Saturday, December 17, 2005
After months of speculation over Time Warner's plans for AOL, the fix is finally in: Google will pay TW a whopping $1 billion for a 5% stake in the business, giving the AOL group an estimated value of $20 billion. The deal locks the two companies together in a more formal way — AOL is already Google's top source of ad revenue — and leaves Microsoft on the outs in its efforts to carve out a more significant chunk of the sponsored search market.
AP - Time Warner Inc. ended talks with Microsoft Corp. Friday and entered into exclusive negotiations with Google Inc. over a $1 billion investment and a broader advertising partnership with America Online, executives close to the talks said.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
If Google Music Search isn’t for you, check out MusicStrands, a young company that relaunched its site yesterday. The company is based in Corvallis, OR (where is that?) and Barcelona, Spain.
MusicStrands had results for every band I threw at it. Lots of stats, and links to buy music from amazon and iTunes. And it has excellent web 2.0 features as well, including social networking, recommendations and user tagging of music. They also have nice support options for small and indie bands, allowing them to get their music into the mix. Basically, MusicStrands is an excellent resource for finding new music.
An anonymous reader writes "There's been a twist in the Sharman Networks vs record labels case in Australia. Lawyers for the music industry now claim that Sharman's attempt to block Australian IP addresses from accessing the Kazaa website doesn't comply with a court order. As such, they want Kazaa masterminds Nikki Hemming and Kevin Bermeister to go to jail term. The saga began in Feb 2004 and ZDNet Australia has a complete timeline.
AP - The video-game industry saw software sales decline from 2004 levels for a third straight month in November as the launch of Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 console helped erode demand for existing titles.
theodp writes "Christmas has come early to Microsoft. After a 12-year battle with the USPTO, the software giant has been granted a patent for Pausing television programming in response to selection of hypertext link, an invention which 'enables a viewer to arbitrarily pause a television program, access a computer network such as Internet, explore the content available at the viewer's leisure and then resume viewing the program at any time without missing any of it.' Handling the patent for Microsoft was Rick D. Nydegger, Chair of the USPTO's Patent Public Advisory Committee." It would seem like this is the sort of thing that Tim Lee was just talking about. It's a software patent on an idea so obvious that most people wouldn't even bother thinking about it. If you're going to include an interactive functionality within a video where someone would click on something, of course you'd want to pause the video playback when someone clicked.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
AP - Internet search provider Google Inc. announced Tuesday it will expand the workforce at its European headquarters by 600, or 75 percent, over the next two to three years.
An anonymous reader writes "Without tip-toeing around the matter, Linus Torvalds made his preference in the GNOME vs. KDE matter quite clear on the GNOME-usability list: "I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE. This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do. Please, just tell people to use KDE." Also, "Gnome seems to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'.""
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Cory Doctorow: 
The Walletex Wallet Flash is a waterproof USB drive that's the same size and shape as a credit card (though it's a little thicker at 1.9mm), and comes in capacities from 64MB to 2GB. The 128MB model is the only one currently shipping, and runs for $29 each in quantities of 10 or more. Link (via Gizmodo)
FeedBurner is launching FeedFlare tonight - a group of web services that can be integrated by the publisher into her/his feed. FeedFlare is located under the “Optimize” tab within the FeedBurner dashboard.
FeedBurner is also releasing a full set of open APIs to allow third party developers to build and integrate customized services.
Give your subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish by including as many or few of the services listed below. FeedFlare places a simple footer at the bottom of each content item in your feed, helping you to distribute, inform and create a community around your content.
If a publisher chooses to include one or more services, they appear at the bottom of the feed. Currently offered services include:
- Email this - Send a link to your item to someone via email.
- Email author - Allow subscribers to email you directly.
- Technorati Cosmos - Display the number of links to your item from blogs, as measured by Technorati.
- Del.icio.us tags - Lists del.icio.us tags for an item.
- Save to del.icio.us - Allows subscribers to bookmark the item with del.icio.us.
- Count comments - Lists the number of comments posted to an item (for WordPress blogs only).
- Creative Commons - Displays the Creative Commons license that you may have applied to your feed or post.
I’ve added a number of these to the TechCrunch feed. Just look to the bottom of any post, within the feed or in a feed reader.
