My friend Jay Graves, the CEO of the Nashville-based Hobby-Lobby International (the Radio Control airplane direct marketer, not the retail chain with the same name that sells basket-weaving materials), is all giddy today because Gizmodo has planted a wet-kiss on a new product his company is selling: a wireless video camera unit that attaches to an R/C airplane and streams video to the R/C operator on the ground who wears some funky virtual-reality goggles. In other words, it’s like a first-person pilot simulation game, but instead of “simulation,” you are watching real-time video that allows you to experience the flight as if you are sitting in the cockpit of the model airplane you are operating. Very expensive military drones have been around for a while, but this takes the concept down market with a big-boy toy that costs around $550. (Since becoming Hobby-Lobby’s CEO, Jay has been trying to entice me into getting an R/C airplane, but I told him that all my toys are from the Apple Store or Lowes. I think I’ll take him up on his invitation to join him for a trial flight “in” one of these, however.)
Here’s some video of how the PilotView FPV 2400 works:
The solution to gridlock on our overcrowded roads is to take to the air in a plane-car hybrid that will revolutionise the way society works. [My 2008 resolution: more links to stories about flying cars.]
Don’t call it a flying car. It’s a “roadable aircraft.” It’s named the Transition, and the first full-scale model is taking shape inside a former machine shop on an industrial back alley in Woburn, MA
Since Kleinheider joined NashvillePost.com and started this blog (which is an improved version of what he was doing at WKRN), it has become the definitive curator of online information related to this topic.
BusinessWeek has launched the first in a series of free online video courses, including nine lessons from high-profile financial journalist Gene Marcial on how to invest in the stock market.
Over on the Hammock.com blog, Custom Media Craft, Jamie Roberts has posted a look at how we communicate with photographer before a shoot. Also, there’s a dandy video sidebar.
“If the magazines published two or three years from now aren’t different, we’re in trouble. The current magazine model won’t take us into the next five years, let alone the next 100 years.”
“…being unburdened by print allowed the team at Infoworld the opportunity to focus on the changing needs of their customers and to develop online, event and mobile products.”
“Yes, print is a burden. It’s expensive to produce for it. It’s expensive to manufacture. It’s expensive to deliver. It limits your space. It limits your timing. It’s stale when it’s fresh. It is one-size-fits-all and can’t be adapted to the needs of each user. It comes with no ability to click for more. It has no search. It can’t be forwarded. It has no archive. It kills trees. It uses energy. It usually brings unions. And you really should recycle it. Wow, when you think about it, print sucks.
So what was the theme? Print is a burden. Unfortunately, saying “print is a burden” implies that there are other options out there that are not burdens. Frankly, the web is a burden. Traveling to events IDG puts on is a burden. Trying to synch my phone and computer is a burden. As Scott Karp displayed in a post yesterday, trying to discover which among 2,000 different news stories on the same topic is a burden.
Despite my love (and I use the word love very deliberately) of the magazine medium, I have never been burdened by thinking print is a hammer and every communications or marketing challenge is a nail.
Granted, my company has published magazines since the day it opened 16 years ago. But even back then, we also created lots of “interactive multimedia” (published on CD-ROM). And in those pre-web days, we also managed “forums” on CompuServe. As a custom media creator, I’ve never felt “burdened” by any medium that helps build strong relationships between our clients (associations and companies) and their members or customers. If smoke signals would help forge and sustain those relationships, we’d be all over it.
Those who know me — even through this blog — know I personally agree with Jeff Jarvis on his somewhat satirical indictment of print. I’m about as paper-free as someone can get in their personal and business practices, but I’m no print vegan (did I just create a new buzzterm?). As Jeff is writing a book and writes for newspapers and magazines, it’s not like he’s a print vegan either. But my print aversion is neither “environmental” (as I always say , if paper is the cause of global warming, someone needs to share that inconvenient truth with this guy) nor based on any belief that print is inherently bad. What I find a burden is poorly designed, written and produced print. What I find a burden is the clutter and confusion print and paper often add to my already cluttered life.
Bottomline: Print is not the burden. My time is the burden. If you publish a beautiful magazine with articles that really matter to me — that instruct, inform or celebrate something I feel strongly about, it is no burden on me. If you help me get to the information and insight I need to live a fuller life or conduct business in a more flexible and productive way, your blogging and tweeting and bookmarking does not burden me. Useless, redundant, meaningless, re-shuffled drivel is the burden. It can be delivered via print or on a weblog or a mobile device. Crap is a burden no matter what the medium used to deliver it.
