With the looming loss of Google Reader, there has been a rethink of "what is it good for anyway?" Some felt that RSS has long been a poor medium for reading. They long for formatting that is consistent with the way an author intended. There have been some Google Reader alternatives that have provided that …
With Google Reader gone, is Google Scholar next?
Yesterday, Google announced its "spring cleaning" whereby it, usually, discards products most people had long thought discarded. Usually the products are Blackberry ones that don't really yield controversy. A few years back, Google retired Buzz which was generally regarded as a failure. Some product retirements are a little more troubling. Consider Google Wave as I wrote about in …
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Will Cory Doctorow buy an iPad now?
When the iPad first came out in 2010, Cory Doctorow said he would not buy one and advised others not to do so either. He had lots of reasons but for this post I want to address Reason No.1: Incumbents made bad revolutionaries Relying on incumbents to produce your revolutions is not a good strategy. …
The Microsoft "Sequester"
Here is a definition of "sequester" that isn't the real definition but what we now talk about. A sequester is a situation where a party (or parties) agree to a horribly painful and costly course of action to themselves in the event that they do not take a certain action. For the US Congress, the …
The Sullied Media Model
Andrew Sullivan is one of the world's best known and well-read bloggers. Or is he a journalist. I have no idea. Nor do I really care. He writes things and people read them. Up until recently, Sullivan has worked on mainstream publishing platforms like Time and The Atlantic and then to the less mainstream Daily …
Does The Magazine Want to be Shared?
Macro Arment, the founder of one of my favourite apps, Instapaper, launched a magazine in Apple's Newstand app last year called The Magazine. Thusfar, The Magazine has received much discussion with regard to two things. First, it was accessible via an app-only subscription of $1.99 per month (there were two issues per month each containing …
Gesture control and the QWERTY effect
How we interact with devices is evolving. We started with the keyboard for a century before we added the mouse. On mobile devices, it was the keypad so much so that I remember a tech exec playing futurologist to me around the turn of the century and claiming that the kids want devices that use …
BBC Talk
The video stream from the BBC Seminar on the Economics of Broadcasting that I discussed a few weeks ago is now up. You can access it here. My talk is the third on the list and it is entitled (this will surprise no one), Television Wants to be Shared. There are lots of interesting talks …
Looking again at "Big Deal" scholarly journal packages
One of the things pointed to in the debate over market power and scholarly journals is the rise of "Big Deal" packages. Basically, this has arisen as publishers bundle journals together for a single price. Indeed, as the publishers have merged and acquired more titles, these bundled packages have become more compelling with individual journal …
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First Impressions of Mailbox
Mailbox is a new app for the iPhone. It is one in a growing series of attempts to re-think what email is about. I have written about this previously here. What these new email solutions are doing is recognising that your inbox is really one big to-do list and trying to restructure how you deal …
Digitopoly 