As Eric Pfanner writes in the New York times:

Why should a technology company in California be allowed to decide what is objectionable to the rest of the world, they ask. By comparison, imagine a Japanese television manufacturer determining what Americans are allowed to see on their sets.

Platform owners need to understand the grey area between application stability and content censorship. Both, subjective fields, need to be unwoven. The US does have its right to freedom of speech so it seems ironic that German publishers are taking a US manufacturer to task.

Ian Fette of Google:

If you’ve wondered why there haven’t been many Gears releases or posts on the Gears blog lately, it’s because we’ve shifted our effort towards bringing all of the Gears capabilities into web standards like HTML5.

Thank you, Google.

Tomi Ahonen writes a somewhat long entry on putting some reality into an analysis of the mobile phone industry. If you ignore the easy jabs at Richard Wray, Guardian Communications Editor, and the somewhat pedantic, noisy tone Tomi has some really very good points:

App store income at less than a billion is 0.4% – one fourth of one percent – the size of the global mobile data services income

Matt Gemmell on the iPad and how to compete with it:

A tablet is a synthesis of hardware and software.

and

Your customers care about ease of discovering, browsing, buying and installing new apps; they don’t care in the least about whether it’s an open system or not.

I can count on one hand the companies that can compete and that understand what synthesis means in this case. Also, Matt mentions limitations in his open letter … suggesting that what are conceived of as limitations are only so because we may be benchmarking against the wrong idea. Sound credible? Certainly there’s a magic interplay of hardware and software in the Apple product lineup that you just don’t get with an Eee PC or Dell tablet. Not yet.

Richard Péréz-Peña at The New York Times writes, in an article without much substance:

Renewing a longstanding link, The Associated Press and Yahoo said Monday that they had reached a new agreement for A.P. articles, photos and videos to appear on the Yahoo News site.

Congratulations to the teams at Yahoo and AP.

Katie Hafner of The New York Times, talking about mobile apps, nails it:

The next generation of gadget users might prove different, but for now it is clear that people prefer fewer choices, and that they gravitate consistently toward the same small number of things that they like. Owners of iPhones are no different from cable TV subscribers with hundreds of channels to choose from who end up watching the same half-dozen.

Please check out my new blog, Germanofile, a chronicle of the trials and tribulations of moving to Berlin after over 10 years in New York. Just how do you leave the center of the universe to join the Teutonic tribes?

From Alton Brown’s haggis recipe:

Rinse the stomach thoroughly and soak overnight in cold salted water.

We’ll be piping in the Poet’s haggis tomorrow. I’ll let you know if I can find a spare stomach here in Brooklyn. Got to love suet.

Motoko Rich writing on techniques to get into the best-seller list on Amazon:

But paid purchases of some of Ms. Dane’s other novels jumped exponentially. Her earlier novel “Chased,” which sold 97 copies in September, sold 2,666 digital units in October, and another of her previous books, “Taking Chase,” which sold 119 copies in September, sold 3,279 in the month in which a free download was available.

An efficient market at work. 30:1 ratio from paid to free. In my experience this ratio is better than what mobile apps do in app stores. Downward pricing pressure is never a good thing, especially in digital markets. Good luck authors.

My good friend Neven has started a blog on eating and food called Salt & Fat. I’ve eaten my way through a number of Neven’s dad’s dried sausages in the past and I’m hoping, one day, that he releases the family recipe complete with photographs of preparation. In the mean time, I suggest you take a look at this beautifully designed and written blog or follow Salt & Fat on twitter.