Last.fm, the social music service that CBS Interactive acquired last year, is venturing into original content for the first time with a new video series called Last.fm Presents.

The series consists of interviews with popular and rising bands and artists; among the first artists featured are techno legend …

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Barrick Gold Raised To Purchase From Hold By Blackmont >ABX Last Update: 5/7/2008 11:18:04 AM (MORE TO FOLLOW) Dow Jones Newswires May 07, 2008 11:18 ET (15:18 GMT) For more visit Source:www.investment-blog.net

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Yamana Gold Post Higher 1Q Rev; Boosts Div >AUY Last Update: 5/7/2008 5:00:34 PM DOW JONES NEWSWIRES Yamana Gold Inc. (AUY) increased its annual dividend to 12 cents a share from 4 cents, reflecting higher revenue and earnings in the first quarter. The Toronto gold company earned $63.1 million in the latest quarter, up from $27.4 million a year earlier. It […] For more visit Source:www.investment-blog.net

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This post is by Sheryl Canter, an On the internet Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense Fund.

I recently wrote about the TreeHugger interview with Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn about their new book. Earth: The Sequel is an engaging look at emerging technology in the fight to cease global warming.

Fred has been getting around quite a bit lately. This week he also was interviewed by Forbes, Newsweek, and Mercury News. Each had a slightly different focus. Here are some excerpts:

On why a carbon tax won’t work, from the Forbes interview:

There’s no example of an air pollution problem anywhere in the world that has been solved without a cap or legal limit on how much of that pollution can be dumped into the sky. A cap gives you that legal limit, where a tax grants people to potentially keep on paying a modest amount and keep on polluting.

On biofuels, from the Newsweek interview:

I think we’ve come to comprehend that the current generation of biofuels has problems and that we need a whole new generation. In the short-term, turning sugar into fuels other than ethanol would have many advantages, given the infrastructure problems ethanol creates. In the long-term, we’re much better off when entrepreneurs develop ways to turn wood and fiber, not food, into energy.

On the power of markets, from the Mercury News interview:

Last night, we were up on Sand Hill Road. Somebody told me he had been walking around in a kind of funk, a depression. But, he stated, now that he’s seen this future, he’s already starting to feel superior. It’s not a message that we have the ability to disengage. It’s not a message that technology can solve it. It is a message that if government does the right thing, and if we put that entrepreneurism to work in service of a new profit motive that’s been designed to create the very things we need to have a future, wow, watch what happens, such as a $1.9 billion order for Applied Materials to make solar cells.

For more visit Source:[green.yahoo]

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Update 3:30 p.m. PDT: A correction: Even though only travel modules could be sponsored at launch, now all can be. Also, there’s no display ad opportunity at present, though the sponsorship can mean more prominence than text ads. Update 11:45 p.m.: I updated with new detail from Yahoo, further information from the site, and some analysis.

Yahoo Glue Pages build a mini-portal around search results. It's in testing in India.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Yahoo has begun testing Glue Pages, a major new way to present search results that caters to its strength as an World wide web portal.

Glue Pages, which the company began offering in beta form to Yahoo search users in India, combine traditional search results with a wealth of other related information. Traditional search results appear in a strip on the left side of the page, while other modules appear that spotlight sponsored links, recipes, medical information, Wikipedia entries, stock charts, Flickr images, train schedules, restaurant lists, news, and even Google blog search results.

Yahoo’s Indian team developed the feature and so far there are no plans to bring it to the United States or other areas, said spokeswoman Kathryn Kelly.

“We encourage other regions to develop things that work for their regions,” Kelly said. “If it does get traction, potentially something care about it could launch in the United States.”

Yahoo pioneered Internet portals, all-purpose sites where people can find everything they need, but Google found a much stronger business model through an effective search engine that presents bare-bones results with text ads alongside. Yahoo, though, hasn’t given up, even though it continues to lose search share; In March the gap widened a bit more, with 59.8 percent of U.S. queries at Google and 21.3 percent at Yahoo, according to ComScore.

The search is interesting for other reasons besides Yahoo’s portal strengths.

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The Eyebeam Art & Technology Center was decked out in red and black for Tuesday night's annual benefit.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

NEW YORK–”We skipped the paparazzi,” Eyebeam director Amanda McDonald Crowley stated as she welcomed several hundred people to the digital art center’s annual …

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I finally got a chance to catch up with Avi Muchnick, the CEO of Flash software maker Aviary and of the art contest site it spun out of, Worth1000 (a Webware 100 winner).

Aviary is an ambitious project to create a full suite of on the web applications for creative professionals. The first application, the image editor Phoenix, is now in private beta (read to the end of this post to get an early invitation). The second, pattern maker called Peacock, was recently added.

Coming up after these applications will be Toucan, a color swatch program for designers (like Kuler on steroids), a 3D-sketching program and modeler, a vector-based editor, and a smart image resizer.

Who needs software? This is a layer-based image-editing application running in a browser window. It's pretty snappy, too.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

After the graphics applications get some traction, the team plans to ship video and audio editors as well.

There are two goals driving Aviary’s development. The first is Muchnick’s belief that design tools need to be more collaborative. He’s trying to build a Google Docs for designers, it appears. While you can’t yet do simultaneous editing in Aviary applications, the fact that all the files are stored online, along with all the raw graphics materials that went into them, can greatly simplify the games of “Photoshop tennis” that designers, artists, and their clients have to deal with during the design-and-review process.

The second is economics. Muchnick is trying to bring Photoshop-quality tools to all designers. He points out that the high price of Photoshop–the Design version of Creative Suite 3 retails for $1,799–is “not fair” for freelance designers, most of whom make less than $35,000 a year. Also, the wikilike versioning and revisioning abilities built into the Aviary suite will enable all contributors to a media project to get their due credit and, if appropriate, to get their share of revenues from a project.

Everybody who sees the Aviary product calls it ambitious. But the ambition to build a Flash-based competitor to Adobe’s tools is only half the story–and half the ambition. Muchnick is trying to enable a new economic system for creative professionals. I think that he’s onto something and that he’s reflecting the reality of creative work today, rather than trying to ram through his own utopian vision.

World wide web economics are changing other creative endeavors: music, photography, and writing. The graphic-design field is also in turmoil, and it needs not just new tools, but also new systems.

Aviary is still in private beta testing, but the first 200 people to sign up here can get priority access to the tools. Note that you must click this link from Webware.

Previous coverage: Flash apps are taking over. Phoenix is proof.

Fore more visit Source: [webware]

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For something so focused on navigation and geography, it’s a bit ironic that location-based social networks have to work their way through such a jungle: carrier partnerships, handset compatibility, creepy privacy concerns, and what-have-you. But one small New York start-up, Socialight, says it’s found a route: developers, developers, …

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There are very few rules on microblogging platform Twitter. But if you use it for unsolicited “tweets” about male enhancement products, watch out: Twitter has started to shut down accounts that it has flagged as “spam,” reported blogger Jesse Stay.

Twitter employees confirmed the new tactic in their developer forum. “…

Source [The social]

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