Cellphone Apps Challenge the Rise of E-Readers

From The New York Times:

Many people who want to read electronic books are discovering that they can do so on the smartphones that are already in their pockets — bringing a whole new meaning to “phone book.” And they like that they can save the $250 to $350 that they would otherwise spend on yet another gadget.

Running and Falling

from BoingBoing

A man runs. He falls down. He struggles back onto his feet and he runs some more. It's a simple narrative. Even without much detail, you can understand what's going on. Pause the video, though, and the scene isn't nearly as clear. Movement makes up for the lack of other visual information. Your brain can read and understand a video at much lower resolution than it would need to make equal sense of a still frame.
Meet Jim Campbell, a former Silicon Valley engineer turned visual artist. Inspired by early Bell Labs experiments with pixelated images, and by his own engineering work with digital filters, Campbell makes art that toys with the human brain.

As Facebook Ages, Gen Y Turns to Twitter

From THE NEW YORK TIMES

Facebook is getting old. No, people aren't getting tired of it, it's actually getting old, as in its population is aging. In May of 2008, the median age for Facebook was 26. Today, it's 33, a good seven years older. That's an interesting turn of events for a site once built for the exclusive use of college students. So where are today's college students hanging out now? Well, to some extent, they're still on Facebook, despite having to share the space with moms, dads, grandparents, and bosses. Surprisingly though, they're also headed to another network you may have heard of: Twitter.

As it turns out, Gen Y likes Twitter...Well, maybe not, but they are using it

Over the course of the year, there have been countless reports - some more substantial than others - but all with the same message: Generation Y is just not interested in Twitter. The reports generally cited members of this demographic as saying Twitter was "pointless" and "narcissistic."

Apparently, that's beginning to change. Well, maybe not their perception of Twitter, but certainly their use of it. Today, Twitter is now the second-youngest of the top four social networking sites. Its median age is 31. MySpace's is 26, LinkedIn is 39, and, as noted above, Facebook is 33.

When looking at specific younger demographic segments, and not just Gen Y, you can see strong Twitter uptake over the past year. For example, 37% of those 18-24 now use Twitter when only 19% did back in December 2008. And in the slightly older 25-34 bracket, a portion of which could still be considered Gen Y, 31% are now using the service compared to only 20% in December of last year. Combined, these two groups account for more than half of Twitter's network.

Secret copyright treaty leaks. It's bad. Very bad.

From Boing Boing

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to
disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

• * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

• * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

• * That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

• * Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)

Flyvertising

Eichborn Fliegenbanner auf der Frankfurter Buchmesse.

Clever Movie Posters Advertise Classic Films with Style

Not Your Mother's Literary Classics

By Elizabeth Alsop

I was browsing in a bookstore recently when a copy of Little Women caught my eye. The cover featured crude, inky sketches of the March sisters, arrayed in a quadrant. They seemed to be suffering from a collective bad hair day. "Oh God please!" Meg laments in the thought bubble over her head. "My skin is so bad I want to grow up, and fast!" Next to her, Amy reads from a Bible, sounding like an evangelical Molly Bloom ("Yes Yes God says hey girls be good …") while the sickly Beth frets below ("But I want to be good I'm trying that's what I'm doing all day!"). On the bottom right, tomboyish Jo scoffs at her sisters. "Grow up and then get married?? Forget it I'm not interested ha ha ha hell no!!"

My mother's hardback, this was not. But something about it looked familiar. Flipping to the back flap, I realized why: The cover was drawn by Julie Doucet, a Montreal-based artist much admired in underground comics circles. In college, I was devoted to her now out-of-print comic, Dirty Plotte. But what was she doing with Louisa May Alcott?
Doucet's cover, I learned, was commissioned by Penguin as part of a series called Graphic Classics. In 2005 the publisher began asking well-known cartoonists to redesign selected titles from its catalog. The results, according to Penguin's Web site, are "timeless works of literature featuring amazing, one-of-a-kind cover illustrations from some of today's best graphic artists."
[...]

