Engadget founder Peter Rojas and former editor Ryan Block are launching a new project today called gdgt. The web site isn't a gadget blog, but rather a portal for gadget specs, reviews, and other information as well as a social networking site that lets users create profiles with lists of the gadgets they have, want, or had.

If you're not interested in creating a profile and sharing your gadget lust with the world, the site still serves a few purposes. It has a decent list of existing gadgets with detailed specifications and some pretty nifty comparison charts. You can also read professional reviews from other web pages as well as user reviews and comments about each gadget.

If you do create a profile, you can submit your own gadgets, which means that the site's already decent catalog of gadgets will continue to grow over time. Users can also add items to your have, want, and had list, and embed a personalized gdgt widget on your web page or social networking profiles.

One upon a time, Joost was supposed to be the future of online video. The project was founded by the makers of Skype as a way to deliver high quality video over a peer to peer network using a standalone application because, let's face it, web browsers weren't really made for video.

But over the past few years, YouTube has continued to grow in popularity, and a little site called Hulu came along and showed that people were pretty gosh darned happy to watch full length TV episodes in a browser if they could access the content they wanted.

Eventually Joost gave up on the standalone media browser idea and relaunched as a web-based video portal. The only problem is that while Joost had a handful of videos you might want to watch, it's content library always paled in comparison to Hulu and other sites.

Today Joost announced a plan to relaunch as a white-label video provider. In other words, Joost will offer up its technology to other companies looking for a way to other companies looking to start their own video portals.

Joost's web portal will continue to exist... for now. But the company is reducing its staff, closing offices, and I'd be shocked if Joost signs any new content deals anytime soon. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see some of the existing premium partners start to disappear from the site.

As I sat down this morning to begin working on a few small news items, Torrent Freak had dropped a bomb on my RSS: the Pirate Bay has been sold for just under $8 million US.

Swedish gaming giant Global Gaming Factory X will become the new owners, and The Pirate Bay as you and I know it will change forever. A necessary evolutionary step, according to Peter Sunde (brokep).

"We've been working on this project for many years. It's time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die. And letting TPB die is the last thing that is allowed to happen!"

Why would a legitimate company want to purchase TPB? For starters, it's one of the top 100 most visited sites on the internet. While I'm not in the habit of referring to $8 million purchases as a bargain, it's hard to imagine being able to pick up any of the other 99 sites on the list for that kind of money.

Wax MP3 is a web based music player for that plays songs from Magnatune's catalog of Creative Commons-licensed tracks from independent musicians.

When you launch the website, you're greeted with a basic music player that gives you information about the song that's currently playing, download links, and the ability to skip to the next track. You can also choose a genre from a drop-down menu in the top left corner if you'd rather hear classical, folk, ambient, or another style of music. There's a pretty eclectic mix of genres, including medieval, Middle Eastern, and metal. And that's just in the M section.

You can also grab URL links that will take you directly to a song if you want to share tracks with friends. Overall, Wax MP3 provides a pretty nifty interface for finding music you might not otherwise have known about.

[via Boing Boing]

NetDrive is a Windows utility that lets you treat remote FTP sites as if they were local drives. The first time you connect to an FTP site, you have to create a profile. But once you're connected you can copy files to and from the FTP site using Windows Explorer or any other file explorer of your choosing. No FTP client required. To disconnect from the FTP server, just bring up the NetDrive window again and hit the disconnect button.

You can also configure NetDrive to automatically map an FTP site as a Windows drive every time your computer boots up. This could come in handy if you want to use a file backup utility to automatically back up files to an FTP server, or if you constantly need to copy files to and from your web hosting server.

NetDrive includes profiles for a few anonymous FTP servers including the KDE, GNOME, and FreeBSD projects as well as Adobe, Apple, HP, and Microsoft servers. You can also create your own profiles.

[via Inspect My Gadget]

Cooliris is a browser plugin that lets you search for and view pictures and videos from sites including YouTube, Flickr, and Google Images. It works with Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Flock, all of which support tabbed browsing. But up until recent, Cooliris didn't support tabs at all. When you launched the plugin, it would automatically show you a full screen media browser. The only way to search for multiple items would be to launch separate instances of the browser and flip between them.

But the latest version of Cooliris lets you find and view media within a normal browser tab. And that means you can also open up multiple instances of Cooliris within a single browser session. You can look for pictures of kitties in one tab while watching the latest updates on YouTube from Iran in another.

One thing to beware of though, is that Cooliris can be a bit of a RAM hog. If you thought Firefox used a lot of memory under normal conditions, try launching 5 or 6 Cooliris tabs and see what happens. OK, I'll tell you. The browser locks up and you get a warning notice telling you to close Cooliris tabs or other "3-D graphical applications."

