Wall Street Journal:
Ballmer Says Microsoft Can Build Ad Business Without Buying Yahoo  —  Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said he is confident that his company can build a competitive online-advertising business without buying Yahoo Inc., but that it “could just take more time.”

Duncan Riley / TechCrunch:
AOL, RealNetworks and Yahoo Get $100 Million Bill  —  A Federal Court found today that AOL, Real Networks and Yahoo owe $100million to songwriters and composers as back payment for streaming music online.  —  The court ruled on a request from the American Society of Composers …

Nick O’Neill / The Social Times:
MySpace Begins Charging for Application Promotion  —  Last week, MySpace opened up their applications for everybody.  By adding an “apps” link to the top of the MySpace header, they began driving users to the applications page.  The initial applications page used to be a simple directory.

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
MicroHoo: Decision Time at 1 p.m. PDT Today?  —  Memo to Yahoo from Microsoft: We will begin bombing in 30 minutes!  —  Whether it is love-bombing or the other kind, it’s still a mystery to BoomTown.  —  But, according to sources close to Microsoft (MSFT), as early as today …

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Twitter Said To Be Abandoning Ruby on Rails  —  We’re hearing this from multiple sources: After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails as their web framework and start from scratch with PHP or Java (another solution is to stick …

Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed:
Age and the Entrepreneur  —  A while back Fred Wilson started a firestorm with a series of three posts (1, 2 and 3) about age and the entrepreneur.  The gist: He was seeing more and more young tech entrepreneurs, most of them under 30, and some even in their teens, and […]

Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Will Grand Theft Auto IV Hurt Iron Man’s Opening Weekend Sales?  —  from the the-media-landscape-has-expanded… dept  —  While Marvel’s lawyers have been doing plenty of work on their own to hurt interest in the new movie Iron Man, some are suggesting an even more interesting scenario …

Spencer Kelly / BBC:
Identity ‘at risk’ on Facebook  —  Personal details of Facebook users could potentially be stolen, the BBC technology programme Click has found.  —  The popular social networking site allows users to add a variety of applications to their profile.  —  But a malicious program …

Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Ballmer to Microsofties: “Yahoo Announcement in Very Short Order”  —  Steve Ballmer held a Town Hall conference call with Microsoft (MSFT) employees today—reported minute-by-minute by our Vas Sridharan.  —  Not surprisingly, the topic employees most wanted to talk about was Yahoo.

Eric Taub / Bits:
Blu-ray: The Future Has Been Delayed  —  Hot on the heels of last week’s report from ABI Research noting that many consumers may not see the picture quality difference between Blu-ray and standard DVDs comes the latest Blu-ray sales figures from NPD Group.  And they’re not pretty.