CATCHING UP AGAIN WITH THE NEWS

Today has definitely been a catch up day... a few hundred emails to sort through, over 4,000 spam emails to delete (in my Yahoo! account, which is my email spam magnet), several emails to send back, documents to download and read, contracts to go through, and of course old bookmarks to read and post:

"What's in Jeff Bezos's Bag?"
A look into the recent move by Amazon to open up Alexa's web crawler to everyone. Business 2.0's Erick Schonfeld touches on Amazon's A9 search engine, which is doing some cool stuff (i.e. maps functions), and mentions how it uses Alexa but I thought they used Google's engine? Anyway, it's a decent overview.

"'Kong' box office highlights industry in flux"
Slump in 2005 due to the web or bad movies? I would guess a bit of the former but more of the latter. I've beeen echoing this point to friends that this year's movie crop sucks.

"Boring game? Hire a player"
China's online gaming scene follows South Korea's. Years ago PC room owners in Korea would hire kids to play online games to build up characters and items to sell through the online black market for games such as Lineage. Now the same same scene is being played out in China. Wonder when this will occur in the U.S.? Maybe the Mafia will get into the Second Life black market? :)

"The Start-Up"
A blook from JB Holston, Newsgator's CEO: A classic business thriller. Cybersecurity, the Feds, nefarious bankers and media magnates from around the globe, and Microsoft. Best possible plane food.

"Social Networks 3.0"
VC David Hornik's view of the social networking space.