The Atlantic has provided an analysis of the Amazon vs. Hachette dispute and explains why you should care. Again, consumers ultimately find themselves the losers when competition diminishes. The battle for domination appears to benefit the consumer, but the eventual elimination of options presents a very different situation.
I am still waiting for Apple to make iBooks cross-platform. This was possible (kind of) with iMusic. Why not a more general way to consume books?
Lately, we spend a lot of time in the car. The drive to and from our lake place takes about 6 hours. I enjoy driving long distances and we both agree on listening to podcasts as a way to multi-task during the trips.
Our typical programs are provided through the TWIT (This week in tech) network. We have been following host Leo Laporte since the days of TechTV – a cable channel that was eventually cancelled. Cindy happened to be reading the Pioneer Press (St. Paul) while I was driving and came across several articles in the business section devoted to the rise of the podcaster. This has to be some kind of meta-experience – reading about Leo Laporte while listing to home from your iPod.
I encourage anyone to explore podcasts as a source of information and entertainment. If you are an iTunes user, you can use the iTunes store to locate podcasts on a wide variety of topics.
We all like a good deal, but often prefer not to know why some goods come at a low cost. It could be outsourcing, companies that refuse to pay workers benefits, or perhaps companies that use their size to squeeze suppliers.
If you have read “The Everything store”, you understand that Amazon falls into the final category. The NY Times describes a current campaign to bring the cost of books provided by Hachette down and provide you a good deal. Great for you. Great for Hachette. Not so good for the publishing company and the authors.
Who gets to define the terms that are the focus of a debate? One might think that a phrase has an obvious meaning, but for reasons of self promotion or ambiguity this is not always of the way it works. Take “fair and balanced” as an example.
I have been commenting on the role of corporate interests in exerting control over your Internet for some time. How do I offer fair and unbalanced comments on this topic. I am by nature an idealist and I had hopes for free expression on the Internet as a way to take back public participation in all forms of policy and politics. Whatever claims made against the biases of media outlets, I had hoped that the opportunity for each of us to express our personal biases would be a remedy. Most probably have no idea why Web 2.0 was described as 2.0. The notion of a “participatory web” or a “read/write web” we could be more than consumers.
The leveling potential of the web in terms of equal expression and equal opportunity is being threatened by the companies that control your access to the Internet. Your cable or phone company wants to do more than offer you access. They want to influence what you access. This is how I think of net neutrality – does the provider exert control over how you use the bandwidth your purchase. Some might claim that is up to the provider as they are providing the service. I might agree should I have alternatives in the services I can access. This is not the case and given that monopolistic practices typically are allowed with some government oversight I encourage reasonable government control of price and neutrality.
Now, to what I mean by the definition of terms. Net neutrality is one of those “Rorchach”-like abstractions that individuals interpret according to their own beliefs. I would prefer we are clear on what we mean by “neutrality” in this case and I defer to Tim Wu on this matter. Wu coined the phrase and hence explains what it meant before it was corrupted by others.
The National Science Foundation report on state by state science performance has been released. Access to the indicators can be found here – http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/index.cfm/state-data
Lately, I have been running into tutorials for popular web services (e.g., Youtube). Here is a guide from The Next Web for Google+. Educators would likely be interested in the use of circles to control access.
