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Monday, April 08, 2002 |
"The success of Oprah's Book Club was predicated on the essential mystery of publishing -- how to successfully match books and readers? Oprah solved the riddle for anyone who trusted her, and there were lots of them. Me, I'm crazy enough about books to want several Oprahs on call at all times, from reviewers in my favorite publications and on NPR, to fellow bibliophiles at the online community I run, to, most importantly, my friends and family. Recommendations lined up at the door means I never have to stop reading.
It's going to be a long time before there's another force like Oprah in publishing. No other public figure has her kind of intimate connection with the audience. But that doesn't mean book marketers should sit around and wait. There's a mini-Oprah in every town in America, someone who is not only well read and loves books, but has an intuitive way of discerning who would enjoy what.
I say find those mini-Oprahs. They're out there, asking intelligent questions at author readings, weighing in at online forums, talking with strangers at bookstores. In their own lives, they've already answered the question "What do I read next?" and are doing so for others. Serve them well and they will do the same." [AlterNet, via Library Stuff]
P.S. Call your local public library if you want to find a whole building full of mini-Oprahs!
11:46:40 PM Permanent link here
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CO Supreme Court Refuses to Order Book Store to Turn Over Records
" 'The Colorado Supreme Court today refused to order a book store to allow police to see its sales records as part of a drug investigation. In a 53-page decision, the judges said police erred when they went after the records to establish who purchased books on drug manufacturing. The court said the search warrant should never have been issued in the first place.'
Thank you Genie for the submission and thank you Gary for providing this additional story.
While I haven't read the decision yet, this is a landmark decision in the fight for privacy in bookstores as well as in libraries. Users of these establishments should not have their private thoughts (via what they read, check out or buy) protruded upon by law enforcement." [Library Stuff]
Agreed, but the case doesn't apply to "national security," so I still think it will be an uphill battle to overturn the Patriot Act. Plus, in this case we knew about the lawsuit and it was written up in the press. No such public knowledge in future cases.
11:39:45 PM Permanent link here
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"Let's be honest. When you think about e-mail and PIMs, you probably imagine Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express. We certainly do. Between them, these two apps boast an astonishing confluence of features and tricks, but we want more--and so do you. Using Outlook as a jumping-off point, we gathered all our creative energy--and some insightful reader mail--and went where Microsoft engineers have yet to tread. The result of our journey? Ten wishes for the perfect PIM."
Most of these are good ideas, but they don't go far enough (how about some of the cool things Userland is doing like Instant Outlining and Shortcuts). It's noting what already exists and should be there, not where it should go next. Pamela says I should look at a program for Outlook called Anagram, so why not add in its ability to grab PIM types of information from anywhere?
This is similar to Dorothea's criticism of the OEBF eBook Survey - if the CNET folks aren't using cutting edge software themselves, (Radio, RSS, web services, etc.) how will they apply a broader vision? I guess that kind of stuff will show up on a future list. Of course, that's my bias showing, but I'm sure others could more that I'm missing.
11:32:01 PM Permanent link here
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IBM Wants You to Talk to Your Devices
"Dubbed the "Super Human Speech Recognition Initiative," IBM's push aims to create new technology that supports what IBM Voice Systems Director Nigel Beck calls "conversational computing."
The Super Human Speech Recognition Initiative's ultimate goal is to create technology that performs better than humans for any transcription task, without the need for customization. It seeks accurate transcription of everything from voice mail to meetings and customer service calls -- with full audio (and possibly) video searching capabilities. Along the way, the company plans a number of milestones that it expects will have wide-ranging applications in everything from data mining in call centers to interpersonal communication to biometrics....
'The state of the speech world is roughly where the state of the Web world was six years ago,' Beck said....
To that end, working with partners Motorola and Opera, IBM has submitted a specification for Multimodal Access to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The specification, XHTML+VoiceXML, would allow users to access data on devices through multiple modes of interaction.
'Multimodal is the mixing of voice and data," Beck said. "People operate in multiple modes at once....'
The company has also put together a number of prototypes to display its ideas.
