Poultry Tribune, July, 1942

An article by Brian Stelter in today’s New York Times (temporary non-punitive URL: http://nyti.ms/xmYt1L) reports that Tumblr is hiring editors and writers to cover itself.*

Quote from the executive editor Tumblr has hired:

“Basically, if Tumblr were a city of 42 million (the number of Tumblr blogs that exist) I’m trying to figure out how we cover the ideas, themes and people who live in it.”

According to the article, Facebook and Twitter have recently announced efforts with similar goals. In my opinion, the mother of all “reporting about ourselves” has to be, collectively, the blogs Google maintains. However, in a nuanced way, those blogs are more neo-press release, than corporate-reportage (two terms that may already exist, but I just made up).**

Two things of significance to the 12 readers of this blog about Brian’s article (Brian, by the way, is the subject of several posts on this blog.):

1. The quote from the Tumblr editor reflects precisely the kind of point-of-view of what the internet is that I explained in the blog post immediately preceding this. The internet is people and place. (Because that post is a Rexplanation, I don’t have to repeat what I mean – you can read it there.)

2. Brian’s article, while appearing to some to be about a new phenomenon, fits into a century-plus old tradition that I have constantly blogged about for the past decade: Companies serve audiences called customers. Those audiences can be passionate about the products those companies provide and can create communities surrounding those shared passions (or work-related topics in the case of business-to-business companies). Creating media to serve and tie-together those audiences is something companies have done since at least the 1890s. I have now declared a 2011 post on this topic the Rexplanation on this topic, so if interested, please go there.

In other words, as I’ve said many, many times: What Tumblr is doing is not new. It is smart, but it is not new.

*Self-serving asterisk: They should have outsourced it to a company like Hammock.

**I’m considering a longer post on the topic of what I’m going to call “the press release parenthesis” in which I will explore how the advent of public relations as a “profession” (see: Ivy Lee) ushered in a period that the internet is now ushering out during which journalists who worked for corporations that made money from selling advertising were deemed ethically and professionally superior to journalists who worked for corporations that made money from selling airplanes or paper clips.

Related posts:

• The History of Media: Brands have been Publishers Since the 19th Century (I’ve now retroactively declared this the Rexplanation post on topics related to the quality and historic context of writers / reporters / editors / content creators at corporate / branded / custom publishing / owned / in-house media.)
• Are corporate journalists real journalists? Better question: Does someone actually call themself that?

[Note: Shortly after I posted this, I edited it to remove a rant I had that I've since discovered was misinformed. I've explained it at the bottom of the post.]

Apple introduced an incredible product today called iBooks Author.

Apple describes the product this way, “iBooks Author is an amazing new app that allows anyone to create beautiful Multi-Touch textbooks — and just about any other kind of book — for iPad. With galleries, video, interactive diagrams, 3D objects, and more, these books bring content to life in ways the printed page never could.”

Now, it may be strange to some of the 12 people who read this blog that I’d be saying that an eBook authoring tool that does anything beyond making text more book-like and readable is “incredible” as I’m on record many times as saying how little I like things called books or magazines that are crammed with interactive goo-gahs. And I’ve written that book and magazine publishers have wasted their time on developing such interactive apps and calling them magazines or books. (Ironically, I wasn’t writing that about Apple, but about the Kindle Fire and Amazon’s aggressive push into children’s books.)

But I’ve also written that when apps are not called “books” or “magazines” or when the interactive goo-gahs help explain or entertain or add-to a story or the experience, I’m gung-ho.

I know I’m going to confuse some people (Reader #8), so maybe I should just say this simply: iBooks Author is not merely an ebook authoring tool. Indeed, it could have been easily called iGames Author or iInteractive Presentation Author or iInteractive Training Author or (here’s the take-away part) iApps Author.

Let me point you back a few weeks to my recap of predictions for 2011 in which I explained why I was wrong about a my prediction that, “Apple will mashup features of Keynote and iMovie and create a program called iAnimator.”

