Notes in the Margin

The post from Mac Slocum on Open-ended publishing poses a useful reminder that in a world of digital content, discrete and deliberate publishing processes, which result in specific editions (or versions) of content, can be an outdated publishing model. As Slocum says, “Digital content is fluid.”

But digital content doesn’t really exist in an edition-based world. It moves, it flows. It gets chunked up, mashed up, and recombined. It can be copied and pasted at will whether you like it or not. It can be added to. It can be deleted from. It hibernates and reappears unexpectedly months or years later.

He has an interesting idea, though it seems more like a tactic oriented to personality: pushing half-baked content into the public view somehow forces him to continue the editorial / authoring process, during which time he might get feedback. Here’s how he rationalizes it:

Public content holds the content creator accountable. This is why I dump all sorts of quotes and excerpts and half-baked ideas into my Tumblr. That’s my big bucket of slop: all the stuff that informs the posts I write and the interview questions I ask. I put it out there not because I think it has value to all (it doesn’t), but because public content makes me want to follow through.

The challenge is that, depending on your self-discipline, things may not actually get done. Further, it makes the public have to slog through that much more “slop” in their search for useful content. It may suit this generation’s apparently transient attention, quickly flitting from one bucket of slop to the next, but it will require unique new age skill to discern the pearls within that slop.

via Open-ended publishing – O’Reilly Radar.

This is a useful article from Valerie Maltoni about the role of content curator. It seems to me that this is a role we all play in one form or another, and our species has always played – filtering, interpreting and transmitting news and information gleaned from other quarters, often adding our own spin or interpretation.

In a networked content model – where we get our information from diverse, multilateral sources – ever less so from narrow broadcast media – content curation is ever more important. In this post, Valerie lists some benefits of content curating:

• becoming a useful filter makes you a destination
• commenting and intelligent framing of conversation are still in scarce supply
• showing trends and patterns from compiling information is powerful
• providing content in a way that makes it usable gains you a loyal following
• seeing what’s out there helps you find gaps in demand
• curating allows you to set the tone for where the focus should be
• seeing your role as that of ultimate decision maker on what’s in and what’s out

On the flip side, the ecology of content curating also means we have to constantly revise and refine the channels on which we listen – good curators may be everywhere, but there’s a limit to how much input we can receive.

via Conversation Agent: Curating Information as Content Strategy.

Interesting concept from one of TED’s own. Focuses on the power of video, which Cisco says will constitute 90% of the web’s content within 4 years.

TED’s Chris Anderson says the rise of web video is driving a worldwide phenomenon he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation — a self-fueling cycle of learning that could be as significant as the invention of print. But to tap into its power, organizations will need to embrace radical openness.

Chris Anderson: How web video powers global innovation

Nice insight into the idea that media is less about content and more about context. And the context is personal – you are the starting point. Content will conform to the individual – place, form factor, time of day, etc. – not the other way around.

When people want to know how the media business will deal with the Internet, the best way to begin to understand the sweeping changes is to recognize that the consumer of entertainment and information is now in the center. That center changes everything. It changes your concept of space, time and location. It changes your sense of community. It changes the way you view the information, news and data coming directly to you.

via A Technology World That Revolves Around Me – NYTimes.com.

Today’s post by O’Reilly’s Hugh McGuire is a real head-turner. In it he makes the following observation:

“(W)hat is a book, after all, but a collection of data (text + images), with a defined structure (chapters, headings, captions), meta data (title, author, ISBN), and prettied up with some presentation design? In other words, what is a book, but a website that happens to be written on paper and not connected to the web?”

He goes on to discuss the EPUB standard as a format that is, essentially, a web site container poised to look to consumers and publishers like a self-contained publication. In other words, the platform is already in place as a standard to deploy books as web sites (or portions thereof).

This augurs a convergence that is natural (but terrifying to publishers), in which the content encapsulated in a “book” becomes liberated to be a full participant in the free exchange of information on the web. Clearly Google Books is pushing this convergence, though it always seemed like a lossy integration, with the Google Book content not a full citizen in the life of the web, but some form of  shadow of the actual content. The GBooks’ content can be searched, but not deep linked nor copied and pasted, etc.

This evolution is another inexorable step to the point where content producers – authors, musicians, analysts, software developers – will find their content become part of the public domain, and they will be left in a new business model in which they have to perform for pay, by applying their “intellectual property” to specific times, places and circumstances.

The line between book and Internet will disappear – OReilly Radar.

