The Social

Now here's one you don't see every day: Wordnik, which launched out of private beta on Monday and states its mission as "discovering all the words and everything about them." Taking the basic premise of a dictionary, Wordnik supplements each entry with Web 2.0's tastiest treats--relevant Flickr images, Twitter search matches, user-contributed tags and comments--and then invites users to add their own words, too.

Calling itself a "project" rather than a company, Wordnik's origins are sort of like a dot-com fairy tale. CEO Erin McKean, then serving as editor-in-chief of Oxford University Press' American dictionaries, was giving a talk at the elite TED conference when she raised an issue for lexicographers--dictionary scientists--that, in her opinion, the digital age hadn't solved yet.

"There are so many more words than dictionaries can handle," McKean said to CNET News about the issue she raised at TED. "There's no program for anyone to go out and try to find all the words. People have been conditioned to be more or less content with what they've got." She has a point: many online dictionary sites are little more than digital replicas of their print predecessors.

As is often the case with TED, some pretty important people were listening in, including Silicon Valley venture capitalist Roger McNamee--now one of the investors in Wordnik, which McKean promptly co-founded with two lexicographers and an engineer. Now the Bay Area-based company has six full-time employees, and is launching with 1.7 million words in its directory.

McKean says she isn't too concerned yet about dealing with the pranksters and vandals who give Wikipedia its more-than-occasional headaches ("people have tended to be well behaved with us, and we're not sure how long that's going to last") and says that copyright issues shouldn't be too much of a problem ("there's about 400 years of precedent in terms of fair use in a dictionary"). Right now the priority is expansion. On the way, McKean said, are smartphone apps, a developer API, and a cleaned-up version of Wordnik for kids to use.

The site's design and depth of information leave a little bit to be desired (it lacks the smooth, words-meet-visuals feel of something like news aggregator Daylife), and McKean said that bringing more interesting and unexpected information to Wordnik is also on the agenda.

But Wordnik faces one of the same concerns that pretty much any information- or search-focused start-up does: what if the likes of Google create a competing product? McKean said that Wordnik's advantage is its team's dedication. "Nobody's going to have as much money as Google," she said, "but nobody's going to be as interested in this as I am and my lexicographer colleagues are."

Now check it out and go look up "bacon."

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos shows off the Kindle DX

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET News)

NEW YORK--Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the much-anticipated large-screen Kindle e-reader in a lecture hall Wednesday at the downtown Pace University. Called the Kindle DX, the new device is geared toward readers of personal and professional documents, newspapers, and magazines--and textbooks, a potentially huge target market.

The debut of the bigger Kindle wasn't exactly a secret: rumors of a larger-screen Kindle had been around for quite some time, and concrete reports began to surface earlier this week.

Amazon's Kindle DX

(Credit: Amazon)

According to Amazon's Kindle DX page, the device has the following:

• A 9.7-inch display with 16 shades of gray. (The standard Kindle has a 6-inch display.)

• Capacity to hold up to 3,500 books, periodicals, and documents.

• An auto-rotating screen to show either portrait or landscape views.

• A built-in PDF reader.

• 3G wireless network support with no monthly fees or annual contracts.

• Battery capacity to "read for days without charging."

• Text-to-speech abilities to read publications aloud.

Several of those features are shared with the current Kindle 2, but several are unique to the Kindle DX: the native PDF reader that doesn't require the files to be converted, the rotating display, the 3,500-publication capacity compared to 1,500 for the Kindle 2, and of course the larger screen.

Leaked photos of the alleged 'Kindle DX' device from Amazon.

(Credit: Engadget)

Newspapers hoping the next version of Amazon.com's Kindle e-reader will be a savior for their beleaguered businesses are likely to be disappointed when it's unveiled Wednesday. But this Kindle could win plenty of converts in academia.

