Editor's Note: We welcome a new regular feature and contributor here today. The MediaShift Innovation Spotlight will look in-depth at one great mash-up, database, mapping project or multimedia story that combines technology and journalism in useful ways. These projects can be at major newspaper or broadcast sites, or independent news sites or blogs. Web journalist extraordinaire Megan Taylor will be your guide to these regular bi-weekly spotlights.

What It Is

St. Petersburg Times' Neighborhood Watch is a database application that tracks weekly house sales in Pinellas and Pasco counties, Florida. Readers can search for home sales by county, ZIP code or neighborhood. Median price and sale count trends are tracked and graphed at one year, six month, three month, and one month intervals. On a neighborhood level, the site plots geographical data on Google Maps and suggests listings to prospective buyers by ZIP code. The application also generates neighborhood-by-neighborhood trend stories by querying the database. The Times plans to expand Neighborhood Watch to cover more counties in the future.

Why It's Innovative

Every paper has to do these kinds of real estate stories once or twice a year: The housing market has gone up, it's gone down, it stayed the same, etc. It's not big journalism, but it is important to the community and it takes a lot of time and resources to put together individual stories for different neighborhoods.

Neighborhood Watch not only provides weekly data on the housing market, but includes an instant story for each neighborhood -- a computer program analyzes sale trends to generate a short synopsis of a neighborhood's market.

This frees up real estate reporters to focus on bigger stories with context and depth. Given the current state of the market, freeing up a reporter's time to work on big stories is becoming more and more important.

The data is even appearing in the print St. Petersburg Times neighborhood sections; the paper has begun to reverse publish information that originally appeared on the web.

Who's Behind It

Matt Waite, the St. Petersburg Times News Technologist, is the brains behind Neighborhood Watch.

A Django evangelist and data hound, Waite worked as a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times for almost eight years. He is also the mastermind behind PolitiFact, a popular site where statements from U.S. presidential candidates were fact-checked and rated (including the "Pants on Fire" logo for worst offenders).

In 2004, Waite created maps to compare prices while he was house-hunting; those maps eventually became the seed for Neighborhood Watch.

Waite explained that even though newspapers only have the time and resources to cover broad, flashy stories, it was really the small, local details that interested readers. The same is true in regards to real estate stories:

I give this speech at various journalism conferences about crime. There are two crimes I care about: There's the crazy dude with the machete who hacks his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend's head off and mounts it to his car and waits for the police to show up; and my neighbor's lawn mower getting stolen out of his garage.One of those you'll find in the pages of the newspaper, guaranteed, the other is the opposite: you'll never, ever, in a million years read about my neighbor's lawn mower getting stolen out of his garage in the pages of the St. Petersburg Times. But I and my other neighbors were very interested when that happened. So the trick is to find a way to deliver that kind of information to people in a compelling fashion that doesn't involve having to pay a massive army of reporters to cover every single thing that moves. And the beauty of apps like this is that you might not care, but the guy in the apartment next to yours may REALLY care. But it didn't cost anything to provide that information to whoever might want it, at whatever scale you want it at.

Listen to Waite talk about the origins of Neighborhood Watch:

Specs

Neighborhood Watch is built on GeoDjango, a former branch of Django that has been merged with the framework in the 1.0 release.

The site uses a spatially enabled database back end called PostgreSQL, with an added SQL library called PostGIS.

For the most part, the city's neighborhood associated boundary files provided good neighborhood maps. But in the suburbs, there are developer boundaries, or common knowledge boundaries. In some places, boundaries and names were invented by the St. Petersburg Times.

The data comes from an FTP fetch through the property appraisers.

Challenges

Waite started building Neighborhood Watch using the same technology he used for PolitiFact -- Django .96 and MySQL. But there was a problem: MySQL didn't support the kind of location relationships he needed.

"I had to establish a relationship between a neighborhood and a parcel," he said, "There's no real good way to do that in MySQL, so I resorted to how I did it originally: in a desktop GIS program."

This had its own problems: Updating.

"Every time I wanted to update the parcel layer, I'd have to recreate that relationship between parcel and neighborhood -- it's called a spatial join," he said. "If you're going to be updating something every week, that's bad."

So Waite started playing with GeoDjango, "which brings the functionality of a world class GIS system into the Django web framework. With GeoDjango, data models can contain geographic data, i.e. data becomes aware of space."

3 Questions

Have you received any complaints about the way you drew up neighborhoods?

Matt Waite: Funny thing, no, we haven't in the areas where we made them up. I've received two complaints about the maps. One was that we left out a neighborhood in an area -- and they were right, I'm adding it in -- and one was that the city neighborhood association map was just one parcel too far over the line in one small neighborhood. So it wasn't even my doing.

What was your favorite part of Neighborhood Watch to build?

Waite: The geographic components, without a doubt. Location and geography -- where you are, where you live -- is such a powerful prism for people to look at something through. It makes the data you have so much more visceral to someone when you can show them a map of their neighborhood or their house and how it relates to what you're showing them. Being able to do that efficiently and powerfully now on the server side is something very cool that I haven't even gotten my head all the way around yet.

So what has the response been like from people in the newsroom and people in the community?

Waite: Very positive on both accounts. I've mostly paid attention to the public's reaction to it and it's been very interesting. The bulk of the email I get about it is, 'We want more, more stats, more measures, more this, more that.' I've gotten a handful of emails from realtors who were mad that I included this sale and not that one, or one of their competitor's sales but not theirs. Every time, it's been because I screen out all but the most basic single-family house sales and toss all the rest. I learned with PolitiFact that the best marketing you can do is to answer your email, good or bad, and I've tried to do that.

