nets

Clearly, social-networking metrics are the new black. It seems like just about everyone wants to know whether Facebook will pass MySpace--or whether there are any trendy, fast-moving start-ups that you ought to be monitoring so that you can start up a profile and amass a healthy friends list before it gets too trendy.

Last month, ComScore released numbers pertaining to social networking's worldwide growth. Now, Nielsen/NetRatings' PR team has released its latest set of figures that track how quickly the top social-networking sites are growing. The results are divided into three different categories of social media: social … Read more

For years, we've been hearing about the need for a tech-savvier American health care system that could make paper health records, prescriptions, X-rays and even in-person checkups into relics. But all of that could be derailed unless U.S. policymakers reject calls for so-called Net neutrality regulations, a new report warns.

That's the position of the U.S. Internet Industry Association (USIIA), a 13-year-old trade association that represents "companies engaged in Internet commerce, content and connectivity." Verizon is the biggest name represented on its board of directors, which also includes representatives from ServInt, a maker of &… Read more

It looks like Pearl Jam isn't the only band that has had its politically charged comments bleeped from concerts streamed from AT&T's Blue Room Web site.

AT&T issued a statement on Friday admitting that this kind of thing has happened before. And the company once again apologized.

"It's not our intent to edit political comments in Webcasts on attblueroom.com," the company said in a statement. "Unfortunately, it has happened in the past in a handful of cases. We have taken steps to ensure that it won't happen again.&… Read more

The BBC's recently launched iPlayer, which allows eligible U.K. residents to download episodes of shows they missed on the telly, seems to be a magnet for complaints lately.

The Windows-XP only online service has already peeved Mac, Linux and Windows Vista users who can't, at least for the moment, get direct access (BBC has promised an upgrade this fall) and drawn protests over its use of Microsoft-produced digital-rights management technology.

The latest brouhaha is reminiscent of the Net neutrality debate that has raged here in the States. That controversy surrounds whether broadband operators ought to be able … Read more

Universal Music Group, the largest of the four big music labels, has become the second major to offer DRM-free MP3 downloads.

EMI was first to take the plunge, selling DRM-free files first on Apple's iTunes (in the AAC audio format) and later offering MP3s through a variety of other services via a deal with MediaNet.

Unlike EMI, the Universal deal is only a five-month trial, and the company hasn't announced any such deal with Apple--not surprising, given the two companies' recent history. In fact, nobody should see this as an act of kindness on Universal's part. Rather, … Read more

Apparently, saying disparaging things about President George Bush is enough to get you censored. At least that's what happened to the band Pearl Jam Sunday night during AT&T's Webcast of the Lollapalooza concert in Chicago.

According to fans who watched the concert on AT&T's Blue Room Web site, portions of the song "Daughter," in which singer Eddie Vedder altered lyrics to include anti-Bush sentiments, were bleeped out. The lyrics came during a segue into Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall."

The lyrics that were missing from the … Read more

Quoth Homer: "Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of people know that."

Something's a little weird about the data reported earlier this week by Net Applications, a Web traffic research firm, on global operating-system share. Net Applications tracks what types of computers are accessing the Web sites of its global network of clients, and it thinks that Mac OS X share is flat this year, while Windows Vista use is soaring.

The specific numbers quoted? Vista share is up to about 4.5 percent of Web users from virtually nothing … Read more

[This entry has been revised: I didn't read the MediaNet release carefully enough...they are offering DRM-less MP3s, not WMA files. Apologies to anybody whom I misled. My bad.]

Back in May, EMI--one of the big four record labels--agreed to sell its songs through Apple's iTunes without digital rights management (DRM) protection.

Before this move, iTunes and the iPod were technically linked: if you bought a song from iTunes, you could only play it on an iPod (unless you burned it to CD then re-ripped it into an unprotected format). Offering DRM-less downloads severed this link, allowing … Read more

Box.net, providers of free and paid-for Web storage have a slick new front-end for iPhone users. Once logged into your box.net account, you can access all your files and folders, using a scrolling hierarchical interface similar to that of the iPhone and iPod. Since it's still the same old Safari browser, you can't actually download any of the files to your iPhone, but it works great for viewing images, natively supported movie files, PDFs, Office documents, and text files on the go.

The real reason this would excite most people is the possibility of accessing music … Read more