DefinitiveInk

Big Red Wheel

via gizmodo.com

"Some bicycle purists have already dismissed the wheel as a novelty while others suggest that M.I.T. has succeeded in reinventing the wheel"

MISTER MORT - the Sartorialist from an alternative universe

via mistermort.typepad.com

Came across this site on a list of great looking typepad blogs. Kind of like The Sartorialist's black sheep brother.

Swell Season (the folks from the movie Once)

via boingboing.net

Jarvis on Content farms v. curating farmers

But then again, the internet has always been filled with crap. So the challenge has always been how you find the cream. That’s where opportunities lie. That’s what Google saw. The new question is whether Google can keep ahead of the content farms and continually find new and better ways to find better stuff. I’ll bet on Google over crap-creators. But they better get cracking...

In all of this, I caution us not to miss Demand’s key insight: that the public should assign the creators, including journalists. The public often knows what it wants to know. I learned this lesson when I consulted at About.com and saw how they monitor search queries to see where there are questions for which the don’t have answers. When that happens, they go write answers; Demand automates the process. Makes sense.

This is not how we have operated in media: We decided which questions to answer because we asked them. What hubris! Today, I teach my students to find conversations on the internet and add journalism to them in the form of answers, corrections, reporting, explanations…

What amazed me most is that Demand uses its method not only for service content but for jokes at Cracked.com. Could an algorithm and social network replace Jay Leno? Easy.

via www.buzzmachine.com

Jeff Jarvis's really interesting report on Demand Media.

just a few of the fantastic people I work with

via hello.typepad.com

Anomia gets some press

via www.wickedlocal.com

Great piece about Anomia. It is a really fun game and makes a great present. This Christmas help an aspiring publisher out buy his game.

Media Watchdog Perez Hilton steps into the void created by Editor & Publishers Closing Breaks News That Men’s Health Recycles Old Coverlines

Zinczenko: ”The newsstand coverlines are a tool that help us reach the maximum number of guys possible, on promises we know we’ll fulfill every issue. For many magazines, certain cover subjects — from lines to celebrities — are an important part of their newsstand branding. But for the 80 percent of readers who get our subscriber copies, the lines are totally different and reflect the breadth and depth of our reporting with the 12 million readers we serve each month. Rest assured — it’s this originality and reporting rigor that’s made us the biggest men’s magazine brand in the world.”

via www.mediaite.com

This is kind of brilliant by Men's Health. They really should do this every month. The covers they use in supermarkets could be the same with different models. They could probably rotate the same magazines in a 24 month cycle and no one would notice. Another thing is why is Perez Hilton reading Men's Health. He is the new Romanesko.

Foosball anyone?

 
So I'm out at the Six Apart office in SF for a few days and I noticed a foosball table sitting unused and tucked into a hallway nook. I've been working in new media since the early 1990's but I've never actually worked at a company that had one. Sure I've been in offices with dogs and even kids running around but somehow I missed this icon of the "dot-com boom" at any of the big media or small start-ups I've worked at. Hopefully someone will humor me with my request to play for a minute but the two people I've asked so far have never used it.

Memo To Book Industry: Here’s A Better Way To ‘Window’ Your E-Books | paidContent

“We’re doing this to preserve our industry, I can’t sit back and watch years of building authors sold off at bargain-basement prices. It’s about the future of the business.”

Correction: This move is about the past of your business.

I’m just being a historian here when I point out that language like “We’re doing this to preserve our industry” is a classic symptom of what we at Forrester loving call The Media Meltdown. I wrote a whole report on this ailment and its many symptoms, chief among them is that media businesses attempt to preserve analog business models in the digital economy, even when analog economics no longer apply. This is exactly that scenario.

via paidcontent.org

Well written piece with some nice options for publishers that are an alternative to simply pulling the digital versions of books for a few months.

I'm on a plane right now and I just watched Julie & Julia (sorry B it was the best on offer) and Mastering the Art of French Cooking got a $1500 advance from Knopf. It is now in it's 43rd printing.

Ars Technica on the "hulu" for magazines concept

If implemented well, it could help boost the struggling publishing industry, which has been trying to find ways to bring its content to the digital world without sacrificing the magazine layouts we know and love and the ad revenue that comes with them. 

The flip side is that this could fall flat—Internet users are accustomed to being able to copy and paste passages, share articles with others, and manipulate content to fit their needs. Will a "tabletized" version of a magazine layout be able to offer that kind of flexibility? Users have also become accustomed to seeing a lot of magazine content online for free. Will they want to pay extra for a digitally-recreated magazine experience? We won't know the answer to this and other questions until more details are available. One thing is certain: the online experiences—especially the missteps—of the music, television, and movie industries demonstrate the challenges of bringing an old media format to a digital medium.

via arstechnica.com