Digital Media

eBay on Sunday confirmed that a "technical issue" had caused search queries on the auction site to be messed up over the weekend, resulting in limited or no search results. The company says that it's being cautious, though, and is holding back on some advanced search features until the issue is fully solved.

"We are happy to report that critical search functionality was restored overnight on Saturday and we are seeing normal activity levels today," a post on the company's eBay Ink blog read Sunday. "As part of our effort to restore critical search functionality as quickly as possible for sellers and for buyers, we have kept some secondary search features temporarily offline. This includes refining search by certain item specifics, such as color or clothing size, and having Store Inventory Format results included in the main search results."

In a statement, eBay also said the technical issue was caused by "a surge in live listings as sellers ramp up for the holiday season. eBay currently has more than 200 million live listings, 33 percent more than at this time a year ago."

Some eBay members still weren't satisfied with the explanation. "I had a one day auction ending today, (and) no one was obviously able to bid on it because they couldn't search for it," one commenter said on the eBay Ink blog. "Will I get a credit for this?"

"eBay should credit all sellers with active listings during this time," another said. "These issues have cost sellers many bids and sales. Once again eBay is screwing sellers."

Much like Twitter's today, outages at eBay were rather prominent in the company's early days. They're not too frequent anymore. But this one came at a time when there are some sentiments of malaise among eBay sellers, some of whom use the auction site to make a living, and when it also faces increased competition in the e-commerce sector.

An analyst release from JP Morgan Chase said that it did not anticipate the outage would have an effect on eBay's fourth-quarter earnings. But, it contained a warning: "Although we recognize it is virtually impossible for a site of this complexity to not encounter occasional issues," the report from analyst Imran Khan read, "we continue to believe that eBay needs to make greater investments in the robustness and functionality of its site in order to remain competitive within the e-commerce space."

For the last year or so, it's become clear that the economics of ad-supported streaming music services are not good for their creators or investors. As CNET's Greg Sandoval reported last week, the acquisition of streaming service Imeem by MySpace Music for pennies on the dollar is the latest bad news for the sector, following the bankruptcies of SpiralFrog and Ruckus and the similar fire sale of iLike to MySpace.

Offering your music via Spotify might help you fill up your piggybank.

Who's left? In the U.S., we've still got LaLa, which has the blessing of the major labels and seems to be enjoying dramatically increased traffic (as measured by Alexa) thanks to its recent deal with Google, and Grooveshark, which has kept a low profile. Neither of these services is purely ad-supported--particularly LaLa, which hopes to charge customers for downloads and "permanent" streams once they surpass a quota of 50 free streams a month.

But the service most often cited as the future of online music is Spotify. It's only available in Europe right now, but it seems like everybody who tries it loves it, myself included. Spotify offers a premium service as well, which offers portability and higher-quality streams, but the free service offers unlimited ad-supported streams, and that's the service that has everybody so excited.

But there's one small problem with the Spotify-as-savior story: it doesn't pay artists very well. According to this story in a Swedish publication, as translated and explained by the TorrentFreak blog, Spotify delivered more than one million streams of Lady Gaga's hit single "Poker Face" over five months. From these streams, she reportedly earned about 1,150 Swedish kronor--about $167--from the Swedish agency responsible for paying royalties. That's not even enough to cover the cost of four tickets to her upcoming concert in San Francisco.

If this story's true, why would any artist agree to make songs available on Spotify? With these kinds of payouts, it looks like music business expert Donald Passman is right--advertising is never going to support an online music service.

Global company IBM seems to have found a way for its employees to get past language barriers and communicate.

IBM employees are currently using text translation software that can instantly convert documents, Web pages, and even instant messages between English and 11 other languages. The software, christened "n.Fluent," is being "crowdsourced" or tested among IBM's 400,000 employees across 170 countries.

As IBMers use n.Fluent, the software learns from its mistakes and improves itself. As the entire company potentially taps into n.Fluent, volunteers within IBM refine each translated word for greater accuracy. In just two weeks this past summer, volunteers tackled around 1.3 million words, averaging around 100,000 per day. Overall, n.Fluent has translated more than 400 million words for Big Blue staffers.

