Steve Outing writes in E-Media Tidbits today: The concept of “citizen journalism” is getting a lot of people excited. Proponents of it, such as Advance.net’s Jeff Jarvis, have suggested that citizen journalism is a huge business poised to take off. One of the first companies to try to make a buck from this is GetLocalNews.com, […]
Ebooks not ready for prime time
As if we needed more evidence that ebooks aren’t ready for prime time, Jim of Georgetown University writes on Dave Farber’s Interesting People mailing list: Dave, a comical experience. I tried to buy some e-books from Amazon that require the use of Microsoft Reader to access them. The following steps occurred: — order, pay for […]
Have you been Iconized?
So I emailed Emily, the proprietor of textually.org and picturephoning.com, and asked whether a friend sketched that icon of her or whether there’s an online service that converts photos into cartoon graphics. She wrote back: “I had it made by Iconize-Me. I think it’s for Mac users only.” It’s an interesting little indie site that […]
Freenet floggers
Ian Clarke, the 26-year-old Irish programmer/tech innovator, greatly impressed me during our 90-minute chat today. He just moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, after spending three years in Santa Monica, Calif. The reason was not so much his distaste for this administration’s foreign policy (“The joke is that I was carted off to Guantanamo,” he said) but […]
Amazon hobbles its new search feature
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has a message on the front page of Amazon’s site today: Starting today, you can find books at Amazon.com based on every word inside them, not just on matches to author or title keywords. Search Inside the Book — the name of this new feature — searches the complete inside text […]