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The New Boom … Be careful what you wish for, all of you with the "Please, God, just one more bubble!" bumper stickers. It's getting wild again in Silicon Valley. In recent months, the breathtaking ascent of Google has lit a fire under its competitors, which include practically everyone in the online world.
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Venture Capital Blogs? They're About Anything But — BILLBURNHAM was having lunch with a fellow venture capitalist at a restaurant in Mountain View, Calif., two weeks ago when the topic turned to secrecy. His lunch mate had been describing a new Internet search start-up company he was investing in …
Discussion:
Mark Evans

Change is good! — We have some great changes in MSN Spaces. — Have a picture that has a great story around it...you can now add a description to your photos. Your viewers can now add comment to photos as well as blogs. So make sure to go to someone's photo album and leave a comment on your favorite photo as well.

MICROSOFT FISCAL 2006 Q2 RESULTS — This afternoon, Microsoft announced results for its fiscal 2006 second quarter, ended December 31. While the company's seven business units report separate P&Ls, the units are now contained within three larger business groups.

SuitSat — Using a simple police scanner or ham radio, you can listen to a disembodied spacesuit circling Earth. — January 26, 2006: One of the strangest satellites in the history of the space age is about to go into orbit. Launch date: Feb. 3rd. That's when astronauts onboard …

Crecente: Schlock wave — Director's juggernaut of atrocious video game films mystifies critics, players — Uwe Boll makes movies everyone hates. — And he won't stop. — While the German-born director's ability to turn a mediocre video game into a truly reviled film is notorious …

How Not To Deal With Blogs: A Case Study — From time to time, I get asked by people at various companies "about blogs and stuff", in particular how companies can best deal with blogs from a PR and marketing perspective. Two things I stress are sincerity and honesty.

THE STORY DOESN'T CARE: AN INTERVIEW WITH SEAN STEWART — As I mentioned earlier in the week, I'm interested in alternate reality games, not just as an advertising journalist, but as a writer. While working on a recent story for Creativity, I did a long phone interview with sci-fi novelist …

AdSense silently adds a 90-day time limit on AdSense referrals — A thread over at DigitalPoint points out that Google AdSense has quietly added a new term to all AdSense referrals generated by a publisher. They have now instituted a 90-day time limit on that referral …
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NEWS 2.0 IS NOT JOURNALISM — Om's right. He says that the news 2.0 startups aren't doing journalism. But News 2.0 isn't about journalism. It's about news. — The key to understanding what is working in "Citizen Journalism" is that they're first-person accounts.

Royal Bank of Scotland opts for open source intranet — From Apache and Perl, to Python and Zope... The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has revealed it is working on a large content management system (CMS) based on the open source application server Zope. — At the end of last year …
Discussion:
Datamation IT News Blog

Torvalds: No GPL 3 for Linux — update Linus Torvalds said Wednesday that he won't convert Linux to version 3 of the General Public License, as he objects to digital rights management provisions in the proposed update. — The position is a significant—though not entirely unexpected …
Discussion:
Shore Communications Inc., Open Source, technology filter, tecosystems, GROKLAW and Between the Lines

VNU Business Media Europe buys the INQUIRER — VNU Business Publications Ltd, the London-based publishing arm of VNU Business Media Europe (BME), has purchased The Inquirer, www.theinquirer.net, one of the leading technology news sites. The investment is part of VNU's ongoing strategy …

When It comes to DSL, Speed Sells — As the parade of earnings of phone companies continues, interesting trends emerge. And some proof, that Bells don't need to muck around with the net much to make money. — BellSouth and SBC/AT&T reported weaker than expected DSL additions.

The Coming Irrelevance Of My.Yahoo For Me — After reading Fooled By Randomness, I found myself becoming increasingly annoyed by the information on My.Yahoo page. I've had My.Yahoo as my default home page since 1997 or so and probably have it refresh (deliberately or otherwise) …

Mobile phone boom set to continue in 2006: survey — LONDON (Reuters) - Global shipments of mobile phones soared in 2005 and will continue to grow in 2006 on the back of strong demand from emerging economies, which snapped up half of all handsets last year, a survey showed on Thursday.

NexTag to be acquired? — Lending Tree rumored to be acquiring NexTag. Barry Diller and IAC the latest to be associated with NexTag. The purchase would strengthen IAC's lead generation and fledgling comparison shopping businesses. — Two days ago, I heard a bizarre rumor - that Quinstreet was to acquire NexTag.
Discussion:
analystblog

H&R Block puts tax software on USB thumbdrive — Yes, it's that time of year again. No, wedon't mean the post-holidays, post-CES, post-Macworld winter of discontent (well, we do, but that's another story).It's tax time! Or at least it's almost tax time.

Yahoo, Linksys offer link for digital music — NEW YORK (Reuters) - Internet media company Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) and wireless equipment maker Linksys on Thursday unveiled a new product to help consumers move digital music from computers to stereo sound systems in the home.
Discussion:
Engadget