Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is getting some attention on the latest geegaw to go with its EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service. Amazon said it will make web-scale computing easier for developers.

The eCommerce giant explains it in detail on its Web Services page.

Since InternetNews.com last covered this service, Amazon.com has tossed in some more features, namely what it calls Elastic IPs -- static IPs for dynamic cloud computing.

Here's the pitch:

An Elastic IP address is associated with your account not a particular instance, and you control that address until you choose to explicitly release it. Unlike traditional static IP addresses, however, Elastic IP addresses allow you to mask instance or Availability Zone failures by programmatically remapping your public IP addresses to any instance in your account.

The larger story here is that Amazon is getting more serious about its cloud computing services -- probably based on a pretty solid uptake on the EC2 beta so far. It keeps EC2 in the same conversations as hosted applications, software as a service (SaaS), Web Services and how software is increasingly sold: like a utility you pay for on a meter.

Amazon is basically building out more cred by saying to potential customers: Applications will be well-cared for here. But in addition, it's a move that will eventually get merchants to deploy Web services behind the scenes -- applications talking to eachother on orders and other logistics stuff that puts Web services to work behind the scenes for a company that makes the bulk of its bread and butter selling books and gadgets in the physical world.

So the latest on EC2 serves a few purposes. It gets folks to take another look at the Web Services menu the e commerce giant is building out. Plus, it fits in with Amazon's SimpleDB (um, hello Microsoft), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.

Looks like Amazon’s getting more religion about selling products that are easily served up, rather than boxed up and shipped out through the mail.

There's, of course, the DRM-free online music sales sales it launched last year, one more piece of its digital content strategy since the debut of Kindle, the electronic book reader. Amazon also launched software sales via downloads in January of tax prep software and is keen to expand its offerings there. The timing on Web services with the latest on EC2 just adds one more piece to the computing cloud at Amazon.

The online version of the "Knowledge@Wharton" publication has another entry to add to the debate about user-generated content and how it impacts traditional publishing business models.

For starters, I agree with how the the article disagees with Newsweek magazine's recent "Revenge of the Experts" cover story in which the magazine argues that the "pendulum" is swinging away from the influence of the user-generated crowd (blogs, social media, eBay even) and back to content edited by professionals. Here's the money quote:

Experts at Wharton disagree on where the Internet content pendulum sits and whether it's worth fretting over the short-term swings between professional and amateur content. Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader and Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Kevin Werbach say fears about user-generated content are misplaced. "It's absurd to say the pendulum is swinging back to professional content. User-generated content has just been born," says Fader. There is little evidence to suggest that it takes market share from the professional variety, he adds.

Great to see Kevin Werbach of the SuperNova conferences (and a leading thinker on the Web), quoted in the article and putting the whole Amateur vs. Professional in its rightful context.

Despite hand wringing over professional and amateur content, the reality is that consumers will use and appreciate both.

I agree with their conclusion as well: Both have their place.

Sad to see the news that "2001:...." author Arthur C. Clarke passed away at the age of 90.

The New York Times has a very good
obit, which is here.

I found this passage from the NYTimes obit spot on about his influence on technology, and beyond:

The author of almost 100 books, Mr. Clarke was an ardent promoter of the idea that humanity's destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth. It was a vision served most vividly by "2001: A Space Odyssey," the classic 1968 science-fiction film he created with the director Stanley Kubrick and the novel of the same title that he wrote as part of the project.

His work was also prophetic: his detailed forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945 came more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight.

Other early advocates of a space program argued that it would pay for itself by jump-starting new technology. Mr. Clarke set his sights higher. Borrowing a phrase from William James, he suggested that exploring the solar system could serve as the "moral equivalent of war," giving an outlet to energies that might otherwise lead to nuclear holocaust.

Mr. Clarke's influence on public attitudes toward space was acknowledged by American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, by scientists like the astronomer Carl Sagan and by movie and television producers. Gene Roddenberry credited Mr. Clarke's writings with giving him courage to pursue his "Star Trek" project in the face of indifference, even ridicule, from television executives.

Talk about the "train wreck" effect. You can't take your eyes off the stories bubbling out of the blogosphere about the fallout from the chaotic interview of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg by journalist Sarah Lacy at the South by Southwest Interactive Confab (SXSW Interactive) in Austin.

Wired's got the juicy details as do plenty of bloggers who were there, as well as plenty of twitter posts on the tweetscan.

Audience members, apparently tired of constant interruptions by Lacy and references to her own projects in the interview, essentially said they weren't going to sit for such lame questions and demanded to ask their own.

Here's one passage from the Wired article:

Lacy tried to get the notoriously tight-lipped Zuckerberg to open up. But the discussion rarely strayed beyond the usual business fare and eventually descended into a string of awkward moments punctuated by the audience's heckling.

"Talk about something interesting," one attendee yelled about halfway through the keynote. The remark was met with waves of cheering and applause.

Meanwhile, members of the audience participated in a back-channel discussion on Twitter, with users of the microblogging site directing most of their animosity at Lacy's unorthodox interview technique.

"Never, ever have I seen such a train wreck of an interview," said Jason Pontin on Twitter. "Poor girl, flirtatiously awful tho' she was."

A quick search for "Zuckerberg" on Twitter search service Tweetscan reveals hundreds of posts written by those who witnessed the disastrous interview.

Lacy didn't help matters with her twitter response: "seriously screw you guys."

Memo to journos who get themselves enmeshed in a story and then turn an audience into an angy mob: If you're in a hole and want to get out, stop digging! In this case, Lacy got the audience even more annoyed with her attitude when a little humility would have helped smooth things over. And we wonder why so many people think journos don't have a clue.

Tech's future is Free. It's also about designing stuff in the U.S. and making it China. Those are just a couple of tidbits that "Long Tail" coiner Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine chatted about on Charlie Rose's talk show last night. (That guy from tech crunch was on too but he was so tense I had to turn it off.)

But Anderson was his usual concise self, even when he was talking up older concepts for today's Web, such as his latest take on the "free" economy. The topic happens to be the magazine's cover story.

Anderson takes the "Information wants to be free" argument a little further.

A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free versus pay online are ending. In 2007 The New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal. (The remaining fee-based parts, new owner Rupert Murdoch announced, will be "really special ... and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive." This calls to mind one version of Stewart Brand's original aphorism from 1984: "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive ... That tension will not go away.")