BlogBuzz July 13, 2007

Hello, and welcome to the July 13, 2007 edition of BlogBuzz.

  • Digg iPhone Beta launched, interesting story behind it. A free iPhone for coding it in 48 hours? Cool. Wait… Does that mean he didn’t have an iPhone to test it on?
  • The courts have declined the request to postpone the increase in internet radio royalties. However, SoundExchange (the morons behind the whole thing) is offering a “temporary reprieve” until a “more equitable rate schedule” is agreed upon. The whole thing is insane. SoundExchange, besides raising the royalty rates by a lot, is demanding a $500 per channel (annually) “administrative fee”. Then they want the rates doubled by 2011. That would kill Pandora, and other sites of the like.
  • The personal data of over 1 million Ohio state employees, taxpayers, and lottery winners was stolen recently.
  • Australia sues Google over sponsored links for “deceptively” close placement of search results and sponsored links. What’s their problem?
  • Mozilla attempts to combat phishing by highlighting the domain in the address bar…and fading the rest to a light gray. They’d better include an option to turn it off! I’m not some clueless newbie who can’t tell which site I’m on. All this new “feature” would do is annoy me. I do a lot of PHP development, which often involves passing variables through the URL. I need to be able to see the rest of the URL easily, not just the domain.
  • Wi-Fi iPods coming soon. Apple’s patenting some stuff again. Hopefully they’ll let you sync your ‘pod through your Wi-Fi network. I hate using cables to load my current MP3 player with music. If they build a Wi-Fi equipped iPod Nano (with wireless syncing), I’d run out and get one.
  • WordPress MU Development Premium (WPMUDEV) released. Doesn’t sound like it’s worth $50 (yearly) to me. I’ll stick to WordPress and the standard WordPress MU.