Top Items:
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
AOL Buys Sphere's Blog Content Engine — Tomorrow AOL will announce the acquisition of San Francisco-based Sphere, a blog content engine that launched in 2006. The price is not being disclosed, but sources are suggesting it's in the $25 million range, or possibly a little more. More details from Om Malik
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Tony Conrad / Sphere Blog:
Our New Address @ AOL.COM — Unlike the rumor that Sphere has reserved the Wrigley Field bleachers for Game 7 of the 2008 World Series, the conjecture about Sphere being acquired by a larger platform is officially true. AOL has acquired sphere. More information is here, here and here again for the curious detail seeker.
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:AOL's Big Give and Whirling Dervish Show!
Discussion:
Silicon Alley Insider
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Google's Don't Be Evil Not “Ordained Motto” Says Marissa Mayer — Google's “Don't Be Evil” motto, first uttered by Googler Paul Buchheit (now founder of FriendFeed) in 2001, has long been the pillar of their self-imposed code of conduct. It was amended somewhat in 2006 when CEO Eric Schmidt …
Duncan Riley / TechCrunch:
Twitter Testing Advertising In Twitter Streams — Twitter was down tonight, nothing really unusual for the San Francisco based startup (to be fair though downtime has improved since they dumped Joyent), but what was different is some reports of users spotting ads in their Twitter stream during the service difficulties.
Discussion:
CenterNetworks, The Social Times, The Last Podcast, TECH.BLORGE.com, VentureBeat, MarketingShift and The Blog Herald
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Caroline McCarthy / The Social:
Elusive ‘Twitter ads’ spotted in the wild — If an ad shows up in a Twitter feed and no one's awake to see it, did it really appear? — Reports surfaced overnight on Monday that advertisements were appearing sporadically in some of the micro-messaging service's Web-based streams …
Discussion:
The Last Podcast
Jeremy Wagstaff / loose wire blog:
Facebook is Dead. I'm Not Being Facetious — Either there's a glitch in Facebook, or else it's dead. Well, not dead, exactly, but I noticed that, at nearly 10 pm, none of my friends have done anything today to merit appearing on the News Feed of stuff (see above).
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Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:Facebook News Feed Reports on You Behind Your Back
Discussion:
All Facebook
Russell Beattie / Russell Beattie's Weblog:
The end of Mowser — It's been a year since I launched Mowser at April 2007's Mobile Monday, so it's time for a progress report. Sadly, the news isn't good. — Mowser is at the end of its life in its current form. We haven't been able to raise funding, and as a site …
Discussion:
Download Squad, TechCrunch, diego's weblog, TechBlog, localmobilesearch.net, All About Symbian, Alexander van Elsas's Weblog …, Alec Saunders SquawkBox, Technology Live, Between the Lines, Mike Rowehl, Digital Inspiration, STARTUP CHATTER, last100, sparkplug 9, The Blog Herald and Mobile Marketing Watch
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Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:Is the Mobile Web Dead? Some Mobile Entrepreneurs Say Yes
Discussion:
Hardware 2.0, Pat Phelan, A Media Circus, broadstuff, ReviewSaurus, Venture Chronicles, techno.blog, TechCrunch and Mashable!
Bill Ray / The Register:
Patent holders take 4G pledge of allegiance — Defeat 99.7% of all Spam! — The owners of the patents underpinning LTE, the fourth generation mobile technology, have agreed to only charge each other “reasonable” licence fees. — The companies involved - Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, NEC …
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Google LatLong:
YouTube videos in Google Maps — I'm excited to report the Google Maps team launched a new feature that showcases embedded YouTube videos in Maps. Geotagged YouTube videos have been available in Google Earth since last year, and we thought that it was only natural to extend this functionality to Google Maps.
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Dennis R. Mortensen / VisualRevenue:
IndexTools (Yahoo!) Web Analytics goes FREE! — Hi there, a bit of news for you who follow the Yahoo! IndexTools integration steps. But first, THANK YOU very much for all the positive feedback I received in blog comments, separate blog posts, emails, phone calls etc. I truly appreciate that.
Danny Mendez / Download Squad:
Parenting 2.0: Mom pranks son's MySpace as punishment — A sassy 13 year-old Virginian laid the smack-down on a vacuum instead of doing his chores and then was caught looking at porn by his tech savvy mother, who stumbled upon some very suspicious looking cookies (not pictured above) stored on the computer's browser.
Discussion:
Alice Hill's Real Tech News
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Mark Evans:
Who's Louis Gray? — At a time when blogging is evolving and the high-tech landscape is being dominated by blog publishers such as TechCrunch, GigaOm and Mashable as well as blogs operated by mainstream media, it is good to see that it's still possible for one-man/woman shop to capture …
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes / Hardware 2.0:
Psystar: Apple's terms violate U.S. monopoly laws — Psystar, a Miami-based OEM which is now offering OS X on generic PC hardware, claims that Apple's restrictive licensing terms violates U.S. monopoly laws. Whoa, bold claim there. Better have some deep pockets if the company wants to take the fight to court.
Discussion:
ZDNet Government, Between the Lines, InformationWeek Weblog, p2pnet and The Post Money Value
Brad Feld / Feld Thoughts:
Your Analytics Data Is Very Wrong — I've written about this in the past so I expect this is nothing new for you, my dear reader. The title summarizes everything I am going to say. — My buddy Fred Wilson had a comScore chart about Delicious' growth (or lack of growth) in his hugely popular We Need A New Path To Liquidity post.
Greg Sandoval / CNET News.com:
Amazon's MP3s not affecting iTunes — Amazon.com's MP3 service is growing but not at the expense of Apple's iTunes, according to a report issued Tuesday by market researcher NPD Group. — About 10 percent of the people who shopped at AmazonMP3 in February were previous Apple shoppers, NPD said.
John Markoff / New York Times:
Tesla Motors Files Suit Against Competitor Over Design Ideas — SAN FRANCISCO — Tesla Motors, the Silicon Valley maker of electric sports cars, filed suit in San Mateo County Court on Monday against a competing company and two of its employees, saying they stole some of Tesla's design ideas and trade secrets.
