Newswatch: Schooling the Mass Market to Pay for Content -FT.com
Monday 8am Silicon Valley news report:
Charging for consumer media content "may work for specific niches of content and consumers", Mr Lancefield argues, "but it can't be just repackaged and repurposed. To tip people into the fee-paying world, it will have to be distinctive and new". Yet making more distinctive content will be hard for companies simultaneously cutting costs in reaction to plunging revenues.
A Web That Speaks Your Language -NYTimes
A number of services, automated and human, are helping to translate what Mr. Zuckerman calls “the polyglot Internet.”
Impending hurricanes and missing children make the local news, but what about smaller incidents — like senior citizens who wander from their care facility or nearby traffic accidents — that residents still want to know about?
Site Lets Writers Sell Digital Copies -NYTimes
In the new Scribd store, authors or publishers will be able to set their own price for their work and keep 80 percent of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with security software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied.
South Korea tries recharging road to power vehicles -Reuters
Unlike electric lines used for trams, vehicles do not need to be in constant contact with the strips and a person can touch the lines without receiving a shock.
Major League Baseball awarded geolocation patent -Reuters
MLB said in the patent application that its technology could apply to promotions, sweepstakes, contests, fantasy games, sale of goods or services, and targeted advertising. However, Valdes said that type of wording was typical as companies seek to broaden the scope of a patent.
Is Facebook Working on a Recommendation Technology? -NYTimes
More likely is the explanation offered by AllFacebook readers, that this new feature is just a way to scrunch up items that are basically the same so users can't spam their friends' newsfeeds and so that newsfeeds are more pleasing to scan down. In other words, in the image above, the two-headed person on top probably posted about "besplatno-ing" like four times in a row.
Just Browsing? A Web Store May Follow You Out the Door -NYTimes
Instantaneous e-mail remarketing might appear to produce an increase in sales, which are easily measured, he said, but “you can’t see the negative effects on customers who are irritated and will never come back again.”
Frustration, distress over Google outage -SFGate
Andrew Kovacs, a Google spokesman, acknowledged outages like Thursday's attract a lot of attention. However, "cloud computing," as the online software is generically known, is more reliable than companies operating their own data centers.
Why Google's Outage Wasn't a Complete Failure -ComputerWorld
With a couple of hours, representatives offered a full explanation of what happened. And an apology. And an assurance that steps were being taken to prevent a meltdown like that from ever happening again.
Curating the Best of the Web: Video -NYTimes
On the Web, digital curators help you organize and manage the data deluge. Content may be still be king, but curated content, filtered through a sieve to help put it into context, may soon begin to reign supreme.
