Year: 2009

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DocStoc Launches Document Collections

Popular document sharing service DocStoc just launched a collections feature, which lets users package documents around a particular topic. DocStoc has already created close to 50 collections, including “Starting a Small Business,” “Advertising Online,” and “Traveling on a Budget,” and is opening up the platform to users to add to existing collections and create their own.

via DocStoc Launches Document Collections.

New feature includes 2 legal collections, “Filing a Patent” and “How to File a Lawsuit“.  With any luck somebody will wade through the docs and put together some more legal collections and maybe even some with an eye toward legal education.  Wait that would be me and law school outlines.

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O’Reilly Takes The Plunge Into Collaborative Authoring With Open Feedback

Over the last few years, traditional publishing has been moving closer to the web and learning a lot of lessons from blogs and wikis, in particular. Today we’re happy to announce another small step in that direction: our first manuscript (Programming Scala) is now available for public reading and feedback as part of our Open Feedback Publishing System. The idea is simple: improve in-progress books by engaging the community in a collaborative dialog with the authors out in the open. To do this, we followed the model of the Django Book, Real World Haskell, and Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (among others) and built a system to regularly publish the whole manuscript online as HTML with a comment box under every paragraph, sidebar, figure, and table.After the impressive success of the Rough Cuts program from Safari Books Online, which we’ve long supported, and Real World Haskell, which used a similar system, we we’re extremely eager to try the idea out with more titles.

Collaborative Publishing Based on Community Feedback – O’Reilly Labs

Seems like a step in the right direction.  The ability to comment on a work at the paragraph level is a great idea.  I wonder if the OPFS engine for turning a book or manuscript into a commentable website will ne made available for others to use?

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Online Ad Revenues Fall in First Quarter

t was the last part of the advertising sector to fall and may be the first to recover, but online advertising is now in a recession. With the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL) having reported March quarter financials, we can get a pretty good sense of how the sector did as a whole. If you add up the online advertising revenues of these four online advertising bellwethers, the total online advertising revenues for the quarter came to $7.9 billion, a 2 percent decline from a year ago and a 7 percent decline from the fourth quarter.

The Online Ad Recession Is Officially Here: First Quarterly Decline In Revenues

In case anyone was wondering whether or not advertising was on some sort of never ending growth cycle.  Money is disappearing from the ad market, it isn’t moving from newspapers and TV to websites.  And just as newspapers and TV are getting squashed, so will websites that rely strictly on advertising for revenue.

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links for 2009-04-29