Eoin Purcell

A fascinating and learned piece on whether or not tweets are protectable in copyright terms. Well worth reading to the end. I’d love to say i remembered who sent me the link, but for the life of me, I cannot.

Here comes the wave folks. Google’s forthcoming beta product that attempts to tie together communication. Fascinating stuff. Got the link via Tim O’Reilly who also has an excellent post on the demo he and others saw.

There are a few articles on the future of books banging about worth reading. This one in Wired seems to be attracting a great deal of attention. The Times has a decent but newsy focused piece on publishers and ebooks. The Nation has a very good piece on the demise of the book industry but to my mind though, this one in Book Business is in every way superior in the sense that it looks at publishers rather than at books:

Publishers have little tradition of revealing what is inside their black box that isn’t focused on meeting specific author and title marketing goals. They have little practice of turning the spotlight toward their contributions in ways that are authentic in today’s marketplace—and that simultaneously support their authors and a community of readers. This is rooted in old conceptions of publicity as a department, as a discrete function with one-way, outbound messaging. Yet today, authentic, personalized, continuous engagement is the way the social economy works. Publishers need to be personally and organizationally engaged with the tools they are asking their authors to use. There are no wallflowers at this digital dance.