Amazon is slated to unveil a new, larger-screen version of the Kindle, which it originally launched late in 2007. Possibly called the Kindle DX, the new device is designed for reading newspapers, magazines, and textbooks, and it's expected to be part of new electronic course material test-runs at six universities this fall. The list, according to The Wall Street Journal, consists of Pace University (where Amazon is holding Wednesday's press conference), Case Western Reserve, Reed College, Arizona State University, the Darden School at the University of Virginia, and Princeton University--Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' alma mater, which already publishes Kindle textbooks.

This move makes loads of sense. Anyone who's been to a U.S. college in the past few decades could tell you that textbooks are very highly--some would say obscenely--priced. They're also bulky, and often difficult to get rid of once purchased: Selling the third edition of an introductory biology textbook on the used-book market is pretty difficult when the fourth edition comes out a year later. Theoretically, this should be the perfect market for an electronic reader like the Kindle.

But just because Amazon has inked a few deals with textbook companies, and a handful of prominent academic institutions, doesn't mean that hordes of incoming freshmen across the U.S. will be moving into dorms this fall with Kindles in hand.

"I do think the textbook market will be the killer app for e-readers," said Sarah Epps, a media analyst at Forrester Research. "(But) we think it's going to start to develop in 2011 and really pick up in 2013...We've been talking to publishers, talking to universities, and what we're seeing is that from the publisher perspective there's some hesitation."

Why's this? There are a lot of questions for the publishing industry, the biggest of which is whether electronic textbooks will take a bite out of the profits that manufacturers are making from paper textbooks. There's also the potential issue of licensed content in textbooks that might not have digital rights stipulated in its original agreement with the publishers. Then, as Epps pointed out, there's the Google problem.

For the past few years, Google has been pushing forward a book scanning and digitization project called Google Book Search, and though it has some prominent allies in the industry, to say that Google Book Search has been controversial would be putting it lightly. The Association of American Publishers sued the search giant in 2005 over potential copyright violations. Authors and publishers of out-of-print books have petitioned for royalties from digitized books. More recently, library industry trade groups have expressed concern in the form of a legal filing over what Google's efforts could mean for their business. An agreement in court has been delayed.

For Amazon, this could mean that it'll have to deal with some publishers who have become quite suspicious of large-scale digital book projects. But on the flip side, this could work to the Seattle-based retailer's advantage: if the digital shift is as inevitable as it appears, and Google is to be the Silicon Valley villain in this story, then Amazon, which has been in the book business for nearly two decades, could be the friendlier alternative.

There's also the potential for the new Kindle, whatever it's called, to have a significant impact outside the U.S. Forrester analyst Epps speculates that it will make waves in developing markets like China and India, where there are millions of university students with tight textbook budgets. "Using e-readers for textbooks would be incredibly empowering for students in their universities," Epps said, "but that's going to take some time."

It's clear that Amazon could shake up the twin pillars of educational publishing and academia with its new Kindle, potentially a much bigger splash than the launch of the original Kindle or its improved Kindle 2 successor earlier this year. What's less clear is how immediate the change will be. And what's even less clear is what impact the new, bigger Kindle will have on the market that everyone was expecting Amazon would target: print periodicals.

Rumor has it that The New York Times will be part of Wednesday's Kindle announcement, possibly lowering its price for a Kindle subscription. But this doesn't mean that Amazon's skinny gadget will suddenly save print media: Newspaper and magazine publishers may think they still get the short end of the stick.

"The way things work now, newspapers and magazines can distribute their content over the Kindle if they want, but it's not a very good model for them. Amazon is keeping the majority of the revenue," Epps said. "In addition, there are some business problems, like that publishers can't count subscribers toward their rate base, so it's diluting rather than adding to their subscription base from the perspective of the business."

But while Amazon has the textbook market in focus, it shouldn't let newspapers and magazines get away from it: this is somewhere that the manufacturer of a rival e-reader could sneak in.

"Some of the other device competitors that will be coming to the market over the next year may be more appealing partners for newspaper publishers," Epps said. "It's another distribution channel for their content, but not all distribution channels are created equal. So there could be a great opportunity for publishers to distribute their content on other types of e-readers, where they have a more favorable business model."

