Library Stuff

NYTimes – “IN a world with grocery store television screens, digitally delivered movie libraries and cellphone video clips, the average American is exposed to 61 minutes of TV ads and promotions a day.”

Associated Press – “If you’re picky about music descriptions and want to find album artwork that iTunes doesn’t have, it might be time to get a little help from a software program promising to fill the gaps in digital music collections. I turned to TuneUp, a plug-in application that competes against a similar program called FixTunes. Drawing upon a database of 90 million songs, TuneUp can pore through thousands of tracks in iTunes within a few minutes to identify problems and offer solutions. It works on Macs and computers running Windows.”

Direct to TuneUp

USATODAY – “Heather B. Armstrong has been blogging since 2001 about depression, childbirth and parenting on her website, dooce.com, which averages 1.5 million visitors a month. Now she has written a memoir, It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, $24), that, like her blog, is sometimes funny and irreverent, sometimes serious, and always honest. Armstrong, 33, lives in Salt Lake City with her husband, Jon, and their daughter, Leta. She spoke with USA TODAY.”

USATODAY – “Enlarge image Enlarge I Can Has Cheezburger? is one of several blogs that has been turned into a book. o Yahoo! Buzz o Digg o Newsvine o Reddit o Facebook o What’s this? By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY It used to be big news when a blogger got a book contract. But now literary agents and publishers regularly look to the Web for book ideas, whether it’s a blog or a wacky website like icanhascheezburger.com.”

CNN.com has a neat little tool to track the economy.

Reuters – "Internet start-up Twitter is taking a much-anticipated first-step in its quest to parlay its popularity into revenue by offering certain customers an expanded range of services. The company is preparing to offer commercial accounts in which corporations and other types of businesses pay a fee to receive an enhanced version of Twitter, a free service that allows people to send short, 140-character text messages to their network of friends."

Just like Blogger Pro, way back when.  Good move.

See also, The Obsession With Twitter’s Business Model, from BITS

Associated Press – “Gilbert Arenas apparently is ready to return to the court. He swears he is done, however, with his computer. Yes, one of the best-known and most-quoted examples of a star professional athlete conveying his thoughts to the world via his blog is hanging up his keyboard. The Washington Wizards point guard said so himself Wednesday when asked whether he plans to resume writing now that he’s ready to get back to balling.”

washingtonpost.com – “Student journalists from high schools across Montgomery County are adding their observations and accounts of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th U.S. president to the volumes of reporting published on the historic event.”

Associated Press – “Good morning, class, and welcome to U.S. history, brought to you by Molto Caldo Pizzeria. In a cash-strapped Idaho high school where signs taped near every light switch remind the staff to save electricity, an enterprising teacher has struck a sponsorship deal with a local pizza shop: Every test, handout and worksheet he passes out to his students reads MOLTO’S PIZZA 14″ 1 TOPPING JUST $5 in bright red, inch-high letters printed along the bottom of every page.”

Associated Press – “Televangelist Robert H. Schuller has reached millions worldwide with his weekly “Hour of Power” TV broadcasts, but when it comes to the Internet, he had a high-tech headache: an online impostor.”