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  • Report from TED 2010
    201002101109

    I'm at the TED conference this week, held in Long Beach, California. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and it is an annual gathering of amazing ideas and stories. Here's a list of TED 2010 speakers.

    In past years, I've posted summaries of all the presentations, but this year I'm going to write a daily wrap-up instead. I'll post my first this evening.

    The highlight of TED each year is the TED prize. The winner of this year's prize is celebrity chef and international nutrition advocate Jamie Oliver, who gets $100,000 and "the opportunity to present his wish to change the world." CNN is live streaming Oliver’s talk, "in which he will reveal his one wish to change the world." You'll be able to watch it here at 8:50 p.m. (ET).

    I was happy to learn that Intelligentsia Coffee is making espresso drinks for everyone at TED, and our pal Kyle Glanville, Intelligentsia's director of espresso research and development and first place winner of the National Barista Championship, is pulling shots. Kyle just made me a mind bending double espresso!

    Ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro is about to perform, so I'm signing off to enjoy his performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody."

    Above, a multiscreen, ultrafast Google Earth station, called Liquid Galaxy. I shot a video that I'll upload later. Photo by Marla Aufmuth, an old Wired colleague of mine.


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  • The Future Journalist: Thoughts from Two Generations

    Shared by Digittante

    Another day, another "journalism is dead, long-live journalism" article... >>>

    Sree Sreenivasan is a professor and Dean of Student Affairs at Columbia Journalism School and contributing editor at DNAinfo.com.

    Ask a journalist about the state of the media and the answer you get may range from dire predictions about  journalism’s imminent demise to cautious optimism. The doomsayers point to falling newspaper circulation, fragmenting TV audiences and the 18,000+ jobs lost in 2009. Sites like PaperCuts, which painstakingly tracked those job losses (and has already noted 815 losses for January of 2010), and Twitter feeds like TheMediaIsDying, help reinforce the notion that the American media is, well, dying.

    For the optimists, this is an exciting time of great opportunities, with more media being created and consumed than ever before. Here’s part of what Joshua Micah Marshall, creator of Talking Points Memo, told the graduating class at Columbia Journalism School last year:

    It’s the people who are entering the profession right now that are going to create the editorial models, the publishing models, the business models, that define journalism in the 21st century.

    And that is something that’s exciting, it’s a challenge, which, in my mind, totally outweighs the bumps in the road, the instabilities, and the lack of security that journalists face today that maybe they didn’t 20 years ago.

    Of course, no one knows for sure exactly where we are headed, but this seems like a time when preparing to deal with the changes ahead would be a good idea.

    And that’s what Mashable did earlier this week with its fourth Mashable NextUp NYC, as part of Social Media Week. Held at the 92YTribeca — the hip, downtown version of the venerable 92nd Street Y of the Upper East Side (“free Wi-Fi” announces a chalkboard at the door) — the event attempted to look at the changing media landscape and the evolving role of journalists in it. When Mashable’s Adam Hirsch asked former contributor (and my student at Columbia J-school) Vadim Lavrusik to do a public conversation with me on the topic, we decided to bill it as “The Future Journalist: Thoughts from Two Generations.”


    The Tra-digital Journalist


    Once upon a time, I used to be a young, fresh-faced journalist of the future, so it horrifies me that I’ve turned into the voice of an older generation. But Vadim is an example of what it will take to succeed in the future: a balance between the traditional values and skills of journalism, and the digital skills and mindset that are so critical these days. My colleague, Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, coined the term “tra-digital journalist” and it describes Vadim and so many other young journalists today (be sure to read his Mashable post on 8 Must-Have Traits for Tomorrow’s Journalist, which served as a backbone for our discussion).

    The concept of the tra-digital journalist is among the many ideas we discussed and we’ve put together our slides below and also have a Twitcam live-streamed video of the conversation.

    Here are some of the other key concepts that we discussed:


    The Fundamentals Are Critical


    Despite the importance of technology, it’s the fundamentals of journalism that are still critical. The fundamentals include: great reporting and writing, journalistic ethics, specialization by topic or beat, investigative skills, news judgment. Also invaluable, critical thinking and critical reading — too many journalists don’t pay attention to either.


