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12:25 AM ET, November 11, 2008

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
BBC:
Study shows how spammers cash in  —  Spammers are turning a profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5m e-mails they send, finds a study.  —  By hijacking a working spam network, US researchers have uncovered some of the economics of being a junk mailer.
John Mahoney / Gizmodo:
How To: Max Out Apple TV's Potential With Boxee  —  This is a guide that, if followed, will unchain your Apple TV from its cruel iTunes tether, turning it into the useful living room conduit of music, video and web-based content it should have been all along via the media center software Boxee.
Discussion: MAKE Magazine
Adam Lashinsky / Fortune:
The genius behind Steve  —  The CEO is the heart and soul of Apple Inc. yet he's got a deep management bench from which to choose his eventual successor.  —  (Fortune Magazine) — Let's start with some uncomfortable truths.  We wouldn't be publishing an article about the under-the-radar guy who's …
Electronista:
Study: new MacBooks likely 33% of US sales  —  Apple's recent MacBook lineup and the iPhone may make it one of the better-positioned companies to survive a likely steep drop in spending during the holidays, according to new data from ChangeWave.  The analyst firm says that a full third …
RELATED:
Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Apple 2.0:   Holiday shoppers like Apple and Dell
Chrix Finne / Google Reader:
Is Your Web Truly World-Wide?  —  The Reader team is happy to announce that another 20% project has come to fruition: automatic translation in Reader!  Post by 20% volunteer and glottology expert, Brett Bavar.  —  Believe it or not, the web truly is world-wide.
Google Watch:
Sun, Microsoft Search Deal Underscore Google's Growing Monopoly  —  Update: Funny how things evolve in high-tech, with some deals lasting what seems like ages and others, announced with so much enthusiasm, dying out.  I want to talk about an example of the latter.
RELATED:
Anthony Ha / VentureBeat:
Yahoo's BrowserPlus continues to dismantle wall between browser and desktop  —  BrowserPlus, Yahoo's Google Gears competitor for allowing web applications to work with your desktop, rolled out two cool new features today: Drag-and-drop file uploads and desktop notifications.  —  These are smart additions.
Discussion: InfoWorld
RELATED:
Yahoo! Developer Network Blog:
What's up with BrowserPlus?  —  Last Friday we quietly pushed …
Discussion: Download.com editors
Jesus Diaz / Gizmodo:
MacBook Nano Looks Like It Came from Cupertino  —  I don't know if these MacBook Nanos are a custom hack or if they come from some kind of shady outlet selling retrofitted MSI U100 laptops made to look like shiny—and fictional—Apple notebooks with Mac OS X installed.
Eric Krangel / Silicon Alley Insider:
Rock Band Creators Score $300 Million-Plus Payday (VIA)  —  When Harmonix founders Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy — the guys behind mega-hit games Guitar Hero and later, Rock Band — sold their company to Viacom's (VIA) MTV for a reported $175 million in 2006, the deal didn't end there.
Discussion: GigaOM, Bloomberg, PE Hub Blog and Valleywag
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Bill Gates' New Career?  Patent Troll For Nathan Myhrvold?  —  from the kinder-capitalism?  dept  —  Plenty of folks have been wondering just what Bill Gates is up to now that he's left his full-time position at Microsoft.  Longtime rabble-rouser theodp has alerted us to one thing …
The Boy Genius / Boy Genius Report:
Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1a hitting Best Buy next month  —  Thanks to our Best Buy ninjas, we've just got some screen shots showing that Sony Ericsson's X1a (North American model) will definitely be hitting best buy early next month.  The actual in stock date as of now is December 7th.  The price?
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Spot.Us Experiments With Citizen-Funded Community Journalism  —  Newspapers are dying across the country.  Local papers are shutting down, Gannett is laying off 3,000 people, the Christian Science Monitor will no longer put out a print edition, and even the New York Times is facing a serious cash crunch.
Troy Wolverton / Mercury News:
Fully digital living room still a few years away  —  Futurists and device makers have long imagined a world in which consumers can access movies, music, television programs and other media content from their sofas at the touch of a button.  —  That living room of the future is taking shape …
RELATED:
MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
Blockbuster in a rush to get you that set-top box there was no rush for
Discussion: CrunchGear, Gizmodo and SlashGear
Priya Ganapati / Gadget Lab:
Google Fixes Embarrassing Android Bug  —  Google has fixed an a potentially devastating bug in its newly released Android operating system.  —  Some users of T-Mobile's G1 phone found that typing any word on the phone's keyboard — in any application — sent whatever they typed to the phone's command line shell.
