Holtzbrinck Online

Cross-Referencing

The Washington Post, The New York Sun, and The Daily Oklahoman have signed on with online news aggregator, Inform.com, to assist in creating richer search functionality on their sites. Inform.com will scan news items and blogs related to articles on these sites and add links to articles from competitors' sites. The increasing popularity of Yahoo and Google's news aggregation and search engine services has prompted these news organizations to further blur the lines between publisher and search engine. This counters the trend in the publishing industry to generate and put out nuggets of information for quick and easy consumption, but it does follow trends set by Slate, Salon, and media blogs that depend on links to external sources for content. As noted in a NYT article by Kelly Dyer Fry, director of multimedia for Opubco Communications Group, which publishes the Oklahoman, “People aren’t just reading one story ... They’ll click deeper because of this, and I can load ads deeper into those pages. It really beefs up the site.” And that's the key--- online news organizations have a lot of content at their disposal, but will users be satisfied "drilling down" news items on their sites versus doing a search on Yahoo and Google?

March On

Penguin Books is launching it's blog today, you can check it out here.  Welcome to the neighborhood penguins!

Article in the New York Observer: "The YouTube Devolution"

The New York Observer has an kind of interesting essay about video sites such as YouTube; whereas most of the recent articles concerning these wildly popular sites have praised them, the Observer seeks more to bury them. And while the writer has a certain point that television moments used to be fleeting but now they're omnipresent (reminds me of a line on the Simpsons where Homer said, "Everything looks bad if you remember it"), what's he's really angry about isn't YouTube but is instead the betrayal of his own reactions. Who hasn't had a movie they loved as a kid not hold up to their adult expectations? Or who hasn't listened to a band they liked as a teenager or early adult or been horrified (for me it's Beat Happening; cringe)? If our estimation of something later in life is changed when we're reacquainted with it (whether it's books or movies or music), that's called maturity (or at the very least reappraisal). So if YouTube makes you confront something from twenty years ago, and you realize it wasn't what you thought it was, it's not really YouTube's fault. And who's to say you are (or were) any worse off for liking it way back when? As they say, ignorance is bliss...

Excerpt: "Video had always been more elusive. It defeated secondhand reports; a critic might describe a scene, but the moving image was unquotable. There was no way to share that passing experience. All you could do was write about it or talk about it. The original moment was transformed by the telling into something else—probably something funnier or more original or more shocking."

You can read the article here.

USA Today article on video "madness"

USA Today's tech columnist wrote an article about the latest Internet craze, video; the article touches upon all of the major players in the field, as well as how marketers (like us, and others) are looking make use of it.

Excerpt: "Big players are crashing the party. In January, Google put up Google Video. Yahoo is all over video. AOL has had video. But on Monday, it will announce new video search capabilities and a site that pulls together both free video and video you can buy all over the Web."

You can read the whole article here.

Speculation

Engadget has heard that the next round of iPod's will have eBook capabilities:   

"We'd say the possibility is very real, since according to a source at a major publishing house, they were just ordered to archive all their manuscripts -- every single one -- and send them over to Apple's Cupertino HQ."

As of now, I doubt that I'd buy any eBook reader but if the technology was available on my iPod I would be using it all the time.  I always wished that iPod's were able to display the lyrics to the song I was listening to, maybe soon they will.

Antarctica

I found this blog awhile back and still think it's really great.  Phil Jacobsen, the writer of the blog, is living in Antarctica working (and blogging about it) during their winter months.  He posts pictures and essays about living on the continent and the lifestyle that people adopt down there.  It's an interesting look into a world that not many people will experience and it's great that we're able to hear about it on a daily basis thanks to blogging technology.

Brought to you by the pro-blog campaign '06.

