News Corp. may allow users to sell goods and advertise their websites on MySpace, reports The Los Angeles Times. It explains that users have already found ways to work around the current ban on peddling wares, so MySpace might as well find a way to make money off any resulting commerce. [The Los Angeles Times]
Amazon.com has, as expected, revealed the details of its new payment service in a lengthy, meandering blog post. Don't bother reading it: The geeks in Seattle take forever to get to the very sharp point. The short version? Jeff Bezos is planning to plunge a long knife right into the heart of eBay CEO Meg Whitman's most important growth business, PayPal. Here's the secret of how the eBay-owned payments service mints money — and how Amazon.com's founder is crafting a boldly savage plan to gut it.
Thank goodness Ollie Kottke is a newborn and not a Harry Potter-obsessed preteen. If he were, then his father Jason Kottke would have had a real problem on his hands when UPS lied to him about its delivery of Kottke's copy of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" on Saturday. As it was, he was just inconvenienced. As was I. Here's my story — and to my mind, proof that Kottke's missing copy was not an isolated incident, and instead, a big problem for UPS and Amazon.com.
