Internet News

After her case was dropped by the courts, a 16-year-old girl turned to YouTube to share her story of rape, CNN reports. “It's the only way I know that someone out there in the world is going to listen to me," says the tearful girl in her video. She joins a growing number of young people seeking help with abuse via the Internet—a method that can be dangerous, experts warn. More »

The latest irreverent star of cyberspace is a former Mormon mommy blogger who isn't afraid to write that motherhood can be "awful." Heather Armstrong of Salt Lake City loves her 4-year-old daughter, but she complains that "sometimes it's really unpleasant and you turn around and you're like, 'What did I do to my life?''' More »

Everyone knows Craigslist, but Craig himself is getting a little restless. Craig Newmark is spending more time and money on outside projects, the New York Times reports, even with his company in a high-profile tiff with eBay. Newmark, 55, says he spends half his time on customer-service issues, the other half on public-service projects and causes like Barack Obama's campaign. More »

Spam turns 30 today, but don't break out the champagne just yet: The junk e-mail is as healthy as ever, frustrating tech experts desperate to blow out its candles. It all started on May 3, 1978, with a pitch for a new computer on a government-run precursor to the Internet. Even then, the reaction was fierce, the Washington Post says. More »

Why did eBay sue Craigslist last week? Craiglist's fear of a hostile takeover played a role, the New York Times reports. The relationship between the classified ads site and minority shareholder eBay began to sour after eBay launched rival site Kijiji. Craigslist’s directors smelled a takeover in the offing and reorganized their stock to reduce the auction giant’s holding from 28.04% to 24.85%. EBay lost its right to elect a director—and sued. More »

In an ominous sign of the times for printed news, a struggling 90-year-old Wisconsin daily newspaper is shutting down its daily print operation, but will continue to exist online, the New York Times reports. Most of the 18,000 current subscribers of Madison's afternoon Capital Times are switching to the city's bigger daily. More »

Two-thirds of American teens aren’t keeping their LOLs to themselves: They're turning in papers and lab reports with abbreviations, dropped punctuation, and other informalities inherent to Internet and text-message vocabularies, the AP reports. Kids who write blogs and have Facebook pages are more likely to slip from formality in their schoolwork, a new survey shows—but OMG! grown-ups aren’t that upset about it. More »

Wikipedia will soon hit bookshelves, the AP reports: German giant Bertelsmann AG is publishing a condensed print edition of the user-generated encyclopedia. The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia will contain 50,000 of the most-searched-for German entries this year—and it could be the first in an annual series. “A yearbook really can be a documentation of the zeitgeist,” said a publishing exec. More »

In 2000, technology watcher George Gilder argued in a book called Telecosm that infinite bandwidth and instant communication were on the way, thanks to booming construction of fiber-optic cable. Eight years later, post-bust (both dot-com and telecom), the “telecosm” is not far from what Gilder predicted, writes Mark Williams in Technology Review . More »

Microsoft won't raise its $44.6 billion takeover bid for Yahoo despite the Internet firm's strong first-quarter earnings, Bloomberg reports. "We are prepared to go forward without a merger," said CEO Steve Ballmer, who has threatened a proxy shareholder revolt to push the deal through, possibly at a lower price, if Yahoo didn’t agree to the original bid by Saturday. More »

Microsoft is testing a new product that will allow users to link data across multiple electronic devices through the internet—so the picture you took on your phone can be in the digital picture frame in your home within minutes. It’s a big step for Microsoft, which until now has resisted the “cloud computing” movement, Reuters reports. More »

Take an idea, a video camera and an Internet connection, add a little how-to know-how and a portal like YouTube, and start counting your clicks. Reach enough viewers, and start counting your cash. That’s the premise behind a burgeoning Web industry attracting entrepreneurs and investors hoping to catch the next big wave, the New York Times reports. More »

The uneasy relationship between Craigslist and eBay, its competitor-turned-minority shareholder, has taken a turn for the worse. EBay has filed a lawsuit against Craigslist, accusing the classified ad site of "unfairly" diluting the auction giant's stake in it by 10%, the New York Times reports. Craigslist has fired back, calling eBay "unethical" and accusing it of aiming for a hostile takeover. More »

The American Medical Association may not yet rank video gaming as addictive, but players who call World of Warcraft “World of Warcrack” know the score, writes Kristin Kalning on msnbc.com. But what is it that drives obsessed players to neglect their jobs, their health and even their kids? Competing and socializing, says a therapist who treats Internet and computer addiction. More »

Spending on Web 2.0 technologies is ready to explode, according to a new report from Forrester Research. The market will reach $4.6 billion by 2013, the report predicts, as the technology starts to saturate the business world. To get there, it’ll have to jump an average of 43% a year, since this year’s sales amount to a mere $764 million. More »

Want to chart real estate listings on a Google map? A free browser extension from Intel can do that and more. Intel Mash Maker, released in beta today, lets users edit Web pages and combine information from different sites using widgets. Users can copy existing widgets from an Intel gallery, adjust them to work on different sites, or write their own, reports CNet. More »

Internet calling system Skype is introducing a plan for unlimited overseas phone calls for $9.95 a month, CNET reports. The plan includes 34 European and Far Eastern countries, along with Australia and New Zealand—but the deal is limited to landlines except for calls to cell phones in Canada, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The plan also includes unlimited domestic calls in the US. More »

Freud would have a field day studying Google searches, posits a blogger who tracked the terms visitors to his web page used and found a window into man's pathologies. John Kelly, a columnist on leave from the Washington Post, writes in the Guardian about "how the fetishes, pathologies and strange obsessions of humankind are catalogued every day on the world wide web."  More »

Wasting people’s time is an odd job—but it’s also a big business, writes CollegeHumor.com editor Streeter Seidell in the New York Times . Seidell spends his days wading through an “ocean” of submitted videos and other items, choosing which funny or bizarre selections deserve publication. Yet there’s no method to the madness: every day is a guessing game as to what will draw in time-wasters. More »

Is it another triumph of Web 2.0, or a concession to the rampantly collaborative tone of the Internet these days? Either way, "Dilbert" has gone interactive, the New York Times reports. On the popular comic’s website, fans can now substitute their own pithy retorts for text bubbles in the final panel, and they'll soon be able to run wild with the whole strip. More »