Electronic Publishing Overview

Despite often being a waste of time, Twitter does has value. For example, it was through this public network that I first learned of Vermont's historic decision to legalize gay marriage. Turns out Twitter can be used to keep you apprised of more domestic developments as well.

This video demonstrates how an enterprising hacker created a Twitter account for his washing machine. When a load of laundry is done, the machine's Twitter account is updated to reflect this completed status. Observe:

A lot of effort for a little gained is okay in my book if it has that "cool" factor. But here's where it gets scary:

The washing machine has 526 followers.

More than five hundred people are watching the status of one man's washing machine, waiting to find out when his laundry has completed its spin around the agitator.

What possible investment could so many people have in one man's clothes? What value does this use of Twitter contribute to their lives?

Had it been my laundry, I would've protected its status updates, so that no one else could track my cleaning habits. My dirty laundry is no one else's business.

Speaking of Google, there have been heated debates about Google (the Web). Eric Schmidt gave friendly speech at the annual conference of Newspaper Association of America : Google is not a foe, but a friend to newspapers, but not many print news media people buy his argument, and still A.P may sue Google News or other online news providers. While confused who I should believe, I came across Scott Karp's posting on Publishing 2.0.
Scott Karp argues "how Google stole control over content distribution by stealing links."
"Google isn't stealing content from newspapers and other media companies. It's
stealing their control over distribution, which has always been the engine of profits
in media. Google makes more money than any other media company on the web
because it has near monopoly control over content distribution." Think about
Amazon, they are distributor, middle man, who has the only power in the
publishing industry now."
(Later he added: "the use of "steal" and "stole' is in the sense of "stole the game." The point of this post is to explain how Google won, and not at all to suggest that they didn't deserve to win.")
His article is linked to what Nick Carr' thinks
"For much of the first decade of the Web's existence, we were told that the
Web, by efficiently connecting buyer and seller, or provider and user, would
destroy middlemen. Middlemen were friction, and the Web was a
friction-removing machine. We were misinformed. The Web didn't kill mediators.
It made them stronger. The way a company makes big money on the Web is by
skimming little bits of money off a huge number of transactions, with each click
counting as a transaction. (Think trillions of transactions.) The reality of the web
is hypermediation, and Google, with its search and search-ad monopolies, is the
king of the hypermediators."
Distributor or Middlemen. This reminds me of the question I had in the very first class; the separation of the medium( "container" maybe be more accurate since both Web and print employ the same "written language.") and the content. A book is a medium(container) and a content itself; so are all print newspapers. But this universal law has changed.

I've previously extolled the virtues of using a content management system, or CMS: it allows for the categorization, manipulation, and preservation of data. It also makes blogging a heckuva lot more fun: why deal with ugly code and clunky FTP clients when you can use a slick WYSIWYG editor and AJAX interface?

But all these improvements don't come for free. There's a cost, and it's complexity. Instead of a single password for your FTP account, now you also have a mySQL database password and a CMS administrator password, if not more. You'd think more passwords would mean more security, but the opposite is true. It's sort of like the observation Dr. Pulaski made about Klingon physiology: multiple redundant organs (two livers, three lungs) may look good on paper, but it only increases the chances of organ failure.

As an example, I offer my own recent experience, when a blog post I wrote was unexpectedly made popular at Digg, a social networking site. My hosting company was unprepared for the influx of traffic and responded by moving not just the blog in question, but all 13 of my domains from a "production server" to a "stabilization server".

Meant as a courtesy to keep my sites running, this transition instead proved devastating. Normally, when a visitor accesses my site, her Web browser makes a request for my site's content. My CMS processes that request and serves the content that is displayed in the browser. All that magic is done in a language called PHP. Whether by design or not, this secondary server did not support PHP. The result was that visitors saw not the requested content, but the PHP code that normally handles the request. In my case, that PHP code included my database names and passwords.

Fortunately, the damage was mitigated by the fact that access to my databases is limited by IP address. For example, given the right username and password, someone might be able to access my data from a computer at Emerson, but not one at Mohegan Sun. All 13 of my sites were still completely inaccessible for the most popular 40 hours of their lives, but at least when they came back up, I wasn't too worried about they integrity.