That we can now appreciate this sort of mash-up of comics and literature may be further proof that we are witnessing the ascendancy of what Charles McGrath, writing in The New York Times Magazine in 2004, called "the comic book with a brain." Since then, comics have only gained legitimacy; meanwhile literature, we are repeatedly told, is losing it. Graphic novels now regularly appear on college syllabi, and even the Louvre is feting la bande dessinée. In 2007, Art Spiegelman taught a course at Columbia University called "Comics: Marching Into the Canon"—but in fact, they may be walking all over it. And that's probably a good thing. With R. Crumb's cross-hatched version of the Book of Genesis now on shelves, I'm betting that more than a few people will actually read it.

http://chronicle.com/article/Not-Your-Mothers-Literary/48887/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Serving Literature by the Tweet

The founders of Electric Literature, a new quarterly literary magazine, seek nothing less than to revitalize the short story in the age of the short attention span. To do so, they allow readers to enjoy the magazine any way they like: on paper, Kindle, e-book, iPhone and, starting next month, as an audiobook. YouTube videos feature collaborations among their writers and visual artists and musicians. Starting next month, Rick Moody will tweet a story over three days.

In its first two issues, this year, the magazine showcased some of the country’s best writers — Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis, Jim Shepard — and created the kind of buzz that is a marketer’s dream. With a debut issue in June and an autumn issue out last week, each consisting of five stories, the magazine has racked up complimentary reviews everywhere from The Washington Post to a blogger on Destructive Anachronism, who wrote, “High quality content + innovative marketing + multimedia could just equal the new model for literature, post-print.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/books/28electric.html?_r=1&ref=technology

A Life of Light and Shadow

After decades of playing a “best supporting” role in 20th-century art and design, albeit an intriguing and seductive one, Mr. Moholy-Nagy is being bumped up to a leading role. Long praised for pioneering film and photography, as well as for working across different creative disciplines, he is now recognized as a critical influence over the increasingly important medium of digital imagery that flickers across our computer and mobile telephone screens.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/arts/design/19iht-design19.html?ref=design&pagewanted=all

Does the Brain Like E-Books?

Writing and reading — from newspapers to novels, academic reports to gossip magazines — are migrating ever faster to digital screens, like laptops, Kindles and cellphones. Traditional book publishers are putting out “vooks,” which place videos in electronic text that can be read online or on an iPhone. Others are republishing old books in electronic form. And libraries, responding to demand, are offering more e-books for download.

Is there a difference in the way the brain takes in or absorbs information when it is presented electronically versus on paper? Does the reading experience change, from retention to comprehension, depending on the medium?

• Alan Liu, English professor
• Sandra Aamodt, author, “Welcome to Your Brain”
• Maryanne Wolf, professor of child development
• David Gelernter, computer scientist
• Gloria Mark, professor of informatics

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/does-the-brain-like-e-books/

Just 30 firms dominate the Internet

THE INTERNET has undergone radical infrastructural and economic changes in the past two years, leading to the dominance of just 30 large companies, according to a major study from Arbor Networks and the University of Michigan.

The two year-long research analysed more than 256 exabytes of web traffic across 110 large cable operators, transit backbones, regional networks and content providers across the globe, and found that 30 "hyper giants" account for 30 per cent of all traffic.

Arbor Networks said in the 2009 Internet Observatory Report that five years ago Internet traffic was fairly well spread out globally across tens of thousands of enterprise managed web sites and servers, but that content today has moved to just a handful of very large hosting, cloud and content providers.

Craig Labovitz, the firm's chief scientist, said that half of Internet traffic in 2007 was generated by between 5,000 and 10,000 companies. Since then, however, a major aggregation of content has meant that just 150 companies are now responsible for the same amount of traffic on a daily basis, led by household names such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

[...]
"The first 12 years of the Internet was all about getting homes and businesses connected. That was the technology and that was the story. Now connectivity is ubiquitous and prices are falling and the innovation is happening not there but in content - getting it closer to the consumer and business," said Labovitz.
"As content is getting faster and better quality it will change the face of the Internet, which is exciting for enterprises and consumers. We are entering the second era of the Internet."

