Online video sites profit from writers’ strike in the US

BBC News reveals that “[o]nline video sharing sites are reaping the benefits of the ongoing writers’ strike in the US.   According to net measurement firm Nielsen Online, some online video sites have doubled their audience since the strike began at the end of October.  The news comes as US-based Pew Internet Project highlights a more long-term growth of video sharing sites.  Its study finds that the audience to sites such as YouTube has nearly doubled in the last year.”

According to the New York Times, “Yahoo appears close to implementing OpenID, a Web authentication standard that relieves people of the need to remember multiple passwords to log into different Web sites.  Yahoo controls a domain me.yahoo.com, which shows a short message indicating the company will act as an identity provider for OpenID.”

Internetnews.com reports that “[t]he newest version of the popular RPM package manager is now out with improved performance and functionality. But there’s a bit of a catch with RPM version 5.0.  Linux vendor Red Hat officially considers RPM 5.0 a project fork.  ‘RPM5 is a fork of RPM, and is not related to RPM.org,’ Daniel Riek, Product Manager Red Hat Enterprise Linux told InternetNews.com.  ‘Neither Red Hat or Fedora are involved in RPM5, and have no current plans to use it. Red Hat remains committed to the main RPM.org releases and development.’”

In a different article, Internetnews.com writes that “[o]ne of the key reasons that Mozilla and its technologies are open source is the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Now, the closely watched MPL may be seeing an update after remaining unchanged for years.”  However, Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker said of plans for a revised MPL, “I wouldn’t expect anything dramatic.  But it’s like a piece of code that hasn’t been changed in five or six years — so there is undoubtedly stuff in there that seemed important at the time that isn’t important now.’”

The Mercury News has an interesting article today on how Apple has created a virtual industry around making consumers guess what its next move will be.