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September 21, 2007
David Isenberg has a good post on One Web Day, Yom Kippur, and their coincidence tomorrow.
So, go celebrate the Web while we still have one that’s distinguishable from cable TV.
And if I have hurt you in any way in the past year, I ask your forgiveness. I will try to do better next year, especially if you’ll let me know what I did wrong ([email protected]).
September 17, 2007
I’m at the Microsoft Research Social Computing Seminar. It’s a fantastic group of attendees. Liz Lawley does the intro, followed by Lili Cheng. We hear a little about Social Genius.
We go around the room saying who we are and what we’re interested in. There are about 60 of us here, I think.
Now Matt Biddulph of Dopplr.com is talking about how to make presence fuzzy. Dopplr lets you see which of your friends are going to be in a city. But why not be able to control the size of the range? So there’s a slider.
Tom Coates (who is hilarious on the back channel) is working on a project code-named Fire Eagle at Yahoo’s Brickhouse. He talks about presence as making you visible and comprehensible not just to other people but to software that could do yet more with it. You can tell Fire Eagle your location via SMS, other apps, etc. E.g., you could map all the Twitter tweets. You could use your phone to look for groups. You could automatically geotag your blogs posts or flickr photos. Tom now talks about protecting against abuse of this info. In addition to the opt outs, you can create “special places” that are off the map, so to speak.
Gilad Lotan talks about presence and objects. He likes to embed conective technology into objects. E.g., he built “imPulse” tha transfers heartbeats through a wall. The next version was wireless. When two of these pods are in the same room, they talk to each other. Likewise, he did a touch project for the Kotel. Ubi.ach (say it aloud) “takes email away from the screen.” It’s a doll that blinks when you get new email. A street exhibit in Jerusalem shows some of the missiles fired at Israel embedded in ordinary scenes. Another of Gilad’s projects creates Tibetan prayer wheels controlled by images from news feeds. Overall: Four points on presence: Connection through intimacy, range of immediacy, culture and context, and importance of the tangible.
danah boyd talks about social networking site as “networked publics” (in the Habermasian sense). They are spaces within which collections of people exist, through mediating tools. Hannah Arendt said that the presence of others assures of the reality of the world around us. Mobile phones create social spaces for teens — an always-on intimate community. [sorry, this is coming out far more disjointed than the actual presentation.] When you write, you write for an imagined audience, a public that your writing creates. Socnets do this for groups of friends/acquaintances. For teens, at socnets you display that you’re engaged in a relationship before you actually are; they’re ways of marking relationships. The intended audience is the social network. danah shows two photos of teenagers kissing by the juxtaposition (“juxtapokissin'”?) of the photos; this is because it’s so hard for teenagers to find real world public spaces. She points to the traces of relationships in the real world in which we can see time and the aging of the relationships.
My sister-in-law, Meredith Sue Willis, the novelist and writing teacher, ran a piece in her newsletter about how small presses see Amazon. It’s by Jonathan Greene of the Gnomon Press. I thought it was interesting. Here it is, in its entirety:
Just back from the [Kentucky] State House chambers and the uphill
useless fight against legislation to give Peabody Coal millions in
incentives which may very well result in more mountaintop removal
devastation in the eastern coalfields.But back to Amazon, this from the view of a small publisher (with over
40 years experience): The way the book world is set up is less than
ideal for a small publisher. Amazon is not Evil in that in many
instances it gives access to readers who want small press books that are
not otherwise easily available. Certainly I agree with my friend Gordon
Simmons: first support your local independent bookstore if you are lucky
enough to have a good one in your neighborhood; they are a dying breed.But not all such bookstores will go to the trouble to order a book that
is not distributed by the near-monopoly of Ingram Book Co. Ingram takes
the same deep discount (55% off of list price) that Amazon takes, but
(unlike Amazon) Ingram often returns much of what it buys in beat-up
condition which the publisher has to eat plus pay the UPS cost back to
its door. I once got a hardback book returned by Ingram with a razor cut
the length of its spine through both the jacket and the cloth. And had
to pay for its trip back to my warehouse. As far as Amazon being
non-union, I doubt many bookstores are union or pay what many would
consider decent wages. Not right, but friends who work in stores
complain to me about this fact without telling me their specific
salaries.Readers can also try to support publishers directly if their local store
will not bother to order a book that Ingram does not carry. Research
on-line and contact or buy from the publisher directly. Not all
publishers take credit cards, a reason some would prefer to deal with
Amazon. Barnes & Noble often will not order from small publishers
directly, but often seem to give out their telephone numbers to those
that want books from those publishers. Small Press Distribution and
Consortium that distribute books for many small presses return even less
to small presses that Amazon: they normally sell books to stores or
chains at 40% – 55% then take half of the gross receipts of any payment
and put the amount due the publisher in escrow for three months. And
Consortium charges the publisher a re-stocking fee for any books stores
or distributors return. In other words, it is almost impossible for a
small literary publisher to survive without massive infusions of grants
from NEA and foundations. Or increasingly asking for author subsidies.
