Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Google's China site hangs by a thread

Google is tweaking its China website in a last-ditch effort to save its search business in the world's largest Internet market after butting heads with Beijing over Web censorship.


The move comes ahead of a Wednesday deadline for China to renew Google's operating license. Google said Beijing had made it clear it was unhappy with the company's three-month old system of re-routing Chinese Web surfers to google.com.hk.

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Conroy retains Comms portfolio

Senator Stephen Conroy has survived a cabinet reshuffle from newly crowned Prime Minister Julia Gillard, retaining his role as the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

Gillard revealed details of her new ministry at a lunchtime press conference today, noting that she had made "limited changes" in order to achieve "maximum stability in the team".

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When Social Media becomes The Message : The Gulf Oil Spill and @BPGlobalPR

Nearly everyone has something to say about BP’s oil spill, and from a public relations perspective, the company is floundering. Both its stock price and brand value have taken a deepwater dive, and it is struggling to make its own voice heard.

When you Google "BP PR" or "BP public relations the top organic result is @BPGlobalPR, a parody account on Twitter with more than 175,000 followers.

In contrast, BP’s official account, @BP_America, has only 15,000 followers. The satirical @BPGlobalPR is dominating the online conversation. It is an object lesson in how social media can shape and control a company’s message during a crisis...

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Did Secrecy Hide the iPhone 4's Antenna Problems?

Did Apple really not know about the problems with the iPhone 4's Antenna system which, particularly when the device is held with skin touching the bottom left of the steel antenna surrounding its case, can cause signal degradation and even dropped calls?

It's possible, and it's possible that its own paranoia, as well as its BFF, AT&T, are at fault.

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YouTube Weighs in on Flash vs. HTML 5 Video

Between the iPad’s blocking of Flash earlier this year and the huge wave of ad campaigns, open letters, and debates that followed, it seems that everyone has an opinion on the merits (or lack thereof) of Flash on the modern web.



YouTube software engineer John Harding took to the site’s official blog to weigh on the current status of HTML5 video support. The gist of it: while HTML5 is great, it can’t do everything YouTube (or most mainstream video sites) need.

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Wednesday, June 16, 2010

YouTube Launches Web-Based Video Editor

This morning, news broke of a spiffy, and very powerful new feature on YouTube: a built-in video editor.

The JavaScript-based YouTube editor isn’t loaded with bells and whistles, but it can handle the basics just fine: it’s easy to trim and splice together the video clips that you’ve uploaded, and you can replace your video’s audio with any of YouTube’s library of 40,000 approved songs (you can’t upload your own audio yet, but YouTube is working on deals to make that happen).

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iPhope 4 Pre-Orders Exceed Supply

The media coverage surrounding Apple iPhone 4 pre-order inventory levels has been almost as crazed as, well, the whole pre-order frenzy. Not unpredictable for a new Apple product release -- and particularly a new iPhone design -- it didn't take long for the Cupertino company to exhaust its supply of devices for day-of-release shipments.

It's true that both AT&T and Apple have depleted their pre-order allotment, but according to Apple's website, new orders for both the 16GB and 32GB models will ship by July 2nd. That's a week and one day longer than the original ship date, which was previously listed as June 24.

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