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by Brad Stone, New York Times
Amazon announced today it will let publishers decide whether they want the new Kindle e-book device to read their books aloud.
by Ashlee Vance, New York Times
Researchers at Microsoft think they’ve come up with a way to solve the fat-finger issue by letting people manipulate the back of a device with their finger while still looking at the front screen. It’s a project called Nanotouch and was one of many that Microsoft had on display this week at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash., during the TechFest event.
by Miguel Helft and Brian Stelter, New York Times
Google began running small text ads on the pages of its Google News service this week, reviving a debate between the company and some struggling newspaper publishers, who have seen their businesses devastated by the shift of advertising to the Internet.
by Mike Riley, Dr. Dobb's
by Farhad Manjoo, Slate
Amazon's reader is a brilliant device that shanghais book buyers and the book industry into accepting a radically diminished marketplace for published works. If the Kindle succeeds on its current terms, and all signs suggest it'll be a blockbuster (thanks Oprah!), Amazon will make a bundle. But everyone else with a stake in a vibrant book industry—authors, publishers, libraries, chain bookstores, indie bookstores, and, not least, readers—stands to lose out.
by Ashlee Vance, New York Times
by John Battelle, Searchblog
What's the most important and quickly growing form of search on the web today? Real time, conversational search. And who's the YouTube of real time search? Yep. Twitter.
by Steve Lohr, New York Times
The competitive edge of the United States economy has eroded sharply over the last decade, according to a new study by a nonpartisan research group.
by Ina Fried, CNET
First, Microsoft showed off its tabletop Surface computer. Then it showed what that might be like as a sphere. At TechFest on Tuesday, Microsoft actually let the user get inside the sphere.
by Clive Thompson, Wired
Netbooks prove that we finally know what PCs are actually for. Which is to say, not all that much.
by Tim O'Reilly, Forbes
Unless Amazon embraces open e-book standards like epub, which allow readers to read books on a variety of devices, the Kindle will be gone within two or three years.
by L. Gordon Crovitz, Wall Street Journal
For years, publishers and editors have asked the wrong question: Will people pay to access my newspaper content on the Web? The right question is: What kind of journalism can my staff produce that is different and valuable enough that people will pay for it online?
by Alex Wright, New York Times
The challenges that the major search engines face in penetrating this so-called Deep Web go a long way toward explaining why they still can’t provide satisfying answers to questions like “What’s the best fare from New York to London next Thursday?” The answers are readily available — if only the search engines knew how to find them.
by Bobbie Johnson, The Guardian
Ever wondered why traffic lights turn red when they do? How Amazon works out its recommendations? Or how Google prioritises its search lists? It's all done by algorithms - jealously guarded mathematical recipes that increasingly dictate how we lead our lives.
by Dave Rosenberg, CNET
by Randall Stross, New York Times
The popularity of Google’s search engine in the United States just grows and grows. In the past three years, its market share gains have even been accelerating, making some people wonder whether the company will eventually obliterate what remains of its competition in search.
by Tim Culpan, Bloomberg
Asustek Computer Inc. which pioneered the market for sub-$500 laptops, may install Google Inc.'s free Android operating system on its low-cost netbooks, challenging the dominance of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software.
by Diann Dianiel, CIO.com
by Mitch Wagner, InformationWeek
by Iain Thomson, venunet.com
by Jack Shafer, Slate
Inventing and refining the rich content that wants to be sold.
by Steven Musil, CNET
A couple in Pittsburgh whose lawsuit claimed that Street View on Google Maps is a reckless invasion of their privacy lost their case.
by Matt Asay, CNET
by John Markoff, New York Times
The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. The four billion cellphones in use around the globe carry personal information, provide access to the Web and are being used more and more to navigate the real world. And as cellphones change how we live, computer scientists say, they are also changing how we think about information.
by Don Reisinger, CNET
Today's new gamer doesn't want to waste their time playing through an epic adventure; they want to jump on a plastic board that's connected to the Wii.
by Motoko Rich, New York Times
“The days of just reshelving a book are over,” said Ms. Rosalia, who came to P.S. 225 nearly six years ago after graduating at the top of her class at the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies. “Now it is the information age, and that technology has brought out a whole new generation of practices.”
by John Markoff, New York Times
There is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.
by Vindu Goel, New York Times
All of the shuttered projects failed several of Google’s key tests for continued incubation: They were not especially popular with customers; they had difficulty attracting Google employees to develop them; they didn’t solve a big enough problem; or they failed to achieve internal performance targets known as “objectives and key results.”
by Stephen Shankland, CNET
All three on Thursday announced they'd support a technique by which a little extra code in a Web page can indicate the address of its "canonical" version--essentially, the original, primary URL. The move will make it easier to tell search engines what they should pay attention to and to avoid treating duplicative Web pages as different.