Far and away, the most common comment I get is 'Where are the condos?' And the answer is 'We're working on it.' This version only deals with single family houses. The condo market and the house market are two very different things, and we're going to treat them that way.

Screencast

Call for More Spotlights

The MediaShift Innovation Spotlight will run every other week. Please let me know of any innovative projects you are working on or have seen lately. It doesn't have to be from a major newspaper, it just has to be an innovative blend of journalism and technology. Please e-mail me at mtaylor[at]megantaylor[dot]org to submit a Spotlight recommendation.

Megan Taylor is a web journalist whose work focuses on combining traditional and computer-assisted information-gathering with multimedia production to create news packages online. Megan tells stories in English, HTML/CSS/, ActionScript, PHP, photos, video and audio, and blogs at her personal site.

MediaShift Spotlight Innovation illustration by Omar Lee for MediaShift.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

pRestaurant guide Zagat has laid off 19 staffers, or about 14 percent of its 130-person workforce, a company rep said, confirming an earlier tip to paidContent. The cuts, which were made across all departments, were blamed on the recession. At the beginning of the year, Zagat a href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-zagat-publisher-put-on-sale-may-fetch-more-than-200-million" title="attempted to put itself up for sale"attempted to put itself up for sale/a, with the hope of netting $200 million. But six months later, after potential buyers balked at the price, Zagat had a a href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-zagat-off-the-block-couldnt-find-a-buyer" title="change of heart"change of heart/a and decided to take itself off the market. In 2000, the Zagat family sold off a third of its business, then valued at more than $100 million, to an investment group led by General Atlantic Partners, and including Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield Byers and Allen Company. After giving up on the sale last June, the company said it would focus on building up its online and mobile products, though those plans may also be scaled back as the downturn deepens. /p pstrongRelated/strong/p ul class="related" lia href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-zagat-off-the-block-couldnt-find-a-buyer" title="Zagat Off The Block; Couldn't Find A Buyer To Pay Its Price"Zagat Off The Block; Couldn't Find A Buyer To Pay Its Price/a/li /ul piCheck out the best business jobs in digital media. a href="http://jobs.paidcontent.org/"Go here/a for paidContent.org Job Board./i/p pa href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?a=cp2sjs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?i=cp2sjs" border="0"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=CQxjO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=CQxjO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=dxe3O"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=dxe3O" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=Vp9Ao"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=Vp9Ao" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=A3TWO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=A3TWO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=rHZNO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=rHZNO" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/pcorg/~4/473741987" height="1" width="1"/

Sony UK has confirmed that in the past 48 hours it has communicated to its trade channel that due to adverse changes in the Yen/Euro Euro/Pound exchange rate over the last six months, and with this uncertainty set to continue into 2009, Sony will increase the trade price of a number of products over the coming months. Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) has however made a statement saying that "this move would not translate into a price rise for the PS3."

Northern Rock, the nationalised mortgage lender, has joined a growing list of banks agreeing to help struggling homeowners by delaying the issue of repossession orders by six months.

Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters without Borders, two groups committed to the freedom of journalists abroad, have called on the Iraqi government to free Adel Hussein, who was found guilty of violating "public custom" for publishing an article about homosexuality in April 2007 in the independent weekly Hawlati.

Said Reporters without Borders: "Sexual practices are part of the individual freedoms that a democratic state is supposed to promote and protect. Furthermore, Hussein did not defend homosexuality. He limited himself to describing a form of behaviour from a scientific viewpoint."

CPJ reports: "The sentence handed down was based on the outdated 1969 Iraqi penal code, said Luqman Malazadah, Hussein's lawyer. Malazadah told CPJ that he has appealed the court decision. A new press law that took effect in October doesn't recognize violations of 'publish custom' (sic) as an offense and also eliminates prison terms for journalists. The new law also says that a representative of the region's Journalist Syndicate must attend a journalist's trial, but Fatih said that no representative attended Hussein's."

Hussein, who is currently imprisoned in Erbil, received a six-month jail term and was fined 125,000 dinars (85 euros).

Daily Mail:
Jewish mother killed in Mumbai attacks ‘was pregnant’... and her son, 2, may have been beaten by militants … The Jewish mother murdered in the brutal Mumbai terror attacks last week was six month pregnant, her father revealed today at her funeral.  —  And Rivkah Holtzberg's two-year-old son …