    The Future Journalist Is…


    We identified specific digitally-oriented skills and traits a future journalist would need. These include being:

    • a multimedia storyteller: using the right digital skills and tools for the right story at the right time.
    • a community builder: facilitating conversation among various audiences, being a community manager.
    • a trusted pointer: finding and sharing great content, within a beat(s) or topic area(s); being trusted by others to filter out the noise.
    • a blogger and curator: has a personal voice, is curator of quality web content and participant in the link economy.
    • able to work collaboratively: knowing how to harness the work of a range of people around him/her — colleagues in the newsroom; experts in the field; trusted citizen journalists; segments of the audience, and more.


    Business Items


    We discussed some business-ish skills and traits that are going to be useful.

    • an entrepreneurial spirit: having an experimental open-mindedness, being an innovator.
    • being entrepreneurial within an existing company: you don’t have to be at a startup to be entrepreneurial; there might be a lot you can do within some large corporations.
    • business savvy: understands the business of his/her industry; understand value of content; understand new media business models
    • knows & embraces metrics: understands the value and danger of metrics; studies today’s major metrics tools, Google Analytics, Omniture, Nielsen, Bit.ly, etc
    • thinks “Career Management,” Not “Next Job”: understands value of thinking long-term; thinks strategically about career choices; keeps re-tooling

    Be a Permanent Learner


    Most journalists don’t appreciate how much better they’d be at their jobs if they were constantly learning new ideas and skills. Such a learner’s media diet may include:

    Being on deadline or in crisis mode is not the time to try and figure out new technology. When the plane lands in the Hudson, it’s too late to figure out Twitter. When your company starts layoffs, it’s too late to figure out LinkedIn. Start carving out time to learn new concepts and tools.


    Social Media


    Wouldn’t be Mashable if we didn’t talk about social media. Using the syllabus of my Social Media Skills for Journalists course (developed with adjunct professor Adam Glenn), we outlined what social media can do for journalists:

    • find new story ideas, trends and sources
    • connect with audience(s)
    • bring attention and traffic
    • help them create, craft and enhance their personal brands — this point is absolutely essential for journalists to grasp. Once upon a time your work spoke for itself. Nowadays, there’s too much competing for everyone’s attention and you have to make sure you get your work out there and get it noticed.

    Smart journalists understand that social media is for listening, not just broadcasting or sharing what’s on your mind.


    Mashable’s Convening Power


    As with most events these days, I learned much from the audience Q&A and the networking sessions before and after the talk. My boss, Nicholas Lemann, Columbia J-school Dean and New Yorker contributor, often talks about the convening power of a place like our school: the ability to bring together influential people to have important conversations. I saw up close for the first time Mashable’s in-person convening power, having experienced its online convening power for a long time now. Attendees included a cross-section of folks doing some of the most interesting work in media today. And, as you will hear in the video, many people in the room knew more about the topic that I did, including Edelman’s Steve Rubel and members of the Mashable editorial team (who, in some ways, are living prototypes of tomorrow’s journalists).


    The Folly of Predicting the Future


    As we say in the slides, the social media scene today is where radio was in 1912, where TV was in 1950, where the web was in 1996. A lot of wonderful opportunities and terrible mistakes lie ahead of us. Predicting the future of journalism at any of those points would have resulted in a lot of wrong predictions back then. While we are sure many of our predictions are going to be wrong in specifics, we have the chutzpah to presume they are right directionally. We welcome your feedback and input.

    Connect with Vadim Lavrusik on Twitter (@lavrusik) and via his blog, Lavrusik.com and his new project covering startups in New York City, NYC3.0.

    Connect with Sree Sreenivasan on Twitter (@sreenet) and via his Facebook tech tips page, Facebook.com/SreeTips. His columns about the media and technology run in DNAinfo.com, a Manhattan news site he helped put together with Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts (whose family just bought the Cubs and Wrigley Field). The syllabus and notes for his Social Media Skills for Journalists course is at bit.ly/socmediaskills and his workshops collection is at bit.ly/workshops. On Friday, Feb. 5, 2010, he is hosting two free webcasts, Basic Twitter for Journalists and  Advanced Twitter for Journalists, one of them featuring Mashable founder Peter Cashmore. Details and archive at bit.ly/columbiajtw2.