One, Meeting Miner, is an agent used during meetings to passively capture and analyze meeting discussion. It also has the capability of becoming an active participant in the meeting when it finds information it determines to be pertinent to the discussion. Meeting Miner uses the audio streams from one or more microphones to capture the speech during the meeting and converts it to a text transcript." [allNetDevices Wireless News]
11:13:44 PM Permanent link here
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"Salomon Smith Barney, J.P. Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse First Boston, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley and UBS Warburg have begun using the Communicator Hub IM service, creator Communicator announced Monday. The companies have each signed multiyear, multimillion-dollar contracts to license the service for their employees and institutional clients, said Leo Schlinkert, chief executive of Communicator.
'Companies are being besieged by their employees who want instant messaging to communicate with their fellow employees and, more importantly, with their customers and partners,' Schlinkert said in a statement. White Plains, N.Y.-based Communicator has a small investment in SecuritiesHub, a consortium owned by the eight financial services companies that signed up for the service Monday....
The Hub IM also allows companies to tailor the material transmitted and have greater control over the information. For example, a mutual fund company could use the service to contact both J.P. Morgan Chase and Merrill Lynch, but neither of the financial services companies would be able to tell by the information that they had the same client. It also allows a company to have a common address book rather than requiring employees to create their own unique "buddy lists," and it gives the company more control over archives of IM conversations." [CNET News.com]
I hope public libraries start taking IM seriously, too.
11:02:55 PM Permanent link here
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Life on The Net in 2004
"Fond memories of the days when there were alternatives to Microsoft's OS pass through your mind -- but that was before the government realised that software was like petrol -- a totally essential commodity in the lives of most businesses and individuals. Legislation was passed in 2003 that required all software developers and vendors to be licensed and a 45% tax added to all sales. Of course, much to Microsoft's glee, this killed the Open Source movement since being an unlicensed software supplier risks a stiff fine or even a jail term and those licenses are incredibly expensive.
You type in "cnn.com" then enter the ID and password associated with your monthly subscription. Remember when there were hundreds of sites offering the latest news for free? Not any more. Sure, there still a few, but they're regularly hit with law suits by the big names who allege breach of copyright. Although such suits are inevitably dismissed -- the cost of defending them means that the independent news sites usually only last a few months at most.
Flicking the remote beside you kicks your digital music player into action and you marvel that 95% of its computing power is dedicated to the sophisticated digital rights management system it contains.
Following an unsuccessful attempt to copy-protect CDs, the recording industry forced everyone to a new mini-CD format that has yet to be cracked (although there are rumours that some Russians have succeeded). You just can't buy music on CDs anymore and the old CDR/RW media now costs $10 a disk, thanks to the $9 anti-piracy levy that was introduced in 2003.
Another warning appears -- 'Your license for this recording has expired, unable to play.' Damn -- another $49 if you want to listen to that music for another year. You wonder, if as they claim, these new measures significantly reduce piracy, why music is now so much more expensive?
You type up a quick email to a friend, inviting them to meet you for lunch. Of course you're very careful not to use the words 'bomb' and 'aeroplane' in the same message for fear of attracting the attention of the new anti-terrorism police. After all, every single bit that enters and leaves your PC is now scanned by the authorities -- under the premise that it is in the interests of (inter)national security and crime reduction.
It's funny how they can supposedly detect even an unfriendly tone in an email but they can't (or won't) stop the endless tide of spam isn't it?" [The Daily Aardvark, via Slashdot]
And if you haven't already read A Love Song for Napster, you should.
8:21:10 PM Permanent link here
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Wacky Packs Uber-poster
 "Check out this amazing click-to-zoom imagemap of all 504 Wacky Packages stickers. I have an uncut Series I sheet that I got dirt cheap at the Chelsea Antiques Market in NYC a few years ago, and it's just about my favoritest wall-hanging. What's more, the guy who made this is in Toronto and he sells homebrew posters with all the 'Packs on 'em." [bOing bOing]
Sorry... reliving my childhood a little more here. What I wouldn't give to have my collection back! Instead, I have to be content with my collection of Star Wars cards and my Chu-Bops albums.
