The first full week of January went pretty much as expected – very quickly! It was a busy week. Nice to be back to a normal schedule though.
Here are my weekly notes:
- It’s possible that the New York Times company could default on $400 million worth of debt in May, and that has many people speculating about the company’s future. What would happen if the New York Times stopped printing? How would the world react if America’s newspaper of record was no longer available in physical form? Michael Hirschorn argues in The Atlantic that the blow would be largely sentimental. I think he’s right.
- Some related stories from the week: On Monday, the New York Times started selling display advertising on its front page. Jack Shafer wrote in Slate about how newspapers tried to invent the web, but failed. And TechCrunch wrote that to see where media is going, simply follow the money.
- Microsoft announced on Monday that the Xbox 360 recorded its best year in history – life-to-date sales of the console reached 28 million worldwide.
- Mininova saw the number of torrent downloads double from 3.5 billion in 2007 to 7 billion in 2008, and the rate continues to increase.
- This looks like a simple but useful tool included in Windows 7 – the Problem Steps Recorder. Run into an issue? Use the tool to record a short video that you can then send to tech support. Nice.
- From Chris Anderson: the best selling MP3 album of the year at Amazon was also released for free under a Creative Commons license. So much for “piracy” destroying the music industry!
- Using Google Insights for Search, the Royal Pingdom blog has identified the current trends for web terminology and buzzwords. Kind of interesting!
- Have you heard about Microsoft Songsmith? It’s a new product out of Microsoft Research that can automatically provide musical melodies to accompany any vocal singing you provide. Very cool!
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