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6:05 AM ET, January 21, 2009

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Jason Kottke / kottke.org:
The country's new robots.txt file  —  Here's a small and nerdy measure of the huge change in the executive branch of the US government today.  Here's the robots.txt file from whitehouse.gov yesterday: … And it goes on like that for almost 2400 lines!  Here's the new Obamafied robots.txt file:
RELATED:
The White House:
Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov  —  Welcome to the new WhiteHouse.gov. I'm Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House and one of the people who will be contributing to the blog.  —  A short time ago, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States …
Anthony Ha / VentureBeat:
WhiteHouse.gov takes a page from Twitter's playbook
Discussion: MediaShift, louisgray.com and SheGeeks
Spencer Spinnell / Traditional Media:
Turning the page on Print Ads  —  Labels: Announcements, Google Print Ads  —  In the last few months, we've been taking a long, hard look at all the things we are doing to ensure we are investing our resources in the projects that will have the biggest impact for our users and partners.
RELATED:
Sam Diaz / Between the Lines:   Google can't save newspapers; smart to dump print-ad project
The Official Google Blog:
Search findings from the U.S. presidential inauguration  —  Today, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States of America.  As we observed throughout the presidential campaign, many people in the U.S. turned to Google Search to find information.
Discussion: VentureBeat
RELATED:
Stephen Shankland / CNET News:
Google search helps provide inauguration subtext
Discussion: Technologizer
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
Despite Inauguration, Google & Others Still Think It's President Bush …
Discussion: Tech Daily Dose
BIZ / Twitter Blog:
Inauguration Day on Twitter  —  It was a big day at Twitter HQ today and it's not even noon yet.  We saw 5x normal tweets-per-second and about 4x tweets-per-minute as this chart illustrates.  Overall, Twitter sailed smoothly through the inauguration but at the peak, some folks did experience a 2-5 minute delay receiving updates.
RELATED:
Heather Dougherty / Hitwise Intelligence:
Twitter catches up to Digg  —  Twitter has become a popular pastime for many who like to update their daily thoughts and activates, as well as for the voyeurs who just enjoy reading the tweets.  Last week, the market share of visits to Twitter surpassed Digg for the first time since launch and was ranked #84 …
RELATED:
Daniel Terdiman / CNET News:
Hitwise: Twitter surpasses Digg's market share
Discussion: Gawker
Brian Krebs / Security Fix:
Payment Processor Breach May Be Largest Ever  —  A data breach last year at Princeton, N.J., payment processor Heartland Payment Systems may have compromised tens of millions of credit and debit card transactions, the company said today.  —  If accurate, such figures may make the Heartland incident …
RELATED:
Joel Hruska / Ars Technica:
Malware infestation responsible for credit card data breach
Discussion: Zero Day
Aidan Malley / AppleInsider:
Apple's iPhone may have outsold Android nearly 6-to-1  —  While Apple may not have had the strongest of holiday sales for Macs and iPods, estimates for sales of iPhone 3G versus T-Mobile's G1 may show Apple's device having outsold one of its closest competitors by a ratio of six to one in the US alone.
RELATED:
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
Word Cloud Analysis of Obama's Inaugural Speech Compared to Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Lincoln's  —  Barack Obama was just sworn in as President of the US and though he stumbled in repeating his oath, the speech that followed was delivered flawlessly and was widely praised around the web.
MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
Pictures: President Obama's inauguration, as seen from space  —  The other day I wrote about how the GeoEye-1 satellite would be taking images of President Obama's inauguration from 423 miles up — in space.  This could only have worked on a clear day so clouds didn't block the view.
Alex Pham / L.A. Times Tech Blog:
Linden Lab acquires Xtreet and OnRez, brokers of virtual goods for Second Life  —  Is the real economy dragging you down?  Hop into Second Life, where the virtual world's gross domestic product jumped 54% in the fourth quarter!  —  Residents of Second Life traded $100.8 million worth …
Daniel Shen / DigiTimes:
Microsoft expected to deliver Windows Mobile 6.5 OS to handset makers in mid-2009, say sources  —  Microsoft is expected to start delivering its Windows Mobile 6.5 OS (operating system) to handset makers in mid-2009 following the expected debut of the new mobile OS in the upcoming Mobile World Congress …
Frederic Lardinois / ReadWriteWeb:
Real-Time News: PubSub Gets Ready for a Comeback  —  In 2002, PubSub released an interesting and useful product that provided a real-time search engine for RSS feeds, flight information, Usenet posts, and even earthquake updates.  Sadly, PubSub closed its doors in 2007 and its assets were bought by Something Simpler.
Discussion: broadstuff
Aza Raskin / Mozilla Labs:
Test Pilot: Vision  —  How many tabs does an average user use at a time?  How about novice users?  How often is the stop button pressed?  How many times do people open a new tab to perform a search?  —  There are hundreds of questions like these whose answers would help quantitatively inform the design process of Firefox.
Reuters:
Microsoft expected to cut jobs as profit weakens  —  NEW YORK/BOSTON (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp is expected to post a quarterly profit that misses its own target and announce thousands of job cuts this week as the global economic slump hurts even the technology industry's biggest players.
Jesus Diaz / Gizmodo:
Android G2 Photos: Thinner and No Keyboard  —  Here they are: Alleged spy photos of the second generation Android cellphone, the thinner, shinier, and totally lickable T-Mobile G2 made by HTC.  It has no keyboard and its back looks oh-so-soap-bar-smooth:  —  As you can see, it has a 3.2 megapixel camera.
mediadonis.net:
The Hyves Hype!  —  It really sounds strange, but mysteriously it just works...  At the moment, it's possible to check if a domain got penalized for selling links (or lost pagerank due any other kind of malicious activity).  —  The only thing you gotta do is put “hyves” as a subdomain in front of the domain to be checked.
Raju Vegesna / Zoho Blogs:
Google Notebook Import, New Zoho Notebook Plug-in & more...  After we rolled out an update last week with several enhancements to Zoho Notebook, we got several requests from users asking us to further enhance the app with some specific features.  We now updated Zoho Notebook with some of these new features …
Gavin Steacy / Tom's Hardware Guide:
Seagate's Update Bricking Working HDDs  —  Seagate recently released a preventative firmware update for Barracuda 7200.11 drives affected by a faulty firmware which caused the drive to lock up and fail to be detected by the BIOS.  Unfortunately, the updating process has not gone smoothly for many people …
Michael Pinto / Fanboy.com:
Social Media “Experts” are the Cancer of Twitter (and Must Be Stopped)  —  Nearly a day goes by on Twitter without yet another social media “expert” choosing to stalk me.  At first it started innocently — back in the day (about a year ago) various techie friends started …
Apple:
iWork '09: Serial number not required for installation of retail boxes  —  iWork '09 retail boxes no longer come with a serial number.  Install iWork '09 from the enclosed disc and you're ready to go.  —  Products Affected  —  iWork '09  —  Though retail versions of iWork '09 no longer come …
 