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/bestof2008_01.png" width="494" height="290" Mobile phone operating systems and a reheated web browser war: that's how we'll recall the year 2008 when it comes to software. From brand new to revamped browsers and mobile platforms and apps, 2008's been good to technophiles who like their data in the cloud and accessible wherever they are. Let's take a look back at this year in software, and some of the best new and improved applications, web services, and mobile platforms that were born in 2008. Looking back at the last 12 months, these are the apps that get a gold foil-wrapped chocolate coin from us this year. iPhoto by a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee/1947414336/"Gaetan Lee/a./i/p pbr clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"Firefox 3/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/firefox3-sq-thumb_01.png" width="135" height="135" align="right" class="right" Not only did you swoon over the release of Firefox 3 because of a href="http://lifehacker.com/392160/top-10-firefox-3-features"the "AwesomeBar" and the rest of the "Had no idea I needed this but now I love it!" features/a it offers, but because the launch itself was a grass-roots community-driven effort towards making software history. Indeed, on June 17th of this year, the makers of Firefox a href="http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/press/mozilla-2008-07-02.html"set a new Guinness World Record for most software downloads in a given day/a, at more than eight million downloads of the new browser iteration in 24 hours. If you haven't dug into the advanced functionality Firefox has to offer, check out our a href="http://lifehacker.com/396312/power-users-guide-to-firefox-3"power user's guide to Firefox 3/a.br clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"Google Chrome/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/thumb160x_gchrome.png" width="135" height="135"While Mozillians and Firefox users celebrated across the globe over the summer, no one knew that search powerhouse Google was in the software development lab cooking up their own lean, mean browsing machine that would forsake all of the fox's bells and whistles (and extensibility) to run Javascript-based applications lightening-fast. On September 2nd, Google released the first beta of a href="http://google.com/chrome/"Chrome/a, their new web browser which they hope you'll make your window to the web and all its apps. Our own in-house a href="http://lifehacker.com/5055406/browser-speed-tests-the-compiled-up+to+date-results"browser speed tests show that Chrome is indeed speedy/a, and we're seeing a significant uptake on Chrome usage by Lifehacker readers. (Last month's browser breakdown for Lifehacker readers was 62% Firefox, 22% IE, 8% Safari, and 6% Chrome. Not bad for a browser that's been out only a few months.) For more Chrome goodness, see our a href="http://lifehacker.com/5045904/the-power-users-guide-to-google-chrome"power user's guide to Google Chrome/a.br clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"iPhone 2.0 and the App Store/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/iphone20-sq-thumb_01.png" width="135" height="135" align="right" class="right" Yeah, yeah, the iPhone launched in 2007, but this year the iPhone 2.0 software and the new iPhone 3G model with a faster data plan and GPS came out to hype almost as big as the original iPhone launch. The combination of an operating system that finally ran third-party apps officially plus pinpointy GPS goodness set the bar for what users can expect to get from the next generation of smartphone with a fast internet connection, full-on browser, and spot-on location-awareness. Plus, dozens of the apps available for the phone are free. At first, we were a href="http://lifehacker.com/395171/how-your-location+aware-iphone-will-change-your-life"in/a a href="http://lifehacker.com/398338/iphone-20-gets-you-laid-and-more"love/a. Later, a href="http://lifehacker.com/398658/why-youre-better-off-avoiding-the-iphone"we had our doubts/a. The iPhone 2.0 launch did start to show some of the cracks in the Apple armormdash;several of the earliest versions of the software were crash and freeze-prone, requiring many users to uninstall apps and reset their phone software to fix maddening keyboard delays and application crashes. Meanwhile, Apple's approval-only App Store left a few applications out in the cold. Still, the iPhone 2.0 software created a compelling mobile platform and app marketing campaign that made Aunt Bertha really want to try that Neil Diamond song out on Shazam.br clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"iPhone 2.0 Jailbreak Utilities and Apps/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/cydia-thumb.png" width="135" height="135" align="right" class="right" What with the App Store limitations and Apple's insistence on ruling over what you can and cannot do on your phone, it's not surprising the enthusiastic "jailbreak" community soldiered on this year, continuing to offer installers and non-Apple-approved applications for your iPhone even in the face of the mainstream iTunes App Store. We take our hats off to these intrepid hackers, who offer such lovely functionality as the ability to SSH into, theme, and download video clips to your phone; if you haven't jailbroken your iPhone or iPod touch, here are a few of our picks of best a href="http://lifehacker.com/400148/iphone-20-jailbreak-apps-you-cant-find-in-the-itunes-store"iPhone 2.0 jailbreak apps you can't find in the iTunes Store/a.br clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"Google Android/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/android-logo-sq.png" width="135" height="135" Google's answer to Apple's proprietary iPhone hardware and software came in the form of their very own touch mobile phone operating system, Android, which launched this past October. Unlike the iPhone, this new mobile platform is open source and will run on various handsets going forward. Right now Android's first release is only available on the HTC G1 handset; you can see our a href="http://lifehacker.com/5064117/a-hands+on-first-look-at-google-android"hands-on first look at Google Android running on the G1 here/a. As an iPhone user frustrated by limited apps, crashiness, and lack of copy and paste, Android is like a breath of fresh air. Even though the mobile OS is still very new, its open-source nature has led to hundreds of new apps. See our pick of a href="http://lifehacker.com/5075332/best-android-apps-to-boost-your-mobile-productivity-so-far"best Android apps to boost your mobile productivity/a.br clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"Digsby/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/digsby-logo_01.png" width="135" height="135" align="right" class="right" One of the few software apps on this list that's not open source or made by a ginormous company, new instant messenger client Digsby took chatters by storm with its