This Saturday, I drove about 30 miles west of Springfield to visit the Gay Parita Sinclair, a restored period filling station in Paris Springs, just west of Halltown, Missouri on old Route 66. Several huge photo blow-ups of the place hang on the wall in the breakroom at TeleTech where I work, in keeping with the building’s “Route 66” decor theme. It was only last week when I googled it that I realized I had actually driven right past it without even noticing it twice while on my way to Carthage. I guess I’d mentally filed it...

Galleycat has a tidbit from a forthcoming Mediabistro feature on marketing guru Seth Godin: Godin has pledged never again to publish books via traditional publishers. Godin said, in part: I like the people, but I can't abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don't usually visit to buy something they don't usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that's hard to spread Godin is no stranger to direct-to-consumer e-publishing. In 2001, he...

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting piece about a German newspaper pairing an issue of its paper with an “augmented reality” iPhone app, so that when the iPhone is held over certain places on the paper it displays content related to the stories in the paper. I tend to think of “augmented reality” as being what you get when you hold the iPhone up and an app superimposes something over the camera view—but then again, this German paper’s app is also location-based, in a sense, so I suppose that’s fair. It’s a clever idea, and reminds me of the “digital...

On Business Insider’s “Silicon Alley Insider” section, Eric Clemons and Nehal Madhani from the Wharton School make the provocative claim that, in order to protect newspapers, copyright laws need to be “strengthened” to give them a 24-hour head start—no aggregator is allowed to link to a story for 24 hours after its publication. They seem to have bought into Rupert Murdoch’s stance that aggregators are, through their ruthless violation of copyright, killing newspapers rather than driving traffic to them. However, they do not provide any proof of this assertion, as Mike Masnick of Techdirt points out: ...

Self-publishing supersite Scribd is off the hook for copyright infringement, at least in one case, after a lawsuit against it was either settled or abandoned (depending on who you believe). The lawsuit in question charged that Scribd’s use of a complete digital copy of a text in its anti-infringement filter was itself a copyright infringement. Most copyright notices these days do include a warning against unauthorized digital copying and storage of the book in question, but Scribd’s attorney holds that in this case it is clearly a fair use. The suit came from a children’s book author who...

Yesterday I mentioned the Associated Press’s complaints against the Drudge Retort two years ago for posting excerpts from its stories, in light of Woot poking fun at the AP by demanding a fee for quoting its blog posting. A story came to my attention today that is at least vaguely related. MediaNews and Freedom Communications, companies that own several Colorado papers, have sent a cease-and-desist order to Colorado Pols, a blog and discussion forum pertaining to politics in Colorado, demanding that it stop quoting from their stories. (Although Mike Masnick’s editorial on the matter at TechDirt ties...

Last week, Techdirt held its “Techdirt Saves Journalism” event, a workshop to come up with ideas for, well, “saving journalism.” JD Lasica at PBS’s “Mediashift” blog has a post enumerating and elaborating on six ideas he brought back from the event. Those six ideas are: Mine the data Elevate your writers Create a platform for your community Multiple revenue streams Expand the brand Changing ideas about news Most of the discussion seems, at root, to be about building...

It turns out that Penguin is not the only company pricing e-books higher than print books. The blogosphere is abuzz about Marvel’s decision to release the 80-page Iron Man Annual #1 as a $4.99 print comic and as three $1.99 digital comics for its comic book reader software at the same time. Techdirt and webcartoonist Scott Kurtz actually got the price wrong in their posts on the matter, thinking that the digital version was three times as expensive as the print when in actuality it’s only 98 cents more. (This misconception actually comes from a comic retailer quoted...

Here’s a round-up of a few more posts talking about how iPad apps for magazines and newspapers really are a poor second to the web versions of those magazines and newspapers: Mike Masnick on Techdirt covers Michael Gartenberg’s review of Wired’s iPad app: Gartenberg notes that the iPad version is, in some ways, a worst of both worlds. It's not like the website, which is easily shared or emailed or discussed with others. Most of that functionality is effectively missing, which is really quite limiting for folks who are used to sharing the news...

A few days ago, Mike Masnick at TechDirt reported on a PDF document released by the FTC containing a number of suggestions aimed at “saving” journalism. Except, by “saving journalism,” most of the suggestions seemed to mean “saving traditional newspapers.” Ars Technica has also taken a look at this document, though it notes the FTC has clarified that the document in question was never intended to be taken as official government suggestions—just conversation-starters. If that was their goal, they have certainly succeeded, as there is an awful lot of conversation going on right now about how misguided...

The Nieman Journalism Lab has an interesting report looking at the BBC’s new link policy for its online news site. While the conventional wisdom might be to link to as few other sites as possible, especially other news sources one might see as direct competitors (after all, why give your traffic away?), the BBC is actually planning to double the number of outbound links from its site by 2013. As BBC News website editor Steve Herrmann puts it: Related links matter: They are part of the value you add to your story - take...

TechCrunch reports that the New York Times is raising its rates for electronic delivery. The “E-Edition” of the paper is going from $14.99 to $19.99 per month, and the Kindle version is going from $13.99 to $19.99 per month for new subscriptions and starting in 6 months for existing subscriptions. Presumably, the iPad edition will be at the same $19.99 monthly rate. PaidContent points out that this is still less than half the cost of having the print edition delivered ($46 per month), but it’s still a hefty bump for people used to the older pricing. ...