Top Items:
Greg Sandoval / CNET News.com:
Trent Reznor: Why won't people pay $5? — UPDATE at 8:55 a.m.: The headline of the story was changed to reflect more broadly what Trent Reznor said during the interview. As some readers noted, the original headline put too much emphasis on one of Reznor's statements.
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
The Music Industry's Last Stand Will Be A Music Tax — It is becoming more and more difficult for the music industry to ignore the basic economics of the their industry: unenforceable property rights (you can't sue everyone) and zero marginal production costs (file sharing is ridiculously easy).
Mathew / mathewingram.com/work:
Hey Trent — a music tax is a dumb idea — There's a great interview with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails up at CNET, in which he talks about his experience with the Saul Williams album he recently released as a “pay what you want” download (which I wrote about here).
Discussion:
CNET News.com
Microsoft:
Microsoft Announces Retirement and Transition Plan for Jeff Raikes, President of the Microsoft Business Division — Company announces it has hired Stephen Elop from Juniper Networks; Raikes will continue at Microsoft through September 2008. — Microsoft Corp. today announced that …
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Eric Savitz / Tech Trader Daily:
Microsoft's Raikes Retiring; Juniper COO Elop To Succeed Him As Head Of Business Division; JNPR Shares Sell Off — Microsoft (MSFT) this afternoon announced that Jeff Raikes is retiring as president of the Microsoft Business Division, which includes Office, Exchange Server and Microsoft Dynamics.
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:Juniper Networks exec to succeed Microsoft Business Division President Raikes
Discussion:
WinBeta
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Amazon Completes DRM-Free Roster With Sony-BMG — For anyone who was bummed about the hoops they were going to have to jump through to get DRM-free songs from Sony-BMG artists, by the end of the month you will be able to download those songs at Amazon's MP3 store.
Discussion:
Profy.Com, WebProNews, Bits, New York Times, mathewingram.com/work, paidContent.org, Electronista, Brier Dudley's blog and TechSpot News
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Matt Buchanan / Gizmodo:Amazon Officially First To Drop Major DRM: Sony the Fourth …
Discussion:
Download Squad
Rafe Needleman / Webware.com:
BLOGGERS BEHAVING BADLY: GIZMODO MESSES WITH CES FLAT SCREENS — The Gizmodo kids pulled a good stunt at CES: they fired TV-B-Gone remotes at walls of shiny new monitors on display and during press conferences, much to the displeasure of booth staffers. — The video is funny.
Discussion:
Ewan Spence's All New Musings
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Adrian Covert / Gizmodo:
Confessions: The Meanest Thing Gizmodo Did at CES — CES has no shortage of displays. And when MAKE offered us some TV-B-Gone clickers to bring to the show, we pretty much couldn't help ourselves. We shut off a TV. And then another. And then a wall of TVs. And we just couldn't stop.
Bruce Schneier / Wired News:
Steal This Wi-Fi — Whenever I talk or write about my own security setup, the one thing that surprises people — and attracts the most criticism — is the fact that I run an open wireless network at home. There's no password. There's no encryption. Anyone with wireless capability …
Discussion:
Wi-Fi Networking News, DSLreports, Boing Boing, Techdirt, Network World, Techmamas, Computerworld Blogs, Cathode Tan, Slashdot and Digg
Heather Hopkins / Hitwise Intelligence:
Wikia Launch & Mahalo Growth — This week's launch of Wikia Search is the latest example of a human powered search engine. Mahalo and Cha-Cha are two other recent entrants. This week we've seen a spike in daily visits to Wikia Search, as you'd expect. In my digging the thing that stood as interesting to me is Mahalo's growth.
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
LinkedIn, SixApart and Flickr People Join DataPortability.org: Is This Stuff For Real? — The Data Portability Working Group is announcing today that key people from LinkedIn, Flickr, SixApart and Twitter are joining the group. These new names are just the most visible part of a groundswell …
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Caroline McCarthy / Webware.com:
FACEBOOK TOPS ONE LIST OF ‘SLOW AND INACCESSIBLE’ SOCIAL NETWORKS — On Thursday, Web site-monitoring firm WatchMouse released the results of a study about the performance of 104 social-media sites—social networks, blogging communities, bookmarking sites, and the like—and boldly deemed them to be overall “slow and inaccessible.”
Matt Rosoff / CNET News.com:
Yahoo tool eases music playback from personal Web pages — If you often link to music files from your personal Web page or blog, and have some control over the code on that page, Yahoo's got an interesting tool for you. With a few lines of very simple Javascript code, you can add small “play” buttons that link to specific songs.
Discussion:
Matt McAlister
BBC:
Americans turn to online videos — Online video sharing sites are reaping the benefits of the ongoing writers' strike in the US. — According to net measurement firm Nielsen Online, some online video sites have doubled their audience since the strike began at the end of October.
Discussion:
Ars Technica, Jim Kukral, Bruce Clay, Inc. Blog, Search Engine Land, Computerworld, Pew Internet, mathewingram.com/work, Furrier.org, Computerworld Blogs, WebProNews, IP Democracy, ReveNews Online Revenue …, Data Center Knowledge, Voice Over Times, HipMojo.com, NewTeeVee, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, Reel Pop, TechCrunch, Mark Evans, broadstuff and JD on EP