by Charles Arthur, The Guardian
For years, people have been wishing for a micropayment system for pages and images on the web. Is there any argument in favour of it?
by Bill Snyder, InfoWorld
With more than 200,000 tech workers on the unemployment line, there's no longer any reason to look abroad for employees.
by David Pogue, New York Times
It can be a business tool, a teenage time-killer, a research assistant, a news source — whatever. There are no rules, or at least none that apply equally well to everyone.
by Geoffrey A. Fowler and Jeffrey A Trachtenberg, Wall Street Journal
Some publishers and agents expressed concern over a new, experimental feature that reads text aloud with a computer-generated voice.
by Tom Sullivan, InfoWorld
A series of announcements suggest 35,000 or more tech-vendor workers lost their jobs this winter; the real figures are far, far less.
by Dave Winer, Scripting News
Why would anyone try to make money by putting an ad on an ad? So when I told you I made over $2 million with this blog, why did you immediately look for ads?
by Brian Hayes, American Scientist
Computers were supposed to be labor-saving devices. How come we're still working so hard?
by Nicholas Carr, Rough Type
We'll likely end up with a handful of mega-journalistic-entities, probably spanning both text and video, and hence fewer choices. This is what happens on the commercial web: power and money consolidate. But we'll probably also end up with a supply of good reporting and solid news, and we'll probably pay for it.
by Michael Kinsley, New York Times
by Clay Shirky
by Erica Ogg, CNET
In the story of e-book readers, we're still in the first chapter.
by Will Leitch, New York Magazine
Sure, the Twitter guys still have no idea how to make money off their fabulous invention. But for now they are living in a dreamworld of infinite possibilities, maybe the last one on Earth.
by Erica Naone, MIT Technology Review
The device betrays a plan to dominate the transition from printed books to electronic ones.
by Libby Purves, The Times
Forget the Baftas and Oscars, the real star of Revolutionary Road is the computer and the freedom it has brought women.
by Claire Wilson, New York Times
A client who claims to know something about design might be an architect's worst nightmare. But it turns out that Joel Spolsky, a software designer, author and blogger, actually knows a lot about it.
by Miguel Helft, New York Times
In a move that could bolster the growing popularity of e-books, Google said Thursday that the 1.5 million public domain books it had scanned and made available free on PCs were now accessible on mobile devices like the iPhone and the T-Mobile G1.
by Matt Asay, CNET
As enterprises get squeezed by the recession, they're going to squeeze their vendors for cost savings. At some point, those vendors' cost structures and business models won't support the squeeze, and the business will go to open-source vendors.
by Josh Quittner, Time
What everyone really wants, of course, is the iPod of e‑readers.
by Neil McAllister, InfoWorld
Novell's open-source .Net clone is alive and well, and it's turning up in surprising, useful places.
by Douglas Quenqua, New York Times
As with anything on the Internet, why this particular distraction has suddenly become a phenomenon is anyone’s guess. For most, it seems to be a creative way to indulge in social networking without coming off as needy or shamelessly self-absorbed.
by Charles Cooper, CNET
Truth be told, it was a compelling performance. I just wonder how long it's going to take before the story line ever jibes with facts on the ground. Panglossian optimism has its place, but Sun's CEO insists on painting a sunny picture that never quite takes shape as envisioned.
by Om Malik, GigaOM
by David Kaplan, paidContent.org
The discussions are revolving around four of the most popular themes: subscription model, micropayments, revenue sharing via devices like Amazon’s Kindle and the non-profit route.
by Noam Cohen, New York Times
There will be lawsuits.
by Powazek
Nine times out of ten, the first impression someone gives you is exactly who they are. We choose not to see it because we need the money, or we want the situation to be different. But if someone rubs you the wrong way at the first meeting, chances are, it’s only going to get worse.
by Roger Ebert, Chicaco Sun-Times
The pages follow in orderly progression. The headlines and artwork point me to stories I find interesting. I am settled. I am serene. I read. I think. I am freed from clicking and the hectic need to scroll, to bounce between links. I don't have search for the print stories. They find me.
by Matt Asay, CNET
To the extend that we build projects that run only with other open-source projets, and intend them to only work with open-source components, we're acting like the proprietary ecosystems that we've been trying to overcome.
by Stephen Foley, The Independent
It was a utopian vision: an encyclopedia for the people, by the people. But eight years on, Wikipedia is plauged by endless hoaxes, riven by boradroom rebellion - and lurches from one cash crisis to another. Will it become a footnote in the history of the web?
by James Urquhart, CNET
by Rafe Needleman, CNET
by Chris Anderson, Wall Street Journal
In a battered economy, free goods and services online are more attractive than ever. So how can the suppliers make a business model out of nothing?
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