On Thursday, a Chicago-based law firm filed a suit in federal court in Seattle against Amazon on behalf of Justin D. Gawronski, a 17-year-old Michigan high school senior. The suit, which seeks class-action status, claims that when the company wirelessly deleted a copy of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" from Gawronski's Kindle earlier this month, it also deleted the notes he had taken on the device for his homework.

The suit, which cites another plaintiff who also lost his copy of the Orwell classic, seeks to prevent Amazon from again deleting books from Kindles. It also seeks monetary relief for people like Gawronski who lost work from the incident.

Amazon declined comment on the suit. The company, which refunded the purchase price of Orwell books to people whose copies it deleted, has already said it would not do it again. Last week, the company's CEO Jeff Bezos apologized for the incident, calling it "stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles."

Perhaps it's because the company, while far from abandoning corporate users, is increasingly looking to impress consumers that the move has happened. The company has a large user base but certainly needs to do something fresh to stave off competition from the likes of Apple's iPhone and other smartphone manufacturers.

Facebook this social network isn't, but rather it's designed more as a bulletin board for users to talk (rant) about the various flavors of BlackBerry, set up a personal profile (tailored dependent on which handset you own), and rate and review applications.

Tens of days ago, The New York Times decided to expand its coverage of personal technology. Gadgetwise is one of the first products of that decision. A new personal-tech blog, Gadgetwise is currently organized around four product categories (digital photography, home entertainment, mobile technology and personal computing), each with a dedicated contributor.

Gadgetwise's mission is to help make people smarter about, well, gadgets–both the gadgets they're thinking about buying and the gadgets they already have. Every day, the blog will feature product news, analysis of tech-industry issues that affect consumers, and a growing database of tips, tricks and hacks that help people get the most out of their hardware and software.

We'll be adding more features to Gadgetwise in the coming weeks, but we wanted to get the conversation started sooner rather than later. Poke around, take a read and let us know what you think.

And thanks for coming to check us out.

"CES's choice of Engadget as its Official Blog Partner further cements the publication's place as the leading voice in consumer electronics coverage. Our award-winning site will cover the 2009 CES with the fast-paced, up-to-the-minute reporting that has made Engadget the market leader and final word in the world of technology journalism," said Joshua Topolsky, Editor-in-chief, Engadget. "CEA is one of the global consumer electronics industry's most powerful trade groups, and CES is the industry's most important and anticipated event, hands down."

"The online technology community is of continuing importance to us and this partnership shows the crucial role that blog sites like Engadget play in bringing CES' hot product news to a worldwide audience, before, during and after the show," said Karen Chupka, senior vice president of events and conferences for CEA, the producer of the International CES. "We estimate that some 20,000 new products are launched at CES each year and the Engadget editorial team is able to bring all the hot product news, across dozens of different categories, to life for both consumers and technology professionals."

Engadget will provide live coverage of the 2009 International CES on both its domestic and international sites, and will have extensive presence at the show, including interviews, product news and reviews, updates on CES events and commentary by a team of Engadget editors from across the globe. Engadget's expansion into the international market will provide an opportunity for consumers and advertisers around the world to follow up-to-the minute news from the show.

Obsessable covers the latest in the world of technology, including cell phones, cameras, and HDTVs - obsessively, of course. Obsessable is powered by the rapid content development engine, Crowd Fusion.

Like Weblogs Inc before it, Crowd Fusion is being built on a custom built content management system (at Weblogs Inc it was BlogSmith). The angle is that the new CMS allows the team to do things they think are important in a better way, without relying on an existing platform such as MovableType (which powers Gawker Media sites among others) and WordPress.

Backed with $3 million from investors including Marc Andreessen and Ross Levinsohn, the list of team members reads like a walk down Weblogs Inc memory lane. Along with Alvey, Barb Dybwad was a former producer at Engadget, CTO Craig Wood was formerley a member of the Blogsmith team, COO Judith Meskill was at one time COO of Weblogs Inc, and CMO Steve Friedman was on the Weblogs Inc sales team...and that's just the ones we know about so far.

