Consumer content

AUSTIN, Texas--The future of news is not breadlines for journalists, a lack of reporting on politicians' scandals, and a dearth of coverage of what's really going on behind the lines of wars around the world.

In fact, a surprisingly optimistic author Steven Johnson said Friday during his talk, "The Ecosystem of News," at the South by Southwest Interactive festival (SXSWi), there's actually a bright future for news and the best hope for a vibrant, effective, and worthwhile news-gathering community is to look back at the model set over the last decade or so in technology journalism. … Read more

Nintendo's Wii may follow Microsoft's Xbox and Sony PS3 into the film market.

On Thursday, entertainment trade publication Variety reported that an executive from film studio Lionsgate said the Wii could be equipped to stream movies as early as this year.

"The thing that is clearly a force in digital are the game devices," Curt Marvis, president of digital media for Lionsgate, told Variety. "I think when we see the Wii come into the market with the ability to stream movies, which I think is maybe going to happen as soon as this year, I … Read more

Web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee says he is making sure the Semantic Web will respect the privacy of online communications and allow people to control who can use their data.

The Semantic Web, an ongoing project overseen by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), seeks to enable the Web to intelligently interpret what people are seeking when they search the Net.

In one example, computers will data-tag photographs and combine those tags with information from a desktop calendar, so people can ask the Web what the people in the photograph were doing on a particular day.

However, researchers have warned that … Read more

David Nelson, the 15-year-old co-founder of the free site Muziic, idealizes Napster creator Shawn Fanning. But that doesn't mean he's going to run his business the same way.

Muziic, which launched two weeks ago, is a music service that piggybacks on YouTube. Nelson's software rounds up YouTube's music videos and enables users to sort and add them to playlists as if they were MP3s. There's no messing around with YouTube's search engine, videos, or advertisements.

There's little about Muziic that compares to Napster, the peer-to-peer service that helped demolish the traditional music business … Read more

Conference attendance may be in a recession-fueled funk, but this week's South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas, seems primed for a steep boost in turnout, one that will dwarf even last year's record numbers and challenge the throngs who stream into packed keynotes, panels, and parties.

If you were among the 9,000 people who crammed into the 2008 SXSWi, which had grown a rumored 80 percent over the 2007 edition, there's a good chance your experience included a series of over-capacity talks, endless lines for parties, and sardine-can hallways.

The 2009 edition of SXSWi may … Read more

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--Call it SearchMonkey Lite--an easier way for a Web site to spotlight its videos, games, and documents in Yahoo's search results.

Yahoo has been working to let publishers spotlight their content in its search results through a program called SearchMonkey, but the company has concluded the technology's power comes at the expense of ease of use. Now Yahoo is offering a lightweight way to use SearchMonkey that it hopes will make the service approachable to average Web page creators.

The company posted a blog entry with some basic text that can be tweaked then inserted into … Read more

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--Facebook has a Web-based instant-messaging application, but Yahoo wants to one-up the social networking site with an application called Pingbox that lets Facebook users chat with widely used Yahoo Messenger technology instead.

In 2008, Yahoo released a version of Pingbox that would let people put an IM widget on their pages at Friendster, Xanga, hi5, LiveJournal, MySpace, and Google's Blogger sites. It was harder work to build the Pingbox application for Facebook but now that's available too.

With Pingbox set up, anyone who visits your Facebook page sees a chat window that invites them to send … Read more

Video hub Hulu now lets its members amass friends lists much like a standard social-networking service, the site said Thursday.

You can now invite friends from your e-mail address books or Facebook and MySpace accounts, and then see a feed of what your friends have been watching, commenting on, or subscribing to.

In the event that you find this creepy or don't want your boss to catch on to the fact that you watch reruns of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia all day long you can disable these activity-feed features.

The announcement comes in conjunction with the one-year … Read more

So either Jon Stewart is really on to something with his mad-as-hell crusade against financial hypocrisy and stupidity, or there are a lot of unemployed people watching Comedy Central clips to pass the time.

Either way, an on-air freakout by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli may have been one of the best things to happen to Comedy Central in months: Fake-news pundits Stewart (of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart") and Stephen Colbert (of "The Colbert Report") have seen traffic to their Web sites and online video clips soar after the two went on mocking vendettas against … Read more