    Image courtesy of 92YTribeca in New York City


    Reviews: Facebook, Google Analytics, Lifehacker, LinkedIn, Mashable, Twitcam, Twitter

    Tags: journalism, Journalist, media, nextup-nyc, social media week

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  • An Apology To Our Readers

    On Monday evening I received a phone call from someone I trust who told me that one of our interns had asked for compensation in exchange for a blog post. Specifically, this intern had allegedly asked for a Macbook Air in exchange for a post about a startup.

    After an investigation we determined that the allegation was true. In fact, on at least one other occasion this intern was almost certainly given a computer in exchange for a post.

    The intern in question has admitted to some of the allegations, and has denied others. We suspended this person while we were sorting through exactly what happened. When it became clear yesterday that there was no question that this person had requested, and in one case taken, compensation for a post, the intern was terminated.

    This was not one of our full time writers, and so the frequency of posts was light. Nevertheless, we’ve also deleted all content created by this person on our blogs. We are fairly certain that most of the posts weren’t tainted in any way, but to be sure we’ve removed every word written by this person on the TechCrunch network.

    Our attorneys have advised us not to disclose the name of the individual because the person is not a legal adult. We also think that, given the intern’s age, it may not be appropriate to make their identity public.

    We are all shaken here at TechCrunch – this is someone who was our friend and who we trusted to be honest with our readers. Our hope is that the intern learns something from this experience and grows into the kind of person that will be more welcome in this community.

    I apologize to each one of you. I promise that we will always maintain complete transparency with you on how we operate, even when it isn’t such an easy thing to do.

    Update: Daniel, the intern in question, has decided to talk about this situation publicly on his blog. I’m glad that he has. You can read his thoughts here.

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  • Best Connected Are Not The Most Influential Spreaders
    The study of social networks has thrown up more than a few surprises over the years. In a social network, most nodes are not linked to each other but can easily be reached by a small number of steps. This is the so-called small worlds network.

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  • Don’t Think Chrome OS Will Compete With iPad? Watch This Video.

    Late last week, I wrote a post about how netbooks running Chrome OS and the iPad were on a collision course. Some people took exception to that, noting the iPad was only a touchscreen device while Chrome OS was created to be used with more traditional computing form factors, like netbooks and laptops. But there’s a new concept video that has surfaced on a Chromium Project page that very much shows how the two could and should compete head-on in the touch tablet space.

    Again, this is just a concept video at this point, but it clearly shows what the people building Chrome OS are thinking about for future products. Oh, and in case you’re worried that since Chromium OS is an open source project, this is just some random person making these videos that Google is unlikely to use for Chrome OS, they were made by Glen Murphy, a Googler working on Chrome (with a sense of humor).

    Clearly, the tablet in this video is bigger than the iPad, but don’t rule out Apple making a larger tablet as well. It’s worth noting that Google’s tablet concept video was uploaded January 25, two days before the iPad unveiling.

    For more of a taste of what Google has in mind with these tablets, check out the concept pictures as well. Watch the video below.

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  • How To Ease the Pressure of Blogging

    A Guest Post by David Turnbull of Adventures of a Barefoot Geek

    After the initial excitement of launching a new blog fades most bloggers are a few steps away from being overwhelmed with the pressure of blogging to the point that they quit, losing the momentum they were building up and all the progress they’d made. This is an unfortunately common occurence.

    Writing. Guest posting. Commenting. Responding to emails. Continuous learning. It’s a lot to take in and if you’re not adequately prepared to face challenges as they appear there’s a likelihood that one day you’ll choose not to publish another post and then you’re back to square one.

    Recently, just a fornight ago in fact I became conscious of these feelings as my most recent blog was reaching the 6 month mark. I’d surpassed all the goals I’d set for myself but there was stilll that worry of being locked into my work instead of having control over it. I have no problem with hard work, but when it hits the point of dominating my life I prefer to step back and ask myself “How can I make this easier on myself?”

    And that’s what I really want to share in this article. This is not about escaping the work of blogging (because I do honestly enjoy it, just not when it causes imbalance in my life) but to relieve yourself of the constant worry and uncertainty that blogging entails.

    Set smaller goals

    I’m an advocate of thinking big in most areas of life. If you’re dedicated and disciplined then ambition can often fuel creativity and drive. But blogging is different. There are so many interwoven components to blogging that a big goal often becomes an aimless goal, and an aimless goal is as bad as no goal.