"For the Drawer"

In honor of the Comic-Con International convention this weekend, I thought that I'd comment on the ascendancy of the webcomic. Master cartoonist (and author of the upcoming Making Comics) Scott McCloud identifies the webcomic as "the great wildcard" in the development of comics in the 21st century in a Wired News interview. Few artists who create for the web can claim to be making a living (without a standard pay-to-view delivery system like iTunes, any cash to be made is generally garnered via sponsorships, advertising, and the like). However, there is an upside to working on the web. In the absence of editorial involvement, experimentation runs rampant in the world of webcomics, and the range of comics themes is far more expansive than the limited range tackled by artists who have to create material that will sell. Some Soviet writers used to write "for the drawer" if the material seemed too subversive; analogically, comics artists must also avoid subverting the rules of what sells and what doesn't. Not so for the webcomics artist as they are free to think up and post whatever interests them. The standardization of a pay-to-view system and having to rely on digital-content distribution companies should digital comics for handhelds take off will change the nature of this relative freedom, of course.

Who is Henry Jenkins?

I have recently started reading Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins.  And now you're probably wondering: who in the world is Henry Jenkins?   While he explains himself on his 'about' page far better than I can, the short answer is that he's the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program.   So what does that mean?  It means that he posts a lot of lengthy thoughts about the state of media and how technology is altering the way media is produced, consumed and thought about.   Fair warning: the length of his blog's name is but a short sample of the garrulous posts to be found within.

What made me post this today is his current post, which is superficially about the video game Star Wars Galaxies, but actually about how marketing departments can interact with their audiences to build better products (and also about how they can fail spectacularly at interacting with their audience, thereby creating a massive disaster).  The team that built Star Wars Galaxies managed to do both at different points in the product's life cycle, which makes it a great cautionary tale.

Jenkins also wrote Convergence Culture and eight other books as well as a ridiculous number of papers, which presumably is part of the whole "MIT Professor" thing.  His MIT faculty page has lots of details if you're interested.   I put up a picture of the book cover because there's something a bit unsettling about his beard in the few personal pictures I saw.    

Hardcore

I'm a sucker for band documentaries.  It doesn't matter if I'm into the band or not, I'll watch it.  Netflix is amazing for this, their selection of such documentaries surpasses any collection I've come across elsewhere, and they're sent directly to my apartment.

I'm an even bigger sucker for books I've read being made into documentaries, which is why I'm psyched on seeing the documentary for Stephen Blush's American Hardcore.  As you can see, this was a book that was read mostly at home due it's cover.  I didn't want people on the subway to get the wrong idea.

If you're interested in this type of music/ scene check out the trailer on the site, it looks great.  There's also some great photos on the site, along with a neat-o interactive map with information about the different parts of the US where hardcore grew up.

Maybe at some point I'll get tired of hearing Keith Morris discuss the scene, he does seem to pop up in everything, but it hasn't happened yet.  And, how long till Our Band Could Be Your Life becomes a documentary?

Listen up: Download black_flag_rise_above.mp3  

Auntie Layla's Book of Curry Recipes

I like curries, so let's say that Auntie Layla wants to put all of her curry recipes in a book and make it available to family, friends, curry-lovers, and posterity. She can contact companies like Blurb.com and Picaboo.com to receive a relatively simple to use and free software package that will turn her text and photos into a book with the aid of customizable templates. Blurb is also developing enhancements including tools that "slurp" blog entries into templates and allow for communal authorship (the dream of socialist realists everywhere, if any remain). According to Eileen Gittens, chief exec at Blurb (as quoted in the NYT), "Books are breaking wide open ... Books are becoming vehicles that aren't static things." Print-on-demand certainly is a valuable means to economically print books in small quantities, but the new wave of companies hoping to exploit this post-modern method of publishing by appealing to the needs/vanities of their clients and to potential subterranean markets for niche would-be "classics" is quite a different thing. In the end, it's the content that matters, and I imagine that most of what Blurb and Picaboo and companies like them put out are meaningful to very small numbers of people. They are more aesthetician than publisher; the value is not in the content, but rather in the artefacts of sentiment (i.e., books) that they produce. Books are "breaking wide open," but not exactly in the way that Ms. Gittens would have us think ...