Four short links: 30 Mar 2009

A great free book, dead newspaper dig, movie Torrent wakeup, and money from free:

1. Digital Foundations with Adobe Illustrator -- CC-licensed book that gets you started using Adobe Illustrator. I'm loving it, and I have the artistic ability of a particularly philistine rock. See also their advice to authors on how to negotiate a Creative Commons license. (via bjepson's delicious stream)
2. How to Become a Death Of Newspapers Blogger -- tongue-in-cheek dig at the recent imminent deaths of newspapers being predicted. Point taken about how unproductive these are: The point's not to fix anything. It's to describe the problem more dramatically than the next guy. If Steve Outing says newspapers have a "death spiral" and Clay Shirky predicts "a bloodbath," the point goes to Shirky. Basically, imagine a group of people watching a building burn down and bickering amongst themselves about whether it's a conflagration or an inferno. It's like that, but with consulting fees. (via migurski's delicious stream)
3. BarTor, Android BitTorrent with a Twist -- take a picture of a DVD's barcode, it looks up the movie, and sends the torrent file to your desktop to be automatically downloaded. NetFlix should have a legit form of this. If iTunes Movie Store had it, you could have racks of "DVDs" in stores that you could browse and snap to "buy" (giving a cut to the store). This feels monumental.
4. Survey of Free Business Models Online -- an interesting breakdown of ways to make money from "free" on the web. (via glynn moody)

What's Keeping Adobe Up at Night? Probably Not Silverlight.

Roger Magoulas, our director of research, sent out the recent comment and graph as part of his weekly analysis of the latest load of our Bookscan-based data mart:

What's keeping Adobe up at night? Probably not Silverlight. I noticed the Silverlight topic looking bright red [in the treemap visualization that shows week-to-week changes by topic] and thought I would take a look - see the chart below. Since Silverlight and the somewhat related Expression Web books started appearing in October, we don't see much trendworthy activity. We do see Flash selling 6-7 times the units as Expression Web, Flash experiencing a holiday bump and Flex increasing steadily. Silverlight and Expression Web are young and Microsoft famously sticks by its products - should be an interesting topic to follow.

In short, if book sales are any indicator, traction for Silverlight appears to be quite low.

While Roger is correct in noting that it's never wise to count Microsoft out, so far it does appear that they haven't made much of a dent in Flash's dominance. SearchEngineWatch recently reported that even Microsoft is still not using Silverlight on many of its web properties.