Alive in Baghdad: Can Citizen Journalism Done Right Pay the Bills?

From NewTeeVee - Alive in Baghdad is arguably the best-positioned citizen news video outfit in the world. It boasts not only an on-the-ground team shooting unfiltered interviews in a highly relevant place like Iraq, but constructive goodwill from videobloggers and video startups like blip.tv and Next New Networks, and even acknowledgment from the mainstream media. It won six prizes, including best vlog, at the inaugural Vloggies awards last year, was recently featured on Good Morning America, and landed on the page-view mine of the YouTube homepage today. | Read full article

Apple Rumors — Day 1

From The New York Times - Apple is announcing a big event at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Wednesday, Sept. 5.

This is really short notice. It leaves us only 167 hours to wallow in rumors.

What do we have so far? | Read full article

The Wait Is Over! News Corp./NBC’s NewSite has a Name.

From The New York Times - They didn’t take any of your suggestions.

The online video venture between News Corp. and NBC Universal - the long awaited challenger to YouTube announced back in March - will be called Hulu.com. | Read full article

German universities embrace Linux

From CNET/New York Times - A German state has signed a major contract with Novell for the supply of Linux server and desktop products to 33 universities.

North Rhine-Westphalia has selected Novell for the supply of its IT infrastructure. Novell already supports 300,000 students in the states of Bavaria and Thuringia; the new deal will add another 560,000 students and thousands of employees. It's not clear how many of the students actually will use the desktop Linux software.| Read full article

Nokia to Introduce Digital Music Service

From The New York Times - In the same converted 19th-century fish market where Apple announced the European introduction of its iTunes music store three years ago, Nokia said on Wednesday that it would soon introduce its own digital music service, along with an easier-to-use Apple-style mobile interface and an Apple-style touchscreen handset.

The Nokia Music Store, to open this year, will let users download songs from the Internet to their computers or directly to mobile phones over wireless networks, which Apple’s recently released iPhone cannot do. | Read full article

Chicago scraps citywide Wi-Fi network

From CBC.ca - An ambitious plan to blanket the city with wireless broadband internet will be shelved because it is too costly and too few residents would use it, Chicago officials said Tuesday.

"We realized — after much consideration — that we needed to re-evaluate our approach to provide universal and affordable access to high-speed internet as part of the city's broader digital inclusion efforts," Chicago's chief information officer, Hardik Bhatt, said in a statement. | Read full article

Music industry caps fees for Net radio stations

From The Globe And Mail - A music industry group Thursday said it would cap “per channel” fees for major Internet radio companies streaming music on multiple channels.

SoundExchange, which collects royalties from Webcasters and distributes them to artists and record labels, said it would limit fees — at $50,000 (U.S.) a year — for online radio station companies that offer more than 100 channels to customers.

A panel of three copyright judges earlier this year mandated that Webcasters had to pay higher royalty fees and a $500 fee “per station or channel” streamed, regardless of the total number of channels. | Read full article

Fighting click fraud: Is it really down for the count?

From The Globe And Mail - It's hard to determine who's right and who's wrong when it comes to calculating the amount of click fraud on the Internet. Search engine companies like Google and Yahoo, which make billions worldwide from online ad sales, maintain that everything is under control, yet reports from independent researchers tell a different story.

And the stakes in the PR war are soaring.

Online advertising revenue in Canada is expected to grow to $1.34-billion this year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada. But as the market continues to expand and businesses increasingly turn to the Internet to promote products and services, the number of online fraudsters is also growing, according to Click Forensics Inc., an independent click fraud reporting service. | Read full article

Skype blames Windows for outage

From The Globe And Mail - At last, the folks at Skype have provided us with a half-decent explanation of what happened when the peer-to-peer telephone service went dark for almost two full days last week. Unfortunately for Skype, it's not a very favourable one. The company does its best to blame the service outage on Microsoft, saying the disruption was triggered by a massive wave of restarts by users whose computers had downloaded routine updates from Microsoft:

"The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update," says a post on the company's blog. "The high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources." | Read full article

The funny papers migrate

From The Globe And Mail - Newspaper comics have been getting thin recently. There are fewer good new ones and the draughtsmanship of many is getting downright awful.

But according to a report from the Times of London this week, comics — especially old ones — are getting a new lease on life with cellphones. According to the story, publishers want to attract readers by sending strips as picture messages. They’re even trying to figure out how to embellish the comics with sound. | Read full article