ability to a href="http://lifehacker.com/354345/consolidate-im-email-and-social-networking-with-digsby"consolidate your IM, email, and social networking in one place/a. Even though the Digsby beta only went public in February, by April it was already a href="http://lifehacker.com/375391/five-best-instant-messengers"one of our readers' top five favorite instant messaging tools/a.br clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"XBMC and Forks/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/xbmc-logo-sq_01.png" width="135" height="135" We were really late to the Xbox Media Center (XBMC) party when we showed up last year and a href="http://lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/transform-your-classic-xbox-into-a-killer-media-center-299809.php"installed it on our old classic Xbox/a, but since then we've been hooked on this rich, open-source media center. Luckily, just because those old black boxes are becoming obselete doesn't mean the XBMC software project has died off. Just the opposite: XBMC has forked into several neat branches that run on various hardware platforms so you can enjoy the same media center goodness without hacking an old Xbox. Check out a few launches from various factions of XBMC developers this past year that have warmed our hearts:/p ul lia href="http://lifehacker.com/5051874/xbmc-atlantis-beta-1-released-for-all-platforms"XBMC 'Atlantis' Beta 1 Released for All Platforms/a/li lia href="http://lifehacker.com/5095241/plex-7-adds-itunes-and-iphoto-support-and-more"Plex 7 for Mac Adds iTunes and iPhoto Support and More/a/li lia href="http://lifehacker.com/396382/boxee-is-xbmc-with-newer-look-and-social-flair"Boxee Is XBMC with Newer Look and Social Flair/a/li /ul br clear="all" h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"Ubuntu Hardy Heron/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/hardyheron-logo.png" width="135" height="135" align="right" class="right" Another year, another Ubuntu release, and they just keep getting better. Seriously, you have to love the free, open source operating system that manages a new major release on a yearly basismdash;something Apple and Microsoft, companies you pay hundreds of dollars to for the privilege of using their software, don't pull off. If you've tried Linux on your desktop before and killed the partition in frustration, only to slink back to Windows, it's time to give it another go. This year's flavor, a href="http://lifehacker.com/383769/hardy-heron-makes-linux-worth-another-look"version 8.04 Hardy Heron makes Linux worth another look/a.br clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"Gmail Labs, Gadgets, and Themes/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/thumb160x_thumb160x_thumb160x_thumb160x_smallish_smallish_smallish_smallish_gmailenvelope.png" width="135" height="135" Our favorite web application on the internet, Gmail, continues to burn down barns and rip up the competition with continual iteration and feature adds. This year, Gmail added a "Labs" section to your account, a safe way for power users to enable "experimental" power features to their email while keeping everyone else's safe from harm. Truthfully, when I a href="http://lifehacker.com/395211/gmail-gets-13-experimental-new-features"attended the Google press event announcing Gmail Labs/a back in June, I had my doubts about whether or not the featureset would ever expand beyond the initial 13, and if it would go beyond eye-candy games like Snakey to, you know, actually useful stuff. Turns out it did. Six months later, a href="http://lifehacker.com/5052060/what-gmail-labs-features-do-you-have-enabled"ten more Gmail Labs features/a are available in your account, including a super-useful Gadgets feature that lets third parties embed their apps into your inbox. (Like a href="http://lifehacker.com/5101139/bitly-offers-in+gmail-url-shortening-gadget"Bit.ly/a or a href="http://lifehacker.com/5084502/add-your-basecamp-projects-to-gmail"Basecamp/a.) Later, Gmail launched a href="http://lifehacker.com/5093536/gmail-updates-its-look-adds-themes"themes/a as well as a href="http://lifehacker.com/5100649/gmail-google-desktop-gadget-now-available"a Google Desktop gadget/a. In the midst of all this, the Gmail security team took the time a href="http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2008/11/gmail-security-and-recent-phishing.html"to respond to a breach/a that several users had experienced and blogged about online. Clearly there's someone home at Gmail; this is a rapidly-evolving product that any webapp developer should use as an example on how to iterate quickly.br clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"Honorable Mentions/h3 pMaking best-of-year lists is always difficult because you risk leaving off really deserving items. At least two that go in our honorable mentions bin are the a href="http://lifehacker.com/5042312/ubiquity-prototype-offers-a-natural-language-web-command-line"Firefox keyboard interface prototype Ubiquity/a, and photo-sharing site a href="http://lifehacker.com/377598/flickr-adds-video"Flickr's launch of short video clips/a in April./p pNow, you tell us which one of these apps impressed you the most in the year two thousand and eight./p pscript type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://static.polldaddy.com/p/1160637.js" /scriptnoscripta href="http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1160637/"Which new or improved app impressed you the most in 2008?/abr span style="font-size:9px;"( a href="http://www.polldaddy.com"polls/a)/span/noscript/p pIf you can't get enough of best-of lists, hop into the time machine and see our a href="http://lifehacker.com/software/lifehacker-top-10/top-10-new-and-improved-apps-of-2007-332617.php"top 10 new and improved apps of 2007/a, and our a href="http://lifehacker.com/software/best-of-2006/geek-to-live--the-best-apps-of-2006-221920.php"best apps of 2006/a and of a href="http://lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/geek-to-live-best-apps-of-2005-144388.php"2005/a./p pAnything you would have included on this list that we left out? Tell us about it in the comments./p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=c25b27e9cc47fec6e2837e6756c1da79p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=c25b27e9cc47fec6e2837e6756c1da79p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=c25b27e9cc47fec6e2837e6756c1da79" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=cDx19c1S"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=ZTEOZvTR"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=6Kfin5AZ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=6Kfin5AZ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=Sg3nuEAr"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=Sg3nuEAr" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~4/TRlejqKX0-0" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/bestof2008_01.png" width="494" height="290" style="display:block;" / iframe