[via WebWare]

Rapidshare is a service that makes it easy for users to upload and share files with a large number of people. It can come in handy whether you want to send a large file to a friend who has an email service with file attachment size limits or you want to share files with visitors to your website without paying a hefty web hosting bill.

But Rapidshare has never gained the respect that sites like YouSendIt have. YouSendIt provided a similar service, but it's aimed at sending files to just a handful of users. RapidShare, on the other hand, has become popular with users who upload copyrighted software, music, and movies. And today the company could be paying the price of allowing users to get away with those activities.

A German court is ordering Rapidshare to remove about 5,000 songs from its servers. The lawsuit was brought by GEMA, a group representing copyright holders. The court has ruled that Rapidshare must begin filtering content to prevent users from sharing any songs from artists covered by GEMA. The court estimates the value of those songs at about 24 million Euros (roughly $34 million).

Of course, it's pretty difficult to filter content on a site like Rapidshare, where users can easily ZIP files, change file names, or make other small changes to trick any filtering software that's put in place. I guess we'll have to see if Rapidshare ties to take any steps toward implementing content filters, and if the court decides that a good faith effort is good enough. Or maybe Rapidshare will just appeal the ruling.

[via TechCrunch]

Multi-protocol chat client Digsby received a major update today, with over 100 bug fixes and new features. At the top of the list, the new version should use about 50% less CPU cycles than previous builds.

Digsby is a chat client that lets you chat with contacts whether they're using AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, or Facebook Chat. It also lets you read and write updates for social networking sites including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn.

Here are a few other new features:

• Search your buddy list by hitting Ctrl+F
• Improved file transfer reliability for AIM, ICQ, and MSN
• Support for entering your status on MySpace
• Added support for invisible mode on Gtalk
• New infobox based on WebKit

Some of these features have been available to Alpha testers for a while now, but the new build will allow all Digsby users to access them.

After months of private Alpha testing, the Boxee team has finally released a public alpha of the Boxee media center application for Windows. That means you can now run Boxee on Mac, Windows or Ubuntu Linux. The public alpha for Windows does seem to be a bit more stable and responsive than the earlier private alpha version.

Boxee provides you with a full screen browser designed for managing and accessing internet media as well as audio and video stored on your hard drive. Over the past few weeks, Boxee has gained a ton of features through a new "App Store" which allows third party developers to create plugins for the media center.

In addition to launching a public Windows Alpha, Boxee also announced last night a new partnership with MLB.com to offer live and recorded Major League Baseball games through Boxee. Boxee has also added support for Digg, Current.tv and Tumblr.

Fortunately, Wikipedia's video options won't end up like this

When I first read the headline that Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, is preparing to offer editors lots of new video tools and support, I was immediately filled with dread. I instantly started imagining the types of videos that overly pedantic Wikipedia editors would create, on such scintillating topics like the "Mary Sue" archetype in fan fiction (and 3200 words on that, really?) or that really awesome episode of Battlestar Galactica (don't flame me BSG fans, Cylons rule and whatnot). Fortunately, the new video features that are going to be coming to Wikipedia aren't about content creation, at least not yet.

According to MIT's Technology Review, in the next two or three months, Wikipedia editors will have access to an "add media" button that allows them to find, annotate, choose the relevant portions of a video and then embed the resulting clip into any article. The whole thing will be web-based and will rely on open video standards. Three sources will be available in the beginning, the Internet Archive, Wikimedia Commons and Metavid, but eventually Wikipedia hopes to allow users to scour the web for content.

Despite my early skepticism, the idea is actually pretty interesting. When I think about the first-wave of "book encyclopedia" killers, the CD and then DVD-ROM based multimedia offerings (like the late Encarta), the video content always sticks out as one of the biggest high points. Having quality video or audio content add context or augmentation to a text article can really make a subject more clear.

Of course, having to rely on copyright-free video or public domain works might make it difficult for Wikipedia to achieve those same goals.

[via Mashable]

Fever is a new feed reader that calculates the "temperature" of your feeds by asking you to group them into essential and occasional categories, and looking at how they relate to one another to create a "hot" category. It's like your own personalized, automated Digg. It's the brainchild of Shaun Inman, one of the most respected designers around, and the UI looks great and seems intuitive.

Here's the catch, though: Fever's not a desktop app. It's a PHP/MySQL app that you host on your own server. This offers several advantages: you can access it from anywhere, you can filter ads by blacklisting advertising domains, it updates itself automatically, and you can use cron to make your feeds automatically refresh whenever you choose. Fever is powerful, but I'm sure some people are going to balk at installing it, despite the very nice video walkthrough on the site.

If you don't mind running Fever on your server, but you're the kind of person who really needs an icon in the dock, you can run Fever on the desktop using Fluid, which turns web apps into standalone browsers. Fever also has a very, very nicely-done iPhone-optimized design, so if you're checking your feeds from an iPhone, you're in for a treat (without having to download an iPhone app, even).