Articles Index: Edit This
I can sing the alphabet backward. I learned it as a child and it sticks with me, just like its more popular cousin, the alphabet song. In his keynote at Enterprise Search Summit West, held Sept. 23-24 in San Jose, Calif., Gene Smith said that social discovery isn't new. It's been around a lot longer than I've known any alphabet songs—not to mention the web, much less its 2.0 iteration.
A former EContent assistant editor, Kinley Levack, forwarded me an August column from The New York Observer, The Media Mob. Her email bore this subject line: "I will always think of you when I hear this phrase …" Alas, the column was not about the most inspiring bosses ever. In fact, it was about "The New Media Religion: ‘Platform Agnostic.'"
Many of us know that bookstores employ "cooperative advertising," which is little more than a pay-for-placement arrangement. So who can we trust? I get my best recommendations from friends, colleagues, and the library staff-picks shelf. In some ways, I am old-fashioned. However, I have also become quite addicted to user reviews...
Agile thinking is something we do everyday. Perhaps we miss a word or two on a bad phone connection, or we don't express our thoughts clearly in an email, yet the person on the other end of the communication detects myriad clues from context or experience to interpret meaning, or asks follow-up questions for clarification. Michelle Manafy, editor of EContent magazine, waxes eloquently on the topic . . .
I don't understand knowledge management. Yes, it is among the things we cover, but I swear it is the one of the most elusive. While content may be reduced to something as ephemeral as zeros and ones or bits and bytes, knowledge is one of the ultimate intangibles. How do you capture it in the first place so that you can make it manageable? It's like trying to catch air with a net.
With digital distribution, the rules are still emerging and, like publishing business models, will continue to do so. Some things remain almost constant, though, such as the free versus fee debate. From B2B magazine and daily paper models to newsstand sales and high-value subscription content, the publishing business has always demanded a range of formulas for feeding the bottom line.
I earned a couple of memorable C’s in my academic history. One was for my capricious foray into physics, which I took as a college elective in an effort to follow the cryptic conversations my physics-major best friend had with her science pals. The other was in fifth grade handwriting. My teacher was appalled at my sloppy penmanship. She sent home a note to my mom, and they both stepped up the practice sessions … to no avail. Two years later, my grandmother bought me my first typewriter. I am forever indebted.
I threw away my dictionary. Tossed it. Considered my cluttered desk and decided it was time to take a critical look at what was crowding this valuable real estate. I gathered a stack of books I’ve always kept near at hand and, as I wiped the dust off of them, came to the realization that, while I look up the occasional tricky bit of grammar in my tiny, trusty Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, I literally haven’t used my dictionary or thesaurus in years.
Part of email's appeal from the start was its ability to link team members who didn’t have the luxury of sharing a space. In some cases, it was teams comprised of individuals throughout a university campus; in others, it was researchers located across the globe. There is also a characteristic that computer folk and academics share: a tendency to keep odd hours. Email helped with this. Much of early email was limited to internal-only mailbox systems that let team members leave messages for others to pick up and respond to whenever they happened to come in and boot up. So, between team playing and time shifting, what’s not to love? A whole lot.
Today in Arizona, pack mules will deliver mail to the Havasupai tribe. Their village, Supai, clings to the side of the Grand Canyon, and—as has been the case for a century—mules still provide the most efficient means of delivering the mail. This isn’t to imply that the Havasupai don’t get email. They are certainly online, as many of the packages delivered to them are products purchased through the web.
The likelihood of any bottled water originating from pristine tropical falls may be questionable, but it does arouse my thoughts about evolving perceptions.
We old-timey publishing folks think in terms of lead time: We always think a couple of months in advance. I'm more likely to have trouble remembering what month it actually is than the fact that I'm working on my October column right now, just finished editing October news, am editing November features, and am voting on the December EContent 100 list.
In his most recent book, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Weinberger humanizes the nearly inconceivable scope of the digital content universe.
Despite his lighthearted take on the power of the Google brand, senior product and marketing manager for Google Enterprise Kevin Gough had some serious insights into how the consumer market dictates expectations inside the enterprise. Without doubt, IT departments hear users say they want enterprise search to “work like Google,” while serious searchers bemoan the sheer quantity of results the engine generates.
