An NYU researcher received grant funding to rewrite all 438 sentences Herman Melville’s Moby Dick using Japanese emoticons. Fred Berenson, the researcher, plans to use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to obtain three different interpretations from each sentence. From there, each sentence will be voted on and one will be chosen.

When asked why he chose Moby Dick as the book to be translated, Mr. Berenson stated that he needed a public domain book and one that was fairly long in order to demonstrate the the capability of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Bloomberg LP has confirmed it’s acquisition of Businessweek. Bloomberg will be paying $2 million to $5 million in cash.

“We are not buying BusinessWeek to gut it. We are buying it to build it” Bloomberg stated.

Businessweek.com has 20 million unique users and 100 million pageviews. It generates $60 million in revenue. It has not been decided what Bloomberg will do with the web operations.

Italian regulators began an investigation into Google News after Italian newspaper publishers made a claim that their content was unfairly used to generate profit for the search giant. One argument the publishers claim is that having their content circulated within Google News is a forced contribution. The newspaper say that inclusion in Google’s news service hurts readership and the ability to generate revenue.

This investigation has now expanded into Google’s primary search business.

The Italian newspaper publishers have also expressed anger over their rankings in Google’s traditional search results. Italian Federation of Newspaper Editors alleged that any organization that refused to have content displayed in Google News Italy was immediately excluded from Google’s main search.

Time Inc. announced that it will close Southern Accents magazine. South Accents is a lifestyle periodical that Time Inc. has published bi-monthly since 1985. The magazine’s online component will continue to operate.

Southern Living, Southern Accents had a circulation of 400,000, however in the past few months its advertising revenue had dropped 37 percent.

Rupert Murdoch demanded that Amazon turn over all Kindle users info. Amazon has yet to comply with Murdoch’s request.

This demand follows News Corp negotiating a larger share of revenue from Amazon sales–in which News Corp stated that content from the The Wall Street Journal would not be made available unless Amazon provides a more generous revenue share and more publisher-friendly policies.

“Kindle treats them as their subscribers, not as ours, and I think that will eventually cause a break with us.” – Murdoch