Clay Shirky’s recent post, The Collapse of Complex Business Models, is typically astute and an interesting perspective on complexity and its limits. Building off the 1988 book by Joseph Tainter called The Collapse of Complex Societies, Shirky describes the inevitable demise of Internet business models that involve complex content production.

The issue pivots on bureaucracy. While democracy and a free-market economy have intrinsic self-corrective processes, bureaucracies seem to defy the second law of thermodynamics (in which entropy increases over time until equilibrium):

In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

His final paragraph is an admonition to remain flexible in the face of the inevitable demise of complex businesses:

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

I’ll confess I hadn’t been paying much attention to Living Stories, though now that I’ve looked into it more the idea seem fascinating and possibly useful if it become broadly adopted. The original concept, as explained by Google in early December, was as follows:

The idea behind Living Stories is to experiment with a different format for presenting news coverage online. News organizations produce a wealth of information that we all value; access to this information should be as great as the online medium allows. A typical newspaper article leads with the most important and interesting news, and follows with additional information of decreasing importance. Information from prior coverage is often repeated with each new online article, and the same article is presented to everyone regardless of whether they already read it. Living Stories try a different approach that plays to certain unique advantages of online publishing. They unify coverage on a single, dynamic page with a consistent URL. They organize information by developments in the story. They call your attention to changes in the story since you last viewed it so you can easily find the new material. Through a succinct summary of the whole story and regular updates, they offer a different online approach to balancing the overview with depth and context.

In other words, at the risk of oversimplification, topic-based and prioritized news, with some personalization.

The stories they tracked in their beta program were limited in number, and some of the topics were interesting to me. Yet, unless I am doing some kind of research on, say, the politics of global warming, the topic-centric approach didn’t fully appeal to me as a way of digesting that news.

An interesting extension to this approach would be to marry Living Stories with social media – say, Google Buzz, to keep it all in the family. It might be really interesting to a) share a link on a story of interest with a group of friends, and then dynamically create a “living story” from that initial kernel, allowing friends to post related links they have found, and also comment on the topic in an associated thread.

Hm… Living Stories is open source… Maybe this is an idea worth exploring…

Google News Blog: Open-sourcing the Living Stories format.

Thanks to Peter O’Kelly for pointing out this story.

Apple’s proposed business model for the iPad separates publishers from their users with the impermeable wall of the iTunes store. Publishers are right in pushing back – hard. Without access to subscriber and other buyer’s data, they become completely commoditized, and our experience as consumers is diluted. The publisher’s response to the public’s interests and habits is critical in bringing more relevant and substantive content.

Ownership of subscriber information and pricing have emerged as key issues.

Apple’s practice of sharing with its partners little consumer data beyond sales volume is a problem. “Is it a dealbreaker? It’s pretty damn close,” said one senior media executive of a US metropolitan daily newspaper.

Publishers have spent decades collecting information about subscribers that influence marketing plans and, in some cases, the content of the publication itself. Apple’s policy would separate them from their most valuable asset, publishing executives said. “We must keep the relationship with our readers,” says Sara Öhrvall, senior vice-president of research at Swedish publisher Bonnier . “That’s the only way to make a good magazine.”

via FT.com / Media – iPad deals with publishers face hurdles.

Below is an overview of a solution that could be called Interpersonal Learning Spaces (IPLS), an online educational application. It may sound audacious, but the technology is readily available and some examples like Coursesmart are beginning to surface.

Solution summary: The Interpersonal Learning Space would be an application that enables students and teachers to engage directly with online content, and with each other, to bring the wealth of a publisher’s educational material to a more socially connected medium and improve the effectiveness of student’s learning.

The Interpersonal Learning Space would include the following capabilities and attributes:

1. Going Online. The key challenge that this concept addresses for a publisher is how to leverage your tremendous wealth of content, yet make it relevant within current technical, social and learning contexts. With standards like EPUBs and robust XML engines to deliver this content online, moving content to the web is an obvious choice. Online reading is clearly a necessary first step, but not in itself sufficient to ensure a publisher’s profitability in the education space and beyond.

2. Making it Personal. The next step may be obvious, and others may have tackled this challenge already, but the results are hard to find in the market. It involves personalizing the reading experience. Imagine offering the ability to read books online and, with an established personal account, being able to annotate the experience. Current reading devices like the Kindle offer the ability to highlight and take notes on ebooks, though the user experience is awkward and ineffective. Instead, imagine the technical equivalent of a piece of personal acetate overlaid as a transparent layer on the book’s contents, on which the reader could type, scribble, doodle, underline, and highlight his or her own personal reflections.