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1558384/just-firms-dominate-internet

Seeing Design as Intellectual Rather Than Just Practical

Until recently, treating design as an intellectual medium, rather than a practical one, was rare in Europe and rarer still in the United States, where designers are more deeply rooted in the “build a better world” optimism of 20th-century modernism than in other countries. For years, the Boyms’ conceptual approach cast them as outsiders in American design, as did their obsession with the “undesignerly” phenomena of tragedy and neurosis. They had other “outsider” traits too: Nationality for Mr. Boym, who was born in the Soviet Union and emigrated to the United States in 1981 on a legal technicality; and gender for Ms. Leon Boym, as design is still a boys’ club in America and just about everywhere else. They also came to design from other disciplines. He from architecture, and she art. Those differences remain, but “conceptual design” — or “critical design,” as it is sometimes called — has become increasingly influential, even in the United States, particularly among young designers for whom the Boyms, who are 54 and 45 respectively, look like seers, not mavericks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/arts/12iht-design12.html?ref=arts&pagewanted=all

Art and Science in a Small World

Web fonts: the talk of Typ09

"Web fonts" are one of the hot topics of Typ09, the conference of ATypI in Mexico City later this month.

Posted on 10 October 2009 by Mark Barratt,

With more web browsers supporting a tag to bring new fonts onto web pages (Microsoft has done so since 1997), a tipping point has been reached in the design world. Designers are excited about the idea that they can use fonts other than the "core set" with the familiar Verdana and Georgia. They are finding out how to get them to users of all the different web browsers.

There are several competing formats in use (EOT, supported in Internet Explorer 4 and above; regular TrueType and OpenType fonts, supported in Safari and Firefox; and more recently WOFF [Web Open Font Format], which will be supported in the upcoming version of FireFox), but a number of well-known type foundries and some interesting startups are promising to solve that problem. Web sites may soon be a much richer place for typography, and perhaps even easier to read.

Participants for this track include:

• David Berlow of the Font Bureau, who is keynoting the main conference
• Roger Black, a New York designer who is introducing web fonts at MIT.edu this month
• John Daggett and Jonathan Kew of Mozilla, the organization that owns the Firefox browser
• Jeff Veen and Brian Mason of Typekit, a new site that will distribute web fonts
• Frank Wildenberg of Linotype, a company dating from the hot metal era that is active in new technology
• John D. Berry, recently hired by Microsoft to help improve typography across Microsoft products, and president of ATypI

Typ09 is the first annual congress of the Association Typographique Internationale to be held in Latin America. Members of ATypI are type designers, typographers, and type foundries from all over the world.

The five-day event starts Monday, October 26 at MIDE, the technology museum in the historic downtown, "El Centro." The web-font sessions will be held at Anáhuac University, host and co-sponsor of the conference, as part of a series of workshops on Thursday and Friday, the 26th and 27th.

http://www.atypi.org/news_tool/news_html?newsid=509&from=/

SYNESTHESIA, a film by Jonathan Fowler.

Synesthesia: A film by Jonathan Fowler

October 8, 2009

Short Outbursts on Twitter? #Big Problem

By LAURA M. HOLSON

TIMES are tough for the “tweet before you think” crowd.

Courtney Love was sued by a fashion designer after she posted a series of inflammatory tweets, one calling the designer a liar and a thief. A landlord in Chicago sued a tenant for $50,000 after she tweeted about her moldy apartment. And Demi Moore slapped back at Perez Hilton over a revealing photograph of the actress’s daughter.

A growing number of people have begun lashing out at their Twitter critics, challenging the not-quite rules of etiquette on a service where insults are lobbed in brief bursts, too short to include the social niceties. Some offended parties are suing. For others, extracting a public mea culpa will do. In some cases, the payback is extreme: Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association, was fined $25,000 for criticizing a referee in a tweet after a game.

Blogs, of course, have long been rife with the discontented heaping abuse on foes. But academics and researchers who study online attitudes say that same behavior has been less common on Twitter, in part, because many people use their real names. Now it is migrating to the service, attracting lawsuits and leaving users to haggle among themselves about what will be tolerated.

Complicating matters, there are few prescribed social norms on Twitter like those in more closed communities like Facebook. The service has attained mass popularity without much time to develop an organic users’ culture. On top of that, with tweets limited to 140 characters, users come right to the point without context or nuance.

