Top Items:
Maria Aspan / New York Times:
Costly gift from Microsoft becomes invite to blog — In Microsoft's latest attempt to reach out to bloggers, the company recently gave away expensive laptops loaded with its new Windows Vista operating system. — But the gifts generated controversy as well as goodwill …
Miguel Helft / New York Times:
Looking for the Next Google — SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 29 — In brand-new offices with a still-empty game room and enough space to triple their staff of nearly 30, a trio of entrepreneurs is leading an Internet start-up with an improbable mission: to out- Google Google.
Discussion:
Digital Markets, Mark Evans, Don Dodge on The Next …, CenterNetworks, Search Engine Watch Blog and digg
Abbi Adest / Seeking Alpha:
Raw Sugar is Toast; Is Digg Next? — Ashkan Karbasfrooshan submits: From Haaretz, via Micropersuasions: Raw Sugar, an Israeli Del.icio.us clone, shut down. The company was privately funded. RIP. — This comes a few days after Conde Nast-owned Wired totally violated any speck …
Michael Rose / The Unofficial Apple Weblog:
Apple web site features teaser shot — Is it a sunrise? A monolith? The light from an oncoming train? Whatever it is, it's now decorating the website of everyone's favorite fruit-flavored company. — Presumably we may expect big things this year from AAPL. — [via MacRumors]
Lev Grossman / Time:
VIDEO GAMES — WII SPORTS (for Wii) — There is no possible way to say this enough times: great graphics don't make great games. Perfect Dark Zero looked like a Titian, but it was a snooze. Wii Sports—a mini-sports anthology that includes golf, boxing, tennis, baseball and bowling—looks like Colecovision.
Charlie Demerjian / Inquirer:
Windows screwup forces Ubuntu shift — A match made in hell — YOU NEVER QUITE wrap your head around how anti-consumer Microsoft's policies are until they bite you in the bum. Add in the customer antagonistic policies of its patsies, HP in this case, and vendors like Promise, and you have quite a recipe for pain.
Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
Gmail bug exposes your mail account to spammers — Like your Gmail account? Consider it a sacred place which must be protected from spammers at all cost? Yeah, us too. Well, we hate to break the bad news at the dawn of the new year but there's a weakness in Gmail which exposes …
Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog:
THE BEST WEB 2.0 SOFTWARE OF 2006 — Looking back over 2006 it's clear that we've experienced one of the most remarkable growth surges in Web application history. Literally hundreds of Web sites and applications were launched this year and brought to our attention via the popular review sites …
Discussion:
Web Worker Daily
John Battelle / John Battelle's Searchblog:
PREDICTIONS 2007 — Yes, I'm at it again, but this year I promise to be a bit more pared down, a bit more to the point. I had nearly 20 predictions last year, I'm hoping that by the time I lift my fingers from the keyboard I'll have a few less. So Happy New Year, and to business:
Google Blogoscoped:
Google Calculator Gone? — Google way back (with a working calculator) — This isn't a good start for Google in 2007: the Google Calculator and currency converter doesn't work anymore, as Ionut Alex. Chitu notes... at least I can reproduce this when I try from here.
Discussion:
Boing Boing
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
EroShare - User Generated Porn — What better way to ring in the new year than with a site that is most definitely not work safe. Eroshare is to Flickr what PornoTube is to YouTube - user generated porn. The site, which launched an hour ago, encourages users to upload their home made erotic photos …
Discussion:
Scobleizer
Paul / Paul Thurrott's Internet Nexus:
We call it "The Hurd Defense" — I'm not sure what's funnier, what Apple actually did this week or the way Mac-friendly bloggers and Web sites lapped it up and declared that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had been "cleared" of wrongdoing. I'm pretty sure that Apple actually announced that Jobs knew …
Jeremy Zawodny / Jeremy Zawodny's blog:
2007: Reduce, Focus, and Filtering My Inputs — This is the first in a short series of things I'll likely write about the coming year (2007). The end of the year is often a good time to look back and think about what has happened and why, not to mention how they compared to my expectations and goals (assuming I had any).
Richard MacManus / Read/WriteWeb:
Nokia's Gizmo Project: Phone-to-Phone VoIP — Written by Rudy De Waele from m-trends.org and edited by Richard MacManus. — We are entering an era of broadband being available anywhere, on any device - and this will happen all 'over IP' (Internet Protocol).
Eric A. Taub / New York Times:
Loaded With Personalities, Now Satellite Radio May Try a Merger — Last year's debut of Howard Stern's radio show on Sirius Satellite Radio put the technology on the map, raising the public's awareness of satellite radio and helping to boost significantly subscriber totals for Sirius and its larger rival, XM Satellite Radio.
Discussion:
Venture Chronicles
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
What Is The Definition Of A Blog? — Yesterday Google posted the yearly stats for the Official Google Blog. Not bad - 294 posts, 7.6 million unique visitors and 15 million page views. Technorati ranks the Google Blog as the 16th largest among all blogs, and it is by far the most popular official company blog.
