DefinitiveInk

IPods and audiobooks - RushHour Italian

On the subway this morning sat across from a woman listening to her iPod and reading Rush Hour Italian.  This CD + Book  series is published by Berlitz (who else). According to Amazon Rush Hour Italian was first published in 2003 probably with commuters in mind but iPods were actually introduced in October of 2001 so perhaps they foresaw it's popularity.

According to Paid Content this morning;

...downloadable audiobooks are on the verge of takeoff with iPod, MP3 players and podcasting taking off.
News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers is forecasting that its digital audiobook sales will jump 40% next year, driven in large part by the popularity of iPods -- not only among older readers, but also the young, an elusive target for book purveyors.

One thing to think about is that is has taken several years for iPods and their possible uses to begin to reach a tipping point. 

Art Tour Podcasts

So tonight a friend told me about a project in which people are creating alternative guides to museums via podcasts. Sure enough here it is a description of the project and, here are the guides which look more like they are about single paintings than tours. Podcast lectures. When I started CityReads my vision was exactly this,  I imagined a whole library of these. How it came to be a company with 1 CD and 1 downloadable MP3 for sale is more about the complexity of difficult partnerships than anything else.   Needless to say I want to get back to the original idea which is why I am so interested in podcasts.

Update:  The NYT has an article about these today. It gives a description and introduces (to me at least) the term sound seeing.

Browsing Podcasts

Seth Godin has two four thoughts  on Podcasts. The first two are at first glance pessimistic and address the lack of browsability of podcasts and the time commitment they take. Then the next two are about how much he likes podcasts but questions whether there is a business model.  So what would make a podcast an A list podcast?

Fred Wilson also has a very interesting post about his take on the business of podcasting. He likens it to photosharing and also thinks the browsing is a problem.

Perhaps someone will come out with an easy way to create time code based TOCs for the files. In the meantime to get around this couldn't you put a TOC on the post.   At Voyager I was briefly in charge of a program called CDLink  (Voyager shut shortly after I started trying to figure out what we could do with it. ) It was a sort of brilliant yet hard to place application. It enabled you to create links in web pages that would trigger a cd to play a specific track at a specific time-code. It was great for writing liner notes and essays. A critic could write about what they loved about an album, a composer could comment on their piece, etc. The flaw was that you needed to own the CD so like many Voyager products had a somewhat limited mass-market appeal. Is there a reason why real media files can't be podcasts? I had thought that you could trigger events on time code in that. Anyway I think if this is a real issue perhaps people can be creative and get around it. The issue of how to make time and sort through it is also real but just as we turn to editors for guidance we may end up with that as well.

Here is an article on MediaPost that compares Pod-Casts to Razzles.

Can podcasts survive and flourish as stand-alone artistic expressions? Remember Razzles? The product was excellent. The ad promoted sampling and once sampled, the product sold itself.

Don't forget, popularity has never been a measure of quality, and similarly, quality has certainly never been a measure of popularity. Hits are not science... they are magic.

The next few links are from  paidcontent.org.  One of them I love because it mentions feedmag  We were  listening to Steven Johnson on the NPR over the weekend and thought about feedmag which he helped start. Then we googled Stefanie Symon the other co-founder and couldn't find her.  So... worth clicking on are:

- Charge v No charge debate continues. Links to Lesley Walker's Wash. Post piece about newspapers and subs. -
- Post and link to article about Salon's subscription mix working.
- post on size of blogosphere and the 4 blogs that have over 150,000 unique visitors a month.

Disintermediation

What is the future for Web sites in a world of RSS? - Matt McAlister of InfoWorld writes that the possibility of disintermediating the web via RSS brings to mind ghosts from 1998 and the "death of print"  that was going around;

The day InfoWorld's top news RSS feed received more requests than our home The day InfoWorld's top news RSS feed received more requests than our home page, I started thinking a frightening thought: RSS is doing to the Web today what the Web has been doing to print for the last several years.  We have disintermediated our Web site by offering our news in an easier to access format...again.  Just as the Web ultimately created more opportunity rather than less, RSS will open up some new doors for the media business.  What's behind those doors may even become more profound than what we're doing with traditional online media properties today.  But the ghost in the closet is a bit scary, probably big, and definitely ugly on first glance.

