Blown to Bits – a book that looks how the Internet is changing the world - is now available for free download, under a Creative Commons license.

Topics include: privacy, findability, encryption, copyright, free speech issues and the future of media.

You can download Blown to Bits here.

In what the newspaper deems a “groundbreaking” move, the Detroit Free Press and News announced that they are cutting home delivery to three days per week.

The Free Press and The Detroit News are the first first “big city papers” to make the shift from mostly-paper to mostly-online news publishing, citing a steep decline in advertising revenue and a dawning realization for its publishers that traditional news publishing is a “way of life that is going to disappear (for some newspapers).”

Dave Hunke, CEO of the Detroit Media Partnership, which publishes the Free Press, said that starting in spring 2009, both the Free Press and the Detroit News — which is also operated by the partnership — would deliver to homes only on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays, which are the heaviest days for advertising. Paper copies of the newspapers will still be available all week long for single-copy purchase at stores, newsstands and coin boxes.

Trying to portray the changes in a positive light, the Free Press says the changes would “allow both papers to maintain their news-gathering forces, shift resources to their Web sites, develop new ways to deliver information digitally, [and] enhance multimedia offerings.”

The change from daily to 3x/week home delivery will result in a 9% reduction of its 2100-member staff, but will leave the current reporting staff intact. Newspapers throughout the country are scrambling to survive in a media universe in which more and more news is consumed online rather than on paper or television. Some newspapers are making across-the-board reductions in personnel as at the Des Moines Register. In the case of the venerable Christian Science Monitor, the newspaper is moving almost entirely to a digital-only format, with only a weekend paper edition. The New York Times announced last week that it is using its headquarters building as collateral for a $250 million loan. The Chicago Tribune, struggling under a $13billion debt, last week declared bankruptcy.

Today, Apple announced that 2009 would be the last year it participated in MacWorld. It also announced that Steve Job’s wouldn’t be attending for the keynote – effectively killing off the company’s participation immediately. 

Here’s the text of Apple’s announcement:

Apple today announced that this year is the last year the company will exhibit at Macworld Expo. Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, will deliver the opening keynote for this year’s Macworld Conference & Expo, and it will be Apple’s last keynote at the show. The keynote address will be held at Moscone West on Tuesday, January 6, 2009 at 9:00 a.m. Macworld will be held at San Francisco’s Moscone Center January 5-9, 2009.

Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways.

Apple has been steadily scaling back on trade shows in recent years, including NAB, Macworld New York, Macworld Tokyo and Apple Expo in Paris.

For many Apple fans, MacWorld isn’t just a trade show, but a sort of Mecca. Apple ending its participation is likely to mean the end of MacWorld.

Earlier this year, we asked, in a world of new media, if trade shows still matter:

Trade shows are encumbered with a lot of old-media baggage. And, as Sara Lacy’s SXSW interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pointed out, people are no longer willing to sit through a presentation that is not compelling.

Trade shows also face competition from unconference-style events, like PodCamp and WordCamp. These events are cheap to put on and are usually closely aligned with what people are interested in, because they are organized by attendees.

Tech tradeshows need a radical overhaul in order to maintain their value.

I’ll be sorry to see MacWorld go – but the trade show is an expense that Apple, a company widely respected for its management and marketing, doesn’t think is justified.

In this economy, Apple’s move doesn’t bode well for the future of trade shows.

Update: Robert Scoble has weighed in the topic, and his views our similar:

What should we expect over the next year? A lot of bad news for big trade shows.

What’s killing them? The Internet. You can launch a product live now from a living room. Thanks to Stickam, Ustream, Qik, Kyte, YouTube, Flixwagon, Viddler, Vimeo, SmugMug, etc and blogs.

Just give the people on Facebook something to pass along and talk about and your product is out there, big time.

What’s interesting about Scoble’s angle on this is that Apple makes no attempt to cater to bloggers.

Six Apart, the creators of Movable Type, have introduced an add-on that turns Movable Type into a social networking platform. 

Motion is a Movable Type application you install and run on your web server. Motion will be freely available in early 2009 for any licensed user of Movable Type Pro. 

According to Six Apart, “We looked at the most compelling social sites across the web, from Twitter to Tumblr, Pownce to FriendFeed, and more. And then we built an application around open standards to offer you the best features of each of these services, on your own site.”

Here are some of the things that Motion will let Movable Type users do:

• Create a private, custom action aggregator to track sentiment and glean intelligence from conversations around the web through action streams.
• Provide a private microblog community for simple internal employee or team collaboration.
• Publish a public microblog to nurture and grow your community while increasing your page views.
• Create a public social network to connect to your community across the web instead of competing against other social networks.

2009 is shaping up to be a the year social networking explodes. WordPress has already announced plans for a social networking add-on, BuddyPress.