Puh-leeze. Not surprisingly, Denton is unapologetic (although Lam says he's sorry about disrupting the poor Motorola guy so many times during his presentation). Most of the events in the video are completely harmless, with TVs winking out as people are staring at them in the big hall - so what? I find it hard to get too excited about the whole thing, and much like Nick I find it refreshing that someone is standing apart from the slack-jawed and drooling coverage that CES gets in other places.

"The Gizmodo staffer interfered with the exhibitor booth operations of numerous companies, including disrupting at least one press event," the C.E.S. said in a statement. "The Gizmodo staffer violated the terms of C.E.S. media credentials and caused harm to C.E.S. exhibitors. This Gizmodo staffer has been identified and will be barred from attending any future C.E.S. events. Additional sanctions against Gizmodo and Gawker are being reviewed."

DVICE - formerly SciFi.com's Tech Blog - is the latest extension of the Sci Fi brand. It has a staff of writers and contributors who will aim to keep readers current in the ever-changing world of technology. The new site will feature innovations that make their lives less complicated, not more, and only the hottest and best will be featured. Peter Pachal, who edited the Sci Fi Tech Blog, will be DVICE's content editor.

DVICE's strategy is to combine entertainment and information when reporting on the latest gadgets. The site will also produce an original weekly broadband show.

In the show, host Vanessa Rae (MTV.com) will try out some of the more adventurous gear, such as the speed and height-enhancing Power Risers; and offer on-the-street product tests and opinions from unsuspecting passers-by. The show is produced in conjunction with NBC Universal's Peacock Productions.

Our third major change is the launch of a brand new blog: Gadgets.boingboing.net. While Boing Boing has always covered personal technology, the four of us (Cory, David, Xeni, and I) believed a critical, intelligent, optimistic, and selective blog about personal technology and consumer electronics would be a fine addition to Boing Boing. But who could we trust to oversee a tech blog that the four of us would want to read? Actually, it wasn't hard to find that person. We went straight to Joel Johnson, a former Gizmodo editor and founder of Dethroner. Joel is smart, funny, knowledgeable, and curious about technology. He was our first, and unanimous, choice to run Gadgets.boingboing.net. And we're grateful he agreed to come on board.

The 18 bloggers were invited to join the CNET Blog Network to bring fresh perspectives; CNET will be adding more topics and bloggers in the coming months. These bloggers are expected to uphold the same journalism standards as the CNET editors, so users can expect the same level of editorial quality from contributors to the CNET Blog Network as they do from CNET editors. The Blog Network will comprise 14 new blogs, including:

Cellular Obsession - Popular talk-show host Ronn Owens from San Francisco's KGO Radio has talked so much to his listeners about the latest cell phones that it's become a passionate hobby. Owens offers his opinions on the latest phones with the CNET audience.

Design and Technology - Design enthusiast Jean Aw finds the most incredible things in the most unlikely of places and loves bringing them to the attention of her readers.

(parent.thesis) - Author of a book titled, "Mojo Mom", Amy Tiemann and her husband Michael Tiemann offer the latest news and musings about raising kids in today's hyper-connected, 24/7 world.

Sports Tech - As one of the founders of golf's leading fitness resource, the Titleist Performance Institute, Dave Phillips writes about technology's significant impact on golf today, and the sports gear that is giving today's players an inside edge to every game they play.

Additional blogs include: The open road with Matt Asay, a blog focusing on open source; The digital home with Don Reisinger; The Macalope, a blog focusing on Apple; Politics, Policy, and Technology with Donnie Fowler; Speeds and Feeds, with Kevin Krewell, Peter Glaskowsky, and Jim Handy; Green Tech, with Vinod Khosla, Neal Dikeman, and Martin Tobias; The Web Services Report with Harrison Hoffman; Music and Technology with Matt Rosoff; Media Sphere with Josh Wolf; and Searchlight: an SEO blog with Stephan Spencer. In addition to this original content, CNET plans to syndicate blog content from Marc Andreesen and Mark Cuban.

