As the Cheezburger network joins Reddit and sites such as Wikipedia are considering a blackout on Jan. 18 in protest of Congress’ attempts to pass legislation to stop piracy, it’s becoming clear site owners believe an end to their chatter might matter. Read more »
Representative Darrell Issa has called a Jan. 18 hearing that will bring more voices from the technology industry to Washington D.C,. to discuss how legislation such as the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would affect the Internet. Read more »
You know things aren’t going well for a website when it has to come out and deny rumors that it’s traffic has fallen 50 percent over the las… Read more at paidContent »
In a smart essay on the technical origins of today’s social networks, Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski explores the idea of why the social graph doesn’t work in the way we need — and explodes it in the process. Read more »
James Erwin had a writer’s dream come true when a story he wrote in response to a question on a Reddit forum was optioned by Warner Brothers for a movie. But who owns the rights to the idea that Erwin just sold to the studio? Read more »
The Daily Dot wants to be the “hometown newspaper for the Internet,” but how many of its stories about Reddit photos or YouTube videos will be of interest to anyone outside of those communities? And does the newspaper metaphor make any sense for an online-publishing venture? Read more »
Can we find clues about the future of news and journalism in the way a link-sharing site like Reddit operates? We just might be able to — and it’s a good reminder that the replacement for mainstream news media may look very different from what we expect. Read more »
A young programmer named Aaron Swartz has been indicted by federal prosecutors for allegedly downloading more than 4 million academic documents from the MIT library last year by hacking into its computer system. But why prosecute him for a crime which appears to have no victims? Read more »
Former Reddit Chief Architect Jeremy Edberg will be joining Netflix to lead a new team focused on cloud reliability. And the move couldn’t come soon enough, as Netflix suffered another period of downtime Sunday evening that left users with spotty service for up to eight hours. Read more »
Cloud computing has grown from a pie-in-the-sky vision to a major IT movement over the past few years. As its promise has grown, though, so too has its scope. This report covers six key sectors in cloud computing: commodity Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), enterprise IaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud storage and private clouds. We highlight the current state of each and provide informed insights into where they — and cloud computing in general — are headed. Much like any market in a still-evolving state, the infrastructure of the cloud-computing transition is still being built by startups, practitioners and even a big-name company or two. Companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Amazon, Nasuni, Terremark and Heroku. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The BBC is adding new ways for iPlayer viewers to share what they’re watching with their friends and social networks, with a new share button. In addition to standard networks like Facebook and Twitter, iPlayer users can now send videos to Delicious, Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. Read more »
Opinion on Amazon Web Services recent outage remains somewhat divided: One side blames Amazon for its technical failings; the other holds the cloud giant’s customers responsible for their bad judgment. But the answer to where the primary responsibility lies is a little less black and white. Read more »
Two markets stand out above all else when looking at the first quarter of 2011: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) — the epitome of cloud computing — and big data. Amazon Web Services continues to lead the IaaS space in terms of customers and innovation, while Rackspace, buoyed by momentum around OpenStack, will be its primary competitor for mainstream customers. In the big data space, there are so many players and terms floating about it’s difficult for outsiders to get a handle on who’s who and what’s what, though such activity validates the technologies. Other developments this quarter included HP’s impending presence in the cloud computing and big data spaces and the realization that Intel won’t be left to die if low-power servers based on x86 processors catch on like the buzz late last year suggests they will. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Microsoft, Cloudera, SeaMicro and Facebook. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Last night, CollegeHumor President of Original Content Sam Reich spent his flight from NY to LA taking questions from Reddit, along the way revealing the site’s writing process, plans for follow-up videos, which traffic day is the worst, and what happened to the CollegeHumor grunt. Read more »
After a problem-plagued relaunch at Digg, thousands of users have been registering their displeasure with the new version of the site by voting up links from Digg competitor Reddit. By noon on Monday, nine out of the top 10 links on Digg were submitted from Reddit. Read more »
As the data landscape changes, so must the databases used to gather, store and analyze the rich information within them. Consumer-facing Internet companies are able to scale by using NoSQL data stores, and CIOs can learn from what’s worked for hugely successful web sites. Here, we offer a number of recommendations for enterprise decision makers. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
This weekend at DEMO a startup called Gwabbit launched a web-based contact syncing service. In seeing the name, I instantly thought of Kwedit, another tech startup whose oh-so-cutesy name makes me want to … well … womit. Startups, please don’t do this to your users. Read more »
Holiday spending has seen sales of Apple’s Magic Mouse soar. According to a report by NPD and covered today by AppleInsider, last month saw a twofold increase in Apple’s share of domestic mice sales. By the end of November, Apple had captured 10 percent of the […] Read more »
Social news-sharing site Digg is testing a new advertising model in which sponsors pay less the more popular their ads are. Digg Ads – which will flow through the site’s main content stream like other stories while being identified as sponsored — will allow users to ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Popular user-curated news and ephemera site Reddit today launched Reddit.TV for browsing videos shared on its site. The Reddit.TV interface is similar to StumbleVideo or Twitmatic, where you’re presented with one zeitgeisty video at a time. Videos are presented in categories like “geek” and “music,” accompanied […] Read more »
