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by Farhad Manjoo, Slate
How Gmail destroyed Outlook.
by Matt Asay, CNET News.com
IT's software, not religion. It matters, but not that much.
by Jack Schofield, The Guardian
Nicholas Negroponte's visionary One Laptop Per Child project may have had its setbacks, but he's still intent on helping young lives.
by Josh Lowensohn, CNET News.com
The new version of the service, which does not allow users to upload music from their hard drives, instead relies on bands to submit ther own tracks for listeners to play on Muxtape—and Muxtape only.
by Motoko Rich, New York Times
The point may soon come when there are more people who want to write books than there are people who want to read them.
by John Markoff, New York Times
Simple-to-use digital technology will make it more difficult to distort history in the future.
by Brad Stone And Ashlee Vance, New York Times
Silicon Valley has been gripped by a growing sense that the economic retreat might do more than depress earnings. There is too much ingrained optimism here to think that the tech sector will not bounce back, stronger than before.
But the fear now is that consumers and businesses operating with the same cost-cutting mind-set, will erode the high-margin businesses of the information technology industry — slowing some technologies and companies but giving new momentum to others.
by Leslie Berlin, New York Times
The myriad companies that must work together to give the technology to the masses have yet to agree on how to split the resulting revenue.
by Jon Evans, The Walrus
1. It was a bad idea to begin with.
2. The XO laptop is a piece of crap.
by Tom Armitage, Infovore
What's really important is to not understand how to do magical things with code, but to learn what magical things are possible, what the necessary inputs for that magic are, and who to ask to do it.
by Anne E. Komblut, Washington Post
If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past.
by Jeff Segal and Martin Hutchinson, New York Times
by Kate Greene, MIT Technology Review
A startup hopes to tap into the expertise of developing nations via cell phones.
by Farhad Manjoo, Slate
Why Microsoft would be foolish to get into the web ad business.
by Kevin J. O'Brien, New York Times
This time, legal experts say, the European authorities may have a harder time winning their case because Microsoft may in fact be losing market share — at least in some segments of the software market.
by Michael Horowitz, Computerworld
Microsoft has made, what I think are, mistakes in changing the user interfaces on their two most important products, Windows and Office.
by Tom Yager, Computerworld New Zealand
There is enormous potential in the GPU, but similar potential can be extracted from resources that standing servers already have.
by Claire Cain Miller, New York Times
The local food movement has been all about buying sesasonal food from nearby farmers. Now, thanks to the web, it is expanding to include far-away farmers too.
by Associated Press
The European Union said Friday that Microsoft's practice of selling the Internet Explorer browser together with its Windows operating system violated the union's antitrust rules.
by Kate Greene, MIT Technology Review
Visualization software makes viewing and interacting with enormous data sets practical without a supercomputer.
by David Pogue, New York Times
Twitter is a massive time drain. It is yet another wayt o procrastinate, to make the hours fly by without getting work done, to battle for online status and massage your own ego.
But it's also a briliant channel for breaking news, asking questions, and attaining one step of separation from the public figures you admire. No other communications channel can match its capacity for real-time, person-to-person broadcasting.
by David Pogue, New York Times
Hey, boss — sorry for this really superlong e-mail message. But since you're my editor, I figure you should be the first person to hear the bad news: I've got no column for this week.
by Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Radar
Work on something that matters to you more than money. Create more value than you capture. Take the long view.
by Steve Outing
The "let's charge for content" argument keeps rearing its head, but get over it. Let's focus instead on "let's charge for services" that are valuable enough to the news consumer that he or she is willing to part with some money.
by Rich Gordon, Poynter Online
by Scott Rosenberg, Wordyard
The more energy the news industry wastes trying to repackage the dead old form in new, ill-fitting digital clothes, the fewer resources it will have to tackle the real challenge.
by Jack Shafer, Slate
Answering David Carr's excellent challenge.
by Scott Rosenberg, Wordyard
It's called Google text ads. It's ad revenue tailored specifically for the web environment. It works, and it's already bringing considerable sums in to many web sites. The problem is, it doesn't bring in as much cash as newspapers want, or have traditionally expected.
by Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine
The real fallacy in David Carr's delusion is that a news story or an opinion, like a song, is unique—that you can't get it somewhere else and so you hve to buy the original.
by Harry Lewis, The Chronicle Of Higher Education
Ironically for the American pioneers who expected the internet to foster unprecedented information freedom, its rapid and ubiquitous adoption has created a flexible and effective mechanism for thought control.
by Saul Hansell, New York Times
If there was one overarching theme from the Consumer Electronics Show last week, it was that absolutely every device in our lives is becoming a computer connected to the internet.
by Jennifer Chu, MIT Technology Review
The first sign-language dictionary that's searchable by gesture.
by David Carr, New York Times
Those of us who are in the newspaper business could not be blamed for hoping that someone like Steve Jobs comes along and ruins our business as well by pulling the same trick: convincing the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspapers sites that it's time to pay up.
by Dave Winer, Scripting News
by Ashlee Vance, New York Times
With Ubuntu, the devotees believe, things might finally be different.
by Joshua Topolsky, Engadget
by Duncan Graham-Rowe, MIT Technology Review
Can simulated handwriting stop the spambots from getting through?
by Nilay Patel, Engadget
by Adam Lashinsky, Fortune
CEO Eric Schmidt wishes he could rescue newspapers.
by Tom Teodorczuk, The Guardian
No one, of course, can know what a future media landscape will look like. But, given that Shirky was among the few to have forecast 15 years ago that classified advertising would be sold online rather than via a newspaper ad, his crystal ball is more estimable than most others.
by Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason Magazine
Craig Newmark on Craigslist, libertarianism, online democracy, and nerd values.
by Jack Shafer, Slate
But failed.
by Jonathan Skillings, CNET News.com
by Noam Cohen, New York Times
Deciding to join a service devoted to spontaneous, often spectacularly mundane updates throughout the day apparently was something to be thought out carefully.
by Motoko Rich, New York Times
Ever since Google began scanning printed books four years ago, scholars and othrs with specialized interests have been able to tap a throve of information that had been locked away on the dusty shelves of libraries and in antiquarian bookstores.
by Abby Ellin, New York Times
The game stars a D.J. named Vinyl Scorcher whose objective is to get the people in his nightclub on the dance floor, by playing great music.
by Sarah Perez, ReadWriteWeb
European researchers working on the MOBVIS project have developed a new system that will allow camera phone users to hyperlink the real world.
by Jonathan Skillings, CNET News.com
The industry side of the military-industrial complex is on the scent of the federal government's cybersecurity dollars.
by Michael Calore, Wired
For this list, we've compiled the most truly life-altering nuggets of brilliance to hit center stage in 2008: the ideas, products and enhancements to the web experience so huge that they make us wonder how we got along without them.
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