Motion is in beta now. 

AnythingButiPod has an interesting round up of the top 5 MP3 players of 2008. 

The Top 5 MP3 Players Of 2008

1. SanDisk Sansa Clip
2. Samsung P2
3. Microsoft Zune 120
4. Cowon iAudio D2
5. Sony Walkman A720/A820

Of the SanDisk Sansa Clip, they say:

The Clip is one of the cheapest MP3 players on the market, in terms of price as well as build materials- though still very rugged and durable. The screen is small and interface is simple and straight forward. It supports OGG and FLAC and sports both MTP and MSC transfer protocol. It is a fairly basic, but thorough player.

I use an iPhone as my primary portable media player – but I could see where a cheap device like the SanDisk could be great to have for situations where you want great sound, but don’t want to risk damaging an expensive player.

The latest version of the Oxford English Dictionary – described as the the definitive record of the English language – has added podcasting:

podcasting n.

A very new word, for a recent phenomenon, and a great example of how technological change, especially that relating to the Internet and the media, can be a driving force not only in generating new words, but in determining whether they survive and succeed.

In this case the rapid adoption of podcasting (the technology) as a means of making audio material available has seen podcasting (the word) move quickly from its first tentative steps in 2004, as only one of a number of suggested names for the process, to near-ubiquity in 2008.

The current OED quarterly release also includes other members of the same family: podcast as a noun and a verb, podcaster, and even the somewhat ungainly adjective podcasted.

About time, eh?

via GrammarGirl

Gunp Media Productions’ Podstreamer (App Store link) is a native iPhone application designed to complement the iTunes-iPhone system for listening to podcasts. As the name suggests, Podstreamer is designed to stream podcasts, rather than download them. 

It’s great to see a new iPhone podcast client – but Podstreamer doesn’t offer a true alternative to Apple’s kludgy iPhone podcast downloads.

Description:

When you are away from your computer and you don’t have fresh content on your iPhone/iPod Touch, fire up Podstreamer, update your favourite podcast feeds, and start listening to new episodes while streaming them through your WiFi network. Podstreamer doesn’t download episodes for listening to them later, you have iTunes for that. Podstreamer plays your favourite podcasts by live streaming.

Media microblogging site Zannel has introduced a new iPhone app, CityWatch (App Store link), that lets you view and post location-based messages and media. 

Zannel describes itself as “the microblogging platform built from the ground up for visual bloggers.”

Features:

• See Flickr and Zannel updates for any location on the US or Canada on the map
• Post geo-tagged photos and text updates to Zannel
• Comment on updates to chat with people nearby
• Set up text alerts for real-time conversation
• Automatically export your posts to Flickr and Twitter

Video demos for the iPhone version of Zannel are available at the company’s site. 

Zannel for the iPhone is a free app. 

via Cnet

Hide the iPhone! Unplug the WiFi hub!

A new survey by Intel has found that 46% of women would rather go without sex for two weeks than give up the Internet for that long. 

Just when we thought we were getting our sexy back, too. 

Here are the bare facts:

• 46% of women would rather go without sex for two weeks than give up the Internet for that long:
  • 49% of women aged 18-34 would make that choice; and
  • 52% of women aged 35-44.
• 30% of all men would swap sex for the Internet for two weeks:
  • 39% of men aged 18-34 are willing to make that sacrifice;
  • 23% of men aged 35-44 said they would do so.

If these numbers are accurate, it’s likely that new media and social media are some of the culprits. Having 24/7 access to all the media you want, all the social connections you want, and billions of people as a possible audience for your thoughts can be a double-edged sword.

Before you get too out of joint, though, it’s worth noting that Intel based these stats on an Internet survey – so the numbers could very well be biased toward people that have already traded mounting the floppy for wireless downloads. 

What do you think – is blogging replacing snogging?

The NFL has launched a new service that could turn out to be a milestone in the development of Internet media, Game Rewind. 

Game Rewind is a $19.99/season Internet video service that lets you watch every NFL game in HD quality, with no commercials. Game Rewind provides DVR functionality and lets you watch up to four games at once. The NFL is saying games will be available within, at most, 24 hours.

Game Rewind has the potential to be huge:

• It routes around cable networks and traditional networks and makes the NFL the network;
• It eliminates the need, at least for football fans, for TiVo-style devices;
• It will expand the idea of the Internet replacing television to a mass audience; and
• It will increase the length of videos that people are watching online to unprecedented time. 

Services like this really highlight the missed opportunity that Apple has with the Apple TV. NFL fans would love to have an easy way to get this on their HDTVs instead of their television, and an Apple TV app store offering a $20 NFL purchase could be a huge hit. 

Do you think NFL’s Game Rewind going to be huge?