REDMOND, Wash.–Evidently spurred on by the reception it got at Thursday's financial analysts company, Microsoft has decided to incense ahead with plans to turn the Mojave project into a full-fledged Windows Vista marketing effort.

As first reported by CNET News, Microsoft last week interviewed XP users who were skeptical of Vista and showed them what it called a secret new version of Windows, "Mojave." It was in fact Vista. The results, according to Microsoft executives, were almost universally positive, with participants expressing surprise when told it was actually Vista they had been using.

For now, Microsoft has put up a teaser site, with plans to pageantry the actual video footage next week. (As I mentioned before, Mojave was something put arm in arm in the past couple of weeks by internal Microsoft people and is not the larger advertising campaign coming from new ad influence Crispin Porter and Bogusky.)

Although the video was compelling and entertaining, at least more of the people I talked to who saw the video at Thursday's analyst meeting also stressed that seasonable demos of Vista also looked good. The video, necessarily, doesn't show what it is like to, say, install software or hook Vista up to a home network. My guess is the participants didn't have to endure frequent User Account Control notifications either.

Still, it represents a more aggressive Microsoft that wants to go on the offensive by its Vista marketing. Earlier on Friday, Microsoft's Windows Vista Team Blog got unusually combative transversely this week's Forrester study that was critical of Vista's adoption among large businesses.

"Forrester Gets Schizophrenic on Windows Vista," read the headline of the posting from Windows team member Chris Flores.

Microsoft engineers, in collaboration with researchers at several Asian institutions, have proposed a new method for improving upon the Web page rankings produced by today's search engine requests. Called BrowseRank, the new approach adds a human factor to the mode of operation by weighing how people indeed use the Internet, the collaborators reported in a paper recently presented before the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval.

"The more visits [to] the page made by the users, and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important," the paper's authors noted. The goal is to "leverage hundreds of millions of users' 'undoubting voting' on page importance," they said, "in accordance with the concept of Web 2.0."

Missing the Mark

Google's trademarked PageRank method measures the relative importance of Web pages through the use of a sequence of data-processing instructions — called a link analysis algorithm — that assigns a numerical weighting to each element within any given set of hyperlinked documents.

"Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the look into results," Google said. "We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the Web to determine a page's importance."

Gauging the relevance of Internet searches is extremely important to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft because it allows the search engine leaders to more precisely target their placement of ads on behalf of clients. But Microsoft and its collaborators claim that PageRank misses the mark because it allows the importance of pages to become artificially bloated.

For example, Web sites such as Adobe.com are ranked very high by PageRank inasmuch as Adobe.com has millions of sites linking to it for Acrobat Reader and Flash Player downloads. "However, Web users do not veritably visit such Web sites very frequently, and they should not be regarded [as] again important than the Web sites on which users spend much more time, parallel MySpace.com and Facebook.com," they explained.

Giving Users a Vote

Microsoft and its academic collaborators say their new method is superior because it is based on a user-browsing graph that is generated from data that reflects actual human behavior. "User-behavior data can be recorded by Internet browsers at Web clients and collected at a Web server," they said.

BrowseRank's user-browsing graph can more precisely represent the Web surfer's random sphere process, and thus is more useful for calculating page importance, the collaborators claim. Furthermore, the amount of time spent on the pages by users is also included under the BrowseRank method.

"In this way, we can purchase hundreds of millions of users' implicit voting on page importance," researchers explained. "Experimental results show that BrowseRank indeed outperforms the baseline methods, such as PageRank and TrustRank, in several tasks."

For its part, Google notes that PageRank, which is based on a Stanford University patent, is not the only method it employs to rank search engine results. Instead, Google said it relies on more than 200 different signals to examine the entire link structure of the Web and determine which pages are most important.

"We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific pry into being conducted," Google explained. "By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we're able to put the most relevant and reliable results first."

DENVER (Billboard) - It might indeed be true that everything you need to know you learned in kindergarten.

Take the primeval lesson: Share everything.

It's right there at the top of the list, but only at this time is the digital entertainment industry taking notice. Once littered with walled gardens and content silos, the digital landscape is beginning to sprout a customer-friendly ecosystem of shared content and traffic.