8:03:47 PM Permanent link here
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For Andy: Adults Find their Inner Sponge
"About 50 million viewers watch SpongeBob SquarePants every month. About 30 million of them are children (the target audience is ages 2 to 11). The little yellow guy recently surpassed "Rugrats," becoming No. 1 in kids' TV ratings. But what of the other 20 million spongeheads--adults who say they compulsively tune in to this invertebrate cast of honest, upbeat, innocent characters? (SpongeBob and his starfish friend, Patrick, once took a free balloon without asking and then turned themselves in for stealing.)
The cartoon dreamed up for kids has turned out to be a kind of brain balm for stressed-out grown-ups, folks who are tired of swimming with the sharks, of dealing with red alerts, job wars, Enron. People who'd like to get away from it all--at least from the neck up....
The big question for industry types who would like to emulate SpongeBob's success is the same one some adults ponder as they watch: What's so compelling about these silly sea creatures who live, walk, drive, sing and talk in an environment that defies all laws of physics? What's so lovable about a sponge who lives in a pineapple, adores his job as an underpaid fry cook, and strives only to do it better each day?" [LA Times, MetaFilter]
SpongeBob is pretty popular at my house, too. While I agree with all of the points made in the article in regards to the popularity of this show, I also think we're just seeing a renaissance of good cartoon shows over the last few years. Most folks I know that are under age 40 (and even many over that age) are familiar with the Powerpuff Girls, SpongeBob, Rugrats, Samurai Jack, Dexter's Laboratory, Blue's Clues, and Between the Lions. A lot of them are outright fans, too. It's a natural progression since my generation have become parents.
What I find interesting is the way my kids now interact online with the characters from these cartoons. It's more of that enhanced, two-way experience.
7:50:14 PM Permanent link here
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Press Play to Access the Future
"[The DVD format's] success has far outstripped expectations, and as a result of the DVD's booming popularity since its introduction in 1997, the audience's relationship to movies has changed. The home video was merely a small-screen version of a movie. The DVD is interactive--so much so that to the studios' alarm, technically sophisticated film buffs with a little determination and access to the Internet can relate to a movie in ways that were impossible only a few years ago, including moving and removing scenes and characters from a movie....
Observes Peter Staddon, senior vice president of marketing for 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment: "Say there are 25 million DVD buyers out there right now. All of them have become film critics. They're looking and listening at films far more critically. At one time, people would rent a movie and think nothing more of it. Now they look at deleted scenes, making-of documentaries and other features. They've become far more involved in the process."
'The DVD format,' says Rob Minkoff, director of the 'Stuart Little' movies, 'begs a larger question about the role movies play in people's lives, whether they want to be told stories or play a larger role of interacting with it and telling their own story.'
To that end, for the 'Stuart Little 2' disc, Minkoff toyed with the idea of using a type of software that allows the viewer to rewrite lines of dialogue....
The biggest potential growth area for DVDs, say home entertainment executives, is family titles like 'Snow White' and the deluxe editions of 'Shrek' and 'Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas,' which have hours of additional material--new footage, video games, Internet links and more. Because children often watch favorite movies repeatedly, the hours of extra material provide more entertainment value and--for better or worse--may alter the neophyte's perception of what a movie is." [LA Times, via Slashdot]
Here's another article illustrating my point about NetGens and interactivity. Not only do they expect to interact with television, but they'll be the first generation to grow up with interactive movies on DVD. What must it be like to come across something new and expect to give it your input?
When I was growing up, books, television, and movies never expected anything - never waited for anything - from me. They were there broadcasting one-way no matter who I was. If somebody else sat down, it was still the same content. But for these kids, every ebook, every DVD movie, every digitally recorded TV show, every video game, has the potential to be a different experience than that of someone else. And not just subjectively, but in terms of the content.
Already my kids ask to see a picture right after I've taken it with the digital camera. If they don't like it, they'll have me take another one. They even expect input into the process of photography.
