Caring is sharing, people, especially when it comes to your personal data. Leading developers from important social-network sites joining a "data-portability" advocacy group doesn't represent history in the making. It's a marketing campaign to make everyone feel sickly sweet, knowing that these websites are so…

The Library of Congress has teamed with Flickr to make its vast catalog of images available on the Web, starting with 3,000 photographs with no known copyright holders. The goal of the project is to provide exposure to these rarely seen images and to harness the Flickr community to compile missing data — like the…

Stock traders weren't blown away by Steve Jobs's Macworld announcements, sending Apple shares down 5 percent. Rivals faired even worse, however. From the numbers, they expect Apple's movie-rental service with support from all of the major studios to pummel brick-and-mortar competitor Blockbuster, and to a lesser…

Who needs a YouTube channel when you can have your own cable network? Estrogen-drenched media mogul Oprah Winfrey has formed a cashless 50-50 joint venture with Discovery Communications to launch the Oprah Winfrey Network in mid-2009. The channel will replace the Discovery Health channel and, in exchange, Discovery…

How does Steve Jobs's Macworld gadgetfest rank among other annual, can't-miss events? You decide in our poll. (Photo by acaben)

iJustine, the videoblogger who's almost as clever as she is blonde, flails about in an attempt to parody herself. The videoblogger mimics her viewers' invasive demands: taking her top off, poking out her eye with a fork, throwing herself under a truck. Don't bother watching — she doesn't deliver on any of it. But…

VC turned entrepreneur Heidi Roizen now riters lyrics about her paranoiac fear that people might be looking at her thighs, for songs featuring session musicians you've never heard of. Can she actually produce "first class, radio-hit-quality music" that's not "preachy or corny"? No, but that won't stop the…

The state of New York is launching its own investigation into Intel's anticompetitive behavior, adding to a list including the European Commission and Korea, all egged on by chipmaking rival AMD. It's only natural for New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo to want in on the action. The accusations are similar to other…

Mary Lou Jespen, founding CTO of the One Laptop Per Child project, recently walked off her job at Nicholas Negroponte's charity case. And now she wants to build a $75 version of the laptop that OLPC has struggled to build for $200. But Jespen may be crazy like a fox. She's actually building a business — the insanity!…

"Why would I throw away the six million dollars they were supposed to give us yesterday? Why would I do all of these things unless I was stark raving mad?" — MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, trying to defend the One Laptop Per Child charity's contentious and short-lived partnership with chip manufacturer Intel.…

Is Europe a country? The question puzzled gameshow contestant Kellie Pickler. And now even the European Commission seems confused. Apple has appeased the pangovernmental body by offering Britons the same price for iTunes downloads as the Continentals. But the original complaint remains unaddressed: Why can't…

Apple's iPod doesn't just dominate our pockets. It's reshaping how we listen to music in the home. The Consumer Electronics Association forecasts that speaker systems with iPod docks — everything from clock radios to fancy Bose players — will exceed sales of traditional compact shelf systems and home-theater-in-a-box…

A federal judge has sanctioned six Qualcomm attorneys for failing to produce tens of thousands of documents in the chip manufacturer's high-profile patent-infringement lawsuit with Broadcom. The six attorneys will also face further scrutiny for ethics violations from the California Bar Association. Thirteen other…

AT&T chief executive Randall Stephenson blamed the weak economy for unpaid phone and broadband bills at Citigroup's annual media and telecom conference. As a result, shareholders blamed Stephenson and wiped nearly 5 percent of the phone company's value off the stock market during the conversation. [Silicon Alley…

According to Silicon Alley Insider, Yahoo may be looking to sell its music subscription service. The move makes sense: Ian Rogers, the general manager of Yahoo Music, declared in October that he was done inconveniencing users with the digital restrictions labels required for online music subscriptions. Subscriptions…

Google and Facebook have joined the DataPortability Workgroup, in a moment the blogosphere is heralding as historic. The group's mission is to make all personal data "discoverable" and "shareable" across websites. This moment is about as historic as the intake of oxygen. The beauty of working groups is that they…

Xerox is synonymous with copiers. But it urgently wants you to forget all that — and, as well, its brief, pointless stint as a "document management company." It has now joined hundreds of young, hip Internet companies with 3D glassy ball logos. Xerox hired Interbrand to spend 18 months conducting 5,000 interviews to…

Jerry Yang has made Yahoo Go 3.0, Yahoo's mobile application platform, a key piece of the strategy to keep his business relevant. Rather than trying to run everything, like Google or Apple, Yahoo will focus on being a friend to all. MySpace, eBay, and MTV. But Yang is once again focused on the wrong partners.

A professed goal of Jimmy Wales's for-profit venture, Wikia, is to eliminate spam from search results. But it's reputation on Wikipedia may not help. Users of Wales's online encyclopedia have deemed the entry on his new startup as spam: "This article reads like a news release, or is otherwise written in an overly…