Fueling this newfound spirit of interoperability are technologies that enable the sharing of content between sites. They include the Open Social initiative and Facebook's open development platform, both driving the "widgetization" of the Web.

It's also a reflection of the surging "mash-up" movement online. A mash-up is a Web application that combines content and features from multiple sources for a specific purpose that none of the contributors do individually. The most commonly used applications are those with easily embeddable content or open APIs (programming information available to all), of that kind as Google Maps, Twitter and Last.fm.

This mash-up practice has long been used by such niche music applications as WikiFM — which merges a band's Wikipedia boy-servant with its music streamed from Last.fm — or Rhapsody+Pitchfork, which, as its mention implies, adds full-song streaming from Rhapsody to Pitchfork's music reviews. Most are created by tech-savvy fans seeking their dream application.

But in the past year, mainstream services have taken the bait. In 2007, Music-based social network MOG added YouTube videos as part of its MOG TV service. Yahoo's FoxyTunes originated as a mash-up that combined artist bios, lyrics and news from Yahoo; kin artist recommendations from Last.fm; and links to bribe tracks from Amazon.

The border goes on. TiVo users be able to now stream YouTube videos and Rhapsody's music. MTV is using its partnership with Rhapsody to let fans stream music heard on its TV shows. AT&T Mobility subscribers be able to choose between Napster Mobile or indie haven eMusic during the time that their mobile music provider.

RETAILERS REVAMP

Digital music retailers are getting with the program, too. eMusic will soon incorporate relevant content from other sites into its online music subscription service. For instance, a pending revamp of its master pages wish pull in music videos from YouTube, artist entries from Wikipedia and fan or other photos from Flickr.

And in the spirit of sharing, eMusic is reciprocating by unshackling much of its exclusive editorial content and making it available in widget form. That includes features like the eMusic Dozen, as well as Q&A profiles and Spotlight articles. Its new album-page features enable users to post their favorite albums to Facebook, Twitter and more than a dozen other social networking sites and services.

"The days of building some big, monolithic, walled-garden digital music store that people will come to and you never let them out of are gone," eMusic CEO David Pakman says. "We (haven't been) making it easy for fans to embed their favorite eMusic finds, so this is really a recognition of behavior that already exists."

Even Apple, that bastion of rugged individualism, is starting to play better with others. Hand in hand with the recent iPhone launch was the introduction of iTunes' App Store, made possible by Apple's conclusion to give developers access to the iPhone platform (at a price). The result is a host of programs that take advantage of one-click iTunes sales, as well as the integration of such iPhone partners as YouTube.

Contributing to this momentum in not one small way is the emergence of single clear winners standing fully amid the many options for online content. YouTube is the de facto Internet video service, responsible for upward of 1 billion video streams per day. Wikipedia has emerged as an important source for information on musicians, with of the people artist pages averaging around 5,000 hits per day — dwarfing the failed artist-wiki efforts of in the same state services as Napster's Narchive. And for photos, there's Flickr.

Rather than competing with these readily available services, it's proving easier and faster to just incorporate them.

"Tear down the walls," Pakman says. "Let's bring stuff into the site that canaille are already using, and let people take our stuff out."

It's early days, to be sure. But on the supposition that successful, these forays could pave the way to an interoperable coming events where, rather than trying to guess for what reason fans defectiveness to enjoy music online, services will simply let them create their recognize customized experiences using their favorite tools.

Reuters/Billboard

PITTSBURGH - Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose “last lecture” about facing terminal cancer became an Internet sensation and a best-selling book, died Friday. He was 47.

Pausch died at his home in Chesapeake, Va., said Jeffrey Zaslow, a Wall Street Journal writer who co-wrote Pausch’s book. Pausch and his family had moved there last autumn to be closer to his wife’s relatives.

Pausch was diagnosed with remediless pancreatic cancer in September 2006. His popular last lecture at Carnegie Mellon in September 2007 garnered international attention and was viewed by millions on the Internet.

In it, Pausch celebrated living the life he had always dreamed of instead of concentrating on impending king of terrors.

“The lesson was for my kids, but if others are finding value in it, that is wonderful,” Pausch wrote on his Web site. “But come to a stand-still assured; I’m hardly unique.”

