Top Items:
Matt Marshall / SiliconBeat:
Friday's essentials from Silicon Valley — Lot of developments to report, so here's a smorgasbord: —Socialtext wins SAP's backing: SocialText, the Palo Alto wiki and social software company, has finally scored more backing, this time from software giant SAP — more on this later.
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Search Engine Watch Blog
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Matt Cutts:
UI fun: Remove result — One request we sometimes hear is for the ability to modify Google results, especially to block unwanted sites. A few eagle-eyed people may have noticed a user-interface experiment on Google that adds the ability to remove results. Here's what you'd see.
Edward W. Felten / Freedom to Tinker:
Google Print, Damages and Incentives — There's been lots of discussion online of this week's lawsuit filed against Google by a group of authors, over the Google Print project. Google Print is scanning in books from four large libraries, indexing the books' contents, and letting people do Google-style searches on the books' contents.
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Infothought
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William Patry / The Patry Copyright Blog:Google Revisited — On Tuesday, The Authors Guild filed suit …
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Tom Raftery's I.T. views
CNET News.com:
Microsoft's nightmare inches closer to reality — As early as May 1995, three months before Netscape Communications' initial public offering sparked the dot-com boom, Microsoft executives were worried that the nascent World Wide Web could one day become a significant threat to the Windows franchise.
Ryan Block / Engadget:
Buy a TiVo starting September 6, get a service contract — We know how much people hate paying for service on their gadgets—let alone being under service contracts for said service. But damned if TiVo didn't just totally stick it to their user base by instituting a $150 "service commitment" …
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Techdirt
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Robert A. Guth / Wall Street Journal:
Battling Google, Microsoft Changes How It Builds Software — Delay in New Windows Version — Drove Giant to Develop — Simpler, Flexible Product — Engineers Get Trip to 'Bug Jail' — REDMOND, Wash. — Jim Allchin, a senior Microsoft Corp. executive, walked into Bill Gates's office …
Daniel Terdiman / Cellular | News.blog:
Free 411 for the mobile masses — Demofall — If you've ever been driving around, trying futilely to find a specific restaurant but refusing to call directory assistance on your cell phone because it's too expensive, the folks at Jingle Networks may have a solution.
Robert X. Cringely / pbs.org:
Google Goes Las Vegas — An AdWords Experiment Shows Why at Google, the House Always Wins — Google is in the news everywhere lately. They are filching executives from Microsoft, and Microsoft is conveniently forgetting how Redmond did the same and worse to Borland.
Tom Evslin / Fractals of Change:
eBay Overbid — That happens sometimes in auctions but Skype would have been overpriced for eBay at half the price. (Full disclosure: I envy and admire the Skype team). Skype did manage to create a huge amount of value in a short amount of time. Meg Whitman is usually both strategically …
Who da'Punk / Mini-Microsoft:
Microsoft Company Meeting 2005 — (Updated: reposted with Post-Company Meeting immediate reactions.) — Pre Company Meeting — So I'm getting ready for the Microsoft Company Meeting, ready to get to campus early and jump on a bus and get my morning box lunch, feeling deep sympathy …
Discussion:
Microsoft Weblog
David Weinberger / Joho the Blog:
Public Radio Program Directors — I'm in St. Louis for the annual PRPD meeting. Jeff Jarvis, Jennifer Ferro (KCRW) and I are on a panel in 45 minutes on "Technology, Culture and Public Radio." For me, the interesting question is: Given that the Net is disaggregating radio stations and networks …
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BuzzMachine
tbray.org:
New England Town Meeting — On the 16th of this month, the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council hosted a meeting at which Eric Kriss, the state's Secretary for Administration and Finance, and Peter Quinn, the CIO, discussed the state's recent proposal to standardize on the Open Document Format.
