Business: April 2008 Archive Page

AP:

Nearly a third of children ages 6 to 10 are regular users of digital audio players, according to market research firm the NPD Group. And thanks to entrepreneurs like Katz, they can now use them to listen to bedtime stories.

In March, the Audible.com founder launched AudibleKids.com, where children can download books directly onto their digital audio players.

"I hear lots of people talking, saying that when they put their kids to bed, they put them down with an audiobook," says Audio Publishers Association president Michele Cobb.

Jason Scott (who has produced a documentary on BBS culture and is working on one now on interactive fiction) offers a thoughtful analysis of an Atari forum thread that went awry.

The problem with a "what do you think about this", or the hardest portion, is listening to what people say and then waiting until it's all died down to give a summary thanks and move on. Fulop instead begins a conversation and ultimately a quasi-interview/roundtable masquerading as a poll.

A web-based forum (in this case, AtariAge) is no longer imbued with the limitations of bulletin board systems; multiple simultaneous posters are a breeze, images can be embedded into discussions, and the software allows for instantaneous restructuring of the postings to satisfy a linear or threaded regard. While in many ways this is a positive set of innovations, it also brings along with it potential for flamewars and flare-ups to immediately consume the parties involved. There is no waiting period. There is an abundance of meta-discussion due to the non-scarce resource of access. There is a lower barrier to entry with commercial and societal interests in lowering the barrier even further. This is the modern environment and it's the way it is.

So saying that there were an average of 4.4 posts an hour is not all that helpful, in fact; you have no idea of the distribution of the messages. Since people can be writing multiple additions simultaneously, the forum can actually "breathe" in a manner not unlike a bellows or chamber in an engine; with posts queuing up in great numbers and blasting across the message base in waves.

Andy Baio offers some forensic digital journalism:

From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" -- a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

For obvious reasons, I can't share the whole Infocom Drive. But I have to share some of the best parts. It's just too good.

So let's start with the most notorious -- Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For the first time, here's the full story: with never-before-seen design documents, internal emails, and two playable prototypes. Sit back, this might take a while.

An article about an entrepreneur who stretches the definition of "book" (International Herald Tribune):

Parker has generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search on Amazon.com under his publishing company shows, making him, in his own words, "the most published author in the history of the planet." And he makes money doing it.

Among the books published under his name are "The Official Patient's Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea" ($24.95 and 168 pages long); "Stickler Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients and Genome Researchers" ($28.95 for 126 pages); and "The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India" ($495 for 144 pages).

But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Parker a compiler than an author. Parker, who is also the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject -- broad or obscure -- and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.

I'm always a bit nervous about reading any news article with "said to consider" or "possibly" or "just might gonna be" in the headline, but the NYT reports:

Over the last decade, CNN has held on-again, off-again talks with both ABC News and CBS News about various joint ventures but during the last several months, talks with CBS have been revived and lately intensified, according to the executives who were granted anonymity because of the confidential nature of the negotiations.

Broadly speaking, the executives described conversations about reducing CBS's newsgathering capacity while keeping its frontline personalities, like Katie Couric, the CBS Evening News anchor, and paying a fee to CNN to buy the cable network's news feeds.

Another possibility, these people said, would be that CBS would keep its correspondents in a certain region but pair them with CNN crews.

Already, newspapers that compete with each other in local coverage use the same wire copy for national or international news. And already, local TV reporters read word-for-word the first few paragraphs of stories from the same wire services. But this is something new.

I'm not a student.  I found your web page while looking for a certain use of slashes.  I thought maybe you might know something about it.

In the legal field, we sometimes use slashes to indicate that there is nothing following the text when there is extra space at the end of a page.  An example would be when a heading falls at the bottom of the page in a brief.  You put in a hard page break to put the heading at the top of the next page, but that leaves a rather large area at the bottom that you don't want some unscrupulous individual to fill with a paragraph that you did not write.  It has been common practice to use centered, spaced slashes indicating the text has stopped on this page and will resume on the next page.

My question is, is there a standard as to how many slashes are used and how far apart they should be spaced?  And, if there is a rather large empty space, should you place a second set a little further down?

/    /    /    /    /

I asked for permission to post this question here.  In the The Aspen Handbook for Legal Writers, a section on slashes does not mention the use described here.

I'm no legal expert, but my legal researcher (a bright 12-year-old named G. Oogle) reveals a case that "held that a virgule ('/'), when placed between two names, is unambiguous and specifically indicates the check is payable in the alternative."

It seems to me that the best thing to do would be to follow whatever conventions you observe in other published writing. If there is a specific rule, I'm not sure what it is or where to look.  Certainly there are plenty of legal blogs (blawgs) out there.

The opening of this story uses the sudden deaths of two bloggers over a three-month span (and the  non-fatal heart attack of a third) in order to suggest that bloggers are blogging themselves into their graves. How many reporters, kindergarten teachers, retirees, people named "Joe" and left-handed people died in the last three months?   OMG -- a trend!

Once you get past that tabloid silliness, you find a thoughtful exploration of the world of bloggers who are paid by the post.

New York Times:

"Wouldn't it be great if we said no blogger or journalist could write a story between 8 p.m. Pacific time and dawn? Then we could all take a break," he added. "But that's never going to happen."

All that competition puts a premium on staying awake. Matt Buchanan, 22, is the right man for the job. He works for clicks for Gizmodo, a popular Gawker Media site that publishes news about gadgets. Mr. Buchanan lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where his bedroom doubles as his office.

He says he sleeps about five hours a night and often does not have time to eat proper meals. But he does stay fueled -- by regularly consuming a protein supplement mixed into coffee.

But make no mistake: Mr. Buchanan, a recent graduate of New York University, loves his job. He said he gets paid to write (he will not say how much) while interacting with readers in a global conversation about the latest and greatest products.