Roundup: The financial crisis explained, land line usage still dropping, and more

Still don’t understand the financial crisis? — Neither does anybody else, it seems, but The New York Times has a good write-up of various issues, in brief question-and-answer format.

Telephone land lines continue to get unplugged — More people are switching to just using cell phones. See screenshot.

Conservative commenter Bill O’Reilly’s site hacked — Hackers took over billoreilly.com after his comments on the earlier Sarah Palin email hack. The full report on Wikileaks.

Google has closed its Phoenix branch — Employees will be moved to other locations.

YouTube agrees to pull videos of local school fights — Vallejo, Calif. students had been taping fights using their cell phones and uploading them to the internet.

GamerDNA says that 500,000 gamers have taken its quiz for categorizing game fans – The company uses this information to do things like recommend related games to its users.

EA loosens access to Spore software — Players of the new world-creator game (pictured) will now be able to install Spore software on up to five computers versus a single computer, among other changes.

Ex-Google salesman David Hirsch joins Metamorphic Ventures – More about the move here.

Oddpost cofounder launches Bandcamp, a web site publishing platform for musicians – Features include transcoding music into different formats, streaming audio, analytics and payment processing.

Conference company DEMO shutters editorial blog — The company decided that creating online news content was outside its organizational scope.

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