    Writing is the most important task for a blogger, so let’s use that as an example. One common belief held by many writers is that you should sit down in the morning at 9am and then not move until 5pm. The idea is that this forces you to write. Do this for 3 days in a row and you’ll lose whatever passion for blogging you ever had. The alternative is much more attractive.

    When you sit down to write tell yourself this magical phrase: I’ll be satisified when I’ve written X words. Replace X with the smallest amount of words you can be realistically satisfied with. Once you’ve made this decision and are no longer constricted by outrageous word counts or time frames there’s no anxiety as you work and I expect you’ll find yourself greatly surpassing the “satisfactory metrics” you set for yourself.

    Clarify and simplify

    What do you want to get out of blogging? Answer that question at least once a month for as long as you own or write for a blog. I imagine most people will respond “to make money” and that’s fine, but there has to be a motivation higher than that, because blogging isn’t exactly the most effective approach to generating an income.

    Once you understand with crystal clear clarity why you’re blogging you can eliminate a ton of the garbage that leads to blogging-based stress.

    When I first started blogging I had the “make money” goal lodged in my brain, but over the past few weeks I’ve had a shift in my thinking, in that what I truly love is writing and making exciting (and sometimes weird) changes in my life. After I had clarified this I realized that my actions were inconsistent with what I wanted. Instead of writing I was spending most of my time leaving comments on blogs, posting in forums, and using other standard blog promotion tactics. Most of this was unfullfilling.

    Now my approach to writing and building a readership is far simpler. These days I do 2 things:

    • Write (for my own blog and guest posts such as this).
    • Care (responding to tweets, emails, blog comments etc).

    This has been enormous, so don’t underestimate it. Clarify exactly what you want out of blogging and shape your actions to accomodate for that. Sure, if I were to leave 20+ comments on blogs per day, or become an active member in lots of communities my readership would probably climb faster. But at the same time the very essence of what I love about blogging would be lost, and that’d be setting myself up for eventual failure. Classic example of short term sacrifice (a small boost in traffic) for long term gain (endless fulfillment).

    Become a “what matters” blogger

    Conventional blogging advice indicates that you should write 3-5 times per week without fail. Yes, in the early days of blogging (at least the first 5-6 months) consistency is crucial. You need to prove that you’ve got the chops and that you’re not going to abandon your readership. But, aside from news blogs and blogs that have multiple contributors, I’d suggest you lower the frequency significantly.

    This is something I lifted from Tina of ThinkSimpleNow.com who is well known for taking multiple months away from her blog. I doubt everyone could be met with success using that approach, but the lesson still holds true: to ease the pressure of writing and heighten the respect from your readership only write and publish content that truly matters.

    What “matters” is a subjective gauge of course, but at its core it’s your own highest inner standard that you must hold yourself too. Through this approach you will end up spending more time writing individual posts, but:

    • Each post will provide you and your readers with lasting fulfillment.
    • There’ll be less of a frantic rush to publish content.
    • Freeing yourself from a strict deadline and schedule is incredibly liberating.

    As a poll here on Problogger indicated, lowering your frequency is not what causes people to unsubscribe from your blog, it’s posting too much that readers dislike. Here’s a quote from Darren himself:

    I’ve lost count of the number of bloggers who tell me that scaling back their posting frequency a little brings a new life to their blog…scaling back a little means that they are able to develop better quality posts, that they get more comments per post (the posts remain on the front page of the blog longer) and readers say that they appreciate it.

    People don’t unsubscribe from blogs when every piece of content provides them with genuine value.

    Successful blogging requires sustained effort over a long period of time. I don’t want to make it seem like you can eliminate hard work and the anxiety that comes with the process. But you can make it easier on yourself. Take action to ease the pressure of blogging and refocus on what you truly care about.

    What strategies do you use to ease the pressure of blogging?

    David Turnbull is a life-long geek who loves to write about life hacking, simplicity and technology at his blog Adventures of a Barefoot Geek.

    Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

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  • The World's Oldest Swiss Army Knife [Multitools]

    This could very well be the world's first Swiss Army Knife. Bearing a striking resemblance to modern multi-tools, it has at least six distinct functions and originates from the Roman Empire circa 200 A.D.

