AOL

John Pavley, CTO of Huffington Post and speaker at the Publishing Business Conference & Expo spoke with Gigaom yesterday on the Huffington Post's recent decision to end anonymous commenting in order to combat abusive "trolls," an effort that he will lead. Pavley will continue to stretch his technological know-how at the Expo's Mobile & Digital Magazine Symposium on September 23^rd.  He, with Livingly Media CEO Tony Mamone, will delve into the challenges and opportunities unique to digital-only magazines and may even impart tips to limit your own site's trolls. Click here to learn more.

May 2, 2013—San Francisco—Byliner, the digital publisher and subscription reading service, today announced that Deanna Brown, former CEO of Federated Media, has joined Byliner as President. Brown brings her deep experience in digital media and publishing to the startup, which is the leading publisher in the fastest-growing segment of digital publishing.

Brown is an accomplished media executive with more than 20 years of experience, ranging from entrepreneur to Fortune 500 executive. As CEO of Federated Media, she doubled the company’s revenues and was responsible for building a network that reached 180 million unique visitors a month—outranking Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft. Prior to Federated, Brown was President of Scripps Networks Interactive, and held Vice President and General Manager titles at Yahoo and AOL. She was CEO and cofounder of Powerful Media/Inside.com, which was acquired by Primedia, and CEO and founder of Gaming Industry News, which was acquired by Ziff Davis. In 1995, Brown cofounded CondéNet, the digital division of publisher Condé Nast.

While it’s odd to think of an organization backed by  Penguin, Hachette and Simon & Schuster as a startup, Bookish, the new book-recommendation and -discovery site, is essentially that. After two years in development under three CEOs, it’s a new site where users can get recommendations based on titles or groups of titles they know they already like and then, in most cases, purchase them. Like the Random House project Book Scout, the idea, on one level, is to facilitate discovery across the industry, for the good of the industry. And while users can discover just about any book, the books they can purchase directly from Bookish are not limited to those published by the companies who footed the bill.

 ‘Tis the season for brick-and-mortar retailers to freak out. Target is rolling out QR codes so shoppers can scan and buy toys on their cellphones. Walmart is dabbling with same-day service while Toys R Us and Best Buy are introducing their own tablet products all in the hopes that consumers won’t treat their stores as three-dimensional catalogs for Amazon.

Just as mobile is changing the media and advertising landscape, it’s wreaking havoc on retail as well.

Microsoft rolls out the Zune to go up against the iPod in 2006. And then, three years later, a new Zune HD to vie with the iPod Touch.  The Zune gets more traction with late-night talk-show comedians than with consumers. Both the player and the brand are now dead. Burger King gives away a free AOL Music download with every Original Whopper. The download code is on the burger wrapper — try not to get grease on your screen! McDonald’s begins renting DVDs. Actually, this one wasn’t a total flop: Turns out people don’t want DVDs with their fries, but Redbox, which now has

Marvel Entertainment is to actively support the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).The US House Of Representatives has released a list of organisations in favour of the anti-piracy bill, which includes the publisher and its parent company Disney.No other comic book firms appeared on the document, though DC Entertainment's parent company Time Warner did feature. Book publishers such as Hachette, Macmillan, Harper Collins, Penguin and Random House are also in favour of the controversial legislation.SOPA aims to allow service providers to tackle websites deemed to be in violation of copyright infringement. Opponents of the bill warn that it could be

Amid the press of daily news, it sometimes helps to step back a bit to examine the larger Internet trends driving a lot of what we see crossing the tickers and newswires. At the AlwaysOn Venture Summit today in Half Moon Bay, AlwaysOn Founder and Editor Tony Perkins is outlining the big trends he sees with Kelly Porter, managing director of Woodside Capital. Here are the big ones they’re watching: Big Data + Cloud: More data has been created in the last three years than the previous 40,000. And with services such as Amazon Web Services, using that data is

During Davis' tenure, The Huffington Post's revenue was on track to increase from less than $1 million to more than $60 million.

Editor's note: Huffington Posts' Anis Shivani interviews publishing visionary Richard Nash. Check out Richard Nash's Guest Column in the September/October issue of Book Business, coming soon!

I've been intrigued by Richard Eoin Nash since the time he ran the indie press Soft Skull Press in the 2000s. His new enterprise is Red Lemonade/Cursor, a reader/participant-oriented publishing venture hoping to take full advantage of the social potential of new media. I recently had the opportunity to talk to him via email about the future of publishing in a rapidly changing landscape.

Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group (USA), and Simon & Schuster have announced a new digital platform connecting book lovers with favorite books and authors.