“Kindle ate my homework” lawsuit

High tech version of age-old excuse:

“…A Michigan student is suing Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) because it remotely erased George Orwell’s “1984” from his Kindle reading device.

Amazon took the action after being informed it didn’t legally have the rights to the book and caused a firestorm of protest when it made the Orwellian move of erasing the book from all of the Kindles it had been downloaded to.

A refund of his 99-cent purchase wasn’t enough for 17-year-old Justin Gawronski, who said in his lawsuit that he had written notes for his summer high school reading assignment on 1984 that have now been rendered useless.”

Article:

Thumbs down on corporate blogs

According to a new survey by Forrester, only 16% trust corporate blogs.  That seems like a different question than whether people read corporate blogs.  You might read them out of desperation because you bought a company’s product or service and need any information you can get about what you’ve bought.  You will read but you won’t necessarily trust.

The big takeaway is don’t blog to promote products or expect blogging to build your corporate voice.  Blog if you already have a strong individual identity like Jeff Bezos of Amazon or a strong brand like Apple.  My opinion is that blogging is conversational so you wouldn’t talk to a corporation, you’d talk to a person or persons at the company.