I take it back. I was only wrong about being wrong. iBook Author is what I was talking about. (As is, the software from some Apple alumni who don’t mess with the ebook metaphor, called Tumult Hype.)

iBook Author is a recognition of what I’ve been trying to express for over a year (and is one of the wish-list platforms of Hammock Labs): If you start with the suite of tools that creative-oriented (designers, illustrators, audio-types, film-makers, web-developers, etc.) Mac users already understand: Keynote, iMovie, GarageBand — and then, you start tweaking the methaphors and beef up the animation tools so that creating interactive experiences in HTML5 is the technical outcome (great content is the non-technical objective), you’ve developed a platform that is going to make Adobe squirm and free the results of a lot of content creation from the web (as in, websites can easily be morphed into offline, iPad native apps, as well).

If you are a power-user of Keynote or any of the Apple iWork or iLife products, iBooks Author will look familiar (I’m looking at it now). Right now, however, everything about it says, “this is a tool for creating text books.”

That is a trojan horse! (The ancient Troy kind, not the computer virus kind.)

That’s sort of what Apple did when they first came out with the iTunes Store. Recall it: It was a means to buy and organize record-label music (and, oh, you could put all that other music you had just lying around your computer on the desktop software version of iTunes).

Only later, did iTunes become a massive commerce marketplace for the distribution of paid and free software apps and video and podcasts and university lectures and streaming TV shows and movies that you can view on your TV.

And only later, did Apple realize they could tweak the metaphors of Garageband to be a podcasting tool. And only later, did they realize that Keynote is an incredibly popular web development and app prototyping platform. (Or do they even realize that now?)

So, today, there’s a Trojan horse product called iBooks Author. And for a while, you will think it’s about creating text books and, no doubt, interactive books that few people will care about reading. The whole textbook and interactive book thing may succeed or not — Apple doesn’t bat a thousand on business verticals, but the one they’ve competed in best is the education market, so it’s a good place for them to start.

But if you step back and see that this is actually an App creation platform that is going to allow you to create things that look a whole lot like something that you don’t think of as a book, but more like a videogame or sales presentation or whatever app you can dream of, you’ll start seeing how the iBook Author is more than textbooks, or books.

This is just the beginning. Watch this space.

Note: Shortly after first posting this, I removed a section that complained about Apple only allowing iBook Author projects to be distributed via the iBook Store. I can show you in the Apple user instructions where I found that, but I’d rather just say I was wrong and leave it at that. Bottomline, there is a way to distribute iBooks with the interactive goo-gahs to users without going through the iBooks Store. It’s a bit clunky, but I’m sure it will get easier. The document has to be free, which is fine, as my complaint was focused on such free documents.

Later: This post can give you an idea of what I was ranting about earlier. Although, I believe his beef is a bit broader than mine.

Later: Let me note the following for the record: It is difficult to locate the how-to directions for sending someone an iBooks Author created document via email. I couldn’t find it on the Apple.com support site, however, it is on the Help Center that’s associated with the program, itself. Here are the directions, just in case I forget them:

Note: You have to use the  Apple OSX Mail application for this to work

• With the book open, choose Share > Send via Mail, and choose an option from the submenu:
• iBooks Author for Mac: Creates an iBooks Author document (with the extension .iba). Your recipient needs to have iBooks Author installed to open the file.
• iBooks for iPad: Creates an iBooks document (with the extension .ibooks). Your recipient can open the book by tapping the file in Mail on an iPad, or by importing the file into iTunes (by dragging it to the iTunes window) and then using iTunes to sync the book to an iPad. The recipient must have the iBooks app and iOS 5 on his or her iPad.
• PDF: Creates a PDF document (with the extension .pdf). Hyperlinks work in the resulting PDF, but other interactive media, such as movies and 3D objects, might not work as expected.
• A new mail message opens with the version of your book attached.
• Edit the email message and click Send.