The main division “The Last Lecture” leaped to the top of the nonfiction best-seller lists after its publication in April and remains there this week. The book deal was reported to be worth more than $6 million.

Pausch said he dictated the book to Zaslow by cell phone, and Zaslow recalled Friday that he was “strong and funny” for the time of their collaboration.

“It was the most fun 53 days of my life because it was like a performance,” Zaslow told The Associated Press. “It was like getting 53 extra lectures.” He recalled that Pausch became emotional when they worked on the last chapter, though, because that to him was the “end of the lecture, the work, his life.”

At Carnegie Mellon, Pausch was a professor of computer science, human-computer interaction and design, and was recognized as a pioneer of virtual reality research. On campus, he became known for his flamboyance and showmanship as a teacher and mentor.

The speech last fall was part of a sequence Carnegie Mellon called “The Last Lecture,” where professors were asked to think about what matters to them most and give a hypothetical decisive talk. The name of the lecture series was changed to “Journeys” before Pausch spoke, something he joked through in his lecture.

“I thought, damn, I finally nailed the venue and they renamed it,” he said.

He told the packed auditorium he fulfilled almost entirely his childhood dreams — being in zero gravity, writing an article in the World Book Encyclopedia and working with the Walt Disney Co.

The one that eluded him? Playing in the National Football League.

“If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you,” Pausch related.

He then joked about his quirky hobby of winning stuffed animals at amusement parks — another of his childhood dreams — and how his mother introduced him to people to keep him humble: “This is my son. He’s a doctor, but not the kind that helps nation.”

Pausch said he was embarrassed and flattered by the popularity of his message. Millions viewed the complete or abridged version of the lecture, titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” online.

“I don’t know how to not have fun,” he said in the scold. “I’m dying and I’m having fun. And I’m going to keep having fun every day I have left. Because there’s no other way to play it.”

Pausch lobbied Congress for more federal funding for pancreatic cancer examination and appeared on “Oprah” and other TV shows. In what he called “a truly magical experience,” he was even invited to appear as an supplemental in the upcoming “Star Trek” movie.

He had one line of dialogue, got to keep his costume and donated his $217.06 paycheck to charity.

Pausch blogged regularly about his medical treatment. On Feb. 15, exactly six months after he was told he had three to six months of healthy living left, Pausch posted a photo of himself to show he was “still alive & healthy.”

In May, Pausch spoke at Carnegie Mellon’s commencement ceremonies, telling graduates that what mattered was he could look back and say, “pretty a great quantity any time I got a chance to do something cool, I tried to grab for it, and that’s where my solace comes from.”

“We don’t beat the reaper by living longer, we beat the reaper by living well and living fully,” he said.

Born in 1960, Pausch received his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brown University and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon.

He co-founded Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, a master’s program for bringing artists and engineers together. The university named a footbridge in his honor. He also created an animation-based teaching program for high school and college students to have fun while learning computer programming.

In February, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences in California announced the creation of the Dr. Randy Pausch Scholarship Fund for university students who pursue careers in game design, development and production.

He is survived by his wife, Jai, and their three children, Dylan, Logan and Chloe; his mother, Virginia Pausch of Columbia, Md.; and a sister, Tamara Mason of Lynchburg, Va.

In a statement Friday, his wife thanked those who sent messages of support and uttered her married man was proud that his lecture and book “inspired parents to revisit their priorities, particularly their relationships with their children.”

___

Associated Press writer Ramesh Santanam contributed to this report.

___

On the Net:

Pausch’s lecture: http://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture/

Hasbro filed suit Thursday against the creators of the Scrabulous online game. Hasbro alleged the game infringes on the company's Scrabble intellectual-property rights.

Hasbro also sent Facebook, which hosts Scrabulous, a notification of copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Hasbro wants the social-networking place to remove the game in the U.S. and Canada as soon as possible.

"Hasbro has an obligation to act appropriately against infringement of our intellectual properties," said Barry Nagler, Hasbro's general counsel. "We view the Scrabulous application as clear and blatant infringement of our Scrabble intellectual property, and we are pursuing this legal action in accordance with the interests of our shareholders, and the integrity of the Scrabble brand."