Throughout its network of 300 print publications and 450 Web sites in 85 countries, IDG has converted smaller magazines to online only…but print versions of some publications are likely to be around for many years.
What is it about magazine economics that makes it worth it to spend millions on pictures of celebrities’ babies vs., say, not laying off a few dozen reporters?
I just love it when breaking down iron-curtain metaphors are used in narrow intramural tech food fights over something no one outside a small band of geeks and online community media wonks have ever heard of.
A new feature that will be recognized as a tumblelog by the tiny fraction of the world’s inhabitants who might know what a tumblelog is, has been added to Google Reader. Wisely recognizing that tumblelog is a far-edge concept, Google chose not use such a term in announcing the feature on the Google Reader weblog.
I would spend a sentence or two describing why I think it is odd that Google is getting into tumblelog hosting through its RSS newsreader platform, however, the explanation would be so esoteric that even my eyes are glazing over at the thought of how geeky my reasoning is. It has to do with having a feature as a part of an RSS reader for sharing items one finds via means other than an RSS reader — but like I said, who cares?
Maybe it will be a great feature for someone. But I’m scratching my head at who might use it other than current Google Reader users who already have a “share” feature. Wouldn’t someone who might actually comprehend what’s going on with the tumblelog aspects of this feature prefer to display such sharing gestures at a URL like rex.tumblr.com than, say, http://www.google.com/reader/shared/02167497403971826980?
Or perhaps I’m having difficulty understanding it because I rarely use Google Reader.
Sidenote: If you want to see a tumblelog, RexHammock.com is an example. It’s where I share items I run across that are bigger than a bookmark and smaller than a blog post and less fleeting than a tweet on Twitter. And another thing: if something makes it to my tumblelog, chances are it has nothing to do with business or technology or media or anything remotely related to this weblog. And wisely recognizing that few people I know use the term tumblelog, I don’t refer to it as a tumblelog except in blog posts about the topic of tumblelogs.
Quote from Kohi: “It’s my belief that you just can’t get great design out of a design agency with a staff larger than a dozen or two. Design doesn’t scale well, in my opinion, or at least it doesn’t do so easily.”
I’m anticipating an off-the-grid day, but before heading out I couldn’t help myself from pointing to this instant blog-post classic from Seth Godin — a public dress-down of a newly assigned copy-editor from his book publisher. It’s the post authors and writers who blog dream of writing, but never due: discretion being the better part of valor, and all.
I’m sure there will be authors and writers all over the world bookmarking this post and e-mailing it around today.
Here’s a snippet:
“Just got some work back from a new copyeditor hired by my publisher. She did a flawless job. She also wrecked my work. Totally wrecked it. By sanding off every edge, removing every idiom, making each and every fact literally correct, she made it boring and dry and mechanical. If they have licenses for copyeditors, she should have hers revoked.”
I guess an e-mail from Seth to the editor would have conveyed the message, but I’m very glad we all got to be spectators on this one.
Later: As a clarification (thanks to the comment Seth made below), read the entire post and you’ll see that Seth’s point is this: an author has the power to respond with STET.
Patrick Ruffini’s archive of the ever-changing front pages of Presidential campaign websites now has a twitter account that is powered by the Flickr set’s RSS feed (using twitterfeed.com): twitter.com/screengrab08
I’m sorry. The title of this post is a joke. I’m merely referring to Kara’s post in which she talks about informally polling some friends outside the bubble of Silicon Valley (where she lives and works) regarding their awareness of Twitter and some other services that, well, a few of us use obsessively but that haven’t reached a level of awareness — even a level of obscurity — among “real” people.
Says Kara:
“I conducted a little experiment among the more than 100 folks gathered for the wedding (in Washington, DC), all of whom were quite intelligent, armed with all kinds of the latest devices (many, many people had iPhones, for example) and not sluggish about technology. They were also made up of a wide range of ages and genders, from kids to seniors. And so I asked a large group of people –- about 30 — and here is the grand total who knew what Twitter was: 0
As I’ve blogged here before, I’ve given up on trying to explain Twitter. I know how I use it and why I like it. But, as with most of the social media or gizmo-technology I experiment with: I really don’t care who uses — or doesn’t. I’m not going to attempt to convert anyone — although, I guess adding my Twitter account to my business card is an implicit act of network-effect evangelism and endorsement.
