Last month, I mentioned the opposition that British papers were fielding to British state broadcaster BBC’s plan to put news content into free iPhone applications in April. Now the BBC has delayed releasing those applications at least until the BBC Trust can examine them more fully at a meeting late next month. British papers fear that the publicly-funded BBC, the beneficiary of billions of dollars in yearly household TV licenses, could harm their own commercial efforts. The article notes that BBC web content “has discouraged many newspapers from attempting to charge readers for content on the Web,” and...

From their blog: We’re bringing DailyLit books to Tumblr. In case you aren’t familiar with it, Tumblr is an innovative blogging platform that allows you to follow friends’ blogs and easily share posts. Tumblr joins DailyLit’s other distribution platforms: email, RSS, and Viigo. We’re kicking things off tomorrow–Tuesday, March 30–with our first three, what should we call them? Tumblebooks? Tumblogbooks? Tumblooks? Anyway, you can find them here: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Emily Dickinson’s Poems The Art of War We hope you’ll join us in this new way to read together!...

Repeatedly commentators write that information wants to be free in the Internet Age. In my own contrarian way, I’ve concluded that information doesn’t want to be free; rather, it wants to be universally accessible. Okay, I know this isn’t the popular perspective but when you get down to the nitty-gritty, information doesn’t have its own life. Someone created that informational bit that you seek — it wasn’t just there waiting to be grabbed. A story is information. The information is contained in words. I’ll grant that the words may be just there for the grabbing — but not in the sequence of...

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90-year-old Canadian history magazine The Beaver is changing its name. Why? In brief, Internet filters. In being named for the dam-building creature that is Canada’s national emblem, it is also named for a prominent slang word for female genitalia. This means that anyone behind a web filter, such as those commonly used at schools and libraries, may be unable to read it. This is only the latest in a number of problems caused by overenthusiastic filter software. Residents of British towns of Scunthorpe, Penistone, and Lightwater have had problems with getting Internet services because their names contained obscenities....

According to the European version of Techcrunch, the iPad may have some real competition in Germany - the WePad, which will be released soon. Formal announcement of the hardware and media partnerships will be made on April 12. The WePad has signed up Europe's biggest publisher, Gruner + Jahr, and is in talks with Axel Springer, publisher of Europe's biggest newspaper, Bild. The underlying strategy is clear: “We insist on our sovereignity of products and contents”, Buchholz said in his Thursday’s speech, clearly hinting at recent problems. Apple removed the Stern iPhone app in November without warning from the App...

If you haven't caught any of them, time to to over to the Apple site and check out the guided tours for the iPad. Neat!...

According to information MacRumors received from an anonymous source, iTunes 9.1 will drop this weekend simultaneous with the iPad’s US rollout, and will include e-book support. Still no word on whether there will be an iBooks app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, however. According to the source, the existing "Audiobooks" entry in the iTunes Source list will be replaced with a broader "Books" section. A similar change will made to the sources for managing content on connected devices such as iPhones, iPods, and iPads. The revamped "Books" section for connected devices will reportedly display...

3D seems to be the latest fad. Half the new movies that come out use it to some extent, including the movie that made the highest (unadjusted) revenue of any single film yet. Even Nintendo has said that the next Gameboy DS will have 3D capabilities. Now researchers in South Korea have come up with a system to create 3D e-books. Details are spare in the Reuters article, but it explains: Pictures in the books have cues that trigger the 3D animation for readers wearing computer-screen goggles. As the reader turns and tilts the...

The 22 new titles cover a range of both regional and metropolitan publications including the Cheshire Observer, the Royal Cornwall Gazette, the Isle of Man Times and the Nottinghamshire Guardian. Adding to an existing selection of 49 titles, the 22 additional publications have been chosen by leading experts and academics to significantly extend the geographical coverage of the resource including a whole range of both regional and metropolitan titles. The additions to the archive have also sought to provide a more comprehensive picture of the political spectrum in the 19th century and include the entire runs of two additional major London...

Last week, the Society of Professonal Journalists released the first volume of its “Digital Media Handbook”—a collection of essays from its members on the uses of various Internet and digital tools including PDFs, videos, social networking, Google Wave, and so forth. While it probably could stand to be a little better-organized in some cases (why did the essay on using hashtags in Twitter come several sections before the “beginner’s guide to Twitter”?), it has a lot of information that could be useful to journalists only just getting their feet wet in the digital arena. Find it on Scribd...

Last week, writer and consultant Mark McLaughlin had a great article in the Huffington Post about the current attempts of newspapers and others to get audiences to pay for on-line content. McLaughlin points out that audiences usually don’t pay for content, but rather for distribution. It is the advertisers who pay for content. McLaughlin cites the old print newspaper delivery system as an example: newspaper readers didn’t pay for the content in the paper, but for having the paper delivered to their door every day regardless of whether they read a single article in it or not. Advertisers...