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Blasted XP didn't warn me that my hard drive was full! Therefore, half of the podcast didn't record. Thankfully, I was able to salvage yesterday's episode from the Ustream recording, so here it is! Special guests include ZDNet's Andrew Mager, SXSW Event Director Hugh Forrest, and Blogger's Rick Klau.

Happy Pi Day! http://www.boingboing.net/2009/03/13/happy-pi-day.html

Facebook: It’s party time for the social Web…on the iPhone http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10196472-2.html

Facebook Adobe AIR application http://www.facebook.com/pages/edit/?id=23723376453#/apps/application.php?id=23723376453… Read more

When President Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act into law 11 years ago, he predicted it will "protect from digital piracy the copyright industries that comprise the leading export of the United States."

The DMCA turned out to be much broader than that. This week, an e-book Web site said Amazon.com invoked the 1998 law to prevent books from some non-Amazon sources from working on its Kindle reader.

Amazon sent a legal notice to MobileRead.com complaining that information relating to a computer utility written in the Python programming language "constitutes a violation" of … Read more

eBay on Wednesday announced plans to revise its struggling marketplace unit, giving it greater focus on its core used goods auction business, rather than its retail business, the company said during its analyst day presentation.

The news apparently pleased Wall Street, which bid up eBay shares 4.7 percent Wednesday, as the company held its analyst day. eBay shares continued to rise Thursday, climbing 2.24 percent to $11.89 a share in morning trading.

With its announcement, eBay addresses one of Wall Street's long-held complaints that the e-commerce giant suffers from an identity crisis. Analysts have previously said … Read more

This was originally published at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Amazon has tweaked its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) pricing model to be more enterprise-friendly. The move is significant enough to sway IT executives to adopt more of Amazon's Web Services-especially when they have tight budgets.

Amazon on Thursday announced reserved pricing for its EC2 instances. Simply put, customers can reserve instances for one-year and three-year terms as if they owned the hardware. Enterprises can guarantee they have an EC2 instance for computing power they know they'll use and buy on the spot market to account for spikes at … Read more

Every now and then, the traditional record industry comes up with a win-win for all involved. Take for example today's announcement from Amazon.com of a new service called Back from the Vault, which offers out-of-print albums for sale as CDs or MP3s.

The key to the program is Amazon subsidiary CreateSpace, which manufacturers individual CDs as users demand them--very similar to part of the service Audiolife provides for independent musicians. (CreateSpace also lets musicians self-publish, and provides similar services for books and video.) In this case, more than 20 record labels have contracted with CreateSpace to make more … Read more

More Apple tablet/Netbook rumors surfaced Wednesday as one Apple watcher wonders what the company is doing with all those books.

Reuters is reporting that Apple has ordered 10-inch touch screens from Wintek, a contract manufacturer in Taiwan that makes the touch screens used in the iPhone and iPod Touch. The screens are expected to be ready by the third quarter of this year, setting the stage for a possible late 2009 introduction of the long-rumored Apple tablet and/or Netbook.

But one interesting possibility for that rumored device comes from longtime Apple writer Andy Ihnatko, who is wondering if … Read more

Firefox is trying a new blank tab feature that gives you some links but leaves the focused middle area blank to go easy on the floveal area of your eye. We also are very excited about mind control peripherals for your computer. And Natali says pinche again. Which is always good.

YouTube to block UK music videos http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7933565.stm

Firefox, too, revamping new-tab behavior http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10191921-2.html

Amazon testing HD VOD on TiVo? http://i.gizmodo.com/5166326/amazon-hd-video-on-demand-now-beta-testing-on-select-tivo-devices

Venezuelan cell … Read more

Slate's Paul Collins on Friday took Amazon.com to task for not being more generous in its charitable giving. "While Amazon.com is famously cheap in its prices, it's also become infamously cheap to the community it lives in," writes Collins. The criticism,while clever, misses the mark, much as deprecations of corporations for not contributing more open-source code largely miss the mark.

Why? Because a company should not be measured by its charity, but rather by how well it delivers returns to shareholders. A company is set up to generate profits, not alms.

This distinction … Read more

Last September, I wrote a piece about a new e-book reader under development at Plastic Logic (see "E-books: The flexible future").

At the time, the company was hoping to ship its still unnamed e-book reader in the first half of this year. I was really looking forward to it, since it provides a unique combination of two valuable features: a big screen and enough flexibility to tolerate a little bit of bending. (I worry about my Kindle getting crunched in my briefcase.)

Monday night, I was watching the local news from KGO-TV in San Francisco, and caught a … Read more