Top Items:
Dale Dougherty / O'Reilly Radar:
Admiring Bill Gates — Dare I say this on O'Reilly Radar? I admire Bill Gates. If I had a vote for Person of the Year, Gates would get mine. Let me explain why. — This year, Gates made an important and potentially difficult transition at age 52, leaving Microsoft as CEO and devoting …
Rochelle Garner / Bloomberg:
Silicon Valley Braces for Firings as Technology Outlook Worsens — A A A — Dec. 24 (Bloomberg) — Silicon Valley, the technology mecca once considered immune to fallout from the global financial meltdown, now faces the biggest cutbacks since the dot-com crash.
Discussion:
HipMojo.com
Jessica E. Vascellaro / Wall Street Journal:
OMG, We're Not BFFs Anymore? Getting ‘Unfriended’ Online Stings — Users of Social-Networking Sites Delete Friends Who Don't Keep in Touch, Misbehave — JoAna Swan recently purged her profile on social-networking site Facebook Inc. of friends she hadn't spoken to for a while.
Azadeh Ensha / New York Times:
There's Lots of Tech Help, Yes, on the Internet — THIS week, I bought a shiny new BlackBerry. This made me very happy. Then I went home and found that my new BlackBerry was inundating my in-box with copies of my sent e-mail messages. This made me very frustrated.
Ed Bott / Ed Bott's Windows Expertise:
A Yule Log for your LCD — I confess I had completely forgotten about the Yule Log visualization for Windows Media Player, which originally appeared as part of the Windows Media Bonus Pack for XP back in 2002. Like most visualizations, it hadn't been updated in years and didn't work with newer Media Player versions.
Discussion:
Addicted to Digital Media
PewResearch.org:
Internet Overtakes Newspapers as News Source — The internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as a main source for national and international news. — Currently, 40% say they get most of their news …
Saul Hansell / Bits:
Future Bits: Google's Machiavellianism — Defining Moment of 2008: Google's offer to help Yahoo fend off Microsoft's hostile takeover bid. — Google's response to Microsoft's bid for Yahoo may represent one of the most brilliant acts of corporate Machiavellianism in recent history.
Discussion:
Beyond Search
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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Om Malik / GigaOM:
Is Time Warner Having Second Thoughts About Bebo? — Most would agree that Time Warner overpaid when it bought social network Bebo back in March. Given the challenges faced by the company's online businesses since then, among them declining ad sales and the difficulty of monetizing social networks …
Daniel / Disqus:
Facebook Connect now available on Disqus — We began our Facebook Connect integration with our announcement last week. Tonight, all websites using Disqus now have the option to enable Facebook Connect. — If you've already added your Facebook API Key to Disqus, note that you will also need …
Richard Behar / Fox News:
World Bank Admits Top Tech Vendor Debarred for 8 Years — For months, the World Bank has been stonewalling and denying a series of FOX News reports on a variety of in-house scandals, ranging from the hacking of its most sensitive financial data to its own sanctions against suppliers found guilty of wrongdoing.
internetnews.com:
Acer, Best Buy Slash XP Netbook Price to $299 — At ever-cheaper prices, netbooks are looking like a big holiday seller. But can it last? — Experts and PC industry insiders have long wondered whether bare-bones netbooks were too cheap for manufacturers' own good. — But don't tell that to Acer.
Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:
The Rise of Cloud Agents — It was only this morning that we were lamenting about the lack of the perfect social tool when what did we stumble across but Twitchboard? No, no, it's not the perfect tool, silly, it's a Twitter app. Yet what it does is something that no other Twitter apps have done before …
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
RIAA Apparently Unable To Stop Lawsuits In Motion — from the legal-inertia? dept — Following last week's announcement that the RIAA was going to back off using mass lawsuits, some were pretty confused by the RIAA's subsequent claim that it had actually stopped filing such lawsuits back in August.
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