A teat for some of us (I still have old copies of LIFE magazine!). And we have Google to thank for it. I wish the images had better captions, and were better organized… but then I am glad that they are available at all.

So you can see gems like this or  or this (must enlarge and see).

LIFE magazine photo archive

TV has proven its worth as a baby-sitter, across cultures! Social networking has effectively come to represent what we do using a browser and not what we do in our living rooms or parks and sports fields… This is a logical next step. Right?

The only loud objection one can hear is coming from the Author’s Guild of America. They don’t have a problem with the product… actually they suspect it may be very good. What they want is that the authors be sufficiently compensated for the audio rights being bundled into the Kindle 2.

Read the op-ed at the New York Times: The Kindle Swindle?
IHT says “The Kindle: Good before, better now”
Read about the open standards debate at wired

Read the Telegraph article

Read the Time article “Content, Once King, Becomes A Pauper”

Raising questions about the effectiveness of advertising on large portals and social networking sites, the report found that “26% of users never pay attention to the advertising on these sites and a further 36% rarely claim to pay attention to it.”

Media Week article

The other question is what motivates people like Professor R. Preston McAfee to make their books available for free, when they could have earned a fair bit from it — $100,000 advance and more, according to a New York Times article (Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free)

Some sources for free textbooks:

Free Learning  http://freelearning.bccampus.ca/
MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu/
Open Textbook  http://opentextbook.org/
WikiBooks  http://en.wikibooks.org/
Google’s Free Textbook Search http://www.freetextbooks.eu/

Please feel free to add to the list if you know of any more.

“Evo Terra, the co-founder of Podiobooks.com, says 45,000 episodes are downloaded each day.”

If you are in the publishing business you may want to find out more…  at Podiobooks.com you can find and subscribe to audio book as well as novel podcasts.

Links:
Time Article
PodioBooks website

What if you were a social networking site? Would you do something to prevent the eight-year-olds from registering?

I know all of these are not exact parallels, but the fundamental idea is the same. For instance, it bugs me no end that promos for late-night adult movies are shown during prime time TV, sometimes even during programming that is obviously aimed at children.
At least to me, all of these are milder or harsher versions of the same ethical question! There is a difference between putting up some mandatory and hard-to-find signs, and actually preventing the underage customers from being served.

When it comes to social networking, what I find particularly interesting is that the age restrictions are self-imposed, and yet they themselves do not implement them. Why have them at all? Unlike some of the more obvious examples above, there are, to the best of my knowledge, no legal restrictions imposed by any government.

Interesting story in The Times:

Hundreds of thousands of children aged between 8 and 12 years are using Facebook, Bebo and other social networking sites in clear breach of their age-restriction policies.

Facebook and Bebo have a minimum age requirement of 13 and MySpace of 14, but a study by an internet security company suggests that the sites are unable to enforce their own rules.

Almost a quarter of children aged between 8 and 12 say that they are regular users of one of the big three sites, which suggests that they could have as many as 750,000 underage users between them.

Consider the word ‘terrorism’ for instance. Trends shows that steadily people’s preoccupation with it seems to have declined over the years. Search volume is much higher in India than in the USA. The volume has steadily declined over the last couple of years in the US but not in India. Washington DC and New Delhi are the leading cities in terms of search traffic. But in the last 30 days Delhi and Mumbai generated more search traffic than Washington. Makes sense!

And now Google has launched Insights for Search, which takes this to a whole new level. You get a world map of interest and you can drill down to city level too. You can get related terms searched for, for instance war on terrorism, terrorism act.

Consider the word ‘hybrid’ for instance. Over the years interest ebbs and flows, but has recently gone up substantially, what with oil prices as they are. And while USA leads here, India doesn’t figure in the top ten. The word ‘hybrid’ is being searched for mostly in the context of a car and not seeds for instance. Honda and Toyota appear to be associated with the word ‘hybrid’ more than other car brands.

You can truly get some insights. Which you can use for social sciences or for marketing projects.
Google Trends
Insights for Search

Is $50 per “loyal subscriber” a good price?

“We’re trying to build a large presence online as more and more of our customers look to the Web for entertainment and content. Daily Candy fits right into that strategy,” said Sam Schwartz, executive vice president of Comcast Interactive Media. The company said the Daily Candy purchase fit well with its cable television properties, including the Style and E! Entertainment channels.