Fans

AUSTIN, Texas--I've blogged about Topspin Media in the past--it's the company that handled the staggered direct-to-fan release for the recent David Byrne-Brian Eno album, "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today." At the South by Southwest festival here this week, Topspin announced that it has taken a lot of the lessons it learned from the Byrne-Eno release and applied it to their platform.

Under the Byrne-Eno program, the artists first asked listeners to enter their e-mail address in exchange for a free song download. A few weeks later, they released a streaming version of the entire record, … 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

Facebook's all set to make a product development announcement of sorts on Wednesday in the form of what it calls an "Open Door" event featuring CEO Mark Zuckerberg and several other executives. The most notable portion of it--according to an e-mail from the company's press corps--is that it'll unveil "the next evolution of Facebook Pages."

Facebook Pages, as you may recall, are the free profiles that brands can set up to establish a presence on the social network, which now has over 175 million members worldwide. Members can sign onto the pages as &… Read more

Research firm Nielsen Online announced the results of a study that found 20 percent more people visited career development sites in January than in the same month last year and unique visitors grew from 41.5 million to 49.7 million in the same span.

According to the firm, CareerBuilder was the top career development destination in January with 20.8 million unique visitors, followed by Yahoo HotJobs and Monster, which captured 11.7 million and 9.5 million unique visitors, respectively. Ironically, the number of unique visitors aged 65 and older who used career sites grew 41 percent year-over-year … Read more

Forbes just put out another of those crazy lists where it proposes to identify the top Web celebrities--following a recent spate of other lists of top Tweeters and talkers and Web-famous types. And while we don't dispute the attractiveness of doing stupid lists to get people to look at your content (see: CNET Top 5), it could be said that the Web 2.0 elite is getting, well, nauseatingly self-congratulatory.

So, Tom Merritt and I decided to make our own list of influential people on the Web. These are some, but only some, of the top CNET TV fans … Read more

Want some big exposure on Facebook? Just pull off a water landing in a fully loaded passenger jet.

For Chesley B. Sullenberger, who successfully landed US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson river Thursday, that happening appeared to have given him a cult-like following on the popular social network.

So far users have created nearly a dozen fan pages for Sullenberger, the most active of which is pulling in more than 100 new fans a minute and totals more than 51,000 members at the time of this posting. While it's nowhere near the millions attained by some celebrities … Read more

Yahoo announced on Thursday that it has added Wikipedia deep links and images to its search results. The company, which is using its SearchMonkey platform to add more third-party content to its results, claims that all Wikipedia results in its search will now include links to the first four sections of the article, as well as an image. The feature can be turned off through Yahoo's preferences pane.

MediaGlow, AOL's publishing unit, announced the launch of a new sports site Thursday. Dubbed FanHouse, the site sports a new design and "an expanded lineup" of national sports … Read more

FanSnap announced Monday a $5.5 million funding round, which it aims to use on completing the build-out of its search engine.

FanSnap, which launched its ticket search engine beta in September, received funding from existing investor General Catalyst Partners, which led the round.

The FanSnap site is designed to allow users to search for tickets based on a number of criteria, from price range to number of tickets sought, as a well as an at-a-glance ticket price range based on the stadium section using a colored map.

The site gleans its data from 56 ticketing providers including StubHub, Ace … Read more

Back when I was a kid, we had to blow on our laptops (and carry them 10 miles in the snow, by the way) to keep them cool. These days, you young whippersnappers have things a whole lot easier.

Take, for example, the Chinese Beijing Opera USB laptop cooling pad. Just plug it in. It contains three quiet built-in fans to dissipate hot air from underneath your notebook and keep your system cool. But it's also a decorative nod to the high drama of Chinese opera.

The cooling pad is powered via a retractable USB cable, and is light … Read more