While the exact definition of a Barnes and Nobles Quamut remains unclear to my non-Millenial brain, I would venture that the term stands for what happens when you throw Home Depot, Wikipedia and a big chain bookstore into a blender and then hit ‘Combine’.
Google Tweaks Apps
After many moons of mash-ups, Google Maps has been steadily adding more socializing features. The latest offering allows comments and ratings to be added to user-created maps by other users.
The Good and Different
Shelfari vs. Blogosphere: The Perils of Book Social Networking
There was audible gnashing of teeth in the book-social-networking scene last week. Shelfari, a reasonably well-traffick’d tell-your-friends-what-you-read-and-find-out-what-they-read-too! site, stands accused of astroturfing (posting on blogs as if you were a user but where you are really acting as an employee) and spamming every address in a user’s Gmail account through an unclear (some might say misleading) user interface.
Big Brother Is Watching...and He Likes Pepsi!
The Pulse of the BlogNation
Check out Nielsen’s free service, BlogPulse, which tracks content mentioned on blogs for intriguing trend analysis.
Facebook, Meet the Long Tail. Long Tail, Meet Facebook.
What Will They Think of Next?
An entrepreneurial company in Shanghai—Bookgg—is exploring a new advertisement-powered free book business model.
Another Option for Adaptation
In light of this guest blog entry, by Elizabeth Spitz and Cristina Sadurni, two teenaged interns over at O’Reilly, expostulating to publishers the necessity of considering the new ways and reasons people, especially younger people, already carry on literacy in ways other than through reading books, I find the release of CommentPress 1.0 an interesting development in the future of content generation.