src="http://digg.com/api/diggthis.php?u=http://digg.com/software/Lifehacker_Best_New_and_Improved_Software_of_2008" align="right" frameborder="0" height="82" scrolling="no" width="55"/iframe Mobile phone operating systems and a reheated web browser war: that's how we'll recall the year 2008 when it comes to software. From brand new to revamped browsers and mobile platforms and apps, 2008's been good to technophiles who like their data in the cloud and accessible wherever they are. Let's take a look back at this year in software, and some of the best new and improved applications, web services, and mobile platforms that were born in 2008. Looking back at the last 12 months, these are the apps that get a gold foil-wrapped chocolate coin from us this year. iPhoto by a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee/1947414336/"Gaetan Lee/a./i/p pbr clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"Firefox 3/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/firefox3-sq-thumb_01.png" width="135" height="135" align="right" class="right" Not only did you swoon over the release of Firefox 3 because of a href="http://lifehacker.com/392160/top-10-firefox-3-features"the "AwesomeBar" and the rest of the "Had no idea I needed this but now I love it!" features/a it offers, but because the launch itself was a grass-roots community-driven effort towards making software history. Indeed, on June 17th of this year, the makers of Firefox a href="http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/press/mozilla-2008-07-02.html"set a new Guinness World Record for most software downloads in a given day/a, at more than eight million downloads of the new browser iteration in 24 hours. If you haven't dug into the advanced functionality Firefox has to offer, check out our a href="http://lifehacker.com/396312/power-users-guide-to-firefox-3"power user's guide to Firefox 3/a.br clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"Google Chrome/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/thumb160x_gchrome.png" width="135" height="135"While Mozillians and Firefox users celebrated across the globe over the summer, no one knew that search powerhouse Google was in the software development lab cooking up their own lean, mean browsing machine that would forsake all of the fox's bells and whistles (and extensibility) to run Javascript-based applications lightening-fast. On September 2nd, Google released the first beta of a href="http://google.com/chrome/"Chrome/a, their new web browser which they hope you'll make your window to the web and all its apps. Our own in-house a href="http://lifehacker.com/5055406/browser-speed-tests-the-compiled-up+to+date-results"browser speed tests show that Chrome is indeed speedy/a, and we're seeing a significant uptake on Chrome usage by Lifehacker readers. (Last month's browser breakdown for Lifehacker readers was 62% Firefox, 22% IE, 8% Safari, and 6% Chrome. Not bad for a browser that's been out only a few months.) For more Chrome goodness, see our a href="http://lifehacker.com/5045904/the-power-users-guide-to-google-chrome"power user's guide to Google Chrome/a.br clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"iPhone 2.0 and the App Store/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/iphone20-sq-thumb_01.png" width="135" height="135" align="right" class="right" Yeah, yeah, the iPhone launched in 2007, but this year the iPhone 2.0 software and the new iPhone 3G model with a faster data plan and GPS came out to hype almost as big as the original iPhone launch. The combination of an operating system that finally ran third-party apps officially plus pinpointy GPS goodness set the bar for what users can expect to get from the next generation of smartphone with a fast internet connection, full-on browser, and spot-on location-awareness. Plus, dozens of the apps available for the phone are free. At first, we were a href="http://lifehacker.com/395171/how-your-location+aware-iphone-will-change-your-life"in/a a href="http://lifehacker.com/398338/iphone-20-gets-you-laid-and-more"love/a. Later, a href="http://lifehacker.com/398658/why-youre-better-off-avoiding-the-iphone"we had our doubts/a. The iPhone 2.0 launch did start to show some of the cracks in the Apple armormdash;several of the earliest versions of the software were crash and freeze-prone, requiring many users to uninstall apps and reset their phone software to fix maddening keyboard delays and application crashes. Meanwhile, Apple's approval-only App Store left a few applications out in the cold. Still, the iPhone 2.0 software created a compelling mobile platform and app marketing campaign that made Aunt Bertha really want to try that Neil Diamond song out on Shazam.br clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"iPhone 2.0 Jailbreak Utilities and Apps/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/cydia-thumb.png" width="135" height="135" align="right" class="right" What with the App Store limitations and Apple's insistence on ruling over what you can and cannot do on your phone, it's not surprising the enthusiastic "jailbreak" community soldiered on this year, continuing to offer installers and non-Apple-approved applications for your iPhone even in the face of the mainstream iTunes App Store. We take our hats off to these intrepid hackers, who offer such lovely functionality as the ability to SSH into, theme, and download video clips to your phone; if you haven't jailbroken your iPhone or iPod touch, here are a few of our picks of best a href="http://lifehacker.com/400148/iphone-20-jailbreak-apps-you-cant-find-in-the-itunes-store"iPhone 2.0 jailbreak apps you can't find in the iTunes Store/a.br clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"Google Android/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/android-logo-sq.png" width="135" height="135" Google's answer to Apple's proprietary iPhone hardware and software came in the form of their very own touch mobile phone operating system, Android, which launched this past October. Unlike the iPhone, this new mobile platform is open source and will run on various handsets going forward. Right now Android's first release is only available on the HTC G1 handset; you can see our a href="http://lifehacker.com/5064117/a-hands+on-first-look-at-google-android"hands-on first look at Google Android running on the G1 here/a. As an iPhone user frustrated by limited apps, crashiness, and lack of copy and paste, Android is like a breath of fresh air. Even though the mobile OS is still very new, its open-source nature has led to hundreds of new apps. See our pick of a href="http://lifehacker.com/5075332/best-android-apps-to-boost-your-mobile-productivity-so-far"best Android apps to boost your mobile productivity/a.br clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"Digsby/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/digsby-logo_01.png" width="135" height="135" align="right" class="right" One of the few software apps on this list that's not open source or made by a ginormous company, new instant messenger