digitizing

Point-and-shoot camera or digital SLR? That's been the long-standing dilemma for shoppers looking for a way to take pictures.

But now the great divide may be shrinking, at least a bit, as camera makers work to bring high-end features (smarter sensors, faster shooting, access to "raw" images, etc.) and low-end convenience (small size, primarily) into a single gadget.

The compact camera that probably comes closest in design to an SLR is Canon's PowerShot G7 (shown here), Stephen Shankland writes on CNET News.com today. Another option, he writes, is the Nikon Coolpix P5000.

Even as enthusiasts … Read more

Old-school book publishers are still trying to figure out how best to reach audiences on the Web and build online communities for their authors. That was the takeaway of a talk this week at Mashup 2007, a conference held in San Francisco that focused on teens and tech.

Diane Naughton, vice president of marketing at HarperCollins Children's Books, said that the challenge has shifted from the publishing industry holding the Internet at arm's length to worries about how to prove value from online marketing efforts.

One way HarperCollins plans to tackle this challenge is to team up with … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Last month, Danah Boyd, a well-known researcher of teen culture online, argued that class divisions in the United States could be split between MySpace.com and Facebook.

In essence, Boyd wrote, MySpace is home to a large population of "burnouts," punks or alternative-scene teenagers whose parents likely didn't go beyond a high school education. Facebook, in contrast, is a bustling hub for jocks, school nerds and prom queens planning for their university years. You get the division.

But what happens to the teens who don't have constant access to technology, unlike those spending hours a … Read more

We all goof, but we don't all do it as visibly as CNET TV star and executive editor Molly Wood, nor do we often relish fessing up. Molly does both with wit, charm, and FotoTagger, a handy digital-photography freeware tool for annotating digital photos via movable captions.

Read Molly's hilarious confession, Anatomy of a Buzz Report screwup, to see why FotoTagger has become her "new favorite thing." While you're at it, try it out.

Last week, Digital Music Group (DMGI) agreed to a merger with The Orchard. Reading through the details--summarized nicely by the New York Times--it appears that this is more of a buyout than a merger, with The Orchard owning 60% of the combined company, which will retain the DMGI name.

I met DMGI founder Mitch Koulouris back in 2004 when he was first raising money for the company, then called Digital Musicworks International (DMI). He and one of his associates (who's since moved on) were very excited about their business plan, which he called the first all-digital record label. … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--If there's one business where the intersection of new technology and old is creating confusion, I can't think of a bigger muddle than the recording industry.

So it is that I had a chance to listen to an interesting discussion on the future of the music business here at the wrap-up day of the iMeme conference organized by Fortune magazine.

Jerry Harrison, who used to play with the Talking Heads (and is now chairman of iLike) offered a provocative and entirely insightful comment about where things likely may be heading.

Nowadays our choices are still limited because … Read more

Adobe released the public beta of its Adobe AIR runtime environment (previously codenamed Apollo) about a month ago. The software is designed to allow the development of rich Internet applications that work on any operating system. I'm sure that there are technical differences, but it seems a lot like an amped-up widget engine to me.

Needless to say, AIR apps aren't nearly as ubiquitous as Adobe Flash apps (yet), but there have been a few interesting recent developments. The most-polished AIR application so far is Adobe Digital Editions, software for reading, downloading, and managing e-books. To learn more about it, check Seth Rosenblatt's First Look video for Adobe Digital Editions.

While Adobe Digital Editions might be the most powerful AIR app so far, the one with the most buzz is definitely the Pownce desktop client, a tool for sending content to your Pownce buddies and the Pownce Web site. (Pownce is currently in private alpha; jump down to the bottom of this post for info about how to request an invitation.)… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Feeling bad about your accomplishments so far in life? Stop reading here.

Catherine Cook is the 17-year-old co-founder of myYearbook.com who spoke here Wednesday at the iMeme tech conference about her vision for online media. Instead of enjoying lazy summer days or drinking beer with friends, Cook's preoccupied with growing one of the most popular social media sites, which in little more than a year has millions in annual revenue, 3 million monthly unique visitors (according to ComScore), and $4.1 million in venture funding from U.S. Venture Partners and First Round Capital.

To illustrate where … Read more

If you've ever wondered who's driving like a bonehead up ahead, it could be a teen who's behind the wheel, steering with one hand and sending a text message with the other. According to a study from AAA and Seventeen magazine, cited by this USA Today article, almost half of teens surveyed admitted that they send text messages from the driver's seat. (The researchers interviewed about 1,000 teen drivers in the United States to compile the data.)

That dovetails with a study published Tuesday about teen cell phone habits, which commonly include texting from the … Read more