These are my links for January 4th:

• Make Video Encoding Easy and Affordable With Encoding.com – Encoding.com is the leading SaaS provider of studio-class video encoding services. It scales instantly and supports all popular media formats.
• Yahoo to Unload E-mail Provider Zimbra on VMWare – As Yahoo continues to refine and redefine itself, it’s been offloading and shuttering some services in an effort to slim down (RIP Geocities!). One of the divisions that’s been on the auction block since September is Zimbra, an open-source e-mail company Yahoo acquired in September 2007 for $350 million.
• 5 Superb Social Media Tools for Musicians – Musicians take notice
• Eric Schmidt: The Baddest Man On Twitter – Stop what you’re doing right now (reading this) and go look at Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s latest Twitter profile picture. Now look closer. Yes, it appears he’s wearing a flak jacket, also known as a bullet-proof vest.
• An Inside Look At A Twitter Style Guide: 140 Characters – We’ve all seen Twitter grow into the company that it is now, but what was it like when it first started — back when it was still called Odeo, and Twitter wasn’t in existence. As we know, Twitter was spun off from Evan William’s company Odeo, into what we know now as Twitter, the social networking service where you post short messages in 140 characters or less.
• Nothing to celebrate on Public Domain Day 2010 in the US – What child has not sat starry-eyed around the fire, dreaming of the goodies to come on January 1—Public Domain Day? The thought of new books and movies and music coming out from copyright is enough to send sugarplums dancing through heads, unless you live in the US in 2010. In which case, you have nothing to celebrate, since nothing is entering the public domain this year.
• Pearl Jam Gives A Song Away For A Tweet – Regular readers may know my affinity for Pearl Jam. The band, which released a new album, Backspacer, last year had a series of promotions with MySpace to promote the album. Now they’re turning to Twitter for some more.
• 4 Ways for Augmented Reality to Get Past the Hype – GigaOM – With 197 million augmented reality-capable smartphones set to be in the global market by 2012, up from nearly 91 million in 2010, the building blocks are falling into place for people to merge digital information with their view of the physical world. But while we’re just getting to the point that normal users can see the promise of augmented reality for themselves, there’s still a long way to go.
• If You Tweet, He Will Come: Mayor Cory Booker Shovels Snow for a NJ Resident – As the snow piled up on New Year’s Eve, Jersey resident Ravie Rave didn’t call a snow plow service to take care of her 65-year-old father’s walk — she tweeted at Newark Mayor Cory Booker.
• CES 2010: What to Expect [VIDEO] – What to expect from CES 2010. From the team at Mashable.com

These are my links for January 4th:

• Former Time Warner CEO Apologizes for “Worst Deal of the Century” [VIDEO] – Now that Time Warner and AOL are officially dissolved, those behind the deal – originally valued at $164 billion – are speaking out. This morning, former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin and AOL co-founder Steve Case discussed the deal on CNBC as we approach its tenth anniversary.
• Las Vegas Courthouse Shooting: Audio Captured on YouTube [VIDEO] – A deadly shooting occurred in the lobby of a Las Vegas federal courthouse building. According to reports from CNN, the suspected gunman was shot and killed after opening fire on federal personnel. A citizen journalist got it all on tape.
• News Corp. Unloads Rotten Tomatoes Onto Flixster – News Corp is unloading more of its digital assets. This time it’s the movie review site Rotten Tomatoes, which is being acquired by startup Flixster, which has the most popular movie app for the iPhone and other mobile devices. The purchase price was not disclosed, but it was at least in part a stock transaction. News Corp now owns a minority stake in Flixster, which has only raised a total of $7 million in venture capital.
• Pinging In The New Year: Seesmic Acquires Ping.fm – Well that didn’t take long. Just four days in 2010 and we already have an acquisition. Social networking application Seesmic has acquired the social status updater Ping.fm.
• Video: iPhone hacked to support the Magic Mouse – Those gifted gents over at the BTStack might just be too clever for their own good. First they blow our minds by sneaking Wiimote support onto the iPhone, and then tickle our productivity-loving souls by hacking in Bluetooth keyboard support. It’s a bit awkward to be typing away on a physical keyboard, only to have to reach over and poke the screen whenever you want to do something – wouldn’t it be nice to be able to use a mouse instead?
• Vegas-bound! What to expect from CES – All of us at CrunchGear are prepping for the pain-fest we all know as the Consumer Electronics Show. For those not aware, every January, just after they’ve waddled away from the all-you-can-eat buffet called the Holidays, journalists, bloggers, and big box electronics buyers all head to Las Vegas for more of the same.
• Worlds Collide: Twitter Has More Uptime Than Facebook – If one of Twitter’s New Year’s resolutions is to reduce sightings of the fail whale, it is off to a good start. Last week, the service was up a laudable 97.97 percent of the time, beating out even Facebook’s availability of 97.22 percent, according to benchmarks published by AlertSite. The only site in the benchmark with better uptime was YouTube, with 99.13 percent availability during the week. (MySpace and LinkedIn showed below average uptimes of 94.74 percent and 95.48 percent, respectively).
• Kleiner-backed GOGII Releases textPlus for Android – Why pay for text messaging anymore when you can send texts for free? That’s the message GOGII is trying to send to users via its textPlus application, which has been wildly successful on the iPhone with over 3.2 million downloads.