The software works as a plug-in or add-on to other applications, making it fairly seamless to use. Plug-ins translate instant messages on the fly. Text from a word processing document or other presentation is copied into one field of the software, with the immediate translation popping up in another field. IBMers can use n.Fluent on their desktops, laptops, and even smartphones.

This "universal translator" can currently tackle English, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Korean, Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Arabic.

"To become a smarter planet, the world needs a shared vocabulary for collaboration -- particularly the business community," said David Lubensky, an IBM researcher managing the n.Fluent project, in a statement. "We see n.Fluent as just such a tool, helping to expand commerce, cement relationships and make the world that much smaller, one word at a time."

Of course, free language translators, such as Google Translate, are already available. But IBM sees n.Fluent as a better alternative. The software is more secure as it runs behind a firewall. It's also adept at handling business jargon. Right now, n.Fluent is only being used internally. But like many of IBM's research projects, it's likely to find a home outside of Big Blue's walls.

IBM spokesman Ari Fishkind said there's no fixed date as to when it might be available externally. "It would be a reasonable assumption that there's a demand in the market for a translation tool that has very good security," he said. "And also this kind of tool is uniquely tuned for a business environment that has almost a language in itself."

Other language translation tools can convert individual words. Key to n.Fluent's success will be how it handles entire sentences and paragraphs as well as colloquialisms. But the company's field tests are geared toward those goals.

"The whole point is to continually refine the idioms and the syntax and the context by people who use the language every day," said Fishkind. "And that's part of this crowdsourcing idea where hopefully at the end of the day we're going to have a system that is not only intelligible but also fluent and fluid."

Wikipedia's exponential growth over this decade is due to the efforts of the millions of volunteers who write, edit, and check its entries. But could that volunteer effort now be in danger?

Volunteers have increasingly been quitting Wikipedia en masse for a variety of potential reasons, according to Monday's Wall Street Journal.

More than 49,000 editors left Wikipedia's English-language edition during the first three months of 2009, compared with only 4,900 for the same quarter a year earlier, according to the Journal, quoting Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzes Wikipedia's online data. Though the service still boasts about 3 million active contributors, volunteers are leaving more rapidly than new ones are joining, the Journal said.

Among the top 10 most-visited sites, Wikipedia is under continual pressure to expand the scope and to police the accuracy of its data, a task that could become increasingly difficult with fewer volunteers. Errors, both accidental and deliberate, have always plagued Wikipedia.

Several reasons for the decline in volunteers have been offered by Wikipedia contributors, noted the WSJ. Many subjects have already been fully written about. The site has also enacted an array of rules to limit conflict among people who contribute to the same entries, especially on controversial subjects. But the rules often trip up new contributors who find their content removed without understanding why.

Despite those rules, arguments over various articles have also taken their toll. "Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again," Ortega told the Journal.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales discussed the site in an interview with Silicon.com earlier this month. With 13 million articles now written and edited by volunteers, Wales sees conflict among multiple contributors as the exception.

"We really tend to use less inflammatory words--try to stick to basic facts and so on. And that's come about over time. You have people come together [on Wikipedia] with different viewpoints but in general they tend to be trying to work in good faith to collaborate and compromise with other people."

Wales also pointed out that most articles are written by a small number of people.

"One of the things that's important to know about Wikipedia is that the entries that are edited by hundreds of people are really anomalies," he told Silicon.com.

Wales does confirm that participation in Wikipedia has slowed, the Journal said, though potential solutions depend on the reasons for the decline. "If people think Wikipedia is done, that's substantial," he said, referring to the notion that there are no more subjects to write about. "But if the community has become more hostile to newbies, that's a correctable problem."

The Winklevoss twins will probably be scary, too. This is a 'Jurassic Park' promo shot of actor Joseph Mazzello, who was recently cast as Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. NB: He's nearly two decades older now.

(Credit: Amblin Entertainment/filmdope.com)

This isn't particularly Earth-shattering news, but it's sort of hilarious.

Dustin Moskovitz, one of Facebook's co-founders and its head of engineering until he left last year, will be played by the little boy from "Jurassic Park" in the tell-all flick "The Social Network."

According to details in the Internet Movie Database, the role of Moskovitz has been filled by Joseph Mazzello, the actor best known for playing Timmy, the skinny 8-year-old who fell out of trees, nearly got electrocuted, and narrowly escaped getting eaten by all kinds of meany dinosaurs in the 1993 blockbuster. In other words, he already has experience as a member of the supporting cast of over-the-top movies about high-tech innovations.

