Top Items:
Rob Hof / Tech Beat:
Unrepentant PayPerPost Gets Funding — Three months after getting slammed by BusinessWeek's Jon Fine, TechCrunch's Marshall Kirkpatrick, and a gazillion bloggers, PayPerPost is crying all the way to bank. The Orlando-based startup, which matches advertisers with bloggers willing to write …
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Controversial PayPerPost Raises $3 million — We first covered PayPerPost when it launched three months ago. — The service is a marketplace for advertisers to pay bloggers to write about products for a fee. Commenters to our original post wee polarized into those violently for and those againt the product.
Katie Hafner / New York Times:
And if You Liked the Movie, a Netflix Contest May Reward You Handsomely — Netflix, the popular online movie rental service, is planning to award $1 million to the first person who can improve the accuracy of movie recommendations based on personal preferences.
Discussion:
TechCrunch, O'Reilly Radar, TechEffect, Geeking with Greg, UMBC eBiquity, Dan Blank, BGSL, Lost Remote, Slashdot, Hacking NetFlix and digg
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Mike / Techdirt:
Winner Take All Outsourcing: Netflix Will Pay $1 Million To Whoever Improves Their Recommendation Engine — from the and-the-rest? dept — The concept of crowdsourcing has been popular lately, but not everything is easily sourced out to the crowd. Netflix is trying their hand at the game by throwing a little money into the pot.
Discussion:
paidContent.org
Liz Gannes / GigaOM:
DVD Jon Fairplays Apple — DRM-buster DVD Jon has a new target in his sights, and it's a big piece of fruit. He has reverse-engineered Apple's Fairplay and is starting to license it to companies who want their media to play on Apple's devices. Instead of breaking the DRM …
QuadsZilla / SEO BlackHat:
10 Steps to Guarantee You Make the Digg Front Page — As I sit here writing on the world's greatest personal computer (The Mac Pro Quad Xeon 64-bit workstation with dual 30 inch monitors): — I can't help but pity you Wal-Mart shoppers who still use software from the Antichrist (Microsoft) …
Jake Ludington:
Zune and iPod Photo Comparison — I got face time with a Zune this weekend and decided to look at how the form factor compares to the 80GB iPod I picked up a few days ago. The Zune weighs considerably less than the iPod, although I didn't have a scale on hand to get exact comparison.
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Michael Liedtke / Associated Press:
Google buys garage that launched Internet's top search engine — SAN FRANCISCO - Internet search leader Google Inc. has added a landmark to its rapidly expanding empire - the Silicon Valley home where co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented a garage eight years ago as they set out to change the world.
Discussion:
Valleywag, Zoli's Blog, Search Engine Watch Blog, VentureBeat and John Battelle's Searchblog
Richard MacManus / Read/WriteWeb:
Digg Blackmarket … I guess this is a sign of the times - a site dedicated to gaming digg, called User/Submitter. But there's no reason such a site couldn't exist for del.icio.us, or stumbleupon, or netscape - or any site that relies on voting. Needless to say, I hope this site gets squashed ASAP …
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Frank Barnako:
Rocketboom's ad price: $80K a week — Andrew Baron seems to have shaken off the heartbreak of separation and gotten down to business. While Amanda Congdon, with whom he co-founded Rocketboom, is on a coast-to-coast trip in a Ford Hybrid, Baron is newly-focused.
Discussion:
Paul Colligan's …
Oliver / MobileCrunch:
Nakama.ca Makes it Easy to Be Seen and Heard. Another MC Exclusive — Toronto based Nakama.ca (don't be confused, it's dot "ca" for Canada the dotCom isn't them) has a new take on making it easy to share your images, video and even your thoughts (via voice recordings).
Paul Stamatiou / PaulStamatiou.com:
Introducing PhishTank — Thanks to some great PR information from Allison Rhodes at OpenDNS, I have learned that PhishTank has launched today, at the beginning of National Cyber Security Awareness Month. PhishTank as you can probably guess from its spelling has something to do with online phishing, phishers and malware.
Terence O'Hara / Washington Post:
Hard-Learned Lesson: Don't Try to Censor A Blogger — Memories fade, but the Internet is forever. — Murry N. Gunty found that out the hard way this summer. Well known among Washington financiers, the head of Milestone Capital Management LLC ran afoul of bloggers for an attempt to censor …
Kotaku:
411 On PSP GPS — ITmedia Games has shots, as well as new info, on the upcoming PSP GPS attachment and the software that will take advantage of it. The (pictured) MAPLUS navigation system will ship in December and have GPS mapping and navigation functions tailored for folks walking, biking …
Softwarepirate / The Software Pirate:
The PS3's worst enemy — Sony's had a lot of problems stirring up excitement with the PS3. Manufacturing problems, launch shortages, high prices, lackluster launch titles (Metal Gear Solid 4 isn't worthy a $660 investment) are just a few of the issues that have made gamers pretty nervous about getting Sony's Grey Goose of a console.
Brady / O'Reilly Radar:
I'm going to become a Fonero — I want WiFi everywhere. I want to be able to boot up my laptop anywhere and be able to connect from my neighborhood park. I want to be able to use Skype from the street. That's why I really like the idea behind FON, a wireless sharing startup, where members share each other's WiFi.
Discussion:
Mark Evans
Alex Mindlin / New York Times:
Google's Gmail Learns How to Spot Spam — From the first quarter to the second this year, Gmail got nearly 15 times better at distinguishing legitimate commercial e-mail messages from spam, according to a new report from Lyris, a maker of e-mail marketing software.
Ryan Block / Engadget:
Sirius Stiletto 100 caught in the wild — Engadget reader John C. managed to nab a Sirius Stiletto 100 and took a bunch of pictures for us — thanks John! Sounds like he was really happy with it for the most part, mentioning that the sound quality is great, but already we're seeing some drawbacks.