And this affects writers who want to be published by small publishers.
The health of these publishers helps the writers they publish. The
worsening condition is also caused by big publishers deciding to kill of
their mid-list authors, authors who do not sell books at or above the
10,000 range. They would rather publish fewer authors selling more
product (a ubiquitous hateful word now in the book trade).Print-on-demand vendors are a new avenue for authors and publishers. Or
in many instances now the author is the self-publisher. A complicated
situation. Bashing Amazon is not really helpful. Bash Ingram, bash the
fact that mainstream literary publishing is now dominated by
multi-nationals. Knopf, Random House, Farrar Straus, etc. are now owned
by German companies. Or lament the fact that just released figures state
that 27% of Americans do not even read one book a year. One was quoted:
reading made them sleepy. Well, then tout reading for insomniacs as much
healthier than sleeping pills. That should boost book sales.
BTW, Gnomon is no longer accepting manuscripts for publication.
September 16, 2007
The Beppe Grillo blog (in Italy’s top five) quotes the International Herald Tribune [pdf]:
The success of a grassroots anti-politics campaign spearheaded by an iconoclastic comedian is giving Italian politicians pause for thought.
Beppe Grillo is the man behind V-Day (the V stands for a very rude Italian expletive), which attracted 300,000 people on Saturday to sign a petition supporting a common goal: purging Italy of its corrupt political class, which in Grillo’s view includes political parties, most government institutions and the media…
The petition wasn’t no stinkin’ online jobby where signing requires scrolling two inches in order to click on a box. People lined up in 200 towns to sign an honest-to-pete, atom-based piece of inconvenience. And there are physical meet-ups. Sounds like an effective blending of the digital and the analog, with all the pleasures and difficulties of the latter.
September 15, 2007
My Times is in beta. I’m not sure how much of it I’m getting for free because Times Select comps people at universities. And I haven’t played with it extensively. But what I’m seeing I’m liking.
my.nytimes.com lets you choose your feeds. Of course, NY Times material is available, but you could make a page that shows the feeds from the Washington Post, Slate, and BBC and not the NY Times. The site lets you see suggested feeds from various NY Times celebrities. You can add widgets like a Flickr photo browser. You can lay out the page you want. You can add tabs to organize your many feeds. You can even add your own feeds. Plus there’s a meta-tab that will take you to Times Topics, taking them from their undeserved obscurity.
It’s not perfect, even at first glance. The feeds only show headlines, not any of the text. It doesn’t input or output OPML. The feed of the NYTimes columnists only shows the title of their posts, not the names of the authors. There’s still no way to comment on the articles, not even a thumbs up or down. The articles don’t link to blog posts about them.
Nevertheless, the decision to allow us to aggregate other sources on a page at the nytimes.com domain is a big symbolic deal. [Tags: nytimes media blogs newspapers journalism everything_is_miscellaneous ]
A couple of days ago, my friend Francois Gossieaux (whose name in my address book is marked with a big “THIS IS THE CORRECT SPELLING”) interviewed me (phoninar format) for his marketing group called MarketHum. The mp3 is here. [Tags: marketing cluetrain francois_gossieaux markethum]
September 12, 2007
Bradsucks, the webbiest musician on the Web, provided the inspirational background while William Gibson was writing his latest novel….
According to a survey of Korean bloggers done by Edelman Korea (Disclosure: I consult to Edelman, which is how I heard about this study), the leading reason (42%) Korean bloggers blog is “To create a record of my thoughts.” Only 1.2% blog “To raise visibility as an authority in my field.” This compares with 34% of American bloggers blogging to raise their visibility as authorities and 32% blogging to create a record of their thoughts. [Tags: korea blogging blogosphere edelman]
September 11, 2007
From the Center for Media Research:
[Tags: web2.0 millennials user-generated-content media everything_is_miscellaneous]Half of All Web Viewers Watching What The Other Half Has To Say
According to the just released Deloitte’s study on Media & Entertainment practice, looking at how American consumers between 13 and 75 years of age are using media and technology today, Millennials (13-24) are leading the way, embracing new technologies, games, entertainment platforms, user-generated content and communication tools. Data from the survey show that user-generated content is in tremendous demand across the generations, with 51% of all consumers watching and/or reading content created by others.
September 10, 2007
Andy Carvin just twittered:
Just realized OneWebDay is the same day as Yom Kippur this year. Guess I’ll be giving back to the Net by fasting and being irritable.
Yes, One Web Day is Sept. 22, which this year falls on Yom Kippur.
At the Berkman Center, on Tuesday, Sept. 18, at lunchtime, we’re going to have a discussion of the near-palindromic Net in Ten, i.e., the future of the Web. Four of the Fellows have agreed to give a five minute talk (a literal five minutes), followed by open discussion. We’ll post the video on Sept. 22 (aka Yom Kippur), on a discussion page.
That way, we can have our cake and not eat it, too.
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