onfocus

This article at Web Services Journal is the first one I've seen mention the amount of money Amazon has made directly through their web services feature: Web Services as the Holy Grail? Here's the quote: "In 2002, Amazon generated about 6.2% of their revenues, or $246 million, by using Web services to become an e-commerce platform." The wording seems a little fishy to me, so I'm not sure how accurate it is. I haven't seen Amazon talk directly about profits via AWS before.

You've probably heard that Lawrence Lessig has a new book available, Free Culture. He released the book under a Creative Commons license, which means I can read the book in my preferred way: two sentences at a time, completely out of order. (Tough with the print version.) And now you can read his book this way too, thanks to the Free Culture Random Quote page I put together tonight.

Insomnia and Perl are a dangerous combination. (Thanks to eBooks/HelpTools for making a text version of Free Culture available.)

Edd Dumbill from XML.com interviewed Jeff Barr about Amazon Web Services. In the interview Jeff notes, "The REST model is particularly good [at providing fast development], since [developers] can do their prototyping and initial exploration in the browser, modifying the URL and refreshing (which I sometimes like to call 'URL surgery.')." I couldn't agree more, and I wish more people developing Web Services would realize that simplicity is key to wide adoption. (Though, as Jeff also notes, providing simplicity isn't simple.)

Interesting experiment in aggregating offline content: Today's Front Pages. Newspaper front pages from around the world.

Last night I went to Portland to hear Nellie McKay play at the Aladdin Theater. I'd heard her double-cd debut, Get Away From Me and I was very interested in what her show would be like. It was just her playing a piano onstage, with no band backing her up—not that she needs a band behind her. She sings and plays like a force of nature, it was great. As Matt mentioned the other day, her music is hard to pin down to a specific genre. After the show we were talking about it as jazzy, sometimes spoken-word, david-lynchian, satirical, doris-day-on-acid sort of stuff (if that helps at all). And to top it all off, she's only 19—straight out of high-school band to touring with her own solo show. Matt posted a photo (and another) he took last night. There was a geeky moment outside the theater that went something like this:

matt: Nellie McKay is just inside the door over there.

pb: I should buy her CD and ask her to sign it.

matt: What CD? I downloaded it.

pb: Me too. Do you think she has a PGP signature?

So I didn't get an autograph. Is this something fans have considered about their stubborn insistence on downloading music? What are music artists going to sign if CDs go away? Wake up, people! The future of autographs is at stake.

My cousin Brandon has been growing a business selling companies' extra inventory on eBay. Today his company announced DropShop. The idea is that you take your stuff to a partnering mail shop, and they take a picture of it and sell it on eBay for you. It sounds like a handy service, and it'd be great if he could roll it out across the country. (It's currently limited to Lincoln, Nebraska.) Here's the DropShop website.

Kinja, a personalized weblog post aggregator (that's the techie way to describe it) is live in beta form. It lets you compile one master meta-blog that contains posts from all of the weblogs you read. Congrats, Meg! Nick Denton explains Kinja in more detail.

Anil makes some great points about sites that don't link out: "You have no presence in the part of the web that has links."

the dog thought the beach was the best thing ever

YADPP

Journalism.co.uk: Reuters launches content tracker: "Reuters has announced the launch of a new software system that will allow it to monitor the web for re-publication and copyright infringement of its news content." bloggers, you have been warned. Reuters is going to make sure your fair use is actually fair. A good rule of thumb: don't copy and paste an entire article into your weblog. Just quote relevant sections. (Photos may be a different story, I don't know.) They're also going to use this system to track the popularity of Reuters stories—which will most likely be a private system. It'd be nice to see a Reuterdex with pointers to weblogs citing Reuters articles, but that's not very likely. I bet there will be more and more private, specialized weblog-tracking tools. (And more people willing to pay for that data.)

The stairs at Devil's Punchbowl