Another great quote from the article:
"The abundance of information and opportunities the technology offers could serve as a spur to creativity, Coppola surmises, freeing future generations from the constraints of the present-day studio system. 'Once computers become married with film, the form becomes promiscuous,' Coppola says, 'and that can bring about new ways of making movies that the studios can't control.' "
There's that word promiscuous again. I've already started using it as a synonym for "shifted." Good thing I hadn't heard the term when I was starting this site or I'd probably be known as "The Promiscuous Librarian." ;-)
7:29:36 PM Permanent link here
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PageRank, the New Net Currency?
"Welcome to the internet. We take Visa, MasterCard, and PageRank." [WebmasterWorld]
Pagerank is also a trust issue. I think librarians love Google, but we'll never trust pagerank enough to use it to verify authenticity. Of course, we take almost nothing on the web for granted, and that's one major difference between us and your average web surfer. Librarians need our own pagerank system that we can control. Imagine getting a library organization's pagerank endorsement as net currency. Maybe integrating pageranks given by the Librarians' Index to the Internet into Google or having our own pagerank toolbar....
4:36:28 PM Permanent link here
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Two interesting font resources to file away from WebDesign-L.
- WhatTheFont - "Ever wanted to have a font just like the one used by certain publications, corporations, or ad campaigns? Well now you can, using the WhatTheFont font recognition system. Upload a scanned image of the font and we'll show you the closest matches in our database!"
- Identifont - "Welcome to Identifont®, the unique font identifier that enables you to identify a font from a sample by answering a series of simple questions. It is ideal if you want to match an existing typeface, or identify a typeface you have seen in a publication."
3:51:48 PM Permanent link here
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A while back, I decided to try evectors RssDistller tool to start pulling any site into my news aggregator. I had some problems getting it installed, but the evectors folks came up with a solution mighty quick. I then tried to RSS-ify sites such as The Handheld Librarian, Librarian.net, New this Week at the Librarians' Index to the Internet, LIS News, and some of the library trade journals, but I couldn't get things to work correctly. So I gave up for a few days until I had more time.
However today, Paolo prods me forward and expands my world by setting up a couple of the sample feeds I'd mentioned so that I can import them directly into my Radio aggregator. To see why I tout news aggregators as the greatest thing since chocolate met peanut butter, take a gander at his screenshots of ALA headlines and LII What's New! This is the future, my friends! Combine your own hand-picked sites with national headlines and local headlines and you've got a good kind of filtering going on.
So I will definitely be working on fully implementing RssDistiller in Radio this week. I can't wait to get home tonight and try it! Maybe I'll even have some time to do documentation for it at some point (although, the next couple of weeks are crazy busy so we'll see).
Paolo also plants the seeds for another interesting discussion about RSS and news aggregators. He asks, "how do sitemasters of these sites feel about being RSS-ified by somebody without their permission? My take is that this is ok as long as you don't make the feeds that you extract available to others for subscription. Is this just another 'personal use' issue?"
I agree with him, since I used to go around the web and visit every site every day anyway. Bringing the content they are already posting into one place that I can check regularly makes me far more efficient. The content is the same, so I don't think the RSS-ee should be upset since the content is still getting out there. In fact, even making your extracted feeds to others is just another distribution channel of the same content, so I personally don't see where that should be a problem. However, I recognize my bias here so maybe that's a discussion we should start. Should you at least notify someone when you scrape their site this way?
I'd be interested to hear what you think about this.
12:39:24 PM Permanent link here
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Speaking of NetGens and two-way communications, Memo to Brands: Surrender:
"Empowered viewers armed with digital video recorders are zapping through Academy Award speeches, opening credits, and thousands of TV commercials -- giggling all the way. And that is only the beginning of the end, says Laurie Coots, chief marketing officer at TBWAChiatDay.
Disruptive advertising is on the way out. And replacing the one-way conversation of pop-up ads and radio spots will be a marketing dialogue between brands and consumers that crosses every channel and grows over time.
