Top Items:
Saul Hansell / New York Times:
AOL Coaxes Google to Try Busier Ads — Users of Google's search engine will soon see something they are not used to on the notoriously spare site: advertising with logos and graphics. And the advertisers will not be limited to America Online, whose talks with Google prompted the change in policy …
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Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Watch Blog:
More On AOL Pushing Google Into Graphic Ads & AOL Promotion — AOL Coaxes Google to Try Busier Ads from the New York Times dives deeper into details that emerged earlier this week about how Google will help promote AOL as part of the bid to retain the company as a Google partner …
Discussion:
SearchViews
San Francisco Chronicle:
Icahn rips into AOL's $1 billion Google deal — Investor tells Time Warner board that pact could prevent more lucrative merger — Google's plans to buy a piece of AOL for $1 billion encountered opposition Monday when billionaire investor Carl Icahn called the plan potentially disastrous …
Evan Hansen / Wired News:
Wikipedia Founder Edits Own Bio — Sleuthing into the accuracy of the open-source web encyclopedia known as Wikipedia has led to the door of its founder, Jimmy Wales. — Public edit logs reveal that Wales has changed his own Wikipedia bio 18 times, deleting phrases describing former …
Elinor Mills / CNET News.com:
Reuters video to get mass distribution — International news agency Reuters is launching a pilot program on Tuesday that will allow blogs, news organizations and other online publishers to show Reuters news video on their Web sites. — The video affiliate network program will enable Web site operators …
useit.com:
One Billion Internet Users … Some time in 2005, we quietly passed a dramatic milestone in Internet history: the one-billionth user went online. Because we have no central register of Internet users, we don't know who that user was, or when he or she first logged on.
Ryan Naraine / eWEEK.com:
MS Research: Typo-Squatters Are Gaming Google — Researchers at Microsoft Corp. have blown the lid off a large-scale, typo-squatting scheme that uses multi-layer URL redirection to game Google's AdSense for domains program. — The scheme was uncovered when Redmond lab rats decided to extend …
Yahoo! Search blog:
Time Saving Search Shortcuts — I'm addicted to shortcuts. Shave 5 minutes from my commute by exiting 2 streets early and cutting through the back roads? I'm there. And with the Internet I'm always looking for ways to do things faster. — Fortunately, one of our engineers, Kannan, is equally impatient.
Discussion:
Lifehacker, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch Blog, Marketing Pilgrim and Labnotes
Ian Austen / New York Times:
U.S. Patent Office Likely to Back BlackBerry Maker — OTTAWA, Dec. 19 - The technology patents at the heart of an infringement lawsuit by NTP against Research In Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry wireless e-mail device, are likely to be struck down by the United States patent office …
Discussion:
business2blog
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Dave Sifry / Technorati Weblog:
Making Technorati easier to use — We just rolled out a whole raft of improvements and tweaks that are built to make Technorati easier to use and easier to understand. A few things that we rolled out: — Charts. Get live, updated charts on what people are saying about stuff you care about …
O'Reilly Network:
PROXY HACK — Google free proxy! — Access restricted web sites using Google language tools service as a proxy. — Contributed by: bigthistle — A little tutorial found on the italian site www.manuali.net inspired me for this hack. That tutorial suggests to translate a webpage …
Om Malik on Broadband:
Need For Speed... How Real? — After years of being stuck in the slow lane, the US consumers are finally going to get a massive speed upgrade and taste the true broadband for the first time. From a 512 Kbps world to 6 Mbps, then 8 and soon 15 Mbps.... it seems the future has finally arrived.
Keith Reed / Boston Globe:
If we're Tech City, where's our WiFi? — Advocates blame delay of a key study, need for project czar — Wireless data networks are being installed free of charge in cities across the nation. But Boston, a city with a reputation for innovation and more than twice the population …
Discussion:
broadband
rexblog.com:
Public Relations lesson of the day: A long time ago, I was in the public relations business. I can't tell you how many times I advised a particular client to do exactly what Dave Winer is saying this morning: … Dave has a consistent platform, scripting.com, and he passionately writes there about his point-of-view.
Discussion:
Weblogs Work
Declan McCullagh / CNET News.com:
Pro-Hollywood bill aims to restrict digital tuners — A new proposal in Congress could please Hollywood studios, which are increasingly worried about Internet piracy, by embedding anticopying technology into the next generation of digital video products. — If the legislation were enacted …
Discussion:
TeleRead
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Bill Burnham / Burnham's Beat:
Google Base + Vertical Search + RSS = Death of Walled Gardens — A few weeks ago, I promised to write a follow-up on my post about Google Base that detailed how the launch of Google Base might affect the Internet's so-called "Walled Gardens" (content sites that charge users and/or suppliers for access to their databases).