    If our multi-tools today, with their screwdrivers, pliers, and the rest, center on fixing things, this Roman predecessor is more useful for enjoying the pleasures of food. The tool includes a spike which historians think was used to snag snails out of their shells. A hook-like spatula is thought to have helped coax sauce out of the bottle.

    Of course, the device also includes a fork, spoon, and knife for mealtime, as well as a toothpick to clean up your grill afterward. Amazingly, all of these tools appear to fold into the handle to keep everything compact, just like Swiss Army Knives and Leatherman multi-tools we use today.

    The tool was found in the Mediterranean area nearly twenty years ago, so technically it's not Swiss at all, and it predates the modern Swiss Army Knife, invented in 1897, by nearly 1,800 years.

    This very old gadget is currently being exhibited as part of a collection of Greek and Roman artifacts at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. [Daily Mail]


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  • The Last 20 Years at Second and Pine

    SecondandPine.jpg

    Jerry Garcia has had his eye on the corner of Second and Pine Streets for the last 20 years. He writes about the site in this week's paper:

    The most notable feature of the block between Stewart and Pine streets and Second and Third avenues was a hole. It stretched across the whole west half of the lot, 30 feet deep and gaping. This is where it was all supposed to happen. The 1 Hotel & Residences announced the arrival of a new sensibility, advertised with plants and warm abstract textures on banners adorning the construction walls and the neighboring Macy's garage...

    The site was once home to one of my favorite international-style buildings, with light green terra-cotta tile shaping ribbon windows on its facade. It housed a rather small furniture store aptly named Grand Furniture. Boarded up prior to my arrival in Seattle in the first month of 1990, I was never able to walk into it, but I enjoyed its defiant presence downtown. It felt like some very straitlaced fellow in a brightly colored suit. It was cleared away in the early 1990s, and the site slumbered as a blank piece of land until 1 began.

    Excavation for 1 began two and a half years ago—"and the hole was born," Garcia writes. Now that 1 is no more, the hole has been filled in. It isn't the only huge hole people downtown have walked by lately; City Hall looks down into another one. What is with Seattle's obsession with moving around dirt? Where did the dirt to fill in the hole at Second and Pine come from? And what's going to happen at that corner now? Read all of Garcia's piece HERE.

    (Blame Mr. Garcia for the Soundgarden pun in the headline. He insisted!)

    [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

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  • Current TV Tires of Twitter, Kills Off MySpace Instead [VIDEO]

    The Twouble with Twitters is that the Twitter jokes are pretty much dead. It’s no shocker anymore that tweets are pointless babble. So who else can Current TV pick on with its viral video parodies?

    Easy: MySpace. Or rather the death of MySpace.

    In its latest SuperNews! masterpiece — the aptly named The Death of MySpace — our Twitter-obsessed friend Craig is confronted with the reality that MySpace is a dead zone and that he needs to kill off his profile to regain social status. In this cartoonish parallel reality, even masturbating is more socially acceptable than logging on to MySpace.

    Although Current takes every cheap shot in the book, you have to admit that The Death of MySpace still has some hilarious moments and one-liners worth repeating. Check it out below and let us know what you think in the comments.

    [via SocialTimes]


    Reviews: MySpace, Twitter

    Tags: Current, humor, myspace, viral video

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  • As Publishers Try To Adapt To The iPad, Startups Spring To The Rescue


    Now that the iPad is finally official, any publisher that wasn’t already figuring out how to bring their content to a color, touchscreen device is probably scrambling to do it now. That’s a bit easier said than done though — while it probably wouldn’t be too tough to simply scan in text and present it in a static format, converting it into something that actually takes advantage of the new platform is going to prove difficult. That challenge is giving rise to some new startups looking to help publishers make the transition from paper to digital.

    One such company is called Inkling, a small startup that’s raised $1 million in seed money from Ram Shriram, Mitch Kapor, and other angel investors. Inkling is looking to help textbook makers convert their content into digitized versions that are more than just static reproductions of the original text. In other words, they’re helping spur the kind of innovation that could change the way we learn (but could take publishers a long time to figure out if they’re left to their own devices).

