AOL tries to navigate the Web it helped you find
ON ITS OWN ONCE AGAIN
Pioneering Internet firm now focuses on content
By Michael S. Rosenwald
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Before it was AOL, it was America Online, and before it was America Online it was Quantum Computer Services, and before that it was Control Video Corp., selling online services for the Atari. Remember the Atari? Pac-Man? In Internet time, that was basically 10,000 years ago. Compared with the Googles and Yahoos of the world, AOL's business of offering a gateway to online tools such as e-mail and instant messaging feels just as dated as Atari. Now, after a disastrous $164 billion merger with Time Warner nine years ago, AOL is being spun off Wednesday into its own company, and the new executives running the firm -- the head honcho comes from Google -- are once and for all breaking free from the we'll-hold-your-hand model to get online, instead creating content that users can surf to on their own. The new AOL publishes sites on gadgets, sports, politics and Tiger Woods's sex life (via TMZ.com). How AOL wound up at this point, an online trendsetter turned content publisher, is a story of innovative snipers that dates to the summer of 1996. It was a critical moment in the Dulles company's history. With telephone firms offering on-ramps to the Internet so users could choose their own travels, AOL executives doubled down on their strategy of a go-through-us portal to send e-mail, chat with buddies and search for recipes. But a digital war was brewing. In California, two young entrepreneurs were quietly working on a plan that would, in hindsight, help blow up AOL's model. Why not take e-mail, then and still the most popular online task, out of portals such…

  The GOP's road map to obscurity By Ruben Navarrette,
 Bio Page America's largest minority would neutralize its power if it were taken for granted by one party and written off by another. So I cringe when I think of the damage that Republicans do to their brand by treating U.S. Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor with the one thing that many Latinos will not tolerate – disrespect. They know that President Barack Obama's first nominee to the Supreme Court has the goods. Summa cum laude from Princeton. Editor of the Yale Law Journal. Seventeen years on the federal bench. She didn't just play the game; she dominated it. After more than 20 years of writing about diversity issues, I knew Sotomayor would be in for a rough ride. Some of her critics on talk radio and in the news media have for years clung to the idea that white males are being discriminated against by affirmative action. However, the attacks against Sotomayor were much swifter and uglier than I imagined. In fact, I don't even think the White House could have hoped things would turn out this well for the administration and the Democratic Party. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel must have known that he was putting Republicans in a box and making it hard for them to derail the first Latina Supreme Court justice. But how could he have known that so many in the GOP would willingly step into the box, lock it from the inside, then blow it up with irresponsible, hateful and disrespectful language? All because Sotomayor said in a speech almost a decade ago: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better…

  Our Brains on Music: The Science     Alan Scourfield “Nova: Musical Minds,” a show on most PBS stations on Tuesday evening, is based on the book “Musicophilia” by the neurologist Oliver Sacks, above.     

  The Taliban will survive Baitullah Mehsud The Taliban may have been decapitated in Pakistan, but their success is not about the leadership of any one man Comments (168)   
Jason Burke guardian.co.uk, Friday 7 August 2009 17.00 BST Article history
Behind the rise of Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan lie factors that are not going to be resolved by a missile fired from a drone.Firstly, there is the fusion of Pashtun tribal identity with a radical Islamic identity. The latter has only ever really thrived when grafted onto a sense of local belonging. Hamas in the Gaza Strip represent radical Islam and Palestinians. Al-Qaida in the Maghreb, about the only off-shoot of the terror group that is thriving at the moment, are, as their name suggests, firmly fixed on a real location. Al-Qaida in Iraq failed through being insufficiently Iraqi, reduced at the end to pretending leaders were from Baghdad when they were Egyptian. But the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) knew who they were and where they were from. They were Pashtuns from the Pakistani side of the frontier that has split their tribal lands for over a century.In 1998 and 1999, I travelled widely in FATA (the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies or Areas) where the TTP and Mehsud were strongest. At the time, I met no hostility. In 2001, as bombs rained on Afghanistan, I travelled up into the Khyber Agency and was warned by Pashtun contacts that the Taliban's war was their war. So, they added, was that waged by al-Qaida. This remains the case today. This intertwining of ethnic identity, religion and politics will take…

    Now, though, Mr. Graham’s position as the go-to Republican for the Obama White House is in doubt. Over the weekend, he abruptly reversed course, backing out of plans to unveil a long-awaited bipartisan energy bill — a high priority for President Obama. He has scheduled a news conference for Tuesday to urge the Senate Democratic leadership to put off debate on another of his priorities, an immigration overhaul. Read Article orRead The Real Reason Graham is Upset.