News 4 to 7 More Years of Tax-Free Internet Access in US The US Senate last night passed a bill that would extend the 1998 Internet Tax Freedom Act, which prohibits local governments from taxing Internet connections, for seven years. About two weeks ago the House of Representatives passed a similar measure that would extend the act for four years. Barring an unlikely presidential veto, this will be the… Josh Catone View comments
News The Desktop Lives: Mozilla Talks Up Prism A Mozilla Labs blog post yesterday announced Prism, an application that takes web apps to the desktop. Prism isn't a proprietary platform, but rather gives any web application that runs in a standards-compliant browser its own window and icons on the desktop. Right now, that's all Prism does. It doesn't add any offline functionality or give apps… Josh Catone View comments
Analysis Maybe Google Should Be Worried About Facebook This morning we published a great piece by my colleague Alex Iskold that asked if Google should be afraid of Facebook. Alex concluded that, no, Facebook is not in the same league as Google and Larry and Sergey should be breathing easy. I'll briefly offer a contrarian view in light of the massive influx of cash that Facebook received yesterday… Josh Catone View comments
Analysis Poll: US Attitudes About Internet Are Insane Zogby International and 463 Communications released the results last night of an interesting and well executed poll about the attitudes US adults have about the internet. Nearly 10,000 respondents were included and I presume the companies did not seek out the craziest 10,000 people in America (only 20% were from the West Coast, for example… Marshall Kirkpatrick View comments
News When Did A Fake Blogger Become a Reliable Source? There are not one, but two stories on Techmeme this morning broken by Fake Steve Jobs, a.k.a. Forbes' Daniel Lyons. Both were repeated on a number of blogs. Yes, we know who Fake Steve is now, and yes he's a credible reporter working for a respected publication, but bear in mind that these stories were reported with no sources and on the blog of… Josh Catone View comments