Lifehacker has a great analysis of why Yahoo's recent Flickr tweaking is a little but underhanded—paid users, who never had a storage limit in the first place, suddenly do, and there are ads now... Briefly mentioned, but not fully explored, is the bigger issue: How many of us really care about the service Flickr offers these days? I used to use Flickr as a place to park photos so I could share them in a blog post or via a link. Now, I can snap the photo directly on my phone and share it from my camera roll, via email or blog...

DBW featured a press release for BookLikes, a new social reading platform that is supposed to combine the features of Tumblr and Goodreads. I consider one of my roles here is to involve trying things out, and potentially wasting my time so you don't have to waste your. And my reaction to this site? Don't even bother. (Click here to see what TeleRead's Susan Lulgjuraj has to say about BookLikes.) Everyone seems to be wanting to get into the social reading space today, and honestly, I don't think we need yet another one. Especially not one that acts so much like Goodreads....

BookLikes has been in beta version for quite some time, but the website has now launched its full release. The site seems to combine different aspects of social media sites such as Tumblr and Goodreads to become a place for readers to share thoughts and reviews. BookLikes is not just limited to reviews. Users can create different posts about anything. You can also follow other users, read their posts and discover books they've read. Social site I tested the site out briefly and uploaded a review I had previously written. It really reminds me a lot of Tumblr in different ways. There are “Dashboard”...

Today marks an important day in Internet history. April 30, 1993, was the day the World Wide Web entered the public domain, which allowed the rest of us to use it on a royalty-free basis. Want to see the first ever web page? Not much to look at by today's standards, but still very cool. Apart from providing us all with animated cat gifs from now until the end of time, this is also an important milestone for e-books and e-reading. Without the Internet, we wouldn't have had Project Gutenberg in its easy to search and access format. (Project Gutenberg began in 1971,...

Buying an e-reader has become more complex, with several solid options, both in E Ink and tablet-like lines. So how do you choose? That's where a brand-new, just-launched-yesterday website called Reader Rocket wants to come in. The site is simple. Put two different e-readers head-to-head, and see which one comes out on top. I sat around and tried a lot of different combinations, and basically I agree with their conclusions. They use a variety of criteria including size of bookstore, overall reviews, features, price and battery life. They give you a detailed report, showing their conclusions, advantages of each and other options...

Blogger Hollee Actman Becker is making headlines for her blog post on a disturbing Instagram trend: the 'beauty pageant', wherein tweenaged girls post collages of their friends and ask readers to vote on which is the prettiest. The girl with the least votes gets Xed out of the picture, and the game repeats until only one girl is left. Her reaction to the discovery that her own daughters were playing these games was swift and surprisingly heart-felt: she posted an image about beauty being only skin deep (which has since gone viral), and used her daughter's account to publicly ask girls...

We've watched with interest as a few new digital publishing-related startups have launched seemingly out of the blue over the past few weeks. Thin Reads, a fantastic new website that runs reviews of e-singles, is definitely one of our favorites, and we're clearly not alone; the site has been enjoying a ton of mostly glowing press. (Click to see what Mashable, Paid Content, and MediaBistro's GalleyCat have to say about the new site.) But there's another interesting and brand-new startup known as Blackstrap that hasn't been getting quite as much love lately. In fact, we hadn't even heard of it until we...

I've seen at least four stories today on the Scott Turow editorial in this week's New York Times (for example, here and here). Turow's editorial was a mishmash of all sorts of trending stories, offering his comments on used books, libraries, the Kirtsaeng decision, Amazon, and who knows what else. He has been derided, and rightly so in my opinion, for taking a somewhat extreme and out of touch view of the current marketplace. But what I think often gets lost in this knee-jerk reactionary stuff (both on the part of the originator and the various respondents) is that these pieces often do...

Bookriot has a great series up detailing the differences between Goodreads and Library Thing. In Part 1, Amanda Nelson covers how to add books, the user interface and how each site handles recommendations, stats, user groups and discussions. In Part 2, Nelson covers reviews, author interactions and miscellaneous details. Her conclusion? Library Thing is, on the whole, more the 'nerd' site (more comprehensive stats, better handling of pre-ISBN books, a more refined recommendation engine) and Goodreads is more a 'Facebook for books' (more popular groups, more social interaction with authors and other users). In the end, the feature set you prefer will...

It’s probably safe to say that we’ve all dealt with our fair share of ridiculousness, bestowed complimentary-style from our local Internet service providers. Hidden fees, promotions that are too good to be true, bad or weak Internet connections, frustrating customer service reps, forced up-selling, etc., etc., and the list goes on… A comedy troupe that makes short YouTube videos and refers to itself as Extremely Decent Films published the following video earlier in the week. Although it’s an obvious exaggeration of the truth, at the same time it really isn’t. What’s alarming, in fact, is just how much of the content in this video is real...

If there is one thing that writing about technology has taught me, it's that things change, fast. People lament the publishing  'power' of Amazon and they forget that before Amazon, Fictionwise was the e-book destination. Remember Hotmail? Not the leader now, are they? Remember Netscape? Also gone. Things change, fast. And here is my latest example. A week ago, I spent probably 80 percent of my online time on Google products. I used Google Drive to store documents and work on them at home and at school. I used Gmail and Google Calendar for both contacts and scheduling, YouTube for video watching, Google Reader for...

Using an iPhone in Ireland to connect to the Internet? Get your passport out. The legislature of Ireland, the Oireachtas Éireann, is exploring the topic of Internet safety and cyberbullying, and the possible need for legislation and regulation of online comments. It’s going about as well as you might imagine, with one senator, Eamonn Coghlan, suggesting that people should pay to post online. Coghlan has also suggested that Internet users use a passport to register their IP address. According to this story in The Irish Examiner, Communications Minister Pat Rabbitte went on to suggest at the same meeting that American companies, such as Facebook and...