Top Items:

Built To Be Bought (Bubble 2.0) — Over the last couple of months I've noticed an increasing sense of unease in the venture community about the trend in Web 2.0 company creation and financing events. While no one is officially willing to peg it Bubble 2.0 for fear of missing the next great opportunity …

BUDGET LAUNCHES BLOG-BASED, SIXTEEN CITY TREASURE HUNT — In a first, Car rental company Budget has launched a blog-based, four-week, 16-city treasure hunt, called UP YOUR BUDGET, which offers a total of $160,000 in prizes. To win, participants must find a sticker which has been placed …
Discussion:
Blogspotting, gapingvoid, B.L. Ochman's weblog, The Voice of Online …, Micro Persuasion and Weblogs Work

Why You Should Pay to Read This — IN a bedroom in New Jersey, there is a shrine to Entertainment Weekly. A 17-year-old who lives there - that would be my daughter Erin - has the magazine's covers on her wall, and she divines a film's artistic value and business prospects with close readings of the magazine.

Google spam suite primer — Google provides a full suite of services for the entry-level blog spammer. There are plenty of legitimate uses for all of these Google services, but Google's market-leading position in search creates a spam ecosystem that inflates corporate revenues, index size, and user data.

Poor Nations Are Littered With Old PC's, Report Says — Waste from electronic devices littered a neighborhood in Nigeria. Computer monitors can contain large amounts of toxic materials. — Much of the used computer equipment sent from the United States to developing countries for use in homes …

No Longer Safe for Work: Blogs — Robert Mason (not his real name) would love to spend a few minutes during lunch catching up on blog posts from around the web, but his company doesn't allow it. The financial institution where Mason works as a vice president has security filters set …

Once It Was Direct to Video, Now It's Direct to the Web — IT was a late night in Seattle. It was probably raining. Scilla Andreen was still haunting the offices of her as-yet-to-be-started Internet movie company, IndieFlix, when the phone rang. It was - no surprise - a young filmmaker.

Techcrunch Tsunami — Last night, I went to megablogger Mike Arrington's Techcrunch party, akin to an open house for nerds, if one can imagine such a locale on tony Atherton's main drag, with free food, drinks, and a TV screen for blasting demos of new products. Instead of paying cash, people brought their new ideas.
Discussion:
ben barren
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BlogOn 2005 — The Copacabana Hotel in Manhattan is said to be an excellent place to enjoy salsa. This week it was also a place to enjoy a discussion about the past, present, and future of blogging as more than three-hundred people gathered at BlogOn 2005.

Cingular Introduces E-Mail Access on Cells — NEW YORK - Cingular Wireless is introducing a service for nonbusiness users to get BlackBerry-like mobile access to their personal e-mail accounts from AOL, Yahoo and MSN Hotmail on a cell phone. — The new service, powered by OZ Communications Inc. …

The Village Voice, Pushing 50, Prepares to Be Sold to a Chain of Weeklies — The company that publishes The Village Voice and five other alternative newspapers is to announce today an agreement to be acquired by New Times Media, the largest publisher in the market.
Discussion:
PaidContent.org

Missing The Point On Amateur Content Online — from the it's-amateur-for-a-reason dept. — Nicholas Carr has a way about him: he comes up with impressive theories that sound so smart — but which are often painfully wrong. However, he does a good job of leading you down the road …

Good News - People are Social Animals — It turns out that we voluntarily do thing we don't get paid for, even for strangers. Sometimes we even do good anonymously. Now go figure. What a way to screw up the economists' models. — This aberrant and apparently unmotivated behavior …

A guided tour of the Microsoft Command Shell — Introduction — The Windows community is a universe of uniformity in which users depend on robust commercial applications and standard graphical utilities. With the Vista release right around the proverbial corner, Microsoft is engaged in much-needed reinvention.

Revisionist curmudgeons — Predictably, the backlashers are trying to make their marks and get their linkjuice by arguing that this web/citizens/blog thing just ain't what it's being blown up to be. But so much of the antihype is even sillier than the hype.