media

With dual announcements in New York and London on Tuesday, social networking site Bebo unveiled its "Open Media" platform, a way for media brands to build a presence in the community with music and video content.

Think of it as a sort of hybrid between MySpace's MySpaceTV portal and Facebook's new "pages" for companies. It's an "open platform" that can be joined without licensing agreements and charges no fee to content providers, but it's limited to entertainment content like video and music. According to a release from the company, this … Read more

Like most news about Microsoft's oddly-named media player, it was leaked well in advance. But now it's official: consumers buying the new Zune devices, which are set to be released on Tuesday, will be able to customize them with laser-engraved text and select artwork.

Now that explains the tag line "you make it you."

Called "Zune Originals," the new Zunes will feature a selection of artwork by 18 artists and design studios: Colletivo Studios, Catalina Estrada, Laurent Fetis, Sam Flores, Klaus Haapaniemi, Pierre Marie, Kenzo Minami, Parskid, Mike Perry, Phunk Studios, Chisato Shinya, Skwak, … Read more

Last week I posted a rather pointed polemic titled "Suicide by strike" in which I argued that the big entertainment companies were acting suicidally in picking a fight with the writers at precisely the wrong time.

In this post, I more dispassionately outline my theory of why that's the case, and what I think may happen next.

The writers' strike, and the studios' response to the strike, may radically accelerate a structural shift in the media industry -- a shift of power from studios and conglomerates towards creators and talent.

First, some context. In Hollywood, the talent … Read more

Time Warner unit AOL announced early Monday morning that it has acquired Yedda, a question-and-answer start-up that was founded in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2006. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition, according to a release from AOL, was all about Yedda's code: the patent-pending semantic technology "automatically matches questions to other related questions and topics, while selecting the best available users to answer the question." Yedda-powered features are set to begin appearing on AOL's sites over the next few months.

AOL makes plenty of acquisitions, but most of the recent ones have … Read more

Although it hasn't exactly exploded into the mainstream music-listening population at large, the music-sharing application Simplify Media (download it for Windows or Mac) is a fan favorite of several CNET editors and staffers.

Simplify Media has always allowed you to listen to your iTunes playlists on the road or share them with friends. Yesterday, it announced support for the popular digital-music jukebox app Winamp for Windows.

When you install Simplify Media, you must choose whether it will work with Winamp or iTunes playlists. Those of us who occasionally use both apps and thought we might be able to consolidate playlists are out of luck. You can, however, change your preferred playlist program after installation.… Read more

LAS VEGAS, Nev.--If you type "Matt" into the Google search bar, you won't immediately get results for the actor Matt Damon or the political site owner Matt Drudge, as you might expect.

Instead, the No. 1 listing points to the site of Matt Mullenweg, the 23-year-old founder of WordPress, the widely used open-source software for blogging.

Befitting his Google ranking, Mullenweg could be considered a superstar here at the BlogWorld conference, where he spoke to hundreds of attendees Thursday about how he started WordPress and the future of blogging. To be sure, when people in the … Read more

TiVo's making a big push with its TiVo HD unit. That's understandable. The company's original foray into high definition, the TiVo Series3, carried a $799 price tag (now $599) that priced it out of the range of all but the most fervent TiVo fan. At $299 or so, the TiVo HD is much more in line with what typical audio and video gadgets go for and therefore something that it actually makes sense to promote.

I finally took the plunge to HD when TiVo offered to transfer the lifetime subscription from my Series2 for $199. I bought my lifetime before they switched to offering only perpetual monthly payment plans and figured that I ought to get some money out of it while I still could. Plus I got an HDTV last year so I had started thinking about upgrading to digital cable service. Finally, TiVo was just in the process of releasing a software upgrade that lets you use external eSATA storage on your TiVo. That was the decider.

I called to make the transfer today and I thought my experiences worth sharing.… Read more

This may be the strangest media player we've seen since the one from Japan that gives facials in between MP3 tunes. And even that one didn't look quite so weird.

For some reason Taiwanese company Yung Fu Technology has come out with a player whose most noticeable feature is an undeniably ugly handle built into its frame, making it look more like some kind of power tool than a piece of personal electronics. And even if you can get past that, Engadget notes that there's no information on storage, pricing, or availability on this product, which has … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Writing the blog iPhoneFreak.com, Stephane Dion has learned at least one lesson, and it's not just that he has a lot of company as an Apple iPhone fanatic.

Rather, it's that blogs are the best way to reap traffic from Google and other search engines. Blogs are dynamic, real-time, and chock full of search-engine-friendly keywords, he said.

Dion, a blog consultant and author, said he put up the iPhone site in September 2006 and it now draws about 250,000 page views per month. For 8 of those 14 months, iPhoneFreak.com turned up No. 1 … Read more