Feed Reader
-
The Internet is quickly destroying the need for newspapers to run printing presses, distribute papers around the city, and employ newspaper carriers, but the cost savings have come with revenue losses, too: most newspapers offer their online content without subscription fees, supported only by ads. A group of media executives has just announced Journalism Online, a new way for newspapers to start charging for online subscription fees. Will it save journalism?
"We have formed...
Via Ars Technica - 7 months 18 days ago -
Men go online more often, stay on for longer, and respond to ads more positively than women do, according to a new report from eMarketer. The firm looked at the Internet habits of men versus women, partially because men are (technically) in the minority online and also because gender "is a distinguishing factor of Internet use, informing online behavior and attitudes."
There are 95.9 million men online in 2009, according to eMarketer's estimation. When compared against the 103.2...
Via Ars Technica - 7 months 18 days ago -
South Korea is crazy for baseball—it's national team made it to recent finals of the World Baseball Classic, only to lose to Japan—so it seems especially appropriate that the country would be one of the first in the world to adopt an official "three strikes" policy toward copyright infringement on the Internet. While the government can order the disconnection of individual users, a key emphasis here appears to be on websites. Host some infringing content, and the government can...
Via Ars Technica - 7 months 18 days ago -
The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the popular Wikipedia website, has called for the project's contributors to vote on a proposal which calls for the adoption of the Creative Commons Atribution Share-Alike (CC-By-SA) license. This change would lower the barriers for repurposing content from the Internet encyclopedia.
Wikipedia content is currently made available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), which was devised by the Free Software...
Via Ars Technica - 7 months 18 days ago -
Google has announced the availability of an early preview release of Android 1.5, the next major version of its Linux-based mobile platform. The new version brings numerous technical improvements under the hood, new features, and additional APIs that third-party developers can leverage in their applications.
When Android launched last year, the platform had a lot of potential but strongly lacked maturity and completeness. There were gaps in functionality due to some capabilities that...
Via Ars Technica - 7 months 18 days ago -
Responding to the outcry over its proposed regimen of price-gouging bandwidth caps, Time Warner Cable says that it's anxious to explain its intentions to the public. "We appreciate the feedback we've received," Time Warner Chief Operating Officer Landel Hobbs wrote in a blog entry last week. "We'll look forward to more dialogue as we progress in these trials." Hobbs is referring to test market tryouts that could leave consumers paying access rates of six dollars a month per gigabyte of...
Via Ars Technica - 7 months 18 days ago -
The downturn continues to take a heavy toll on the computing industry, as Intel kicks off earnings season (which is now kind of a "tallest pygmy contest") with a 55 percent sequential decline in net income and earnings of 11¢ per share. Note that the latter number came in well above analysts' expectations of just 3¢ per share, a profitability boost that was apparently the result of cost-cutting, less-than-expected losses and writedowns, and a very low (1 percent) effective tax rate....
Via Ars Technica - 7 months 18 days ago -
Cerulean Studios, the software company behind the Trillian instant messaging program, has been working on an ambitious overhaul of its flagship product. The new version, which is called Trillian Astra and was originally announced in 2006, is currently in the beta testing stage.
Trillian lost some momentum during Astra's protracted gestation. Users are increasingly adopting alternatives, such as Digsby and Pidgin. The growing sophistication of these free competitors has made Trillian...
Via Ars Technica - 7 months 18 days ago -
The current Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, is no fan of corn-based ethanol, presumably because a variety of studies have suggested that it takes a significant amount of energy to produce, diluting its impact on carbon emissions. Nevertheless, the Energy Independence and Security Act sets hard targets for ethanol produced from biofuels, and the US has largely met those through corn-based ethanol to date. A study that appeared in the journal Environmental Science & Technology suggests...
Via Ars Technica - 7 months 18 days ago -
The long-awaited P2P music service Qtrax is finally ready for an official launch, for really real this time. The site rolled out its 1.0 (actually, 1.0.1) software Tuesday morning, enabling users to partake in its free, legal music downloads from all four major music labels. Qtrax says that it anticipates becoming a major competitor to the iTunes Store, Amazon, and Wal-Mart's online stores, though there are severe limitations in Qtrax's format that will hinder it from reaching that goal....
Via Ars Technica - 7 months 18 days ago