DefinitiveInk

CityHarvest ad with apples coming out of subway is CGI based

via gawker.com

Well a little Internet sleuthing jut saved CityHarvest from quickly losing my year-end contribution. When I saw this ad I couldn't believe the waste involved in creating such a bad ad. However while they've lost me on their ad strategy they haven't lost me as a contributor since according to Shoot the apples are all computer rendered.

My friend Eric's book - Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity is out

via us.macmillan.com

Thought I would post it so everyone could see the nice cover which is about as close as we will get to reading it. The book is $85 for the 150+ page hardcover edition. Granted it is small point type so it could be like 225 pages. But still. He explained it was priced this way because it is being sold to research libraries and others who have to have it. What was the point of forcing him to have a keyword friendly title if no one other than an institution is going to buy it? But what gets me riled up is that his publisher is only giving him a discount that brings his copies to abut $45. Really shouldn't they be giving it to him for something a lot closer to the printing costs?

David Carr writes an elegy for NY Media

For every kid that I bump into who is wandering the media industry looking for an entrance that closed some time ago, I come across another who is a bundle of ideas, energy and technological mastery. The next wave is not just knocking on doors, but seeking to knock them down.

Somewhere down in the Flatiron, out in Brooklyn, over in Queens or up in Harlem, cabals of bright young things are watching all the disruption with more than an academic interest. Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago. And they are ginning content from their audiences in the form of social media or finding ways of making ambient information more useful. They are jaded in the way youth requires, but have the confidence that is a gift of their age as well.

via www.nytimes.com

40 is the new 20. If only that were really so but it's close enough. A nice but painfully precise description of what is going on. At least it ends on a hopeful note.

A look at the way a sports site redesigns

Velo news is launching a redesign. Right now the new site is in Beta, so it offers a great chance to see thinking at work, on what I'm going to assume is a modest budget. Screenshots after the jump.

Songs about the Origin of Species

2009 has been a big year for Charles Darwin as it marks his 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the release of On the Origin Of Species. He’s been getting a lot of attention in the science community this year and now a literary minded group of musicians have decided to pay tribute in their own creative way.  Darwin’s work was the November book for the Bushwick Book Club, a Brooklyn-based group that meets monthly to play songs inspired by the chosen piece of literature.

via www.sciencefriday.com

Our friend Sweet Soubrette's homage to the Origin of Species, the Humble Bee, and other songs by members of the Buswick Book Club can be heard on this post.

An Editor from the Toronto Star takes a red pencil to the Publisher's note about layoffs

via torontoist.com

Informed Comment on 'The Geographic Gap' in news coverage

Of 237 countries and territories in the world, the 4 largest newsgathering and distribution companies that supply the world with 90% of news do not cover 116 of them.

These 116 countries or territories contain 4 billion people over half the world.

63 of these media-ignored countries and territories are desperately poor.

All this has security implications for the United States.

via www.juancole.com

Am glad Tiger is okay. Obviously want to know what happened but also interesting to know that his house is worth about as much as some brownstones up the street, in the exclusive gated-community of Park Slope.

TGP (6)
Originally uploaded by JonathanWolfson.

Waldo Hunt, 88, King of the Pop-Up Book, Is Dead - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

An advertising man turned novelty-book packager, Mr. Hunt was almost single-handedly responsible for the postwar revival of the pop-up book in the United States. For decades the country’s leading producer of the books, he is widely credited with having taken a long dormant, long marginalized and long unprofitable publishing genre and making it a thriving, ubiquitous industry.

