NewsTrust - All Rated Stories

The psychology of healthcare reform

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

CNET News - By Adam Richardson - Nov. 13 (Opinion) - The House has passed the first comprehensive reform package of the health insurance industry in decades, which is now up for debate in the Senate. This is a highly complex issue, but there are some quite basic reasons why it's so difficult to accomplish significant reform, and in part these have to do with psychological responses to change and uncertainty.

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For The New York Times, the digital future is now

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

CNET News - By Daniel Terdiman - Mar. 10 (News Report) - By now, just about everyone who follows the media industry has heard of the deep fiscal troubles of The New York Times. But even as the paper does its best for all the news that's fit for newsprint, it is also conducting experiments aimed at moving itself into the forefront of digital journalism.

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One-fifth of Americans have never used e-mail

Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

CNET News - May. 19 (Poll) - About 20 percent of all U.S. heads-of-household have never sent an e-mail, and about 20 million households, or 18 percent, are without Internet access, according to a study released earlier this week.

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A business model for Twitter: Pay up

Sat, 17 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

CNET News - By Dan Farber - May. 17 (Opinion) - The Web spirit of "build an audience and figure out the business model later" is a great filter. It allows products and services into the wild without barriers or the need to sell advertisers on an unproven concept. Those who can build an audience, such as Twitter and FriendFeed, and before them Google, Facebook, and dozens of others who turned into giants, have the scale to develop monetization schemes that a loyal and fanatic user base won't summarily reject.

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Google to launch Friend Connect for the social Web

Sun, 11 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

CNET News - By Dan Farber - May. 11 (Opinion) - Google is expected to join the social network data portability crowd with "Friend Connect" on Monday. TechCrunch speculates that Friend Connect will be a set of "APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites." Google will join Facebook and MySpace, which launched ways to port user data to partner sites this week. Facebook Connect will provide the hooks to let users port their friends, profile photos, events, and other data across the Web to partner sites. MySpace on Thursday announced Data Availability, with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter as initial partners for its effort to let members port their data.

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Q&A: Battelle talks blog roll-ups, Google, and Federated Media's future

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

CNET News - By Stephanie Olsen - Mar. 22 (Interview) - By federating together with a lot of other like sites, they get better access to terms and deals from large companies like Google or Microsoft. The core of that is that we work with a select group of really high-quality sites that are independent; and it's in our interest to help them stay that way. Particularly last year, everyone was running around talking about how cool the idea of a roll-up was: "We'll buy a bunch of these sites and stick them together and we've got the next big media company."I'm not certain that that strategy doesn't kill the...goose that laid the golden egg.

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Judge: Wikileaks gets its domain name back

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

CNET News - By Declan McCullagh - Mar. 01 (News Report) - "The court has the obligation to get it right," White had told attorneys for Bank Julius Baer, or BJB, earlier Friday. "I took an obligation to uphold the Constitution. The court has its own obligation to raise these issues. Contrary to what you say, my obligation is to look down the road and see where this thing is going."... a host of free-speech groups, including Public Citizen, the California First Amendment Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, requested to intervene in the case on behalf of Wikileaks.

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Ad spending moving from portals to search, entertainment sites

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

CNET News - By Elinor Mills - Feb. 25 (Opinion) - The share spent on portals dropped from 24 percent in 2006 to 19 percent, while search share rose to 31 percent from 28 percent, vertical sites rose to 39 percent from 37 percent, and spending on ad networks was flat at 11 percent. More dollars went to the top 5 ad networks.

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Wikileaks domain name yanked in spat over leaked documents

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

CNET News - By Declan McCullagh - Feb. 19 (Opinion) - U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White on Friday ordered that the domain name be disabled at the behest of a group of Swiss bankers who filed a lawsuit alleging that confidential information appeared on Wikileaks.org.

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National Press Club targets citizen journalists

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

CNET News - By Stefanie Olsen - Feb. 15 (News Report) - The National Press Club, a 100-year-old professional club for journalists, aims to recruit new online-media members through a partnership with Helium.com, a hub for citizen journalists. The deal is expected to be announced on Tuesday.

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Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

CNET News - By Anne Broache - Jan. 09 (News Report) - For one thing, under an Obama presidency, Americans will be able to leave behind the era of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and "wiretaps without warrants," he said. (He was referring to the lingering legal fallout over reports that the National Security Agency scooped up Americans' phone and Internet activities without court orders, ostensibly to monitor terrorist plots, in the years after the September 11 attacks.)

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Bush administration attacks 'shield' for bloggers

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 05:05:04 -0700

CNET News - By Anne Broache - Jun. 14 (News Report) - The latest draft of the Free Flow of Information Act would pose a grave threat to national security and federal criminal investigations by protecting far too large a segment of the population, a U.S. Department of Justice official told Congress.

