Publishing and content

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.

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.

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."

There are apparently still people in Congress that want to regulate blogs. This brief article says that blogs that spend more than $5000 a year on their operations could be regulated by the Federal Election Commission if they write about politics.

This is just one of several stories I have seen recently about K12 students who have their own blogs and get censured by K12 school officials. Student blogs are now common, and school systems have failed to adapt to the new reality. It clearly unnerves some school administrators that students now have a public forum completely independent of the school system. In the old days, students with a bent for writing worked on the school paper, which was monitored by a faculty member.

According to USA Today, XM Radio is being sued by the music industry for its new satellite radio, which has a record feature. XM's iPod-like recording functionality is actually pretty limited. Although it can store up to 50 hours of music, the service is essentially subscription-based. If you discontinue your XM radio subscription, your music disappears. The songs are also stored in a proprietary format, so there is no easy way to copy them to other devices, like your computer or to a CD.

USA Today has an article today on the front page of the Life section about Microsoft's bid to sink its tentacles into every kind of digital entertainment. There is a quote in the article from an analyst at at Morgan Wedbush Securities, and he said:

"Microsoft...recognize[s] their software needs to be the gatekeeper to that kind of commerce."

Teh Federal Election Commission has clarified rules for political and campaign activity by exempting virtually all kinds of political speech on the Internet from the onerous rules that cover how campaign funds can be spent.

The rules, which surfaced last year, seemed to require onerous reporting by citizen bloggers if they even wrote about political candidates, and if they accepted campaign ads on their Web sites, it was worse. But occasionally government does the right thing.

Just weeks after news that Google "respects" the Chinese government's efforts to censor free speech, the Chinese have rolled out their own search engine, meaning that Google's efforts to suck up to the communists was all for naught.

Cory Doctorow, writing in the Canadian Globe and Mail, says that some of the more than 4.5 million World of Warcraft players are taking aim at Chinese communist censors. The popular multiplayer online game has a worldwide audience of participants, including many in China.

I got this link from a friend. It's a short video clip hosted on Google, and when I click on it, I get this message (so do many other people).

This video is not playable in your country.

As my friend asked, "Are living in China now?"

Google has stepped on a banana peel at the top of a very steep hill.

Update 2/22/06

I was completely wrong about this...see the comment below for a perfectly reasonable explanation.

I worded the title of this article carefully; I used "may," not "will." Google may end up as de facto owner of the world's information, and I could be wrong. Time will tell.

Google's early success came by doing something well that no one else was doing--searching the Web. Google studied the behavior of early search engines like Alta Vista, and came up with better search algorithms. Everybody liked Google because it did something no one else could do--produce relevant search results.

A Marquette University dental student has had an expulsion reversed after the widespread publicity forced the university to back down.

The dental student foolishly made some short-tempered remarks about teachers and fellow students on his personal blog. The school responded like a three year old with a temper tantrum by kicking the student out and revoking a full scholarship.

But a local newspaper and radio station, along with bloggers, publicized the university's actions.

SlashDot has a long discussion thread about an opinion issued by the Federal Election Commission that "bloggers are journalists." The ruling exempts bloggers from having to file lenghty reports and paperwork to meet the McCain-Feingold campaign laws. As Slashdot points out, the ruling indicates that bias in reporting does not automatically mean a blogger is NOT a journalist.

Congress is fighting over a bill that would protect bloggers from having to file onerous reports on their activities. Part of the fall out of the 2002 campaign finance law is strict regulations on campaigning and candidate support. The problem arises because the law is so vague that a private citizen with a lightly read blog who endorses a candidate for election would fall under the regulation of the Federal Election Committee.

CNet reports on the looming battle between Google and book publishers, who are outraged that the search company intends to scan millions of books and make them available to search online.

Google's new partnership with Sun is creating a lot of speculation, in part because the details of the agreement are quite vague. Sun has agreed to download the Google Toolbar with every copy of Sun's Java software. The Google Toolbar is unpopular with a lot of net folks (including me) because it actually inserts links into a Web document where there were none. In other words, the Toolbar changes the meaning of a Web page without the author's permission. And the links, of course, point to Google content.

In a perfect example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, a Federal campaign reform law has created confusion about whether or not it applies to blogs, which are normally written by just one or perhaps a handful of people.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) officials don't even agree on what is correct. Some commissioners think bloggers and Internet campaigning generally are exempt, and others disagree.

Google is coming under increasing fire for its controversial book scanning project. The company is scanning hundreds of thousands of books from several major university libraries, with the intention of making the searchable and viewable on the Web. Each viewed page will, of course, have Google ads.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is considering a move away from Microsoft Office and toward Open Source products like Open Office.

Microsoft's proprietary XML formats that are being used in current and future versions of Office to store Word and Excel documents, among others, are licensed to users. What this means, basically, is that you have the right to open and use your own Word documents only as long as Microsoft allows you to.

The state government of Massachusetts is worried, and rightly so, that public documents may become inaccessible either legally (if in the future the state does not continue to renew MS software licenses) or may become incompatible and therefore unreadable because MS has changed document formats.