My friend, Nick Bradbury, writes about the discontinuation of HomeSite, an HTML editing software he developed before most people ever heard of HTML. He created the software in 1995 and sold it in 1997, so it has been a while since he’s been involved with the product. (After a few sales and corporate consolidations, the software ended up at Adobe.) Nonetheless, the announcement by Adobe provided Nick with the opportunity to reflect on the early days of the software’s development and how he depended greatly on the users of the product to shape it — something else he helped pioneer.

I especially like this quote:

“Sometimes in this blog I’ve made disparaging remarks about HomeSite, but that’s not because I disliked it. It’s just that it’s hard to look at something you created so long ago without seeing all the mistakes that you’ve learned not to make since then. I’m actually very proud of HomeSite, and very thankful that it enabled me to quit my job and work at home. And, funny enough, HomeSite is also what paid for the home I’m living in now.

I’ve never used HomeSite. Heck, I’ve never even used Windows. But I’m grateful for the software. Why? Because when Nick quit his job and started working at home, he decided that home would be in Nashville — making him the Jack White of web software developers.

The company producing Michael Jackson’s concert tour has announced those who have purchased tickets can get a refund or receive “souvenir tickets.” In the old days, before electronic ticket ordering, the tickets would have been issued upon purchase. I assume the “souvenir tickets” are going to be printed up and authenticated in some way to add a measure of validity to any claim they are “limited” and thus, have some value as a collectible. I assume also they’ll be marketed in the same way a collectible dish or “special minted” gold coin will be — except with a significant twist: the marketer is attempting to convert someone who is already a fan and who has already parted with their money — just not for what the promoter is selling. The promoter — if they act quickly — can convince that potential buyers to “act immediately” to exercise their right to take special delivery of this once-in-a-life-time item they’ve already purchased. The message (which is a natural for those who attend concerts) is that they belong to a private club that no one else is going to be given membership into.

When I saw this announcement, I wondered if, other than sentimental value, the “collectible” ticket might have any value in the future. Some extremely quick (two-clicks) research and unscientific back of the envelop calculations lead me to think that the tickets could possibly increase in value by up to 5% annually (compounded) based on the current retail price ($75) of a $15 unused ticket to an August, 1977 Elvis concert. Of course, that’s the retail price. It’s probably worth a lot less.

Bottomline: If the idea is to hold the ticket for a long time and then sell it, I’d take the money now. (However, I would have never purchased the ticket in the first place.) I’m guessing that a lot of people will take the tickets, however. I think they’d be better off flipping the ticket quickly — while those outside the exclusive group may want in — rather than wait for 32 years to sell it on eBay.

One of those intangibles about working on a magazine — an intangalbe that one doesn’t often experience when working primarily on the web — is a sense that something can have a beginning, a middle and an end — and then it starts all over again. But sometimes, those of us who are immersed in producing magazines all the time forget the joy of the process — admittedly, it’s hard to be reflective while you’re actually in the process.

But 24HourMagazine.com will give you a jolt of magazine-work adrenaline as it chronicles the efforts of an all volunteer team of aspiring European magaziners who created a fashion-lifestyle magazine — from concept to late-night-party, from nothing to press-ready — in, uh, 24 hours. (Here’s a PDF of the magazine.)

Especially impressive on the website are all the ways in which the team documented and shared the process. Lot’s to learn from this, especially for jaded magazine people who think producing an issue of a magazine is just a job. Share the process.

(Sidenote: Come to think of it, sharing the process is a lot of what we try to do all over our company website, Hammock.com)

(via: Springwise.com)

I’m taking part in an online book-reading-club-support-group-community-project* called Infinite Summer, a group-read of the 1,000+ page novel Infinite Jest by the late David Foster Wallace.

I’ll admit, I got a bit of a head-start on the project because a couple of months ago, I purchased the Kindle version of the book after reading Aaron Pressman’s account of how the flow of the book is changed (for the better) by having hyperlinked endnotes. As the whole footnote thing is but one of the challenges of the post-modernist work, I decided to once more give the book a try. Doing it via a Kindle also means I can carry the book with me at all times (it’s on both my Kindle and my the Kindle-App on my iPhone — although the footnotes don’t work the same on the app version). Because the Infinite Summer project is broken down into 75-page per week increments, I feel a little more inclined to read the book in short chunks than I would otherwise. (It helps if you can read multiple books at one time — which is something I’ve done for a long time. I figure if I can keep up with characters and plots of multiple TV series, I can do the same with books.)