The really interesting part of this announcement, however, is that FeedBurner is opening up the API and allowing anyone to build in their own services. Del.icio.us competitors, for example, can build their own version of this and promote it to publishers. Or entirely different types of applications can be built. I like having interactive services like these being built directly into the feed.
Media Play is shutting its combined doors. All 61 of the stores in 18 states will be closed by late January, according to a story in my very own Rocky Mountain News. (There’s five stores in Colorado.)
Reader Shawn says he swung by a store in Detroit and found that everything was already 10 to 40 percent off. And get this: They have Xbox 360 games and accessories. I shit you not. Go on, don’t finish reading this, run to the store, get deals.
Shawn says 360 games were 10 percent off and accessories were 20 percent off. I'm hitting one later this morning if I can find time.
Store Locator [Media Play]
Monday, December 12, 2005
Google AdWords Quality Score Includes Landing Page Shor, last week, posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Landing Page Quality Now Influences AdWords Position. He quotes an AdWords Blog from 12/8 describing; Today, we started incorporating a new factor into the Quality Score -- the landing page -- which will ...
AP - A man who posted false information on an online encyclopedia linking a prominent journalist to the Kennedy assassinations says he was playing a trick on a co-worker.
Two professors at the University of Rochester in New York have designed a prototype CMOS chip that uses a fraction of the energy used today, captures better images and can run for years on a single battery. Mark Bocko, professor of electrical and computer engineering and assistant Zeljko Ignjatovic, are also working to incorporate further technology that will compress the image with far fewer computations than current compression techniques. It's likely that the technology will be tested first in wireless...
Yahoo and Six Apart, creator of Movable Type—the most popular software used to create professional blogs—say Yahoo will be the preferred supplier of Movable Type for small businesses.
AP - When it comes to celebrity dog-parenting skills, Joss Stone is tops and Paris Hilton is the worst, according to an online poll of readers of two dog magazines.
Sunday, December 11, 2005
AP - A man who posted false information on an online encyclopedia linking a prominent journalist to the Kennedy assassinations says he was playing a trick on a co-worker.
The Brits have gone and done Pac-Manhattan .. sort of. The onward march of technology means that this time the participants receive real-time updates direct to their mobiles, and they've called it Pac-Lan:
This game takes place in real space as well as on a mobile phone screen. Called Pac-Lan, the game enables players to keep track of one another's position through images on their mobile phones as they chase one another round campus.
Students chasing each other around campus? Whatever next? Don't tell me.. cherry-popping and electro music..
Dude got out a soldering iron and everything: how to hardware hack the Dreamcast to harness its native VGA output capability.
The commentors over at Digg point out that plugging in a VGA converter cable or VGA box will do more or less the same thing; you have to admire the clean work of the man with the nimble fingers, though.
Dreamcast VGA hack [via Digg]
Looks like pearLyrics creator Walter Ritter may want to count himself lucky that he got off with a cease and desist. The music publishing industry has announced plans to go after copyright infringers in a big way, and they want to jail the operators of web sites that publish song lyrics and sheet music. Authorities should "throw in some jail time I think we'll be a little more effective," Music Publishers Association president Lauren Keiser told the BBC. While this is a case of a business having an apparently legitimate complaint — sheet music and lyrics are copyrighted works — the response appears to be typical music-industry overkill. Let's just hope the publishers stick to their plans to go after "very big sites," and doesn't start demanding that teenage kids who run Britney fan sites be dragged off in cuffs. (Then again, maybe a little jail time is what they need to convince them that their taste in music is questionable at best.)
Sam just let us know that you can now get your Firefox fix anytime, any place, and on almost any machine. Portable Firefox 1.5 now has the cross-platform goodness, and you can get it from theplaceforitall.com. One little trick to getting this to work on OS X: you have to manually type the exact name of your removable drive in a text file. The best thing about this particular tool is when you start the Mac side, a little script runs to synchronize your profile and keeps things compatible (since there are some incosistencies between versions). Now if someone can add Linux to the mix...
[via Download Squad]
AFP - Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that is the product of collaboration of its users, has become a major force on the Internet, but faces a crisis after a false biography raised questions about its credibility.