Mazzello is now 26, which should make you feel very old.

Moskovitz was instrumental in Facebook's origins, but in "The Social Network" (helmed by "Fight Club" director David Fincher with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin) he has a relatively minor role. The film is not supported or authorized by Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg, its CEO and co-founder. And the book that the movie is based on--Ben Mezrich's "The Accidental Billionaires"--relies on sourcing, much of it anonymous, from other figures early in Facebook's history. We can confirm that Moskovitz, who has been loyal to the company even after leaving, was not one of them. Putting too much of him in there could lead to legal problems.

The young cast of the movie has proven to be an amusing blend, with "Adventureland" star Jesse Eisenberg starring as Mark Zuckerberg (likely a very good fit), pop star Justin Timberlake playing Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sean Parker (really?), and "Gossip Girl" actor Armie Hammer playing both Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the identical twins who claimed Zuckerberg's founding of Facebook amounted to a theft of their own idea.

Some looks at the new AOL branding.

(Credit: AOL)

It's the media equivalent of moving out of your parents' house, heading to the nearest tattoo and piercing parlor, and yelling FREEEEEEDOM!: AOL has unveiled the "new brand identity" for its post-Time Warner era, slated to begin December 10 when it begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company. And there's nary a blue triangle in sight. Instead, there's a plain new text logo presented with various backdrops, from cartoon scribbles to a rock-star hand symbol to a totally adorable goldfish.

The company is currently offering just a preview, and says in a release that a full unveil will come on the spin-off date. Yay, secrets! I love secrets! But we, of course, have many hints: like the fact that CEO Tim Armstrong, who joined the company in March after a long stint as a high-profile Google sales executive, keeps talking up AOL's future as a powerhouse in digital content and publishing. The company's array of niche blogs, which were hatched when AOL purchased Weblogs way back in 2005, are now its centerpiece.

So the new mood? "It's one consistent logo with countless ways to reveal," the release explained. Ooh, sexy!

The release also included a soundbite from Karl Heiselman, CEO of Wolff Olins, which AOL enlisted to help with the transformation: "AOL is a 21st century media company, with an ambitious vision for the future and new focus on creativity and expression, this required the new brand identity to be open and generous, to invite conversation and collaboration, and to feel credible, but also aspirational."

Of course, it's not all sunny: The company is on the verge of significant layoffs, as well as the possible chucking of non-"content" properties like ICQ and MapQuest, as the spinoff date grows closer.

Whatever. Isn't that goldfish cute?

Maybe Rupert Murdoch was serious about wanting to go without Google.

Murdoch's News Corp. has initiated discussions with Microsoft over a plan to have the media company's Web content essentially delisted from the world's largest search engine, according to a report Sunday in the Financial Times that cited a person familiar with the situation. Microsoft, which owns rival search engine Bing, has also reportedly approached other media giants about having their content removed from Google search results as well.

Microsoft representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The two companies have been linked discussing a Web-search partnership in the past. During Microsoft's failed bid for Yahoo in 2008, the tech giant was reportedly in "serious" talks with News Corp. to make a joint bid for Yahoo.

Murdoch, the chairman of a newspaper, TV, and Internet empire that includes The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, 20th Century Fox, Fox News, and Hulu, warned earlier this month that his sites may soon disappear from the search engine's listings. Murdoch accused search giants of "stealing" his company's content during a recent interview with Sky News Australia. When he was asked why he just doesn't pull his Web sites from Google's search results, he said: "I think we will. But that's when we start charging."

Murdoch and other News Corp. execs have said that they intend to charge readers and viewers for access to the company's content, forsaking the ad revenue model.

For several months, executives at some of the nation's most influential news sources, including The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, have been blaming Google and similar Web services for at least some of their deepening financial troubles.

Google sells ads tied to the news blurbs it "scrapes" from news sites. It links back to the Web sites from which it acquired the content but doesn't share ad revenue with them.

"Publishers put their content on the Web because they want it to be found," Google said in a statement earlier this month. "Very few choose not to include their material in Google News and Web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don't."

