Peter Elkind / Fortune:
The trouble with Steve Jobs  —  Jobs likes to make his own rules, whether the topic is computers, stock options, or even pancreatic cancer.  The same traits that make him a great CEO drive him to put his company, and his investors, at risk.  —  (Fortune Magazine) — In October 2003 […]

Matt / Photo Matt:
Backing BuddyPress  —  Some of you may remember when I wrote about Chickspeak, a WordPress MU-based social network.  Andy Peatling, the fellow behind it, later decided to recreate the work he had done as an Open Source effort he called BuddyPress.  And it was good.

Todd Bishop / Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog:
Microsoft Research shows new search projects  —  Opening its annual TechFest event in Redmond this morning, Microsoft Research showed a pair of projects meant to help people make “collaborative” Web searches.  —  One, SearchTogether, is an Internet Explorer plugin that puts a sidebar into the browser.

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land:
Google Tests Additional Search Box Within Search Results  —  Tamar tipped me off to people seeing secondary search boxes in the Google search results.  I see them myself now.  For example a search on amazon returns this search box directly under the snippet but above the URL, here is […]

The Technium:
1,000 True Fans  —  The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers.  Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.  —  But the long tail is a […]

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Demand Media Buys Pluck for $75 million  —  Demand Media, a big buyer and operator of Internet domain name companies, completed negotiations to acquire Austin-based Pluck last night after about two months of negotiations.  The price is not being disclosed but is rumored to be in the $50 million range.

Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:
Office Live Workspace vs Google Docs: Feature-by-Feature Comparison  —  Today, Microsoft announced that the Office Live Workspace beta is publicly available for everyone to access.  The site, a free web-based extension of Microsoft Office, lets you access your documents online and share your work with others.

Arik Hesseldahl / Byte of the Apple:
Highlights from Apple’s Shareholder Meeting  —  Details are starting to emerge from Apple’s meeting with shareholders, taking place in Cupertino today.  Among the tasty bits:  — The iPhone will launch in China this year.  (We knew that.  When?)  — India is also on the iPhone roadmap …

Jessica E. Vascellaro / Wall Street Journal:
IAC’s Ask.com to Cut 8% of Staff  —  Ask.com announced an internal restructuring that eliminates 40 jobs as well as plans to turn back the search engine’s focus to better answering search queries posed as questions.  —  The job cuts, which amount to roughly 8% of the company’s […]

Christopher Null:
What is a firewall and why do you need one?  —  Of the many computer security measures available to end users, none is more confusing to the novice than the firewall.  I can understand why.  Unlike anti-virus or anti-spyware tools, a firewall doesn’t immediately telegraph what it does.