A Facebook browser that would allow you keep up to date with your social life from in-built plug-ins and features on the menu bar could be on the cards. Pocket-lint has heard from one of its trusted sources that the social networking giant is looking to buy Opera Software, the company behind the Opera�web browser. According to our man in the know, the company could be about to expand into the browser space to take on the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla and now even Yahoo, who has recently launched its own browser. The move, which would no doubt send shivers of panic through Google, although unlikely to affect Chrome's continued growth in the short term, would see the two tech giants battle it ... Continue reading →
�ONLY connect,� the English novelist E. M. Forster admonished mankind. I don�t think, however, that he meant that we should connect exclusively, or continuously. Skip to next paragraph This week: Microsoft�s $3 software for the poor, spending it on Beckham, and the stock market surge. Habitual users of a new, free communications service called Twitter would disagree. For anyone unfamiliar with the latest trends in technology, �Twitterers� send and receive short messages, called �tweets,� on Twitter�s Web site, with instant messaging software, or with mobile phones. Unlike most text messages, tweets � usually in answer to Twitter�s prompt, �What are you doing?� � are routed among networks of friends. Strangers, called �followers,� can also choose to receive the tweets of people they find interesting. Tweets ... Continue reading →
A recent view of the world from “Twittervision.” (source: twittervision.com)The concept of the Web as a decentralized network — a sprawling, makeshift Busytown built of bamboo, copper wire and coal chutes — may have run its course.Instead, the Web, if web’s still the right metaphor, currently seems like a fiercely centralized Palladian estate. Or maybe a row of august-looking banks.Maybe its virtue, for the forseeable future, will be in providing obvious, visible-from-space landmarks where people can meet and stash data: YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace, Skype.We can now add Twitter to that list. This is the site that allows you to post what you’re doing, and read what others are doing — all over the world. For a graphic sense of the implications of this simple idea, ... Continue reading →
CNN’s rotten ratings have grown only rottener. The Time Warner-owned news network drew fewer prime-time viewers last week than any week since September 1991, the New York Times just reported. But CNN isn’t the only network riding the down escalator when it comes to ratings. Over the same week, Fox News Channel attracted its fewest viewers in the important 25-to-54-year-old category since July 2008, the Times added. Various observers have blamed the viewership downturn on the lull in the 2012 campaign, on viewers defecting to the season finales on the entertainment channels and on the lack of breaking news. But I interpret the falloffs as fresh evidence that the audience for cable news has peaked. The first sign of a peak in cable news appeared ... Continue reading →
by Alicia Shepard Published May 25, 2012 8:04 am The Henri Nannen Prize is considered the most prestigious journalism print prize in Germany, the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize in the United States. So it came as a surprise earlier this month when, at the annual awards ceremony in Hamburg, three journalists from Sueddeutsche Zeitung rejected the award for the investigative news category. The judging is similar to the Pulitzers in that submissions are weeded down to three finalists. This year, however, the Henri Nannen judges could not decide between two of the three finalists in the investigative news category. So they split the prize between Sueddeutsche, the largest broadsheet in Germany, and Bild, a populist New York Post-style tabloid that runs pictures of half-naked ... Continue reading →
Aired May 25, 2012: Conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh compared "Trayvon Martin Day" at a Washington, D.C.-area high school with a perceived "war on races" Limbaugh says is being launched by President Obama. Continue reading →
