Techmeme: In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture (Patricia Cohen/New York Times)

4:35 PM ET, December 17, 2010

Top Items:

What's Next for Delicious — Many of you have read the news stories about Delicious that began appearing yesterday. We're genuinely sorry to have these stories appear with so little context for our loyal users. While we can't answer each of your questions individually …

Leena Rao / TechCrunch:

Yahoo Trying To Unload Del.icio.us, Not Shut It Down — Yesterday, a leaked internal Yahoo slide brought us the news that Yahoo will soon be shuttering Del.icio.us, the bookmarking service it bought a few years back. Today, Yahoo has released a statement on the group's blog.

Discussion: digiphile, This is going to be BIG!, Regular Geek, Lifehacker, ProgrammableWeb and Faster Forward

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:

Yahoo Has Hit Rock Bottom And Is In “Absolute Disarray” — Yahoo has hit rock bottom. They've now, finally, had their layoffs. Those that are left are keeping their resumes fresh and don't expect to stay there over the long term. Everything we hear from employees boils down to this - the company is in “absolute disarray.”

Discussion: SmoothSpan Blog, virtualeconomics, TUAW, SiliconANGLE, Gawker, Geek.com and ReadWriteWeb

Wall Street Journal:

Amazon Can't Dent iTunes — On the day Apple Inc. rolled out the Beatles' catalog on its iTunes Store, Amazon.com Inc. fired back with a digital exclusive of its own: The latest album from rap-rocker Kid Rock—whose music still isn't available on iTunes—for just $3.99.

Discussion: Examiner, TechEye, TUAW, The Tech Report, MacRumors, Yahoo! News, Beyond Search, blogs.chron.com, SlashGear, 9 to 5 Mac, The Next Web, Music Ally, MediaPost Raw, iLounge, hypebot, AppleInsider and MacNN, more at Mediagazer »

Jacqui Cheng / Ars Technica:
Apple owns 66% of online music market, Amazon second at 13%

Discussion: Gearlog

Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:

Word Lens Translates Words Inside of Images. Yes Really. — Ever been confused at a restaurant in a foreign country and wish you could just scan your menu with your iPhone and get an instant translation? Well as of today you are one step closer thanks to Word Lens from QuestVisual.

Sean Hollister / Engadget:
Word Lens augmented reality app instantly translates whatever you point it at

Discussion: 9 to 5 Mac, Gizmodo and TUAW

Jon Ying / The Dropbox Blog:

Dropbox hits 1.0! — Hey everyone! — We're super excited to announce the new hotness that we've been cooking up for the past few months: Dropbox 1.0! In addition to hundreds (yep, hundreds) of bug fixes, vastly reduced resource usage (think of it as the Prius model of Dropbox) …

Nicholas Carlson / SAI:

Facebook Stock Sold At $56 Billion Valuation In “Significantly Oversubscribed” Auction — Private shares market Sharespost just sold 165,000 Facebook shares for $25 each. That price implies a $56 billion valuation of Facebook. — In an email to members, Sharespost said that because the auction was …

Discussion: All Facebook

Om Malik / GigaOM:

RIM In Talks To Buy Gist — RIM, the company behind the iconic mobile-messaging platform BlackBerry, is said to be in talks to acquire Seattle-based startup Gist, according to industry sources. While the deal is said to be nearly done, there is always a fair chance that the two parties might not come to an agreement.

Discussion: VentureBeat, IntoMobile, SocialTimes.com, mocoNews, FierceMobileContent, TechFlash, Know Your Cell, Electronista and Xconomy

Amir Efrati / Wall Street Journal:

Google Rejects Connecticut Request for Wi-Fi Data — Connecticut's attorney general said Friday his office may take legal action against Google Inc. after the Internet company rejected his request to turn over personal data it collected inadvertently from unsecured wireless networks.

Discussion: L.A. Times Tech Blog, CNET News, Between the Lines Blog, SAI, TechEye, Mercury News, Reuters and Electronista

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Rupert Murdoch's “Daily” iPad Newspaper Set for January Launch — Want to get a gander at “the Daily,” Rupert Murdoch's much-discussed but still sorta-secret iPad newspaper? Wait a month. — News Corp. plans to launch the publication the week of January 17, multiple sources tell me.

Discussion: App Advice, MacRumors, Digital Trends, Fortune, 9 to 5 Mac, Macgasm, The Next Web, MacStories, SlashGear, iGadgetsReport, BGR, Electronista, everythingiCafe, Erictric, Know Your Mobile, MediaPost Raw, TUAW, SAI, Gawker and iClarified, more at Mediagazer »

Gideon Wald / Google Webmaster Central Blog:

New hacked site notifications in search results — Today we've added a new notification to our search results that helps people know when a site may have been hacked. We've provided notices for malware for years, which also involve a separate warning page.

Discussion: Search Engine Land, Krebs on Security and CNET News

Vint Cerf / The Official Google Blog:

Governments shouldn't have a monopoly on Internet governance — The beauty of the Internet is that it's not controlled by any one group. Its governance is bottoms-up—with academics, non-profits, companies and governments all working to improve this technological wonder of the modern world.

Thanks:hornokplease

John Hilvert / iTnews:
UN mulls internet regulation options

Discussion: CNET News, As Seen Through PeriVisioN, p2pnet, the::unwired and CrunchGear

James Kanter / New York Times:

E.U. Deepens Investigation Into Google — BRUSSELS — European Union authorities have broadened their investigation of Google by accepting two complaints from Germany, one involving a powerful group of newspaper and magazine publishers and the other, a mapping company, officials said on Friday.

Discussion: GigaOM, SiliconANGLE, Post Tech, The Register, MediaPost Raw and Tech Report

Martin Bryant / The Next Web:
EU extends Google investigation to news and mapping

Discussion: Bloomberg

Panos Ipeirotis / A Computer Scientist …:

Mechanical Turk: Now with 40.92% spam. — At this point, Amazon Mechanical Turk has reached the mainstream. Pretty much everyone knows about the concept. Post small tasks online, pay people cents, and get thousands of micro-tasks completed. — Unfortunately, this resulted in some unfortunate trends.

Discussion: ReadWriteWeb and SAI

Patricia Cohen / New York Times:

In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture — With little fanfare, Google has made a mammoth database culled from nearly 5.2 million digitized books available to the public for free downloads and online searches, opening a new landscape of possibilities for research and education in the humanities.

Christopher Finke / Less Talk, More Do:

Tapsure: Better password input on mobile devices — Typing passwords on mobile devices sucks. If you have even a reasonably strong password (one that includes letters, numbers, and special characters), it can take more than a few seconds to type it out on a phone's keypad or on-screen keyboard.

Zack Whittaker / iGeneration Blog:

Facebook adds ‘Memories’: Internal prototype exposed by mistake — Facebook has added ‘Memories’ to the long list of new features rolling out on the site over the last few weeks. This will be particularly useful for college students who struggle to remember the drunken times they have had …

Discussion: BBC, Mashable!, Inside Facebook, The Social Media …, The Next Web, Computerworld, SlashGear, Neowin.net and BuzzFeed

Sam Gustin / Epicenter:
Facebook Briefly Shuts Down After Code Leak

Discussion: Computerworld, msnbc.com, Switched, Techland, Geek.com, Softpedia News, SAI, WebProNews, VatorNews, Network World, Examiner, Tech Report, Runnin' Scared, Mashable!, All Facebook, The Next Web and The Huffington Post

Bianca Bosker / The Huffington Post:

How The World's Technology Juggernaut Lost Its Buzz And Became The ‘Underdog’ — Facebook's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recently took the stage at a joint press conference alongside another large technology company. He described his partner using a once-unthinkable designation.

Amazon.com:

Newspapers and Magazines Coming to Amazon's Buy Once, Read Everywhere Kindle Apps - Starting with Kindle for Android — All of the features customers love about Kindle newspapers and magazines coming to Kindle for Android, including convenience of automatic overnight delivery of subscriptions …

Discussion: Engadget, GigaOM, mocoNews, TechCrunch, The Next Web, Pocket-lint, IntoMobile, Between the Lines Blog, dailywireless.org, Electronista and PalmAddicts, Thanks:richdemuro

Alastair Goldfisher / PE Hub Blog:

Facebook To Make About 15 Talent Acquisitions in 2011 — Next year, look for Facebook to make plenty of small acquisitions to beef up its engineering expertise, like it did with Hot Potato and Drop.io this fall. — That was the message from Michael Brown, corporate development manager at Facebook …

Discussion: ReadWriteWeb

Horace Dediu / asymco:

92 percent of RIM's sales growth came from outside the US — First, a round-up of the quarter's numbers: — 14.2 million devices shipped, sell-through: 12.3 million — expect to ship 14.5 to 15 million units in the next quarter — ASP of approximately $315 — US, UK and Canada are 56% of sales

Discussion: GigaOM, MediaPost Raw, mocoNews and Tech Check

Joe Mullin / paidContent:

The Details Behind The Government's Recent Domain-Name Seizures — When Immigrations & Customs Enforcement agents seized 82 web domain names over the Thanksgiving weekend, it was an unprecedented event—not just because of the scope of the seizures, but also because the web sites grabbed included …

Discussion: Techdirt, TorrentFreak and techPresident

Sam Diaz / Between the Lines Blog:

RIM: “Playbook redefines what a tablet should do” — On Research in Motion's conference call with analysts to discuss third quarter earnings result, there was the obligatory comments about the quarter that just passed - but clearly, one of the biggest topics of interest centered around the upcoming launch of the Playbook tablet.

Discussion: Market Wire, PC World, SlashGear, PhoneDog.com, GottaBeMobile, 9 to 5 Mac, Mobilized, L.A. Times Tech Blog, Crave, CNET News, IntoMobile and Electronista

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CIO challenge 5: Can we find an effective solution that also minimizes operational costs? — Welcome to the next and final installment of our CIO series! After what feels like a thousand cups of coffee …

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