Oliver Reichenstein of IA makes an astute case for a "Business Class for News," which, as a long-time happy subscriber to Ars Technica's Premium Service, I think has much greater potential to be a viable business model for publishers than does a traditional paywall.
Cory Doctorow in the Guardian has a great, quick write-up of the recently-released "Media Piracy in Emerging Economies" report:
"This weighty, 440-page report took thirty-five researchers three years to produce, and it is a careful, thoroughly documented rebuttal of practically everything you've ever heard or read about copyright infringement in the poor world."
It's high time we moved away from knee-jerk reactionary policies based on FUD and started gathering real-world data on the actual impacts of this important issue. With SCIENCE.
Pencil-necked little weasels unite! Republican Matt Dean goes after superstar author Neil Gaiman in true schoolyard bully fashion, railing against the "pencil-necked little weasel who stole $45,000 from the state of Minnesota." Gaiman responds with his usual aplomb, and the internet explodes with indignation. And with puppets. —Pablo
***
A new addition to an already awesome development this spring: the improved experience on the MLB network's Gameday. While the revamped site is great and the MLB.tv option is amazing for any truly crazed baseball fan, I'll focus on the app that goes along with the new feature, MLB At Bat. Some of the awesome features include live clips of games; radio coverage from both teams (a major plus for a Red Sox fan living in NYC); the Gameday feature found on the MLB site (improved considerably); and the scoreboard, which is often overlooked, but done so cleanly in this app. Overall, it's a fantastic experience and I'm thoroughly impressed with the developers. I wouldn't mind seeing this done for a few of my other interests: football, Iron Chef, the Quidditch World Cup . . . —Lara
***
This week Google shared Search Globe, a new tool that allows users to visualize and interact with Google queries worldwide. Across the globe, you can see where searches are coming from with color-coding for language.
Check it on the Google blog or grab the embed code to share the Search Globe on your blog: <iframe src="
http://data-arts.appspot.com/globe-search/embed" height="500" width="500"></iframe>. Google has also open sourced the code so folks can build their own globes using their own data;
click here for the code, or have a look at it at the bottom of this post.
Woody Allen writes about the top five books that have influenced his films and comedy, via the
Guardian. I loved hearing his thoughts on
Catcher in the Rye and Elia Kazan, and his manner on discovering Machado de Assis.
In a bid to raise ad performance,
Facebook is now rewarding users for watching ads. Via Facebook Credits, users can get ten cents for consuming select ads, which they can redeem to buy goods on Facebook Deals. According to Mashable, the ads will mostly appear in games and Crowdstar, Digital Chocolate and Zynga are participating game publishers. —Lauren