Publishing
New Yorker Plans Articles on AOL, Facebook | Kara Swisher …
Within the next several weeks, the New Yorker magazine will be publishing big pieces about a pair of digital icons located on the East and West coasts–an assessment of the turnaround at AOL by staff writer Ken Auletta and a profile of …
MySpace Now Letting Users Syndicate Status Updates to Facebook
After having launched integrations with Twitter and other sites, MySpace has launched a new form of Facebook integration today. Now, it’s easy for MySpace users to syndicate their status updates on Facebook as well. The UI is available to users in a drop-down on MySpace’s status publisher, beneath the Twitter syndication feature that MySpace introduced last year. As part of this, MySpace is also asking users for extended permissions for publishing to their walls — but is is also asking for access to their Photos and Videos on Facebook, and their Facebook data when they’re not using the application. In other words, MySpace is asking for permission to access lots of valuable social data from Facebook, but we don’t yet know how it might use that data in its products. We should note that Facebook and MySpace have been talking about some sort of deal since last fall, as we and others were hearing . Then-chief executive Owen Van Natta told The Telegraph that MySpace saw value in Facebook for its content plans. “We are in talks with Facebook, and other sites, about how we could partner with them. Partnerships are going to be a big part of our strategy moving forward as a lot of value can be derived from them. Facebook is about core communications with your friendship network, whereas MySpace is about congregating around popular content with people who share your interests.” The MySpace blog post on the matters has that same theme today: “Sync with Facebook allows users to keep their friends on Facebook up to date on everything, including: sharing songs, latest photos, fun game apps, and more.” Perhaps MySpace will attract some avid Facebook social gamers through news feed updates? The integration could bring new usage scenarios to MySpace, but also reinforces the need for MySpace to provide a differentiated social service in order to lure users away. Van Natta is now at Zynga, the leading social gaming developer on Facebook and MySpace’s platforms; Mike Jones is now CEO at MySpace, apparently pushing the current integration forward – and MySpace still has considerable traffic .
The Next “Oxford English Dictionary” Could Be Online-Only
Bad news for everyone out there who was eager to hold the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (that exceedingly portable 20-volume set of wordy goodness): Thanks to the rise of the Internet, the next OED will probably be online-only.Granted, OED3 is still about a decade in the making (according to The Telegraph , a team of 80 lexicographers have been working on it for the past 21 years), but seeing as how the OED has never posted a profit since its inception back in 1879, the move to online-only seems like a long time coming.The second edition of the dictionary (which came out in 1989) has been online for about 10 years now and garners about 2 million hits per month from subscribers. Add to that a plethora of online dictionary sources, and the stack of books that make up OED3 seems a bit, well, like an unnecessary massacre of trees.Oxford University Press, which prints the dictionary, will still continue to publish the slimmer Oxford Dictionary of English , however, which should set your mind at ease if you’re one of those folks who likes to keep a giant dictionary on a pedestal in the parlor.The future of book publishing has become obfuscated this past year, as big companies like Amazon reported that Kindle sales have been outstripping hardcover book sales and Barnes & Noble posted declining retail sales while boasting that online sales are on the rise .The news that the OED3 might exist solely in the online realm will likely add more credence to the idea that the publishing industry could be undergoing a massive change due to the rise of e-readers and devices like the iPad. Still, the final decision is still 10 years away, and a lot can happen in a decade. Images courtesy of Flickr Flickr , greeblie For more Tech coverage: Follow Mashable Tech on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Tech channel Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad