Photo of the Week: This is a photo I took in my old neighborhood in Lincoln Park in Chicago prior to moving on to AOL in Virginia. Happy St. Patrick's Day!Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 03.18.07
Viacom Drops a $1 Billion Nuke on Google
Remember when Napster was a lawsuit target for helping to foster pirated music? When Google acquired
YouTube everyone wondered who would be the first company to try and
collect on video copyright infringement in a similar fashion. We now know, as
Viacom was the first to step to the plate with a one billion dollar
lawsuit against Google. Complete.com offers some interesting analysis on the situation.
AOL moves AOL Local Search into Beta - it's very slick
CenterNetworks
reviewed the latest beta to come out of AOL. AOL Local refreshes the
local options as a user moves around a map. So start in 10036 (Times
Square) and move to 11235 (Brooklyn) and the options move.
Microsoft to Acquire Tellme Networks
Tellme Networks, Inc., a leading provider of voice services for
everyday life, including nationwide directory assistance, enterprise
customer service and voice-enabled mobile search. Microsoft and Tellme
share a vision around the potential of speech as a way to enable access
to information, locate other people and enhance business processes, any
time and from any device.
Last.fm Adds Video Tracking
The Register reported earlier this week that social music play, Last.fm has added the ability to not only track the music you play on iTunes and other services but now is going to start doing the same with video.
Report: New Bloggers Flatlined in 2005, Reading Climbs
Steve
Rubel reports that according to the latest State of the News Media
report, the share of the online population that tried blogging peaked
back in January 2005 at 10% and has hovered since at 8%. Blog
readership, on the other hand is climbing.
The Attention Economy is Killing My Attention
Nick
O'Neill explains how the attention economy may be producing information
overload. He wonders how product like twitter along with blogs will be
able to co-exisit as people piling on attention commitments.
Del.icio.us Adds Tag Descriptions
Del.icio.us, the popular social bookmarking site owned by Yahoo, has added a new feature which enables users to for the first time not only tag items but also add meta-data to title and describe each tag.
Goplan launches! Webreakstuff
has launched a new product called Goplan which offers a suite of online
project management and collaboration tools that could draw comparisons
to
37signals' product line.
TECH cocktail 4: Going, Going, Gone
TECH cocktail 4, the forth event in the event series I co-founded with Eric Olson back in July 2006, is now on its fourth event and we filled a 500 person guest list in 23 hours. Wowsers! TECH cocktail 4 will be on April 12, 2007 at John Barleycorn Wrigleyville in Chicago but due to the overwhelming response we have started a TECH cocktail 4 wait-list for anyone still interested in going. I hope to see you there.
AOL has announced a strategic content and advertising partnership with CitySearch an IAC owned company. The agreement enables AOL CityGuide, AOL Local Search and MapQuest to leverage CitySearch's local content and in return CitySearch gains access to AOL's distribution. CitySearch CEO, Jay Herratti had this to say:
Draggable maps should at least put MapQuest back on the same playing field from a usability standpoint. Not to mention, with draggable maps developers might be more inclined to 