Related:

• Apple announces iBooks 2, iBooks Author to “reinvent textbooks” (arstechnica.com)

Here’s a first for me. I received an email overnight from Amazon telling me that I can update the Kindle version of the book, Steve Jobs, by Walter Issacson [My review; my shared highlights and notes made while reading the book].

Here’s an excerpt from the strangely worded (why are they “happy” to admit the previous version was wrong?):

We are happy to announce that an updated version of your past Kindle purchase of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is now available. The version you received had image and caption layout issues that have been corrected.

You can receive the new version by replying to this email with the word “Yes” in the first line of your response. Within 2 hours, any device with an active wireless connection that is registered to your account and that has the eBook currently downloaded will be updated automatically.

In order to ensure that your notes, highlights, bookmarks and furthest reading location are retained in the new version, please check to see that all of your devices that you have used to read this book are connected to a network and that their Annotations Backup settings are turned on. For help with modifying settings, go to http://www.amazon.com/
kindlesupport and check the help pages for the devices or applications you are using.

As I heavily annotated my version of the book (and made those notes public if you follow me on Kindle.Amazon.com), I’m glad to know that my backing them up actually has a reason.

While we are all used to automatic updates to apps, I wonder what the ability to issue updated versions of books could do to that medium. While for some books (the reference kind, especially), having ongoing updates would perhaps be a good thing. However, permanence is one of the characteristics of the medium called a book; will permanence be a characteristic we will not associate with eBooks?.

As printed books go through editions, typo corrections and the type of fixes in this update have precedent in the printed world.

However, if the content changes significantly (for example, if a chapter were added that reported on Jobs death), then it would need to be called something other than an “edition” or even an “update.”

This is an area where the technology may be outpacing our understanding of its impact on the role of books, time and context.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, this year marks the 20th anniversary of Hammock Inc., the company that provides me the keyboard on which I type these blog posts. Since I don’t blog a lot about what we do at Hammock, I often get the question, “What exactly do you do?”

My short answer: “We’re a marketing services company that helps clients communicate directly with customers using different forms of media ranging from print magazines to online wikis.” If they still have a quizzical look after that answer, I’ll say, “We publish magazines.”

The one thread that runs through all our relationships with clients, and all of our projects and properties, is this: The services we provide are focused specifically on helping our clients create, deepen and lengthen their relationships with customers (or members, supporters, donors, etc.). Because building such relationships (vs., say, promoting a one-time clearance sale) involve long journeys, we don’t work with clients whose needs are one-time clearance sales.

As part of our 20th anniversary, Hammock is publishing a year-long series of eBooks called, The Hammock 20th Anniversary Guides to Content that Works. I wish I could say they are filled with wisdom we’ve learned from 20 years of successes. Unfortunately, some of the best lessons have come from failures.

The first guide in the series is being released today:

Originally, we intended to wait until next summer to explore this topic — more close to the time of year when marketing budgets are first being planned. However, we decided to release it now so that marketers could have several months during the first part of the year considering content marketing within a new context or framework. (And where they might look for money to fund it.)

It’s not a how-to guide, it’s more a thought-framework guide, a term I just made up, so don’t look for it on Wikipedia. Whatever it is, I think that if you’re in marketing and you’ve read this far down into a RexBlog post, you’ll probably like it.

You can download the eBook at this URL: Hammock.com/20

When the Hammock children, both now over two-decades old, were brand new, they were never more than a few inches away from an Eric Carle book. (The Very Hungry Caterpillar* is likely the book I have read out-loud more times than any other book ever published, except, now that I think of it, Good Night Moon.)

So it caught my eye recently when reading about next month’s launch of the Kindle Fire – that it is going to include a 1000-title (at launch) collection of children’s books formatted especially for the Fire, including Carle’s classic (among Hammock children and millions more), Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?.

I’ve seen some punditry that suggests these “books” are likely to make it to other Kindle reading formats (which makes sense, as Amazon makes money from selling content, not hardware). But those pundits aparently haven’t let it fully sink in that the Kindle Fire will not just be an ebook reader,  it is an Android pad (tablet) device. It’s a computer with a touch screen.

