letters from a firm in the UK ordering the sites to stop using the term “netbook”.
Alan Patrick / broadstuff:
FUTURE OF MEDIA PART 1 - WILL USER GENERATED CONTENT DROWN IN ITS OWN OUTPUT? — One of the prime tenets of the Web 2.0 movement has been the democratisation of content creation, leading to Time Magazine's declaration of 2006's Personality of the Year being YOU!
Brian McClendon / The Official Google Blog:
Tracking Santa: the backstory — When I look back on four years of tracking Old St. Nick on Christmas Eve, I can't help but smile. The Santa tracker has really come a long way. I always thought NORAD's Santa Tracker was a great holiday tradition, but I felt like it could have been even better …
Ajay Kamalakaran / Reuters:
RIM accuses Motorola of blocking job offers: report — (Reuters) - BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd sued Motorola Inc over claims the mobile-phone maker is improperly blocking it from offering jobs to laid-off Motorola workers, Bloomberg said. — RIM, in a complaint filed in state court …