(via Susan Mernit who adds a comment about mobile search and, it's great to see that she has finally added  trackbacks)

So much of what this is about the future of newspapers and of news but what about other forms of media like magazines and books. I don't see the

Sometimes it is hard to remember that the Internet isn't the web. From the wikipedia:

The Internet, or simply the Net, is the publicly available worldwide system of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using a standardized Internet Protocol (IP) and many other protocols. It is made up of thousands of smaller commercial, academic, and government networks. It carries various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat and the interlinked web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web. Because this is by far the largest, most extensive internet (with a small i) in the world, it is simply called the Internet (with a capital I)

Yesterday I posted a link to an OJR article about the future of magazines. In it there was this quote:

Online Journalism Review: The Magazine Publishers of America envisions a Jetsons-like future where people take floating baths but are still using the old print magazines to read in the bath. What do you imagine might change about the physical nature of magazines in the decades to come? More tablet or e-ink readers?

Jeff Jarvis: I don't see the form changing in profound ways at all (unless you consider a new size a profound change; I don't). It's a quite separate matter to ask whether magazine content -- feature writing, long-form writing, in-depth reporting, strong photography -- will be distributed via other media -- namely, online -- and become multimedia, with audio, video conversation. Would that still be a magazine? No, I think it would be a mistake to try to import the old definition to the new thing -- whether that is magazines or newspapers or TV or radio. Magazines are magazines. Paper is paper. New things are new things.

 

Future of Magazines - rountable

OJR has an impressive  virtual roundtable of magazine execs and thinkers to discuss the future of magazines.

The magazine world has seen the future of print -- and it's still print. But how could the Internet and new technologies expand magazine journalism? We convene a virtual roundtable to find out.

Looks like a very interesting report. (via paidcontent.org)

Puma's Spring catalog - mimics a print catalog. You turn the pages yourself and all sorts of nice little interactive surprises are tucked in. Very interesting and fun! approach. (via Cool Hunting

"I don't think it's hopeless. But man, it's tough to restore lost cool, and I'm not sure even the whizziest technology will do the trick." Rob Hoff of Business Week on the changes at Friendster.

G&J sold to Meredith so Family Circle and parents.com join the impressive BHG.com.

I've been trying to figure out why I am so excited by citizen how-to's. Is my excitement based on the technology and the fact that people are being creative or is it more about the sharing of knowledge? Other than instant distribution, and that is no small thing, what does it bring that is different that a good book, magazine article, big media website, or television show? Why is the renovation on Brownstoner better than the videos of HGTVpro. Which will I be able to find in search? That's actually a question - would a podcast from a blog that is titled roast chicken show up higher on Google that a video from the food network on how to roast a chicken. Is that an edge that blogs have? Is it a flaw of content management systems and the deep web? This is a bit of a ramble but any thoughts on this would be welcome and I'll post more as I wrestle with it. Right now I'm thinking about an opportunity I have to create a people's guide to something and I'm wondering how and why it would be better than comprable guides already out. Sorry to be vague but it is work related.

PodCast cooking lessons

The podchef podcast food show with cooking lesson via flickr.  Haven't listened to it yet but a really smart use of flickr and audio. (via Micropersuassion.com) .  Okay so as we all  twitch with the new possiblilities of  creating how to's, woodworking, cooking, wine, travel guides,  guitar, yoga, golf, bee keeping, cocktail making, etc., the question is how to remain seated at a desk. Actually a bigger question is distributon but for now who cares.

This month's make magazine shows you how to make a teleprompter.