So, despite having the word book in their names, this collection of Kindle Fire formatted children’s books are as much apps as they are books. If that assumption is correct, then the “appification” of  1,000-books (or 1,000 apps) of children’s book/apps before the Kindle Fire launch next month appears to be heavily subsidized by Amazon. Book publishers, especially the long-tail of small-house children’s book publishers, are already strapped keeping up with two formats (iOS and Kindle) to support yet another format, the Kindle Fire version of Android (which, like iOS apps, must be approved by Amazon before making it onto the Kindle Fire).

However, as always, some creative entrepreneurs started thinking about books as software long ago. The Kindle Fire could be their overnight success that took ten years to happen. For example, the decade-old company, zuuka, publishes iStory Time apps for the iPad via iTunes and will have Fire formatted books on day one.

Perhaps because of those young Hammocks and my (even then) obsession with the whole paper-digital connection, about 15-years ago, an early Hammock project was a magazine advertorial that appeared in Family Fun magazine that was sponsored by several pioneer developers of what used to be called back then, edutainment — think Madden NFL meets Richard Scarry’s Busytown. Long-gone (at least as independent entities) companies like Brøderbund sponsored it.

No doubt, had there been a Kindle Fire around in the early 1990s, the brand new Hammocks would have asked for Brown Bear, Brown Bear to be read over-and-over on that device, as well.

One thing any parent can tell you about children and their books: there is no such thing as a child getting tired of being read the same book over-and-over — nor, do I guess, being read (and playing with) the same book on too many apps in too many formats.

*All Amazon.com links go to my affiliate store. I think I’m up to $1.75 in commissions this year.

Thanks to superstar Chris Brogan for inviting me to join him the other day for a Skype interview about Google+, publishing, customer loyalty and what exactly the heck I do. It turns out, Chris is one of the 12 people who read this blog. (Side thanks to Hammock videographer Gaby, who, after seeing this video, has made me rearrange my webcam so that in the future, I won’t appear like that scary gigantic-headed person in the famous 1984 Apple ad..) :

[credit]

It’s somewhat ironic that “short” and “long” are both being used to describe a length of non-fiction writing that I believe will change book and magazine publishing as significantly as anything we’ve seen since Amazon.com first came online.

“Long” is used by those who are discovering there’s a lot of incredibly well-written “longform” non-fiction on the internet that can be enjoyed if saved to a friendly-to-read format (for extended reading on an iPad or Kindle) using InstaPaper, Readability or Read it Later. Those “long” articles tend to be in the 5,000-10,000 word range — a word-count cap that’s due, primarily, to the constraints imposed because they were first written and edited for print magazines.

“Short” is used to describe a length of ebook being marketed through the storefront of the Kindle Store called “Kindle Singles.” (I love their use of the term “natural length.”) Amazon describes Kindle Singles ebooks as, “well researched, well argued, and well illustrated books between 5,000 and 30,000 words.” (They don’t describe them as Spam.)

Another way to think of this: “Longform” is the length that certain indepth, non-fiction articles would be published if they weren’t edited originally to the length imposed by the constraints of a print magazine. And “Shortform” or “Singles” are the length that the same article would be published if it didn’t have to be bloated up to fit into the economic requirements (say, 75,000 words) of the print book publishing business.

So here’s the long and short of it: Somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 words, there seems to be a new book format that is, to quote Goldilocks, “just right” for a marketplace that has been created by the success of the Kindle/iPad.

I know it’s right for me, as I have become a voracious reader (and purchaser) of this length book (and/or article).

And today, there is news that gives me even more hope that the economic potential of this format may be going mainstream.

Last month, I wrote a post titled, Why Jon Meacham’s ebook is better because he’s no longer at Newsweek. In it, I observed how Meacham’s obvious gift (for anyone who’s read his books“>read his books) for longform traditional book-length non-fiction is a natural fit for the emergence of an entirely new form of publishing that, despite being described by Mikael Blomkvist, hasn’t quite sunk in. Meacham’s intellect and editoria skills, timed with his landing at Random House after leaving Newsweek, along with the emergence of the Kindle Single format and store, is, in my opinion, a near-perfect alignment of timing, technology (specially, the iPad and Kindle) and talent.