Still, just to be sure, I spent the next weekend signing a contract with a new hosting company, changing all my usernames and passwords and uploading all my sites to their server. I've also explored ways to make sure that sensitive PHP code is never served to a site visitor, no matter the circumstances. It was definitely a learning experience.

Would all this have happened if I was using static HTML files instead of complex PHP code? Probably not. Is it worth the risk? Definitely. Thanks to the power of the CMS, I could've imported my sites into any number of other systems, including Blogspot and Drupal. Try doing that with plain HTML. (Oh, wait — I already did.)

I'm a terrible Twitter-er (Tweeter?) mostly because I love having an empty e-mail inbox and, to me, Twitter is the complete antithesis of inbox zero. I'm also not interesting enough to warrant more than one 140 character update per week, really. I did some searching for the whole productivity and Twitter issue and came up with a few interesting articles.

Slate recently featured two somewhat conflicting, but informative, articles about Twitter and productivity. "Do I Really Have to Join Twitter" points out that Twitter is "not a faster or easier way of doing something you did in the past, unless you were one of those people who wrote short 'quips' on bathroom stalls." The second article, "What Are You Doing?," points out that Twitter can increase productivity levels, if only by allowing a "mental escape hatch" conveniently restricted to 140 characters.

And (thankgoodness) David Allen, master of getting things done, says that Twitter is okay, providing that you "stay very clear about what your agreements with yourself are, relative to your engagement."

I am pretty certain I had read Carr's article in the Atlantic before.

In response, I immediately recalled several things I had read before. There was something about distractions in the digital age -- I was pretty sure it was in Wired. Was it in the issue I just read? There was another that had stuck in my head long ago, about storing knowledge in other people, but I couldn't remember anything more. I could visualize the words of both, even the layout of the words-- But if I were to go to my bookshelf and start looking through old Wireds, or through the books either article might be in, I'd be there all day, searching, getting distracted by rereading unrelated things I'd run across. (Oh wait, that sounds like the internet. Amazing how you can get distracted without technology entering into things...)

So. Thank you Google for helping me find both articles in under ten minutes with minimal digression.

The first was in fact a Wired article, which turned out to not be quite what I want to talk about. The second was in a Best Non-Required Reading collection I have, reproduced here. In response to the question "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" Harvard professor Stephen Kosslyn said, "Mental processes: an out-of-body experience?" (We think outside our brains?)

To sum up:
1: Our brains are limited and we use tools, as simple as pen and paper to do complex math.
2: We use 'social prosthetic systems,' or SPSs: Other people serve as an extension of our own brains. They extend our reasoning capabilities, etc.
3: As we function as SPSs for other people, it changes our brains -- in ways so that we can best help them.

To quote Kosslyn directly: "In short, parts of other people's brains come to serve as extensions of your own brain. And if the mind is "what the brain does," then your mind in fact arises from the activity of not only your own brain, but those of your SPSs."

Not only does my brain, or way of thinking, change because I can rely on other people to be part of my brain, but anyone who I rely on as an SPS is changed a little too. Everything changes the way we think. Every day, interacting with people, how we process life can change. Which is fascinating, and pointing it out in regard to Google only makes me think of the promise of the semantic web -- which would really serve like a human SPS, when you think about it.

Hi Class:

I was looking online for experimental writing sites, and came across a site by Kathryn Cramer, a blogger and science fiction writer, that talks about a couple of things that relate to the discussion of managing one's online identity:

First, my attention was drawn to an article she posted about mobsourcing. The idea is that crowdsourcing may really be mobsourcing because we aren't gathering diverse ideas necessarily, but whatever the norm is, determined by a few leaders in the pack. Cramer compares this idea and relates it to the incitement of politically motivated mobs to spread rumors about candidates. In her post, "Mobsourcing: A Term I've been Needing", she writes:

On her site, she also has a larger discussion of mobbing - and online mobbing - where a person is picked on by people (rather than having certain actions criticized). It sounds like an adult version of bullying. The online mobbing she describes is less intense than in-person mobbing, but seems to be more common. From what she speaks about, it seems to be rather common in academic circles, but I would imagine extends beyond into other types of closeknit communities that are online.

