New Media News Every Morning
Now that Carol Bartz has signed away Yahoo’s 20 percent search market share to Bing for a song, she’s revising history to justify her actions. Now she claims Yahoo was never a search company. [Read more…]
Originally posted on August 7, 2009 @ 1:52 pm
YouTube just upgraded their mobile site, and I like what they’ve done with it. The previous mobile site opened videos in your phone’s player application. With this new mobile site, the videos play right there in your phone’s browser.
I did run into one little niggle while testing the site on my Nokia N95: thumbnails in listings still reverted to the old behavior of launching an external player. YouTube’s own mobile player application is still the best way to watch skateboarding dogs on the go, but this new mobile site is a viable alternative. Try it yourself: visit youtube.com on your mobile device.
Originally posted on August 8, 2009 @ 5:09 am
Combine midair holograms with two Wiimotes for motion sensing and focused ultrasound for force feedback, and voila — you get touchable holograms! That’s what researchers from Shinoda Labs unveiled at Siggraph 2009 this week.
The system can simulate balls and raindrops right now, but imagine the complex objects we could generate as the technology improves. More to the point, imagine the porn applications.
Originally posted on August 7, 2009 @ 11:10 am
A report by the British media regulator Ofcom suggests that a proportion of 15-24 year olds who used to hang out on social networks like Facebook and MySpace have abandoned them because of the influx of older people, particularly the 25-34 age group.
Basic figures showed that just half of 15-24 year olds used social networking sites in the first quarter of this year, compared to 55% in the same period of 2008, while 25-34 age group usage has increased from 40% to 46%. [Read more…]
Originally posted on August 7, 2009 @ 7:12 am
The copyright-trolling insanity of the Associated Press continues. After quoting bloggers Dave Zatz and Danny Sullivan, they’re now charging both bloggers for quoting themselves. As if that wasn’t ridiculous enough, blogger James Grimmelmann got the AP’s automated form to charge him for the public-domain words of Thomas Jefferson.
Seriously, AP, this is getting silly. Keep up your ignorant copyright-trolling, and savvy bloggers will just troll you right back. Never mind the argument for fair use: charging people for quoting themselves is just stupid. Charging for content you don’t own, through an automated form or otherwise, is plain and simple fraud.
Originally posted on August 4, 2009 @ 10:47 am