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"Rock On" skewers the recording industry

I picked this book up while traveling yesterday, read a few pages in the bookstore, bought it, and have blazed through the first 150 pages in little more than a day. It's one of the funniest and most entertaining books about music, culture, and business that I've ever read.

Like a lot of suburban white boys of a certain age, Dan Kennedy dreamed about being a rock star in his youth, but reality eventually intervened and he got a corporate gig. Only in this case, the corporation was Atlantic Records--Led Zeppelin's record label, as he points out. … Read more

AOL Radio re-posts security update

AOL Radio may need to turn up the volume to get its users to download the latest security update, or its listeners may tune them out.

AOL Radio re-posted its Unagi plug-in 2.6.2.6 on Friday, but it failed to stress that users running versions of AOL Radio prior to August could be facing a security risk if they didn't download the update.

It turns out that AOL Radio users running version 2.6.1.11 are at risk, said Thomas Chau, who runs the AOL Radio blog. He noted, however, that anyone who downloaded the Unagi … Read more

AOL tweaks BlueString, preps new XDrive

At CES, AOL was showing new features in its media-sharing service, BlueString (see hands-on). The latest news is the release of a Facebook app, My Memory Gallery, that lets you share your pictures with your Facebook pals. It's a nice bow to AOL's realization that, "We need to be where people actually are," as a representative told me. In my quick tryout of the application, though, I found no way to move files from preexisting BlueString folders into the Gallery folder so they'd show up on the Facebook widget. That kind of burst my bubble. … Read more

AOL launches Desktop for Windows

AOL Desktop (download it for Windows XP/Vista from CNET Download.com) is a new, free download that collects most of that brand's services, such as Mail and AIM, into one location.

This is an interesting, old-school approach to organizing Web-based content on the desktop, unlike so much new webware that leans on the browser as the portal for anywhere-access to services. Another recently-released download that depends upon the Internet for most functionality is Microsoft's Windows Live apps bundle. However, while that package adds useful and novel tools, the AOL portal left me puzzled.

The AOL Desktop download … Read more

AOL co-founder's Revolution Health acquires HealthTalk

First AOL, next a revolution.

AOL co-founder Steve Case announced Wednesday his online health and wellness company, Revolution Health Group, has acquired HealthTalk, pushing his company into the ranks of the second-largest health information site on the Net.

The deal is designed to bolster Revolution's offerings beyond the health and wellness category and into the area of supplying content on chronic conditions. The acquisition marks yet more activity in the online health care arena, which has seen not only mergers but also the birth of medical and health-related search engines, according to American Medical News. There's also been … Read more

Gmail integrates AIM, adds colored labels

Update 2:50 p.m. This article has been updated with user experience information on AIM integration into Gmail.

Gmail and Google Talk users can now chat with their AOL Instant Messenger buddies through the Gmail interface, Google announced today. Rolling out to all English-based users by the end of the day, the new feature will let you seamlessly jump from chatting with a Google contact to an AIM buddy without having to use two separate chat clients.

AOL, Netflix and the end of open access to research data

Correction: The authors of the Netflix de-anonymization study contacted me to point out that they originally published a draft of their results a mere two weeks after Netflix released its dataset. Netflix has known about their study for over a year.

Over the past year, there have been a number of high-profile incidents in which sensitive user data was accidentally revealed to the Internet at large. As a result, I believe that high-tech companies will never again share anonymized data on their users with academic researchers, at least not without requiring contracts and nondisclosure agreements. For the users and privacy … Read more

AOL acquires question-and-answer service Yedda

Time Warner unit AOL announced early Monday morning that it has acquired Yedda, a question-and-answer start-up that was founded in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2006. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition, according to a release from AOL, was all about Yedda's code: the patent-pending semantic technology "automatically matches questions to other related questions and topics, while selecting the best available users to answer the question." Yedda-powered features are set to begin appearing on AOL's sites over the next few months.

AOL makes plenty of acquisitions, but most of the recent ones have … Read more