<sarcasm alert> Tired of the self-referential and self-important? Then do not attend a conference on communications policy in Washington D.C. (or watch the latest debate among the Republican candidates for president). What is the next best anecdote to that tone? A bit of humor to punctuate the bubble, of course!<End of alert> Need some humor …
Controlling the timeline
Facebook have finally released their much-anticipated timeline. Finally, this is a product change that its users will actually like from the start. It is a major innovation. What timeline is is a way of strolling through all of your Facebook activity since you first enrolled (and indeed, by adding retrospectively, from before that). To be …
Ignore the piracy
Louis CK is responsible for much joy. If you don't believe me, watch this and if that isn't enough hunt down his appearances on The Daily Show. So you had better believe that if he had a digitisation angle I was going to post about it. Fortunately, this week he ran an experiment. Rather than putting …
Pricing the Vogue archive
I must admit that I have no idea why the pricing of the new Vogue archive is interesting me so much. I guess it was Matt Yglesias's post that described the whole endeavour as tragic that got my attention. Having noted that an individual subscription will cost $1,575 per annum, Yglesias wrote: I don't care …
Platforms and a visit to Japan
During the first week of December I visited Tokyo, Japan, and spoke about platforms. This was my first visit to Japan. Accordingly, this post mixes commentary with a bit of travelogue. Platforms are reconfigurable base of components on which participants build applications. Platforms have a long history in computing and electronics, with examples going back …
Amazon's new exclusivity drive
Amazon has introduced a new option for publishers/authors -- Kindle Direct Publishing Select. What is it? KDP Select is a new option that features a $6 million annual fund dedicated to independent authors and publishers. If you choose to make a book exclusive to the Kindle Store for at least 90 days, the book is …
Thinking about patent woes
I'm currently in Brussels at the Charles River Associates conference on competition policy. The session I am participating in is about patent policy and its interaction with antitrust law. As it happened, I read a relevant book on the subject by Alex Tabarrok. It is a short eBook, Launching the Innovation Renaissance. It deals with a …
EC launches eBook collusion investigation
The European Commission has launched an investigation into possible anti-competitive practices in eBook publishing. The European Commission has opened formal antitrust proceedings to investigate whether international publishers Hachette Livre (Lagardère Publishing, France), Harper Collins (News Corp., USA), Simon & Schuster (CBS Corp., USA), Penguin (Pearson Group, United Kingdom) and Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holzbrinck (owner of …
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News Zealots: Old and New
Over the last few days a debate has emerged (or more accurately continued) between those who think newspapers in their current form are socially desirable and should be supported to continue in more or less their current form and those who think that the entire institution has come to an end and is in the …
Why Facebook "gets social" while Google+ does not
[This post originally appeared on HBR Blogs on 1st December, 2011] Back in July, I suggested that Google+ lacked the features that would allow it to displace Facebook. While Google+ was technologically wonderful, I argued, it did not solve a problem for consumers and therefore would not attract users. Despite the reported 50 million people who …
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Digitopoly 