Publishing and content

News downsizing affects reliability

Michael Smerconish, a newspaper columnist, writes today about the Martin Eisenstadt hoax. Eisenstadt was the source of the rumor that Sarah Palin had mis-identified Africa as a "country," not a continent. The problem was that Eisenstadt was an entirely fictitious person, or as Smerconish puts it, the "Borat" of the news business. Both Eisenstadt and the Africa quote were entirely made up.

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Comcast invests in P2P

Comcast, which has been criticized of late for apparently trying to throttle peer to peer (P2P) file sharing traffic, seems to be shifting focus by investing in a P2P business start up. This is a good sign. As I and others have argued for a long time, we need to shift away from the "bucket of bits" model of broadband and move toward a service-oriented business and network model. P2P file sharing is just another service.

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Amazon: we want our cake and eat it too

A lengthy discussion on SlashDot highlights a new tactic by Amazon. The book distribution giant is trying to muscle out other print on demand services by forcing authors who use print on demand to use Amazon's print on demand (POD) service or else--the "else" being Amazon won't list their book.

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Google search within a search steals customers

Google has announced a new "search within a search" option that has online retailers worried that the search behemoth will steal customers. The new option lets you use Google to search only pages that are part of a single site. So if you want to buy a digital camera and go to Google to start the search, you get the usual search results page. If you click on a Best Buy site, as an example, Google will now do an extended search only on the Best Buy site.

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Blu-Ray wins

There are reports that Toshiba has decided to cut its losses and discontinue manufacturing HD-DVD equipment. Microsoft is the other loser in this battle, as the company had been a backer of the HD-DVD format. Christmas 2008 will be a good time to invest in the high def players and recorders, as by that time there will be plenty of competition and lower prices.

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The Eagles boot the record companies

The somewhat elderly Eagles rock band has given record companies the boot with the band's latest album. The Eagles simply skipped working with a record company at all, and went straight to Wal-mart to sell their new CD. The two CD set is priced at a very reasonable twelve bucks. The artists get a bigger share of the sales, and music lovers spend less and get more.

Even more interesting, the two CD set is priced low enough that some music stores are simply going to Wal-mart, buying a bunch of the CDs, and then marking them up and selling them in their own stores.

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Here we go again...

Senator Ted "the Internet is made of tubes" Stevenson is at it again, calling for "universal" filtering of the Internet to protect us all from pornography. The Internet pornography problem is a serious one, and deserves serious attention, but Senator Stevens is not making a serious proposal.

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Have FaceBook and MySpace peaked?

Those of us that have been watching how people use public networks (I started in 1982) know that there is a certain "newbie" phenomenon that takes place when some new feature or service is introduced. I have always been skeptical of the "social networking" trend, which is best represented by sites like FaceBook and MySpace.

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Just turn off the TV

This editorial from the LA Times discusses rumblings from the FCC that the agency may try to regulate "violence" on television, and may try to extend the agency's control to cable and satellite broadcasting--entirely new for the FCC.

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Civility in social discourse

The blow up over Imus' idiotic remarks and a raging debate among bloggers about the need for civility online may just be the tipping point for a long overdue honest appraisal of the lack of civility in our social discourse. There is no question that over the past decade, the way we speak to each other and the language that we use has been coarsened to the point that sometimes I think we need to cover our ears.

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Blogging: At least know what it is

There are several stories about blogging making the rounds of the news sites, as well as an ongoing discussion in the business world about employee blogging.

Item One: Katie Couric is in the news because she tried to pass off a producer's made up story as her own thoughts. Couric is supposedly blogging, but as it turns out, other people write her blog. And those other people, as it turns out, did not have much to say either so they were cribbing from the Wall Street Journal.

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Mainstream media struggles with blogging

I was at a regional bloggers conference yesterday, where several bloggers spoke about blogging and the value of bloggers to the community as well as the value of business-oriented blogs. One of the invited speakers was a local TV newsperson who has a fairly lightweight blog, and while this person started off talking about blogging, they quickly veered into a fingerpointing lecture about how "real" journalists have gone to journalism school and are trained in the ethics of reporting the news. It went downhill from there.

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Will Joost trounce YouTube?

Joost, a video streaming start up long the lines of YouTube, may be poised for rapid growth. Frustrated with YouTube's lack of attention to copyright, media giant Viacom has signed a deal with Joost to host Viacom's extensive catalogue of music and TV shows (including MTV, among others). It is not so much the redistribution of copyrighted material that has been bugging Viacom--instead, the company just wants its fair share of the ad revenue.

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Grappling with technology

An Illinois legislator has introduced a bill to outlaw "social networking" sites in Illinois libraries and schools. The bill is extremely broad, and probably will never be passed, but it is an interesting exercise in lawmaking.

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New media is beating old media

It has taken about five years, but the New Media revolution, which I think started in 2002 with the availability of easy to use blogging software, has started to put real pressure on Old Media. This article talks about huge job cuts among the Old Media newspaper and TV giants. It is not so much that Old Media is irrelevant--it is more about the fact that Old Media has stubbornly refused to rethink what it does and how it does it. The stubbornness has led to loss of revenue and job cuts.

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Are Google book scans selling books?

As an author, I was highly skeptical when Google announced a year ago that it would start scanning books and making them available for search. Along with many other groups and organizations, it seemed like an obvious violation of copyright. The main problem is that Google, of course, places ads on every scanned page that someone sees, and authors get no share of that ad income.

But a new report suggests that the Google "service" might be increasing book sales. That is good news for authors, if it applies across most scanned books.

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Wikipedia defies China

The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has refused the Chinese government's request to remove certain material from the Wikipedia Web site, and in retaliation, the Chinese have blocked access to Wikipedia for everyone in China. Unlike other the leaders of other companies like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo!, who have collaborated with the Chinese government and agreed to assist with censorship, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has taken a principled stand and refused to participate in censorship.

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Amazon offers an eBook

Amazon is offering an eBook. Dozens of companies lost their shirts with ebooks in the late nineties. Back then, laptops were expensive and PDAs had tiny screens and were hard to read (Apple's Newton was the exception). So many thought that ebooks--light, portable readers--would catch on. But the number of titles available for any given platform were limited, and too many manufacturers opted for proprietary book formats that made publishing a nightmare.

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Cheap easy video is changing politics

YouTube is beginning to change politics, as the rising new Internet service is making it easy for anyone to make video available. Short video clips with political messages are chipping away at another Old Media monopoly, the political ad. Back in the old days, as far back as a year ago, you had to have a big budget to produce and air a political ad. Limited time spots for such ads on broadcast and cable TV made them expensive.

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The blogger police

A school system in Illinois apparently does not have enough to do in the teaching our kids department, and is now going to start reading student blogs to make sure the kids don't write something "inappropriate."

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