The underlying book could remain unchanged, but the user would have an anthology of personal engagement with the book throughout its pages. This approach could be particularly valuable for textbooks, where students could not only highlight key sentences or examples, but could actually do some portion in their homework directly in their book-centered learning space.

3. Making it Interpersonal. Now, going the first of several steps further, imagine that the user could share their personal learning space with others. It could start with the user’s teachers or tutors, who could gain greater insight into the thought processes and learning of his/her students. But perhaps more importantly it could be extended to sharing pages with fellow students, with whom the user could work through problems, questions, inquiries and solutions. Social environments can enhance the learning experience, especially for the emerging generation, so this application would drive learning by extending student’s instinctive connectedness and shared constructivism.

Furthermore, using an approach referred to in web 2.0 circles as “crowd-sourcing,” access to the reactions of your readers will enable publishers to adapt and refine published content to address concerns and amplify key points that are unclear. This could dramatically improve the value of the content, making it more relevant, targeted and effective.

4. Making it Instructional. The teacher or tutor would also have his or her own interpersonal learning space, which means that the teacher’s notes on course content could be made available to students at the teacher’s option. This could be particularly effective for teachers who capture the SmartBoard notes they create in class. This means that the output of a class session could be available online as part of the teacher’s shared space. Using initial textbook content while extending the environment to provide additional context, notes, etc., the value of the textbook for the teacher, student, or tutor is enhanced.

5. Making it Immersive. For Internet delivered applications, there are many delivery options that go beyond plain and simple web pages (HTML). My experience for the past several years has been using Adobe’s Flash platform to deliver desktop-quality user experiences by way of a browser, or other Internet connected environments. This means that the Interpersonal Learning Space could be designed as a high-end, more immersive experience that would increase user adoption and loyalty. Both the technology and craft are constantly evolving in this area; immersive applications require intuitive user experiences and the capability to manage text, video, and interactive content. Younger generations increasingly expect this kind of user experience, just as they expect to be able to interact with their friends and content from any Internet connect device.

6. Making it Interactive. Tools now exist that allow for integrating synchronous communication into a web application, so this interpersonal learning space could include IM, chat, audio and video communication, as well as shared whiteboards. Technically, this capability is currently available, especially within the aforementioned Flash environment. Clearly, alliances with key software vendors will also facilitate the development of this solution.

7. Making it Inclusive. Finally, the Interpersonal Learning Space could extend beyond textbook content. In the same way that it could enable annotations and discussions overlaid on published content, it could offer the same capability for any web address. This means that students could easily do research and bookmark specific web pages, and also annotate those pages and share those notes with others. This last step is particularly audacious, but still completely feasible technically. It would enable research and annotation of the entire web, going beyond textbooks, and could become a much more generalized research facility, and perhaps an opportunity to cross-sell other  services by attracting the general public as users.

Here’s a use case, one of many, but the one that has been informing this vision:

Ellen, a High School junior, is propped up against pillows on her bed, iPad in her lap, reading The American Pageant for her AP US History class. Having logged in to her IPLS, she highlights relevant passages in the book using her finger. Alternately, she can touch the pen tool and scribble notes in the margin, again using her finger. For more extensive notes, she can invoke the keyboard and type at length.

Ellen reaches a section where the interpretation of the text is unclear, so she overlays onto her screen the class notes from the teacher’s SmartBoard that day. Wanting another perspective, she overlays the personal notes on the chapter from her friend Darcy to gain insight. With Darcy’s personal learning space active, she notices that Darcy is in the book at the same time, so Ellen sends her a text message and the resulting exchange (not all about school) provides useful context and perspective.

To extend her research, but staying within the learning space, Ellen browses to an Internet site for more background on the topic. Finding a passage that is particularly relevant, and one she will likely cite in an upcoming paper, she highlights the text and then copies the reference with link to her citation library, along with a comment on how and where it might be used.

This project would clearly be a significant undertaking, but based on my experience in developing solutions such as Adobe Digital Editions, the Random House Insight Widget and the Acrobat.com Suite, this kind of application is both plausible and timely. At Adobe, we saw educators beginning to think differently about writing after their experience with Buzzword, and this application would extend the online collaboration capability even further.

I guess this emphasizes the fact that everything is marketing.

Today, “the new tactic is to blur the lines between marketing and social networking” by introducing commercial messages into “the stream” of realtime status updates exchanged among friends.

Intimacy, whether real or feigned, is gold in the ad world, and it is the impression of intimacy that Facebook and its competitors look to deliver, to both members and advertisers.

via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The stream.