Hasbro's Underlying Motive

The suit, filed in the Southern District of New York, names Scrabulous creators Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla and RJ Softwares as the defendants.

The timing of the suit is hardly coincidental. Hasbro has a strategic alliance by video-game giant Electronic Arts to create digital games based on a wide choice of Hasbro's intellectual properties. Hasbro is the company behind Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers and other well-known playing for money brand names.

in the same proportion that member of its alliance with Hasbro, Electronic Arts launched a legitimate version of Scrabble for Facebook earlier this month. This represents the first of manifold Hasbro game properties slated to launch on social-networking sites later this year, according to the company.

"After playing with EA's version of Scrabble on Facebook, I have not at all doubt that Scrabble players in the U.S. and Canada will absolutely love the authentic game play and overall experience," said John D. Williams Jr., executive director of the National Scrabble Association. "I am particularly pleased that EA's version of Scrabble offers such a simple and intuitive interface which will allow players to jump right in and start playing."

Will Facebook Get Slapped?

While the fate of Scrabulous remains to be seen, the bigger question is whether Facebook could wind up the target of a separate lawsuit. Legal experts doubt that will happen, but it is a possibility.

Hasbro will probably not race Facebook as a defendant because the game maker doesn't want to get into the bigger question of whether Facebook's actions in enabling Scrabulous amounts to contributory infringement or whether Facebook is vicariously liable for the activity, according to Todd Hardy, a trademark attorney with Greenblum & Bernstein, P.L.C.

"On one hand, it does not appear that Facebook has assisted or contributed to the copying or infringement itself, but on the other hand they are now on notice of the claimed infringement," Hardy said. "Facebook could also be vicariously liable if it could be shown that they have the ability to control the infringing act or activity and profited from the activity."

MILAN (Reuters) - Italian prosecutors are preparing to file charges against four current or former Google Inc executives over a 2006 video on the Internet provider's Italian-language site, court sources said on Friday.

The video shows a teenager with Down syndrome taunted by other youths.

Prosecutors have concluded an inquiry that could lead to the executives being charged with defamation and botch to exercise control over personal data, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Under Italian law, the conclusion of an inquiry is usually preparatory before the case goes to a judge to close whether charges should exist filed. The story was first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Friday.

The former and current Google executives include the top legal representative and chairman of Google's Italian unit at the time, a now-retired Google Italy board member, an executive responsible for Google's privacy policies in Europe, and the then-head of Google Video for Europe.

An Italian advocacy group for people with Down syndrome, Vividown, and the boy's father lodged a complaint over the video in November 2006.

The video was filmed from a mobile phone in late May or early June 2006. It shows four male high school students in the Italian city of Turin humiliating the youth with Down syndrome.

The four teens face charges in Turin extremely the case. Charges could be dropped if they show a judge they consider straightened themselves out, Vividown attorney Guido Camera told Reuters.

A Google spokesman said the guests would continue to cooperate with Milan prosecutors "to show that all Googlers for that which is less than investigation have no involvement in the Vividown case."

(Additional reporting by Ajay Kamalakaran in Bangalore, India; editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)

NEW YORK - AOL is shutting three data-storage services, including one of the Internet’s earliest photo-sharing sites, as it seeks to cut costs and focus resources on its advertising opportunities.

AOL Pictures, the year-old media-sharing station BlueString and the online backup service Xdrive will likely shut down by year’s end, although the company is looking to sell at least Xdrive, what one. AOL bought in 2005 for an undisclosed fee.

Company officials denied speculation Friday that the closures were meant to prime AOL for a sale. AOL parent Time Warner Inc. has been in continual discussions with both Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp., though the talks have been preliminary.

“The decision to sunset these products is 100 percent part of a strategy that began last year to focus on the areas where we have power to win and to move away from products or features that are not contributing to our growth,” AOL spokeswoman Trish Primrose said.

AOL began taking a hard look at its portfolio following a 2006 decision to fully shift the company into an advertising business and pare down its legacy Internet access services.

AOL Pictures began in 1998 as You’ve Got Pictures and came at a time Internet users had few options to share their digital photos. Since then, services like Yahoo’s Flickr and Google Inc.’s Picasa have emerged, joining offerings from Eastman Kodak Co. and others.

