Just a quick post to share some recent articles worth reading and trends worth watching or ignoring:

• Amazon is now in the publishing business and will release 122 new books this fall. While I hate eBook readers and the experience they offer, I’m all for more competition in the publishing space, especially if it gives the traditional publishing houses of NYC a kick in the rear. Amazon is nicely cued up to revolutionize the system.
• The debate on the future of search rages on, especially now that Apple has unveiled Siri. I think this Forbes article dives into it nicely, at least on a philosophical level. What matters more? Answering your questions or indexing the world’s content? Writer Alliot Cole argues that Google is conquering everything, but search. Pretty interesting…
• This was the only obit on Steve Jobs that I read, and it felt like the only one worth reading (courtesy of The Telegraph UK).
• Dumb Idea of the Month: I’d be remiss to not include at least one article about the travel industry. This month? Ryan Air continues to hate our urinary tract by replacing lavatories with more seats. Some flights will now have one bathroom and a passenger to toilet ratio of 200-to-1. This from the same airline that seriously contemplated coin-operated toilets on its planes last year, as if a flight from Dublin to Rome were akin to San Francisco’s Union Square. And after all this, Ryan Air president Michael O’Leary allows himself to be photographed hugging a phallic Ryan Air fuselage. You can’t make this shit up.
• Dumber Idea of the Month (courtesy of our dumb-tech-loving friends at Mashable). Austin-based company Blue Marble offers to create massive QR codes for your corporate HQ roof. Why? Because surely this will increase your exposure on Google Maps. And I thought QR codes jumped the shark when that idiot in Paris had one tattooed on his chest.