Catch-up: Google column soon, Digital Sharecropping, Wikia CEO tale

["Life Trumps Blogging", but some collected notes]

1) The obligatory pontification about the Google Book Search settlement, a topic on which all Google interested pundits must write about, will appear in my next Guardian column, in a few days.

2) Briefly noted: The Economist Innovation Awards and Summit

Business Process: Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia for public collaboration as a form of product and content development.

I have yet to see a more blatant business jargon way of saying "for electronic plantations full of digital sharecroppers".

3) Amazing story from an unreliable source of "Why Jimmy Wales got booted from Wikia's top job". I wouldn't have believed it, and it's been denied, but a reliable source confirmed to me that it's true. There looks to be some very strange backroom politics going on within Wikia (the company aiming to "commercialize the hell out" of Wikipedia concepts and success, though having no significant financial connection to the Wikimedia Foundation).

Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog (Wikipedia, Google, censorware, and an inside view of net-politics) - Syndicate site (subscribe, RSS)