Category: long tail

  • Exciting e-book progress from Amazon and Google

    It’s been over two years now since I first starting writing about electronic books and e-book readers on my blog. At the 2006 introduction of Sony’s reader, I was concerned that the “long tail” of niche and out-of-print content was being ignored in favor of making the latest John Grisham best sellers available on an…

  • WordPress 2.7 is the best WordPress yet

    When WordPress 2.5 came out a few months ago, there was a lot to like but there was also a lot to not-so-like. The layout of key parts of the program, including the dashboard and the editing page for new posts, didn’t seem very well thought out. The overall design was visually noisy and distracting,…

  • Harvard Bookstore gets solid new ownership

    Back in May, I fretted a bit about the future of the Harvard Bookstore (not affiliated with the university), one of the last great indie bookstores left in these parts. Today comes news that a retired tech executive and his wife have bought the store and intend to keep its operating philosophy intact. New owner…

  • Amazon-Tivo ecosystem works for me

    Stumbling around Amazon’s Unbox video store looking for a movie to rent last night, I happened across “21.” It’s the film about a group of MIT students who beat the Vegas casinos to the tune of millions of dollars by counting cards at Blackjack as a team. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a huge fan…

  • Useful info getting out on new iPhone apps like e-reader

    The iPhone coverage tsunami continues unabated and, thanks to the long-tail of new media and blogging, we can find people writing about just those aspects of this mega-story that we find most interesting. For example, the What’s on iPhone blog has a lengthy review up of the new Fictionwise e-book reader for iPhones and iPods…

  • Kindle or no, we still need great book stores

    (UPDATE: In October, 2008, new ownership promised to maintain the store’s essential character – phew!) Woke up and received a slight slap in the face as I read the morning paper today. Seems that Frank Kramer, owner of the very fine Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Ma., is planning to sell his establishment. Make no…

  • Yelping for fun and profit – well, fun anyway

    True to my astrological sign, Taurus, I’m always on the look out for some new, fancy-shmancy restaurant or coffee shop or paper store or whatever. As such, I’m starting to get more and more into the local review site Yelp.com. I’m adding my Yelp profile page to my links list here and dropping the Facebook…

  • Sometimes you eat the long tail, sometimes it eats you

    The explosion of the Internet and e-commerce and the interconnectedness of everything is generally A Really Good Thing. As Wired editor Chris Anderson has explained ad nauseam on his blog, we’re in age where more different things sell to fewer people and the collective weight of all that less-popular stuff is growing. The “long tail”…

  • Ignore the static: Kindle is great for reading

    Wow, the new electronic book reader from Amazon, Kindle, sure is getting a lot of absurdly misguided and factually incorrect criticism. My fingers are getting sore from responding to such a tide of disinformation in comment boxes scattered across a zillion web sites. Just this morning, I’ve been writing a lengthy comment to a Kindle…

  • Back in the New York Groove thanks to HBO

    One of the wireless phone companies, I think it was, some years back concocted a crazy service to help identify random songs by calling them in to some all-knowing, tune-analyzing super computer. You know — hear a great tune on the radio, dial up the supercomputer, hold your phone up to the speakers, and find…