Bad marketing makes me sick. From releases comprised of extreme hyperbole to buckshot-spray pitches and spam-filter clogging quantity, I am inundated with the bad and the ugly, along with the good. This week, I read a press release that had the profoundly poor taste to “leverage” the shooting at Virginia Tech in order to promote its video search engine. I won’t mention the company’s name here because I wouldn’t want to give them more attention than they deserve. What is significant about the release, other than the depths to which those who aren’t good at their jobs will sink in an effort to get a little ink, is how it highlights the hottest marketing tool of the moment: user-generated video
The other day I was trying to track down someone I haven’t seen in about 20 years. I tried Google and, shockingly, received too many results. The two links on the first page of results that I clicked and skimmed through were old and not terribly useful. Next, I tried ZoomInfo. I actually find this service to be a bit spooky.
Examples of fixed and fluid organizations abound. There are those that rely on size and dominance to maintain the status quo and those which, even if they are large, stay nimble and evolve with the marketplace, in part by tapping the collective web whims and wisdom.
Charles Simonyi is slated to be the fifth day-tripper to visit the International Space Station and plans to document his adventure online with a blog, pictures, an “Ask Charles” forum, and more. I bet there will be a good-size audience for some vicarious thrill riding. On the other hand, despite the novelty of civilian space travel and Simonyi’s cyber-extended nerd entourage, I can’t quite picture whole families huddled around the computer to watch.
Maybe it is the nature of publishing, but I don't remember ever working in the same office with every member of my team. I've witnessed the evolution of digital collaboration first hand and with hands on: from taking typewritten copy from writers and keying it into a Verityper all the way to building and using wiki workspaces.
A plane hit a building in New York. I saw it on the evening news. The evening news saw it on YouTube. Right in the middle of the broadcast, the anchors cut to a YouTube video of the tragic event. The audience is making the news these days.
In a recent edition of John Lienhard's The Engines of Our Ingenuity, which I heard in the car on National Public Radio, Lienhard discussed the demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet—brilliantly tying in the naming of the Disney dog. When I went to the University of Houston's site to check the name of the episode ("Poor Old Pluto"), I found that in addition to offering online transcripts of his commentaries on NPR, Lienhard now also provides them as podcasts. I will admit that I got what I needed from the transcript, but I clicked to listen anyhow, to reignite the flame of inspiration.
Simply put, really simple syndication isn’t simple at all. While ease of use on the consumer side—one-click subscription—is improving through aggregators like syndic8 or NewsGator, finding and using RSS feeds continues to mystify most readers. If you see that orange RSS (or XML) button and click, you get a discomfiting view of the code that makes the feed work. I don’t want to know. I just want to click, read, and go.
Most of the media is breathless about Web 2.0. While we’ve dipped our toes into the hyperbolic floodwaters here at EContent, our reporting has mostly been of specific applications, rather than a lot of the rah-rah coverage I’ve read in a number of mainstream and technology publications.
I have never lived in a development or suburb, but those I’ve visited seem to suffer from a confusion of quaint street-naming conventions in which Honeysuckle Lane intersects Honeysuckle Court. The fact that the houses look nearly identical is painfully exacerbated by the streets all bearing cloying and similar names, which has left me winding through speed bump-safe streets only to be frustrated by a surplus of cul-de-sacs. It leaves me with the impression that suburbs are insiders’ clubs, where only those who can detect the subtle distinctions between mass-market designs can navigate with confidence.
Face it: face time remains the most valuable way to forge relationships. While the Web makes it possible to find almost anyone, nothing compares to shoulder bumping and elbow rubbing when you want to make useful business connections. That’s why networking remains the most compelling reason to attend the Buying and Selling eContent conference. Not only is the show a content-biz Who’s Who, almost every aspect of it is designed to provide networking opportunities. In fact, sometimes the actual conference sessions feel like they get in the way of why everyone is really there.
The announcement of the Sony eBook Reader, expected out this month, triggered a flurry of speculation about the ebook market. We at EContent aren’t immune: We wrote about its Japanese predecessor (LIBRIé), covered its CES debut, speculated on its potential impact on the ebook market, and are angling for a review unit (as is every other media outlet on the planet). Sure, I’m interested in any delivery mechanism for digital content and the opportunity it offers as another content outlet, but damn, the new Sony Reader is just so small and hot!
The opening of the 2006 Winter Olympics was a picture of postmodernism. The athletes pointed still, phone, and video cameras back at the world watching them. It is interesting so many chose to be chroniclers of the moment rather than simply experience the fact they are living history. Yet, as each Olympics offers a time-lapse look at how humans push the boundaries of physical achievement forward—for me embodied in the women’s halfpipe snowboarding competitors, who only four years ago barely met TV cameras head on and now soar high above them—they provide similar insight into the way technology and the coverage of the events changes as well.
