Anonymity on the web has its pros and its cons. If you’re a citizen living under a repressive regime, and looking to overthrow the government, anonymity is fundamental to your goal. If you’re a troll sitting in an American basement looking to trash your neighbor’s reputation, you probably don’t serve it. The New York Times is taking a new look at the consequences of online commenting in an article called “In Small Towns, Gossip Moves to the Web, and Turns Vicious” that focuses on Topix, a news aggregation site. The Times wrote:

A waitress, Pheobe Best, said that the site had provoked fights and caused divorces. The diner’s owner, Jim Deverell, called Topix a “cesspool of character assassination.” And hearing the conversation, Shane James, the cook, wandered out of the kitchen tense with anger. (more…)

It’s hard to know what to think about the state of publishing. Every other day someone is declaring the book to be dead — and in between, there is someone rebutting the doomsday prophecies of the end of books. if you’re a new author trying to get into the book market, it’s downright anxiety inducing.

Over at The Guardian Lloyd Shepherd writes:

According to Nielsen BookScan, the publishing industry standard for book sales data, book sales are pretty healthy, with one significant proviso which I’ll come to. Ten years ago in 2001, 162m books were sold in Britain. Ten years later – a decade in which the internet bloomed, online gaming exploded, television channels proliferated, digital piracy rampaged and, latterly, recession gloomed – 229m books sold. So, a 42% increase in the number of books sold over the last 10 years. (more…)

The Financial Times just may go down in history as the publication that stood up to Apple.

Last year 10% of FT’s new subscription revenue came through the iPad. But two months ago Apple started requiring all in-app purchases go through the iTunes store, and it seems that FT is standing its ground…perhaps to its detriment. The Financial Times apps have disappear from iTunes.

Apparently, though, the skirmish isn’t about money. Financial Times is more concerned with the customer data it gathered by processing its own subscriptions, according to PaidContent. It just goes to show the value of information. What’s a measly 30% of 10,000 (or more) iPad subscribers when you can mine the subscriber info for valuable stats that can make your product more alluring to advertisers.

Yesterday, Future U.S., a publisher of gaming and technology media properties  announced an exclusive partnership with Justin.tv, owner of Twitch.tv, a gaming video and chat community. Twitch.tv, for the non-gamers among you, is a place where you watch streaming video of game play. It’s not exactly my thing, but that’s kind of the point… These two companies are joining forces to provide more content for a very specific demographic.

“Justin.tv and Digital Future are partnering because the core audience is the male influencer… This partnership really represents the perfect marriage, allowing us to cross-link and deliver engaging content ranging from long form 8 hour live videos to short form 30 second clips,” says Rachelle Considine, VP of sales and marketing at Future U.S. “The partnership will also allow Digital Future to deliver a coveted unduplicated audience of nearly 8 million influential, engaged 18-34 year old males, furthering Future’s expansion into the digital space.  Simultaneously, Twitch.tv is able to grow its audience by tapping Future’s established network of loyal gaming fans.” (more…)

From its inception in 2005, the BlogHer Conference has aimed to bring together female leaders in social media to network with one another and to connect with brands for mutually beneficial engagement. BlogHer founders Elisa Camahort Page, Jory Des Jardins, and Lisa Stone have said that with the first conference, which drew 300 attendees, they wanted to answer the question, “Where are the women in blogging?”

The 2011 BlogHer conference, held August 4-6 at the San Diego Convention Center and attended by 3,600 mostly female bloggers, provided a definitive answer to the question—they’re at BlogHer, and their collective online voice is influencing purchase decisions across the board. During the keynote address on August 5, the BlogHer co-founders quantified that influence with highlights of the BlogHer annual Social Media Matters study, conducted by the Nielson Company in April 2011. (more…)

I was shocked (shocked I tell you!) to find one of my favorite journalists disagreeing with me this morning when I did my daily perusal of Slate.com. But there it was in black and white: Jack Shafer was saying Patch — and other hyperlocal journalism — is a waste of time. I’m not one to argue about his assessment of Patch, but I don’t think he’s right about local news in general.

Shafer writes:

In other words, social news trumps hyperlocal news.

Hasn’t it always been so? We’re always more interested in what our friends and family are doing than we are about plans to add a curb-cut to a neighbor’s property. Besides, for users who tune their Facebook accounts to include neighbors, schools, curmudgeons, and other sources, they get a stream of hyperlocal news in addition to the usual social news they desire. (more…)

Barnes & Noble has seen its fair share of financial turmoil over the past few years. This morning, though, it announced strong earning reports — largely thanks to the popularity of its e-reader, the Nook. Following the announcement of the report William Lynch, CEO of B&N, said, “We now sell three times as many digital books as all formats of physical books combined on BN.com.”

With a little over a quarter of the e-reader market share, the Nook often finds itself in the shadow of Amazon’s Kindle — or even the iPad — but B&N has been pushing sales of the device hard. Last December you couldn’t walk into a Barnes & Noble to buy your grandmother a cookbook without passing the Nook nook, which was front and center in every store.  (more…)

It’s a big week for Apple. Not only did Steve Jobs announce the availability of the iCloud yesterday — which wasn’t much of a surprise — but it’s also gearing up to start taking 30% of in-app purchase revenues in a few weeks. With that in mind, some publishers have been fighting back.

As Apple was closing deals with major record companies to allow for the streaming of music from iCloud, The Financial Times was working on the release of its new web app. According to the press release:

The Financial Times has today launched a new, faster and automatically updating app available directly through a web browser at app.ft.com. The FT is the first major news publisher to launch an app of this type, which will allow readers to access its award-winning journalism easily and quickly across a broad range of tablet and smartphone devices. As part of the launch, the new FT Web App will provide free access to FT content during launch week. (more…)

Yesterday afternoon I received a call from my mother. She sounded terrified. As it turns out, she was terrified. The television had scared her into a tizzy about tornadoes. While I was busy slaving away over EContent, she was being inundated with messages about tornado warnings across Connecticut. Since my mother also gets this way about snow storms, I didn’t worry too much. The skies here were a normal gloomy gray for an unbearably humid day.

Out here in Newtown we didn’t see more than a few drops of rain, but in Springfield, MA — just 20 or 30 minutes from where my mother lives — at least two tornadoes ripped through the city. How did I find out about this? Well, Facebook of course! Friends started reporting the news… and then the videos started showing up. (more…)