Holtzbrinck Online

"The Best Words In Their Best Order"

Halfway through National Poetry Month, we’re pleased to see that FSG’s new blog initiative is looking fantastic! Launched on April 1, the FSG poetry blog, The Best Words In Their Best Order, was created to celebrate FSG’s legendary roster of poets. FSG kicked off the month by distributing an “unusual” cell phone ring tone – an original couplet by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon that you can download here and listen to here:

“It’s only me trying to get through
I’d really love to talk to you”

The blog (which is named after a quote from a great writer) features wonderful posts by publicist and events coordinator Ami Greko, and focuses on poetry as a spoken art form. How so, you wonder? Well, we were able to assemble a wonderful collection of MP3 recordings of FSG poets introducing and reading their own poetry, as well as that of backlist poets. As FSG’s press release points out, “The matchups chosen by these poets are remarkable: Robert Pinsky reads Elizabeth Bishop’s At the Fish Houses, C.K. Williams reads Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead, Seamus Heaney reads The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott reads Joseph Brodsky’s Lullaby.” New audio clips are available almost every day to stream, to download, and even via podcast. Also, we worked with FSG-designed broadsheets for two poems to create desktops and screensavers that visitors can download. The blog’s a wonderful treat, but it will only last so long – until April 30, actually – so visit www.fsgpoetry.com sometime soon. Enjoy!

Double Clicking Goodness

My incredible discovery of the day, which is apparently not "new" in any way, is that you can double click any word in any article on NYTimes.com and instantly receive thesaurus and dictionary entries for that word in a pop up window.

I think what amazes me about this functionality is that this is exactly the sort of thing I want to see eBooks doing, and here it is on the NYTimes website right under my nose!  It's simple, elegant, and extraordinarily helpful to users. 

But ultimately it also shows a different attitude towards how we interact with text than most books or websites do - the very fact that they do not trumpet this feature shows it as something that we should be able to take for granted, and hearkens back to times when it was unthinkable that one should read a book without other books to reference or writing materials to make notes in the margin.    When did the act of reading become so passive? 

Already browsers are including search bars that will allow you to quickly choose a search engine or website (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, IMDB) and jump directly to the search results for a phrase, how long before we can select text on the screen, right click, and choose from a drop down menu whether we want to see what sort of response that selection brings up in Dictionary.com, Google, or Wikipedia?    It seems more and more likely that the answer is "not that much longer".  I'm looking forward to it.

Obama, the Social Butterfly

To be honest, I haven't exactly been engrossed in recent political news and agenda like most Americans. There's good reason to pay extra attention to the 2008 election, we have our first female candidate - Hillary Rodham Clinton. Senator Clinton, however, will not be the focus of this post. Earlier this month, our alternate Democratic candidate Barack Obama has integrated a full-fledged social network on his website BarackObama.com. Essentially a tool for his supporters to organize their efforts in the most optimal manner, signing up with My.BarackObama.com provides every user a slew of functionalities - My Dashboard (a page showing an overview of your account's activities), My Friends, My Events, My Messages, My Groups, My Fundraising, and My Blog. Support rallies have never been so easy to organize.

In addition to this network tool on Obama's official website, he also covered other bases by creating accounts with YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook (see screen shot). I'm not sure if he has my vote just yet, but he's sure caught my [web] attention.

A Long Way Gone

This compelling memoir by Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier in Sierra Leone, is on sale today. I’ve been keeping close tabs on this book since early January, when the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, asked us to develop the website for the book. Since then, A Long Way Gone has received a huge amount of advance praise and very strong reviews. As Belinda Luscombe of Time Magazine says, “Ishmael Beah doesn't realize it, but he's about to become a [literary-humanitarian] rock star … (I'll eat my hat if he does not meet Bono in the next 12 months.)” Beah, now 26 and living in New York City, recalls his journey in and out of the madness of the civil war in Sierra Leone. He fled attacking rebels at the age of twelve, was picked up by the government army at thirteen, and after years experiencing and committing unspeakable acts, released to a UNICEF rehabilitation center. His story is poignant: shocking, and often extremely violent, but also touching and hopeful. It’s one of those books that has stayed with me; that I think about at random moments. Importantly, as Beah continues to point out in interviews and speeches to non-profit and humanitarian organizations, his story represents the lives of hundreds of thousands of children across the world. Poised to become a huge success, the book, which is also the current Starbucks Entertainment featured book, is well worth the time.

For more, visit www.alongwaygone.com

A Wiki Novel

Back in November, Meredith wrote a post on We Are Smarter Than Me, an anticipated Pearson publication that is a collaborative effort of thousands of authors registered on WeAreSmarter.org. Today, Penguin UK launched a similar effort - its first wiki novel A Million Penguins.

Using MediaWiki technology, anyone who registers on www.amillionpenguins.com is able to edit and/or add onto this web-based tale for the next 5 weeks. Already, there are 500 posts (some by return users), four chapters, and an interlude. While there are no definite plans to publish a print version, the site has quickly developed a decent web community during the first day of launch. By opening registration to any willing participants, it’s questionable whether the material spawned will be quality ficiton, but this is surely beneficial to Penguin’s brand recognition, site traffic, and their entry to social networking.

Read about Penguin UK's wiki novel in this Reuter article.

The Power of Community

Featured as the Entrepreneur of the Week on Yahoo finance is Threadless.com.  I first heard of Threadless.com when a friend mentioned it on Facebook a few months ago. I paid no attention to the fact that it attracted a huge web following, all I focused on were their laid-back, yet fashionably hip t-shirts. If I had to describe the website in two words, it would be “T-shirts galore”. 

