Top Items:
Daniel Gross / Slate:
Twilight of the Blogs — Are they over as a business? — As a cultural phenomenon, blogs are in their gangly adolescence. Every day, thousands of people around the world launch their blogs on LiveJournal or the Iranian equivalent. But as businesses, blogs may have peaked.
Elatable:
Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers — As Yahoo! has been gobbling up many social media sites over the past year (Flickr, upcoming, del.icio.us) I often get asked about how (or whether) we believe these communities will scale. — The question led me to draw the following pyramid on a nearby whiteboard:
Discussion:
Matt McAlister, apophenia, The Social Software Weblog, Slacker Manager and Chad Dickerson's blog
Thomas Hawk / Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection:
Meet the New Boss, NOT the Same as the Old Boss — CEO Tom Rogers on the Future of TiVo — TiVo CEO Tom Rogers gave an exclusive interview to Bloomberg News earlier this week on Bloomberg's broadcast "Corner Office." He talked about his own life personally as well as what TiVo …
Saul Hansell / New York Times:
Amazon Will Take On iPod With Its Own Music Player — Amazon.com is preparing to take on Apple Computer in digital music by introducing its own portable music player that would be linked to an online music service, according to several music industry executives involved with negotiations with Amazon.
Dennis O'Reilly / Today @ PC World:
Bye-bye, FrontPage in New Office, Says Microsoft — Microsoft will close the book on its FrontPage Web-design program with the release of Office 2007, formerly known as Office 12, late this year. — Microsoft acquired FrontPage in the mid-1990s, and it soon outdistanced Adobe's PageMill …
RELATED ITEM:
Peter Galli / eWEEK.com:Microsoft to Unleash Host of Office 2007 Suites
Discussion:
Microsoft Watch
Jon Van / Chicago Tribune:
It's a Wi-Fi kind of town — Chicago seeks proposals for citywide Internet access — The City of Chicago wants to blanket its streets and neighborhoods with a wireless Internet signal, granting residents and visitors access to the Web wherever they are—on streets, in homes, offices and shopping malls.
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Naked Conversations TechCrunch Party Tomorrow — I'm pretty excited about the Naked Conversations TechCrunch Party tomorrow night starting at 7 pm. — We've been working hard for weeks to get the event together and, thanks to our sponsors, this should be the best one so far.
Discussion:
SiliconBeat, Texas Venture Capital …, Somewhat Frank, Weblogs Work, Web Strategy by Jeremiah and Message
Declan McCullagh / CNET News.com:
Congressman quizzes Net companies on shame — When the U.S. House of Representatives convened a hearing on Wednesday to talk about China and the Internet, it quickly devolved into an exercise in political speechmaking. — Not until nearly halfway through the event did any of the technology …
Erick Schonfeld / CNN:
Segway creator unveils his next act — Inventor Dean Kamen wants to put entrepreneurs to work bringing water and electricity to the world's poor. — San Francisco (Business 2.0) - Dean Kamen, the engineer who invented the Segway, is puzzling over a new equation these days.
Saritha Rai / New York Times:
India's Outsourcing Industry Is Facing a Labor Shortage — MUMBAI, India, Feb. 16 — India's leadership in global outsourcing may be in jeopardy unless it increases its supply of skilled workers, according to executives gathered here for an foindustry meeting.
May Wong / Associated Press:
Apple Hackers Encounter a Poetic Warning — SAN JOSE, Calif. - Apple Computer Inc. has resorted to a poetic broadside in the inevitable cat-and-mouse game between hackers and high-tech companies. — The maker of Macintosh computers had anticipated that hackers would try to crack …
Discussion:
Gizmodo
Bonnie Ruberg / Wired News:
Sex Games Get Down to Business — Sexy mods squeezed into video games may still cause controversy, but racy titles are becoming so popular the industry is planning a convention so developers can chart a path to success. — Evergreen Events will host the first-ever Sex in Video Games Conference this June.
Wall Street Journal:
News Corp. Goal: Make MySpace Safer for Teens — When News Corp. bought the social-networking Web site MySpace.com last July, the media company got two surprises, one good and one bad. — The good part: The site, where teens and twenty-somethings post pages about themselves and communicate with friends …
Xeni Jardin / Boing Boing:
NBC nastygrams YouTube over "Lazy Sunday" — A source at YouTube informs BoingBoing that NBC recently sent the user-submitted video hosting site a nastygram over the Saturday Night Live "Lazy Sunday: Chronicles of Narnia" video. — That's right — NBC's lawyers are beating YouTube …
Will Sturgeon / silicon.com:
Proof: Employees don't care about security — Like we didn't already know... An experiment carried out within London's square mile has revealed that employees in some of the City's best known financial services companies don't care about basic security policy.
Discussion:
Techdirt
Christopher Grant / Joystiq:
DirecTV blade coming to 360 Dashboard? — During CES in January, Microsoft andDirecTV announced a"long-term agreement to expand the reach of digital content throughout the home and on the go." Part of thatagreement involved extending "the DirecTV experience to the Xbox 360 system."