via www.nytimes.com

The Future: When the Editors Hire the Publishers | The Awl

At a bar last night, I was talking to someone smart who made an excellent point: that a very quiet, revolutionary act in the history of publishing had just taken place. (This person compared this moment to Gutenberg, which might be a little bit far afield but not that far off!) That is that Joshua Micah Marshall is hiring a publisher for Talking Points Memo, the blog he started all on his own in 2000, a bit before all the warbloggers like Jeff Jarvis and Glenn Reynolds came onto the Internet, and four years before Michelle Malkin. (Oh yes, how soon we forget.) My friend's point was: here is an editor, who built and owns his publication, who is now going to be the editor-owner, who will employ the publisher. For those of you who have worked at any sort of publication, the implications of this are staggering

via www.theawl.com

Thanks David

Willa wants macaroni and cheese pancakes Shopsin's delivers

via www.doobybrain.com

This morning I asked Willa what she wanted for breakfast and she said macaroni cheese pancakes. She also wanted a pink cupcake but lines have to be drawn somewhere. I'd heard that they had them at Shopsin's which sadly I've never been too. But thanks to the internets I can now feed her this fine combination.

The NYT makes opening a bookstore in VT seem more appealing than making cupcakes

How many cupcakes do you have to sell to pay the rent? And are cupcakes a viable business? These are still very early days in the Great Cupcake Rush, but the answers appear to be, respectively, a lot and maybe.

via www.nytimes.com

Work off your turkey induced stupor by coding a Motion site this weekend

At Six Apart we have a long history of developing leading class open source applications and supporting developers who contribute to the open source community. Our latest community microblogging application, TypePad Motion, has been extremely well received since its launch over a month ago. As these communities have grown around TypePad, so has their need for better community management and social integration. Our members have given great feedback on features and improvements they would like to see, and we've listened!

via everything.typepad.com

Few things go better with a turkey and stuffing sandwich than Motion 1.1 for you coders looking to add a great new community feature to your site.

Julia Child was a blogger at heart

A blogger isn't just someone who uses blogging software, at least not to me. A blogger is someone who takes matters into his or her own hands. Someone who sees a problem that no one is trying to solve, one that desperately needs solving, that begs to be solved, and because the tools are so inexpensive that they no longer present a barrier, they are available to the heroic individual. As far as I can tell, Julia Child was just such a person. Blogging software didn't exist when she was pioneering, but it seems that if it did she would have used it.  

Julie used blogging, but Julia was a natural-born blogger.

via www.scripting.com

Nice.

You can't put a price on angst

Spider silk is the new pashimina

The American Museum of Natural History is displaying a 11'x4' tapestry woven made completely of spider silk. It took four years, required more than one million spiders, and cost $500,000 to make.

via kottke.org

Dash to D.C.! Tech Guru Will Head Gov't Incubator, Digitize Democracy

Mr. Dash wondered: Could WhiteHouse.gov be the next iPhone? Could developers get just as giddy over coding software to serve their country as they are over creating an app for the Apple store? He’s about to find out. Soon after he wrote his post, Mr. Dash received emails and calls from those “digital natives” in the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, asking him if he’d like to help. They eventually approached him with an opportunity to lead a new Washington, D.C., incubator called Expert Labs. He got the job in early October.

via www.observer.com

The NY Observer on Anil's next move. Really exciting. (thanks David)

Anomia A Great New Game Is Shipping

via www.anomiapress.com

A few years ago, my friend Andrew had an idea that he could create a new game. He created prototypes, held countless play parties, and refined it. Carrying on, he found a designer, a printer, convinced his wife to let him dig into savings, got people to preorder - and is now the owner of lots of boxed sets of Anomia. I got mine yesterday and it looks great.

The game is sort of a cross between war, trivial pursuit and a game called Set that my eight year old nephew kicked my ass at. The photo above of the uncut sheets shows a bit of detail. You flip[ cards then when you match the pattern the players need to yell out the item listed; detergent vs. biblical prophets, Japanese Monster movies against operas. It's fun. I have deep admiration that he brought this to fruition. Though he has sold a lot through preorder, he has some other copies to sell so check them out at Anomia Press.

The Google Search Box Weighs In on the "Newspapers are..." Debate

via twitpic.com

fact-checked this a minute ago in my browser.