Until e-ink gets cheap and ordinary people can gaze into their very own super high contrast electronic copy of the NY Times, we'll have to settle for sneak peeks at concept devices like this, E Ink's blueChute e-ink tablet. Even though the exact functionality of the device has yet to be decided -- currently it's functioning as a glorified demo platform -- the blueChute's Bluetooth support and microSD slot would suggest that it could be used to display maps streamed from a mobile phone, or have it display widget-like information from a nearby tethered computer.

I gave up two years of my life writing about gadgets for this site. Waking up every morning at 5 AM, chewing up press releases to find the rare morsel of legitimate information, chasing down "hot tips" that ended up being photochops of iPods with reflections of genitals in the touchscreens. Oh, and the worst: fielding emails from PR parasites eager to suck away precious time in a half-hour phone meeting while the Senior Vice-President of Smoke Blowing tells me about how his company's software—based on an idea cribbed from Google—is going to change the way I look at something I didn't care about in the first place. (Inevitably, "forever.")

And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket to impress your friends and make you forget for just a few minutes, blood coursing as you tremblingly cut through the blister pack, that your life is utterly void of any lasting purpose.

What an idiot. I guess Johnson forgot who reads these blogs. They're not written for or by your average Joes. These are designed by and for tech and consumer electronics enthusiast who live to know about the latest new thing. Who consider it a badge of honor to try things out first, to suffer through bad design and ill-thought out products. All so they can tell friends family co workers, and especially the companies that make these products how crummy n--or great-- they really are.

In the gadget blog arena, Engadget and Gizmodo are the two elephants, surrounded by 10-12 tiger-sized smaller sites. The rest of the field is chock full of small foxes drying to get a piece of the adsense action.

The innovative terminal will be presented to the Industry as a world first at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona from February12th (booth in Hall 2, D 06). The device uses the unique Polymer Vision rollable display technology which enables mobile devices to incorporate a display larger than the handset itself and offers a readability similar to printed paper. The product follows up on the rollable display technology based concept device Readius presented by Polymer Vision less than 18 months ago at the IFA Consumer Electronics Trade Fair in Berlin.

While smaller than a typical mobile phone, the new device features a display which extends up to 5-inches and may simply be stored away after use by folding it, thanks to the flexibility of the polymer based display material. The device features the largest display available in the industry for the same form factor, the 16 grey levels combined with a high contrast and high reflectivity display for paper like reading experience enables comfortable reading, even in bright sunlight. Future developments include colour and moving image capable display.

The Readius is the culmination of 16 years of research and I'm sure this device is simply the beginning, both for Polymer Vision and its competitors.

It took four years from the production of the first digital audio player, in 1997, to the first iPod, which kicked off the growth of the digital music market. The arrival of iTunes in 2003 brought digital music into the mainstream. Now commuter trains are filled with people plugged into their white earbuds while they flick through a newspaper. How long before they're scrolling through their emails and RSS feeds or reading their books on an electronic reader?

1. Boing Boing
2. Engadget
3. Post Secret
4. Daily Kos
5. Huffington Post
6. Gizmodo
7. Instapundit
8. Michelle Malkin
9. Crooks and Liars
10. Dooce

1. Engadget
2. Boing Boing
3. Gizmodo
4. TechCrunch
5. Huffington Post
6. DailyKos
7. Lifehacker
8. PostSecret
9. Ars Technica
10. yanxi.bokewu.com

Bound for the news stands in 2007, the new 50-60 page monthly glossy Cool Hunter magazine will come free as a tip-on to the world's most prestigious fashion, design and lifestyle magazines. It will also be distributed throughout the world's top boutique hotels as well as our favorite stores and retailers across the globe. A fascinating read, the magazine will be brimming with feature length articles that showcase the best of cool from around the world.

