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."

Any blogger can sign up for the company's 'Kindle Publishing for Blogs' beta program and set up an account to participate. Bloggers just have to made their feed available to Amazon’s website and the company will translate it into a Kindle friendly format.

Amazon hasn't made clear how much bloggers can charge for their blogs but it will split revenue from the subscriptions with the individual publishers. Currently most blogs on the Kindle charge $2 for subscription. Amazon has said individual publishers will get 30 percent of the revenue, with 70 percent going to the company.

• Plurk, Twitter and Kwippy are having problems showing images loaded with Amazon A3. It sounds minor but it just isn't as much fun microblogging without the avatars.
• Posterous.com reported problems posting different types of files.
• Picnik, a web graphics tool, has reported problems (via Technologizer)
• Another site down is Smugmug.com - you can see their message here.
• Slideshare.net reported problems related to the outage.
• A video and photo sharing site called Phanfare also reported problems.
• More discussion of the outages can be found here on Techmeme.

What happened to my Plog?
The program that was Plogs has made way for the new and improved Amazon Daily. Your feedback and investment in Plogs has helped shape this new program. We hope you enjoy Daily as much as you did Plogs! Any authors you had subscribed to from Plogs have been transferred over to your Amazon Daily, as well as reminders and activity from friends.

Amazon Daily is a blog-short for "web log"-that contains posts by editors from all over the company. Whether you're a die-hard fiction lover, a gadget geek, an avid collector of classic films or just a fan of what we sell, you'll find all sorts of entries that will interest you. Amazon Daily's home page contains all editorial posts (sorted so the most recent entries appear at the top); in the sidebar, they're sorted by topic, so you can browse one concept at a time instead of taking all of it in at once! Each post gives you the opportunity to provide private feedback to the editor as well as leave public comments for other customers to see.

How can I interact with Amazon Daily?
At the bottom of each post you will find an assortment of things you can do once you have read that post. The first is vote whether or not you liked that post, which will give you the option to leave feedback. You can also leave public comments on that post. You will also see an options menu, which has many interesting features. As more interactive features for each post are introduced they will be added into the options menu.

It launched with approximately 800 internally created articles and 5000 articles that were ported over from the previous version. As you click-thru the site you will quickly realize just how empty it is and how many fact & category tags have not been filled in yet. Try playing with the random article functionality to take a spin through the site. The article pages are very nicely crafted. The tags are on the left. The article text and images take up the majority of the page.

If you do post or otherwise submit questions, answers feedback, or any other content, and unless we indicate otherwise, you grant amapedia and its affiliates a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display such content throughout the world in any media.

your favorite products; only you can tell us which ones they are

product information that comes from you, so that it might be more impartial and authoritative

product facts that actually matter to you (like shutter lag for cameras and fan noise for notebooks), not those supplied by manufacturers or sellers.

It is not clear how much traction Wikia company has gained. The company says more than two thousand wiki sites have been created on its platform, edited by 30,00 registered users. Wikia wants to users do everything outside of Wikipedia's collaborative encyclopedia process.

It enables "groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions." Wikis are useful, because they let fans - Nascar fans, for example - find information and express themselves. But they are tricky to manage, and Wikia's format isn't exactly elegant. Wikia was founded by Jimmy Wales, the founder Wikipedia, which is one of the rare wiki success stories so far. Part of Wikia's round (amount undisclosed) includes the purchase of the sports community site, ArmchairGM for more than $2 million, underscoring how Wikia is having to reach out to acquire talent and technology. Wikia says it will use the ArmChairGM technology to help it incorporate user-generated news and voting into future Wikia fan sites. With Amazon behind it, Wikia could presumably be used to form wikis around various Amazon product lines. Wikia says it will look for more acquisitions.

The Turk was a wooden cabinet on wheels, atop which sat a chessboard and a life-sized wooden mannequin dressed in Turkish style. This mysterious contraption would play against, and often defeat, human opponents. In truth the Turk was a clever illusion: the cabinet concealed a human chess expert who moved the Turk's arm and played the games.

There are no up-front fees to use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service. Instead, Amazon Mechanical Turk collects a 10% commission on top of the amount you (the "Requester") have paid someone to complete your Human Intelligence Tasks ("HITs"). The minimum commission charge is $0.005 per HIT.

The message is entertainingly bizarre but the concept is terrific. Companies use an API to submit tasks requiring mundane but human intelligence to Amazon; people abroad willing to work for peanuts (but more than they'd make otherwise) use Amazon to complete these tasks, and Amazon gets a small cut rather than the extortionate overhead taken by the eight million outsourcing "firms" (I use the word 'firm' loosely) that e-mail me inappropriately every time I post a job on Craigslist.