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An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an email message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. "When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers' devices, and refunded customers," he said. Wow, swiping media you've already paid for out of your own media device. Down the memory hole we go. It's oh so 1984. No, really, one of the reapprop

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Conrad writes: "He took out a piece of double-sided tape and began peeling the paper off one side. 'Well, I'm gonna have you tape this microphone to the inside of the front of your bra and run the wire around your side, then I'll clip the mike pack on the back of your bra.' He pressed the tape down, securing it against the tiny mike, and handed it to her. Then he pushed both his thumbs against the tiny mike pack, holding down two buttons at once. After a couple of seconds, a small green light gl

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The company this week disclosed the results of an elaborate study on online video advertising called Project Inform. That effort sought to find a better ad standard for the burgeoning medium, preferably one that combined brand effectiveness with user tolerance. By early 2009, it had boiled down its list of potential ad formats to three, including the classic pre-roll. Another unit was called the Lower 1/3 Product Suite, which combines five-second pre-rolls with transparent Flash ads that take ov

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During the past few weeks, America witnessed a growing movement to rein in, extract money from, or stop altogether the aggregators who are accused of eroding news sites' revenues by quoting from or linking to traditional (and expensive) content. Murdoch (in all his wisdom) is leading the charge to, well, charge for content on his many online news sites. Aside from the ridiculousness of thinking you can put the genie back in the bottle let alone make people pay for it, going backwards is no way t

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It is variously described as crowdsourcing, the wisdom of crowds, collective intelligence and peer production - and these terms apply to a range of practices. The overarching notion is that the internet opens the door to a new world of democratic idea generation and collaborative production. Early triumphs like Linux operating system and Wikipedia web encyclopedia are seen as harbingers. In the new model, innovation is often portrayed as a numbers game. The more heads, the better - all weighing

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"BB Kush, NY Soma, SD Strom, Forrest G, Green C, Baby Crunch, Spy Diesel, buy 1/4 get gram free. Baked goods, Grams, Joints avail." reads the Twitter stream for Artists Collective, a Hollywood based dispensary. Artists Collective also has Facebook and Myspace pages touting their free delivery service, as do other medical marijuana dispensaries, like San Francisco's Green Cross. In California, it's legal to cultivate and dispense marijuana for medical purposes provided both grower and buyer adher

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The patents are titled "On-Demand Generating E-Book Content with Advertising" and "Incorporating Advertising in On-Demand Generated Content," and they're designed in part to tackle that irritating little problem that "out of print or rare books ... typically do not include advertisements" and their content is thus fixed, and not at all "adapted to modern marketing." Would you tolerate in-book embedded ads? Would they drive you crazy? Would they defeat the whole purpose of, y'know, actually buy

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Viral videos of YouTube 1.0 - dog-on-skateboard and cat-on-keyboard - are being supplemented by a new, more vibrant generation of online video. Production companies are now creating 10- and 20-minute shows for the Internet and writing story arcs for their characters - essentially acting more like television producers, while operating far outside the boundaries of a network schedule. Story arcs? Hell, what will they think of next?

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