RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech EP 37

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech
Episode 37 - download now - subscribe now - iTunes subscribe

• A member of the TechPodcast Network @ techpodcast.com. If it's Tech, it's here.
  
• Remember, if you're listening on the podcast recording, you can call into the show live if you tune in through TalkShoe.com at 2:30 PM EST every weekday.
• If you like the podcast (and you haven't already given us a rating), head over and do so, and don't forget to sign up for the discussion list.
• Other Podcast Plugs:
  
• TalkGirls comes on Tuesday nights. Check out the TalkGirls Podcast ... it's good times!
• Cotolo Chronicles: Frank is a good friend of the show, and an associate of the late great Wolfman Jack. Check out his podcast.
• NewsReal: Good friend to Art and I - has one of the best hours of news podcast each week.
  
• Sponsors:
  
• Try GoToMeeting for 45 days! Visit www.GoToMeeting.com/podcast to start your free trial today.
  
• AACS - Guaranteed improved credit - http://aacsnet.com/ - Mention RizWords and get $50 off your entry to the program.
  

This was a PACKED episode... FULL of news. Art Lindsey is still on Medical Leave. See www.artlindsey.com for more information. On Monday, Bill Grady from You Are The Guest Podcast will be joining as co-host, and Derrick Vann, longtime personal friend, will be joining us on Tuesday. Do not fail to miss these shows, if you can. Hopefully, Art will be re-joining us next week soon.

But now, the news! The big talks today center around re-opening of merger talks between Microsoft and Yahoo!:

Massive: Microsoft, Yahoo Talk Merger
By Nicholas Carlson

Microsoft and Yahoo are talking at the merger table. And this time, Microsoft is said to be willing to pay the heavy price it would cost to acquire Silicon Valley's most successful Web portal. Some wonder whether that's wise.

According to unnamed sources cited by the New York Post, Microsoft broached the merger topic months ago and Yahoo quickly rejected the deal. A Yahoo spokeswoman told internetnews.com the company refused to comment on "rumors or speculation." Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment.

But since, a series of Google successes -- its launch of Web-based applications for small businesses, its outbidding of Microsoft for advertising firm DoubleClick and another quarter of spectacular financial results -- has Microsoft hot for Yahoo's Web presence once more.

ahoo's current market capitalization is $44.75 billion. In morning trading, Yahoo's share price rose five points, or 17 percent, to a near 52-week high of $33.23 per share.

Apparently, merger talks are just the cure for Yahoo after weak first-quarter financial results caused investors to bail on the company in mid-April. The problem then was that Yahoo did not exceed expectations for its new advertising platform, code-named Panama.

When reporting Yahoo's 2006 financial results, CFO Susan Decker said Yahoo did not expect Panama to positively impact its profits until the second quarter of 2007. But early reports of the advertising platform's success raised investor expectations. Despite positive reviews from Yahoo advertiser customers, however, those expectations were not met and the stock tanked. Until today's merger talks.

In other Yahoo! related news:

Yahoo Photos going dark as Flickr shines on (USA Today)

LOS ANGELES — At Yahoo, Web 2.0 has won one battle with stodgy old Web 1.0. — Yahoo is shutting down Yahoo Photos — for years, the No. 1 or No. 2 most-visited photo site on the Web. Its users will be directed to move their pictures to Yahoo's hot upstart, Flickr.

And on the flipside, two interesting Google-related stories:

Google Scholar Added to Google's Homepage
There's a new link to Google Scholar in the list of services from the "more" box. Google's search engines for scholarly papers was available on the homepage only if you visited Google from your school.

Google Scholar includes a big list of scientific publications and some of them aren't available in Google's main index. "Google Scholar covers peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, and other scholarly literature from all broad areas of research. You'll find works from a wide variety of academic publishers and professional societies, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

And the other:

YouTube Users Get Paid. Tomorrow.

