Outside the Lines

Beet.tv's Andy Plesser has an interesting interview with Michael Zimbalist, vice president of R&D at The New York Times Co. He describes how the newspaper company is finding ways to link print and online in the mobile arena and how rich annotation of content will lead to more personalized delivery of information and the Semantic Web.

On this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss the latest moves in carving up the wireless world as Verizon Wireless announced plans to acquire Alltel for $28.1 billion. It won't be long before the U.S. wireless industry shakes out into AT&T, Verizon, and a Sprint/T-Mobile merger. We also discuss the latest news in the travails of Yahoo as it tries to keep Carl Icahn from taking over the board.

Plus, we speculate about the Steve Jobs' keynote at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday.

Techmeme has added a missing piece of functionality to its search feature--RSS. Now users can subscribe to results for any query and have them show up in widgets and RSS readers.

Not exactly a super newsworthy event, but increasingly news aggregation and filtering services, including Techmeme, Digg, Reddit, Blogrunner and a host of others, are filling in the gap between the overflow of content from the thousands of sources and RSS readers. Some RSS readers, such as NewsGator, are adding collaborative filtering to surface recommended stories. FriendFeed is adding a summarization feature to filter content. Twitter has a tracking feature … Read more

Former Googler and FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor in this video offers his views on Twitter and describes the new summarization feature coming to FriendFeed soon. Taylor said he was not interested in cloning Twitter, but in improving FriendFeed's communications tools. The next major FriendFeed improvement is an algorithm that processes signals from inputs, such as comments and "likes," to surface the best-shared items from a user's set of friends.

See also:

Gillmor Gang: Inside FriendFeed

Jeremiah Owyang: What FriendFeed's Micromeme means to you, brands and the Web

Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay is betting that Google and Amazon.com will loom as the two giants of Internet. According to Lindsay's report, "U.S. Internet: The End of the Beginning," cited by Reuters, "Both Google and Amazon.com are still racking up annual growth rates in the 30-40 percent range, with only a relatively modest slowdown in sight."

Given how those two companies own their respective fields, it's not a stretch to forecast them as long-term winners in the coming years. Google and Amazon have done the best job of creating … Read more

The witty John Paczkowski has come up with his list of the best quotes from the D6 conference. (See our full coverage here)

Following is a small sample:

"Guys like us avoid monopolies. We like to compete."--Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates

"AOL is the Rodney Dangerfield of the Web. We don't get no respect."--Jeff Bewkes, president and CEO, Time Warner

"I didn't leave business school to go bankrupt."--Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on his first days at Microsoft

"Hollywood is a community that's so inbred, it's a wonder … Read more

The Friday Gillmor Gang podcast featured special guests Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor, the creators of FriendFeed. Along with Twitter, FriendFeed has become a poster child for the next wave of communications tools favored by the cybernauts.

Steve Gillmor seems to think that Twitter will become the predominant messaging backbone for the social Web. If the company behind Twitter can't make it happen, Gillmor suggested that FriendFeed should do it.

Buchheit, who was employee No. 23 at Google and suggested the now famous "Don't be evil" motto, said that FriendFeed wasn't designed to kill Twitter. &… Read more

On this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss the celebrity interviews at the D6 conference, hosted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Unfortunately, I called in from the San Diego airport United Airlines gate area, so you'll hear crying children and the ticker taker coaxing me to get on the plane. Larry gives the lowdown on Dell's earnings and the most recent security issues, patches from Apple, and the Comcast hack.

Sitting across from his employees and writers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the D6 conference, News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch shared his view on newspaper editing.

"A Wall Street Journal story is touched or edited by 8.5 people, and the story gets longer and longer, and people don't have time for that," he said. "There is not a story you can't get in half the space."

If the whole Wall Street Journal were like Mossberg's column, Murdoch said he would be a happy man, getting some big laughs from the D6 … Read more