Roundup: Amazon’s ‘ham-fisted’ error, Facebook’s baseball surge and more
Here’s the latest action:
Gay books disappear from Amazon’s sales rankings — What caused the incident now known as “amazonfail”? The online retailer first blamed a glitch, and is now saying a “ham-fisted” cataloging error is at fault. Meanwhile, a hacker claims to be responsible.
With the start of baseball season, teams see a surge in Facebook fans — The Boston Red Sox’s page grew from 1,173 fans to more than 46,000 in under a week.
Banner advertising isn’t dead yet — In fact, a new blog post from comScore says that the recent decline in the “display advertising” category came from rich media and sponsorships, while banner ads (like the one you see at the top of this page) continue to grow.
Only 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online? — If the Nieman Journalism Lab is making such a bold claim, it must have done a new, statistically valid study, right? Actually, no: “That’s my conclusion after I got out my spreadsheets and calculator to check the math.”
What went wrong at the Boston Globe? — This bleak look at the New York Times-owned paper’s declining fortunes includes the tidbit that a decade ago, Globe executives passed up an ownership stake in job site Monster.com.
Palm Pre caught taking a walk in the park — No, seriously, Palm’s not-yet-released smartphone was spotted at an outdoor event for reasons unknown.
OpenSecrets publishes 200 million money-in-politics records – That data comes from the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics, and includes campaign finance, lobbying and personal finance records.
Meet Google’s immigration fixer — The New York Times profiles Christine Doyle, whose whole job is to help Google employees seeking visas or experiencing other immigration problems.
Wikipedia users vote on whether to adopt Creative Commons — If approved, the move to a CC license would put even fewer restrictions on how Wikipedia content can be used.
Next Story: Add True Knowledge’s semantic answer engine to your website
Previous Story: Imbera gets $15 million to help pack more functions onto small devices
About the Author, Anthony Ha
Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.
-
ducdebrabant