News : Wii Continues Sales Dominance in February

Nintendo's Wii outsold all other next-generation consoles in February, the NPD Group reports, further solidifying its second place market share among new consoles in the US. Meanwhile, PS3 sales continue to lag.

It was not all bad news for Sony, however. Sales of its PS2 are still strong, selling 295,000 units during the month. This was about the same as its performance in January, when it sold 299,000 consoles.

The Wii sold 335,000 units in February, a drop of 23 percent from the previous month. Xbox 360 came in second with 228,000, down 22 percent. However, the PS3 showed the biggest drop with some 127,000 consoles sold, falling some 49 percent.

Sony's obvious sales problems with the PS3 are beginning to lend credence to reports that the consoles are beginning to sit on shelves while consumers opt for the cheaper Xbox 360 or Nintendo Wii.

A sales associate of an EB Games location in central Pennsylvania told BetaNews that since February, the location's stock of PS3's had either stayed the same or grown, whereas new shipments of Wiis -- few and far between - would sell out within hours.

Overall, the Xbox 360 still maintains a considerable lead in the US, with 5.1 million consoles sold, with the Wii selling 1.9 million and the PlayStation 3 1.1 million units.

Microsoft says it is satisfied with its position, and that the biggest challenge for it now is to expand the market, much like Sony has done with the wildly successful PlayStation 2.

News : Google Earth Highlights Destruction

While Google Earth has primarily been touted for its uncanny ability to take users on a tour of the world's most beautiful sights right from their desktop, a new feature added Monday highlights the immense destruction human beings leave in their wake.

Environmental advocacy group Appalachian Voices has joined to Google to deliver a special interactive layer for Google Earth that tells the stories of over 470 mountains that have been destroyed from coal mining, and its impact on nearby ecosystems. Separately, the World Wildlife Fund has added the ability to visit its 150 project sites using Google Earth.

News : MySpace News Service Appearing Imminent

Almost a year to the day following the acquisition by Fox Interactive Media of startup social news aggregation service Newroo, the company appears to be gearing up to integrate it with a certain service it acquired since that time. After a blog post last week in which celebrated former local TV news director Terry Heaton cited industry insiders as revealing FIM's intention to preparing to launch a MySpace news portal around Newroo technology in the second quarter, FIM officials this morning - very clearly and ostentatiously - declined comment.

This as the parent company's careers site today actively advertises for positions such as a software engineer for its Newroo Labs project, describing it in the same paragraph with MySpace as providing "social interaction and communication around user's personal interests relating to news."

When Newroo was acquired last year, it was serving as an online news aggregation service similar in principle to Google News, except that members were capable of contributing to the dissemination process. As a result, Newroo members' customized pages could contain not only selectable content by subject or context, but also active discussions related to those subjects.

FIM's purchase of Newroo was celebrated in some quarters, and criticized in others, for having pre-empted any venture capital backing for Newroo, which would have presumably substantiated its takeover value. Did FIM know what it was getting and what it's getting into, analysts asked?

Apparently, the answer to both questions is "yes," as indicated by this citation from Heaton's blog, which appears to have come from FIM promotional material: "MySpace users previously had to leave the site to find comprehensive news, gossip, sporting news, etc. With MySpace News, we bring the news to them!"

Heaton, whose blog addresses local television producers and newspaper editors, wrote last week, "Now it doesn't take a genius to figure out that this is not good news for those of us in the news business, unless we view it as another way to get our content onto yet another platform." The implication here is similar to some of the early comments at the time Google News was announced: Somebody else's platform could be capitalizing on true news producers' content, and at the producers' expense.

As it turned out, many online news sites actually rely on Google News for as much as one-third of their incoming traffic. In some cases, more readers reach an online article via Google News' front page than from the article publisher's own home page. The convenience of a centralized provider is the key to its success.

However, since MySpace attracts a far younger audience, the characteristics of the readers its news service will direct to news providers' sites may be somewhat different. From a research perspective, Heaton believes, it may be helpful for local news providers to inexpensively determine what type and flavor of news younger readers prefer.

But there's an implication that this "flavor" could bleed into online news content and subtly adjust the way it's edited and produced, in a parallel fashion to how many sites carefully adjust the phraseology of their articles' headlines to help weight them amongst Google News' aggregator. If general news sites started openly fishing for MySpace News' audience, imagine how their headlines could become fine-tuned yet again.