Top Items:
Ellen Lee / The Technology Chronicles:
iPod vs. Zune Update — So how is the Zune, Microsoft's MP3 player, doing so far? — The Zune debuted just before the frenzied holiday shopping season, and so far, it's ranked No. 2 behind rival Apple's iPod, according to statistics released by the NPD Group today.
RELATED:
Todd Bishop / Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog:
Zune debuts at No. 2 — After a bunch of negative reviews and one particularly awkward moment on national television, there's a sliver of good news for Microsoft's Zune initiative today. But it might be fleeting. — In its first week, Zune secured the No. 2 spot among portable media players …
Katharine Q. Seelye / New York Times:
Huffington Post Will Add Original Reporting to Its Blog — The Huffington Post, which started about 18 months ago as a political Web site for celebrity bloggers, is preparing to venture into original reporting, with plans to cover Congress and, already, the 2008 presidential campaign.
Andrew Chen / Futuristic Play:
Why BitTorrent Inc. is no sure bet! — I'm going write about something near and dear to my heart: BitTorrent. — Many of you guys may have been reading about the company, recently, since they are rumored to be raising a huge venture capital round: BitTorrent Raises $25 million, Bram Cohen is History.
Gadgets, Google, and SEO:
R.I.P., Google Answers — Google has decided to shut down Google Answers. In my personal opinion, this was the right call. Products from years ago often need overhauls and rewrites or else the underlying code grows stagnant, and the Answers code launched in 2002.
John Markoff / New York Times:
For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs a Big Debate — CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — When computer industry executives heard about a plan to build a $100 laptop for the developing world's children, they generally ridiculed the idea. How could you build such a computer, they asked, when screens alone cost about $100?
Wired News:
Virtual Console Stuff: Controller Get — Golden Axe was pretty bad. Luckily — considering I just dropped eight lousy bucks on it — it's one of those games that's bad in a good way. I can enjoy it ironically. If you've never played it, imagine Double Dragon except your guy has a sword and can't hit anything.
Roy Mark / internetnews.com:
Court Greenlights DOJ Case Against Realtors — A Chicago district court cleared the way Tuesday for the Department of Justice (DoJ) to proceed with its antitrust lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors (NAR). — The DoJ contends the NAR is engaging in anti-competitive behavior against online home brokers.
Gizmodo:
Netstreams DoorLinX MP3 Doorbell is Your Bell — The humble doorbell has just made the leap into the 21st century. DoorLinX by Netstreams can play an MP3 of your choice whenever someone presses your doorbell button, and that MP3 is easily placed on the slim wall-mounted slab via WiFi.
Guardian:
Real life crashes into Second Life's digital idyll — Aleks Krotoski — It was three weeks ago that my virtual world disintegrated. I had been struggling with a digital littering problem in my Social Simulation Research Lab and I wanted to automate the cleanup process.
Discussion:
Rough Type
Guy Kawasaki / How to Change the World:
The Venture Capital Aptitude Test (VCAT) — If you want additional proof that we're in a bubble, here it is: young people are trying to get into the venture capital business again. I get several emails a week along these lines: … They see a wonderful job: going to cocktail parties …
Discussion:
O'Reilly Radar, Will Price, The Ponderings of Woodrow, JD on EP, Open Culture, shmula, Global Nerdy, engtech and digg
Erin Teeling / The Bivings Report:
The Presence of Magazines on the Internet — TBG has recently completed a research study called "Analyzing the Presence of Magazines on the Internet". In the wake of success surrounding our previous newspaper study, "The Use of the Internet by America's Newspapers", we decided to conduct similar research on the magazine industry.
technosailor.com:
Review of Feedburner — Several months ago, b5media made the choice to move all our feeds to Feedburner. We had actually been looking to do this for awhile, but there were a couple things holding us back. Portable feeds and money. Both of those things were resolved around the middle to end of September.
Discussion:
Blogging Pro
This Is London:
ANGER AT YOUTUBE VIDEOS THAT SHOW HOW TO BREAK INTO HOUSES — Householders were warned today to check their security in an alert sparked by video website YouTube. — Hundreds of videos are available on the site showing users how to pick locks, which experts fear will result in a spate of burglaries.
PR Newswire:
Verizon, NFL Team up to Offer Live NFL Network Game Broadcasts on Verizon's Consumer Broadband Services — Verizon to Offer Live NFL Network Programming Over Broadband. Deal Includes Thursday and Saturday Regular Season NFL Games, Various College Football Bowl Games and Other Programming
Om Malik / GigaOM:
At Skype, Nightmare (almost) before Christmas — Skype, a leading VoIP services provider and a division of eBay, went through a major reorganization this morning, which included axing of the entire business development part of the company, barring a handful of country heads.
Sam Sethi / TechCrunch UK & Ireland:
New Opera Mini — Opera arguably reinvented the mobile browser with the original release of Opera Mini. The innovation of Opera Mini was to be able to fit four quarts into a one pint jug. By putting most of the guts of the browser into a smart proxy layer, they were able to create …
Don Dodge / Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing:
Blogs and wikis, Web 2.0 platforms? — Application platforms are very profitable in the software business. Platforms attract developers. Developers build all kinds of interesting applications...which attracts users. Millions of users mean your platform will generate revenues for a long, long time.