Today, NYTimes.com’s Media Decoder blog reports that Meacham and Random House have signed a deal with Politico to “publish four e-books about the 2012 presidential campaign, the first of which is scheduled to go on sale sometime before Christmas. Each will be in the 20,000- to 30,000-word range and written by Mike Allen, Politico’s chief White House correspondent.”

Those who, like me, have come to the conclusion that the 10-30K non-fiction “book” (the novella of non-fiction) is a length that heretofore did not exist (for economic reasons, primarily), but is the Goldilocks of non-fiction, are going to devour these books (if priced in the $2 range like Meacham & Random House’s first book published in this manner, Beyond Bin Laden).

Whether through major publishers (like Random House or major magazine publishers) or direct from writer to reader, this is a natural formula for break-out success.

[Disclosure: I do not know Meacham, but as I always say when writing about him, his Tennessee and Sewanee (where my son is a student) connections earn him bonus points on this blog.]

During the next week, I’ll be with a group of journalists and a group of publishers who, in different ways, are exploring a similar topic: What are media creators and users learning about what works (and doesn’t) when content is delivered via small-screen mobile devices during this era when such devices have gone from being perpetually-predicted publishing platforms to real-world opportunities?

This Friday, April 1 (no fooling), I’ll be leading a session at a conference at the John Seigenthaler Center at Vanderbilt University. Called, “The Mobile Migration,” the one-day conference is co-sponsored by the Online News Association and the Freedom Forum’s Diversity Institute with underwriting from the Scripps Howard Foundation. You can learn more about the conference, and how to register, on the blog of its ever-vigilant organizer, Jack Lail, multi-media editor of the Knoxville News Sentinnel.

My session is called: “The Reader Decides: How Magazines are Learning What Screen Publishing is All About” and is described like this: “From multi-million dollar mega-apps to dorm-room developed content reading apps, the iPad is proving to be both a launch pad of opportunity and a landing pad for humbling crashes. What has year one of the iPad taught magazine publishers that helps predict the future of screen-based media?”

This is my second time to speak at this conference that is attended by the journalists at legacy media companies — newspapers and broadcasters — who are embracing the tools and approaches of new media (even when some of their bosses don’t quite get it). It’s a great group. It’s the kind of group I thought about when I read the recent tweet by John Paton [@jxpaxton], the CEO of a regional newspaper business, whose advice is to “stop listening to print people and put the digital people in charge – of everything.”

Next Monday, April 4, I’ll be in New York where I’ll be moderating the Annual Digital Magazine Symposium that’s held in conjunction with the Publishing Business Conference & Expo. I’m looking forward to this as I’ve been able to work with the conference organizers at Publishing Executive and Book Business magazines, Noelle Skodzinski and James Sturdivant to develop a 2 1/2 hour program that includes discussions with the developers of some most ambitious magazine-related apps and other publishers who have found success in keeping their strategy focused on content rather than developing their own technology. Likewise — and this will be no surprise to readers of this blog — I’ve also invited former NYTimes.com creative director and usability rock star Khoi Vihn to review some lessons in usability from early iPad apps, and what they might suggest for the future.

Yesterday, I attended a couple of hours of a day-long gathering of 600+ people, primarily from Nashville and drivable distances away.

While the event was labeled “Podcamp,” it didn’t resemble what those early geek-camp things called “barcamps” were like — nor, frankly, does that matter.

Far more important than what it was labeled or what its format or funding or even its content was, is this: There were hundreds of people gathered who have realized that their businesses, churches, schools, causes, concerns, passions, families, neighborhoods and everything else they care about or touch, are being profoundly changed by the ways in which we can now use internet-enabled platforms, tools and ideas to connect, communicate, collaborate and do countless other stuff that may not as easily alliterate.