On Friday, YouTube will begin revenue sharing with top users including LisaNova, renetto, HappySlip, smosh, and valsartdiary using the same system they’ve used for TV networks. They’ll also be sharing revenue with thousands of medium-sized content content creators like small production houses and universities.

These “top users” have been picked from the “most subscribed” list, and YouTube is spinning this as a way to put ordinary users on a par with professional content. I’m going to guess that this is partially related to the Viacom lawsuit, which alleges that YouTube is almost totally reliant on copyrighted professional content: just like the bizarrely late YouTube Video Awards 2006 (held in March 2007), this may be an attempt to highlight the importance of user generated content. (”Look, we make so much money from Renetto that we can pay him!”).

The top users were plucked from the “most subscribed” list, which may be a little worrying based on the fact that YouTube doesn’t really regulate these numbers. Even more worrying: they still haven’t fixed the bug that allows you to get more views by refreshing the page: when there’s money involved, that trick will be even more enticing (look at all the crappy videos on the Most Viewed list with very low ratings). Nonetheless, we now know that the YouTube rev share program is being tested on many more accounts that just the Afterworld trial we mentioned earlier.

More on the YT blog.

Embedded below: LisaNova, whose good looks almost make up for a lack of talent.

In more reasons to hate the RIAA news:

RIAA Drops Yet Another Case
Given just how many cases the RIAA has had to drop after it was pointed out that it's sued the wrong person, why isn't anyone questioning why the RIAA is allowed to file thousands of cases in a single shot when it's clearly not very careful about the process? The latest is that the RIAA has dropped a case after it was pointed out to the RIAA that the person being sued wasn't actually a subscriber to the ISP in question at the time of the observed file sharing. Oops. At some point, you would think that someone would point out that the RIAA appears to be abusing the legal system as its personal plaything in suing whoever it wants whenever it wants on whatever flimsy evidence it can find.

In EVEN CHEAPER laptop news:

India Hopes to Make $10 Laptops a Reality
sas-dot writes "We all know Nicholas Negroponte's $100 OLPC. India, which was a potential market, rejected it. India's Human Resources Development ministry's idea to make laptops at $10 is firmly taking shape with two designs already in and public sector undertaking Semiconductor Complex evincing interest to be a part of the project. So far, the cost of one laptop, after factoring in labor charges, is coming to $47 but the ministry feels the price will come down dramatically considering the fact that the demand would be for one million laptops."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is quite a big deal... lots of big deals in the news today:

AOL Slips to No. 3 on Internet
After more than a decade connecting more Americans to the Internet than any other company, AOL has given up its title as the leading Internet service provider, a reflection of changing consumer habits and its own strategic shift.

I'm interested to hear what Todd Cochrane will say about this:

THE END OF MILITARY BLOGGING
The most excellent Noah Shachtman of Wired's Danger Room has a great article with lots of milblogger reaction to the new OPSEC regulations that will end military blogging as we know it. Yes, that's right - the end of soldier blogging from the war zones.

In purely political news:

Bush vetoes troop withdrawal bill
WASHINGTON - President Bush vetoed legislation to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq Tuesday night in a historic showdown with Congress over whether the unpopular and costly war should end or escalate. — In only the second veto of his presidency …

Condi, and why it's legal for her, and not Pelosi:

Rice to Meet With Syrian Foreign Minister
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plans to meet with Syria's foreign minister here later today, United States officials said. The meeting would be the first diplomatic contact at such a high level between the two countries in years.

This story set me off:

Is Virtual Rape a Crime?
cyberianpan writes "Wired is carrying commentary on the story that Brussels police have begun an investigation into a citizen's allegations of rape in Second Life. For reasons of civil liberty & clarity we'd like to confine criminal law to physical offenses rather than thought crimes but already threats, menace & conspiracy count as crimes. Could we see a situation where our laws extend?"

Read mor of this story at Slashdot.