Question: Why is a podcast where you have to download a MP3 and look up something on flickr feel seem so much more satsfying than videos on hgtv.com?

Disclosure: I love how-to's. In fact I have a small collection of cigarette cards from the turn of the century that tell you how to do all sorts of handy things. The more the better.

"She was always a good mudder" - Paula Creamer's father after his daughter overcame rain and the field to  become the youngest winner of an LPGA tournament since 1952.  I've always liked the term, to me it speaks of concentrating in adverse conditions and getting the job done regardless of how spattered you get.  I'd like to think I'm a mudder.

 

"My reaction: what you people call serendipity, we call links. What you people call the homepage, we call Bloglines. What you call in depth-reporting, we call blogging a story to death. The difference is as deep as definitions. The difference is as deep as perception. The difference is the reality..." Rafat Ali on a meeting he had with media execs in NY

Slate on which  NY Times columnists are worth what out of the upcoming NYT premium offering. I would pay a lot more for Frank Rich than their readers but otherwise agree.

Wall Street Journal on How Old Media Can Survive in a New World (free article)

 

Forbes: Hanhelds will replace PCS as primary web appliances - hmm ...

The MPA hires a bunch of interns/actors to wear red-shirts over other shirts to read magazines on the street in front of  Radio City before NBC's up-front season presentations.  Oh yeah - looking like a group of  tour group members or a corporate softball team waiting is really going to help.

 

Bee suit

Bee suit
Originally uploaded by bromptonman.

My sister in the bee suit my mother gave her for her birthday. It was like a scene from The Graduate. She is the author of the bee blog I link to and it turns out that with the right pair of gloves the suit is pretty handy.

No posting tomorrow as I'll be travelling.

The second issue of Make magazine arrived yesterday. I love this magazine everything from it's size, the paper, the graphics for the sections and then there is the articles. What a perfect cover a bunch of Star Wars fans who have made their own R2D2 and C3Pos. Then there is the article on podcasting, one on how to repair old guitar amps, a man who made a plasma jet out of travel coffee mugs and, many more. . Lastly, it is fun to read on the subway as it makes me feel like a hip super-geek.

The opening of Star Wars also has me excited. As a kid I saw it only twice but I saw it at the Ziegfeld and that is where I plan to see it sometime in the next few weeks. The Ziegfeld is probably the last massive movie palaces in New York. I remember one Christmas standing on an incredibly long line with what seemed like a good percentage of the Jewish population to see Gandhi. around the corner the Burlington Fabric headquarters also had an exhibit called the World of Fabric where you took an moving walkway ride through the story of fabric.  Anyway the opening takes me back and has me somewhat excited. Also interesting to read in the Times that it is being politicized.

A number of cat related links on BoingBoing including this one of a dancing cat.

 

John Battelle on the NYT's move to charge for access to some sections.

A friend told me about a weekly call hosted by Jerry Michalski and his consulting collective called Yi-Tan.com. The last one on Monday was a phone conversation with Chris Anderson on his article about The Long Tail.

Sat in on a very small meeting with the CEO of SyndicateIQ. Really interesting stuff in the works. Variable delivery of content using the same feed, one partner / or subscriber gets headlines, another a few sentences, another full text, etc. It made me wonder about the future of e-mail newsletters. Eventually they will converge. Will people want e-mail newsletters or would they prefer the anonymity or rather choice of a feed? Right now people are talking about it as a choice. I suppose it could be though one is pushed another pulled. Both are at the users discretion though one is harder to turn off and the other is basically anonymous.

Tomorrow is possibly the day that Sen. Frist tries to undo over 200 years of history and undermines the basic workings of our "democracy". From Daily Kos;

This has long ago ceased to be about the merits of a handful of (ironically activist) judges. As has been amply demonstrated elsewhere, Republicans were brutal in holding up Clinton nominations in recent years based on the whims of even a single Republican Senator. Their current bluster and outrage is simply manufactured.

