Condé Nast Publications (which owns Wired, Wired.com, and a whole bunch of major magazines) has agreed to purchase Ars Technica for an undisclosed sum.
According to TechCrunch, Ars will be placed under the Wired Digital umbrella under CondéNet, which was made whole with the 2006 acquisition of Wired.com, and may be combined with Wired and Wired.com. The sale will be announced some time in the next week, Mashable has confirmed.
Ars looks to be a good fit for Wired and Wired.com, especially given the similar styles of tech reporting available on on both networks. Both include traditional professional feature style reporting on technology and trends. Wired will benefit from the addition of the new writing staff and Ars will gain a new outlet from its reporting. We wouldn't be surprised to see their work appearing in other publications across the Condé Nast house. The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and even GQ (all Condé Nast publications) could stand to benefit from Gear and Gadgets and some of the other ongoing reporting from Ars Technica.
CBS is buying CNET. For $1.8 billion in cash. While that might seem like a drop in the bucket compared to some buyout offers we've seen recently, that's still a lot of cash flowing from an old media company to a new one.
CBS is no stranger to new media. The company purchased the internet radio service Last.fm last year. But according to a press release put out by CBS this morning, this acquisition will make CBS "one of the 10 most popular Internet companies in the United States."
CNET Networks owns a whole slew of internet sites, including ZDNet, GameSpot, TV.com, MP3.com, Download.com, and of course, CNET and News.com.
Twitter may seem nice and innocent to a nonchalant user, but they may soon start killing spammy accounts with one stone. According to a recent News.com article, accounts flagged as spam will be removed. Employees of Twitter have been chirping up a storm about the new policy in their Google group forum.
Previously, blacklisted accounts were simply frozen to adding new followers, but as the amount of users on the service has increased, so have the spammers -- therefore, new policies had to be put into place. Users will be notified prior to their accounts being removed and have a chance to plead their case to the big bird in Twitterville.
As announced on Friday by David Eisenstein, the Fedora Legacy project is shutting down. As of his announcement (or maybe even earlier) Fedora Core 4 and earlier distributions are no longer being maintained or supported. He said that their current model of maintaining older distributions of Fedora Core are being examined, but right now everything is on (seemingly indefinite) hold. Jesse Keating later followed up and put it on record that the lack of contributors, and zero response to their call for help with the project, lead to the demise. I can't imagine anyone who would be absolutely dependent on Fedora Core 4, except maybe for older servers. If you're a dedicated Desktop Linux user, you're likely running Fedora Core 6, or another distribution like Ubuntu or SuSE.
The real question this leaves in my mind (an no doubtedly others) - is this just another case, in what has seemed like a recurring theme, of a concerted group of people being unable to provide support for Linux over the long term? Will Ubuntu LTS succeed where Fedora Legacy could not? With the rapid pace of Linux development, is long term support just a pipe dream, or a realistic goal?
CNet's popular web photo-sharing site Webshots has taken the obvious next step of launching its own video sharing feature. Aficionados of YouTube and other video sharing sites won't find much here they haven't seen before. The features are pretty standard. Upload your videos, embed them in your blog or web site, leave comments. You get the idea. The site boasts larger and higher-quality videos than most sites, but also has limits other sites don't. If you're a non-paying member you're limited to five-minute videos and up to 100 videos uploaded, plus 10 more for every month you're a member. If you're a paying premium member that goes up to 10 minutes, 250 videos, plus 25 for each month of membership.
While Webshots' new video features aren't bad by any means, if it's their aim to differentiate their service from the ever-growing crowd, they need to drop the arbitrary limitations. Existing Webshots users and people who want their videos and photos in one place (and who aren't already using Photobucket) will probably take advantage of the new video features, it's going to be a hard sell to people who are already happy with YouTube or its dozens of cousins.
You can check out Webshots' embedded player after the jump (ooh, elephants!), or see a few promo videos on Webshots.
I don't know if you've seen this, but CNet TV is pretty cool. A lot of news, reviews, and video clips showcasing new hardware and software can be found there. It is of course ad-supported (by Geek Squad), but makes catching up on the new stuff quick, painless, and actually fun. If only Engadget could do something like this, it would be off the hook. CNet TV is still in beta, but hey it isn't cool NOT to be in beta these days. I like the format and the coverage which I use to catch up on current news quickly (almost daily). It is a refreshing change from reading text-based news all the live long day.
Webshots is a site from CNet for browsing digital photographs, uploading photo galleries, or downloading photos from other users. There are currently over 387 million photos on the system in categories from flowers and bird to space and Japan.
Webshots members have two account options. A free account can store and share 1,000 photos, plus 100 more for each month of membership. It also includes the ability to upload from mobile devices. The premium account members have no ads, 5,000 photos with 500 more for each month of membership, and the ability to download hi-res pro shots, all for $2.49 per month. Webshots is a great free, easy to use, online photo storage and sharing tool, with a clean interface. The free account looks like it could be good for the average user, especially with the additional 100 photos each month. However, if you take pictures like crazy, it might be good to spend the extra $2.50 a month.
Check out some screenshots of Webshots after the jump...
AllYouCanUpload is a new image hosting site from CNet's Webshots. Unlike Webshots, it's in the ImageShack/PhotoBucket camp, intended not for browsing like Flickr, but for hosting photos and images to be used on other web sites. Like ImageShack, AllYouCanUpload is a free, no-login service and the upload form is right on the front page, and the service is completely devoid of advertising. There are no file size limits and no limit on total storage of number of images uploaded. Its most notable feature, though, is that there are no bandwidth constraints, so if you upload a file that becomes immensely popular, it won't get taken down as with some other services. That feature is by no means unique to AllYouCanUpload, but it's nice to see. Like ImageShack, once you upload an image you have to hang on to the URL or you'll never get it back. If you're interested in such things, CNet's Martin Green writes a bit about the service, and CNet's new "Haystack" back-end storage system, in his blog. Now, how long before ImageBot will work with it?
Sales and Marketing has a
nifty piece on "The
World According to Google." Worth a read, even if it's a little fluffy. Let's face it, but for the grace of
Google goes online marketing...
Condé Nast Publications (which owns Wired, Wired.com, and a whole bunch of major magazines) has agreed to purchase Ars Technica for an undisclosed sum. 
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Some of the news that's fit to blog from around the world and throughout the day. Here's your daily
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