Top Items:
Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Online Video Auteurs: Keep Your Day Jobs, Part 2 — Perez Hilton tells TVWeek his videos on Google's YouTube generated 25 million views over the past three months and netted him a whopping $5,000 in revenue. That's a 20-cent CPM. (It's an even lower net CPM for Google, by the way, assuming a payout ratio of more than 50%.
Nilay Patel / Engadget:
RIAA not suing over CD ripping, still kinda being jerks about it — Okay, so we've done some digging into the RIAA's lawsuit against Jeffery Howell, in which the industry is claiming that ripped MP3s are “unauthorized copies,” and it turns out that Jeffery isn't actually being sued for ripping CDs …
Robert Scoble / Scobleizer:
“What's your audience size?” is wrong question — I'm reading my feeds this morning and see a few people talking about audience size for videobloggers and other content people. Here's a sample: — Henry Blodget points out that Perez Hilton has a huge audience, but hasn't yet been able to sell much advertising to it.
RELATED:
Allen Stern / CenterNetworks:Sorry Robert, Advertising is About Audience Size First, Brand Sponsorships Later
Discussion:
HipMojo.com
Eric A. Taub / New York Times:
In the DVD War Over High Definition, Most Buyers Are Sitting It Out — What if nobody wins the high-definition DVD format wars? That increasingly looks to be the situation for the next-generation DVD technology, which is available to consumers in two incompatible formats.
Discussion:
Silicon Alley Insider
RELATED:
Scott Karp / Publishing 2.0:
Email And Cellphone Contacts Are The Real Social Graph — Google has been quietly rolling out social features across all of its services based on Gmail contacts. While Google still has to overcome some of its social tone-deafness (e.g. automatically adding contacts without asking), this move makes perfect sense.
Matt Asay / The Open Road:
Does Vista's stunted growth hint at the death of the desktop? — Is the desktop metaphor dead, replaced by web services like Google and Facebook? Or is Vista so bad that it's not worth buying? — New data points to the latter suggestion, leaving Microsoft with two options.
Discussion:
Slashdot
Peter Ha / CrunchGear:
iPod Touch does VoIP — There you have it, the first VoIP call made on the Touch. Software should be out tomorrow so keep your eyes peeled for our very own hands on video.
Discussion:
ParisLemon
Janet Rae-Dupree / New York Times:
Innovative Minds Don't Think Alike — IT'S a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.
Brooks Barnes / New York Times:
Web Playgrounds of the Very Young — LOS ANGELES — Forget Second Life. The real virtual world gold rush centers on the grammar-school set. — Trying to duplicate the success of blockbuster Web sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz, children's entertainment companies are greatly accelerating efforts …
Dsifry / Sifry's Alerts:
Announcing Hoosgot: Resurrecting the Lazyweb — Today I'm unveiling a new service that I put together over the last 48 hours. It's called hoosgot.com. Hoosgot (pronounced “who's got...") is a simple way to ask who's got what you're looking for. Just put “hoosgot” in a blog post or a Twitter tweet and it'll show up on Hoosgot.
Mathew / mathewingram.com/work:
What are we doing when we Twitter? — I came across a post by J.P. Rangaswami, whose blog I quite like, and he was talking about Twitter and what he gets out of it. You can read the full post, but in essence he says that he gets something different from the people he follows on Twitter …
Andru Edwards / Gear Live:
iPhone 1.1.3 firmware feature gallery — Looks like the soon-to-be-released iPhone firmware 1.1.3 has quite a few surprises. We were able to get a look at it, and here is what we found: — That is all we have found for now. We also know that is you used AnySIM to unlock your phone, you can expect the 1.1.3 update to brick it.
Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Holiday eCommerce Falls Short — U.S. eCommerce spending in November and December (through the 27th) was up 19% year over year, falling slightly short of Comscore's estimate of 20%. In its latest release, the rose-colored Comscore blames the shortfall on warm weather in early November …
Discussion:
PR Newswire
Rebecca Buckman / Wall Street Journal:
VC's New Math: Does Less = More? — Thiel Seeks to Change Old Habits by Investing Small on Start-Ups — Three years ago, Peter Thiel, who runs a small venture-capital concern called Founders Fund, plowed $500,000 into a little-known social-networking Web site called Facebook Inc. Later on, his company invested a bit more.
Discussion:
Mark Evans, Best Engaging Communities, The Stalwart, Furrier.org, HipMojo.com, Texas Startup Blog and broadstuff