Threadless.com is a retail business that heavily relies on consumer judgments. A majority of t-shirt designs are submitted by registered users via the website and are voted on to determine which designs will go into production. Every registered user has a blog and posts or comments on shirts for sale are cross-referenced on the respective product page. The brilliance of it all is that the community built by this website ensures a constant supply of fresh and original merchandise and then sells it to the same crowd. By passing on production decisions to the site users, calculating the equilibrium on the pesky supply & demand graph is probably avoidable.

Creators of Threadless.com, Nickell and DeHart, have accredited their success to the intricate web community they’ve built. Where else can one reach an international audience and bypass the dilemmas of assorted time zones? Nowhere.

Who's Minding the Information Society?

Lawrence Lessig (pictured; first heard about him in an article in Foreign Policy magazine, of all places, on the future of ICANN), Stanford Law School professor and Wired magazine columnist, charges that installing Rep. Howard L. Berman as the new chairman of the House subcommittee on the Internet and intellectual property (which, by the way, is just what happened in December) "is like making a congressman from Detroit head of an automobile safety subcommittee, or a senator from Texas head of a global warming subcommittee" (see quote in context in the NYT blurb). Lessig notes this appointment as a blow to reforming copyright policy "to fit the legitimate objectives of copyright --- to assure that artists have the incentives they need to create great new work--- into the contours of digital policy." Hysterical? That's apparently what Rep. Berman thought of criticism of his 2002 bill to permit media companies to "disrupt" or "impair" illegal file trading by hacking into peer-to-peer networks. It will be interesting to see how policies on copyright and intellectual property will shape and interact with existing and developing digital technologies as we (and our elected officials) guide the development of the information society in which we read, think, and live.

Words For Sale

Recently I was reading an article online when I encountered a word with a curious double-underline. So, I decided to investigate. What I expected was to click on the word and zoom over to another place on the website where I could learn more about that topic. Little did I know that as soon as my cursor moved across the word, a pop-up advertisement would appear over the text! Although I’ve since discovered that this type of advertising has been around since 2004, the ad was a surprise. What I found out was that this is called “in-text” advertising, a form of promotion that is steadily spreading across the web. Previously found only on niche sites, in-text advertising is cropping up more and more as publishers experiment with various types of online advertising to see what works best for readers and advertisers. In-text ads have even made their way onto mainstream sites such as FoxNews.com. Since you are probably wondering by now … yes – in-text ads have been controversial since the day they were launched because, essentially, they violate the publishing equivalent of separation of church and state. As the Wall Street Journal reported recently, among other problems, in-text ads mark “a departure from a long-observed tradition in the print medium of keeping editorial content separate from advertising.” The ads are not like a “special advertising section” you’d see in a magazine, because they’re embedded in editorial content, with only that subtle double-underline to distinguish them. So, concerns that the ads present ethical problems or have the potential to corrode ‘‘journalistic quality and credibility’” seem well-founded. If the trend grows, could writers be tempted to sprinkle their pieces with keywords for advertisers? Publishers who run in-text ads say there’s no problem since their news departments don’t know what keywords advertisers purchase. And purveyors of in-text ads argue that editorial departments are responsible for maintaining good editorial judgment in the face of any type of advertising. Spending on online advertising is increasing, and in-text advertising offers advertisers and website owners another opportunity to serve highly targeted ads that I’m sure is difficult to pass up. Plus, providers of in-text advertising are gaining a better and better understanding of where, and how, and how often to serve the ads. My sense is, keep an eye out for those double-underlines.

Books Come Alive!

Microsoft launched their Live Search Books in beta yesterday, and, frankly, I think it's fantastic. Live Search Books includes Search Inside the Book functionality, so if I've selected Voltaire in His Letters, and I keyword search Chatelet, I'll get links to pages including mention of that keyword sorted in order of relevance. This isn't anything revolutionary, of course, but its relative lack of novelty doesn't nullify the convenience offered (I'm not jaded). People are reading more and more online, generally in snippets, excerpts, and on a per-document basis. Initiatives such as this and Google Book Search expand the possibilities of the book reader's experience beyond the paper format, though I imagine that most will opt to print out their downloads. Books for download in PDF are limited to noncopyrighted material scanned from books from the British Library, the University of California, and the University of Toronto, and there are plans to add books from the New York Public Library, Cornell University, and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine. (Read more.) Copyrighted material will be included at a future date. Navigating from the download page back to the search page is a bit difficult (perhaps, this is anecdotal), and it is taking Firefox on my Mac what seems eons to upload search results for Voltaire (this also may be anecdotal; IE on my PC had no problem loading the data). And a friend of mine noted that he can't locate any editions of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Oh well.

Pileus is not a cloud…

Before all the angry meteorologists start leaving rebuttals as comments, give this post a chance.

The term Pileus is known to Romans as a hat and to forecasters as a sign of stormy weather. From the same culture that brought us squid-ink pizza and Power Rangers, the Japanese will tell you that Pileus is the name of the coolest umbrella - ever. To out perform this umbrella, the challenger must beat the following list of unexpected features:

1) Wi-Fi enabled 

2) Integrated digital camera 

3) Handle with a built-in projector 

4) Automated picture and video uploads to Flickr and YouTube (respectively) 

5) Last, but not least – rain resistant.

Developed in the Okude laboratory of Tokyo's Keio University, a Pileus prototype showed up early in the year at the Ubicomp 2006 conference. Accounts were also set up on Flickr and YouTube with photos and videos uploaded. The Pileus’ design has been improved into a sleeker version since then and features a twistable grip for file navigation. Although I question the practicality of this invention, I still find it an extremely innovative creation. By debuting at a conference on ubiquitous computing, it’s further evidence that soon no one will be able to escape YouTube – even if it’s just you, the rain, and your umbrella.