Discussion: Gizmodo and InformationWeek
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
Van Natta Takes Playlist CEO Job, With New Investment By Pittman  —  Former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta will take the CEO job at a music discovery site called Playlist, a move that has been widely speculated, after he did not end up taking another position he had been in talks about as head of MySpace Music.
Discussion: TechCrunch
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
Look Out Google Site Search, Lijit Says It's Right On Your Heels  —  Innovative search startup Lijit has done study of search widgets on pages around the web and says its widget is very close to becoming as popular as Google's own “site search”.  We think Lijit is quite interesting and we're …
Discussion: Venture Chronicles
Wayne Chang / Facebook Blog:
A Rush for Mobile  —  When we recently added the ability to comment on your friends' status updates to the Facebook mobile site, we didn't expect that we would receive nearly a million status comments in the first 24 hours.  —  This may not seem like much, but it was actually part of a really important change.
NEWS.com.au:
China's not important: Microsoft CEO  —  THE global head of Microsoft has dismissed China's importance to its business due to the Government's failure to curb rampant software piracy.  —  Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer also left the door open for a partnership …
Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
Video: China's wasteland of toxic consumer electronics revealed  —  Any self-respecting gadget hound knows that China is responsible for packing millions of shipping containers with the consumer electronics we crave.  What you may not know is what we ship in return: our waste for recycling.
Discussion: Switched and Neowin.net
RELATED:
Greg Linden / Geeking with Greg:
Tasks, not search, at DEMOfall08  —  Philipp Lenssen points to a video of a DEMOfall08 panel on “Where the Web is Going” that included Peter Norvig from Google and Prabhakar Raghavan from Yahoo.  —  What is notable in the talk is that (starting at 12:32) Prabhakar and Peter agree that …
Discussion: The Noisy Channel
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Dapper MashupAds Turn Your Website Into Contextual, Display Ads  —  The most important ad for a company or brand is its Website.  So why not use that Website to generate ads?  Dapper, a startup that can create a feed from any Website, is applying its technology to generate contextual …
Darien Graham-Smith / PC Pro:
Windows 7: faster or just smarter?  —  If you've been following the PC Pro blogs, you'll know that we recently received a preview build of Windows 7.  Useful work has pretty much ground to a halt as we've all set about nuking our Vista installations and upgrading our work PCs to this unsupported pre-alpha OS.
Discussion: Gizmodo
Nicholas Carlson / Silicon Alley Insider:
Everybody's Underwater In Silicon Valley  —  As tech stocks plummet, more Silicon Valley workers find themselves holding worthless options — the kind that would allow them to buy company stock at higher prices than they are currently being publicly traded.  —  They're “underwater.”
Discussion: Valleywag and Epicenter
Chris Ziegler / Engadget Mobile:
The better part of Nokia's smartphone roadmap goes on display  —  Okay, so maybe the N96 isn't your cup of tea.  Perhaps you're disappointed that Nokia didn't blow out its inaugural entry into the wide world of touch with something just a little more superphone-ish than the 5800.
 
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 More Items: 
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Blinkx Boosts Revenues 115 Percent (But Is Still Losing Money)
Discussion: Beet.TV
Robert MacMillan / Reuters:
Hulu, YouTube, iTunes take a walk on Sesame Street
Discussion: AppleInsider, Gizmodo and MacNN
Guy Kawasaki / How to Change the World:
Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter
Discussion: ThreatChaos and InformationWeek
Esme Vos / MuniWireless:
Boingo acquires airport Wi-Fi operator, adds 25 airports to network
Peter Judge / PC World:
Meru Brings Virtual Ports to Wi-Fi
Discussion: Wi-Fi Networking News
 Earlier Items: 
Steve O'Hear / last100:
I've been playing with Nokia's new touchscreen phone …
Discussion: Electronista
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Textbook Rentals Big Business - Kleiner Perkins Goes After Chegg
Discussion: VentureBeat
Newsosaur / Reflections of a Newsosaur:
It's time to rip the lid off
Discussion: SteveOuting.com
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
Time to Quit?  Layoff Memos From Time, Sports Illustrated, People and Fortune
Discussion: Gawker and paidContent.org
Sydney Morning Herald:
Cyber criminals target Facebook users