A decade ago, America Online merged with Time Warner in a deal valued at $350 billion, which is still the largest merger in American business history. But the trail of despair in subsequent years produced a deal now regarded by many as a colossal mistake.
AOL is developing a website that compiles user-generated news stories on important, hot-button issues like "The Best Twitter Backgrounds" and "The Top 6 Things Snuck into Space."
"Apple's iPad is due in late March, pending FCC approval, and on the FCC's official broadband blog, Director/Scenario Planning Phil Bellaria and Wireless Bureau Deputy Chief John Leibovitz say there may be trouble ahead if the device
drives up demand for mobile broadband. They write that the iPad announcement on January 27 "set off a new round of reports of networks overburdened by a data flow they were not build to handle," saying the problems are reminiscent of the outages AOL users ran into when the then-dialup service went to unlimited use in 1996 -- problems that persisted for months."
Here's an update on AOL's citizen-journalism site, Seed.
"In what he hopes will be the first big demonstration of the "crowdsourcing" potential of AOL's new Seed.com service, former New York Times writer Saul Hansell says he is looking for writers who will write up interviews with all of 2,000 or so bands and artists at the SXSW music festival in Austin. The assignment will involve "real reporting," Hansell said in an interview, in which writers will have to pick up the phone and call the band or artist and write up a 1,000-word interview in question-and-answer format, as well as a 300- to 500-word biography. The price for this assignment? The princely sum of $50."
A new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that while one in 10 adults blogs, only 14 percent of teens do, down from nearly 30 percent in 2006. Surprisingly, they don't seem too partial to Twitter either: The Pew survey found that only 8 percent of teenage Internet users tweet.