The Cool Hunter magazine launching March/April 2007- a must for those in the know. Don’t miss it.

We're not really traders here at Engadget, but we decided to indulge our fantasies of Gordon Gekko grandeur and put together a portfolio of tech stocks. To pull this thing together we enlisted a little help from our friends over at Blogging Stocks; we think besides being a barometer for the gadget industry, perhaps the Engadget Index will serve as a look from a different angle into the massive economy of consumer electronics.

But what is perhaps most interesting about the new Custom Search is that publishers (large or small) can allow anyone or selected colleagues, friends or community members to contribute to that index. For example, if I own a site dedicated to stamp collecting and have a group of regular contributors or trusted readers I can allow those individuals to contribute their selections to this index. This gives the index the ability to evolve and grow over time -- and makes it "social."

They created a blogging purse by hacking fashion (handbag and fabric), hardware (Nokia 6682, pedometer, GPS device, custom stamp, breadboard, wires, soldering iron) and software (CSS, APIs) in less than 24 hours to produce a working prototype. The custom-designed handbag is rigged with a pedometer and a Nokia 6682. Every 10 steps (this is programmable), the pedometers triggers the 6682 to take a photo. The 6682 then uses Yahoo! Research Berkeley's Zonetag mobile client to geotag the photos and upload the photos to Flickr.

Even though most enthusiast press regulars read the top videogame blogs, it's a scary thought for many of us that someone who is currently sitting in their living room could challenge us for reader mindshare, credibility and eventually even impact our mighty bottom line.

The entry barriers to the enthusiast press are as low today as they've ever been. Gamers have their pick between a vast array of free blog publishing services. These services give anyone with a passion and a keyboard a crack at self-publishing.

However, as multitudes of would-be media giants have discovered, just being able to publish doesn't mean that anyone will actually read what you've written. In fact, because self-publishing is so easy and so cheap it has become insanely difficult to start from scratch and to grow a blog to the point of being a major player. It's difficult but not impossible.

The best voice for any blog is a voice that actually taps into the writer's core personality. Yes, there can be an exaggeration of certain traits and emphasis on core viewpoints, but readers can spot dramatized viewpoints from a mile away. Judging from the top blogs, readers are drawn to genuine viewpoints, no matter how controversial.

In order to avoid the blandness that anchors many blogs, one must be sure that every single post is purposely written in the style and voice that's carried through the entire blog. Even if the blog has several writers, each one must carry their voice into each post.

Read, read, read, and read some more. The better informed you are, the more information you'll be able to convey to your readers.

CrunchGear is going to be different from the other gadget blogs out there. The team is committed to writing about breaking news but will also be featuring weekly product comparisons in a given category. Expect CrunchGear to look like something between a pure blog and CNET Reviews. Our goal isn't just to let you know about the hot new stuff coming out soon, but to also help you decide what kind of camera, laptop or MP3 player you want to buy as well.

The Webcams come bundled with LifeCam Dashboard software, which lets the user zoom, tilt, and pan the Webcam. An optional software service called "One-Touch Blogging" automatically publishes pictures free to the user's blog on Microsoft's MSN Spaces. After the LifeCam snaps a picture, the software automatically logs a user in to MSN Spaces and posts the picture as a new blog entry, Cowan said. Users can add text to the photo blog entry before publishing it.

Both Webcams have integrated microphones with a noise-cancellation feature, Cowan said. When a user speaks into the microphone, the Webcam creates a sound funnel that automatically cuts down on echo and room noise, Cowan said.

The $100 LifeCam VX-6000 is aimed at tech-savvy users looking for a feature-rich Webcam that offers robust performance, Cowan said. The round Webcam has a 71-degree wide-angle lens and shoots video at a 1280-by-1024 pixel resolution.

