Links for 05-21-2009

• Sharing Where You Are When You Care to Share | Nick Wingfield | Personal Technology | AllThingsD - All the new geo-related stuff coming online could get me really paranoid if I wanted to. We're heading into an era where there's the potential for much closer linkages between our online identity and our physical presence.
• Blogola: The FTC Takes On Paid Posts - BusinessWeek - The beginning section of the article seems to grossly overstate what is actually being talked about. The scenario discussed is standard practice for all sorts of reviews from well before blogging even began--and often without the disclosure that was made in this case (e.g. a good proportion of the book and album reviews ever written). [Apparently, if you read the comments, the problem is that the writer seriously misrepresented the situation here. To his credit, it's now been corrected but it's now a pretty lousy example to lead off the story.]
• Gawker's Nick Denton: 'Original Reporting Will Be Rewarded' - Advertising Age - Digital - "Remember the dream of micropublishing? A few years ago, we still believed that costs were so low and online advertising so magical that the most arcane of subject matters could attract a viable audience. That dream is dead. We'll spend our time and money on sites such as Gizmodo, Kotaku and Gawker -- where we already have the scale or soon will. " This was much what happened with cable TV as well. I'm less comfortable--though I'm not sure he's wrong--with the implication in this interview that it's not clear that "serious" news has a profitable audience.
• Wild IIlusions: The economics of the $9.99 ebook - There's not much here that I agree with. For example, it's not clear to me how disaggregating functions necessarily makes the cost go down at the same level of overall quality. Sure, you can cut out design, editing, and so forth or spend less time/money on them but you don't get something for nothing.
• Op-Ed Columnist - In Praise of Dullness - NYTimes.com - "What mattered, it turned out, were execution and organizational skills. The traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytic thoroughness and the ability to work long hours."
• MySQL forking heats up, but not yet to the benefit of non-GPLed storage engine vendors | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services - The interaction between MySQL and storage engines would appear to be one of those corner cases where reasonable people can disagree as to whether GPL MySql required GPL storage engine.
• How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write - WSJ.com - I also wonder book length will be affected. The author of this article doesn't discuss this aspect, but shorter books seems a very possible outcome of a lot of the dynamics he mentions.
• BookFinder.com Journal: Breakdown of book costs - This is interesting. Note how relatively small the slice that's eliminated in an ebook is--under 20 percent in this example (I assume the Wholesaler costs are eliminated as well as the printing).