“It’s the same reason why schoolyard fights don’t start out with, ‘I have a real problem with the way you said something so let’s discuss it,’ ” said Josh Bernoff, a researcher and an author of “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.” “You get right to the punch in the nose. Twitter doesn’t allow room for reflection. It gets people to the barest emotion.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/fashion/08twitter.html?_r=1&ref=technology

Rethinking the Shape of Everyday Life

After decades of being an evolutionary process of incremental improvements, design is now revolutionary. Just think of how quickly we have come to depend on once unimaginable innovations like cellphones, the Internet, BlackBerries, iPods, Bluetooth, satellite navigation and iPhone applications. That’s just the start. Advances in technology are accelerating, and the social and political pressure on businesses to develop environmentally responsible alternatives to existing products is increasing. Over the next few years, many more familiar objects will be reinvented. Here are a few possibilities.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/arts/design/05iht-design5.html?ref=arts

movie posters for minimalists

Apple Tablet To Redefine Newspapers, Textbooks and Magazines

Steve Jobs said people don't read any more. But Apple is in talks with several media companies rooted in print, negotiating content for a "new device." And they're not just going for e-books and mags. They're aiming to redefine print.

http://gizmodo.com/5370252/apple-tablet-to-redefine-newspapers-textbooks-and-magazines

Daily Beast Seeks to Publish Faster

By MOTOKO RICH

Having ramped up her metabolism from magazines to online journalism with The Daily Beast, Tina Brown now wants to speed up book publishing.

In a joint venture with Perseus Books Group, The Daily Beast is forming a new imprint, Beast Books, that will focus on publishing timely titles by Daily Beast writers — first as e-books, and then as paperbacks on a much shorter schedule than traditional books.

On a typical publishing schedule, a writer may take a year or more to deliver a manuscript, after which the publisher takes another nine months to a year to put finished books in stores. At Beast Books, writers would be expected to spend one to three months writing a book, and the publisher would take another month to produce an e-book edition.

In an interview in her office at The Daily Beast, which is owned by Barry Diller’s InterActive Corporation, Ms. Brown said she believed books often missed opportunities to attract readers because the titles took too long to come to market.

“There is a real window of interest when people want to know something,” Ms. Brown said. “And that window slams shut pretty quickly in the media cycle.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/books/29beas.html?ref=technology

Two-Thirds of Americans Object to Online Tracking

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

ABOUT two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers — and that number rises once they learn the different ways marketers are following their online movements, according to a new survey from professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley.

The professors say they believe the study, scheduled for release on Wednesday, is the first independent, nationally representative telephone survey on behavioral advertising.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/business/media/30adco.html?_r=1&ref=technology

Visionaire magazine: paper-engineered issue

from "Boing Boing":

Issue #55 of ultradesigned fashion/art/culture magazine is a gorgeous
slipcased collection of pop-up designed by the likes of Andreas Gursky,
Steven Meisel, Sophie Calle, and engineered by Bruce Foster.

http://www.visionaireworld.com/issues.php?id=55

All Me, All the Time

By Mark Bauerlein

Today in The Wall Street Journal, Eric Felton summarizes a new book by Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell that has the motto: "Capture everything, discard nothing." Felton explains: "The idea is to use newly available technologies to record every moment of our lives, public and private." With present and future tools, we can retain every experience we've had, every move we've made.

I can think of nothing worse for the teenage psyche. It encourages them in the damaging belief that what happens to them inside and out, every experience they undergo, has a value. It encourages every narcissistic impulse and hinders the process of growing up. After all, one of the acquisitions of maturity is to recognize that 90 percent of what goes on in your head and your life during an average week is of little significance to anybody else. And that's not an unfortunate circumstance. It is the precondition of living happily with others.

The trend will only get worse, though. Elsewhere in the Journal appears a story with the headline, "Twitter's Value Is Set at $1 Billion."

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/All-Me-All-the-Time/8205/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Moresoon.org

Google Unveils Tool to Annotate Web Sites

September 23, 2009, 10:35 am

By Miguel Helft

Google is rolling out a new service on Wednesday that will allow users to post notes alongside Web sites that can be read by other users. The service, called Sidewiki, will be a new feature of the Google Toolbar, a popular browser add-on.

Sidewiki users could, for instance, provide an account of their own travel recommendations for Paris next to a travel Web page for that city. Other users visiting that page would see that there are comments on a thin left-hand sidebar and click on it to read them.