Her site's policy on comments from others is new this year and states, "Comments are moderated. I blog under my real name. You should comment under yours. Identify yourself when commenting by writing your name in the Name box. Pseudonymous & anonymous comments will not be published."

It seems that anonymity may increase people's willingness to be openly cruel or unnecessarily attack a person's character, rather than criticizing an action. People need to see that the internet still should be a part of a civil society and community. She links to articles such as this one on Information Architects Japan that list some compelling reasons for why people should comment on sites by your own name, or at least by referencing true sites.
Identifiable publishing corresponds to our basic philosophy of the Internet changing from carnival to a respected networked means of communication.

Her site also links to Word Spy which has a definition of Google Bombing, which is to intentionally set up a large number of sites that point to a specific site so that the site will appear at the top of a google search... with the intention of making someone look bad.

So, the interesting thing in setting up an online identity is that it seems one has to be aware that there are going to be creeps out there, and try to prepare for coming into contact with them the same way one does when merging onto a highway in a small car. The Internet is still, in some ways, very unregulated. As we post transparently, we ask that those who comment on our sites openly identify themselves as well, so that we can create a community in which we can speak freely and with faith that the online community can also be a civil society.

Yes, yes; you read that right. Twitter has a dark side.

In a recent CNN article about the "Digital Biz," new studies have found that instant messaging technologies are too fast for the brain's "moral compass" to fully understand. These same scientists from the University of Southern California believe that young people are most likely to receive the most "emotional damage," due to their still developing moral values.

Also, this article gives an overview of these sociologists results, which are published in the National Academy of Sciences Early Online Edition. They explain: "If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality," said researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang.

This same belief of numbness, both of an emotional and intelligence notion, is mentioned in our readings for this week. In the "Is Google Making Us Dumb" article, Carr discusses the "stacco-like" reading pattern that we (computer-savy) people have adopted. We read for results not for content, and the same can be linked to Twitter. The 140 character limit is meant to condense and dilute a feeling or statement, making the reader and the writer more succinct. But this brevity, as suggested in the CNN article, can stunt our original feeling, opinion, or belief about something.

So...What do you think? Do you believe we are harming ourselves, and others well-being, by punching out 140 character statements? Are we really crushing our moral compass? (Or have we done this a while ago, once we started watching television for hours on end?)

Caveat: I am not a neurologist.

But I wholly agree with the premise of Nicholas Carr's article in The Atlantic. Technology is certainly changing the ways in which we think, and we should have a conversation about the repercussions of these changes. As Sven Birkerts recently wrote of the Kindle in the same magazine, "we construe it as just another useful new tool," but it is so much more than that. I don't think the Kindle is such a fair target, though; the Internet as a whole would be more apt, and indeed Birkerts has spilled a lot of old-fashioned ink over the years warning of the changes that electronic reading will bring. It will take a long time to sort out how thought processes will change as a result of getting most of our information from the Internet. These things are more than toys or just really cool, super-efficient ways to retrieve information; they could fundamentally change the way our brains are wired to process information.

Still, I'm also (probably morbidly) fascinated with the prospects for artistic representation of our online experiences. How will artists represent the changing thought processes that Carr warns about? While thinking about this, I stumbled on the work of Ryan Trecartin, a visual artist whose films seem to be trying to represent such a "nonlinear reality," as the New York Times writes (SFW, but definitely too weird for the office). And Josh Poehlein's YouTube collages have an effect that replicates viewing about ten wildly different videos in as many seconds. I think taking a look at the way artists are representing the new-media experience can provide an interesting window into the neurological changes that are probably taking place right now in our collective noggins.

Got any leads?

When trying to find a suitable article for discussion, I came across this one, about a service called "Legacy Locker," supposedly premiering this month.

It's sort of an online will--for each online account you own (Facebook, PayPal, Flickr, etc) you can designate a beneficiary to access the content after you pass away.

This seemed kind of odd to me, but the article brings up the point of money, especially for those who might have a substantial PayPal account, or something along those lines. I still think this is a bit odd...but it DOES solve the problem of who gets your Facebook account after you die.

