Apple computer has a great piece running in the Pro section of their site. It is about how the Washington Post is using new media including podcasts, blogs and video to enrich the content that they are delivering to their readership.
According to this article in ars technica, Google is going to unveil a service by which you can buy just chapters of books, instead of the whole thing. Ars technica focuses on the advantages of this scheme for its audience of techies. For example, a web developer confronting a knotty ASP problem could just download a chapter of ASP in a Nutshell rather than plunking down $29.95 for the whole tome.
Of course, publishers and authors won’t be too pleased about this, in the same way that musicians weren’t very happy about the music industry becoming dominated by singles instead of albums. With iTunes, you don’t have to buy the whole album to get just the one song you like; with this new Google service, the same would apply for books.
However, this new business model in the staid publishing industry, if it succeeds, could lead to a whole new world for authors and readers. What if you could buy the first chapter of a novel from an unknown author for $1 instead of buying the whole book for $21.95? Wouldn’t that get you to try many more authors than you would’ve? If you don’t like it, who cares, you’re only out a buck. It’s like a McDonald’s Dollar Menu for readers.
Publishers could even bundle first chapters from new authors together, like a buffet of writers. Pay $5 and get first chapters from a publishing house’s hottest authors. If you like one of them, you could buy the whole book, in an e-book format, at a discounted rate. (Pricing e-books at the same price of a physical book makes no sense to me, BTW. A topic for another time.)
Most exciting to me is the thought that this rumored Google service could bring back the old-fashioned serial novel, like Dickens for the 21st century. You could buy a novel chapter by chapter as it comes out or perhaps subscribe to the novel of one of your favorite authors. Why should we, as readers, wait for a novel to sit on some publisher’s desk for six months, then get printed on paper, bound, galleys sent out and finally shipped to bookstores? This is a market that is crying out for Google to bring some efficiencies to bear.
Diaries were once something teenage girls hid from nosy little brothers. Now, they put them online for all the world to see. Just goes to show that people are willing to exchange their privacy to be just a little bit famous. Not Britney Spears-style famosity, but just well-known enough to have a diary online, as if being on the web conveys legitimacy.
According to a recent study by the Census Bureau, Americans spend more time every day consuming media than they do eating. And what does 2007 hold?
In the US, adults and teens will spend nearly five months (3,518 hours) next year watching television, surfing the Internet, reading daily newspapers and listening to personal music devices.
Americans will do many of these things at the same time – we’re a nation of hopeless multitaskers. Internet use has increased dramatically – doubling since 2000. However, this hasn’t entirely been at the expensive of other media (newspapers, for example) since total media usage has increased. As James Rutherfurd of Veronis Suhler Stevenson told The New York Times, “The demand for information and entertainment seems almost insatiable.”
Interestingly, 39% of adult internet users read blogs; 9% have created blogs. Numbers like that indicate that the web truly is developing into the online conversation that Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he created it. With greater online usage and web 2.0 tools enabling ordinary people to create content, the future is one where “intercreativity” is the norm.
Who’s the Time magazine Person of the Year? Why, it’s you. And me. And anyone else who blogs, takes digital pictures of their cat, shares their inability to spell with their MySpace friendz or uploads video of that disastrous birthday party to YouTube. According to Time, it’s about:
It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
Whew! Viva Revolution? Growing up, I always thought that revolution was in the streets. Turns out, you can be a world-changer just by sitting in front of a computer.
What writer hasn’t had the fantasy of being a big-city reporter? We’ve seen it a hundred times in movies – you pound out the story which blows the lid off big-city corruption, a glass of bourbon at your side, fame and fortune just moments away. What’s the reality?
Darkness falls on a chilly Winn-Dixie parking lot in a dodgy part of North Fort Myers just before Thanksgiving. Chuck Myron sits in his little gray Nissan and types on an IBM ThinkPad laptop plugged into the car’s cigarette lighter.
As readers abandon print for pixels, newspapers have finally begun to see the light. They’ve decided that the future is “mojos” – mobile journalists. These reporters work out their cars and file news stories on local events continuously, for their paper’s website and print edition.
What is Intercreativity?
According to Tim Berners-Lee, it’s
That was from an interview in 1996, 5 years after he first created the “www program” that has grown to take over the internet. In 1996 he thought that the future wasn’t interactivity, but intercreativity. The web brought us the ability to fill out forms and press submit… interacting not with a person, but with a server. What he wanted to the ability for people to work together, all over the world to create something new, not just interact with something that was already there.
It is now late 2006, has his dream come true? A quick google search for intercreativity turns up a mere 754 entries, whereas Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” brings back 78,400. What does that say? Though truthiness may have been the word of the year in 2005, I think intercreativity is the more important term. Where did most people see Colbert in 2006? Though his show is one of the top hits on Comedy Central, I would wager to guess he has more viewings on YouTube than his own network. And what is YouTube if not the embodiment of intercreativty on the internet. People create videos and post them to the site. Other people then mashup and remix those videos. New creations from old. One person inspiring another person to create, which inspires another.
Sites like YouTube, Flickr, Digg…all of these Web 2.0 sites are intercreativity. Let’s do our part to fulfill Berners-Lee’s vision.