Some interesting "hyperlocal" Web sites have emerged in the past few years, the idea behind them being to provide news at an extremely local level. Prominent among them is EveryBlock.com, launched last year in Chicago. The site now covers about a dozen major cities in the U.S. It aggregates, largely through computer programming, information feeds from commercial, nonprofit, or government sources, down to the level of a city block, and up to the level of the entire city. Starting this ...

A New York City hospital will lay off 240 employees, including doctors, nurses and management positions, because of the difficult economic times, the hospital announced in a statement Monday. The paper published its final print edition Tuesday as the P-I makes a transformation into an online-only news outlet. A skeleton crew of 20 to 25 staffers will remain at the new Seattle PI.com while more than 140 staffers will lose their jobs. "Its been an opportunity to experience your ...

Reporters, editors and photographers at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer prepared their final contributions to the paper, toasted one another with shots of Wild Turkey and packed up their desks in an "eerily clean" newsroom as the final edition of the paper went to the presses Monday night. The paper published its final print edition Tuesday as the P-I makes a transformation into an online-only news outlet. A skeleton crew of 20 to 25 staffers will remain at the new Seattle PI.com ...

YouTube began pulling music videos from its United Kingdom Web site Monday after talks with Britain's music licensing group collapsed in a dispute over how much the video-sharing site should pay to host the songs. The Performing Right Society (PRS for Music) said YouTube -- which is owned by Google -- wants it "to pay significantly less than at present," while YouTube accused PRS of demanding we pay many, many times more for our license than before." "We were shocked ...

A floating city off the coast of San Francisco may sound like science fiction, but it could be reality in the not-too-distant future. The Seasteading Institute already has drawn up plans for the construction of a homestead on the Pacific Ocean. One project engineer described the prototype as similar to a cruise ship, but from a distance the cities might look like oil-drilling platforms. According to the plans, the floating cities would not only look different from their land-based counterparts, ...

Matthew Baron is one of those gizmo guys, the kind who covets all toys new and shiny. But the Brooklyn, New York, attorney, like so many other American consumers who are watching their bank account balances, is reassessing his gadget habit. "If I'm going to buy something, I want it to count. I want it to last," said Baron, who incidentally goes by "OMG! Ponies!" when he posts comments on Gizmodo, a popular tech and gadget blog. So, even though ...

Google launched the latest salvo in the cellphone wars Tuesday with the unveiling of the newest handset to carry its Android platform. Unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Vodafone's HTC Magic smartphone will make its European bow in the UK, Spain, France and Germany in the coming months. In Italy it will be available under a non-exclusive contract. The Google-run handsets are regarded as the chief rivals to Apple's iPhones in the battle for the next generation of ...

You can manage your bank balance and social life on the Internet and very soon you will be able to manage your electricity consumption online. The development could be welcome for consumers as the recession and high energy prices put pressure on household budgets. And environmental concerns have sparked a growing demand for devices that read energy usage, or misusage. About 40 million trackers are in use worldwide and Internet giant Google says it believes another 100 million will be ...

Up until very recently, perhaps as recently as six months ago, the prevailing wisdom among analysts who covered the media industry was that "content is king." It is an inexact way of looking at what editors, photographers, actors, producers, and reporters create. Movies, TV shows, magazines, radio programming and high-quality internet content were viewed as having a significant intrinsic value. The best content can be moved from one medium to another, increasing its value even further. TV shows can ...

Microsoft is gearing up to take on rival Apple in the smartphone market. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Microsoft is getting ready to launch an online marketplace akin to Apple's App Store. Microsoft is also readying a more sophisticated version of its mobile operating system called Windows Mobile 6.5, the Journal reported. Smartphones are sophisticated mobile phones that offer users access to the Web and e-mail, as well as, provide phone calling and all kinds of other messaging ...