client Digsby took chatters by storm with its ability to a href="http://lifehacker.com/354345/consolidate-im-email-and-social-networking-with-digsby"consolidate your IM, email, and social networking in one place/a. Even though the Digsby beta only went public in February, by April it was already a href="http://lifehacker.com/375391/five-best-instant-messengers"one of our readers' top five favorite instant messaging tools/a.br clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"XBMC and Forks/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/xbmc-logo-sq_01.png" width="135" height="135" We were really late to the Xbox Media Center (XBMC) party when we showed up last year and a href="http://lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/transform-your-classic-xbox-into-a-killer-media-center-299809.php"installed it on our old classic Xbox/a, but since then we've been hooked on this rich, open-source media center. Luckily, just because those old black boxes are becoming obselete doesn't mean the XBMC software project has died off. Just the opposite: XBMC has forked into several neat branches that run on various hardware platforms so you can enjoy the same media center goodness without hacking an old Xbox. Check out a few launches from various factions of XBMC developers this past year that have warmed our hearts:/p ul lia href="http://lifehacker.com/5051874/xbmc-atlantis-beta-1-released-for-all-platforms"XBMC 'Atlantis' Beta 1 Released for All Platforms/a/li lia href="http://lifehacker.com/5095241/plex-7-adds-itunes-and-iphoto-support-and-more"Plex 7 for Mac Adds iTunes and iPhoto Support and More/a/li lia href="http://lifehacker.com/396382/boxee-is-xbmc-with-newer-look-and-social-flair"Boxee Is XBMC with Newer Look and Social Flair/a/li /ul br clear="all" h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"Ubuntu Hardy Heron/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/hardyheron-logo.png" width="135" height="135" align="right" class="right" Another year, another Ubuntu release, and they just keep getting better. Seriously, you have to love the free, open source operating system that manages a new major release on a yearly basismdash;something Apple and Microsoft, companies you pay hundreds of dollars to for the privilege of using their software, don't pull off. If you've tried Linux on your desktop before and killed the partition in frustration, only to slink back to Windows, it's time to give it another go. This year's flavor, a href="http://lifehacker.com/383769/hardy-heron-makes-linux-worth-another-look"version 8.04 Hardy Heron makes Linux worth another look/a.br clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"Gmail Labs, Gadgets, and Themes/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/thumb160x_thumb160x_thumb160x_thumb160x_smallish_smallish_smallish_smallish_gmailenvelope.png" width="135" height="135" Our favorite web application on the internet, Gmail, continues to burn down barns and rip up the competition with continual iteration and feature adds. This year, Gmail added a "Labs" section to your account, a safe way for power users to enable "experimental" power features to their email while keeping everyone else's safe from harm. Truthfully, when I a href="http://lifehacker.com/395211/gmail-gets-13-experimental-new-features"attended the Google press event announcing Gmail Labs/a back in June, I had my doubts about whether or not the featureset would ever expand beyond the initial 13, and if it would go beyond eye-candy games like Snakey to, you know, actually useful stuff. Turns out it did. Six months later, a href="http://lifehacker.com/5052060/what-gmail-labs-features-do-you-have-enabled"ten more Gmail Labs features/a are available in your account, including a super-useful Gadgets feature that lets third parties embed their apps into your inbox. (Like a href="http://lifehacker.com/5101139/bitly-offers-in+gmail-url-shortening-gadget"Bit.ly/a or a href="http://lifehacker.com/5084502/add-your-basecamp-projects-to-gmail"Basecamp/a.) Later, Gmail launched a href="http://lifehacker.com/5093536/gmail-updates-its-look-adds-themes"themes/a as well as a href="http://lifehacker.com/5100649/gmail-google-desktop-gadget-now-available"a Google Desktop gadget/a. In the midst of all this, the Gmail security team took the time a href="http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2008/11/gmail-security-and-recent-phishing.html"to respond to a breach/a that several users had experienced and blogged about online. Clearly there's someone home at Gmail; this is a rapidly-evolving product that any webapp developer should use as an example on how to iterate quickly.br clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"Honorable Mentions/h3 pMaking best-of-year lists is always difficult because you risk leaving off really deserving items. At least two that go in our honorable mentions bin are the a href="http://lifehacker.com/5042312/ubiquity-prototype-offers-a-natural-language-web-command-line"Firefox keyboard interface prototype Ubiquity/a, and photo-sharing site a href="http://lifehacker.com/377598/flickr-adds-video"Flickr's launch of short video clips/a in April./p pNow, you tell us which one of these apps impressed you the most in the year two thousand and eight./p pscript type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://static.polldaddy.com/p/1160637.js" /scriptnoscripta href="http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1160637/"Which new or improved app impressed you the most in 2008?/abr span style="font-size:9px;"( a href="http://www.polldaddy.com"polls/a)/span/noscript/p pIf you can't get enough of best-of lists, hop into the time machine and see our a href="http://lifehacker.com/software/lifehacker-top-10/top-10-new-and-improved-apps-of-2007-332617.php"top 10 new and improved apps of 2007/a, and our a href="http://lifehacker.com/software/best-of-2006/geek-to-live--the-best-apps-of-2006-221920.php"best apps of 2006/a and of a href="http://lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/geek-to-live-best-apps-of-2005-144388.php"2005/a./p pAnything you would have included on this list that we left out? Tell us about it in the comments./p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=c25b27e9cc47fec6e2837e6756c1da79p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=c25b27e9cc47fec6e2837e6756c1da79p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=c25b27e9cc47fec6e2837e6756c1da79" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com:80/~f/lifehacker/full?a=cDx19c1S"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com:80/~f/lifehacker/full?a=ZTEOZvTR"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com:80/~f/lifehacker/full?a=6Kfin5AZ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=6Kfin5AZ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com:80/~f/lifehacker/full?a=Sg3nuEAr"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=Sg3nuEAr" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~4/TRlejqKX0-0" height="1" width="1"/