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 More Items: 
Associated Press:
Ericsson reports profit drop, to cut 5,000 jobs
Kevin C. Tofel / jkOnTheRun:
ASUS Bringing Phoenix HyperSpace into Next Gen Notebooks: Who Pays?
Discussion: SlashGear and Engadget
Urmee Khan / Telegraph:
Google boss denies ‘screwing’ music industry and defends YouTube in Warner row
Discussion: Beyond Search
Dan Goodin / The Register:
New OS X research warns of stealthier Mac attacks
Richard Waters / blogs.ft.com:
Microsoft's money backs an IBM adversary - again
Discussion: Ars Technica
Joseph Tartakoff / The Microsoft Blog:
Microsoft considers moving 30 percent of vendors off-site
Ian King / Bloomberg:
Intel Raises Possibility of a Loss in First Quarter, Ending 21-Year Streak
Discussion: Tech Trader Daily
 Earlier Items: 
Mike Tedesco / Mac Mojo:
Entourage for Exchange Web Services Beta is Live!
Joseph Tartakoff / The Microsoft Blog:
Microsoft won't cut perks, but here's how much they cost
Discussion: Computerworld and Beyond Binary
Randall C. Kennedy / PC World:
What Will Become of Windows Vista?
Discussion: Smalltalk Tidbits …
InfoWorld:
Eclipse PHP upgrade tackles object-oriented programming
Discussion: The Register
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
An Outsider Gets A Peek Behind The Scenes Of The Music Industry's …
Eric Savitz / Tech Trader Daily:
Microsoft Sells Entire Comcast Stake
 

 
From Mediagazer:

Lachlan Cartwright / The Ankler:
Sources: MSNBC renewed Rachel Maddow's contract early this fall, but with a pay cut; MSNBC bosses' plan to shake up daytime and weekend programming

Caitlin Huston / The Hollywood Reporter:
Internal memo: Hearst Magazines president announces layoffs as part of a decision to “reallocate resources” to “continue our focus on digital innovation”

Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced she will leave the agency on January 20; she was the first woman to be confirmed to lead the agency

 
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