InternetOnline services tearing down walls, sharing content (Reuters)

Reuters - It might indeed be true that everything you need to know you learned in kindergarten.

DENVER (Billboard) - It might indeed be true that everything you need to know you learned in kindergarten. Take the first lesson: Share everything. It's right there at the top of the list, but only now is the digital entertainment industry taking notice. Once littered with walled gardens and content silos, the digital landscape is beginning to sprout a customer-friendly ecosystem of shared content and traffic. Fueling this newfound spirit of interoperability are technologies that enable the sharing of content between sites. They include the Open Social initiative and Facebook's open development platform, both driving the "widgetization" of the Web. It's also a reflection of the surging "mash-up" movement online. A mash-up is a Web application that combines content and features from multiple sources for a specific purpose that none of the contributors do individually. The most commonly used applications are those with easily embeddable content or open APIs (programming information available to all), such as Google Maps, Twitter and Last.fm. This mash-up practice has long been used by such niche music applications as WikiFM -- which merges a band's Wikipedia page with its music streamed from Last.fm -- or Rhapsody+Pitchfork, which, as its name implies, adds full-song streaming from Rhapsody to Pitchfork's music reviews. Most are created... [ Read more on www.yahoo.com ]

InternetMicrosoft Becomes Official Apache Sponsor (TechWeb)

TechWeb - InformationWeek - Microsoft said it's putting a wide range of protocols that were formerly in the Communications Protocol Program under the Open Specification Promise.

InternetMicrosoft Expands Open Source Presence

Pledging "open and honest" work with the community, the software giant throws in with Apache and other groups -- but not everyone is likely to be as welcoming.