Top Items:
Tom Zeller Jr / New York Times:
House Member Criticizes Internet Companies for Practices in China — WASHINGTON, Feb. 15 — In a crowded House hearing room, Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey, unleashed a scathing condemnation of four American Internet and technology companies — Google, Yahoo …
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Associated Press:
Tech's China Policy a 'Disgrace' — Lawmakers blasted four U.S. tech giants Wednesday, accusing them of willingly helping China suppress dissent in return for access to a booming internet market. — Representatives from Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco Systems. and Google defended themselves …
Discussion:
Mary's Blog
Jenstar / JenSense:
ContentAds the name of MSN contextual ad program with a 2006 launch date — You may have noticed I will be speaking at Mix06 next month (I list upcoming conferences I am speaking at on the right side of my blog), and I was taking some time to check out the speakers of the other sessions …
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life:
Office Live is Live — Office Live is now live at http://www.officelive.com. As I mentioned yesterday, our team has been working closely with the folks behind Office Live. This means that I got the hook up with regards to early access to the service. I've heard it's okay to post screenshots …
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microsoft.com:
Customers to Receive Better Solutions and More Product Options With 2007 Microsoft Office Release — New and improved programs, servers and services will give customers unparalleled flexibility. — REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 15, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the lineup …
Joseph Kahn / New York Times:
Beijing Censors Taken to Task in Party Circles — BEIJING, Feb. 14 — A dozen former Communist Party officials and senior scholars, including a onetime secretary to Mao, a party propaganda chief and the retired bosses of some of the country's most powerful newspapers, have denounced …
Discussion:
IP Democracy
Marc / O'Reilly Radar:
Campfire — Our friends at 37signals just launched Campfire, their latest product (following on Basecamp and Backpack). I've been testing this product with them and think it's a great one — a fantastic tool for distributed teams (which is perhaps not surprising since they used to be an international company).
Stephen Shankland / CNET News.com:
Oracle tried to buy open-source MySQL — SAN FRANCISCO—Oracle tried to acquire open-source database maker MySQL, an indication of the profound changes the software giant is willing to make as it adapts to the increasingly significant collaborative programming philosophy.
Daniel Terdiman / CNET News.com:
Power lunching with wizards and warriors — "We Know" isn't your father's country club. — Sure, it has about 100 members, some of them wealthy, a few of them wildly wealthy. On the membership roster are at least 10 people who have the letter "C" in their job titles.
Declan McCullagh / CNET News.com:
Yahoo on NSA surveillance: No comment — Under cross-examination during a congressional hearing, Yahoo's top lawyer refused on Wednesday to say whether the company opens its records for government surveillance without a court order. — Michael Callahan, Yahoo's senior vice president and general counsel …
Dave Winer / Scripting News:
Scoops and corporate PR — Scoble wrote a stimulating piece on the flattening of PR, and quotes Chris Pirillo saying the scoop is dead. Both are interesting points of view, but I think the scoop is alive and well, and corporate PR, especially at large corporates, has a continuing important role.
Dsifry / Sifry's Alerts:
brrreeeport report: Technorati: 422, Google Blog Search: 337 — Robert Scoble created a very interesting meme and test: To see how well folks in the blogosphere are indexed by the major search engines. He's on vacation today, so I thought I'd put up a couple of screenshots of the results.
David Miller / internetnews.com:
Search Engines Here to Convert You — Hunting for something on America Online's search site? Beware. You may be converted. — And it's not a religious thing, although advertisers do seem to see it that way. "Conversion" in marketing speak refers to people who start off as window shoppers and are transformed into customers.
Discussion:
Techdirt
Matt Marshall / SiliconBeat:
Kleiner Perkins surprises, with $200 million "pandemic" fund — Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's best known venture capital firms (backer of Google, Sun, Netscape...), has raised the nation's first fund dedicated to bio-defense and preventing pandemics.
uspto.gov:
United States Patent & Trademark Office Issues 7 Millionth Patent — Patent Assigned to DuPont for Novel Fibers — WASHINGTON, D.C.- The Department of Commerce's United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today issued patent No. 7 million to DuPont senior researcher John P. O'Brien for …
Guy Kawasaki / Let the Good Times Roll:
The Art of Creating a Community — I admit it: I'm a user-group junkie. I got my first taste of user groups when I worked for Apple—speaking at their meetings was one of my great pleasures. Their members were unpaid, raging, inexorable thunderlizard evangelists for Macintosh and Apple II.
Johnny Debacle / Long or Short Capital:
How do you know if something is Web 2.0? — Web 2.0 is on the tips of fingers and lips of influentierati across the web. But how do you know if you, a product of yours, an investment of yours or a service you use is Web 2.0? This handy reference sheet will help guide you.
Reuters:
FACTBOX-Key points of proposed U.S. Internet freedom bill — WASHINGTON, Feb 15 (Reuters) - The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations subcommittee on human rights said on Wednesday he would soon introduce legislation affecting U.S. technology firms operating in China and other restrictive countries.
Guardian:
The ringmaster of the blogosphere — Technorati.com began as a case of 'scratching a personal itch' and has grown to be a vital tool for web watchers — Glyn Moody — If life without Google is hard to imagine for most web users, life without the blog search engine Technorati.com …
Discussion:
gapingvoid
Wall Street Journal:
Amazon Plans Music Service To Rival iPod — In recent years, Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos has explained his company's deliberately paced approach to the digital-music business by saying he wants to avoid simply imitating the dominant player in the field, Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store.
