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3:35 PM ET, May 16, 2009

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Matt Marshall / VentureBeat:
Facebook raises $150 million more to cash out employees  —  Facebook has almost finished raising $150 million in capital, in an extraordinary move by the company to buy out shares of hundreds of regular employees.  —  Hundreds of the Palo Alto, Calif.'s employees have now toiled at the company …
RELATED:
C.K. Sample III / Sample the Web:
Fun with Wolfram Alpha  —  Wolfram Alpha, a new computational search engine, launched last night.  Instead of merely searching a corpus of information to present possible answers based on keywords (what Google does), Wolfram Alpha actually uses computers to attempt to answer your questions …
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Wolfram/Alpha launches: Can it break out of niche-ville?
Discussion: Technologizer
Meg / meish dot org:
Game Web 2.Over?  —  This collage of web 2.0 logos should be pretty familiar to many people by now.  It's been knocking about for a few years, ever since the whole Web 2.0 Koolaid (what's the British equivalent?  Ribena?) started flowing.  —  During that time, I've seen it printed …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Digg Chief Architect Joe Stump Teams With Social Thing's Matt Galligan To Found Crash Corp.  —  It must be something in the air.  Spring perhaps.  But when high level employees start to leave perfectly good startups before a liquidity event, there's usually something pretty important that they think they need to work on.
Discussion: joestump.net and VTOR, Thanks:blogfisher
RELATED:
Jolie O'Dell / ReadWriteWeb:
Digg Lead Architect & Socialthing!  Founder Start Mobile Gaming Company
Discussion: Mashable!, Thanks:bobcaswell
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Longer Queries Driving Down Ad Impressions?  How About Bankrupt Advertisers?  —  Comscore has a fascinating post today talking about the relative decline in paid search ad clicks when compared to search query volume in the U.S. Search queries are up 68% in the last year, but paid clicks are up only 18% in the same period.
Discussion: Traffick
RELATED:
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
Apple Serious About Background App Support For iPhone 3.0  —  Apple (AAPL) is serious about letting more iPhone software — beyond its native apps like phone, iPod, and Mail — run in the background, we've heard from sources in the mobile industry.  This could potentially happen as soon …
RELATED:
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Apple Is Indeed Talking About Opening iPhone Background Tasks  —  As great as the iPhone is, it has one glaring weakness: The inability to run third-party applications in the background.  That badly cripples certain types of apps, such as those that do instant messaging, music streaming and location-based services.
Discussion: Daring Fireball
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Rumors Regarding Background App Support in iPhone 3.0
Discussion: Gizmodo
John Borthwick / Silicon Alley Insider:
The Rise Of Social Distribution Networks  —  Over the past year there has been a rapid shift in social distribution online.  I believe this evolution represents an important change in how people find and use things online.  —  At betaworks I am seeing some of our companies get 15-20% …
Thanks:atul
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
New Danger Mouse CD Released As A Blank CD-R Due To Legal Fight With EMI  —  If you follow copyright issues, you're no doubt aware of Danger Mouse.  He's the DJ who got quite a lot of attention a few years back for creating one of the very first mainstream mashups — mixing the Beatle's …
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
This Is Getting Ridiculous: Cat Amasses Half A Million Twitter Followers In 3 Months  —  Ok, I dig Twitter and I understand why celebrities - who continue to flock to the service as if their careers and social status depend on it - manage to attract massive amounts of users following …
Andrew Warner / Mixergy.com:
PR Lies Destroy Your Understanding of How Business Really Works.  - With Owen Byrne  —  You know that much of what you learned about how businesses were built is bull, right?  It's a collection of anecdotes created by PR people whose job is to promote their clients-not to give us an honest business education.
Discussion: CenterNetworks
Joe Wilcox:
Is Twitter @replies Change Ashton Kutcher's Fault?  —  Analysis.  My immediate reaction is “yes,” after reading Dare Obasanjo's post “Why Twitter's Engineers Hate the @replies feature.”  OK, so maybe CNN and Oprah, also members of the “million-followers club,” share the blame.
RELATED:
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life:
Why Twitter's Engineers Hate the @replies feature
Discussion: WebProNews, Pulse2 and Epicenter
 
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 More Items: 
Elizabeth Woyke / Forbes:
Google's Gaffes  —  Two of the Internet giant's open competitions …
Tomio Geron / Venture Capital Dispatch:
Backed Into A Corner, Child Star Twitter Speaks!
Chris Dannen / Fast Company:
10 Questions About the Facebook Hack Attacks
Discussion: eWeek and Switched
David Eaves / eaves.ca:
Vancouver enters the age of the open city
Discussion: The Open Road, Open Source and open
Nick O'Neill / All Facebook:
Facebook Prepares To Launch Live Video Chat Product
Discussion: NewTeeVee and Mashable!, Thanks:mrinaldesai
Gregg Keizer / Computerworld:
Google's Chrome was ‘hackable’ at Pwn2Own contest
Jacqui Cheng / Ars Technica:
crackho.com DNS prank ruffles Sarah Palin's feathers
Discussion: digg.com
 Earlier Items: 
Erica Ogg / CNET News:
Sony hires a professional fixer
Discussion: The eBook Test
Eric Eldon / VentureBeat:
Google improves Blog Search, but not by much
Alexander Haislip / PE Hub Blog:
Apple Buying Eye-Tracking Devices
Mark Milian / L.A. Times Tech Blog:
Social Status: The guy who spread Keyboard Cat fever
Discussion: Global Nerdy
Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Apple 2.0:
Pushing the App Store price envelope
Discussion: 148Apps.biz
Mark Cuban / blog maverick:
How Twitter and Facebook Now Compete with Google
Discussion: Techdirt and Beyond Search
Tom Steinert-Threlkeld / Between the Lines:
Jeff Bezos, meet Tony Hsieh.  Zappos Moving into Electronics.  And More.
 

 
From Mediagazer:

Jonathan Stempel / Reuters:
A New York judge finds Sirius XM liable for a difficult subscription cancellation process; Sirius says it will appeal but abide by a new “click-to-cancel” rule

Brian Steinberg / Variety:
Sources: NBCUniversal Vice Chairman Bonnie Hammer plans to leave the company at the end of the year; she has been with the company since 2004

Peter Kafka / Business Insider:
A Q&A with Chris Balfe, CEO of Red Seat Ventures, which has helped Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly set up their podcast and streaming businesses and sell ads

 
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