Critics of the media companies' bashing Google point out that if media companies were serious about not being indexed by search engines, they could accomplish the feat on their own by adding a robots.txt file to the root of their Web site containing a simple code that would prevent bots from indexing their pages.

If it's five o'clock in the morning and you have to spend your time with far more people than you're used to, pushing, pulling and writhing your way to satisfaction, then perhaps a shopping mall is not the ideal location.

The tradition of Black Friday as the day when one attains negotiation nirvana seems a peculiar one. And one has to wonder whether people have learned that some of the deals really aren't deals at all.

As CNET's Rick Broida has already pointed out, many of the alleged deals aren't terribly enticing, as stores have been forced to reduce their prices all year in a desperate attempt to attract the cash-strapped.

However, CNNMoney.com has also written of some slightly tired tactics being promulgated by Black Friday peddlers.

It seems that some are using the rather more saliva-inducing tech items to snap people's sleeping patterns. However, the tinier print of the inducement reveals that there may not be many of these items in stock.

If this reminds you of car dealers, well, then it's perhaps not a good thing.

CNNMoney.com tells the story of Sears' trumpeting of a Samsung 40-inch 1080p LCD HDTV for $599.99. Would this make you slip you fur coat over your PJs, leap into your sedan, and rush to your local mall while it's still dark outside?

Black Friday is so much fun, isnt it?

(Credit: CC HermanTurnip/Flickr)

The tinier print might give you pause for thought. It reads "Only while quantities last, minimum three per store, no rainchecks."

This is not to suggest that Sears is the only retailer succumbing to these slightly tired mechanisms. But why does this remind one of Vegas casinos, who, when realizing that the gambler with a fine memory was in a relatively favorable position in two-deck blackjack, introduced multiple decks, just to increase the fun?

CNNMoney.com also revealed that some products on sale might be so-called "derivatives." For the less initiated, this might be translated as "inferior models." It might be an HDTV that enjoys a lower image contrast ratio. Or an iPhone that can't download apps. (Yes, the latter is an exaggeration.)

Edgar Dworsky, editor of Consumer World, was even quoted by CNNMoney.com as dampening the hopes that might dwell in a raincheck: "A raincheck doesn't guarantee that you will eventually get that elusive Black Friday deal. Consumers can go weeks waiting and hoping, and the retailer may never get more of the product shipped to its stores."

Might I make a suggestion as I watch the fast-moving train that is the desperate need for deals rushing headlong at the train that is the equally desperate need for profits?

Why don't stores offer a couple of truthful ads? Something like this: "Look, we've got three Samsung 40-inchers for $599.99. We won't make any money on them. But we're advertising them so that you can get excited. We promise there will be three of them and we'll sell them to the first person who comes in and guesses the middle name of our handsome salesman, Brad. We think that's fairer than having y'all fight, bite and claw outside our front door. Life is random. So are our deals."

This is a new era in the relationship between retailers and their customers. Social networking is forcing companies to be far more authentic with their customers than they have ever felt comfortable being before.

Why can't some of them use Black Friday as the first day of their new authenticity? It just might engender a little loyalty and a little trust. You know, for those other 364 days of the year.

I was just sending a tweet about some excellent chicken livers I'd eaten when I espied some information that made my acid perform a refluctive motion.

According to eMarketer, three different digital actuaries declared that Twitter traffic has performed a slight plummet.

While comScore suggested a drop of 8.1 percent in October and Compete estimated 2.1 percent, while Nielsen, that apogee of accuracy, declared a 27.8 percent decline between September and October.

Nostradamus is on Twitter. Does this secure its future?

(Credit: CC RachScottHalls/Flickr)

It seems that these figures, blessedly inconsistent as they are, are not taking account of all the third-party and mobile methods of keeping everyone up with your eating, drinking, reading, philosophizing and socializing.

But is it also possible that some people will simply never participate in the Twitter phenomenon, finding it either annoying, uncool, or even too much effort?

With Twitter intent on becoming more businesslike (why does the word 'more' seem slightly redundant here?), 2010 seems destined to be the year that the microblogging service becomes either de rigueur or dazed and confused.

Will Twitter become a permanent habit or a disappearing, perhaps even elitist, fad? I'll tweet Nostradamus and ask him.

You didn't know Nostradamus is on Twitter? Where have you been?