Social networks like Facebook and MySpace have reputations as time-sucking procrastination tools, but a new study from the University of Minnesota says au contraire.

Social networks build beneficial technological, creative, and communication skills, the study says, leading the researchers to actually describe social networks with the adjective "educational." Who knew?

"What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today," Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher from the school's College of Education and Human Development, said in a release Friday.

Data from the study came from teenagers ages 16 to 18 in about a dozen urban high schools in the Midwest.

"Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content and thinking about online design and layout," Greenhow continued. "They're also sharing creative original work like poetry and film and practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology."

As an added bonus, social networks may be part of the reason that low-income students are largely just as technologically proficient as their peers, contradicting parts of a 2005 Pew study that detailed an economic "digital divide." According to the new study, a full 94 percent of students use the Internet, 82 percent use it at home, and 77 percent have social-networking profiles.

The "digital divide," obviously, goes far beyond Facebook profiles, and social networks come with a whole host of new problems like cyberbullying, but at least there are signs that it could be leveling the playing field a bit.

Something just feels off about the new Facebook app from Embark.

Called College Planner, this widget lets prospective college students research schools and then apply to them without actually leaving their Facebook profiles. You can also see which people on your friends list are interested in the same schools.

Applying to college through Facebook. A little weird, isn't it?

(Credit: Embark)

I like to think that it wasn't all that long ago that I was applying to colleges.The world was "wired" enough so that most of my application forms were downloaded off the Internet, but I don't recall actually submitting any online.

Online applications, I suppose, have been thoroughly destigmatized (back in my day, there was still the concern that an electronic application wouldn't be taken as seriously as a paper one), but it's still a bit ironic to be applying to college through a site that's best known as an addictive procrastination hub.

What really stands out about "social college applications" is that many people I knew (not all, obviously) were fiercely private about where they were applying, especially if the school was a "reach." Then again, this was before high schoolers were eagerly exposing their souls on MySpace.com profiles, so perhaps privacy is no longer sacred.

No, actually, now I think I know what's unnerving about the Embark application. It's the fact that this is a Facebook application that actually could be useful. Zombies and FluffFriends, beware!

(Via AllFacebook.com.)

Discovery Communications, parent company of the Discovery Channel, TLC and Animal Planet, has made plans to acquire HowStuffWorks, which calls itself "the leading source of credible, unbiased, and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world actually works."

The news was originally reported in The Wall Street Journal, which named a price of $250 million.

Atlanta-based HowStuffWorks, which was founded in 1998 by North Carolina State University professor Marshall Brain (yes, that's his real name), pulls in about 3.8 million unique U.S. visitors per month, according to ComScore. Instead of issuing a press release to announce the acquisition, the site created a HowStuffWorks article in the "television" category called "The Future of Media is Now," explaining how the popularity of YouTube, video-enabled media players, and high-definition technology have created conditions ideal for such an acquisition.

According to the Wall Street Journal article, Discovery will integrate its own education-based video programming with HowStuffWorks articles and potentially factor HowStuffWorks into future broadcasts.

It's all part of a broader digital strategy for Discovery Communications; earlier this year, the company purchased the widely read environmental blog TreeHugger as a new-media property for its Planet Green network.

If indie cinema hero Wes Anderson--of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums fame--directed a quirky courtroom drama, there's a chance that it might bear some resemblance to what could unfold at Wednesday's impending showdown between social-networking sites Facebook and ConnectU.

The backstory of the legal squabble, after all, in which the three founders of college-centric start-up ConnectU have accused Facebook czar Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their business plan and code, reads like classic Anderson.

It's a melange of gossip about upper-crust Silicon Valley, allegations of old-school Ivy League skulduggery and an oddball cast of characters that ranges from precocious dot-com millionaires to aspiring Olympic athletes. In what other intellectual-property lawsuit are two of the plaintiffs a set of Harvard University-educated twins from Greenwich, Conn., with several international rowing championship medals under their belts?

But we still won't have much of an idea of where the plot might head until after Wednesday afternoon's hearing at a Boston courthouse.

Read the rest of the CNET News.com story here.