'Consumers have all the power now, and they want more from a brand relationship,' says Coots, who contributed a chapter to Beyond Disruption: Changing the Rules In the Marketplace ( John Wiley & Sons, 2002 ). 'Consumers only allow a small repertoire of brands into their lives, and they want the relationships with those brands to be meaningful. The stakes are a lot higher for marketers now....'
It is no longer enough for a brand simply to request permission from a consumer. It must also grant permission -- invite consumers to tamper, tinker, and communicate with the brand any way they wish. That 'requires the fundamental surrender of power from the company to the customer,' Coots writes. Marketers must relinquish control in order to perpetuate meaningful relationships." [Fast Company]
Which is why the iPod is being hacked to new heights and Palm is losing market share. If you ever studied the most popular ads at Ad Critic (back in the day when it was a free site), they tended to be funny, outrageous, parodies, or include great music. In fact, that was the whole reason I used Ad Critic - to track down the music from various commercials. It was a great synergy between television, radio, and the music industry (when The Wiseguys' song Start the Commotion became a radio hit). Even without watching commercials on TV, friends could email you the link to a specific commercial and for the great ones (especially after a Super Bowl) and a meme was born.
But after finding the information about a particular song, the entertainment industry did nothing to help me purchase it. Instead of working with Ad Critic to build brands, build communities around brands, and sell the music, they let the site die (in its free version at least, since it's now been bought by Ad Age and will be a subscription-based service that only corporate entities will be able to afford). If they had partnered with the site to let me buy songs for $1 each I probably would have done it, even though that price is really too high for a digital music file.
While they mire themselves in copyright and lawsuits that alienate their core customer base, they're missing the opportunities to build brands, whether it's by label, artist, or genre. I know the Mitsubishi commercials, I even know the music in them, or at least I used to until Ad Critic shut down. They're fusing a great brand, but you don't see any of this on their web site. Imagine if they had a link on their front page to a site where you could view the commercials, sample the music, and then buy it. How great a partnership would that be with the music industry? Traffic for both, a loyal customer base that keeps coming back to the site, with a potential sales outcome at the end.
Then imagine if they took it one step further and let you mix the music on the site or create a compilation you could buy and download. Then imagine if they built a community around it where visitors could rate the compilations and have Friday night VJ (Virtual Jockey) parties. All of a sudden, Mitsubishi and the music companies would have a whole new customer base that actively participated in creating brand for their products.
My favorite quote from this article, though is this: "Trust is the new currency -- and no one is buying." That sums up the entire us versus them mentality that now dominates consumer interactions with the entertainment industry. For myself, I don't trust them anymore because they've proven their intentions that they want to work against me - not with me, and I'm taking my ball and going home. Their brands mean nothing to me now.
9:33:36 AM Permanent link here
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"Whenever a new patient is admitted to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center here, a four-foot eight-inch talking robot rolls up to the nurses' station nearest to the patient's room, bringing doses of whatever drugs the doctor has ordered....
'When you look at the nursing and pharmacy labor shortage, you want to keep skilled personnel with as high-level tasks as possible,' Babbitt said. 'You don't necessarily want people hauling things around and waiting for elevators....'
Some Japanese companies now use robots to deliver mail. Researchers led by Carnegie Mellon's Sebastian Thrun are field-testing the "nursebot," a talking robot that guides nursing home residents from their rooms to the dining hall or other areas -- offering weather reports and television schedules along the way -- and are working on an "intelligent walker" that can both navigate and physically support elderly patients....
TOBOR's human co-workers, for the most part, seem to ignore it. Children greet it with cries of delight. Some patients play chicken with it when they meet it in the hall, trying to fake out the robot's sonar 'vision.' " [Washington Post]
I wonder if TOBOR has wireless and data storage functionality built into him so that a doctor without a PDA could use him to retrieve patient and reference information.
9:03:30 AM Permanent link here
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Speaking of NetGens, Classrooms Need Upgrades, Too
"Schools have made progress integrating computers and PDAs into the classroom, yet one design firm believes that more drastic changes are needed, so they created a prototype of what a future classroom may look like....
