Amazon today announced two new enhancements to the latest generation Kindle—85 percent more battery life and a native PDF reader. The 6-inch Kindle now has a built-in native PDF reader. This will let users read documents in  PDF format without conversion. To read PDFs, users can email PDFs to their Kindle email address or move […]

The decline of traditional newspapers isn’t as bad as it looks – it’s worse. According to an Associated Press story, newspapers are loosing subscribers at a staggering rate, but you wouldn’t know it from their circulation figures because they’ve changed the way they count circulation: Since April 1, new auditing rules have made it easier […]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wants your help to beat a recently approved patent on podcasting that many feel is bogus.

“I’m certainly not a lawyer or an expert in patent law,” said podcast pioneer Dave Winer upon hearing of Volomedia’s patent announcement, “but it seems the work Adam Curry and I did in creating the format and protocol for podcasting, in 2001, may have inspired their ‘invention’. It certainly predates it.”

We’ve seen a lot of ignorant new media moves over the last few years – but it looks like photosharing site TweetPhoto and their lawyers could be blazing a new trail. TweetPhoto, via their representatives Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, has sent a takedown letter full of legal threats to podcaster Frank Peters, because Peters […]

Voting is now open for the 2009 Podcast Awards. It’s the fifth year for the annual event, which has the goal to “recognize the best podcasters in the world by allowing the people (Listeners and Podcasters) to nominate, and then vote for their favorite podcast.” Voting for the slate of podcast nominees is open through […]

YouTube has announced a new platform for aggregating user-generated content, YouTube Direct. YouTube Direct allows you to embed the upload functionality of YouTube directly into your own site, enabling your organization to request, review, and re-broadcast user-submitted videos. YouTube Direct Features: 100% open-source Customizable interface – allows you to tailor the look and feel of […]

ReadWriteWeb has posted a surprisingly pessimistic look at recent stats on how many people in the US are willing to pay for access to online news: 80% of US Consumers Won’t Pay For Online News. They cite two sources on this: According to a new Forrester Survey, 80% say they wouldn’t bother to access newspaper […]

Blue Microphones has introduced Blue FiRe, a free, high-fidelity field recording app for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Blue FiRe is optimized for use with Blue Microphone’s Mikey microphone, which attaches to the iPhone and iPod touch.

If you do location recording, you probably use a battery-powered portable audio recorder. WingFieldAudio did a battery life comparison test on the recorders that they sell, and found that there was a huge range in how long the recorders could work. Here are their top 10: 10 Top Long-Lasting Battery-Powered Portable Audio Recorders Sony PCM-M10 […]

Open source media platform Boxee has announced plans to partner with consumer electronics manufacturers to create a Boxee Box platform – an open Internet video hardware set top box. Here’s the text of their announcement: We launched our public alpha for Mac/Linux in January at CES. During the show we met with several device manufactures […]