Bob Caswell

This past week a national cable and high-speed Internet provider by the name of Charter Communications accidentally deleted all the contents of 14,000 active email accounts. A spokeswoman for the company explained that there is no way for them to retrieve anything that was erased. The spokeswoman offered this explanation and apology:

“We really are sincerely sorry for having had this happen and do apologize to all those folks who were affected by the error… During this maintenance we erroneously deleted active accounts along with the others. It’s never happened before. They are taking steps to make sure it never happens again.”

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Hot on the heels of the Last.Fm announcement that you can stream any song up to three times for free, Yahoo rumors are brewing again. According to two record company executives wishing to remain anonymous, Yahoo is in talks with major record labels about offering DRM-free (unprotected) MP3s either for sale or for free supported by ads. Either way, Yahoo wants to launch the new service this year sometime.

This news could be even more interesting when juxtaposed with what Yahoo Music’s VP of Product Development Ian Rogers hinted at a couple weeks ago. Namely, big news revolving around dramatic changes in Yahoo’s music model. He said, “We’re in the process of redefining what Yahoo! Music is, and making it the Music destination in Yahoo!’s successful image.”

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Last year around this same time I wrote on the then current companies killing DRM (Digital Rights Management, music with restrictions). Coincidentally, this year has the month of January giving us even more news on the battle-for-unrestricted-music front.

Here’s the latest news about music within the context of Amazon, Napster, Sony, and Yahoo:

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Plenty of buzz is a flutter today on the news that airlines will soon have in-flight Internet access. Back in April of this year, the same buzz existed. Here’s a quick summary of what’s new today plus an overview of other details released earlier this year:

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Switching from one search engine to another is simple, right?

Well, I thought I’d try a couple new options, but it was difficult. I had to consciously remind myself that I was going to use new (for me) search engines. If I didn’t think about it, Google is always where I ended up.

First on the list, the other two of the big three: Yahoo and Microsoft / MSN / Live (come on, Microsoft, I still don’t know what you want to be called here).

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Quoting our favorite source of “people familiar with the situation,” the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) claims that executives at Microsoft and Yahoo are in early-stage discussions about merging the two companies to take on Google. Investors seem to be taking this seriously, as Yahoo shares surged in overseas trading because of this news. The company’s market value is now close to $38 billion up from $32 billion earlier this week. So if you want to quantify this rumor, there you have it: the world thinks its worth $6 billion dollars.

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The Yahoo Suggestion Board, Dell IdeaStorm, and MSN Reporter were all released last week and were all at least, shall we say, “Digg Inspired.” But should we call them Digg clones? How similar are they? Let’s take a closer look and compare things like purpose, voting/bury style, uniqueness, algorithm, login, default view, etc. See the chart below.

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So Yahoo today released a Digg-like voting system as the backbone of the Yahoo Suggestion Board. Even though the Yahoo announcement credited Digg, the Digg crowd is not pleased. The new suggestion system was first implemented for Yahoo Autos and of the top 5 “suggestions,” 3 have nothing to do with autos (see screenshot below).

My initial thoughts echoed what Michael Arrington said, “It’s an excellent way for Yahoo to gauge the popularity of suggestions, and is in no way competitive with Digg.” But then, what stops Yahoo from easily implementing this new Digg-like system elsewhere on the site? Answer: nothing.

Even then, if Yahoo competes with Digg down the road, what would that mean? Should I be upset for some reason? Digg has a good thing going, to be sure, I’m a huge fan. But I just can’t think of a good reason for Yahoo’s move to bother me.

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