tech.memeorandum

Tech Web, page A1 … for 8:20 PM ET, February 17, 2006
Current Tech Page     Also:   Politics

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.
RELATED ITEM:
Mark Evans:
Have Blogs Peaked?  —  According to Slate, it's the beginning of the end for blogs.  Based the Sports Illustrated cover story theory - which implies that any person or team touted on the cover is doomed to fail - Slate's Daniel Gross concludes the fun and games are over within the blogosphere …
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:
Andrew Keen / Weekly Standard:
Web 2.0  —  The second generation of the Internet has arrived.  It's worse than you think.  —  THE ANCIENTS were good at resisting seduction.  Odysseus fought the seductive song of the Sirens by having his men tie him to the mast of his ship as it sailed past the Siren's Isle.
RELATED ITEM:
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 …
Discussion: PVR Wire, HD Beat and Engadget
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.
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.
Discussion: WorldChanging and Boing Boing
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.
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 …
Discussion: Techdirt and SearchViews
Michael / michael parekh on IT:
ON BLOGS STUCK IN A RUT  —  (UPDATE 2.17.06: There have been several creative suggestions on how today's blog infrastructure can be tweaked and morphed into doing some of the things I talk about in this post, both in the comments below and on other blogs like Zoli Erdos' blog here.
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
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.
Discussion: Manthan
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.
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 …
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
Charlene Li / Charlene Li's Blog:
Forrester's Social Computing report  —  We just published a new report, "Social Computing: How Networks Erode Institutional Power, And What To Do About It" (available to clients only, but it's getting some good distribution as I'm getting pinged about it left and right).  Here's the Executive Summary:
John Palfrey:
Statement Regarding the RSS 2.0 Specification  —  We've heard from a number of people about an uneasy (and unfounded) sense that something is happening with respect to the RSS 2.0 spec.  Just by way of clarification, nothing has changed from the perspective of Harvard, which is the owner and trustee of the RSS 2.0 spec.
Discussion: Workbench and Scripting News

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More Items:

Nathan Weinberg / InsideGoogle:
TRACK THE SOPRANOS WITH GOOGLE MAPS
Dan Farber / Between the Lines:
Apple's fragile hold on reality
Marc Perton / Engadget:
Kodak launches four new compact digicams
Ina Fried / CNET News.com:
Newsmaker: Ending Microsoft's identity crisis
Regine / we make money not art:
The owl that takes control over innocent devices
Jason Chervokas / TRICKSTER!:
Media Wants to be Free (But Not in the Way You Think)
Discussion: A VC and The River
Joris Evers / CNET News.com:
Homeland Security official suggests outlawing rootkits
James Flanigan / New York Times:
Venture Capitalists Are Investing in Educational Reform
Discussion: SiliconBeat

Earlier Picks:

Kevin Hsu / digitimes.com:
Sony expects strong PS3 shipments in 2006, may work with Microsoft
Discussion: Gizmodo, Joystiq and Kotaku
Russ / Russell Beattie Notebook:
Why MySpace Scares The Crap Out of Me
Discussion: Conversion Rater and B2Day
Will Sturgeon / silicon.com:
Proof: Employees don't care about security
Discussion: Techdirt
TiVo.com:
Inside TiVo...with Amir
Christopher Grant / Joystiq:
DirecTV blade coming to 360 Dashboard?
Wall Street Journal:
News Corp. Goal: Make MySpace Safer for Teens
Chris Pratley / Chris Pratley's OneNote Blog:
OneNote 2007 Drawing Tools
Bonnie Ruberg / Wired News:
Sex Games Get Down to Business
 
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