On Wednesday, a 19-year-old young man in Florida killed himself live on the Internet, broadcasting the event by connecting a webcam in his bedroom to Justin.tv, a lifecasting site. Viewers who tuned in and egged Abraham Biggs on, presuming it was a prank, were shocked to see police arrive on the scene a few hours…

Once again, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation is offering two of its XO machines for $399. One goes to you, one goes to a third-world child. Technologizer editor Harry McCracken, the pathologically honest former head of , bought into the program last year. This year, he says, he'll do it again, but he's not sure you…

"Sounds like they are preparing for a sale, not saving costs,” says the pullquoted analyst in the today. Nortel's , at 18 percent of headcount, would seem if they didn't include CTO John Roese, whose blog documented the company's efforts to turn itself around. Roese typed up "" yesterday. As a going-away present,…

Programmer Richard Stallman's 25-year crusade to banish proprietary software from planet Earth hasn't had many victories. Most recently, One Laptop Per Child stabbed RMS in the face by replacing its Stallman-approved freeware with a Windows operating system. OLPC head Nicholas Negroponte, who originally backed a…

Peter Kafka is Kara Swisher's latest star hire at AllThingsD. She stole him from Silicon Alley Insider, where he worked with Henry Blodget. At SAI, Kafka always seemed to do fine without invoking the wisdom of the crowd. Why is Kara pushing him to go on and on about nothing? His was the standard Web 2.0 "Hello,…

Yesterday, as Web 2.0's bubble burst in slow motion at 30,000 feet over downtown San Francisco, I received a preview copy of Reality Check, by Guy Kawasaki. Someone had stuck a Post-it on the cover: "See inside for foreword by The Fake Steve Jobs!" Awesome. I'm never going to read Kawasaki's book, even though he's way…

The Wall Street Journal has an 800-word report this morning announcing Eric Schmdt's plans to "hit the campaign trail this week" for Barack Obama. Blah blah blah natural evolution, Google is officially neutral, "I'm doing this personally," says Schmidt, a week after self-appointed Internet Co-Founder Vint Cerf came…

Search marketing icon Danny Sullivan recently moved back to his native Southern California after 12 years in a small English town. Yeah, we thought he was British, too. Sullivan documented several infuriating problems he hit trying to connect with local businesses through Google. One stands out, because it was caused…

" Venture Capitalists: Don't blame us" is the title of an 800-word essay at The Deal. This kind of headline always has an obvious, hidden meaning: Yes, VCs are to blame. Let's skip to the end and see how they did it: From there, the piece just needs a punchy conclusion, which we'll supply: "Now that the economic…

Most bloggers seem to be mentally competing with the newspaper media model of . Were they to visit the average newspaper office, they'd quickly realize what they really want: A glamorous magazine job. That seems to be Arianna Huffington's thinking, too. Gawker writer Ryan Tate has a about Huffington's workplace…

The company that funded Netscape, Google and Genentech is now focusing on electric cars, solar power and biofuels. New York Times contributor Jon Gertner has been meeting with Kleiner partners since last year. His in Sunday's paper goes deep on details of a few KPCB investments such as . But it spends a lot of time…

Nick dePlume, as the 13-year-old Nicholas Ciarelli dubbed himself in 1998, became more than Internet-famous as the target of an Apple lawsuit. Ciarelli had published leaked details about Apple's Mac Mini two weeks before the hush-hush product's launch. Apple strong-armed him to shut down Think Secret in February. Now,…

PBS pundit Robert X. Cringely says he realized at last week's MIT Technology Review conference that cloud computing means, in short, "No database." Cringely sees it as the end of Oracle's dominance of information technology. I expect Oracle Cloud any day now. Here's a summary of Cringely's long article, plus the joke…

"Hong Kong is now the one and only country in the world where you can buy an unlocked contract-free iPhone directly from the online Apple Store," writes John Gruber, aka Daring Fireball. He goes on to answer my plea for an explanation of Apple's motives. You can , or my 100-word edit:

San Francisco-expat turned LA PR pro Jeremy Pepper wrote a long post documenting his exploration of Twitter as a company communications channel with the outside world. The advent of Twitter hasn't changed this much: I can still get paid to take a two page long, rambling essay by an expert and rewrite it to fit on a…