by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
You should not be surprised to learn that a federal judge yesterday ordered BlueBeat.com to immediately stop selling Beatles songs and other music from its site, rejecting a goofy assertion that the company had copyrights on the songs via the use of something called “psycho-acoustic simulation.”
Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.)
by Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said Friday that the online encyclopedia aspires to be a higher-quality source of information but added that mainstream publications could learn from its disclaimers and community features.
“Our goal is to make Wikipedia as high-quality as possible. Britannica or better quality is the goal,” he said during a question-and-answer session at the ad:tech conference in New York.
by Jon Gray, Contributor, Laid Off and Looking, The Wall Street Journal
My productivity lapses don’t come from Facebook. My problem is a combination of world news sites and Twitter. Using RescueTime, an online time management tool, I’ve named two productivity goals for myself. One goal sets my unproductive time at less than 90 minutes per day. The other sets my highly productive time at greater than five hours per day.
by Yukari Iwatani Kane, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Blowing away terrorists, apparently, never gets old.
The new videogame Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, set to hit stores Tuesday, is a sequel spawned by sequels. But rather than following the frequent pattern of franchises fading as they age, Modern Warfare 2 is the most highly anticipated game of the season.
So the inevitable “offers are scams” story finally blew on to the scene last week at the Virtual Goods Summit when TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington attacked OfferPal’s Anu Shukla for having misleading offers (e.g. sign up for Netflix, get 10,000 coinz) as a core part of her business.
by Scott Austin, Lead Editor, Venture Capital Dispatch, The Wall Street Journal
In light of Ancestry.com’s IPO today, tech site Vator.tv calculated the average age of the venture-backed tech companies that have gone public this year.
by Pui-Wing Tam, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Atherton, Calif., is the mansion Mecca for many of Silicon Valley’s tech multi-millionaires. And so far in 2009, even though home sales and median property sale prices in the town have slowed from a year ago, The Wall Street Journal found that there hasn’t been as little activity as some techie buyers might think.
by Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
News Corp.’s digital chief said Thursday that the company’s social-networking property MySpace is going in a different direction than rival Facebook, based on how its members socialize and share interests.
by Jessica E. Vascellaro, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Eric Schmidt is brimming with Bay Area pride.
In the 33 years that the Google CEO has lived in the Bay Area, Schmidt says he has watched a long list of regions try–and fail–to create technology capitals of Silicon Valley’s scale.
This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."
We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.
The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.
That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.
Because the site is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, we aim to adhere to the journalistic standards of the best of the mainstream media. But, because it is run autonomously as a small online startup, we aim to exhibit the fresh thinking and nimbleness of the best of the new media. We want to be first, and sassy, but also well sourced and accurate. We will offer lots of opinion and analysis, but plenty of fact as well.