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech - EP 32

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech
Episode 32 - download now - subscribe now

(For some reason, the system has not yet processed the file. Look for it to appear later this weekend. To make sure you're updated first, subscribe in iTunes - or maybe from now on you should just listen live!)

• A member of the TechPodcast Network @ techpodcast.com. If it's Tech, it's here.
  
• Remember, if you're listening on the podcast recording, you can call into the show live if you tune in through TalkShoe.com at 2:30 PM EST every weekday.
• If you like the podcast (and you haven't already given us a rating), head over and do so, and don't forget to sign up for the discussion list.
• Other Podcast Plugs:
  
• TalkGirls comes on Tuesday nights. Check out the TalkGirls Podcast ... it's good times!
• Cotolo Chronicles: Frank is a good friend of the show, and an associate of the late great Wolfman Jack. Check out his podcast.
• NewsReal: Good friend to Art and I - has one of the best hours of news podcast each week.
  
• Sponsors:
  
• Try GoToMeeting for 45 days! Visit www.GoToMeeting.com/podcast to start your free trial today.
  
• Want $10 for free? Try Google Checkout today! Visit http://oblongbox.net/checkout/ to create your account and start with $10 off your first purchase.

Normally, something like this would be a complete non-story in terms of what we normally cover on the show, but so many of my friends (quite rightly so) decry the worthiness of the mainstream American media, and point to the UK's Guardian as the only bastion of credible American news, of course never forgetting to point out the irony that it's from the UK. Today, Art and I rip apart a very poignant article that best represents the feelings and opinions of the UK Guardian we've ever seen.

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all

Tuesday April 24, 2007
The Guardian

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy - September 11th
2. Create a gulag - Guantanamo Bay

3. Develop a thug caste - Security Contractors (Halliburton), Homeland Security

4. Set up an internal surveillance system - Wiretap of Private Citizens

5. Harass citizens' groups - the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents".

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release - People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

7. Target key individuals - Various CIA people, Plame incident, Wesley Clark

8. Control the press - You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason - We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials.

10. Suspend the rule of law - The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

In more humorous news, Jason Calacanis talks about how to meet Jason Calacanis (We're not sure we do):

Who Wants to Meet a Calacanis?
I've developed some deep relationships over the past couple of years blogging and I realize that those relationships manifest themselves in the links I find when I do my 28x a daily ego search over at Technorati. The quickest way to develop a relationship with me isn't to twitter me, call me, email me, or skype me. Heck, even posting a comment here--the second best way to develop a relationship with me--is weak when compared to the power of the link.

If someone writes anything about me or links to this blog I find out about it instantly with my various RSS alerts, Technorati, Google blog search, Bloglines, etc.

Some folks have figured this out and they get on my radar by writing a critical piece. That's a savvy move--to a point. I'd like to outline the best way to link bait a person like me:

The Blogosphere has stopped it's all encompassing growth. Am I the only one who sees Blobosphere when people write that? I guess the similarities from the blobosphere to the blogosphere end at semantics now:

Blogosphere is Expanding No More
It's the web media equivalent of the central cosmological constant: does the universe of personal sites expand ad infinitum, or else collapse under its own weight? And we may finally have an answer. The number of active blogs tracked by Technorati has stalled at about 15 million. Now that's still a remarkable number, even before one adds in quasi-blogs, such as pages on social network sites such as Myspace. But, compared with the conventional wisdom -- that every human, and household pet, will eventually have a blog -- the reality is sobering. (The irony: these numbers on active blogs were provided by Dave Sifry of Technorati, whose state of the blogosphere reports have created the illusion of limitless growth; and the data emerged because the blog index boss was asked to distinguish between active and inactive sites by a reporter at Business Week, the magazine that has done more than any other to hype up the medium.) After the jump, your take. I have my theories, but, first, why do you think the number of active bloggers is flat?

