Bits in the news...

Published: 2009-02-28

In a bid to make sense of the many random bookmarks I stick into delicious.com each week I've decided to briefly highlight the more interesting bits floating around.

first up...

last.fm vs Techcrunch

I use both services extensively, last.fm is a customisable music streaming service (http://www.last.fm/user/coffeerings) and Techcrunch is a tech blog focusing on startups.  Techcrunch accused last.fm of giving the RIAA a list of all users scanning unreleased tracks on their PC's (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/20/did-lastfm-just-hand-over-user-listening-data-to-the-riaa/), a very serious allegation considering the organizations history of taking consumers to court for file-sharing.  Turns out the claims were completly unfounded, last.fm's response can be found here http://blog.last.fm/2009/02/23/techcrunch-are-full-of-shit.  Paul Carr offered up a and amusing brief commentary on the episode in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/25/not-safe-for-work-techcrunch-last-fm.

Revenue Generation through Customised Twitter Feeds

Glam magazine offered advertising in their Twitter streaming widget covering this weeks Oscars. How is it the 3rd parties can make money via Twitter but Twitter can't make money from Twitter? http://venturebeat.com/2009/02/22/glam-edits-oscars-twitter-feed-and-makes-money/

Amazon gives away access to 1 terabyte of public data

Kinda.  You have to gain access to the data via their cloud services but that's not really a bad thing.  The datasets cover a range of subjects including chemistry, biology and economics.  More can be found on the Amazon AWS http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/

Comment form Mark Zuckerburg's (Facebook) former lecturer

Interesting article regarding the creation of Facebook http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-i-almost-killed-facebook.html (I also took slight comfort in his brief mention of PHP, not ideal but facebook don't care, it works)

Facebook photo hack

Short article exploring recent Facebook photo exploits http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2009/02/11/new-facebook-photo-hacks/

Customisable twitter streams

Particles (http://www.particls.com) offer a service to track keywords/phrases from twitter using a variety of clients.  Read Write Web has a decent description of the service http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_track_is_back_thanks_to_particls.php

Zumo Drive

Cloud hosting on the iPhone. Cool. http://zumodrive.com/

40 Cracking Illustrations on the Web

Another good Smashing Magazine highlights article http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/02/19/40-excellent-illustrations-in-web-designs/

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