New Hazards For Book Reviewers, by Steve Denning

From a Book Review to a Criminal Trial in France
By ADAM LIPTAK, The New York Times,
"In a little more than a week, a court in Paris will decide whether a law professor in New York committed criminal libel by publishing a book review."

Steve Denning, RETHINK - Forbes, Feb. 21 2011
EXTRACT:
In a bizarre story in The New York Times...

... Moreoever “France is an odd place to adjudicate a claim concerning a review written in English by a German professor of a book written in English by an author living in Israel. The book was, moreover, published by a Dutch firm. The review was published on a Web site in New York. True, Ms. Calvo-Goller is a French citizen. But still.”

What’s next? Students suing their teachers for poor grades? Commenters in Amazon being sued for their less-than-five-star reviews?
Continue reading

Fee for service or pay as you go to read NYT Newspaper

--this post will be updated as new reviews / criticism appears on fee-based access

A look at the trends in the market shows many options to charge fee for users. A sample of this in today's news is the following:

N.Y. Times tests website fees on Canadians, CBC News Posted: Mar 17, 2011 6:12 PM ET

New York Times to Put Up Paywall March 28

Game On: New York Times Unveils Digital Subscriptions

Google's Bookstore in the Market, at last

If you are following Google's word, it was expected in 2009 and then in June 2010. Anyways, now it is up and running.

What's making news then?
Amazon Vs. Google: Who Will Win E-Book War? "Google's (NasdaqGS: GOOG) launch of e-book store has put the search giant in direct competition with market leader Amazon (NasdaqGS: AMZN), unfolding an interesting rivalry in the coming days."

Excellent comparative review is by Doug Thompson: See the 'Missing Features on Google eBooks app' + 'Strengths of Google eBooks over Amazon Kindle' at Doug Thompson's site

What are the impressions of the Librarians? One example is here, and it is by Tom Peters, and his interesting insights are:

First Impressions on Google's New Bookstore:
"Then I let my digits do some walking and did some comparison shopping for a few books on my wish list. Stanislas Dahaene’s 2009 book, Reading in the Brain, sells for $9.99 both in the Google ebookstore and as a Kindle edition. The Kindle edition of No Shelf Required sells for $46.80 (ouch); the Google ebookstore has a list price of $41.60. You Are Not a Gadget is $9.99 for the Kindle edition, but only $9.48 at the Google ebookstore." continue reading Tom Peters' First Impressions on Google's New Bookstore @ ALA TechSource

On the same shelf:

The list of bookstores offering Google ebooks is here

Review of a Website - A good example

Note: This review is not from my desktop.

This site has been removed: learn.senecac.on.ca/~mehedder/TCS301/Assignment1.html
Extract:
First Impression: I found this webpage to be very bright upon first look. There is some extreme detail, and the picture of the falls is as beautiful as in real life.
Navigation: The webpage was relatively easy to follow. Everything was broken down in categories so it was easy to manoeuvre your way through the site.
Current Information: The website was extremely up to date including upcoming events on dates from February onwards.
Problems Observed: The only problem that I found with this website is that it was completely in English. I know that the majority of people do speak English however, because Canada’s two National languages are French and English I think it should have the option for the site to be displayed in French.
Useful applications for customers: Some useful applications for customers that I noticed were links to tourism information (for where to eat, shop and stay), Transit information, event calendars, and a section called visitor’s favourites.
E-Commerce considerations: There are links on the website so clients can look at and select hotel packages and purchase online, so I would not change anything in this section.
Additional Comments: I was really impressed with the website’s ability to make myself able to find everything that I was looking for.
Improvements: Although the site was very interesting and helpful, it may have been a bit too busy, so I may have taken the clutter down one step by removing a few things from the front page and replacing them with links.
Rating: ***

Job Search Website Article - Excellent Benchmarking

This StarREVIEWS site measures and ranks each of the following Job Search Web sites:

Monster

CareerBuilder

The Ladders

College Recruiter

SnagAJob

Job Bank USA

Each site is analyzed for its performance based on the following analytics:

Overall Rating

Post Resume

Star Review

Search Resumes Employers

Career Resources

Potential Employers

Network Abilities

On the same shelf:
Just released: Job Search The Canadian Way
Buy our book:
Download Ebook @ $10 CDN
Buy softcover in print @ Createspace.com

The top-secret formula for decoding Toronto Star movie reviews, revealed

Interesting perspective on reviews:

Toronto Life Magazine by Alan Nance