Daily Beast Seeks to Publish Faster

By MOTOKO RICH

Having ramped up her metabolism from magazines to online journalism with The Daily Beast, Tina Brown now wants to speed up book publishing.

In a joint venture with Perseus Books Group, The Daily Beast is forming a new imprint, Beast Books, that will focus on publishing timely titles by Daily Beast writers — first as e-books, and then as paperbacks on a much shorter schedule than traditional books.

On a typical publishing schedule, a writer may take a year or more to deliver a manuscript, after which the publisher takes another nine months to a year to put finished books in stores. At Beast Books, writers would be expected to spend one to three months writing a book, and the publisher would take another month to produce an e-book edition.

In an interview in her office at The Daily Beast, which is owned by Barry Diller’s InterActive Corporation, Ms. Brown said she believed books often missed opportunities to attract readers because the titles took too long to come to market.

“There is a real window of interest when people want to know something,” Ms. Brown said. “And that window slams shut pretty quickly in the media cycle.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/books/29beas.html?ref=technology

Two-Thirds of Americans Object to Online Tracking

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

ABOUT two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers — and that number rises once they learn the different ways marketers are following their online movements, according to a new survey from professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley.

The professors say they believe the study, scheduled for release on Wednesday, is the first independent, nationally representative telephone survey on behavioral advertising.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/business/media/30adco.html?_r=1&ref=technology

Visionaire magazine: paper-engineered issue

from "Boing Boing":

Issue #55 of ultradesigned fashion/art/culture magazine is a gorgeous
slipcased collection of pop-up designed by the likes of Andreas Gursky,
Steven Meisel, Sophie Calle, and engineered by Bruce Foster.

http://www.visionaireworld.com/issues.php?id=55

All Me, All the Time

By Mark Bauerlein

Today in The Wall Street Journal, Eric Felton summarizes a new book by Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell that has the motto: "Capture everything, discard nothing." Felton explains: "The idea is to use newly available technologies to record every moment of our lives, public and private." With present and future tools, we can retain every experience we've had, every move we've made.

I can think of nothing worse for the teenage psyche. It encourages them in the damaging belief that what happens to them inside and out, every experience they undergo, has a value. It encourages every narcissistic impulse and hinders the process of growing up. After all, one of the acquisitions of maturity is to recognize that 90 percent of what goes on in your head and your life during an average week is of little significance to anybody else. And that's not an unfortunate circumstance. It is the precondition of living happily with others.

The trend will only get worse, though. Elsewhere in the Journal appears a story with the headline, "Twitter's Value Is Set at $1 Billion."

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/All-Me-All-the-Time/8205/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Moresoon.org

Google Unveils Tool to Annotate Web Sites

September 23, 2009, 10:35 am

By Miguel Helft

Google is rolling out a new service on Wednesday that will allow users to post notes alongside Web sites that can be read by other users. The service, called Sidewiki, will be a new feature of the Google Toolbar, a popular browser add-on.

Sidewiki users could, for instance, provide an account of their own travel recommendations for Paris next to a travel Web page for that city. Other users visiting that page would see that there are comments on a thin left-hand sidebar and click on it to read them.

Sidewiki will compete against a handful of startups that perform similar functions. None has gained much popularity.

Google says Sidewiki has some unique features. For instance, it uses a complex ranking algorithm to evaluate the quality of comments using “what we know about the author, and user-contributed signals such as voting and flagging.” Only highly rated comments will be shown. Google said it spent most of its engineering effort on the ranking algorithm.

Sidewiki will also post notes across multiple sites that have the same content, so a note about a Barack Obama quote may appear on multiple Web sites that have published that quote. Sidewikis can include video content and can be shared easily with others via Facebook, Twitter and other services, Google says.

The idea of a service to annotate Web sites has been around for a decade. Back in the Web 1.0 days, a start-up called Third Voice allowed people to post unmoderated comments on sites. After receiving some initial buzz in 1999, the company changed its model a year later and eventually shut down its service altogether in 2001. Some Web site operators complained that the comments were nothing more than Web graffiti.

Of course, Google’s Sidewiki will have an advantage over its predecessors: wide distribution. The company’s toolbar is used by millions of people.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/google-unveils-tool-to-annotate-web-sites/?ref=technology

Best Buy and Verizon Jump Into E-Reader Fray

September 23, 2009

By BRAD STONE

The budding market for electronic reading devices is about to get two powerful new entrants: Best Buy and Verizon.

On Wednesday, iRex Technologies, a spinoff of Royal Philips Electronics that already makes one of Europe’s best-known e-readers, plans to announce that it is entering the United States market with a $399 touch-screen e-reader.

Owners of the new iRex DR800SG will be able to buy digital books and newspapers wirelessly over the 3G network of Verizon, which is joining AT&T and Sprint in supporting such devices. And by next month, the iRex will be sold at a few hundred Best Buy stores, along with the Sony Reader and similar products.

By all accounts, e-readers are set to have a breakout year. Slightly more than one million of them were sold globally in 2008, according to the market research firm iSuppli. The firm predicts that 5.2 million will be sold this year, more than half of them in North America, driven by the popularity and promotion of the Kindle, which is available only through Amazon’s Web site.

Best Buy’s involvement could give an additional lift to sales. Starting this week, Best Buy is training thousands of its employees in how to talk about and demonstrate devices like the Sony Reader and iRex, and adding a new area to its 1,048 stores to showcase the devices. Best Buy previously sold e-book devices only on its Web site and in limited tests in stores.

“The e-reader has high awareness, but most people have still not seen or touched or played with them,” said Chris Homeister, senior vice president for entertainment at Best Buy. “We feel that this is a technology that is beginning to emerge and that we can bring a unique experience to the marketplace.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/technology/internet/23ebooks.html?_r=1&hpw

Is the Internet melting our brains?

