Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs, commerce and e-commerce.
++
These days, it’s hard to publish an edition of “This week’s news” without mentioning Amazon. The New York Times debates the issue of the online giant’s incapability of making profit. Despite exploding revenue and confidence among shareholders, the company is still focusing on growth over profit. Some observers actually are questioning whether Amazon will be able to “change its business model from selling other people’s products at a razor-thin margin to selling other people’s products at a large margin”. Still, the extraordinary long-term strategy of the company seems to have a lot of support within the industry. The idea that one day everyone will buy everything from Amazon simply is too intriguing.
But as a little sign of change, Amazon just raised the free shipping limit for deliveries in the U.S. from 25 to 35 Dollar.
++
eBay wants to get rid of its image as auction site. The strategy: Becoming more like Pinterest, the booming visual bookmarking site that generates a lot of referral traffic to other online shops. This week the company also announced the acquisition of the UK delivery startup Shutl.
+++
10Centuries is the name of a new bloggging service for users of App.net (the company trying to establish a better Twitter) and Evernote. The idea is pretty neat: Instead of having to use a dedicated admin interface and blog editor, users can simply send a private message to @10centures from their favourite App.net client. The first time they do that, a new website will be created and a link is being sent back to them to share. Also, 10Centures lets users publish Evernote notes to their blog. Content is hosted at either App.net or Evernote, meaning that users of 10Centures own their content.
+++
All kinds of people blog. At least in Sweden, even police officers do. Martin Marmgren works for the police in Stockholm and publishes reflections and opinions about his work as police on a dedicated, personal blog. He is not afraid to discuss highly controversial cases that have gotten a lot of media attention and doesn’t hesitate to criticise specific police operations either. His blog is in Swedish but a version automatically translated to English should be ok to read: konstapelbastian.blogspot.se (translated).