The $50 LifeCam VX-3000 shoots video at 640-by-480-pixel resolution and is designed for budget-conscious buyers. It doesn't have a wide-angle lens.

"You can't just have a blog on Friendster or MySpace and say you're blogging about games," says John Fowler, an E3 spokesman. E3, which ended Friday, is this city's biggest annual convention, drawing 60,000 participants from around the world, including game publishers and developers, retailers and media folk -- many of whom are bloggers. To be credentialed as a blogger, one needs a business card, a business license for the blog and proof that you've been blogging for more than a month. That means everyone here has a business card, no matter how flimsy it is. Many of the bloggers have outside jobs -- a security guard at a New Jersey casino, an 18-year veteran in the Canadian Army, an event organizer for a Buddhist foundation. They don't claim to be journalists, because they think being a blogger, quite frankly, is better. ("It's journalism without the rules. It's more opinionated," says Kyle Orland, who runs the Video Game Media Watch on VGMWatch.com.) Many do it for free, and the battle to break a story about a game or score an exclusive interview with a game designer is fierce, though entirely virtual. "It's hyper-competitive, but it's not nasty," Bulaong says of her blog's competition with Joystiq.com. Kotaku.com, owned by Gawker Media, has 10 bloggers here. Joystiq.com, an AOL subsidiary, has nine. E3 provides a year's worth of material. Last Tuesday, on the eve of E3, Joystiq.com had more than 1 million page views, says James Ransom-Wiley, a 24-year-old contributing editor. So far this month, Kotaku.com has had 2.8 million page views, says Brian D. Crecente, its 35-year-old editor, compared with 5 million in all of April.

In one of its first major efforts to build a Web site with original material, Yahoo will introduce today a site devoted to consumer technology.

The site, called Yahoo Tech (tech.yahoo.com), will feature blogs on technology and a weekly video program. It will also republish articles and product reviews from several magazines and accept comments contributed by users.

Yahoo's goal for the site is to create more space for technology-related advertisers, said Scott Moore, Yahoo's vice president of content operations.

"We take in many millions from technology and telecom advertising," he said. "We had a lot of requests from advertisers to advertise on content related to their categories."

Today's the great big launch of Geekologie . It's tough to try and break into the market with a new technology/gadget blog, but it's a huge subject and there's always room for more coverage. Plus, we hired an actual geek to manage our geek blog. He lives at his computer, doesn't shower, and has probably never even touched a girl. Actually none of that is true, but I'm sure he's really happy that's what we're telling people.

Why do people blog? You might as well ask why do fools fall in love, or what's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding. Or why did GM kill Oldsmobile (and how did a nameplate that sold over 200,000 cars a year still manage to tank)?

People blog because cave paintings are obsolete, but the need to say "I was here" never goes away. And very much like cave painting, Tuvan throat singing and late-braking on a off-camber, decreasing-radius left-hander, some folks are naturally good at it while others get buried in the weeds a time or two before reconsidering their life path.

The coming week, however, will be a veritable blogging feast here at PCWorld.com, since it's CES week -- which means a small army of us will be heading to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. I'll report in here, and many of my colleagues will cover the show over at our Today@PCWorld.com blog.

And we've just launched a new blog which will be rife with news and notes on consumer electronics, digital entertainment, and gadgets all year long. It's called Digital World, and will feature the work of three technophiles: Emru Townsend, Cathy Lu, and Martyn Williams. (Martyn, by the way, will be reporting from the gadget wonderland known as Tokyo.) Check in often for updates -- and let us know what you think.

It started when security researcher Mark Russinovich first posted to his blog that Sony's music CDs surreptitiously installed digital rights management software based on a "rootkit" -- a hacking tool widely considered to be spyware. Following that, bloggers of all stripes, from seasoned security experts to aggrieved consumers, vented about the record company's unethical and possibly illegal behavior.