Google’s announcement that it was launching its very own Video Store dazzled a lot of folks. While the interface is anything but high-gloss (in fact, it is so understated—like all things Google—it’s almost silly), this “search engine’s” further push into media-mogul territory captured a whole lot of attention. Now that Google has not only taken on the biggies but joined their ranks, it isn’t surprising that it will counter Apple’s iTunes success with a stream mall of its own. Still, streaming video is hot, hot, hot, and a lot of ink (e- and otherwise) will be spilled analyzing this move and the populist approach Google has taken by putting “Joe’s home movies” on a virtual shelf right next to super-successful television series.
Stereotypes simplify social situations. Old person wise, young person foolhardy; tall person better basketball player, guy with pocket-protector better with computers; and policeman good, robber bad (or vice versa, depending on your perspective). Imagine all the hard work you’d have to do if you sincerely evaluated every individual you encountered, well, individually. So stereotypes serve as shortcuts for the socially lazy. But as my grandma used to say, “Anything worth doing is hard.”
I don't own a cell phone and rarely carry a laptop or PDA because, quite frankly, I have too much information and communication already. I do some of my best idea-formulation (even writing) during the brief lulls in between info-streams. The content clutter has to clear and then coalesce for things to make any larger sense. It isn't that I think I don't need to know more. I know I do.
I won’t go into book cover-judgment platitudes here; rather, I’ll suggest thinking a bit about the whole what-you-see-is-what-you-get proposition. In life, it usually means that just wanting something (or someone) to be one way or another won’t make it so. The problem with the assessment phase, I find, is spin. Like cars: one person’s standard is another’s option—and software’s no different.
Each of us can look back on our lives and pinpoint individuals whose influence shifted our course for the better. It might have been the teacher who gave you a book of MC Escher drawings and talked to you about the interconnectedness of things and ways of seeing. Maybe it was a workplace mentor who taught you that tenacity is as important as a well-turned phrase. I have been lucky to have many such forces in my life, not the least of which was my grandmother, who showed me the power one woman had to make her life what she dreamed, that it is never too late to reinvent yourself, and that hard work will take you where you want to go. As she aptly explained, “Nobody ever told me life would be easy, so I don’t mind hard work.” She valued knowledge gleaned in the classroom but placed experiential learning on an equal plane.
At EContent magazine, we adhere to a strict separation of church and state. I think most reputable magazines do, but in trade publishing it is particularly challenging—and important—to maintain editorial integrity while balancing the interests of the vendors, who are both readers and potential advertisers. Despite this separation, I find myself with plenty of sales issues to think about. I’m not hawking ad pages or subscriptions, but many editors are concerned with the salability of their product in both of these arenas; it is our primary objective to fill pages with quality content that will attract readers—both for subscription revenue and to offer advertisers a desirable audience.
Cut and paste culture might be all the rage on the creative side of the entertainment business but is often an anathema to the business side. While the latter will gladly pocket Gorillaz’ green, a team of lawyers probably frets over every echo of another artist’s work. At this year’s Entertainment Technology Alliance conference, I moderated a session called “Can Content Remain King?” in which—as usual—DRM surfaced as the highest hurdle for widespread entertainment digital content delivery.
What goes on in some people’s minds? On an April business trip to the Buying & Selling eContent show (BSeC) in toasty Arizona, I got stranded in a blizzard in Colorado. Surrounded by 40,000 other travelers in various states of distress, I found myself wondering why some come together during difficult experiences and pool resources and knowledge to better the situation while others turn competitive and adversarial, hoarding both assets and information.
I don’t know if my art is a dying one, but I do know that the way I have done business is fading like a weathered signpost. No doubt a lot of old-school publishing pros are haunted by similar specters: blogging, community journalism, news-harvesting tools, templated software that will “do the writing for you.” A multitude of new-world media methods are redirecting the flow of information, putting its navigation into hands other than our own.
If Richard Nixon is history, then Eddie Haskell is nostalgia. With history, we factor in the complexity and context in which things take place, seeing the bad and good through the tempered eye of perspective. Nostalgia filters reality through a soft-focus lens with blemishes retouched, so that even our villains are charming, if disingenuously so.
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