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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.
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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 …
Discussion:
A View from the Isle

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:

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 …

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.

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 …

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.
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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.

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.

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.
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Manthan

Invasion of the Computer Snatchers — If you think your computer is safe, think again — In the six hours between crashing into bed and rolling out of it, the 21-year-old hacker has broken into nearly 2,000 personal computers around the globe. He slept while software he wrote scoured …
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Alice Hill's Real Tech News

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.
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SiliconBeat, Texas Venture Capital …, Somewhat Frank, Weblogs Work, Zoli's Blog, Web Strategy by Jeremiah and Message

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.

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 …
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Is there an optimal size for a reading list? — I was reading Jim Moore's blog for the first time, and I came across this recommendation in his instructions for new users of OPML reading lists: … I've seen this idea before and it's always puzzled me. Amy Bellinger makes the same point:

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 …

The Sony Bean is Dead — Sony has discontinued its sexy, sly bean MP3 player, hinting that it may have something better up its sleeve—debatable—and that this might not be the end of the bean—debatable. The Bean appeared last April to great fanfare and promptly fell off the radar as the Nano sucked up its market share.

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:
Discussion:
The Social Customer Manifesto

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.

Dale Begg-Smith & AdsCPM: A Spyware low life Criminal Distributor wins an Olympic Gold Medal for Australia — You can run but you can't hide. If you fail to answer reporters questions in a candid and detailed manner, lots of folks will poke around and discover your checkered past.
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Alice Hill's Real Tech News