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Hungry Media Companies Find a Meager Menu of Web Sites to Buy — Media companies are still hungry. Is there much left for them to consume that they'll find satisfying? — NBC Universal's $600 million acquisition of iVillage, an early Internet company catering to women …
Discussion:
michael parekh on IT, PaidContent.org, Blogspotting, Perceptric Forum and John Cook's Venture Blog

MySpace Messenger on the Way — The cool kids are all talking about the impending release of MySpace Messenger (screenshots below). The story appeared on Digg yesterday, and the commenters are impatiently trying to make it to work. No official launch has been mentioned yet. — So is this a good idea?
Discussion:
Search Engine Journal
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MySpace Messenger Coming — Update: So this has been something which has been whispered for a while, but Pete Cashmore has discovered actual screen shots of MySpace Messenger. Even though the screen shots have been around for a while (as pointed out by eagle eyed readers) …

Google lands on Mars — Tonight I noticed that mars.google.com now has a CNAME record that points to www.google.com. This usually means that something is about to happen with that subdomain — with the exception of calendar.google.com of course. So I started digging and you will never guess …

Gosling Didn't Get The Memo — I've been blissfully neglecting this site for months with the assumption that a large part of our goal was completed. After watching good people like Martin LaMonica and Jon Udell balance out the mainstream tech press with coverage of lessish tools and languages …

Why I will stop blogging — I can do it, folks, I have already, in some sense, stopped one of my rivers, and soon, probably before the end of 2006, I will put this site in mothballs, in archive mode, and go on to other things, Murphy-willing of course. — It's been a long time coming.

Leadership in World of Warcraft — This ended up becoming a longer and more rambling post than I expected, but I'm going to post it anyway since I don't write enough these days... The other day, I was doing an interview for a management and strategy magazine and one of the questions that came …
Discussion:
Werblog
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The business lessons of World of Warcraft — AUSTIN, Texas—"World of Warcraft" is a game. There's no doubt about it. More than 6 million people around the world have signed up to go questing, kill beasts, search out loot, and have fun with friends and strangers alike.

Online Auteurs Hardly Need to Be Famous — On his computer screen, Jake R. Sanowski scrutinizes a short video of a baby eating its first pickle. Next is a skit of a woman getting drunker over the course of a meal at which, it turns out, her dining companion is a dog.
Discussion:
John Cook's Venture Blog

Blogging for Dollars Brings Unexpected Responsibilities — Reporter's Notebook: Professional bloggers Jason Kottke and Heather Armstrong took the stage at SXSW to discuss what happens when you start making a living from your hobby. — The story of blogging has largely been written.

Microsoft pauses work on Adobe rival — Microsoft has temporarily halted development work on some aspects of its upcoming professional graphics application as it tries to bring companion tools and its next-generation Windows Vista operating system to market.
Discussion:
Digital Inspiration

Alive and Well in Silicon Alley — THEY arrived in crisp button-downs and pleated Dockers, 150 or so, nearly all men in their 20's and 30's, few of whom would probably object to being called a nerd. — The event, the New York Tech Meetup — part technology conference …

The Larry and Shelley Story — In few minutes or so, MusicIP, a company that we've invested in, takes the wraps of a ton of work at the SXSW show in Austin. I'm pleased that all the team's hard work will be paying off. I'll let the company do all launch stuff first and point you to some interesting things as they go public.

Media's Idea that Origami is Just a Small Tablet PC Misses Intel Role — Mr. Thurrott is almost right when he says the four-year secret origami project was small Tablet PCs discussed at WinHEC. However, Origami was an interim product of the Haiku project, expected post 2007.

Behold the power of botnets — (Adam Piggott of Proactive Services originally found this mess, contacted Suzi Turner at SpywareWarrior who got him in touch with one of our spyware researchers, Adam Thomas.) — Discussions about botnets in the security community are quite active these days.
Discussion:
Spyware Confidential

Knight Ridder Board Accepts McClatchy's Bid For $4.5 Billion: Report : Work in progress.The Knight Ridder board has accepted a $4.5 billion cash/stock offer from the McClatchy Company, according to a report from the NYT based on "sources involved in the negotiations." Official word is expected Monday.
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The shift to Social Computing — There's been a lot of interest recently in the social aspects of Web 2.0 experiences because of their tendency to alter the communities that use them. As part of tracking this, I wrote recently about McKinsey and Co.'s discussion of coming Interaction Age …