Gleen Greenwald has a great article at Salon on the indistinguishability of the telecommunications industry and the government. [Tags: ]

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I like Jaiku both because as the second entrant, it learned from Twitter, the first entrant, and because Jyri Engeström is one of those brilliant, sweet people who make the world better in several dimensions at once. (Disclosure: Jyri is a conference buddy.)

It’ll be interesting to see where Google surfaces the UI for entering Jaiku microblog posts and where it surfaces the posts themselves.

And most important, of course, is whether Jaiku will be renamed Jaigoo or Jookle. [Tags: jaiku twitter google blogging Jyri_Engeström everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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David Isenberg lays out a history of common carriage as part of an argument for Net Neutrality.

You should also note his quoting of Jim Hoffa on AT&T’s decision to censor messages it considers critical of AT&T. [Tags: david_isenberg net_neutrality at&t jim_hoffa free_speech ]

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Berkman.TV has posted a video in which Wendy Seltzer and Angela Kang explain why the Harvard Coop was deliriously wrong when it used copyright to justify its kicking out a student for copying down book prices. [Tags: copyright berkman wendy_seltzer angela_kang publishing harvard harvard_coop ]

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Soctt Kirsner has started a as the online side of his Boston Globe “Innovation Economy” column. He says:

My goal with both the column and the blog is to cover the most interesting people and companies involved in the tech, VC, and life sciences scene here in New England…ideally before they’re written about elsewhere.

So, New England innovators, start your PR engines! :) [Tags: scott_kirsner innovation ]

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Martin Weller has an excellent article on the future of content, presenting an economic and a quality argument for why it’s bound to be (in my terms) miscellanized.

This is the first in a “distributed blogging” experiment that will have three other bloggers responding. [Tags: content publishing books clay_shirky martin_weller long_tail chris_anderson everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Julian Dibble has a rich post about the interpenetrating of work and play. There’s so much in it, it’s hard to know where to start. Fortunately, I don’t have to decide because I’m running late for a presentation… [Tags: julian_dibble game play philosophy economics ]

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I keynoted Shop.org this morning and then walked up the long aisles of their exhibit hall. I was (and am) pooped, so what caught my eye was more random than usual.

I thought PermissionData.com was going to be one of those phony permission marketing companies that are all too happy to spam you. Nope. They show you (at your request) a page of offers. None of the boxes are pre-clicked and none are pre-clicked and below the fold. The idea is that if you trick people into giving you permission to spam them, they are remarkably bad leads. Bad leads cost money. So, good for PermissionData!

3B.net looks like a combination of Second Life, the early Wolfenstein, and LL Bean. They render the entries in your product catalog as posters along the wall in a 3D space. Your avatar and your friends’ avatars can wander together, talk about what you see, and click to be taken to the normal merchandising page. The guy in the booth (lost his name…sorry) and I bonded over our days playing Doom, Duke Nukem, and the under-rated Painkiller.

I met Rousseau Aurelien, CEO of SecondRotation, which aims at being the place you sell your stuff when you’re done with it. If the item is one of the thousands on SR’s list, SR buys it from you and arranges to have it picked up. It then refurbishes it and resells it or donates it. Rousseau says they pay about two thirds of the going rate at eBay. But, boom, you’re done. I asked how many people say their item is in one shape, but when it arrives, it turns out to be broken or damaged. Rousseau replied that 95% of the stuff is in the shape claimed or better. “People are generally good,” he says.

I kept running into people from Bazaarvoice. (Brett Hurt, the CEO, introduced me when I gave my talk; he said some very kind things. Thank you, Brett. It meant a lot to me.) Bazaarvoice creates customer review pages. The booth had one of the more effective marketing gimmicks: a rack of irreverent sayings you could attach to your name badge, like the “speaker” and “media” tags. I saw a whole bunch of people with “More cowbell” tags from Bazaarvoice.

I met with Daniel Wright, CEO of mporia, which does “m-commerce” (= e-commerce for mobile phones). Interesting space. It’s not going to get smaller over time. The actual transactions are handled via PayPal, or by sending the merchant an encrypted message with the credit card info.

I stopped in at Broadvision because they bought Interleaf years ago, a company I worked at for eight years. (I was long gone by the time it got bought.) Interleaf was way ahead of its time, with a structured document editor, electronic publishing system, document management system, and program-enabled documents. I often wonder why there’s no market for high end document systems for managing the creation and management of large, complex document sets. Broadvision is still selling the Interleaf system, and the maintenance stream is strong. Good to see the product is still around.

