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:
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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 …
Discussion:
ReadWriteWeb, Tech Central, Collaboration 2.0, Workbench, Associated Press, Twist Image, PC World, Todd Watson, Engage, geeksugar, Michael Geist Blog, Digits, VentureBeat, Bits, Increasing your Website's …, Ross Mayfield's Weblog, MSNBC, Telegraph, Webware.com, Jobwire, One By One Media, TECH.BLORGE.com, CircleID, paidContent.org, Alice Hill's Real Tech News, O'Reilly Radar, Voices, Computerworld, The Technology Chronicles and p2pnet
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.
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 …
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.
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Sam Diaz / Between the Lines:Google can't save newspapers; smart to dump print-ad project
Discussion:
Search Engine Watch
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.
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Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:Despite Inauguration, Google & Others Still Think It's President Bush …
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Tech Daily Dose
Stephen Shankland / CNET News:Google search helps provide inauguration subtext
Discussion:
Technologizer
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 …
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 …
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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.
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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.
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Caroline McCarthy / The Social:Inauguration Day, by the numbers — Updated at 2:53 p.m. PST …
Discussion:
paidContent.org, New York Times, Mashable!, Webware.com, MSNBC, CBS News, NewTeeVee, Obsessable, Beet.TV and eWeek
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.
Discussion:
TechCrunch, GPS Obsessed, CNET News, Google Earth Blog, MAKE Magazine, everwas, Bruce Clay, Inc. Blog, Pocket-lint.co.uk and All Points Blog
Matt Pace / Compete Blog:
Amazon Prime Squeezes Already Struggling Rivals — While the 2008 holiday shopping season brought considerable anguish to the retailing industry, Amazon.com was the standout exception. As rivals lick their wounds and look ahead to a challenging 2009, the retailing giant offered them a measure …
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 …
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.
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.
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 …
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.
Bloomberg:
Apple's Disclosures About Jobs's Health Said to Face SEC Review — Jan. 21 (Bloomberg) — U.S. regulators are examining Apple Inc.'s disclosures about Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs's health problems to ensure investors weren't misled, a person familiar with the matter said.
Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
Apple quietly updates $999 white MacBook with unibody specs — Hmmm, what's this? Did Apple just update its lowly, $999 white plastic polycarbonate MacBook to more closely align with its new unibody MacBooks? Why yes, yes it has... sometime in the last 3 days according to Google's cache.
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Recession not so scary to Riverbed; It pays to deliver ROI — If you are a company that offers technology that can cut costs this recession may not look so bad after all. Exhibit A: Riverbed, a wide area network optimization company, that said earnings will be better than expected and announced …
Maggie Shiels / BBC:
Open government — The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through open source technologies and products. — The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley's most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.
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 …