"It seems crystal clear that but for the citizen journalists, Sony never would have done anything about this," says Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a cyber liberties advocacy group that has been vocal in its condemnation of Sony and may eventually file a a lawsuit against Sony, in addition to three that have already been filed. "It's plain to me that it was Sony's intent to brush the story under the rug and forget about it."

After extensive analysis Mr Russinovich realised that the "cloaked" software had been installed when he first listened to the CD album Get Right With the Man CD by country rockers Van Zant.

Although resembling a virus, Mr Russinovich found the hidden files had come from an anti-copying system called Extended Copy Protection (XCP) developed by UK software company First 4 Internet.

About 20 titles are thought to be using the XCP software and in May 2005 Sony said more than two million discs had been shipped using the technology. XCP is just one of several anti-piracy systems Sony is trying.

XCP only allows three copies of an album to be made and only allows the CD to be listened to on a computer via a proprietary media player. The hidden files are installed alongside the media player.

"We've said all along, we're always going to rely on the content we get from our partners," said Yahoo! spokesman Brian Nelson.

Nelson added Gawker's content, frequently laced with profanities, will pass through a language filter before appearing on the news portal. "The content isn't for everyone... Of course, all of it will be in line with our editorial policies," he said. "There won't be profanity running on our site."

Eventually, the other Gawker blogs will be included and the distribution will spread to other Yahoo sites. For instance, Defamer will show up on Yahoo Entertainment. Terms aren't being disclosed but a lot of emphasis is placed on the amount of traffic Yahoo can drive back to Gawker Media.

From April 2000 to July 2002 I was a director of product marketing at Apple, responsible for Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, iDVD and few others.

How I went from merely being a fan of Apple's products, living far away from Cupertino, to actually working for the company and for Steve Jobs himself is the what this book will be about.

My name is Nova. As a longtime TiVo customer, I have been spreading my love for the TiVo service far and wide by gently coercing (sometimes, flat out forcing) my friends and family to experience the fabulousness that is TiVo. None are ever sorry. And so it goes that they tell 2 friends, and they tell 2 friends, and so on and so on...

Well, here I am a few years later, such an aficionado that I've landed a position here at TiVo headquarters that gives me license to talk TiVo all day!

TiVo's had a few rocky moments in the past year or two, and often I could point to a lack of communication as the main problem. A TiVo customer notices something strange, posts about it online, and eventually other users gather and share complaints -- but those complaints are usually met with silence from TiVo HQ or you might hear a soundbite from a news story. With a new official company blog, I think TiVo could do a lot of good for the company by having an open and honest communication channel with customers -- many potential problems could have been nipped in the bud with a few carefully worded statements at the right time.

Don't worry, it's only temporary. It's just that we've all gotten a little tired of spending so much time deleting comment spam and dealing with trolls and all that "first post!" crap, so we're switching off comments on new posts for the next day or two while we think about what we're going to do to try and make the comment boards not completely sucky. This was the first morning in months where I didn't have to spend the first 45 minutes of my day deleting spam and banning trolls, and I can't say that I hated it.

This is very, very beta, but it could be big... I think: http://chinese.engadget.com

Late last year I spend some time in China and had a major Starbucks moment. People were lining up to pay US$4 for a cup of coffee even though a lot of white collar folks in China make $500-$1,000 a month. There is an appetite for US products in China, it's a huge market, but there are ton of issues.

Ok, we admit it. We are late to the party. Blogs are flourishing everywhere and editors at Tom's Hardware Guide are still attached only to traditional types of journalism. Well, I have to stop right here. We at Tom's Hardware Guide are fascinated by the idea of blogs and their functional interface that allows us to communicate directly with you, our reader. Up until now we watched a trend in which even the most renowned publications in the US embrace blogging and cherish it as a revolution in reporting. To be honest, you won't see blogging to replace traditional journalism on our site, but the blogs to come on tomshardware.com will open you a view beyond the pages of Tom's Hardware Guide.