Ramu Yalamanchi, CEO of Hi5 isn't worried about the recession. "We started in a recession so we know what to do. Plus, recessions make available some great resources."

Hi5, headquartered in San Francisco, is much better known outside of the region, and the US. It is larger than MySpace or Facebook, in 30 countries especially Spanish-speaking such as Mexico, and in developing countries--and it is growing faster than both.

"When we started in 2003, we saw that the US market was getting crowded so we looked at emerging markets, that's how we got popular outside of the US," says Mr Yalamanchi.

Hi5 has great momentum and it is looking for new markets. It thinks that virtual worlds is a potentially large opportunity. Earlier this year Hi5 acquired Pixverse, a small company that makes virtual products for virtual worlds. Gaia Online, for example, makes a lot of money from its virtual world economy.

"Our users like to express themselves creatively and we think that virtual worlds will allow them to do more of that. Also, mobile is very important for us, because in a lot of countries people have mobile phones but they don't have PCs."

Hi5 hopes that virtual worlds and mobile will help it continue growing at a very fast pace. In the first six months of this year comScore reported Hi5 visitors increased 79 per cent to 56.4 million per month from 31.4 million per month.

And although Hi5 is big elsewhere, it is not giving up on the US, it hopes to capitalize on its large Spanish speaking user base. "We think we can do very well among Hispanic users in the US," says Mr Yalamanchi.

Hi5 has also cultivated the application developer community by being a big supporter of the OpenSocial standard. This helps developers easily port their applications across different social network platforms.

Hi5 is a privately held company and has about $20m in cash. Mr Yalamanchi notes that economic downturns make resources less expensive such as office space, and also make it easier to find great software engineers, which will help Hi5 in this next phase of its expansion.

Foremski's Take:

Monetization of social networks continues to be a challenge for all social networks because the environment is different to search advertising. It is especially challenging for Hi5 because of its diverse geographic spread. Advertisers continue buy space on a regional basis rather than on a global scale and that won't change for a good while.

Also, ads on social networks are considered very low quality and they don't have the same conversion rates as on other sites. However, that means that there is an excellent arbitrage opportunity for those advertising agencies that can craft the right type of commercial message. Hi5 is working with various agencies to create interactive ads that engage users. And Hi5 has done well with partners in various local markets.

Hi5 is well positioned for growth. We are still in the early stages of social networks, and this is even truer in developing countries where many people are getting online for the first time, and that's where Hi5 has brand leadership. On the Internet being number 1 means being far ahead of number two, or three, and that's a great advantage for Hi5. Especially in markets that are growing far faster than the US.

Recessions might slow spending, but they don't slow Moore's Law, which means the Internet becomes more accessible every day to millions more people overseas, and that's where Hi5 is strong.

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/43908?ns=guardianpageName=World+news%3A+Forty+years+on%2C+Laos+reaps+bitter+harvest+of+the+secret+warch=World+newsc3=The+Guardianc4=World+newsc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Ian+MacKinnonc7=2008_12_03c8=1127780c9=articlec10=GUc11=World+newsc12=c13=c14=h2=GU%2FWorld+news%2F" width="1" height="1" //divpThe entrance to Craters restaurant is guarded by a phalanx of bombshells, each as big as a man. Opposite, the Dokkhoune hotel boasts an even finer warhead collection. For tourists who have not cottoned on, the Lao town of Phonsavanh lies at the heart of the most cluster-bombed province of the most bombed country on earth./ppThe haul of unexploded ordnance (UXO) is just a taster of that littering the countryside, or sitting in vast piles around homes and scrapyards. The deadly harvest from the US bombing of this landlocked country 30 years ago in the so-called "secret war" as the real battle raged in next-door Vietnam has become big business. Steel prices that surged on the back of soaring demand from China's go-go economy drove up scrap prices five-fold in eight years in impoverished Laos. It sent subsistence rice farmers, struggling make to ends meet amid spiralling food and fuel prices, scurrying into their fields in search of the new "cash crop"./ppBut it comes at a high price. At least 13,000 people have been killed or maimed, either digging in fields contaminated with live bombs or, increasingly, in their quest for lucrative scrap metal. Half the casualties are young boys, most killed by exploding tennis-ball-sized cluster bomblets - christened "bombies" locally - that are everywhere./ppThe scale of the contamination is mind-boggling. Laos was hit by an average of one B-52 bomb-load every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, between 1964 and 1973. US bombers dropped more ordnance on Laos in this period than was dropped during the whole of the second world war. Of the 260m "bombies" that rained down, particularly on Xieng Khouang province, 80m failed to explode, leaving a deadly legacy./ppOverwhelmed by the immensity of the clear-up, Laos - which has dealt with just 400,000 unexploded munitions - had resisted the signing today in Oslo of a treaty banning cluster bombs and demanding that remnants be cleared within 10 years. But the country has had a rethink and will now be a key player in the ceremony./ppFor Laos it could be a godsend, focusing world attention on its plight and bringing international resources to tackle the problem. With 37% of agricultural ground made unsafe by unexploded munitions in a nation where four-fifths of people farm the land, the scourge has stifled development./ppYet farmers eking out a living below the dollar-a-day poverty line have no choice. Bombs unearthed as they gingerly peck at the soil are planted around, or moved to the side of the field./pp"In the end the Lao people regard lack of food as much greater threat than unexploded bombs," said David Hayter, the Lao country director of British-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG). "It's just that each UXO death is marked by a big bang, but deaths from lack of food or poor water are less noticeable."/ppFatalistic acceptance of the danger is fostered by familiarity. Bomb remains are fashioned into everyday items: cluster-bomb casings become fencing; houses perch on stilts crafted from 500lb bombs; mortars with fins are used as table lamps. "People's familiarity is the most striking thing for me," said Jo Pereira, an occupational therapist with the Lao charity Cope, which fits UXO victims with prosthetic limbs. "They've lived with it for so long. Much of it is in their houses. Children think 'we've got those at home' and don't see the risks."/ppSo when scrap metal prices rocketed many saw it as a heaven-sent opportunity to boost meagre incomes. For those unable to grow enough rice to feed their families throughout the year, there is little choice but to collect UXO scrap despite the dangers./pp"People have lived with this for two generations," said Gregory Cathcart, an MAG programme officer. "They don't view it as risky. It's simply a cash crop. The problem is the main scrap on the surface is gone, so they've to dig it up which is extremely dangerous."/ppCheap Vietnamese metal detectors costing as little as pound;7.36 boost the business. Landless families have turned full-time scrap collectors, earning up to pound;2.70 a day if they unearth six or seven kilos. Stumble on half a cluster bomb casing of "best Detroit steel" and they hit pay-dirt, worth pound;20 to pound;27./ppNo such luck for Sher Ya, 25. He plonks a plastic bag of bullet casings on the scrap dealer's scales and anxiously eyes the needle. His teenage brother dredged the shells from their village rice field. It earns a welcome 40p. "My family grows only enough rice for six months," he said. "So when we're not planting or harvesting we collect bomb scraps. It's scary, but we've no choice."/ppThe trade is so lucrative that scrap dealers ferry collectors by truck to virgin forests every day. Sypha Phommachan, 45, need not to go to such lengths. Farmers around Thajok village beat a path to the scrap dealer's door. A pile of fragments, casings, and mortars is all she had left after the foundry took away nearly eight tonnes a few days before./pp"That took me about three weeks to collect," she said. "That's quite slow because it's the rice harvest season and people are busy farming. In a couple of months they'll be out furiously collecting to raise cash for the Hmong festival." Yet she carefully inspects the bomb harvest, rejecting live munitions. She knows the risks. In the six years she has lived in the village, 10 people have been killed collecting scrap. One 50-year-old man died three months ago when he tossed half a "bombie" he believed safe into the wicker basket on his back. It exploded and the ball-bearings it threw out went clean through his chest, killing him instantly./ppToday's treaty banning the stockpile and use of cluster munitions is due to be signed by 107 countries - including the UK, which has been the third biggest user. Those holding out include the US, China, Russia and Israel. /ppBut Richard Moyes, co-chair of the Cluster Munition Coalition, is confident that the convention will change the climate. "We sense we'll see a dramatic decline in cluster munitions use even among states that don't sign."/pa href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/0isZpde_2gKB0VQVLsihe6OOssY/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/0isZpde_2gKB0VQVLsihe6OOssY/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