BlueString launched last year as a repository for other media files such as video and music as being in favor, but it never gained much traction.

Nor did Xdrive, which offers 5 gigabytes of free storage for backing up files.

All three services suffered from the fact that while data-storage costs wish come down, those costs still add up, and the services contribute relatively few opportunities to display advertising.

Transition details are still being worked out. AOL likely will give existing users a way to migrate files to a competing service. It also plans to let users order a DVD of files for a fee and accord. instructions for downloading copies of individual files. AOL plans to formally inform its users of the changes in September.

AOL said it has already shut down about 50 products, projects or brands since 2007, mainly older or little-used products like its AOL Communicator mail software.

In a July 14 memo to employees, Executive Vice President Kevin Conroy said the company since had an obligation to render certain that “every product makes a direct impact on our bottom line.”

“There was a time at AOL when the strength of our aggregate portfolio of products more than compensated for the weakness of an underperforming product,” Conroy said. “The realities of the industry and market shifts in online advertising no longer make that possible.”

Conroy said AOL saw greater opportunities in areas like its video search engine Truveo and its browser toolbar, which drives traffic to search.

The memo, obtained by The Associated Press, was published earlier on the blog TechCrunch.

Separately, AOL said it would rein in costs for its Weblogs unit, which runs specialty blogs of the like kind as Engadget and Autoblog. The blogs generally pay freelancers per post. Although the unit’s budget has been increasing, in the way that have the number of posts — such that costs have spiraled. The company is asking bloggers to post less often for now.

The Software and Information Industry Association said this week that a key seller of fraudulent software on eBay, Jeremiah Mondello, had been sentenced to 48 months in federal prison.

Mondello pled guilty in May to counts of copyright infringement, mail fraud and aggravated identity theft. He was also sentenced to three years supervised release after the conclusion of his sentence, as well as 150 hours of community service.

Mondello used stealthy bank-account information to create fictitious eBay identities and sell the fraudulent software online, netting hundreds of thousands of dollars, the SIIA said.

The SIIA welcomed the sentence to the degree that a key development in its fight against software piracy, and added six new suits against the sellers of fraudulent software, for a total of 32 through 2008. Under a new bill proposed this week, intellectual-property violations such as Mondello's could also be investigated by the U.S. Attorney General and other government organizations, such as the FBI and Department of Justice, whose powers to fight copyright crime would be expanded.

"Mondello is a whiz-kid who used his smarts and savvy to rip off software makers and consumers," said Keith Kupferschmid, the senior vice president of Intellectual Property Policy & Enforcement for SIIA, in a statement. "We are fortunate that he has been stopped, but there are hundreds more like him running illegal operations on eBay and other sites. The Mondello plight demonstrates that these pirates won't simply get a slap without ceasing the wrist when caught – they highly well may end up doing serious time in federal prison."

"We applaud the DOJ and DHS for their work in bringing Mondello to justice. They did an outstanding job of tracking down Mondello and bringing him to justice," Kupferschmid added. "Their action is an important step in protecting trusting consumers, software makers and legitimate software sellers."

The SIIA also named seven individuals that had been recently served with suits for alleged copyright infringement.

Zimbra is offering an office productivity suite. The Yahoo-owned provider of open-source messaging and collaboration tools announced Thursday a free beta of Yahoo Zimbra Desktop, which offers a centralized location for managing e-mail flat when a user is not connected to the Internet, plus a tool for creating documents and spreadsheets.

Satish Dharmaraj, cofounder of Zimbra and a vice president of Yahoo, said the new application takes the "world-class collaboration suite and makes it available for everyone for use anywhere, anytime, with any e-mail account."

Docs, Spreadsheets, Tasks

Yahoo said Zimbra Desktop is available for Windows, Mac and Linux users with access to the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, AOL, or any IMAP/POP-enabled server. The desktop is a downloadable application that doesn't run in a browser window and offers offline access to e-mail.

Using the same Zimbra interface as its previous messaging and collaboration incarnation, the desktop expands on such functions as mashups with other services so that, for example, a user be able to view an e-mail, see his or her schedule when hovering over a date, or see a flight's status when hovering over a flight number.