In Nashville yesterday, Podcamp was not merely a gathering of geeks (people who develop technology were definitely there) nor even a gathering of people who may, in some cases, care that much about technology, in and of itself. It was, in my opinion, a gathering of people who have personal passions and who want to use technology to accomplish things they believe are important. And some of the most important things they want to use technology to improve are real communities: the offline communities where they live, work, raise their kids, worship, create art, save stuff, help people, have fun, etc.

While my online community days go back to managing listservs and Compuserve forums and creation of precursors to what we now call “social networks,” when it comes to eureka moments where I realized “online community” and “offline community” appear easily on the same Venn diagram, I can note two: October, 10, 2004, when I was listed as “Best Local Blogger” by the Nashville Scene (My first reaction was, “What’s a local blogger?”). The second (and most profound) was on February 12, 2005, a Saturday morning when this photo of a group of local bloggers was shot. By that time, I had already attended gatherings of bloggers away from Nashville, like the first two BloggerCons, but the geographically local impact of what we today call “social media” had not yet sunk in for me.

As the 12 regular readers of this blog know, only a small percentage of what I blog about (or, for that matter, tweet about) is about Nashville. However, as I explained when I was the shocked recipient of the Nashville Technology Council’s first “blogger/social media” award, I blog about my passions, and, of course, the community in which I live certainly ranks high among those — so Nashville shows up in this blog regularly, and by intent. I love living in Nashville for reasons that have nothing to do with those things Nashville is famous for, the world over. But I also love living in a place that has something the world-over knows it for.

Yesterday, as I spent time looking around one of the presentation rooms at a lot of others who call Nashville home (instead of, say, “Music City”), I pondered what led many of them who, other than using Twitter and Facebook, aren’t tech-developer or hardcore-user geeks, to attend something called PodCamp.

Three alliterative things popped into my mind: people, proximity and passions. The people and passion parts of those three can be easily “virtualized” online, but there’s something about “local” that requires “proximity” that can’t be automated or replicated by technology. It can be enabled and encouraged by technology, but not replicated, no matter how much (to be up-to-the-moment) group texting or group photographing one has.

I see vast investments (frankly, at this point, bets) that are being made in support of the notion that technology platforms and business models can turn something called “hyperlocal” into something that is -scalable — a vast network of hyperlocal websites, for example.

But I think what matters most about local is proximity, not technology.

Perhaps plug-and-play, pre-fab, or “your-city-name-here” online couponing sites or “hyperlocal” user-generated-content-sharing media sites may work, but I’m not as convinced as I might be if I didn’t live in a place like Nashville, where people who aren’t really geeks are passionate about ways to use geek-toys for offline purposes.

Living in a place like Nashville (compared to, say, Silicon Valley) is perhaps why I believe “local” is more than a platform. “Local” community is what we belong to and care about. I know that authentic community exists online. But “local” community must have more than “virtuality” (if such a word exists) to be authentic.

“Hyperlocal,” I’ve decided, is a term that only makes sense in the context of a business or academic discussion. No one in real life ever uses the term. We use words like “my neighborhood” or “my hometown” or “my school” or “my church.”

But local is more dependent on people and their passions and the reality of proximity.

In other words, non-scalable things.

Like hanging out at Podcamp Nashville.

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Goldilocks who broke into a house owned by three Bears: Papa Bear, Mama Bear and Baby Bear.

Okay, so the door was unlocked and wide open, but still, it wasn’t her house, so she broke in, okay.

After she broke into the house, she started ransacking the place, eating all the food in sight and busting up the furniture — she even had the audacity to take a nap in one of the beds, right there in the middle of the house.

Soon, the bears returned home and, as any bear would be, they were mad as hell.

So they ate her.

Why?

Because they were bears.

The End

*Steven King fans may recognize this post as an homage to a version of Goldilocks found in his short story called “The Library Police” that is part of the four-story collection, Four Past Midnight.