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Via.

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The post title is taken from Roy Blount Jr.’s NYT Op-Ed entitled “The Kindle Swindle?” In it he argues, in his capacity as president of the Author’s Guild, that the Kindle 2 will undermine the market for audio books, which provide a decent amount of income to authors. He writes: “What the guild is [...]

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From the NYT:
… The PepsiCo Americas Beverages division of PepsiCo is bowing to public demand and scrapping the changes made to a flagship product, Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice. Redesigned packaging that was introduced in early January is being discontinued, executives plan to announce on Monday, and the previous version will be brought back in [...]

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Roger Ebert makes me want to be a better writer.

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CNET has a fluff piece about the fun of iPhoto’s new face recognition software. The author shares how the software identified a friend as a lemur and mistakenly identified friends as aged relatives. So here “the goofs are what make it fun.” One tags some photos and the software examines the entire library to find [...]

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Via.

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Five newspapers in the Northeast are going to pool some of their newsgathering to save money, an ad hoc editorial pooling arrangement (commons) that both presages more to come and echoes other larger, more complex commons all around us.  Given that commons is one of my main research interests at the moment, one thing I [...]

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If you do any significant internet-related research, chances are you know who danah boyd is.  If not, there’s a Wikipedia page with a run-down of relevant details and links.  What I did not know until just now is that her PhD thesis on teens and social software is posted online.  You can find a link [...]

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Have you ever noticed that really engaging academic scholarship unfolds like a story?  Like the authors had subconscious ideas about main characters and plots and conflict and resolution?  Great scholars are often great characters in their own right, or at least they become great characters, in kind of a literary way.  I think I have a [...]

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Some time back, I noticed that Rick Garnett at Prawfs was one of the few people to notice a recent David Brooks column in the New York Times on the value of institutions. 

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I’ve been pretty busy lately, but I wanted to link to some recent blog posts of mine that may interest Madisonian readers. On Balkinization, I’ve put up a few posts recently on innovation policy:
Beyond Innovation: The Many Goals of Internet Law and Policy
Beyond Competition: Preparing for a Google Book Search Monopoly
Search [...]

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[Updated Feb. 22:  With the benefit of more information about this affair, I'm advised that my speculation about Facebook's interest in changing its ToS to enable service delivery may be not only incorrect but positively upside down.  The old ToS makes clear that Facebook needs rights in user data in order to enable service delivery; [...]

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From here:
… a friend told us the story of her husband taking their 3 year old kid out to run errands. He decided to grab some lunch for them and pulled into Arby’s. The kid, not being able to read, yelled out “Yay! Arby’s!”
The dad was surprised because the kid couldn’t read yet so he [...]

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Seems even longer!

More here.

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Google Books is an amazing service. Many others have raved about it, and many others have analyzed the settlement agreement between Google and the The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. For very insightful analyses, see various posts here (a, b, c, d, e) and here, here, here, and here. [...]

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Major cuss word warning! Don’t watch this in South Carolina!

See also.

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I’ve wondered about that sometimes. Mother Jones reports:
Americans can buy virtually anything over the Internet these days—sex, booze, houses—everything, that is, but a new car. If you want to buy a new Ford Fusion, you have to go down to your local dealership and haggle with the car salesmen, an unpleasant and daunting task. The [...]

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A second draft op ed, below the fold

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