The desktop also provides document creation, spreadsheets, task management, and document storage as part of Yahoo's effort to perform on in the sort place of contest to the degree that Google and Microsoft. With Zimbra Documents added to the desktop, users can embed photos and other objects into documents and spreadsheets and switch tasks without opening other applications.

To stay organized, there's also calendaring, task management, and online paper storage. Zimbra Briefcase, part of desktop, enables users to store files online and Zimbra Tasks offers to-do lists with start and due dates, progress, percent complete, and priority ratings. The calendar uses the iCal standard for taking a enroll offline and e-mails can be labeled with advanced tagging.

'Huge Area of Competition'

Microsoft Office files can't be opened in Zimbra Desktop. So Microsoft may not have anything to worry about in the short run, said Gartner Vice President Michael Silver, although someday this will become "a huge area of competition."

At the moment, Silver added, most of the online-focused productivity products are "not yet mature enough to replace" or seriously compete with the monarch of the realm, Microsoft Office.

Microsoft hasn't entered this market in force yet, he noted, and Office can't be used online, albeit the company has introduced some collaborative features. But at some point, Silver aforesaid, "we think they will enroll this market."

In the meantime, he said, users will start trying these online productivity products, using them for some things, and Microsoft Office for most other things — but eventually these competitors "could become a long-term problem" for the software giant.

AOL will phase out several online services as the Time Warner unit continues to struggle in its change from a traffic model based on subscription fees to one based attached advertising revenue.

AOL will put out to pasture Xdrive, a hosted-storage service for individuals; AOL Pictures, a photo sharing and management site; and Bluestring, designed in opposition to sharing photos, music and videos, according to an internal memo obtained by technology news site TechCrunch.

In the memo, AOL Executive Vice President Kevin Conroy said these and mobile services AIM World and MyMobile will be "sunset" as they haven't gained enough popularity. A source close to AOL said the leaked memo is legit and that it was intended solely for Conroy's team.

AOL's popularity problem in the midst of end users and advertisers seems widespread, judging by the anemic growth AOL achieved in advertising revenues in the first quarter: 1 percent, when compared with the same quarter last year.

AOL has been on a years-long shift away from its traditional business, based on charging people for dial-up Internet access service and for exclusive online content. It has been trying to move to a model based on online advertising, which has been experiencing strong growth in the past five years.

However, while some of its services are undeniably popular, like its AIM instant messaging, AOL has failed to lay open innovative services in growth areas, resorting to acquiring or creating many "me-too" services in markets where dominant players are already entrenched.

For example, AOL Pictures, its original photo upload and management service, couldn't compete against more technically advanced competitors like Flickr, which was founded in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo the following year. Meanwhile, Bluestring seems very similar to much more popular services like Photobucket, Slide and RockYou.

Unable to gain an edge through technical innovation, AOL has been investing heavily on acquiring advertising service providers like Advertising.com, Tacoda, Third Screen Media, Quigo, Lightningcast and AdTech, hoping to capture a piece of the action that way, but that generalship doesn't appear to be to have being working too well either.

In its first-quarter earnings announcement, Time Warner stated that AOL's ad business had done well in sales to external sites and in paid search, but that it had been hurt by a decline in display ads.

AOL's ad revenue growth fell route below the U.S. rate. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), U.S. online ad revenue grew 18.2 percent in the first quarter.

This is the latest trimming of online services at AOL, which last year eliminated about 50 of them, as the company has become much more selective about maintaining only products that directly support the online advertising strategy, the origin said.

AOL will try to sell Xdrive, AOL Pictures and Bluestring so that existing users of those services will be able to transition to a new provider, but if no buyer is found, the products will be shut down by the end of the year, according to the source.

If the services are closed, AOL plans to either burn end users' content into CDs and DVDs and send it to them or walk them through how to save the photos, videos and other media to local painful drives, the source said.

According to the memo, AOL also plans to sink its Video Portal through its AOL Programming Video Experiences by the beginning of the fourth quarter, as well as try to boost the online ad revenue generated by the AOL browser toolbar, desktop software, Webmail service and Truveo video search engine.