Sometime in the last few days, evidently my newest book hit the data streams, because it now shows up on Amazon, in LibraryThing, and on the publisher’s website! It won’t be out until March or so, but it’s still exciting to see.
Category: Media
I was going to blog about the recent article describing how publishers are going to be slotting ebooks into their traditional Handcover-then-Paperback release schedule. I was going to point out that treating digital objects like physical objects has never worked, will never work, and to expect it to work is a fundamental error of modern media.
I was going to do that, but then Chad Haefele over at Hidden Peanuts did it for me. Go read it.
From his post:
Scribner has created an ecosystem where piracy is literally the only option for potential customers who would otherwise line up to give them money, AND that piracy delivers what’s actually a superior product with no DRM.
Yep, that’s pretty much what they’ve done. And, like the music industry, they are going to shoot themselves right in the foot.
Google Wave and Igor
For the BIGWIG Showcase this year, I talked about and put together a presentation on Google Wave, and what I think it will do to library services. One of the things I talked about was the ability for software robots to watch the Wave, and alter it in specific ways. Well, it looks like we’ve got our first bibliographic example of this, with Igor. Stew over at Flags & Lollipops has put together a robot that will watch a given Wave for mentions of citations, and then query and automagically fill in footnotes from PubMed, Connotea, or CiteULike (for now, I’m sure that Zotero and other coverage is easily possible).
I’ve got no idea how he did this, given that Wave isn’t public yet…but the demo shows what’s going to be possible with Wave. Take a look, and get ready….Wave might change everything. You may need to click through and enlarge the player to really see what’s going on.
Igor – a Google Wave robot to manage your references from Stew Fnl on Vimeo.
Igor is a robot for Google Wave written in Java and running on Google App Engine.
It allows users to pull in references from PubMed & personal libraries on Connotea or CiteULike by querying services with keywords that they supply inline with the article you’re writing.
This is a panel that I was a part of at ALA 2009 on the future of mobile….phenomenal panelists. I was especially geeked to finally get to meet Eli Neiburger. Anyway, we all had something to say about the future of mobile, and what libraries need to be worried about. Watch it, and let me know if you have any feedback. I’m always interested in what other librarians think about things like this…the future isn’t certain, and it’s always possible that I’m remarkably wrong.
Here’s part one:
And part two:
Automated book scanner
I so want one of these for my new library!! Why? No idea…we’re not a Research 1 school, not an ARL, but the idea of loading this thing up and just letting it run as an art project makes me happy. And yes, I’d love to digitize some of our public domain books with it, even as few as we have.
I got ambushed by the Dutch Boys at the OCLC Blog Salon at ALA Annual 2009. Evidently, so did lots of other people…the video below is the result.
OCLC Blog Salon:Shenanigans with Shanachies from Jaap van de Geer on Vimeo.
I discovered an audio tool the other day that was too well done and too interesting not to use in some way. Audioboo is currently an iPhone only audio blogging application that knocked my socks off when I tried it out. You sign up for an account, and download the application from the iTunes store.
Once you have the app installed, you can use it to record up to 5 minutes of audio, title it, tag it, attach a photo, and hit send…up it goes to the Audioboo site, and to your personal page. If that’s all it gave you, it would still be a great app, but it goes the full 2.0 route and automatically feeds your audio into iTunes podcast store for download via iTunes. It gives you a raw RSS feed which you can do with as you will, and even supports embedding of the “boo” anywhere else on the web. Oh, and of course, it with Twitter for you. Here are my first two tries at playing with this new tool:
I’m going to play with this a bit at ALA Annual 2009 in Chicago, maybe track some people down and do flash interviews with them. Try and find something interesting to share, and see if this tool answers some questions on making media available to the masses.
So: Keep your eyes on this space, or even better, subscribe to the RSS feed directly. Let me know what you think, and see if this tool gives you another option when it comes to creating and distributing media.
Death of Newspapers
As with many things, the Daily Show nails the death spiral of the newspaper with absurdity and humor. My favorite line in the whole piece is “Find me anything in here that happened today.”
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
End Times | ||||
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Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.
As many will probably say about The Cluetrain Manifesto, it’s almost scary how precient it was. To put it into perspective, when the authors were writing Cluetrain, Google had less than a dozen employees and has just moved out of a garage. The word “blog” had yet to be used to describe a chronological website. Napster hadn’t shattered the media industry yet. And statistics put the number of people on the Internet at just about 150 million, or around 10% of the current number.
Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger put together an amazing set of principles that are even more relevant today than they were 10 years ago. The sad part about Thesis 17, in particular, is that companies haven’t yet learned this lesson. Some of them are trying, with standouts like Zappos. But far too many companies are failing to see the benefits of participatory marketing and extreme customer service.
The market is no longer passive. Almost no one under the age of 35 these days interacts with products in the way the older generation did…we expect to be involved in our consumption, connected to it. We ask friends, we poll our social networks, we take recommendations of the people we know very seriously. We have to love both the object and the process or we just don’t buy. And loving means becoming involved, knowing more, interacting with the makers, asking questions, and otherwise being active.
We want a relationship with our products, and producers who try to feed us advertising may be ok short-term, but the days of the passive are over. The new market is fragmented and participatory, and content producers will have to adjust or die. Making a better product isn’t enough. The companies that will thrive in the coming years are the ones that understand and cultivate the one-to-one relationships with their customers and their potential customers.
This post is a part of the larger CluetrainPlus10 project. Follow other reflections on the Cluetrain there!