• They had this business to themselves for years. Now everybody’s joined the party. The U.S. is probably tough for them now.
• Charter Equity Research analyst Ed Snyder • On Research in Motion’s declining sales this quarter. The company’s BlackBerry is being attacked on all fronts, by both the iPhone and the upstart Motorola Droid. As a result, the company only shipped 10.5 million devices, half a million off from estimates. They’re still profitable (and profits are up), but the sales suggest future weakness. source

• hadron A particle that has mass,
  bound together from smaller parts called quarks. Protons and electrons are types of hadron
  (which we didn’t misspell).
• collider A device that takes two beams headed in opposite directions and makes them run into each other, in an attempt to make two sets of particles combine.
• higgs boson The thing which is suspected to give matter its mass if Peter Higgs‘ theory pans out. The Large Hadron Collider is trying to figure out whether it’s real or not.
• dark matter This weird, cool stuff that
  scientists think makes up a quarter of the universe, and kinda shapes the trajectory of the universe a little. Like we said, weird and cool. source

• She shows you how she does it, then she does it. And then you watch it and it makes you feel inferior. Don’t you feel inferior? We know we do.

• £1 for a day of Times or Sunday Times of London; thank Rupert Murdoch
• £2 for a week of the same thing; oh yeah, you can try them out first for free or something source

• Mashable did an awesome interview with him. Skype is quickly becoming the blogger’s interview tool of choice. And in the case of Merton, the lovable, not-Ben-Foldsy guy behind Chatroulette’s biggest phenomenon, it drew out some pretty great details.

• one The original video
  was forced offline
  after two chatters
  felt their privacy
  had been violated
  by the coolest
  guy ever.
• two That same video
  was also the
  highest-rated
  video YouTube
  has ever hosted,
  which is pretty
  crazy to consider.
• three Merton, who
  chooses to (for
  now) remain
  anonymous, is
  way more inspired
  by Tori Amos than
  Ben Folds.
• four That doesn’t
  mean he doesn’t
  find Ben Folds’
  rendition hilarious,
  though, especially
  with the crowd
  interactions.
• five He says that the
  clips allow him to
  mix his sense of
  humor with his
  often-maudlin
  piano playing.
  Neat. source

• Opera Mini for iPhone submitted today. When do you think Apple will approve it?
• Opera’s official Twitter account, @opera • Regarding their playing with fire and submitting their Opera iPhone app, which would directly compete with Mobile Safari to some degree (though they’ve been careful to note the differences in speed and approach). Opera is being downright clever about this, creating a contest where people suggest when the app will be approved by Apple, and giving away an iPhone to the winner. Clever bastards. Might as well have fun with uncertainty. source

• No photos, just a press release. It’s secret. Nintendo has this way of pushing a new technology that’s never been tried in video games before and turning it into a smashing success. The latest? The 3DS, a backwards-compatible variant of the DS series which uses 3D screens. It could be super-interesting. source

• Curation, personalization, centralization – Digg wants to be your hub again. For a couple of years, Digg was THE place to go to hear what’s hot, as well as a solid way to drive traffic to your site. Nowadays, it’s a total niche and it’s hard to get your articles noticed in the abyss. Facebook (especially) and Twitter work way better. Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, in his column for CNN, talks a little more about Digg, whose new social buttons his site is testing. It sounds like Digg’s at least trying to get their mojo back. But will it work? Let’s just say we’re excited to see it. source

• Oh boy, this is getting testy. YouTube and Viacom’s long-running lawsuit is still going on, and if anything, it’s heating up. On one side is Viacom, claiming the site was designed around copyright infringement. On the other is YouTube/Google, claiming that Viacom’s conduct suggests the company if full of hypocrites. Who’s right? Take a gander for yourself:

Viacom’s corner: “You’re stealing our stuff!”

• YouTube was intentionally built on infringement and there are countless internal YouTube communications demonstrating that YouTube’s founders and its employees intended to profit from that infringement.
• A statement from Viacom • Regarding what they feel is a culture of copyright infringement – a statement they released after documents from a lawsuit between the two firms became public today. Viacom first sued the Google-owned company in 2007 for $1 billion. They used old statements from the founders suggesting that they knew what they were doing – ripping off copyrighted content.

YouTube’s corner: “You guys are total hypocrites!”

• Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. … Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt ‘very strongly’ that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
• YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine • Giving his take on the lawsuit and documents on the site’s blog. He argues that YouTube is following the “safe harbor” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and Viacom themselves would send employees to a Kinkos for the singular purpose of uploading content to the site, going as far as “roughing up” the video to make it seem like it’s from a second-hand source. Oh, and allowing copyrighted video to just stay on the site. source