There is an article in The Baltimore Sun about the increasing amount of people experiencing what they call "sociability fatigue." More and more on-line networkers are becoming increasingly tired of constantly having to manage their on-line lives and keep up with the vast array of on-line tools they're "expected" to use to "stay and loop and not become irrelevant." The article also claims that it isn't just older adults who didn't grow up with the internet but sites examples of 20 and 30 year olds. My problem with this age group, however, is that they didn't actually grow up with the web being as pervasive as it is today...my guess is that if you ask anyone starting college their "fatigue" won't be quite as severe.
A study done by the Pew Internet and American Life Project is also cited, claiming that "48 percent of all age groups are indifferent to Internet social networks, overwhelmed by gadgets, or often avoiding Internet use altogether." Additionally, 7 percent (median age 29) use social networking and are almost always connected to the Web, but feel conflicted about staying in constant contact with friends and family. Pew calls this group "ambivalent networkers." People are apparently feeling that social networking can be "too much trouble for too little award." Craig Kinsley, a neuroscience professor at the University of Richmond states that "our brains crave networking, online and off, but differentiate between the quality of the interactions." Basically, that though our brains crave any interaction with others, on-line networking isn't as of high quality as one-on-one. Though I understand this and believe it's true for many on-line users, the next generation seems to be on-line almost 24/7 and have adapted to this status.

Reading Nicholas Carr's article for class this week while on lunch break at work has me thinking about a couple of disparate but, I think, related issues. The first is, of course, Carr's basic point that the ubiquity of the internet is changing the way we think and interact with information. The second is, I guess, less a point than a question: Is the internet turning us into a society of ever-narrower specialists, or is it making us all Jills and Jacks of all trades?

I ask this because the nonprofit I work for is currently overhauling our website, and I am simultaneously trying to bring our online communications and fundraising into the 21st century. I wasn't initially involved in any of this, but insinuated myself when I started to worry that my boss would essentially farm out our online presence without making sure anyone on staff had anything other than a rudimentary understanding of it (basically a "Just email the webmaster" model). Since joining this effort, I've endured some deadly webinars about services for hosting donation pages, newsletter tools, etc. I'm so sick of this stuff that I want to learn how to do everything myself, but, at the same time, I realize as technology becomes more complex, it's especially necessary for small organizations to use outside services for some things.

I just find it increasingly difficult to figure out where to draw the line between what should be outsourced and what should be done in-house. At what point are we being inefficient, for example, managing our online donation page ourselves, and at what point are we losing control over our content by using a limited publishing tool to put content on our website?

I think this speaks to Carr's article because, more than ever, we have shortcuts to accessing information, sharing content, and basically getting work done. We jump between tasks not only because the distractions of the internet encourage us to, but also because we can get things done in bits and pieces. Are all of us (besides the Luddites and the hardcore programmers) destined to be kinda specialists in everything?

This recent New York Times article highlights the many celebrities who tweet vicariously through assistants, PR reps, and directors of web empires called Broadway. Among the stars called out are 50 cent, Britney, and Kanye, who actually hired two seperate employees for blog management. Even Obama's farming out the job. But one man stands a hero - he respects Twitter as what it was born to be, not some trashy marketing PR tool, but a way to express bursts of random thoughts and emotions to a billion of your closest friends. Mr. O'Neil explains, "It's 140 characters. It's so few characters. If you need a ghostwriter for that, I feel sorry for you." Stick it to 'em, Shaq.

I arrived at a company meeting this spring expecting simply a series of PowerPoint slides outlining sales, and was amazed and interested by what an executive from Gale had to say. He spoke at length about the digital information, resources, journals, and books that Gale provides to libraries and other research centers around the globe. Many in the audience likely tuned out. But to my nerdy ears, global, electronic access to information was a breath of fresh air.

In thinking about ebooks today, I stumbled upon an article posted on Straight.com , "Vancouver's online source", outlining the Vancouver Public Library agreement with Gale for access to almost 1,000 e-books, the VPL's largest one-time purchase of electronic resources. With this addition, 2,500 books are now available online at any hour of the day at every public library branch in Vancouver starting on April 1st of this year. They'll also be providing instruction to visitors on how to search, print, e-mail, and download digital books and articles. This made me think that this must open another whole can of worms with permissions and usage, although it would depend on how Canada's laws operate.

