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FT Press, taking a hint from the twitter/blog/rss trend and came up with a business plan to dice up their best book content into smaller, downloadable formats.

"Mr Jobs articulated his belief that a "functioning media" is vital to a "functioning democracy" and how his "gorgeous" device would help safeguard that role...The question haunting publishers is whether they will suffer the same fate as the music industry, which was hit by Apple's 2003 deal to unbundle the album format by offering downloads of individual songs via iTunes."

The University of California at Los Angeles on Wednesday announced that it will continue streaming copyrighted videos in online "virtual classrooms" despite legal objections from an educational media trade group. The university's decision is the latest development in a copyright dispute with the Association for Information and Media Equipment over whether it is legal for the university to convert DVDs from its libraries into a digital format that students can stream from password-protected course Web sites. UCLA considers the practice "essential," since it allows students to watch the videos on their own computers and on their own time, rather than having to gather in a classroom. Many educators at other colleges have watched the case with intent, waiting to see what implications, if any, the spat might have on their own institutions' use of streaming video.

Here's an update on AOL's citizen-journalism site, Seed. "In what he hopes will be the first big demonstration of the "crowdsourcing" potential of AOL's new Seed.com service, former New York Times writer Saul Hansell says he is looking for writers who will write up interviews with all of 2,000 or so bands and artists at the SXSW music festival in Austin. The assignment will involve "real reporting," Hansell said in an interview, in which writers will have to pick up the phone and call the band or artist and write up a 1,000-word interview in question-and-answer format, as well as a 300- to 500-word biography. The price for this assignment? The princely sum of $50."