Top Items:
Jon Pareles / New York Times:
2006, Brought to You by You — IMAGINE paying $580 million for an ever-expanding heap of personal ads, random photos, private blathering, demo recordings and camcorder video clips. That's what Rupert Murdoch did when his News Corporation bought MySpace in July.
Discussion:
BuzzMachine, IP Democracy, Technically Speaking, The Gong Show, ben barren, TeleRead and Rex Hammock's weblog
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Keith Teare / edgeio:
De-portalization and Internet revenues — This post is a little more philosophical than most that you will see here. It provides a little bit of background as to why edgeio is in the business of bringing together, organizing and distributing listings to the edge of the network.
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Scott Karp / Publishing 2.0:
Platforms Are The New Portals — We've all become so enamored with the increasingly distributed nature of the web — or the de-portalization as Keith Teare of Edgeio puts it — and the success of user-centric platforms like YouTube and MySpace. But we seem to be forgetting …
Discussion:
Mathew Ingram
Dan Farber / Between the Lines:
Buzzword alert: De-portalization — Interesting post by Keith Teare on the how the Internet is moving away from mammoth, centralized portals. Traffic, he said, is moving out toward the edges of the network, flattening out as users move from habituating portals like Yahoo to a more distributed network of content and services.
Discussion:
Keith Teare's Weblog
Michael Gartenberg:
Lessons of Zune — So while Microsoft works to get the first million Zunes sold, here's some thoughts at what they need to do (and should have done at launch) to get to this milestone. — Zune lacks elegance - It's actually not bad looking device but put it next to a 30gb iPod …
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Steven / StevenLevy.com:
A Universally Bad Idea — So Microsoft is paying the record label Universal a dollar for each Zune sold. (See the story here.) Doug Morris, the CEO of the Universal Music Group, justified it quite succinctly: "These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it," he said.
Tim O'Reilly / O'Reilly Radar:
Web 2.0 Compact Definition: Trying Again — A commenter on one of my previous posts about Web 2.0 wrote: … I replied, and thought that my reply might be worth publishing more widely than just in the comments. So here is a new attempt at a brief definition:
GigaOM:
Can Personal Cellular Sites boost cell service? — By Allan Leinwand — Mobile operators are on the verge of asking you to help them solve one of their biggest problems - how to get more signal strength where you need or want it most. Their plan? Allow end users to buy personal devices …
Discussion:
UMBC eBiquity
Joel Spolsky / Joel on Software:
Simplicity — Donald Norman concludes that simplicity is overrated: "But when it came time for the journalists to review the simple products they had gathered together, they complained that they lacked what they considered to be 'critical' features. So, what do people mean when they ask for simplicity?
Michael Gartenberg:
iPhone Madness is Starting — I got a call the other day from a Wall Street publication asking me if the new delays in shipping the iPhone was affecting Apple's stock price. Excuse me? Delays? Is it possible to call a product that hasn't been acknowledged much less shipped delayed?
Wagner James Au / GigaOM:
Virtual World Currency Deflates a Real One? — At a fundamental level, all money is virtual. (If it's no longer tied to a precious physical product like gold, that is- but then, what currency is, nowadays?) At root, its worth depends on the value a group invests in it, whether it's made of paper, metal- or binary code.
Discussion:
Technically Speaking
Reuters:
TV networks reportedly discussing YouTube rival — News Corp.'s Fox, Viacom, CBS and NBC Universal are in talks about creating a video Web site to compete with Google's YouTube, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. — While a deal is still far off, the four media companies envision …
Richard Siklos / New York Times:
The Hat Trick That Didn't Happen — WITH the arrival of mittens and mufflers comes the inevitable onslaught of year-in-review columns. Certainly there have been plenty of media milestones this year — from the march of Google and the explosion in online video to the turmoil in the newspaper industry …
Jeff / The Jeff Pulver Blog:
Blog-Tag: A Game for a Virtual Cocktail Party — As a blogger, people may know you, but how good does anyone ever really know anyone? During the past few weeks I've attended a number of charity events in and around New York City and I've run into people who otherwise would be total strangers …
Conrad Quilty-Harper / Engadget:
Disgruntled Dell customer finds crafty path to lawsuit settlement — Pat Dori, a disgruntled Dell customer who found no resolution to the issue of a broken laptop after five long months and 19 wasted phone calls, decided to go legal and sue the company for failing to adequately address the problem.