Sidewiki will compete against a handful of startups that perform similar functions. None has gained much popularity.

Google says Sidewiki has some unique features. For instance, it uses a complex ranking algorithm to evaluate the quality of comments using “what we know about the author, and user-contributed signals such as voting and flagging.” Only highly rated comments will be shown. Google said it spent most of its engineering effort on the ranking algorithm.

Sidewiki will also post notes across multiple sites that have the same content, so a note about a Barack Obama quote may appear on multiple Web sites that have published that quote. Sidewikis can include video content and can be shared easily with others via Facebook, Twitter and other services, Google says.

The idea of a service to annotate Web sites has been around for a decade. Back in the Web 1.0 days, a start-up called Third Voice allowed people to post unmoderated comments on sites. After receiving some initial buzz in 1999, the company changed its model a year later and eventually shut down its service altogether in 2001. Some Web site operators complained that the comments were nothing more than Web graffiti.

Of course, Google’s Sidewiki will have an advantage over its predecessors: wide distribution. The company’s toolbar is used by millions of people.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/google-unveils-tool-to-annotate-web-sites/?ref=technology

Best Buy and Verizon Jump Into E-Reader Fray

September 23, 2009

By BRAD STONE

The budding market for electronic reading devices is about to get two powerful new entrants: Best Buy and Verizon.

On Wednesday, iRex Technologies, a spinoff of Royal Philips Electronics that already makes one of Europe’s best-known e-readers, plans to announce that it is entering the United States market with a $399 touch-screen e-reader.

Owners of the new iRex DR800SG will be able to buy digital books and newspapers wirelessly over the 3G network of Verizon, which is joining AT&T and Sprint in supporting such devices. And by next month, the iRex will be sold at a few hundred Best Buy stores, along with the Sony Reader and similar products.

By all accounts, e-readers are set to have a breakout year. Slightly more than one million of them were sold globally in 2008, according to the market research firm iSuppli. The firm predicts that 5.2 million will be sold this year, more than half of them in North America, driven by the popularity and promotion of the Kindle, which is available only through Amazon’s Web site.

Best Buy’s involvement could give an additional lift to sales. Starting this week, Best Buy is training thousands of its employees in how to talk about and demonstrate devices like the Sony Reader and iRex, and adding a new area to its 1,048 stores to showcase the devices. Best Buy previously sold e-book devices only on its Web site and in limited tests in stores.

“The e-reader has high awareness, but most people have still not seen or touched or played with them,” said Chris Homeister, senior vice president for entertainment at Best Buy. “We feel that this is a technology that is beginning to emerge and that we can bring a unique experience to the marketplace.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/technology/internet/23ebooks.html?_r=1&hpw

Is the Internet melting our brains?

Sept. 19, 2009 | By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil.

Such sentiments, in the opinion of Dennis Baron, are nostalgic, uninformed hogwash. A professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Baron seeks to provide the historical context that is often missing from debates about the way technology is transforming our lives in his new book, "A Better Pencil." His thesis is clear: Every communication advancement throughout human history, from the pencil to the typewriter to writing itself, has been met with fear, skepticism and a longing for the medium that's been displaced. Far from heralding in a "2001: Space Odyssey" dystopia, Baron believes that social networking sites, blogs and the Internet are actually making us better writers and improving our ability to reach out to our fellow man. "A Better Pencil" is both a defense of the digital revolution and a keen examination of how technology both improves and complicates our lives.

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2009/09/19/better_pencil/index.html

Exploring News by the Amish Online

IT’S not easy being the emissary from the digital world in Amish country.

For two weeks this summer, Jessica Best, a 22-year-old journalist from Wales, fell into that role as the intern at The Budget of Sugarcreek, Ohio, a weekly that is the largest newspaper serving the Amish.

Her self-assigned task, supported by a traveling scholarship from the Welsh Livery Guild, was to study The Budget’s transition to the Internet and the willingness of the Amish to accept that transition. It led, she said, to many a friendly, if awkward, conversation, some of which she chronicled in a blog written from Sugarcreek.
There was the Amish man where she was a houseguest who asked her what an “ip-id” was. “He had read about an iPod,” she explained. “I wish I had had mine with me to show him.”

