Technorati's annual report on the Blogosphere

Google will launch a ebook reader software that will compete with Amazon's kindle.

Detailed website about ebook readers

Not bad website which evaluates various ebook readers.

Thanks Sam Oazy for sending these interesting income models for academic publishing.

Marieke Hardy, who some may know from The First Tuesday Book Club on the ABC and also as a Melbourne Triple J presenter is going to launch a "mbook". Mbooks are where a story is sent by SMS over a number of days. This style of writing has become very popular in Japan.

New book on collaboratively "mashing up" data for use in libraries.

Useful journals on internet research from Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR).

Google has tried to made a deal with those opposing it's Google Books deal (such as Amazon and Microsoft) by offering to allow them to resell books from it's site. Amazon has rejected the idea.

Sony released a 7-inch, $399, touchscreen, 3G and Wi-Fi e-book reader this morning, and it's never more obvious that Amazon is up against a wall in the market segment it helped create.

Articles by Jean Burgess at QUT. Interesting researcher who has just co-authored a book with @joshgreen

While current computing practice abounds with innovations like online auctions, blogs, wikis, twitter, social networks and online social games, few if any genuinely new theories have taken root in the corresponding "top" academic journals. Those creating computing progress increasingly see these journals as unreadable, outdated and irrelevant. Yet as technology practice creates, technology theory is if anything becoming even more conforming and less relevant. We attribute this to the erroneous assumption that research rigor is excellence, a myth contradicted by the scientific method itself. Excess rigor supports the demands of appointment, grant and promotion committees, but is drying up the wells of academic inspiration. Part I of this paper chronicles the inevitable limits of what can only be called a feudal academic knowledge exchange system, with trends like exclusivity, slowness, narrowness, conservatism, self-involvement and inaccessibility. We predict an upcoming social upheaval in academic publishing as it shifts from a feudal to democratic form, from knowledge managed by the few to knowledge managed by the many. The technology trigger is socio-technical advances. The drive will be that only democratic knowledge exchange can scale up to support the breadth, speed and flexibility modern cross-disciplinary research needs. Part II suggests the sort of socio-technical design needed to bring this transformation about.

Objective: To understand belief in a specific scientific claim by studying the pattern of citations among papers stating it.