IT Buoy

From The Daily Fix : Friday brings the opening of cricket’s wildly popular Indian Premier League and with it, hopefully for sports fans, a window into the future of international sports broadcasting. (NBC Sports executives, please keep reading). Getty Images Matthew Hayden, seen last season with Chennai of the Indian Premier League. IPL, which has quickly become one of the most popular forms of one of the world’s most popular sports, has new wrinkle this year. Google’s YouTube unit has purchased the world wide Internet rights to the event and plans to use them in a way that many sports fans wish NBC uses its rights to the Olympics. NBC ultimately put footage of all Olympic events on its Web site, but in many prominent cases it did not carry live footage online in an attempt to maximize its audience for prime time television. Using a designated URL , YouTube will Webcast every minute of the IPL game during the next 43 days.

With so many e-readers on the market, what should you be looking for? Plus, Sony makes a move into Wii-like technology. Walt Mossberg and Dan Gallagher join Stacey Delo on Digits to discuss. Follow @staceydelo on Twitter.

The Internet has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010 — but should it be? AFP/Getty Images An Internet sign outside a shop in Paris The nomination was proposed by the Italian version of technology magazine Wired and has so far been endorsed by 11 people including 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop Per Child. Backers of the Internet’s candidacy for the prize cite its achievements in bridging differences and promoting dialogue among different nations. On the promotional site for the Internet’s campaign, called Internet for Peace , supporters contend that the Internet “is much more than a network of computers; it is an endless Web of people.” But critics question whether the Internet has actually brought people closer — and whether the Internet as a tool is even eligible for the nomination. The Guardian’s Bobbie Johnson argued that the Internet may have created more rifts among people than consensus because of the wide range of opinions that users post and exchange on it every day. But he concluded that if President Barack Obama managed to win the prize “without doing anything,” then the Internet could win too. The CNN SciTechBlog is one of many posing a legitimate question: Who would accept the prize if the Internet happened to be the winner? Suggestions include LOLcats and Al Gore.

A new site that maps users of Chatroulette is taking a little of the anonymity out of the random video-chat service. The Laughing Squid blog points us to the site, Chatroulettemap.com , which puts users — and their images — on a Google map, based on their IP address. The site doesn’t map everyone on Chatroulette (right now it lists only about 2,500 people), and it doesn’t mean that anyone who logs onto Chatroulette will be mapped. But it does provide an interesting glimpse of Chatroulette for those who don’t want to try the service. The still pictures are about what you’d expect — which means some of them aren’t safe for work. But more importantly, they make the point that anonymity on the Web isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. The mapping site says it is able to get the IP address of users because Chatroulette connections are peer-to-peer links, and “Chatroulette mearly handles the behind the scenes handshakes.” The Chatroulette map also suggests an increase in efforts to make Chatroulette a little cleaner. Chatroulette’s 17-year-old founder has said he is against offensive uses of the site, and the map’s creators write that they “plan to attempt to flag all of the offensive images, or allow for community flagging.” It’s too early in Chatroulette’s life, though, to know whether such efforts will work — or even whether Chatroulette itself is going to last

From China REal Time Report : While Twitter remains generally blocked in China, that hasn’t stopped tech-savvy Chinese from putting the microblog platform to creative uses. Associated Press The Twitter Web site, which has become the center of speculations about its possible ad platform This week, influential blogger Lian Yue started publishing a novel on Twitter, believed to be the first time a Chinese-language novel is released on the popular service. The novel, entitled “ 2020 ,” revolves around a character named Mao Zhiyong, described as a pale, overweight middle-aged man, and it will be written in regular installments through the year 2020. In Wednesday’s chapter, the protagonist Mao became a father to twin boys and was promoted to head of the Communist Party propaganda department in the city where he lives. The author announced plans to start the Twitter novel on his blog late last year. “It will only be available on Twitter,” he wrote. “If you are interested, try getting a Twitter account.” Even though Twitter– like other foreign social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook– is currently blocked in mainland China, Internet users can find their way around the restrictions by using proxy servers or third-party applications. Lian Yue is the pen name of Zhong Xiaoyong, a writer and social critic based in the east China city of Xiamen