links for 2009-01-13

"How would an iTunes for news market its products? Publishers could sell their editions directly to readers or license them to aggregators, much as the music labels license their tunes to iTunes and Amazon. The aggregators could bundle publications, giving you a financial incentive to subscribe to, say, the Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal all at once." Nuts.

AOL Pictures API was little more than “Look at us, we have an API!” lipservice. There’s no way to programmatically log-in and access private pictures, there’s no way to upload via the API, and the system for returning information about those pictures was unintuitive bordering on useless. The API should be a programmatic reflection of what your web service is capable of.

"Last time we looked, no-one was planning to storm the streets of Edinburgh to demand an end to didactic Irish frontmen. But think of the untold suffering that Bono – and other celebrities like him – have caused the world over the years. It's enough to make a stone weep!"