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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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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 …
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Mary's Blog

Joining the Me2Revolution — I have never used my blog as a means of self promotion or hyping our firm. But this morning, Steve Rubel, of MicroPersuasion fame, has decided to join Edelman, to make the Me2 Revolution happen even more quickly. He joins Phil Gomes, Guillaume du Gardier …
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Strategic Public Relations
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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 …
Discussion:
Techdirt, Conversion Rater, Search Engine Roundtable, InsideMicrosoft, Search Engine Journal and Clickety Clack

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.

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 …

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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Whatever Office Live is, it ain't the Web Office
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Web 2.0 Explorer, LiveSide, The Internet Stock Blog, Geeking with Greg and Microsoft News Tracker

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 …

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.

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).

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.

Microsoft's Office-Come-Lately — The software behemoth plans its biggest-ever package of business-productivity apps. The catch: It's behind schedule — Microsoft (MSFT) is readying the next version of its Office suite of products for release later this year.

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.

The Blog Herald has sold (Part 2) — As written about elsewhere The Blog Herald has sold. Due to the contract I am not at liberty to discuss the buyer or the amount of the sale unless given permission by the new owners. Settlement, all things being equal is set for early March so I'll still be around for a while.

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

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.