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)