The rules of the Senate will be purposefully and deliberately broken, because ninety-five percent compliance with the President, and with the allied James Dobsons of the world, is not good enough. Frist requires Democrats to countenance any action the President wishes; in a choice between the institutions of this country and the wishes of his President, Frist has already made his choice. We shall see who follows.

Sign up for People for the American Way's text messaging call to action.

What kind of American English do you speak. A fun test that is apropos. I'm 45% Yankee, 40% general American English, 10% Dixie, 5% Upper Midwestern, 0% Midwestern.

Morning Reading

Link to audio of Bill Moyer's Speech at the Conference for Media Reform this weekend.

"I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House," Moyers told a packed room at the National Conference for Media Reform. "And that's what Kenneth Tomlinson has been doing."

---------
Article in Newsweek about the reality of the job the winner of The Apprentice now has.
NY Times article with global Apprentice spin-off's and their catch phrases.
------------

Added Cycling links to celebrate a return to doing laps around Prospect Park over the weekend.

 

Mark Miller enters the blogosphere

Mark Miller - NYU Professor, a leading expert on propaganda and, author of Boxed in: The Culture of TV, The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder, and, Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order, and lastly the  writer and performer of the show  "A Patriot Act," a chilling indictment of the movement to subvert the US Constitution and replace American democracy with religious values, has finally started a blog called News from Underground.  I've been on Mark's mailing list for over two years and so far the blog looks much the same - links to interesting news stories some better than others. Hopefully he will also comment on what he is posting.

Morning reading

Wahoo....Stamps.com to offer custom stamps again! I made some stamps with my cat and a Brooklyn water-tower. But the folks at SmokingGun.com took it to a whole other level putting the Rosenberg's and Slobodan Milosevic, and Jimmy Hoffa on some stamps.
--------
BBC opens up for remixing, Ben Hammersly on what it means - and it is big. (original link via paidcontent.org)

It’s actually a symbol of something much much bigger: it’s laying down the gauntlet for the rest of the world. It highlights the point that on the internet, hiding your content is suicide. It says that you can either open up, and we can all flourish together; or you can remain closed, and die alone.

Keep in mind that the BBC is also having big layoffs and staff is planning strikes. You can read about it on the BBC itself.  Would we read such a thing in our own papers? Slightly unrelated, apparently the press wasn't officially alerted to evacuate the White House yesterday when everyone else was.

I went to the ITP thesis show last night at NYU. Some interesting things including  Cellphedia, some networked diodes in mason jars that were like very smart fireflies, a toy that lets users create a custom track for a model car using infrared sensors, a bunch of place related projects using VOIP and cellphone texting.

My sister got her bees yesterday. 9,000 of them in fact. Read her account of unloading them into their hives. Hopefully she will soon post a very silly photo of her bee suit that rivals Dustin Hoffman's scuba suit in The Graduate.  Apparently the Queen is placed in the hive in a cage that as a candy plug. The bees eat through it to free her and then she has to immediately start laying thousands of eggs.

 

When I buy lottery tickets (which I do when it gets to an absurdly high level)  I use the fortune cookie method as well.  In the hallway of the building where I am working there is a small newsstand that sells lottery tickets. They have a sign up saying that they once had a $10,000 winner. Every day the same man either sits on a stool in the newsstand or leans against the wall in the hallway, scratching off instant lottery tickets. I don't think he ever wins.

A game based on Google images called Guess the Google.  A selection of images and you need to guess the term that joins them together. If iTunes ever opened up their API I bet you would see an amazing name that tune game.

History of sampling map

My musical tastes run more to the fare at Barbes and not towards hip-hop but I nonetheless appreciate the timeline and information displayed on this map that outlines the timeline of sampling from the 1960s on. (via CoolHunting)

Really devastating article about the Huffington Post. Ouch.

It almost seems like some sick hoax. Perhaps Huffington is no longer a card-carrying progressive but now a conservative mole. Because she served up liberal celebs like red meat on a silver platter for the salivating and Hollywood-hating right wing to chew up and spit out.

