otis wildflower writes "C|NET reports that GE will be airing a new advertising campaign called 'One Second Theatre'." From the article: "'GE One Second Theater,' as the campaign is being called, presents a humorous peek behind the scenes at recent General Electric commercials produced by BBDO. The campaign is intended specifically for new media like digital video recorders, which can be used to watch expanded versions of the spots, and News Corp.'s MySpace social-networking service, where visitors can read a mock profile of Elli, the elephant star of one of the commercials. The spots will also be accessible on MP3 players, through podcasts presented as if they were recorded by Elli and other characters from the spots, and on a microsite offering an online version of the campaign. The multimillion-dollar campaign, scheduled to begin Friday, is the most recent effort by GE to explore media beyond conventional commercials and print advertisements."

CTD writes "Grimwell Online notes that IGE has announced a merger of networks involving: Thottbott, Allakhazam, OGaming, and L2Orphus. There is a thread in the Allakhazam forums that brings all the release data together - but still leaves some questions about what is to come. Grimwell raises one in his post about this: 'Even more fun for our friends who work PR for gaming companies. IGE = RMT, which is not the Devil - but is not exactly welcomed at most companies. Will this move help push things past the tipping point and force developers to deal with the new, larger network?'"

AntonOnymous,Cowherd asks: "I am in the process of designing an application for general public use. The application will allow end users to search and display a large collection of songs (both lyrics and tunes) with annotations, all in text format. The intent is for this application to run cross-platform (Linux, Windows, Mac, and whatever else), so I want to avoid platform-specific binaries as much as possible. I also believe that the program should be Open Source. The end users will not necessarily be computer experts, so I want to avoid as much additional setup on their computers as possible. The application (data and program) will all be stored on a CD or DVD, and it should be able to be run locally. The most important part of this application is the data, not the program, so the guts of it should be fairly simple with a decent user interface. Does anyone have any suggestions as to general approach to setting this up, or have any pointers to existing open source programs which already perform a similar function?"

ReadWriteWeb writes "A number of small startups are trying their luck building a WebOS, which is a software platform that interacts with the user through a web browser and does not depend on any particular local operating system. Current WebOS contenders include XIN, YouOS, EyeOS, Orca, Goowy and Fold. There's also a bit of crossover with Ajax homepages like Netvibes, Pageflakes, Microsoft's Live.com and Google's start page. The key difference from Ajax homepages is that a WebOS is a full-on development platform. Indeed for developers, a big benefit is that a WebOS theoretically makes it easier to develop apps that work cross-platform. DHTML and Javascript are the main tools to do that, but not all developers think they are suitable."

Mark writes to tell us that LinuxForums is running the second in a series of articles designed to reflect on "what Linux is, where it came from, where it's going, how to use it and why you should." With all of the recent talk about the perceived difficulties within the OSS community sometimes it is just good to take a look at our roots.

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist has a story about a laser made by painting a solution of semiconductor crystals onto glass. It could be used to break the interconnect barrier by having optical interconnects, the interconnect barrier threatens Moore's law unless a faster way of connecting chips is found."