The virtual news

Businessweek
Second Life membership just hit 1 million and the media land grab has begun — for virtual news on Second Life. Reuters just set up a bureau there, complete with flesh-and-blood veteran reporter

Adam Pasick as its full-time bureau chief. Pretty ironic, given that reporters covering the real world are being downsized on a regular basis. CNET and Wired magazine have built virtual offices on Second Life. With more than 200,000 new members expected to join in October alone, it’s no surprise that media and advertisers want to tap into the estimated $400,000 spent by Second Life members in a recent 24-hour period.

TechBeat

Techdirt hopes to fill the void between broad consumer testing firms and traditional analyst firms such as Gartner and Forrester with its new service called the Techdirt Insight Community, which matches bloggers and companies in a feedback loop. The service will be double-blind so companies can put forward questions without revealing competitive intelligence and bloggers can feel free to offer honest opinions. Bloggers set the price -- $50 to 100 per post per blogger -- and Techdirt packages them , pricing the bundle so it can make some profit.

PaidContent

YouTube has a strategy for staving off copyright infringement lawsuits. Namely, hand out candy. Vivendi's Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony BMG each received a small stake in YouTube as part of content deals with the video-sharing company. The three could receive a total of $50 million from Google's acquisition of the company. This has something to do with why Universal recently sued Grouper and Bolt.com for copyright infringement instead of YouTube.

CNN

Gordon Bell, a researcher for Microsoft, is working on creating a backup for your brain -- a device that can remember everything in your life from the smallest of details, to your most memorable moments. The problem? It's all-consuming to record your whole life. Sunil Vemuri at QTech is doing something a little more manageable. He's transforming "smart phones into tools for jogging your memory." Unfortunately none of this stuff will help you remember where you left your car keys.

Micropersuasion

Steve Rubel warns start-ups that the sky might be falling. An analysis by Blackfriars Communications shows that actual ad spending overall this year is down from original estimates. And while researchers thought 10 percent of all ad spending this year would go online, only 7 percent did. On top of that, Google is grabbing 25 percent of all online ad dollars. This spells trouble for the glut of ad- dependent start-ups. Rubel says, "If you're a start-up, now would be a good time to roll out your backup plan."

BoingBoing

In a big win for the nutrition movement and with the potential for far-reaching ripple effects for the food industry, Disney has announced that it won't license its characters to sugary food products or products that contain trans fat . The company has also pledged to clean up the food in Disney theme parks. The guidelines take effect immediately for new licensing deals and will be phased in over time for existing deals like McDonald's, Keebler, and Kellogg , which has seven years left on its deal. I notice that Tony the Tiger is alive and well on the Disney site right now.

Inc.com

Have you ever needed to share a slide show with someone and then run into the problem of having to send an enormous PowerPoint file as an attachment? Then, when their e-mail server rejects it, you have to chop it up into pieces or send a DVD in -- egad! Snail mail? Well no more. Slideshare is a new beta Web application that makes sharing PowerPoint presentations online as easy as sharing video clips on YouTube.