Her experiences taught her a general rule: “it is difficult to explain a Web site to someone who hasn’t seen one.”

Yet for all the gaps among the technology-shunning Amish — grist for stand-up comics — Ms. Best said she was struck by what was familiar in the way news spread among the Amish.

The national edition of The Budget, now available in print only, is largely composed of submissions from hundreds of volunteer “scribes” from across the country. Typically, a scribe talks about the weather and segues into the goings-on in the local community. Around 500 scribe letters a week take up roughly 50 pages, said the publisher, Keith Rathbun, who like the rest of the Budget staff is not Amish. (The local edition covers just the area around Sugarcreek.)

In a letter dated Sept. 3, a scribe from Camden, Ind., told how a great-uncle, Owen, had the family over to “cut down a big tree in the front yard and turn it into firewood. Uncle Owen cut it down while his sons stopped traffic as they had to throw it on the road. He got tired out, but at 89 I think that is doing quite well.”

By assembling detailed reports from around the country, Ms. Best said, the editors of The Budget “have been doing for 100 years what we have only been doing recently — looking at news on the hyperlocal scale and asking each person what is on your mind,” she said in an interview from Newport, Wales, where she is a reporter at The South Wales Argus.

“They are looking at the individuals to make a bigger picture. With the Internet, the power has shifted to many hands, but they have done that for a long time.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/technology/internet/21link.html?ref=technology

Wireless Carriers Oppose Neutrality Rules

08:58AM Tuesday Sep 22 2009 by Karl Bode

AT&T and Verizon have unsurprisingly come out against the FCC's new network neutrality push. "AT&T has long supported the principle of an open Internet and has conducted its business accordingly," says AT&T's top policy man Jim Cicconi, joining a chorus of carriers this week suddenly pretending they support rules governing their network management.

Calling wireless the "most competitive consumer market in America," Cicconi warned that such rules are impractical because of the bandwidth concerns on wireless networks, which in AT&T's case are partially self inflicted given intentionally lower wireless CAPEX despite the clear demands of Apple iPhone users. Cicconi's suggestion that network neutrality principles shouldn't adhere to wireless networks would seem to run contrary to statements he made just one year ago, when he suggested that broadband principles should be applied "across the board."

Verizon similarly says they're working hard with their "Open Development Initiative" to embrace open networks without government prodding, though as we've explored, the initiative is more public relations than substance so far.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Wireless-Carriers-Oppose-Neutrality-Rules-104580

Google Working to Revise Digital Books Settlement

September 21, 2009

By MIGUEL HELFT

For months, Google and its partners in a class-action settlement that would allow the company to create a vast digital library appeared unmoved by a rising tide of opposition. 

Google and its settlement partners — the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers — argued that the agreement would not harm competition, and said they were confident that it would be approved in its current form by a federal court.

But the Justice Department, in a filing on Friday, made clear that the parties were busily negotiating modifications that would address some of the concerns raised. Those negotiations are likely to accelerate now that the Justice Department has said that it too believes the settlement raises serious legal issues and has urged the court not to approve it without changes. 

Legal experts say the new round of discussions, and the government’s intervention, are almost certain to delay an agreement that Google and the other parties were eager to see ratified quickly. 

“The news out of this is that there are frantic negotiations going on in back rooms right now,” said James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School, which raised antitrust and other objections to the settlement. “The parties are scared enough to be talking seriously about changes, with each other and the government. The government is being the stern parent making them do it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/technology/internet/21google.html?ref=technology 

A Blogger Makes a Pitch for Supporting Print

Blogs are often criticized for helping to kill print media. Last week, though, the prominent political blogger Andrew Sullivan used his forum on TheAtlantic.com to tell readers to subscribe to the print edition of the magazine.

It worked. Within two days after last Monday’s post, Mr. Sullivan’s appeal pulled in 75 percent of the subscriptions that the Web site draws in a typical month, the magazine’s publisher, Jay Lauf, said. The Atlantic expects this month’s subscription orders to be double an average month’s.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/business/media/21atlantic.html?_r=1&ref=technology&pagewanted=print

The Machine is Us/ing Us

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g