Microsoft Hires Tony Scott as Chief Information Officer  —  Respected industry veteran to join executive leadership team, run global IT operations.  —  Microsoft Corp. today announced the appointment of Tony Scott to the role of chief information officer (CIO) and corporate vice president of Microsoft.

Source:   Microsoft
Link:   http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/jan08…

Time Warner: Download Too Much and You Might Pay $30 a Movie  —  Let’s say you buy a new Apple TV because you want to rent high-definition movies.  And say you are about to move to Beaumont, Tex. If so, you might wind up paying Time Warner Cable as much as $30 when you download […]

Digg’s secret editors  —  Why do some stories abruptly disappear from Digg?  Duncan Riley of TechCrunch suspects “super users.”  But there’s a much simpler explanation: Digg’s shadowy moderators.  Digg cofounder Kevin Rose has admitted that the social-news site, a supposedly democratic venue …

Source:   Valleywag
Author:   Owen Thomas
Link:   http://valleywag.com/346263/diggs-secret-editors

Blogger Suffers Major Outage.  Bloggers Not Happy  —  Google’s Blogger hosted blogging service has suffered a major outage this afternoon (PST) with [Spammers] bloggers flooding forums to complain.  —  Users affected by the outage were presented with a Blogger error message that included the code …

Source:   TechCrunch
Author:   Duncan Riley
Link:   http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/17/blogger-suffers…

Blogger Suffers Major Outage.  Bloggers Not Happy  —  Google’s Blogger hosted blogging service has suffered a major outage this afternoon (PST) with [Spammers] bloggers flooding forums to complain.  —  Users affected by the outage were presented with a Blogger error message that included the code …

Source:   TechCrunch
Author:   Duncan Riley
Link:   http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/17/blogger-suffers…

Dell laptops in electric shock shocker  —  We’ve discovered a worrying new feature in some Dell laptops: if you touch them, you may get an electric shock.  This discharge can vary in strength from a gentle tingle to a sudden jolt.  Disturbingly, you could also be shocked when connecting printers …

Source:   Crave at CNET […]

IBM: A Separate Reality?  —  We knew the bottom-line numbers, after I.B.M. jumped the gun by three days and announced its surprisingly strong profits and sales figures on Monday.  But what was striking in the company’s conference call on Thursday afternoon was the unhedged optimism in its outlook for 2008 …

Source:   Bits
Author:   Steve […]

Folks In Europe Trying To Connect The CIA To Every Successful American Internet Company?  —  Earlier this week, some readers sent in the utterly ridiculous article from the Guardian in the UK working out all sorts of laughable conspiracy theories behind Facebook.

Source:   Techdirt
Author:   Mike Masnick
Link:   http://techdirt.com/articles/20080117/030348.shtml

Update: Joost Fires CTO  —  Joost CTO Dirk-Willem van Gulik was fired by the Internet TV software company.  He has taken another job as chief technical architect of the BBC Future Media and Technology Group, which is responsible for a similar project, the peer-to-peer video software iPlayer.

Source:   NewTeeVee
Author:   Liz Gannes
Link:   http://newteevee.com/2008/01/17/joost-loses-cto-to…

Sink or Swim?  The Top Moving Sites Of 2007  —  At Compete we frequently write about monthly traffic volume and site popularity, but the focus is usually on the ten or twenty sites that enjoy monthly visitors in the tens (or even hundreds) of millions.  While it’s important to investigate these sites …

Source:   Compete […]