On Booksquare, Kassia Krozser has a really interesting (and really long) essay about the social nature of reading and how to accommodate it in the Internet age. She points out that, much as e-book companies like Copia are making a big deal out of intersecting social networking with reading, our reading has almost always been “social” in the real world—we started out discussing stories around fires, and we still discuss (and review, and write fanfic of) stories even today. The big difference is that we’ve moved it on-line. Krozser spends much of the essay talking about a proposed all-inclusive system for...

Lately, social networking has often been hailed as a kind of great equalizer to help writers connect better with fans and sell more books. It’s a way to connect with fans, show that you’re a real person, and show the human face behind your stuff so they might be more inclined to support you. But, as guest writer Daniel Kalder notes in a Publishing Perspectives editorial, too much emphasis on social networking as a sort of publicity cure-all is fundamentally misguided for several reasons. For one thing, it runs the risk of turning into specious “magical thinking”. ...

TechCrunch has a three-minute video demo from a startup called Rethink Books who is looking to build a social network interface around e-books. From the video, this seems to revolve around integrating Twitter into an e-reader app and then using tweets as shared annotations linked to particular parts of a given e-book. The Kindle already allows some integrated social network sharing, but does not seem to go as fully into the networking aspect as Rethink’s application. Certainly, social networking is one of the major drivers of Internet use nowadays, especially on mobile devices—and lack of it has been...

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...

Lawrence Lessig has a piece in the Huffington Post stemming from a presentation he gave last week at an award ceremony. Lessig was a judge for a video remix contest put on by web video host Vimeo, and as part of his participation on a panel he gave a speech relating to the importance of remixes, and how they relate to copyright and fair use. (Lessig is known for his expertise in this field, given that he has written entire books about remix culture and related matters.) I bring this up not to touch upon Lessig’s statements about...

A couple weeks ago, I posted about reviews of Nick Bilton’s new book, I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works. After reading the sample chapters, I was intrigued, but I don’t have the money right now to go around buying books just because I want to read them. So I hopped on the web, and a short time later I was reading the book for free. (That is to say, I placed a hold request at my public library’s website, and a few days later picked up the hardcover. Why, what did you think I...

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...

Business Insider’s Silicon Alley Insider has talked to the company behind the iPad social network reading app Flipboard again, catching up on the aftereffects of the controversy surrounding the company at its app’s launch in July. Some wondered whether, in aggregating content from links posted to social networks Twitter and Facebook, the company was taking more than fair use allowed. It turns out that the controversy may have been on the order of a tempest in a teacup. [Cofounder and CEO Mike] McCue says only a tiny handful of publishers have complained about the...

On TechCrunch, Paul Carr has an interesting piece on online journalism being used to show up traditional print journalism. (It is also being covered by ReadWriteWeb.) It talks about Adam Penenberg, who in 1998 exposed one of print journalism’s big names of the day, Stephen Glass, for fabricating his news stories. Penenberg has been at it again. Having written a book in 2003 about Ford’s negligent attitude toward the safety of its SUVs concerning a woman, Donna Bailey, who was nearly killed in an accident, he recently learned of a recent court award of $131 million in damages...

One of the more controversial e-reading apps to hit in recent days is Flipboard, the free app that aggregates content that friends have shared on social media. I’ve previously reported on the controversy it engendered by its potentially copyright-violating aggregatory nature. Lately, I’ve finally had the chance to examine the app itself. In summary: wow. Flipboard is one of the prettiest things I’ve seen on the iPad yet. And it’s free. If you have an iPad, and are on Facebook and/or Twitter, you have absolutely no excuse not to go and download it. Even if you’re not on social media,...

Over the last few days, a new iPad media app called Flipboard has been getting a lot of attention. The app isn’t quite an RSS reader or social networking app, but seems to combine elements of both. The app, though popular, has gotten off to a rocky and slightly controversial start. The rockiness comes in that it seems that Flipboard’s developers were not prepared for just how popular their app was going to be—it seems that everyone was trying to sign up for the service at once, entirely overwhelming their servers. They responded by configuring the servers to...

Chris Good has an interesting piece in the Atlantic (found via Slashdot) pointing out one of the unforeseen consequences of the digital age on the nominations of judicial appointees such as Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. Nominees to the Supreme Court and other high-profile judicial positions must provide the Senate Judiciary Committee with a copy of everything they’ve ever written or said publicly. It used to be that this was a relatively simple and straightforward thing—but thanks to Lexis-Nexis and the Internet, not only is it possible to find a lot more pre-existing media, but there are also...