I also visited briefly in the Endeca booth because Endeca is doing great selling faceted classification (they call it “guided navigation”) systems, and I like what they’re doing. It’s been fun watching the company go from just about nothing to having an amazing client roster.

So, that was a truly random assortment. Now it’s off to the casinos to use my patented and proven Lossless Las Vegas System(tm): I don’t play. Well, I will drop $20 into gambling machines and wonder why people consider this fun. [Tags: shop.org ecommerce marketing ]

[Note: I had a stupidity glitch and ended up deleting and then rewriting from memory what this post said. The original was up for about 15 mins and this one is as close as I could come to the original. If you noticed the change, I didn’t want you to think there’s anything nefarious going on. Just stupidity.]

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My sister-in-law, Meredith Sue Willis, the novelist and writing teacher, ran a piece in her newsletter about how small presses see Amazon. It’s by Jonathan Greene of the Gnomon Press. I thought it was interesting. Here it is, in its entirety:

Just back from the [Kentucky] State House chambers and the uphill
useless fight against legislation to give Peabody Coal millions in
incentives which may very well result in more mountaintop removal
devastation in the eastern coalfields.

But back to Amazon, this from the view of a small publisher (with over
40 years experience): The way the book world is set up is less than
ideal for a small publisher. Amazon is not Evil in that in many
instances it gives access to readers who want small press books that are
not otherwise easily available. Certainly I agree with my friend Gordon
Simmons: first support your local independent bookstore if you are lucky
enough to have a good one in your neighborhood; they are a dying breed.

But not all such bookstores will go to the trouble to order a book that
is not distributed by the near-monopoly of Ingram Book Co. Ingram takes
the same deep discount (55% off of list price) that Amazon takes, but
(unlike Amazon) Ingram often returns much of what it buys in beat-up
condition which the publisher has to eat plus pay the UPS cost back to
its door. I once got a hardback book returned by Ingram with a razor cut
the length of its spine through both the jacket and the cloth. And had
to pay for its trip back to my warehouse. As far as Amazon being
non-union, I doubt many bookstores are union or pay what many would
consider decent wages. Not right, but friends who work in stores
complain to me about this fact without telling me their specific
salaries.

Readers can also try to support publishers directly if their local store
will not bother to order a book that Ingram does not carry. Research
on-line and contact or buy from the publisher directly. Not all
publishers take credit cards, a reason some would prefer to deal with
Amazon. Barnes & Noble often will not order from small publishers
directly, but often seem to give out their telephone numbers to those
that want books from those publishers. Small Press Distribution and
Consortium that distribute books for many small presses return even less
to small presses that Amazon: they normally sell books to stores or
chains at 40% – 55% then take half of the gross receipts of any payment
and put the amount due the publisher in escrow for three months. And
Consortium charges the publisher a re-stocking fee for any books stores
or distributors return. In other words, it is almost impossible for a
small literary publisher to survive without massive infusions of grants
from NEA and foundations. Or increasingly asking for author subsidies.
And this affects writers who want to be published by small publishers.
The health of these publishers helps the writers they publish. The
worsening condition is also caused by big publishers deciding to kill of
their mid-list authors, authors who do not sell books at or above the
10,000 range. They would rather publish fewer authors selling more
product (a ubiquitous hateful word now in the book trade).

Print-on-demand vendors are a new avenue for authors and publishers. Or
in many instances now the author is the self-publisher. A complicated
situation. Bashing Amazon is not really helpful. Bash Ingram, bash the
fact that mainstream literary publishing is now dominated by
multi-nationals. Knopf, Random House, Farrar Straus, etc. are now owned
by German companies. Or lament the fact that just released figures state
that 27% of Americans do not even read one book a year. One was quoted:
reading made them sleepy. Well, then tout reading for insomniacs as much
healthier than sleeping pills. That should boost book sales.

BTW, Gnomon is no longer accepting manuscripts for publication. [Tags: amazon books publishing gnomon_press jonathan_greene meredith_sue_willis media bookstores ]

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A couple of days ago, my friend Francois Gossieaux (whose name in my address book is marked with a big “THIS IS THE CORRECT SPELLING”) interviewed me (phoninar format) for his marketing group called MarketHum. The mp3 is here. [Tags: marketing cluetrain francois_gossieaux markethum]

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