John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

Short Shelfari Life?

Amazon (AMZN) racked up its second acquisition of the month today, announcing the purchase of Shelfari, a social-networking site for bibliophiles. This just three weeks after the retailer acquired AbeBooks, an online marketplace for rare books that happens to hold an equity stake in Shelfari’s chief rival, LibraryThing. Which makes for an awkward situation, given the bad blood between the two. LibraryThing has been a vocal critic of Shelfari, denouncing it as a “bad actor” that’s built its business through astroturfing and spam. But now that bad actor is owned by one of LibraryThing’s own investors. “LibraryThing is clearly worried about today’s acquisition,” Richard MacManus writes over at ReadWriteWeb. “… Founder and lead developer of LibraryThing Tim Spalding notes that “Amazon can make Shelfari the choice of casual book lovers who see a button on Amazon.com and click on it.” LibraryThing hopes to compete with this by being a superior service. However it’s very difficult to compete against Amazon’s bulk.”

Twitter’s Tanking

December 30, 2013 at 6:49 am PT

2013 Was a Good Year for Chromebooks

December 29, 2013 at 2:12 pm PT

BlackBerry Pulls Latest Twitter for BB10 Update

December 29, 2013 at 5:58 am PT

Apple CEO Tim Cook Made $4.25 Million This Year

December 28, 2013 at 12:05 pm PT

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald