Chinese girls are buying ‘homes’ at iPartment, a social networking/gaming site that lets users interact with their ‘love apartment’ via pets, diaries, gardens, and games all while looking for someone to share it with.

The economy has hit the traditional brick-and-mortar book business especially hard. Even landmark literary institutions like Cody’s have not been spared. In contrast, Avalon.ph – a Manila-based online specialist in second hand books – has been thriving. Its founder, Jasper Ong, manages to maintain an independent shopkeeper’s touch by giving customers the chance to close transactions personally in select coffee shops during weekends. We sat down with Jasper to see if we could learn something from his success (which seems to be out-of-print these days).
1. What guides you in your book selection process? Does the weakening economy influence that process [...]

With news that not even Google can make traditional print advertising work, Jeff Jarvis has some thoughts on new models that newspapers could consider. Jarvis argues that a newspaper’s ability to set a price for advertising within its finite number of pages was nulled by Google who could set a tiny price in an infinite universe of web pages and search queries and that it’s now time to consider alternatives:
New advertisers – if Google could attract companies who never advertised before, why can’t newspapers?
New services – “a local media company should act as an agency for every local business, helping [...]