    So what exactly can the platform add beyond the text these publishers already have? CEO Matt MacInnis says that Inkling is building tools that give publishers a scalable way to add interactive and dynamic content. They’ll be able to include interactive figures and quizzes. And they’ll be able to give their texts cloud connectivity, allowing students to download new, updated content. Other benefits from connecting to the cloud include the ability to sync your work between multiple devices, and the ability to add social features to a text. Imagine if you had a question about a particular diagram in your text; you could send it to your professor, and they could leave an annotation in the book that would be visible to all other students.

    Inkling is currently in talks with all four of the major textbook companies, though MacInnis wouldn’t divulge whether they’d signed any deals yet. He does say that the company is also interested in working with smaller publishers, including free projects like California’s free textbook initiative.

    But Inking isn’t the only startup looking to help publishers take advantage of the iPad. Another player is PixelMags, which is looking to help magazine publishers make the leap themselves. PixelMags has actually been around for a while, offering to help magazines get their content on the App Store for consumption on the iPhone. As of today, they’re making the jump to the bigger screen. They company says that it will allow publishers to include both text and streaming media in their magazines, and they’ll take care of getting the content into the App Store.

    It’s great to see companies that are looking to help publishers truly take advantage of the iPad, but I am concerned that Apple may soon step on their toes. During its event today, Apple showed off its native eBook reader, but it wasn’t clear if it would be offering a similar universal reader for magazines or textbooks. I suspect they will, otherwise each magazine and book could have an inconsistent user interface. And that means companies like Inkling will have to adjust their content to work within whatever file formats Apple allows for.

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  • Pondering The Apple Tablet's Print Revolution [Apple]

    The Apple tablet could change everything. That's what people are hoping for, revolution. But revolutions don't actually happen overnight, especially if you're talking about turning around an entire diseased, lumbering industry, like publishing.

    The medium is the message, supposedly. The iPod was a flaming telegram to the music industry; the iPhone, a glowing billboard about the way we'd consume software. The Apple tablet? Possibly no less than the reinvention of the digital word. If you look very generally at the content that defined the device—or maybe vice versa—the iPod danced with music, the iPhone's slung to apps and, as we were first in reporting a few months ago, the tablet's bailiwick might very well be publishing.

    Since then, the number of publishers—of newspapers, magazines and books—reported to be talking to Apple has exploded: NYT, Conde Nast, McGraw Hill, Oberlin, HarperCollins, the "six largest" trade publishers, and Time, among many others, are making noise about splaying their content on the tablet. A giant iPod not only for video, photos and music, but for words. That's what they're lining up to make ritual sacrifices for. Publishers want this, whatever it is.

    I say "whatever it is," because, for all of the talk and pomp and demos, they haven't seen the Apple tablet. They don't know what it's like. They don't know how to develop for it. As Peter Kafka's reported, neither Conde Nast (publisher of Wired) nor Time will be ready to show anything for the tablet on Wednesday, much less a mindblowing reinvention of the magazine, because Apple's keeping them at arm's length. (Why? Secrecy, which matters far more than launch partners. All the leaks about the tablet have come out of third parties, like the goddamn publishers, so Apple's not telling them much more than they are the rest of us.)

    The sole exception, that we know of, is the New York Times. The Gray Lady has a team of three developers embedded in Cupertino. This makes a certain kind of sense, given the content the tablet is framing, and which publisher is currently best suited to delivering that content in a new experience.

    When it comes to experimenting with the display and digestion of the digital word, the NYT has aggressively been the most innovative major publication on the web: Just look at the incredible infographics, the recently launched NYT Skimmer and the NYT Reader. Logically, they're the print publication perhaps most able to realize the early potential of a device that's essentially a window for displaying content. And it doesn't hurt that Apple loves the NYT.

    The tablet might just be a big iPhone, but the key word is "big." What defines the tablet in opposition to the iPhone is the screen size, less than any kind of steroidal shot to processing muscle. A 10-inch screen will hold 10 times the screen real estate of the iPhone's 3.5-inch display. That's room for ten fingers to touch, navigate and manipulate, not two. Real estate for full web pages, for content apps that are so much more than news repackaged for a pocket-sized screen. The ability to really "touch what you want to learn about" is an "inflection point for navigation," that is, the potential to truly "navigate serendipitously," as the NYT's media columnist David Carr put it to me.

