XplanaZine

Here’s our take on news that matters for Tuesday, November 8. Today’s theme is media (as was yesterday’s) and there are again interesting things afoot that will have an effect on all of us.

• To begin with, yesterday marked the final and complete demise of once-dominant P2P software purveyor Grokster. As part of the settlement in a federal lawsuit filed against the peer-to-peer service, the company is
  href=”http://www.riaa.com/news/newsletter/110705_2.asphttp:/online.wsj.com/article/SB113134634029589862.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news” target=”_blank”>going out of the file-sharing business. The suit itself was made possible by the US Supreme Court’s decision in the infamous
  href=”http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050627-5042.html” target=”_blank”>MGM v. Grokster case, which opened the doors for lawsuits against companies that create applications that “encourage” copyright infringement.
• Also important is the evolving trend towards On Demand TV. On Monday, NBC and CBS unveiled separate plans to make some of their hottest prime-time shows available for viewers to watch at their leisure–without commercials–for 99 cents an episode, throwing open the door to “on-demand” television.
• And then there was the informative post by Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired. — Mainstream Media Meltdown. His starting oint is the fact that average weekday circulation at U.S. newspapers fell 2.6 per cent during the six
  month-period ending in September in the latest sign of trouble in the newspaper
  business.
• Finally, Google has announced its new ad-services referral program. Under this plan, Google will provide additional incentives for participants using ad-sense.

Now, here’s a recap of our favorite posts from the edublogging community from the past 48 hours.

• From Alan Levine : Post on SuperGlu and sticky aggregation.
• From Ben Vershbow: Post MIT’s $100 laptop program.
• From Stephen Downes: Post on academic blogging.