Month: September 2009
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“We have broken your business, now we want your machines.”
Russell Davies on what’s been percolating in digital culture regarding print media: It’s not news that the internet has stimulated all sorts of creativity in the real world. From communities and marketplaces of crafters like folksy to new forms of personal manufacture like shapeways; technology is giving regular people access to tools and markets that once they…
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Books, Printing, and Self-Publishing
In an age of increasing digitization, objects become more valuable. And that value is the reason print media will not die, even if it does shrink. My prediction for print media, therefore, is two-fold: you will see small run, local editions of hardbound books and quick, cheap paperbacks. Couple this with our new attitudes on the democratization of…
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Social Publishing
You’ll hear more about social publishing from me in the future, but this is too fresh to hesitate showing you. Richard Eoin Nash, former publisher of Soft Skull press, has been trying to rally interest for a social publishing start-up called Cursor. In this interview, he defines “social publishing”: 1) Define “social publishing” in terms…
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There is something outside of the text
To make a very long story short, I was a book lugging Luddite until about three years ago when I discovered that the internet was more than cats fiending after cheeseburgers. And, since then, I have become increasingly fascinated with digital culture’s scrolls and more than a little concerned about my friend, the codex. Over the next few days,…
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Guest Posts (3)
Still away this week, and with my return flight date fast approaching, I have one final guest author waiting in the wings to entertain you. For the coming few days you will be treated to the musings of Andrew Simone. Andrew is a thoughtful and amusing chap who writes over at the fantastic group blog clusterflock (Andrew’s posts…
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Surviving Jet Lag
With my 25-hour flight from Sydney back to London fast approaching, my mind is wandering to the topic of jet lag–or desynchronosis, to use the medical term. The most often suggested remedies for jet lag (where recovery times are generally said to be 1 day per eastward time zone or 1 day per 1.5 westward time…
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Sydney Dust Storm
After travelling to Sydney, I somehow managed to miss the spectacle that was the biggest dust storm to hit the city in over 70 years by going somewhere else for a week. While I was in Melbourne preparing for a road trip down the Great Ocean Road (and generally avoiding the earthquake and the collapse…
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Blogs as Public Billboards
First seen over at Raul Gutierrez’ Heading East, this Tim Berners-Lee quote on the role of the home page from 1996 or so seems to come from an interview with Rohit Khare and DC Denison: With all respect, the personal home page is not a private expression; it’s a public billboard that people work on…
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Scarcity Marketing
Neuromarketing has recently been looking at The Scarcity Effect: WORCHEL, LEE, AND ADEWOLE (1975) asked people to rate chocolate chip cookies. They put 10 cookies in one jar and two of the same cookies in another jar. The cookies from the two-cookie jar received higher ratings—even though the cookies were exactly the same! Not only…
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Ebook Readers and Auto-Correcting Books
With the growing prevalence of ebook readers that can be updated remotely–such as Amazon’s Kindle–could the time of the book riddled with errors be coming to an end? Errors are common in all forms of media, but it is mistakes in the printed word that are perhaps the most pernicious. Once a “fact” has been…