I am now curious to find out how many other libraries in the United States are looking into similar agreements with Gale, and if any of these libraries are nearby to me. Why walk over there if I can read everything in the comfort of my own home? Also, I start to wonder how will libraries maintain their own customers? I think they can do this by emphasizing and keeping track of individual, local information. A person might be able to go online and find a mass market book on any site, but maybe their best source for Somerville history will be the local Somerville library, whether they are logging into Somerville's site or walking down the street to visit and browse.

Although not technically an "ebook" by standard definitions, I did read this piece in The New Yorker recently. (It is from December 2008, I may be slightly behind on my issues)

It's a long one--if you're bored at work you will appreciate it--but it centers around the extreme popularity of cell phone novels in Japan, which seem to be mostly written by young women. The style of these "novels" is what interested me; they were described as having "lots of white space" with simple language, and as characterizing the feelings of young Japanese women.

I wonder-- Americans have a hard enough time embracing the e-book, so how would we ever embrace these "novels"?

Our most concerns regarding e-book, and e-book formats are how to create and how to distribute them. We hardly ask which e-book format or encoding is the best when it comes to question of preservation of digitized information. Papyrus manuscripts from ancient Egypt survived! How are we sure that all digital or digitalized information will be preserved a millennium later? Even if they can, would it cost more than what we expect? Dietrich Schuller, Director of Information Preservation in UNESCO states here:
"Longevity of digital information, however, cannot live up to such expectation: generally, its life expectancy can only be measured in years, not so much because of physical or chemical inability of its carriers, but because of obsolescence of hard and soft ware, which renders those documents unreadable after short time." Yes, think of a floppy disk!

To make clear to myself: e-books are different from Web-publishing. E-books are books, but in electronic form (or presentation?) of (digital) contents. One of the distinctive features that defines a book is a "portable form," according to Oxford Dictionary . World Wide Web, a "non-book-like delivery mechanism," is not really e-"book"? I am still confused whether e-book formats mean downloadable file or linkable text if this makes sense.
While searching articles about "e-book," I came across ".epub," (should it be capitalized?), which I couldn't locate in The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing at all. Then I got so puzzled with all the languages and acronyms I came across: which ones are like Kleenex, which ones are like a tissue? Which one is behind the scene (logical?), which one is the presentation format (presentational?)? (Andrea kindly explained to me that XML is a way of encoding, behind the scenes). Project Gutenberg announced that most of their titles are available in EPUB eBook format and they are free from any DRM. They can be read in iPhone and iTouch with Stanza platform, in Google Andriod and other Linux-based mobile devices using FBReader and in Sony Reader. They can be read in Kindle, but need to be converted. I suppose it is intuitive to drive for standardizing the e-book format. How ridiculous is it that certain books can be readable in a certain format with a certain device? The disparity of content and container (device and format) should be resolved. Why accessibility doesn't apply to this matter?

At the moment, the Kindle and the Sony reader are vying for the top spot among electronic paper readers. Both competitors are ideal readers for books, with their six-inch-diagonal, black-and-white displays are adequate for reading books. The weight is agreeable, the display is functional. This works for an e-book reader.

But, what if someone wants to read a magazine or a newspaper (before they all go out of existence)? Reading a magazine is more of an experience; the advertisements and the glossy pictures are essential to the reading. That's why half-dozen companies, including Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Polymer Vision, FirstPaper, and Plastic Logic, are developing (hopefully) a new type of reader:an e-mag or e-news reader. This is a picture of what the e-mag reader will look like. (It will be thin (<7mm), lightweight (<16 oz), form factor of 8.5" x 11").

Unlike e-book readers, these e-mag and e-news readers are designed with special regard to the magazines and newspapers. Therefore, these readers will feature larger screens, to support navigation between stories; wireless updating; much better image resolution; and (hopefully according to the designers) color and video. These special e-readers will make their debut in late 2009 and early 2010.