Sept. 19, 2009 | By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil.

Such sentiments, in the opinion of Dennis Baron, are nostalgic, uninformed hogwash. A professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Baron seeks to provide the historical context that is often missing from debates about the way technology is transforming our lives in his new book, "A Better Pencil." His thesis is clear: Every communication advancement throughout human history, from the pencil to the typewriter to writing itself, has been met with fear, skepticism and a longing for the medium that's been displaced. Far from heralding in a "2001: Space Odyssey" dystopia, Baron believes that social networking sites, blogs and the Internet are actually making us better writers and improving our ability to reach out to our fellow man. "A Better Pencil" is both a defense of the digital revolution and a keen examination of how technology both improves and complicates our lives.

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2009/09/19/better_pencil/index.html

Exploring News by the Amish Online

IT’S not easy being the emissary from the digital world in Amish country.

For two weeks this summer, Jessica Best, a 22-year-old journalist from Wales, fell into that role as the intern at The Budget of Sugarcreek, Ohio, a weekly that is the largest newspaper serving the Amish.

Her self-assigned task, supported by a traveling scholarship from the Welsh Livery Guild, was to study The Budget’s transition to the Internet and the willingness of the Amish to accept that transition. It led, she said, to many a friendly, if awkward, conversation, some of which she chronicled in a blog written from Sugarcreek.
There was the Amish man where she was a houseguest who asked her what an “ip-id” was. “He had read about an iPod,” she explained. “I wish I had had mine with me to show him.”

Her experiences taught her a general rule: “it is difficult to explain a Web site to someone who hasn’t seen one.”

Yet for all the gaps among the technology-shunning Amish — grist for stand-up comics — Ms. Best said she was struck by what was familiar in the way news spread among the Amish.

The national edition of The Budget, now available in print only, is largely composed of submissions from hundreds of volunteer “scribes” from across the country. Typically, a scribe talks about the weather and segues into the goings-on in the local community. Around 500 scribe letters a week take up roughly 50 pages, said the publisher, Keith Rathbun, who like the rest of the Budget staff is not Amish. (The local edition covers just the area around Sugarcreek.)

In a letter dated Sept. 3, a scribe from Camden, Ind., told how a great-uncle, Owen, had the family over to “cut down a big tree in the front yard and turn it into firewood. Uncle Owen cut it down while his sons stopped traffic as they had to throw it on the road. He got tired out, but at 89 I think that is doing quite well.”

By assembling detailed reports from around the country, Ms. Best said, the editors of The Budget “have been doing for 100 years what we have only been doing recently — looking at news on the hyperlocal scale and asking each person what is on your mind,” she said in an interview from Newport, Wales, where she is a reporter at The South Wales Argus.

“They are looking at the individuals to make a bigger picture. With the Internet, the power has shifted to many hands, but they have done that for a long time.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/technology/internet/21link.html?ref=technology

Wireless Carriers Oppose Neutrality Rules

08:58AM Tuesday Sep 22 2009 by Karl Bode

AT&T and Verizon have unsurprisingly come out against the FCC's new network neutrality push. "AT&T has long supported the principle of an open Internet and has conducted its business accordingly," says AT&T's top policy man Jim Cicconi, joining a chorus of carriers this week suddenly pretending they support rules governing their network management.

Calling wireless the "most competitive consumer market in America," Cicconi warned that such rules are impractical because of the bandwidth concerns on wireless networks, which in AT&T's case are partially self inflicted given intentionally lower wireless CAPEX despite the clear demands of Apple iPhone users. Cicconi's suggestion that network neutrality principles shouldn't adhere to wireless networks would seem to run contrary to statements he made just one year ago, when he suggested that broadband principles should be applied "across the board."

Verizon similarly says they're working hard with their "Open Development Initiative" to embrace open networks without government prodding, though as we've explored, the initiative is more public relations than substance so far.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Wireless-Carriers-Oppose-Neutrality-Rules-104580

Google Working to Revise Digital Books Settlement

September 21, 2009

By MIGUEL HELFT

For months, Google and its partners in a class-action settlement that would allow the company to create a vast digital library appeared unmoved by a rising tide of opposition. 

Google and its settlement partners — the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers — argued that the agreement would not harm competition, and said they were confident that it would be approved in its current form by a federal court.

But the Justice Department, in a filing on Friday, made clear that the parties were busily negotiating modifications that would address some of the concerns raised. Those negotiations are likely to accelerate now that the Justice Department has said that it too believes the settlement raises serious legal issues and has urged the court not to approve it without changes. 

Legal experts say the new round of discussions, and the government’s intervention, are almost certain to delay an agreement that Google and the other parties were eager to see ratified quickly. 

“The news out of this is that there are frantic negotiations going on in back rooms right now,” said James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School, which raised antitrust and other objections to the settlement. “The parties are scared enough to be talking seriously about changes, with each other and the government. The government is being the stern parent making them do it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/technology/internet/21google.html?ref=technology 

A Blogger Makes a Pitch for Supporting Print

Blogs are often criticized for helping to kill print media. Last week, though, the prominent political blogger Andrew Sullivan used his forum on TheAtlantic.com to tell readers to subscribe to the print edition of the magazine.

It worked. Within two days after last Monday’s post, Mr. Sullivan’s appeal pulled in 75 percent of the subscriptions that the Web site draws in a typical month, the magazine’s publisher, Jay Lauf, said. The Atlantic expects this month’s subscription orders to be double an average month’s.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/business/media/21atlantic.html?_r=1&ref=technology&pagewanted=print

The Machine is Us/ing Us

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g