Over the years, I’ve learned that when it comes to certain types of new media, the gap between geek adoption and “real people” adoption is typically wide.
I’ve mentioned on this blog that in 1996, I gave a presentation about the Internet to the 300-member Downtown Nashville Rotary Club. I asked for a show of hands from the audience filled with civic and business leaders: “How many of you have your e-mail address printed on your business card?” I recall precisely that six people raised their hands. Six.
Two years later, I gave a similar presentation to the same group and asked the same question. Nearly everyone in the audience raised their hands.
One of the reasons (one among several) I register on new “social networking” services is to watch their adoption rates — often there is no adoption rate, but almost always there’s a long lag time between geek and real-world registrations. For example, I registered on LinkedIn on February 3, 2004 — over four years ago. For a year or so, I had a grand total of 3-4 contacts, all geeks, and probably all of them personal friends of the creators of the service.
I had nearly forgotten that I’d registered on the service when, a couple of years ago, I started getting a few more connection requests when they added a feature that allows users to upload their contact list and bounce it against a database of LinkedIn users. (I’ve written before about this use of e-mail as a means to assert identity and serve as a rudimentary precursor to some way in the future where we can all easily migrate our “connections” from service to service. In the past month, I’ve received more LinkedIn connection requests than in the previous 3 1/2 years combined — and they’re all coming from my off-line connections. But still, a poll of my offline friends would probably still reveal that few of them have heard of LinkedIn.
So, as for Kara’s friends. Mine are the same. I regularly ask people if they’ve ever heard of Twitter. I then work my way up to services like Flickr. (They’ve all heard of Google, for the record.)
Kara is correct. No real person has ever heard of Twitter.
Sidenote: About two months ago, I spent a 30 minute cab ride from Baltimore (BWI) to DC explaining my use of Twitter to a commissioner of the FCC. Later that day, I spent 15 minutes in a similar discussion of Twitter with 12 CEOs of business-to-business media companies who were perplexed by my use of the service — as they were with my early blogging many years ago.
As I listen to myself explain Twitter, I’m surprised anyone uses it. However, as I discovered just yesterday, using Twitter makes solving problems a snap if you happen to ask a question that someone who’s following you can answer.
Frankly, I think it’s a good thing that Twitter has not gone mainstream yet. But that’s another post for another day.
Later: I believe that Twitter — or something like it — will go “mainstream” one day. It’s just not going to be “soon” in geek-time.
Note: I’m stepping on a plane and will check back in later to edit this post.
Berners-Lee Quote (Regarding 15th anniversary of The Web) - What’s exciting is that people are building new social systems, new systems of review, new systems of governance.
Other breaking news: Teens say “you-know” in the middle of sentences. Teens think surveys are, like, duh. Teens are beginning to limit all test answers to less than 140 characters.
The BBC has posted a feature to commemorate the 15th anniversary of CERN directors allowing the technology that enables “The Web” to be used by anyone free of charge. (Thank you, CERN.) While it’s hard to believe that so much could happen in 15 years, recall that the Internet had been around since the 1960s*. It took 20 years of Internet usage — and about that long using rudimentary early consumer-oriented systems like Compuserv and its geekier precursors — to realize that some of the hyperlinking, visual-oriented, interactive-multimedia things taking place in closed networks and on ones desktop (Hypercard, for example) could be replicated in a more open, universal way utilizing the Internet. What you’ll note when reading the observations of the experts is this: The Web is still in its infancy. We’re still playing in a giant sandbox here. I’ve written often about Paul Saffo’s thoughts on the 20-year adaptation rule about new technology (“Never confuse a clear view with a short distance”) — there is no such thing as “Internet time” — he argues. The older I get and the longer I get to observe the long arc of these things, the more I realize how slowly things move. No matter how fast you think things are moving, we’re still at Kitty Hawk. And that’s a good thing.
Yet another dumb idea (IMHO) - In the latest effort by print magazines to make their pages interactive, Hearst Magazines lets readers send text messages to buy products from magazines.
I’m not quite sure a ‘best of 2007′ is being published in May, but it’s a thorough review. Quote - ‘Any rumors of the death of magazines at the hands of the web are overstated.’
Observations, opinions,
and occasionally news on
magazines, new media,
marketing and life from Rex Hammock, founder & CEO of the custom media firm, Hammock Inc.
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