Fortune Magazine's article "The End of Paper?" relates this invention to something Tom Cruise would use in Minority Report:

"Imagine wirelessly downloading an issue of your favorite magazine onto an 8- by 11-inch plastic screen that is light and durable enough to throw into your briefcase, to take to the beach, or to read in your easy chair on a Sunday morning. The resolution of each page is as clear as what you find in today's magazines, and the photographs appear in striking color. Flip the page with a touch of your finger, and an ad for, say, BMW appears. Touch the image of that navy-blue 3 Series, and a video shows the car slicing through the hills of Bavaria."

While this sounds a great, lofty idea, exactly how practical would e-mag readers be? My personal concerns would be: if I'm going to spend $ XXX, is it worth it? Would this product really simulate the experience of reading a magazine or newspaper? Granted the lightness of the e-mag reader would bear resemblance to a physical magazine, but would it be a carbon-copy of the experience?

I applaud this new invention in the field of electronic publishing, but I'm suspicious: is this product necessary?

In "Why Kindle Should be an Open Book," Tim O'Reilly suggests that, unless Kindle dismisses its proprietary file format, the product will be dismissed by users within three years. O'Reilly points out several problems with the Kindle, like its inability to support tables and monospaced fonts, that are not issues with the openly available Epub format.
He also suggests that Amazon was trying to model its Kindle files for Kindle reader model after the ITunes for IPod setup, but, "what Amazon seems to have missed is the important role that 'free' played in the success of the iPod. People didn't populate their iPods solely with music purchased from Apple. It was easy for them to 'rip' their own CDs into the standard mp3 file format and load their entire music collection onto the device."

When the Get-It-Done Guy was asked how best to take and organize notes on-the-go, he advised choosing a device that is "portable and 'instant on' when it's used. You'll want high resolution with rapid data entry, preferably handwriting recognition, capable of storing sketches and little drawings, and I like color compatibility for highlighting."

What product meets all these criteria? Pen and paper. Such a low-tech solution eliminates the need to struggle with the interface when you should be spending time producing or absorbing content. Remove the technological barrier, increase efficiency.

It's an aspect of the Kindle that's often overlooked. We can safely assume Amazon's new toy is currently being purchased only by the tech-savvy who know their way around such interfaces. But should the adoption of e-book readers become widespread, it's possible we'll be facing an audience that literally does not know how to read a book.

Such transition is not unprecedented; the rise of the World Wide Web has been likened to the invention of Gutenberg's printing press. I wonder what sort of issues that created for those accustomed to "old media":

Penny Arcade had their own take on this newfangled technology

So if you get your hands on a Kindle before your parents do, be forewarned: today's early adopters are tomorrow's tech support.

The last question I asked my e-pub interviewee a few weeks ago was an open-ended, "What do you think of this whole e-book-versus-print debate that springs up all the time?" His response: "I don't care how long they want to do print books, but eventually--some day--there will not be any. It's a consequence of technology." I have to agree with him. Not that I'm happy about it (more on this in a second).

What I liked about his response was the refreshing neutrality of the delivery. This electronic-versus-print "debate"--actually not a debate, but more like a foregone conclusion--seems to me to be too cartoonishly fierce. I hear about "two sides" to the debate. There's the "I love the smell of paper" Luddite sentimentalists, pitted against the hip, futurist mac guy-looking bloggers. I'm always puzzled when I check out Teleread and inevitably start reading some oddly gleeful entry about some minor endorsement for a new e-book reader. Let's just accept the inevitability that someday--someday--just about the whole of the written word will be read on some electronic medium, be it computer or e-reader.

Only then can we start to focus on the consequences of the death of print, in the here and now. It's a very sad, very scary thing that daily newspapers are dying, no matter how out-of-touch and backward-thinking they may have been. Check out this article in The Nation, which lays out a convincing argument that the obsolescence of local print newspapers will usher in an era of even more watered-down democracy and dumbed-down discourse (seriously). Or this op-ed piece by The Wire creator David Simon for an account of how there weren't any reporters to question a Baltimore police officer's shooting of an unarmed 61-year-old. A snippet:

"There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.

Well, sorry, but I didn't trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick's identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn't anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission."

Point is, the discourse needs to get away from all this talk of "Will electronic replace print?" and "Would you read a book on a screen?" Everyone needs to accept the fact that the death of print will affect all of us, regardless of whether we prefer a bubble bath with a printed book or with a Kindle.