It used to be that the term “aggregator” was generally used for on-line services such as Google News that pulled together articles from a variety of sources to provide a web-based news summary more inclusive than any one source alone. Then Flipboard came along, showing a completely different way of gathering and displaying news on tablets. Needless to say, when something new and original comes along, the rest of the world immediately tries to copy and improve upon it. So now PaidContent has a comparison chart of Flipboard and eight other news aggregation apps: Pulse, Zite, SkyGrid, Editions, and...

On Wired’s Gadget Lab, Charlie Sorrel has a report on Book Creator for iPad, an intriguing program that turns the iPad from a device meant only for reading e-books to one that can also create them. Sorrel calls it “a kind of InDesign Lite”, that allows editing e-book format, putting text in boxes, adding pictures from the library, resizing, layering, and more. Once done, the resulting book can be opened in iBooks or sent to Dropbox, and from there you can e-mail it to friends, kids (it’s a great way to make a children’s book) or...

Looking for a great, cheap way to download e-books when you can’t get a wi-fi signal, even if you don’t have a free-3G-enabled e-reader? TruConnect Mobile might just have you covered. Last year I wrote about retrofitting 3G to wifi-enabled devices (such as e-readers) by use of a mobile hotspot such as a MiFi. Now Rick Broida’s latest “The Cheapskate” column on CNet points out what might be the best deal yet for such a device: $96 for the MiFi plus shipping, then $4.99 per month plus 3.9 cents per megabyte for service. The fee is charged only...

The major publishers seem to be desperate to hold onto printed books for as long as they can, doing everything possible to try to make e-books less attractive than print books. (Though to what extent they’re really doing this has long been a subject for debate. Consumer complaints aside, even agency-priced e-books still seem to be selling pretty well.) But what might it look like if they went the other way—shoved the New Media throttle wide and cut the rope to the Old Media barge they’re towing? It might look more than a little like what Reed Hastings is...

An article in Knowledge @Australian School for Business discusses the fact that the present Internet addresses system, known as IPv4, will have literally used up its 4.2 billion addresses soon: APNIC, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, is the registry that issues Internet addresses for the booming Asia-Pacific region, and is expected to be the first to run out. Registries in other regions may last just a few months longer. The article's writers describe the new address system, IPv6, and its 340 billion billion billion addresses, as the system that will save the Internet from the end of capacity.  It...

It’s long been a truism of the net that free information flow and freedom have a lot to do with each other. You see it in cases like the recent revolution in Egypt where the Egyptian government tried to stifle dissent by shutting off the Internet, and again in the current situation in Libya. E-books and other long-form digital reading matter are one point on that information spectrum, but so are forms as small as tweets or as large as digital video broadcasts. TechCrunch has an interesting post by guest author Shervin Pishevar, founder of the OpenMesh Project, in...

Some people worry that reading a book might date them, but I hadn’t heard of anyone dating a book—until now. Daemon’s Books reports on a French website called BOOX Affinity (in French, naturally) that is based on a model similar to a computer dating site: the prospective reader answers a few questions about his tastes, and get matched up to a book as to a cyber-date. It has even come up with a few hilarious TV commercials, which you don’t really have to understand French to find amusing. Of course, the idea of finding a good book via a...

(Welcome, BoingBoing readers! Thank you for coming.) Our main mission here at TeleRead is cover the ways that electronic media have changed reading. But occasionally we also talk about how it changes writing, because after all, writing is just the flip side of reading. And there are a number of sites where writing is only half the equation, because after someone has written something electronically, then naturally other people are going to need to read it electronically. One such site, which I have discussed here before, was Ficlets.com, begun in early 2007 as a subsidiary of...

Google Wave, one of Google’s more infamous red-headed stepchildren, has found a home in the Apache Software Foundation’s incubator program. Originally touted as a fantastic new way of revolutionizing the collaborative process, the cross between e-mail, instant messaging, and an outlining tool faltered after its initial start when only a minority of the people who tried it could actually figure out any useful purpose of it. Along the way, Wave imperiled a collaboration tool that I and a number of others found considerably more useful, as Google bought up the company that created the EtherPad collaborative web text editor...

Here’s some interesting synchronicity: at about the same time as a Twitter-based long-article aggregation service gains a website, a website-based such service jumps to Twitter. Longreads started out as a Twitter feed for articles between 1,500 and 30,000 words long. It now has its own website, Longreads.com, which serves as an aggregator, archive, and search tool for the service. The man behind the project, Mark Armstrong, said he wants it to serve as a “Techmeme for long stories”. I learned about this move in an article on TechCrunch by M.G. Siegler in which he said he uses Instapaper...

Publishing Perspectives has an editorial by Chris Vanozzi, co-founder of Quilliant.com—another one of the self-promotion guest pieces that Publishing Perspectives often runs, but at least an interesting one. Quilliant, as Vanozzi explains in the article, is another attempt to “recreate the classic writing group over the web.” Writers fill out a profile about what kind of writing they do, and they are matched with other writers working in similar areas to work together and trade feedback. The goal, he explains, is to help writers find an audience, to help literary agents find promising writers, and to help...

Adrianne Jeffries at ReadWriteWeb has an interesting piece looking at how the focus of Twitter has shifted over the years. It started out as a way to communicate with friends, sort of instant messaging on a time delay, but its role has changed considerably as more and more people began using it as a way to share links they found interesting—and more and more media sources began making it easy to share links via Twitter. Now, Jeffries writes: Twitter is increasingly about news, content and information in an easily-digestible format. By delivering real-time updates...