Someone's going to find this fabulously useful.

[Carlos] Bueno raised money with Kickstarter to publish his book through Amazon’s self-publishing service, making his book available in a variety of electronic formats and also as a print-on-demand book—each time a physical copy is purchased, it’s printed specifically for that order. Bueno set the price of the book at $14.95 and has sold about 1,000 copies.

But in the last few weeks, Bueno has seen his book become the center of a strange phenomenon on Amazon: the bot market. A reseller in Amazon’s used books section was offering the book for $55—even though the book was available for forty dollars less on the same website.  Then another one appeared, selling for $14.94—lower than the retail price. Another was for sale for $12.50. The only way these resellers could profit would be through excessive shipping and handling charges. 

Even stranger, these resellers are offering “Very Good” or “Like New” used copies of a book that is printed on demand—that is, they’re offering used copies of books that probably don’t even exist.

Imagine if this happened in financial markets. Oh.

Stunning talk, just nine minutes long, whose key message is embodied by comparing two peoples' searches on one word: Egypt.

As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.

The best use you'll make of nine minutes today. (Thanks @ocoonassa, from the discussion about Google's Dafari hacking.)

Eli Pariser (of the Filter Bubble) on stuff that machines still lag at doing when it comes to offering you news.

"In a new research paper, Microsoft’s Johannes Kopf and The Hebrew University’s Dani Lischinski describe a new algorithmic method for converting pixel art into sweet, smooth vectors."<br />
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Completely ruins the look of Space Invaders, though. Those things are *meant* to look pixellated - not like some weird crab with attitude problems.

Figuring out who's up and who's down is going to keep SEOs amused for weeks. Interesting though that content farms have definitely, er, bought the farm in this case.