FutureWire: Mark Pesce, co-creator of Virtual Reality Modeling Language, has coined a new term to describe the peer-to-peer distribution of media content — hyperdistribution . Specifically, he addresses the use of BitTorrent technology to distribute television programming, and how producers and broadcasters are eventually going to have to come to terms with this new distribution method. Pesce asserts that television […]

Wired News: When David Yang recently looked for a new apartment in Chicago, he took an aerial tour of the city. As a 22-year-old on a limited budget, Yang couldn’t afford to hire a helicopter for his visual inspection of Chicago. Instead, he turned to HousingMaps, a hack that combines craigslist real estate listings with city maps from Google Maps. […]

BBC News: A UK website is to offer the internet’s first legal film download service. Wippit, which already sells music downloads, has announced plans to provide movies that users will be able to keep, from this summer onwards. Some US sites offer films which can be downloaded legally for viewing within a time limit but cannot be stored. Wippit founder […]

Wired News: Sony Online Entertainment, the developer of massively multiplayer online games like EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies, is the first major U.S. publisher to facilitate the buying and selling of virtual goods. Late Tuesday, the company unveiled Station Exchange, an auction site that allows players to spend real money on virtual weapons, armor, coins and new, high-level characters. The […]

BusinessWeek: They aren’t the only ones coming to that conclusion. Increasing numbers of Web surfers are going to alternative search engines, which specialize in finding certain kinds of information or offering additional capabilities to well-known search sites. Though exact data is hard to come by, entrepreneurs say venture capitalists are sinking new money into search startups. Tech pundits believe that […]

PSFK: The online magazine for dating service Match.com reports on a new dating phenom called Quiet Parties, at which singles aren’t allowed to speak to each other, just pass notes. It’s not surprising that the digital communication era is leading to such elaborately constructed excuses for exchanging hand-written notes, which seem in danger of extinction. While I can see how […]

Reuters via Yahoo! News: Internet media company Yahoo Inc. is likely to build and buy tools that help its users create, publish and search blogs, Susquehanna Financial Group Marianne Wolk said in a note on Friday. Wolk also said she also expects the company to expand into social networking software, which lets users share and organize content. Yahoo recently integrated […]

Yahoo! News: Lycos is making it easier for lonely hearts to find their soulmates online. The company will launch on Wednesday a search engine that only indexes dating Web sites, giving users links to personal profiles found at iMatchup.com, LoveAccess.com, Tickle, True.com, and Lycos’ own Matchmaker.com. “We did research last year and it revealed that [online] dating customers want a […]

Trendwatching: Prefer soap shows over reality TV? Then check out this case of GRAVANITY par excellence from The Netherlands: Soapshow, a multimedia concoction that enables any needy individual to create his or her own soap series, for all the world to see. Users create their own soap by posting texts, voice, pictures, and video of their daily lives onto their […]