Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Twitter Raising New Cash At $250 Million Valuation  —  Twitter, which just recently turned down a half billion dollar acquisition offer from Facebook (albeit to be paid mostly with Facebook stock), is dipping back into the venture capital market, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deal.

Loïc Le Meur / Loic Le Meur Blog:
The New Twhirl (preview release) for Team Seesmic-Twhirl  —  We are as excited as you are about Twhirl and are happy to announce a new version today which we will be circulating as a preview to get your help and feedback.  We are gathering a “circle of […]

Chris DannenFri / Fast Company:
Does the White House Have Wi-Fi?  —  Is the White House more of a museum than a working office?  Does it even have WiFi?  —  MSNBC has reported that on their first day on the job, Obama’s White House staffers suffered from downgrades on every front.  During the campaign and […]

John Resig:
OCR and Neural Nets in JavaScript  —  A pretty amazing piece of JavaScript dropped yesterday and it’s going to take a little bit to digest it all.  It’s a GreaseMonkey script, written by ‘Shaun Friedle’, that automatically solves captchas provided by the site Megaupload.

Noam Cohen / Bits:
Wikipedia May Restrict Public’s Ability to Change Entries  —  Stung by criticism after vandals changed Wikipedia entries to erroneously report that Senators Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd had died, Wikipedia appears ready to introduce a system that prevents new and anonymous users …

Brandon LeBlanc / The Windows Blog:
General availability for the Windows 7 Beta to end  —  First off: thank you for your interest in beta testing Windows 7!  As we near January 24th, we wanted to update everyone again on the next steps for the Windows 7 Beta.  The amount of feedback we have received […]

Ross Miller / Engadget:
Microsoft reports $100M decline in Zune revenue  —  Microsoft’s newly-announced layoffs and declining profits aren’t the only bad news in Redmond — according to the company’s quarterly statements, Zune platform revenue decreased $100 million, or 54 percent compared to the same quarter last year, due to falling device sales.

Stacey Higginbotham / GigaOM:
Surprise!  VC Funding Fell Off a Cliff in Q4  —  As expected, the venture industry is seeing the fallout from the economic crisis, with fourth-quarter investments dropping to a total of $5.4 billion invested in 818 companies, according to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers …

Stacey Higginbotham / GigaOM Daily:
Surprise!  VC Funding Fell Off a Cliff in Q4  —  As expected, the venture industry is seeing the fallout from the economic crisis, with fourth-quarter investments dropping to a total of $5.4 billion invested in 818 companies, according to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers …