Interesting: Amazon is going to start offering subscription payment services for businesses and startups ala PayPal.

The Law Library of Congress has a new report about country-specific restrictions on genetically-modified organisms. It’s also available as a PDF.

The Economist has an interesting article on data mining Twitter that mostly looks at Dataminr. “In April Twitter bought Gnip, which may spell trouble for DataSift. But Twitter and Dataminr say this has no implications for their relationship, despite some pundits speculating that Twitter is changing its strategy for working with outsiders. Dataminr’s access to the fire hose is ‘rock solid’, argues Mr Bailey.” Note to self: go back and reread this quote in six months.

Want to follow the World Cup? Mashable has some app suggestions.

Harvard Library will be preserving Tibetan literary works with a vast digital archive. “Beginning in July, Harvard Library will upload onto its digital storage system 10 million pages of Tibetan literature that survived China’s convulsive Cultural Revolution, the movement between 1966 and 1976 that led to the destruction of countless Chinese and Tibetan literary texts.”

A professor at the University of California, Riverside has created two web sites that track/analyze health and social/entertainment sentiments on Twitter. “Health Social Analytics and Social Predictor build upon previous work by Hristidis and other researchers that used data from Twitter to help predict the traded volume and value of a stock. A trading strategy based on a model created by Hristidis and others outperformed other baseline strategies by between 1.4 percent and nearly 11 percent and did better than the Dow Jones Industrial Average during a four-month simulation.”

Speaking of Twitter data, ethical guidelines for use of Twitter data in scientific studies are being proposed. “Researchers interested in user-centric studies look at the Twitter activity of individuals, but doing so raises potential privacy concerns. Twitter data is public information, but many individuals claim a reasonable expectation of privacy. Even if a user’s assumptions on privacy are incorrect, there are presumptions that because something is shared publicly, the user consents to it being used for research.”

George R.R. Martin has finally joined Twitter. I mention this only because of the huge number of fake George R.R. Martin accounts out there. Good morning, Internet…

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