The $100 Laptop isn't $100 anymore....:

'$100 laptop' to cost $175
The founder of the ambitious "$100 laptop" project, which plans to give inexpensive computers to schoolchildren in developing countries, revealed Thursday that the machine for now costs $175, and it will be able to run Windows in addition to its homegrown, open-source interface.

Get in the Choppah!:

If You Want To Live, Send $40k To This Paypalcom.ru Account
Online extortion scams seem to be a recurring problem, even though script kiddies are killing the margins. The latest scam sees users being spammed with a note from a would-be contract killer, saying he's been paid to kill them, but will let them live for $40,000, then responds to emails with personal information stolen from other sites. The whole thing sounds about as believable as the average 419 spam, but given the number of folks who should have known better that have fallen for them, it's probably worth highlighting for the sake of the wealthy individuals who are being targeted. In particular, heed the last line of the original article, which relays that a security expert "recommended that no one reply to these e-mails" -- unlike all those other scams you keep replying to.

Oh noes! our pages are bl4nk!:

Glitch Has Users Fuming, Google 'Frantic'
netbuzz writes "A problem with Google's Personalized Home Page feature has apparently cost a lot of users their carefully crafted doors to the Internet. And Google, which says it is frantically searching for a fix, also acknowledges that it is not sure if it will be able to recover the lost settings. 'The problem is the latest in what seems a regular stream of technical glitches and availability problems affecting Google's online services. In the past six months, Google services like Blogger, Gmail and Google Apps have all experienced significant technical issues that have left users fuming. The problems highlight one of the risks of relying on hosted applications providers, which offer to house software and its data for individuals and organizations. Google is one of the biggest cheerleaders for this software provisioning model, which many see as a viable option to the traditional approach of having users install applications on their own PCs and servers.'"

And the same story, worded better from Google Operating System (if not a bit more sensationally):

Homeless Internet Citizens
So you open the door, you step inside and you discover that your house is empty: no furniture, no books, no family, no pets. Your home became empty and nobody bothered to explain why.

That's what happened to Google Personalized Homepage for some users today. Says Michael M.:

Today, I logged on at college and all was fine on my homepage. When I got home, I turned on my laptop and my homepage had reverted to the default, with all of the default gadgets and the default theme. I tried to re-add my gadgets, but it keeps going back to the default style. I've tried clearing my cookies/history and signing in/out.

The personalized homepage is the page I visit most on the internet, it tracks all my news and weather and lets me keep track of my schedule and chat to my friends on Google Talk.

My homepage looks the same, but there's a big thread at Google Groups with people who lost their homepages. Google's answer is so endearing:

We're now in frantic-chase-down-this-bug mode here at the Googleplex, and I hope to have more info for you soon. For now, we're not entirely sure of this, but it's possible that changing your homepage theme might cause the problem. SO, if you still have your homepage intact, please avoid changing your theme until further notice. The big question I know you'll all want answered is whether you'll get your homepage back once we sort things out... and the really honest answer is that I hope so, but I just don't know yet.

/rizzn

$300 Laptop

$100 Laptop. $300 Laptop - coming soon to the general public!

According to the BBC, the folks over at the Laptop Per Child project are considering opening up for sale their goods to the general public. They are still attempting to get the price down to $100 (it currently is at $150 per computer).

According to a statement by a company official at CES this year, they are considering putting forth a deal where they will sell to the general public if the customer commits to buying another for charity. This effectively puts the price of a laptop at $300 now, which is a fair price for an internet ready portable terminal.

/rizzn

$300 Laptop

$100 Laptop. $300 Laptop - coming soon to the general public!

According to the BBC, the folks over at the Laptop Per Child project are considering opening up for sale their goods to the general public. They are still attempting to get the price down to $100 (it currently is at $150 per computer).

According to a statement by a company official at CES this year, they are considering putting forth a deal where they will sell to the general public if the customer commits to buying another for charity. This effectively puts the price of a laptop at $300 now, which is a fair price for an internet ready portable terminal.

/rizzn