Books – Audiobooks – Ebooks – Video – Movies – Podcasts – Magazines – Twitter

Complain on Twitter to get better customer service

At least one practical use for travelers: complaining.

As hotels, airlines and other travel companies line up on Twitter to promote their brands, customers who voice their grievances in the form of tweets are getting surprisingly fast responses for everything from bad airplane seats to poor room service.

Take Tony Wagner, 34, a new-media director for an academic group in Washington. When he found out he wasn’t seated next to his wife and 2-year-old daughter on a JetBlue flight to San Francisco over the Memorial Day weekend, he first called up customer service. But the agent told him to take it up at the gate. So Mr. Wagner indirectly sent JetBlue a message, by posting a plea for help on his Twitter account: “@jetblue Advice to get both parents and 2 yr old seated next to each other on flight later today? Right now only one parent. Full flight.”

Charging for Online Content Gets Closer

Two startups, Journalism Online and ViewPass, aim to help battered publishers find ways to get paid for content

Expect the ecosystem of the Web to start feeling a little different once the summer slips away. Publishers, stung by an economic downturn and ongoing disappointment with online ad revenues, will begin charging for at least some of their Web content. Eager to help make this happen are two proposed e-commerce systems, Journalism Online and ViewPass, which are developing technologies to enable publishers to sell their wares. Gordon Crovitz, a co-founder of Journalism Online, says “we expect a very large number of news sites will have some elements of paid content beginning in the fall.” Crovitz, a former Wall Street Journal publisher, says that a number of companies have already signed on with his service. He won’t identify them, but one executive familiar with the situation says some may be announced by early July.

Have wikis lost their mojo?

Sure, Wikipedia still has a page for everything from Charlemagne to Chewbacca, but it seems more attention now is focused on kick-back-and-have-fun social networks, not hit-the-books-and-contribute-some-research wikis. Has the wiki well run dry?

A long time ago — meaning, of course, three or four years in Internet time — wikis came to represent the best of the true democratic, user-generated nature of the Web. The collaborative writing/editing of a wiki meant that all voices could be heard, but majority rule would prevail.

A Publisher Stumbles Publicly at the Post - Careful how you generate online revenues

The Washington Post had sent out a brochure offering sponsorships — a fee of $25,000 for one, or $250,000 for an entire series — for an exclusive “Washington Post salon” at Ms. Weymouth’s home in which officials from Congress and the administration, lobbyists and, yes, the paper’s own reporters could have a quiet, off-the-record dinner, discussions to be led by Marcus Brauchli, the newspaper’s editor. Theoretically, you can’t buy Washington Post reporters, but you can rent them.

Microsoft’s Bing Search Wins Share From Google

Microsoft Corp’s new Bing search engine gained U.S. market share in its first month in operation but still trails dominant rival Google Inc, according to data released on Wednesday.

Bing, launched on June 3 but available to some users a few days earlier, took 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June, up from 7.81 percent for Microsoft search just prior to its rollout and 7.21 percent in April, said Internet data firm StatCounter.

Google lost share slightly, dipping to 78.48 percent from 78.72 percent before Bing. Yahoo Inc, the perennial No. 2 in the market, rose to 11.04 percent from 10.99 percent.

Are brands ignoring moms? How should marketers use Twitter?

According to M2Moms, a report from the Market to Moms Coalition, 60% of moms feel marketers are ignoring their needs, and 73% feel advertisers don’t really understand what it’s like to be a mom. The challenge, says the report, is sensing her distinct, timely needs and responding in a way that truly resonates.

Can Twitter help market to Moms?

If your company markets to moms you’d best pay attention to the groundswell of moms online.

“In trying to perfect the message, many have forgotten to listen to the very consumer they are trying to woo,” reports Brandweek.

60 Years Later Blocked: Judge Says No To Salinger Spinoff

A Swedish author whose new book was promoted as a sequel to J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” cannot publish it in the United States because it too closely mirrors Salinger’s classic without adequate parody or critique, a judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Deborah Batts issued her written ruling in Manhattan after considering arguments in a lawsuit brought by the 90-year-old reclusive author against the publishers of “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye.”

Batts said Swedish author Fredrik Colting had “taken well more from `Catcher,’ in both substance and style, than is necessary for the alleged transformative purpose of criticizing Salinger and his attitudes and behavior.”

A newspaper recovery is nowhere in sight

The troubles of the newspaper industry are well-chronicled. Many chains are bankrupt or close to it. Some city papers have closed completely.

Is a Newspaper Recovery in sight?

Newspaper publishers hope that as the economy recovers, so will their advertising, which has been falling at a rate of 20 percent or more year-over-year. Many experts believe that there will be no recovery. Too many print marketing dollars have moved to the internet and won’t be back.

Automated Content Access Protocol

The Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) is an initiative of the European Publishers Council, the World Association of Newspapers and the International Publishers Association and hopes to provide copyright holders with the power to define how their content is used in the online environment in the same way they are able to control the use of their copyright in the physical form.

Project Coordinator Mark Bide labelled ACAP’s communication standards an “Internet scale solution to an Internet scale problem.” With the excess of content available, ACAP wants to communicate use rights in a form that can be processed by software agents when they access a work, at a level the precedes the final consumer.

Paleontology and Creationism Meet but Don’t Mesh

But here in the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky, Earth and the universe are just over 6,000 years old, created in six days by God. The museum preaches, “Same facts, different conclusions” and is unequivocal in viewing paleontological and geological data in light of a literal reading of the Bible.

Check out other fun stories

In the creationist interpretation, the layers were laid down in one event — the worldwide flood when God wiped the land clean except for the creatures on Noah’s ark — and these dinosaurs died in 2348 B.C., the year of the flood.