    Think of it as a more tangible version of the force that drives you from a Wikipedia page about gravity to one about the geological history of the planet Vulcan, touching and feeling your way through everything from a taxonomy for Star Wars fanboys to the Victoria's Secret catalog.

    The Wikipedia example might be particularly apt, actually. If we use iPhone history as a guide, given that the tablet is likely to be an evolution of the iPhone software and interface, it's likely these publications will be content "apps" that will be islands unto themselves: So it might be easy to wander all over the NYT's island via the tips of your fingers, but not so easy to float off to the WSJ's abode. At least to start, we assume it'll much like iPhone apps. For all of the very whizzy Minority Report wannabe demos from Sports Illustrated, we don't know what the content apps are actually going to look like, or what they'll be able to do on the tablet. In particular, what is it they'll be able to do that they couldn't do on the web right now, given how powerful the web and web applications have become over the last couple of years? (Look at everything Google's doing, particularly in web apps.) The question, as NYU Journalism professor Mitch Stephens told me, is whether the tablet's capabilities can "actually get the Times and Conde Nast to think beyond print?"

    If you think the newspaper and magazine industry is slow, the book industry is prehistoric. As whipped into a fervor as HarperCollins and McGraw Hill may be about jumping aboard the full color Apple tablet express to carry them into a new age of print with "ebooks enhanced with video, author interviews and social-networking applications," past the Amazon schooner, they take years to move. And they're likely in just as in the dark as everybody else.

    There's also the macro issue that it just takes time for people to figure shit out. Think about the best, most polished iPhone apps today. Now try to remember the ones that launched a week after the App Store opened. It's a world of difference. New media, and how people use them, aren't figured out overnight. Or fade back to the internet circa 2006. Broadband wasn't exactly new then, but so much of the stuff we do now, all the time—YouTube, Twitter—wasn't around.

    The apparent readiness to yoke the fortunes of the sickly publishing industry to Apple, and its tablet, oozing out of info scraps and whispers, like a publishing executive telling the NYT that, versus Amazon, "Apple has put an offer together that helps publishers and, by extension, authors," is deeply curious. The publishing industry wants the iPod of reading, but they've clearly forgotten the music industry's traumatic experience when they got theirs. Apple basically wrested control of legal digital music, and the music industry got far less than they wanted to make up for it. Hollywood, in turn, played their hand far differently, scattering bits of movies and TV shows across tons of services, so no one had any leverage, especially not Apple. (Hence, Apple's negotiations for a subscription TV service with Disney or CBS always seem delicate at best.) I don't know why Apple would be any more magnanimous with publishers than record labels, given the chance to be gatekeeper.

    The gatekeeper matters, because it dictates the answer to publishing's current crisis: "How we gonna get paid?" The NYT is bringing back metering to its website; book publishers weep over the fact that Amazon has decided books are worth precisely $9.99. Publishers want to control their financial destiny. Apple wants to control every element of the experience on their devices. (Apparently, they'll get to.) I want to be able to read the NYT, WSJ, The New Yorker, Penthouse and Wired, in all of their dynamic, interactive, multitouch glory easily and cheaply. Ads might be the secret to making that possible. Ultra targeted, innovative ads designed just for the tablet. At least, in the future—Apple's acquisition of mobile ad firm Quattro, and its CEO's ascension to VP, have happened too recently to bear much fruit yet.

    Point being, there's a lot of stuff publishers have to figure out, from the big stuff to the little stuff. Apple hasn't exactly sped up the process by giving them much to work with, either, but for one publisher that we know of—and maybe a couple we don't. The tablet might change the digital word the way the iPod changed digital music. But it'll take some time.

    Thanks to Joel for that awesome render; original CC printing press image from JanGlas/Flickr


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  • A Tale of Two Cockpits [Image Cache]

    By way of our own Joel Johnson we get to see a very gritty, very geeky collection of photographs this fine evening. Above, the cab of a Panther Command vehicle. Below, the svelte cockpit of a Virgin Pendolino train:

    Both images are the work of photographer Anthony Dickenson. Click 'em for full size.

    I also encourage you to sample the rest of the portfolio, as they run an interesting gamut of urban landscapes, machinery and even a vintage pic of something our parents once called a "newspaper printing press."

    Oh, I'm sorry, I've just been told that last one is still around. [Stem Agency]


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