Morning reading

The Huffington Post launches.  I like the little animated guy with the hat in the  O. I was going to write a parody over the weekend after I read a quote in TimeOut NYin which Arianna said that she got e-mails from these people all the time. I imagined Gwyneth Paltrow forwarding a save the NEA petition from her mother. In the e-mail she would write about how she wasn't sure it was real but just in case... So far it is much better than that, though I'm not sure why I would go to the site on a regular basis. Time will tell.  A friend forwarded me the intro letter which says; "Ever since college [she went to Cambridge], I have always enjoyed bringing together people from many different parts [of] my life, and facilitating interesting conversations.  Now I'm excited to be taking these conversations -- about politics and books and art and music and food -- and bringing them into the blogosphere, where some of the most interesting exchanges are taking place."

PluggedIn: Big media companies weigh blog strategies - Reuters on blogging and RSS plans at a number of large sites.

Clearly the Nick Denton piece is a must-read if only because when I got to work this morning it was making the rounds in e-mail.  A link from Susan Mernit writes that Boing Boing makes around 40k a month so that is 520k a year which is a nice amount but less than the cost of several pages in many magazines, which is just the point.This isn't necessarily about money and is instead more about a revolution in the way we communicate.

Grokker making it into Yahoo. I had honestly forgotten about this software from a few years ago. It is nice to see another kind of information display enter the search world. I am still madly fond of musicplama.com 

Why walk when you can take a pill

The FDA has just approved a drug for RLS - which apparently stands for Restless Leg Syndrome. First you have to love the name of this drug - Requip. Second, the fact that there is something called restless leg syndrome.  This from the news release on WebMd;

May 6, 2005 -- The FDA has approved Requip to treat moderate-to-severe restless legs syndrome (RLS). Requip was first approved by the FDA in 1997 to treat Parkinson's disease.

RLS affects nearly 10% of the population, says the FDA. The condition is characterized by an urge to move the legs, usually accompanied by or caused by uncomfortable leg sensations like a creepy-crawly feeling, tingling, pulling, or pain.

For most people with RLS, symptoms begin or worsen during periods of rest or inactivity and are partially or totally relieved by movement. (partially or totally relieved by movement how is this a condition? ) Symptoms typically worsen or occur only in the evening or at night, and can disturb sleep (well that isn't great but aren't there a lot of reasons people over 50 can't sleep?)

Woman are twice as likely to be affected by the condition compared with men, and the condition can worsen with age. At first, restless legs syndrome symptoms may be mild and sporadic, but over time they may get worse. After age 50, many people with restless legs syndrome have daily symptoms (why not then take a walk, or dance a few steps.) and significant sleep problems (would they have these problems if they were more mobile?).

The cause of restless legs syndrome is not known. In some people, it's a primary condition, which means it's not caused by another health factor. In others, it may be a secondary condition linked to pregnancy (pregnancy is a secondary condition?), iron deficiency, or renal (kidney) failure....

Common side effects of Requip reported in the studies include nausea, headache, and vomiting, says the FDA. ( I for one would certainly opt for the drug and the possibility of vomiting rather than walking.)

The drug's label will also include a caution that Requip has been associated with sedating effects, including somnolence (sleepiness) and the possibility of falling asleep while engaged in activities of daily living, including driving.

Fainting (syncope) or low blood pressure (symptomatic hypotension) may occur, particularly during initial treatment or dosing, says the FDA. 

I just find this amazing and needed to post it. Last night I saw an ad for another drug to combat ADDS - Adult  Attention Deficit Disorder. It was remarkable. Shot as if throught the computerized eyes of the Terminator it showed a man gaining or losing points as he went through life. Late on a report, late to meet friends his score went down, after taking the drug which remarkably is called Strattera (the ethical issues the ad brings up  is the subject of  this article).