In an interesting display of timing (almost as if he read my article on fansubbing the other day!), Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson asked three anonymous anime fans why they continue to download shows via Bittorrent even when they are available for free on-line watching at sources such as Hulu. This comes in the context of a suit a peer-to-peer lawyer filed against 1,337 BitTorrent sharers (yes, the lawyer chose that number intentionally) of a One Piece episode last month on behalf of anime importer FUNimation. As I noted in my own article, the major reason comes down to the...

On his GigaOm blog, Om Malik takes on the old media vs. new media dichotomy that has been showing up in so many places over the last few years. The main example he cites is the recent case of television broadcasters blocking Google TV from accessing their content (in much the same way Hulu’s TV network sources forced it to block Boxee last year), but he also mentions the music industry’s problems and the “death of newspapers”. When I look at these industries and the failure — or impending failure — of these institutions,...

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...