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Experts say Microsoft's patent quest won't go far

Wed, 16 May 2007 08:01:15 -0700

CNET News - By Stephen Shankland - May. 16 (News Analysis) - Microsoft said it released the tally--though not the 235 specific patents--in an effort to bring open-source companies to the table to hammer out intellectual property licensing deals similar to the one struck by Linux seller Novell in 2006. But industry experts said the declaration's implicit demand--that companies with open-source software should figure out what Microsoft patents they're infringing and come to the negotiating table--is unrealistic at best. In general, searching for potential software patent violations isn't practical, given the number, breadth and opacity of patents in the United States. Not only that, but it's at odds with Microsoft's own policy to wait for patent holders to get in touch with it if they think there's infringement. In fact, searching for potential patent problems can actually leave a company financially exposed: if a lawsuit concludes a patent was infringed, a company or individual that knew about the potential infringement must pay triple the financial damages compared with an unknowing infringement.

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Burning Man takes on green tech

Mon, 07 May 2007 20:12:57 -0700

CNET News - By Daniel Terdiman - May. 07 (Special Report) - For Harvey, the green theme is a chance to show the world that Burning Man is serious about its many altruistic philosophies. "It will affect nearly everything we do and can lead to a dramatic effect or transformative effect, and we're betting on transformation," Harvey said. "We're betting that in 10 years' time, the culture we've created will have met Main Street and will be alive and thriving in hundreds or thousands of places. And people needn't necessarily come to the event."

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Google buys ad firm DoubleClick for $3.1 billion

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 08:15:27 -0700

CNET News - By Elinor Mills - Apr. 13 (News Report) - In its largest acquisition yet, Google has agreed to pay $3.1 billion in cash for online ad company DoubleClick, the companies announced Friday. The deal gives Google a large network of advertisers and Web publishers to serve and sell ads to, and it boosts the search giant's banner advertising business, which lagged rival Yahoo's.

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Rather: Journalism Has 'Lost Its Guts'

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 11:26:52 -0700

CNET News - Mar. 13 (News Report) - To longtime CBS broadcaster Dan Rather, American journalism in recent years "has in some ways lost its guts." During his hour-long keynote address at South by Southwest Interactive, Rather opined at length on the state of his profession, in which too many journalists have become lapdogs to power, rather than watchdogs. "I do not exclude myself from this criticism... By and large, so many journalists-there are notable exceptions-have adopted the go-along-to-get-along (attitude)," he said. So, because of this "access game," journalism has degenerated into a "very perilous state," he said in response to a question from his on-stage interviewer, FireDogLake.com writer Jane Hamsher....

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Cheaper LEDs to light a green path?

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 09:15:43 -0800

CNET News - By Michael Kanellos - Jan. 19 (News Report) - "We estimate that the cost and efficiency could be better than florescent." --Mark Schmidt, president, Cyberlux Consumers currently have to pay more than $5 for an LED-lighting chip, he said. To be able to use it in a flashlight or lamp, they have to pay another $10 or so for connectors and other parts. "We estimate that the cost and efficiency could be better than florescent," he said. Schmidt, an IBM computing veteran, likened the movement toward LEDs in the light industry to what happened with computers in the 1970s and 1980s. The new style of LEDs is based on technology licensed from the University of California at Santa Barbara and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

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New Netscape.com focuses on news

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 15:07:41 -0700

CNET News - By Elinor Mills - Jun. 14 (News Report) - Netscape is expected to relaunch its Web site on Thursday, transforming from a general purpose portal into a news site in which both readers and editors choose the content. In its latest incarnation, Netscape is a hybrid news site combining elements of social bookmarking, like Yahoo's Delicious, Digg and Slashdot, where users recommend and rank their top choices for news stories, and traditional news sites, where editors select their top picks. Netscape also is borrowing from blogs by having paid editors--dubbed "anchors" in a nod to broadcast journalism--comment on stories. The site is even taking it a step further by having its editors fact check news stories and do some additional reporting to provide background or further context, said Jason Calacanis, who co-founded blog publisher Weblogs Inc., which AOL bought last year. "This is a new type of journalism," Calacanis said in a recent interview with CNET News.com. "I think it's a risk-taking, bold step by AOL." Calacanis knew he wanted to do a news site that featured reader participation, but said he got the idea to have some editorial oversight when he read complaints about lack of transparency at Digg. A reader suspected Digg editors of gaming the site by pushing stories up without merit, or allowing readers to. Digg denied the accusation. "I had an 'aha' moment," Calacanis said. "I was watching the controversy about Digg and I thought I would just put an editor on top of it to check the facts."

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Google fixes China search bugs

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 06:04:16 -0800

CNET News - Jan. 27 (News Report) - A day after Google's buggy censorship of sites for Chinese-users was revealed, the search giant has responded by fixing its filters so topics such as beer and jokes are no longer deleted. An investigation published Thursday by CNET News.com showed that Google's new China search engine not only censored criticisms...

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