The three-part technology system consists of an interactive PDA called the GooBall, a backpack and a removable flexible LCD screen for each student. Students can sit, stand or lie down when using the devices, and are not confined to desks....
The GooBall is an interactive communication device containing six layers of learning software. The device monitors a student's heart rate and body temperature with a bioread function and uses GPS to track where they are. It includes instant messaging and a compass, watch, and topic-specific alert system that directs a student to relevant articles and books about whatever they are studying. Students can choose an animal icon to represent their personality.
The backpack houses the main power supply for the system and holds any personal items. The pocket keeps items locked tight with a fingerprint security zipper. The portable flexible screen functions like a laptop, providing wireless Internet access and streaming video. It has a touch-screen interface....
'I can't see where people are willing to put more money into advanced ideas when there are some really basic things that people aren't willing to pay for,' said Rozanna Bejin, a seventh-grade English teacher at DeLong Middle School in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. 'There's just no money for schools. We have to have referendums for people to make the payrolls and fix the roofs on the buildings.' " [Wired News]
I don't believe something like this will come to pass any time soon, but imagine if it ever does. How would the school library ever fit into this model if they're still stuck circulating physical materials because the law (DMCA + CBDTPA) has moved to a point where it prevents an exemption for libraries to circulate digital ones.
7:57:17 AM Permanent link here
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IPod: Music to Hackers' Ears
"Jean-Olivier Lanctôt-David is a 14-year-old hacker who has figured out a way to display online news headlines on Apple's iPod digital music player.
Lanctôt-David, who has been using Macs since he was 4 and programming since he was 11, was given an iPod for Christmas and immediately wanted to make it do more than just play music.
So he whipped up PodNews, a program that fetches headlines from the Web in XML format and displays them on the iPod's small screen.
In the last few months, hackers have figured out clever ways to store not only names and addresses on the iPod but calendar items, song lyrics and even phrases in foreign languages.
The iPod, which must be the hottest gadget on the planet, has also been made to work with Windows. It's supposed to be Mac-only, but EphPod is a free program that allows iPods to connect to Windows machines; Mediafour's Xplay, currently in beta, is a commercial program that does the same thing....
Michael Zapp, an instructor at the University of Manitoba in Canada, has created a pair of AppleScript applications that take data from Microsoft's Entourage (the Macintosh version of Outlook) and transforms it into vCard file format, which can be displayed using the iPod's new contacts feature." [Wired News]
This is the kind of impact the NetGens will have on our culture in the future. If you think we're recycling old ideas and morphing them into something new now (hip hop, the movie Moulin Rouge, any animated Disney movie), then just wait. These kids are much more computer-literate and they're much more prone to interact directly with their environment.
Everything is two-way for them, whereas most of us are still stuck in one-way. For them television, radio, the internet, books, music - they're all something from which to get entertainment or information, but they also expect to give back to them, too. Sometimes this is in the form of filtering what is coming out (digital video recorders, recommendation engines), sometimes it's global discussions (online discussions, instant messaging instead of email), and sometimes it's creating new distribution channels from old ones in order to do what they want to do (Apple iPod, Gameboys with ebooks on them).
Whatever you give or sell them, they're going to expect to make it do what they want. Letting them go to town on iPods is an excellent strategy by Apple, although this isn't anything new for them. Apple understands these kids extremely well. They could try to put a halt to all of this hacking using the DMCA and other laws, but by letting folks hack it instead, they're letting the community take the iPod to new heights.
This is the point the entertainment industry is missing. Instead of realizing the vast potential of customers who would interact directly with their product to do even more with it (all the while paying for this privilege), they want to lock out the very people that will innovate them to new levels.
I also wanted to highlight this article because I still want to figure out how to automatically generate vCards for events in the SLS Calendar. If you come across anyone doing this (especially if they're using Oracle or Microsoft Access), please let me know!
7:51:51 AM Permanent link here
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© Copyright 2004 Jenny Levine.
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