Apple has released a new update for Apple TV, Apple TV Software Update 2.3.

Here’s what’s new in Apple TV 2.3:

While these features are welcome, third parties like Boxee are moving faster than Apple to add new functions to Apple’s Internet television device. 

Maybe it’s time for Apple to move to a App Store model with Apple TV.

Another one bites the dust: industry stalwart PC Magazine will print its last paper issue this coming January, according to an announcement from Editor-in-Chief Lance Ulanoff. Increased print and delivery expenses contributed to the decision to move away from the print edition of the magazine, which has been around for 27 years.

Ulanoff paints the changes as “exciting and new” with the PC Magazine Digital Edition. “There are many technology innovations on the horizon,” he enthuses. The subscriber-only digital edition of PC Magazine (a more in-depth version of the content available at PCMag.com) has enhancements like searchability, portability (were paper magazines not portable?), interactive multimedia options (like slideshows) within articles, and even gimmicky magazine “pages” that you can “turn” virtually.

In addition, and we are not making this up, the magazine will now be printable, but is also “green” and environmentally friendly if you do not print it.

Read Write Web raises an excellent point, too: the long lag time between the news event and its magazine coverage frustrates readers who are used to seeing the same news online almost immediately as it happens. The experience of reading a tangible, portable, paper publication is hard to duplicate with a glowing screen. But reading a tree-based magazine with six-week-old news is not very rewarding.

Changes in the economic climate influence purchasing decisions, which drives changes in where advertisers are putting their money. And as more consumers of media turn their attention to online options, look for more venerable old-school publishing brands to shut down their paper editions.

High-level talks are happening this week in Washington, D.C. this week between Big Business and government officials, focused on an emergency government bailout of the foundering financial and automotive industries. The thinking is that saving Wall Street and Detroit from further disaster will have some kind of ripple (trickle-down?) effect and buoy prospects for smaller businesses on Main Street.

But what of the rest of us? And what of those poor old journalists who work in media with shrinking audiences — and budgets?

With tongue only partly in cheek, TypePad, Six Apart’s hosted blogging service, offers writers “recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs” the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program.

The Journalist Bailout offers writer-applicants an opportunity to continue to be paid for the work they publish via a free TypePad pro-level account, participation in the company’s advertising program, promotion on the Blogs.com website, and other support.  Journalists apply for the bailout by sending a note with a link to their most recent print or broadcast piece.

Talking about the first few days of the bailout offer, Six Apart’s VP and “Chief Evangelist” Anil Dash writes,

“These experiences showed me something I’d expected: A lot of people are thinking about how journalism is going to evolve online, and many people are passionate about making sure journalists make the leap.

“What I hadn’t fully expected was how gripping the stories from individual journalists have been. The mood of the emails we’ve gotten has ranged from hopeful to heartbreaking, from cynical to sincere. Overall, there’s an optimism which indicates that having a starting point to do something proactive and positive will be a great first step for many journalists to take control of their careers in an industry that is going through enormous upheaval.”

Even Six Apart is feeling the pinch of an uncertain economic future, however. Just last week, CEO Chris Alden announced a reduction of about 8% of the company’s staff.

Image: Google News

Monty Python announces that it’s tired of getting ripped off for all these years, that it’s launching its own YouTube channel and that they’d really like you to buy some of their stuff, say no more.

NASA announced today that it has successfully tested the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet. 

Working as part of a NASA-wide team, engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about 20 million miles from Earth. 

“This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet,” said Adrian Hooke, team lead and manager of space-networking architecture, technology and standards at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Long-term, this development promises to bring space travelers onto the Internet, which is mind boggling. Can it be long until the astronauts are blogging, podcasting and Twittering directly from space?

i.TV has announced that it’s looking for beta-testers to try out the next version of its popular iPhone media app:

We have some new features to roll out and we would love to have some help testing the next version of i.TV. 

Our development team is almost finished with the next release. If you are interested and have an iPhone or iPod touch, please follow this link and fill out the questionnaire to apply to become an official i.TV beta tester. 

Please note, because we only have a limited number of slots to participate in this program, not every applicant will be chosen. If you are not chosen to participate in the beta program this time around, we will still keep your application on file to be considered to test future releases. 

Creative Commons – the non-profit that promotes legal sharing on the Internet – is on Twitter, as of about 2 hours ago. 

Music that is licensed using Creative Commons licenses has been hugely important to podcasting and new media – so you may want to consider subscribing to the “official Creative Commons microblog.”

The Mayo Clinic has a semi-monthly podcast on health issues that range from chemotherapy to Omega 3 fatty acids, to erectile dysfunction, featuring information and resources from medical experts in those respective fields.

The current Mayo Clinic podcast topic is about “Tips For Slowing The Mental Decline of Alzheimer’s.”  While not offering techniques to stop or reverse the loss of cognitive function, the eight-minute discussion does have practical ideas about slowing that loss, and for how to encourage habits help manage keeping track of things that the brain can no longer do on its own.

The feed to subscribe to the entire podcast series is here.

Microsoft, makers of the Zune portable media player, announced a firmware update today, along with announcements of lower prices for the devices.

The 3.1 update features some new free games, refreshes the Zune Social, and adds incremental updates to the Zune software. Games in this update include Checkers, Sudoku, and Space Battle. A multiplayer mode for the Texas Hold’em poker game are also part of 3.1.

The Zune Social refresh purports to make navigation easier and includes a “like minded listeners” feature, comparing your musical tastes with others. The incremental software update improves overall software stability.

Also announced today: Zune price cuts, which take effect Wednesday (Friday in Canada). The new prices (and comparisons to similar capacity iPods), according to MobileDevicesToday:

16 GB: Zune, $179; iPod $199
8GB: Zune, $139; iPod $149
4GB: Zune, $99; no similar model iPod

The update is available now free to Zune owners. The last major update was the 3.0 update in September.

Amazon today announced a new service, Amazon CloudFront, that promises to speed up your site. 

It’s a simple pay-as-you-go content delivery network that offers to deliver your content to people, with Amazon-scale service, but without big upfront costs. 

Amazon has a network of “edge” network locations that it can automatically distribute your content to. These “edge” locations are data hubs placed at optimal locations on the Internet in order to minimize the network latency and speed when serving up web content. 

CloudFront has locations around the world:

 

• United States: Ashburn (VA), Dallas/Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Palo Alto, Seattle and St. Louis
• Europe: Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt and London
• Asia: Hong Kong and Tokyo

 

These edge locations work together to direct customers’ requests to the edge location that can provide the response with the lowest latency.

Content delivery services are used by most major sites because they speed up users’ experience by getting the content closer to the user. Web pages and media files from these big sites loads quickly because the content is located as close to the user as possible on the Internet. 

At this point, Amazon’s service is likely to bring content delivery services to sites that have the resources to build custom solutions based on CloudFront.

However, it’s likely that plug-ins will be developed for major blogging platforms, like WordPress and Movable Type, that will automatically tap into CloudFront. When this happens, it should be easy for high volume blogs, podcasts and video podcasts to take advantage of the benefits offered by content delivery networks.