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Tuesday, December 16, 2008

From the Twittersphere: Trophies for the Best Tweets

Brad Stone

Hollywood has the Oscars. Broadway has the Tonys. Now Twitter has the…Shorty Awards? The awards, announced last week by the Brooklyn Internet company Sawhorse Media, aim to honor the best Twitterers of 2008 in categories like humor, news and food.

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Monday, December 15, 2008

Survey Asks: Internet Access or Sex?

Ashlee Vance

Intel came up with a novel way to show how important the Internet and computing have become in the lives of Americans. In conjunction with Harris Interactive, the company conducted a survey of adults in the United States under the prosaic-enough banner, “Internet Reliance in Today’s Economy.”

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Monday, December 8, 2008

How YouTube Broadcasts Your Taste in Videos

Saul Hansell

The slogan of YouTube is “Broadcast Yourself.” I’ve got to wonder if many YouTube users are broadcasting information about their tastes in video far more widely than they understand.
Google’s video site lets you subscribe to a “channel”–a collection of videos from one person or company–so you can get reminders about new clips from sources that interest you.

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Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Watching the Times Struggle (And What You Can Learn)

Seth Godin

Page by page, section by section, the influence of the New York Times is fading away. Great people on an important mission, but their footprint is shrinking and the company is losing stock value and cash and power and the ability to have the impact that they might.

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For Laid-Off Journalists, Free Blog Accounts

Jenna Wortham

It’s a long way from $700 billion, but the media start-up Six Apart is introducing its own economic bailout plan. The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program offers recently terminated bloggers and journalists a free pro account (worth $150 annually) on the company’s popular blogging platform.

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Monday, November 24, 2008

Google Seduces With Utility

David Carr

Not long ago, someone invited me out to the Googleplex, the nickname for Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. The fact is, I already live there. And it’s starting to worry me. Having grown up in the vapor trail of the ’60s, I learned to be wary of large, centralized organizations, and yet Google, a huge enterprise with a market value of $80 billion, is my ever-present wingman.

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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Newspapers Jettisoning Top Talent to Cut Costs

David Carr

In March 2007, Circuit City came up with a plan to confront softening sales and competition from online and offline retailers: Fire the most talented, experienced employees.

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Monday, November 17, 2008

What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?

Randall Stross

Ellen Spertus, a graduate student at MIT, wondered why the computer camp she had attended as a girl had a boy-girl ratio of six to one. And why were only 20 percent of computer science undergraduates at M.I.T. female?

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Friday, November 14, 2008

Is There a Privacy Risk in Google Flu Trends?

Miguel Helft

When Google released its Flu Trends service earlier this week, the Drudge Report flashed a headline that read: “SICK SURVEILLANCE: GOOGLE REPORTS FLU SEARCHES, LOCATIONS TO FEDS.”

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Monday, November 10, 2008

Zuckerberg’s Second Law

Nicholas Carr

There’s something about the crisp autumn air that brings out the philosopher in Mark Zuckerberg. At this week’s Web 2.0 Summit, the Facebook founder mused, according to Saul Hansell of the New York Times, “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and [the] next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.”

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Monday, November 3, 2008

30 Seconds to Boot Up? That’s 29 Too Many

Randall Stross

New laptops that boot up in 30 seconds? Too slow for me. Five seconds? Better, but what I want is a machine that’s ready in about a second, just like my smartphone.

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Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Google’s Green Agenda Could Pay Off

Miguel Helft

Google, the Internet search and advertising giant, is increasingly looking to the energy sector as a potential business opportunity. From its beginning, the company has invested millions of dollars in making its own power-hungry data centers more efficient. Its philanthropic arm has made small investments in clean energy technologies.

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Monday, October 27, 2008

The Hitler Meme

Virginia Heffernan

On YouTube, we’re in a bunker, and the enemies are always, always closing in. The ceilings are low. The air is stifling. A disheveled leader is delusional. This is the premise of more than 100 videos on the Web–the work of satirists who for years have been snatching video and audio from “Downfall,” the 2004 German movie of Hitler’s demise, and doctoring it to tell a range of stories about personal travails and world politics.

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Monday, October 20, 2008

Changing That Home Page? Take Baby Steps

Miguel Helft

A few weeks ago, Yahoo began what may be its biggest overhaul of its home page. But if you are among the roughly 100 million Americans who stop by Yahoo.com every month, the odds are that you haven’t noticed any changes.

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Monday, October 13, 2008

Amid the Gloom, an E-Commerce War

Brad Stone

When the e-commerce giant eBay emerged from the last recession seven years ago with an aura of invincibility, its chief executive, Meg Whitman, boasted that “eBay is to some extent recession-proof.”
As the online auctioneer’s revenues and stock price kept climbing, one of its primary rivals, Amazon.com, just limped along. How times have changed.

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