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Here it is: the much anticipated, long awaited (not to say constipated), recently imitated, likely over-rated despite attempting to be understated, USA Newsbot (and here is the cheesy press release).
I'm glad it made it out before I did, but such is life in a big company! I'd like to chronicle the press coverage as it rolls in, but I'm off to a funeral in CA for my sweet, 90 year old grandmother who passed on this Sunday. So be kind.
Newsbot just releasen in seven new international markets (und eine neue Sprache):
These seven new markets join the previous ten:
Congratulations to the news reading robots and their handlers!
In an interesting article on the 'stick-to-it-ness' of that scrappy butterfly known as MSN, 
there is a cryptic mention of Newsbot buried in a broader description of making the butterfly an object of love. Here's Saul Hansell from the NYT:
"Yusuf Mehdi, a vice president for MSN, concedes that the company needs to find a way to engage its audience more.
"We want to have the sort of evangelical feedback that people have for the iPod or the TiVo," Mr. Mehdi said. "I want people to say, 'I love MSN.' "MSN hopes one way to achieve that is to customize its service to the interests of each user. For example, it has introduced trial versions of an automated news service that displays headlines for articles based on the topics that users have shown interest in.
Another part of Microsoft's Internet strategy is to combine Web searches with an improved application that lets users find documents and e-mail messages on personal computers. The enhanced search function will be a feature of the next major version of Windows, scheduled for 2006, but Mr. Mehdi said that MSN would make a desktop computer search feature available much sooner, probably as part of the free downloadable toolbar that it introduced earlier this year. And last week Microsoft bought Lookout, a tiny software company, to help with its desktop search effort."
More Newsbot news is just around the corner.
John Batelle is hypothesizing that subscriptions are the next turnpike for Google to head down in his post Is Subscription the Next Thing?. It's actually an old thing. Going all the way back to 2001, Google was evaluating subscription offers.
There have been more recent mentions in the press that Google was testing including subscription content in their index, but apparently it isn't a slam dunk with users. Getting the customer experience right is crucial to avoid pissing off users with links to subscriber content they may not want to see - and because much of the paid content is behind the sign-in, it gets linked to less often on the web and often has subscriber goo in the url, so the link graph could be sparse or muddied.
My bet is Google takes a much simpler approach than the one Batelle describes. Rather than sell the subscriptions and manage authentication for publishers, use AdSense to turn the archives into a revenue source to split with publishers. They've already started doing this with Reed Elsevier through Google Print - giving full access to articles with AdSense down the side - that's an interesting link to check out by the way. Meanwhile, the publisher's site limits the same content to subscribers. It's basically the same thing Looksmart has done with Gale and Find Articles.
And the travel business? Well, he's the inside source.
While Cory Doctorow and David Weinberger are lighting up the internet (cosmos 1, 2) with their principled pleas to Microsoft on the perils of DRM - a group of publishers are talking up trying to chisel away the first sale doctrine which allows you to resell the books you buy.
In a recent report, the NY Times' Bob Tedeschi provocatively asks "Is Amazon.com becoming the Napster of the book business?". It's a provocative question, but one that ignores the copyright and property laws that effect real property and printed matter. There is no Digital Millennium Copyright Act for bit based mediums like books but that doesn't stop the publishers from talking up the metaphor: "Used books are to consumer books as Napster was to the music industry," Lorraine Shanley, a publishing consultant and publisher of Publishing Trends says to Tedeschi. In what reads like a parody but sadly is not, Shanley continues: "The question becomes, 'How does the book industry address its used-book problem?' There aren't any easy answers, especially as no one is breaking any laws here."
Egads. Perfectly legal sales of used books, this is a problem indeed. The obvious implication is, we need new laws to address the "used-book problem" because, as it turns out, in these United States you can actually own movable property, like books, even though you didn't author or publish the ideas contained within the covers. Paying for it is sufficient to gain the right to sell it. In the pre Digital Millenium era, once you own something, you are generally free to sell it but we can solve this problem of owning and selling books by following the inspied work of the RIAA. If we sufficiently reduce the property rights that people have in their books, they'll no longer be able to sell them (and thereby it follows, they'll buy fewer of them, as they will own "less" than they did before). Perfect - the relatively flat market for book publishing will crater like the music publishing market. Can you imagine the DRM required to keep you from selling property you own and can move about at will? Perhaps there is some RFID meets LoJack opportunity these publishing mavens have invested in as a solution.
Now before we take these sorts of measures, we'll want to make sure there is a real problem. Or maybe not. What is the impact of used book sales on the publishing industry? "We think it's not good for the industry and it has an effect, but we can't measure it," said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, a trade group who has previously petitioned amazon not to promote used books next to new books (as is done in many physical book stores) and has previously investigated collecting royalties when libraries lend books to patrons.
Well perhaps someone closer to the publishers knows the impact? "We've not been able to pinpoint a definite effect, but my gut is that absolutely there's an effect," said Dominique Raccah, chief executive of Sourcebooks Inc. in her interview with Tedeschi, pointing out that the book industry had no formal response to online used-book sales "and it concerns me."
Well this whole matter concerns me too. Legal issues aside (like the right to buy and sell property), did these concerned folks consider that used books have a history as old as publishing. That most of human wisdom depends upon the transmisson of ideas in print and that their entire business is based on a public grant of copyright meant to further a public interest.
This is a scandal - and folks ought to speak up about it before these coconuts shoot themselves in the foot and take the publishing industry down the path of the recording industry, with their dreams of electronic texts sold directly to customers and their politically well connected publishing leaders.
| This was a great father's day - and probably the last time I'll have both kids in my arms. Plus this was a test of Flickr's blog this photo feature. |  Father's Day Originally uploaded by joshp. |
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