Bad debts in FirstRand's home loan business had increased significantly, a picture that was expected to get worse over the next six months, the group said yesterday.

Red Hat's Spacewalk project is getting into place. The project wants to feed development of the Red Hat Network Satellite product for system management. Satellite is a critical tool for Red Hat users as it provides management capabilities for multiple servers for software deployment and updates. Almost six months ago, Red Hat kicked off the Spacewalk project in an effort to create an open source version of Network Satellite that would serve as the upstream project that drives development. According to Red Hat executives, Spacewalk is still in the process of getting aligned with Network Satellite releases in terms of the development model. As well, Spacewalk is now gearing up to replace Network Satellite's proprietary Oracle database backend with an open source database. It's all part of Red Hat's larger efforts to use the open source model effectively in all parts of its business, as well as reducing the costs associated with proprietary databases.

pimg class="float_right" src="/~~/f?id=4934681614b9b930000d2092maxX=240maxY=320" border="0" alt="DeWolfePretty.jpg" title="DeWolfePretty.jpg" width="240" height="320" /One upside of the Web 2.0 shakeout: As companies with great ideas or innovative tech start to run out of money, they can be gobbled up cheap. That's what MySpace (NWS) CEO Chris DeWolfe told a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/Media08/idUSTRE4B08WL20081202"a emReuters/em conference/a closed to outside reporters:/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"DeWolfe said companies worth between $200 million and $300 million just six months ago are now running out of money and willing to sell themselves for less than one-tenth of that value./p pBut he's not ready to buy just yet -- we still haven't hit bottom./p p style="padding-left: 30px;""At the lower levels the money dries up, everyone's looking for some kind of exit and the valuations we're seeing out there are definitely a small, small fraction of what they were even five or six months ago," he said, adding that he expects these companies to become emeven cheaper/em in the next few months./p pDeWolfe said he considers acquisitions central to MySpace's overall strategy of looking for growth overseas, in music, and on mobile phones. One company DeWolfe doesn't want tor MySpace: Twitter, which recently a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/twitter-rejects-500-million-takeover-offer-from-facebook"flirted with Facebook/a. Twitter duplicates MySpace functionality without helping the company grow, he said. (Really?)/p pstrongSee Also:/strongbr /a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/michael-wolff-myspace-and-its-braindead-users-are-going-to-zero"Michael Wolff: MySpace And Its Braindead Users Are Going To Zero/abr /a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/dewolfe-myspace-hasn-t-seen-any-impact-from-financial-crises"DeWolfe: Recession Hammering MySpace's Growth/abr /a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/myspace-ceo-maybe-we-ll-build-an-ipod-killer"MySpace CEO: Maybe We'll Build An iPod Killer/abr /a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/myspace-will-come-out-with-a-payment-platform-maybe-before-facebook-"MySpace Will Come Out With A Payment Platform (Maybe Before Facebook)/a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/1gpscDU_QE1zeK9C6GPkZkc4k_Q/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/1gpscDU_QE1zeK9C6GPkZkc4k_Q/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=Y2HZvfCh"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=Y2HZvfCh" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=35mJIfro"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=vTyWeIjt"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=80" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=kMFju2SV"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=kMFju2SV" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=gSrhOG53"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=131" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=HfvSSlix"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=336" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=irisVeZu"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=TajraIag"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=50" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~4/w9dmTMR2t94" height="1" width="1"/