Also: Musicload complain about DRM | Time Warner to sell AOL? | Yahoo's local mobile search tool | Europe's top tech 100 | Community engagement report | Danny Baker's first podcast | Fly-fishing with the Intel chairman
The new toy that allows custom versions of Google's iconic homepage is really quite rancid.
The My First Website colour scheme is basic, yes, but that and the uncluttered space simply work.
But now you can personally ruin your own Google homepage by introducing all manner of headline/weather and calendar tools and - worst of all - choose from six graphic themes including the beach, a city scape and a bus stop. The small mercy is that these are optional, I suppose, but Lordy. I'm almost in shock.
ValleyWag sums it up: Google goes ghetto.
MySpace clamps down on widgets
MySpace is clamping down on the widgets that users can add to pages, thus denuding the social networking site of one of its few assets - its customisability. Poor old Tila Tequila (who's something of a MySpace superstar...) had her new Hooka music player taken down (the name is coincidental, I think) and MySpace Tom contacted her directly to tell her she shouldn't have added it. That all seems very odd. MySpace's terms say that it will remove obscene or copyrighted content but also tools that allow users to sell content without authorisation, as Hooka does. Presumably that's because Rupert won't get a slice if people sell directly to their audience. (New York Times)
DRM is holding back the music downloads industry
Digital rights management is causing big problems for one of Europe's largest web music stores Musicload, so much so that three quarters of its customer service calls are from people with rights related problems. Musicload says that record companies expect sizeable margins for their artists but the costs of supporting DRM are covered solely by online retailers. In a latter distributed last week, Musicload said that DRM is holding back the development of a mass market for music downloads and that the lack of interoperability is preventing true competition. (Ars Technica)
Time Warner to sell AOL?
Time Warner could sell off AOL this year, according to analyst Aryeh Bourkoff from UBS. His reasoning was that AOL wants to go global and the best route to that would be through a merger or partnership. Bourkoff valued the company at $17bn and said potential buyers could be Microsoft, Yahoo or Google, which already owns 5% of Time Warner. The background here is that the Time Warner/AOL merger is regarded as very ill-advised, to put it mildly. Time Warner and AOL have repeatedly denied a sale. (New York Times DealBook)
Yahoo's new mobile search tool
Yahoo has introduced a new mobile search tool that offers locally relevant answers. The OneSearch tool is for the US market initially as Yahoo battles Google for the mobile search space. Instead of a list of raw links, results are presented with more local information such as news headlines, weather, business listings, Flickr photos and various other local web-based services. The idea is to get to the information in fewer clicks, and crucially in fewer clicks than the competing service from Google. Yahoo has signed deals with four handset makers to have its YahooGo mobile software installed on new devices, and that will include the new local search tool. Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and LG are all on board. (Reuters)
Europe's top tech 100
Red Herring has published its list of Europe's top 100 tech companies. San Sethis has done a meaty summary of these on Vecosys but notice the hefty batch of UK companies that made it including Last.fm, Zubka, Garlik, Omnifone and 7Digital. (Vecosys)
Mainstream news needs to broaden its agenda
Hats off to Kevin Anderson, the Guardian's blogs editor, who has not only done a far better job of breaking into this year's State of the News Media report but has managed to get through the latest from the Centre for Citizen Media too. It's really bloody tough reading long stuff on screen: we read 25% slower on screen, according to usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Kev's take on the latter Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement report is focused on the observation that news organisations are too focused on the mainstream news agenda rather than reflecting "lived experience".
"Sometime we get so close to the stories we cover that minutiae excite us a lot more than they should... there are hundreds if not thousands of other people interested in a myriad of other things - minutiae by journalists' standards but deeply important to them and their communities."
Danny Baker's first podcast
We can all relax now - Danny Baker is dabbling with podcasts for the first time. He's offering "The All Day Breakfast Show" for free through MP3 downloads site Wippit.com, and the first one features Peter Kay. It may or may not be relevant that Baker's BBC London show isn't part of the BBC's podcast trial.
Fly-fishing with the Intel chairman?
Fly-fishing not with JR Hartley, but Intel chairman Craig Barrett. It has been a while since we had a gimmicky eBay story so I suppose this was overdue, but how desperate do you have to be to meet a tech executive? You'll need to fork our a minimum bid of $25,000 before 26 April and the money goes to the National Forest Foundation. (TechWeb)
