blogging

People serving in the U.S. military now have their own Web site where they can upload, share, and watch videos.

Announced yesterday, the new MilTube site has been set up as a safer, more secure alternative to YouTube, with content protected behind firewalls. As such, it's designed to serve the interests of military personnel who want to share videos but also satisfy the concerns of the Department of Defense (DOD), which has never been comfortable with access to commercial social network and sharing sites.

"Video is an extremely powerful tool for storytelling and sharing information among personnel,&… Read more

Is there a happy medium between a Tweet and something like a full-blown blog post? Microsoft seems to think so and is working on a new experimental publishing system called Montage that lets you throw together a page of content--be it yours, or collected from the Web in just a few minutes.

Actually, less than a few minutes is the aim of the game for Montage, which pulls together news headlines, photos, and Tweets based on Bing searches. These items can then be placed on a page that stays static or changes based on the searches and feeds it's … Read more

I'll admit it: the App Store is home to so many nifty and inventive news readers (Blogshelf, Early Edition, and TheScore, to name just a few), I never got around to Pulse News Reader.

My mistake. It's not just the coolest blog/feed reader for the iPhone and iPad alike, it's also one of the coolest iOS apps, period. And where it once cost $1.99, Pulse News is now free. (Same goes for the Android version.)

I spent some time fiddling with Pulse News for iPad. (If you're interested in Pulse News Mini for iPhone, … Read more

This is a story about a series of tubes.

Well, it's about two series of tubes. There's the Internet, the "series of tubes" per the late Sen. Ted Stevens, the web of invisible filaments that tie together our e-mail accounts, Facebook profiles, RSS readers, instant-message clients, and so forth.

Then there's the New York City subway system, the creaking circuitry of tunnels and machines that has shuttled the town's millions of residents and visitors underneath its streets for well over a century now--and which, it was revealed in a shadowy and alluring New York Times feature last week, … Read more

Twitter is trying out a new feature to display ads, or promoted tweets, directly in a user's Twitter stream, but the company admits it's watching carefully to see how people react.

The site expanded its "promoted tweets" feature yesterday, starting slowly by displaying the ads only for those who use HootSuite, a third-party Twitter client. Promoted tweets are tweets that advertisers pay to show to a large number of people, similar to the way advertisers pay for sponsored links that appear among search results at Google.

Those who access Twitter through HootSuite will begin to see … Read more

Editor's note: We used Cover It Live for this event, so if you missed the live blog, you can still replay it in the embedded component below. Replaying the event will give you all the live updates along with questions and commentary from our readers and CNET editors. For those of you who just want the updates, we've included them in regular text here. You can find a brief summary of what was announced in our followup article here.

CUPERTINO, Calif.--Fresh off of crowing about strong iPhone sales, and unloading on Google and Android, Apple is turning its attention to one of its smallest businesses: the Mac.

Join us live as we find out for sure what Apple has in store. Our coverage begins just before 10 a.m. PDT today. You can follow the blow-by-blow account in the Cover It Live module below.

Those of you on Apple devices can watch Apple's own live stream of the event here: http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1010qwoeiuryfg/event/index.html. The stream requires Safari 4 or 5 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard or Safari on iOS 3 or later. It can also be watched on non-Apple products by using a media player called VLC (download here) and inserting the URL into the Open Network Stream option under the media tab.

9:52 a.m. PDT: Hi everyone, thanks for joining us! We're just getting settled inside Town Hall here on the Apple campus. The event should begin in about 10 minutes.

9:56 a.m. (Josh Lowensohn): Hey, Josh here. I'm on photo duty this morning. Ina will be on in a second to corral your comments.

9:59 a.m.: Lights are lowering. Here we go. … Read more

A majority 64 percent of CEOs are not using social media to engage with the public and other stakeholders, according to a new study from PR firm Weber Shandwick.

Released yesterday, the report "Socializing Your CEO: From (Un)Social to Social" (PDF) looked at the social media presence and activities of CEOs from the world's top 50 companies.

Among those CEOs profiled, 93 percent have been reaching out to people outside their companies in traditional ways. Most have been quoted in news and business publications, while 40 percent have talked to audiences directly at public events.

But … Read more

After receiving nary a mention at Apple's annual developers conference in June, it turns out Mac OS X will be getting its own special event October 20.

Invitations to a special event titled "Back to the Mac" showed up in tech press e-mail in-boxes just moments ago, featuring the above image of a lion peeking out from behind the Apple logo. Besides what we can assume will be an introduction of new Mac hardware, the invitation promises a peek at the "next major version of Mac OS X." Since past versions of the operating system … Read more

Social networking is more popular in Latin America, the Middle East, and China than in the U.S., Japan, and other Internet-saturated markets.

That is just one of the findings of the "Digital Life" study released today by British research firm TNS. Polling nearly 50,000 people across 46 countries, the survey was designed to gauge changes in online behavior globally.

The study found that online users in certain rapid-growth regions are now spending more time on social-networking sites than on e-mail. Consumers in Latin America, the Middle East, and China put in 5.2 hours each week … Read more