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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

Google already has a mobile version of Google Book Search…
Is the future of ‘books’ likely to be in our palms?

Google and Amazon to put more books on cellphones

2 book publishers announce mobile phone plans

Amazon in Big Push for New Kindle Model

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

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

I was glad to read in a recent Guardian article that MyCBBC, a social networking site for kids launched just four months ago by BBC has already reached 100,000 registered users. I wish them success and hope that they set the benchmark…

And BTW, if you have kids please point them towards MyCBBC, gently!

Read the Guardian article

BTW: If you haven’t been to Plaxo recently you should check out their new interface and tools.

‘xyd wants you to join Yaari!… Is xyz your friend?… Please respond or xyz might think you said no’

Normally I completely ignore such messages, but this time I did not. Why? Firstly, I was curious (media has been giving some play to this site), and the curiosity was heightened by the fact that the company is named as Yaari LLC, and provides an Atlanta address on the invite. Then of course, I was curious what my good friend was doing on a site like this, perhaps there is more there than apparent from the name.

So I went. A short registration later they asked me for my Google or Yahoo password so that they could check if any of my friends were already registered (this step could not be bypassed). I have used this tool at other international sites, but somehow I was suspicious, because they did not give me an option to bypass the utility. Just to be sure I went to the About Us page of the site – Stanford education, lot of media play… looked ok. Somehow I decided NOT to give them my Google password. I feel ashamed to say this but somewhere they being an India site made me doubt their integrity. Hindsight perhaps, but I cannot think of any other reason. . .

A couple of hours later I received a mail from the friend titled ‘YAARI.com is a spammer’ and the contents of the mail:

I received a mail from a friend that was similar to the one you received from yaari.com, pretending it was from me.

They have misused my permission to check if any of the persons in my address book was on their site and sent mails to everyone on it, WITHOUT my express permission.

Please delete the mail from Yaari.

And avoid the site like the plague!

I apologise for the inconvenience

I come out of this with mixed feelings. Am I glad I did not give them my password? I have over 500 email-ids in my addresses book. Yet I feel sad that a web site has breached the unwritten rule of the game and now I, and perhaps you if you have read this, and others who have been penalized, will never trust this beautiful utility and perhaps India sites who expressly promise not to misuse your email id.

PS: Yaari has its flanks covered, perhaps because it is registered in highly litigious US. The fine print of the site’s user agreement, which most people never read, says that they will send mails to all the people in the user’s address book. From now on, I will read the fine print of all sites, at least all sites led by Indians. What a shame!

You’d notice that money is not one of them. It is interesting when you consider that ‘that Google Answers, which paid people to answer other people’s questions, is out of business, but Yahoo Answers, which pays only in non-monetary points, had millions of users…’ Read the article here