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Under the radar: week ending May 29th
29 May 2009 | 14.24 Europe/London
Good afternoon campers, and welcome to this week's round-up. Let's start with the news that Wikipedia is banning Scientologists — or at least any contributors from all IP addresses owned by the Church of Scientology and its associates. Does that mean Tom Cruise won't be able to update his wiki page? In other movie-related news, the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment outlined his thoughts on piracy, although he prefers to use the term "preserving creativity online."
At the All Things D conference this week, new Yahoo! boss Carol Bartz showed that she was still up for a bit of action with Microsoft. “If there’s boatloads of money and the right technology involved, would we do a deal? Sure,” she grinned. Well, dear, wouldn't we all? Funniest quote comes when she's talking about when her predecessor, Jerry Yang (or jerry yang as he has it) offered her the job. “I said ‘well Jerry, why don’t you draw me an org chart?’ And he pulls an org chart out of the closet and starts drawing Yahoo’s org. He drew arrows everywhere. It looked like a Dilbert cartoon.”
Moving to Lithuania now (not literally, I am very happy here in London), where the country's anti-piracy chief, Vytas Simanavicius, has been receiving death threats in his attempts to close down the country's torrent sites. Meanwhile, the world's anti-Satan chief, His Holiness the Pope, having blessed the Internet, has gone all Father, Son and Holy Facebook on us all. And speaking of which — Holy Social Networking, Batman! — Google's getting very hot under the collar about what it perceives to be serious search-engine competition from Zuckerberg and Co.
Two media behemoths, one old, one new, are branching out. Sky TV's music download service has leaked, whilst new kid on the block Twitter is, apparently going into TV, with an unscripted show that will, apparently, put “ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format.” And Time Warner, who put together a monstrous $147 billion dollars to buy up the World's Worst Internet Company™ — AOL, has now decided to spin it off into another company.
And finally, proof that modern communications will be the death of irony. Poor the Peter Serafinowicz, who probably doesn't give a toss, actually.
At the All Things D conference this week, new Yahoo! boss Carol Bartz showed that she was still up for a bit of action with Microsoft. “If there’s boatloads of money and the right technology involved, would we do a deal? Sure,” she grinned. Well, dear, wouldn't we all? Funniest quote comes when she's talking about when her predecessor, Jerry Yang (or jerry yang as he has it) offered her the job. “I said ‘well Jerry, why don’t you draw me an org chart?’ And he pulls an org chart out of the closet and starts drawing Yahoo’s org. He drew arrows everywhere. It looked like a Dilbert cartoon.”
Moving to Lithuania now (not literally, I am very happy here in London), where the country's anti-piracy chief, Vytas Simanavicius, has been receiving death threats in his attempts to close down the country's torrent sites. Meanwhile, the world's anti-Satan chief, His Holiness the Pope, having blessed the Internet, has gone all Father, Son and Holy Facebook on us all. And speaking of which — Holy Social Networking, Batman! — Google's getting very hot under the collar about what it perceives to be serious search-engine competition from Zuckerberg and Co.
Two media behemoths, one old, one new, are branching out. Sky TV's music download service has leaked, whilst new kid on the block Twitter is, apparently going into TV, with an unscripted show that will, apparently, put “ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format.” And Time Warner, who put together a monstrous $147 billion dollars to buy up the World's Worst Internet Company™ — AOL, has now decided to spin it off into another company.
And finally, proof that modern communications will be the death of irony. Poor the Peter Serafinowicz, who probably doesn't give a toss, actually.