As of press time, 9,016 people answered “yes” to this question. 26,668 said “no.”
On one side, those content producers who choose to stay on the free-and-open web will be forced into making more and more ethically dubious decisions to stay profitable. Out will go professional writers and church-and-state separation of content and commerce; in will come more Groupon-style “reader offers”, affiliate links behind every keyword and an Idiocracy of dumber and dumber linkbait.
All the while, Ms. Deng hasn’t neglected the business of minding Mr. Murdoch, who has undergone the kind of change in appearance often associated with a man’s marrying a new and much-younger wife.
Mr. Murdoch for decades preferred establishment addresses such as New York’s Upper East Side and Bel Air in Los Angeles. But after remarrying, he and Ms. Deng set up residence in Manhattan’s trendy downtown SoHo district, a few blocks from the apartment of Mr. Murdoch’s son, Lachlan. Known for his British-style double-breasted business suits, the elder Mr. Murdoch suddenly started sporting black turtlenecks on some social occasions. News Corp. executives say that sometimes he even forgoes a tie at the office, which was once unthinkable. He told Vanity Fair that he is pumping iron with a personal trainer at 6 a.m. and downing a morning concoction of fruit and soy protein.
Call him Rue.
We live in the much vaunted Age of Information. Courtesy of the Internet, we seem to have immediate access to anything that anyone could ever want to know. … In effect, we are living within the nimbus of an informational Gresham’s law in which trivial information pushes out significant information, but it is also an ideational Gresham’s law in which information, trivial or not, pushes out ideas.
Internet Killed the Philosopher
$32 million settlement, an average of $1,846 per employee involved. (I wasn’t in the ESOP.) Not exactly a big payday for journalists that rode the leveraged buyout into the concrete.
The unspoken comparisons of Baidu to the early days of Google are staggering.
"Songs you listen to often on Spotify sit, encrypted, on your hard drive. The application looks first for these; if it doesn’t find them, it pulls down 15 seconds of the song from the closest server while it looks for copies of the rest of the song on the hard drives of other users near you. This is file sharing. It increases speed and lowers the demand on central servers by spreading it among several connections. Spotify and The Pirate Bay don’t just share a country; they share an operating system."
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Some of the magic why Spotify is such a slick service.
Daniel Ek’s Spotify: Music’s Last Best Hope - BusinessWeek
(via david-noel)
(via soupsoup)
"It’s transparently ridiculous that someone would buy a $600 phone with a 5-megapixel camera and then download an app that makes photos look like their grandma took them with a drugstore-bought camera, got them developed at the drugstore, then left them out in the sun for a week because of all the drugs."
— Wired’s Lore Sjöberg on apps like Hipstamatic making any photo look like “art.” (via cnnmoneytech)
Apple Rocks Way Cool!
My sister found a textbook in New Zealand called Apple: Business in Action, published in 1997 (a very strange time in Apple’s history, with section headings like “Apple on the Decline”), so she sent it to my dad, who would get a kick out of it. Reading it brought back such an ugly nostalgia for what I think of as Apple’s puberty, which coincided with my own…
