roundup

News roundup: YouTube rival cometh, Tabblo purchased, Kongregator goes public

NBC and News Corp. push new Web rival to YouTube. If you can't beat 'em join 'em, which is what AOL, MSN, Yahoo and MySpace are doing to combat media juggernaut YouTube. The companies have combined forces and are gearing up to launch a new online video service this summer. Besides user-submitted clips, expect to find full-length TV shows and paid-for movies from two major studios. ( CNET News.com)

HP to acquire photo start-up Tabblo. Photo sharing and printing service Tabblo is being acquired by Hewlett-Packard. In our hands-on we noted the ease and simplicity of its built-in printing … Read more

News roundup: Google, Congoo, RateItAll + MuseStorm, Mashtracker

Google rolls out pay-per-action. Google's got a new advertising scheme, and it's set up to help small-time advertisers avoid the dangers of click fraud. Instead of just paying by the click, advertisers can set up predetermined actions the user must go through, such as purchasing an item or browsing a certain section of the site. The new system has sparked controversy in the blogosphere as a potential destroyer of smaller affiliate marketing services.

Congoo launches News Portals. Premium news content distributor Congoo ( previous coverage) has rolled out a customizable single-page-aggregation service that pulls stories from user-selected topics. Users … Read more

News Roundup: March Madness on YouTube, Google privacy, and SkypeFind

NCAA tournament clips on YouTube. Just because Viacom has gone lawsuit-happy with YouTube, that doesn't mean CBS wants to keep its content off Google's video-hosting service. CBS will be adding highlights, press conferences and specials available "immediately" following live TV coverage. YouTube users will also be able to vote on and rank their favorite game clips.

Google adding search privacy protections. Google will be "anonymizing" search queries connected to your IP address and browser cookies about 18 to 24 months after they were created. Currently, all three pieces of information are grouped together and … Read more

News Roundup: Viacom sues YouTube, MySpace News screens leaked, Microsoft to buy Tellme

Viacom drops $1 billion lawsuit on YouTube. The news came this morning that Viacom is suing Google-owned YouTube for "massive intentional copyright infringement." The suit is due to the repeated viewing of almost 160,000 clips of Viacom-owned content that were hosted on the service. It was only a matter of time before the big lawsuits came from content providers after Google's acquisition of YouTube late last year. It's worth noting that the lawsuit amount is more than half of what Google paid for YouTube in stock in November. ( CNET News.com)

Shots of MySpace News surface. … Read more

Look, I found some Craveable stuff completely unrelated to SXSW!

If you read tech and new-media blogs (which you probably do, since you're reading this one) you must be under the impression that anyone who's anyone is at South by Southwest right now, Twitter-ing away on 6th Street, etc., etc., etc. Well, here's the truth. Not everything cool right now is in Austin. Like me, for example. I'm totally awesome. And then there's this stuff...

--Gridskipper has found a dozen hotels worldwide that are made out of ice.

--Portable de-stressing kits are now available for $250, according to BornRich. I know of … Read more

News Roundup: Unbox for Tivo goes live, Friendster + Google, Web radio deathwatch?

TiVo users get unboxed. TiVo users looking to spend their hard-earned money on digital downloads of movies and TV shows online can now do so without leaving the couch. Last month's announcement of the partnership to bring Amazon's Unbox service to TiVo owners has been fulfilled, and now TiVo users can pick from more than a thousand pieces of content to download straight to their set-top box. ( News.com)

Friendster makes Google its ad, search supplier. Google has unseated Yahoo for advertising supremacy at Friendster, one of the oldest social networks that still has 37 million registered users. … Read more

New York Comic Convention news roundup

From Friday through Sunday, the New York City Comic Convention took over Manhattan's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, and Will Greenwald and I were there to brave the hordes of Star Wars cosplayers to bring you plenty of super sweet news coverage. Actually, scratch that. We get along just fine with Star Wars cosplayers. No horde-braving is necessary.

--Digital age plays villain, hero in future of comics (CNET News.com)

--Halo ActionClix and other nerd games (Crave)

--Web comics, print comics, and really really big print comics (Crave)

--More than comics at comic convention (CNET … Read more

Nutty '24' fan legally changes name to 'Jack Bauer'

I thought that 24 fandom had gone a little bit too far when I heard about the shot-pounding "Jack Bauer Power Hour" viewing parties at various urban bars, but this one really takes the cake. A "computer expert" in the U.K. has changed his name to Jack Bauer, according to Geeksugar. Apparently his given name, Tim Annan, really wasn't doing it for him.

We here at Crave highly encourage you not to do dumb things like change your name as a tribute to a TV show--even though it took me hours the other day … Read more

News Roundup: Digg gets OpenID, Flickr downtime, 37signals Highrise teaser, Blinkx + Sproose partnership

Digg to adopt OpenID. Later this year, Digg will be adding OpenID to its site. OpenID, which we looked at back in September, creates a master password similar to what you get with Microsoft's Live ID, but it's not proprietary. ( TechCrunch)

Flickr outage reveals site's scale. Flickr wasn't working yesterday, but fear not--it's back up. The problem mixed up a large number of photos across the site, which quickly led to Yahoo shutting down the service for several hours. Interestingly enough, the outage revealed that at times, the site serves over a billion photos a day. ( … Read more