Consumer content

Yahoo plans to fire up a revamped version of its Artist Pages on Tuesday, a service that lets people add content from iTunes, YouTube, and other sites to the Yahoo Music site that previously only had Yahoo's own content.

The site publishes information including tour dates and music videos for more than 500,000 artists and lets people download and purchase music. Now the site will blend in information from non-Yahoo sources, the company said, part of an effort to make the site a better starting point.

First come modules from iTunes, Amazon.com, Last.fm, Rhapsody, Pandora, YouTube, … Read more

The thwacking sounds of bats striking balls will once again fill stadiums, as Monday is opening day for Major League Baseball. This year, Microsoft will watch from the sidelines.

MLB.com no longer uses Microsoft's Silverlight to stream games to its 500,000 subscribers. This season fans will watch live and on-demand video via Adobe's Flash player.

In November, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, the league's tech unit, announced it would discontinue using Silverlight, the browser plug-in that MLBAM had signed up for barely a year earlier. The decision was not insignificant. MLBAM not only runs the … Read more

This was originally published at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Facebook's photo storage system holds 850 million photos and costs a lot of dough. Niall Kennedy has a nice overview of what Facebook is doing to minimize its storage costs.

Facebook's system, dubbed Haystack, is custom-built but relies on content delivery networks and NetApp. Facebook is trying to minimize the custom stuff and use commodity hardware.

Kennedy does a nice job of synthesizing Facebook's storage system. In a nutshell:

• Facebook's previous system relied heavily on Akamai and Limelight to improve latency. • That Akamai and Limelight use … Read more

Viacom's MTV Networks has brought some of its television content to Netflix's library of streaming online video, the companies announced Monday.

The offering consists primarily of kids' shows from the Nickelodeon network, with select seasons from the shows "iCarly," "Blue's Clues," "Dora the Explorer," "SpongeBob SquarePants," and a handful of others, as well as the first nine seasons of "South Park," the Comedy Central animated series that you probably don't want your kids watching.

Netflix's streaming-video service still very much takes the back burner to … Read more

YouTube is in talks to acquire licensing rights to full-length content from Sony Pictures, home of such films as "The International" and "Spider-Man," sources familiar with the negotiations told CNET News. Details about what a final agreement could look like are sparse, but any partnership between the two powerhouses would likely benefit both.

Representatives from both companies declined to comment.

Word of the negotiations comes a week after Disney announced it had licensed short-form content to YouTube. Those clips will come from a range of Disney brands, including ABC and ESPN. For YouTube, obtaining short-form clips … Read more

The Los Angeles Police Department is battling a virtual crime wave in downtown L.A. caused by an Internet map coding error.

If the department's online crime map is to be believed, one might think that a downtown location just a block from the LAPD's new headquarters is the most crime-ridden place in the city. In the past six months, that location experienced 1,380 crimes--4 percent of all crimes mapped--or roughly eight a day.

The crimes were real, but the locations were off. A coding error within the system's geocoding--the process of converting addresses into map … Read more

Updated at 6:32 a.m. PDT Friday with All Things D's denial and Google's no-comment, at 7:10 a.m. PDT with further TechCrunch information, and 9:10 a.m. with Twitter comment.

Google is in "late stage" talks to acquire microblogging service Twitter, according to a report on Thursday on TechCrunch citing two unnamed sources.

All Things Digital's Kara Swisher, however, on Friday said the report isn't true, also citing unnamed sources and saying the companies have only been in product-related discussions. And a TechCrunch update backpedaled a bit, citing another source … Read more

FBI agents have started looking for whoever uploaded to the Web an incomplete version of the unreleased movie "X-Men Origins: Wolverine."

The film, which reportedly cost $100 million to make, was not scheduled for theatrical release until May 1 but was leaked to the Web Tuesday evening. Laura Eimiller, a spokeswoman for the FBI's Los Angeles field office, said Thursday that the agency is responsible for investigating copyright infringement and allegations of piracy.

She said the bureau received a call within the last 24 hours from 20th Century Fox, the News Corp.-owned studio that produced "… Read more

For the second time in five months, Wired.com, the Internet arm of Wired magazine, has trimmed its staff.

According to a Twitter post from Evan Hansen, the Web site's editor in chief, the company laid off 3 out of 25 full-time staffers or 12 percent of its workforce.

"Reports of Wired.com 'gutting' greatly exaggerated," Hansen wrote on Twitter, presumably referring to published reports about Wired.com's layoffs. "We cut three staff, five contractors, (and) still have 45 people working for us overall."

Among those who lost their jobs was Eliot Van Buskirk, … Read more