Anyway, since one of the non-starters for Infinite Jest is its sheer heft, it’s interesting to me that such a community who lives in a real-time, digital, 140-character world has been drawn to this bookish-meme. On the other hand, there is so much about the book that is entertaining and intriguing to those of us who are fascinated (obsessed) with the role that technology, marketing and media plays in our lives, that it makes sense the book is popular with this group. And by slowing down and reading the book a few paragraphs — or a few sentences at a time — one realizes that it’s not the volume of the book, but the precision of the book, that is most impressive.

For me, reading the book also corresponds with a renewed interest in tennis after several years of setting aside what used to be a big passion of mine. While one doesn’t need to know anything about the game to follow the narrative — Wallace footnotes and explains everything you could possibly not understand — it adds a layer of interest if you have ever been even a bit obsessed with the game.

Which leads me to on last thing.

Yesterday, Esquire magazine posted on its website a 1996 piece written by Wallace that is a nearly 12,000-word examination of the “physics and non-physics” of tennis. The article is, in Wallace fashion, filled with endnotes. But check out the javascript(?) pop-up that appears if you hover your cursor over the endnote number. That’s an example of how a publisher can “enhance” content by moving it from one medium to another, rather than just “repurpose” or “port” it.

*I would call this a “book club,” but the geekish crowd doing this makes the notion of “book club” seem so Oprah minutes ago. This is the kind of group that has a Google Calendar of suggested reading goals that has both page numbers and whatever one calls the numbers at the bottom of a Kindle screen. And did I mention the Infinite Jest Wiki, a totally separate project, but I’m just saying?

**If I’d written this a few weeks ago, I would have said such a long-piece about tennis would be impossible to find in a magazine today — but that’s before I saw (but haven’t read yet) Cynthia Gorney’s recent 8,500-word profile of Rafael Nadal, “Ripped (Or Torn Up?)” in the New York Times Magazine.

The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell has a review (preview?) of his fellow Conde Naster, Wired’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

Like Anderson’s previous blockbuster book, The Long Tail, the new book started out as a Wired magazine cover story — so the ideas he puts forth in it have had lots of time for debate and pre-first guessing (or whatever you call sped-up second-guessing) in the blogosphere and elsewhere.* Also, as the original article was written before the economic meltdown, it will be interesting to see how a gut-wrenching recession may have altered the reaction the book will receive in the marketplace when it is officially released next Tuesday, July 7.

The publisher has reportedly already printed 80,000 copies of the book, so there’s a lot of cash riding on a book called free that costs $26.99 retail ($17.81 on Amazon).

In any discussion of the “power” of free (its marketing power was known long before the advent of the internet), there seems always to be a lot of rehashing of brands and products that have included “free” in their business models over the years: Think Gillette — give the razor away free, make money on the blades. Or think of almost anything one provides “free” that results in an indirect benefit rather than a direct benefit. My current favorite personal debate along these lines has to do with paid vs. free wifi. While all hotels and airports understand the value of providing the comfort of free air conditioning and restrooms to their passengers and guests, why do some hotels and airports not extend such logic to free wifi access to the internet while others do? Obviously, the answer has to do with the understanding by those airports who provide free wifi that the return on that “free” comfort/service is far greater than the licensing fee revenue they receive from selling internet access. Here’s one: One will arrive early at an airport with free wifi knowing they can be productive while waiting. More time that means more money spent in the shops and restaurants in the airport. Conversely, if one travels a lot and encounters paid wifi in airports and hotels, the value of purchasing a wireless 3G modem from a cell-phone carrier becomes easily apparent. (The current favorite public debate over this topic is free vs. paid content from newspapers — a topic Gladwell focuses on.)

What benefit do I get out of posting this item for free — or of doing anything on this blog that gives away ideas or suggestions I run across that may help someone — even a competitor — do something they may charge others for.

Well, hmmm. Let’s think.

Once I got an e-mail from Chris Anderson asking if it would be okay if he gave my name to a publishing group who wanted him to speak about how “the long tail” might affect magazine and journal publishing. As it was a publishing group and he’d read several posts I’d written regarding the book (or maybe the article), he knew I was at least somewhere in the ballpark of correct in explaining the concept to a group of publishers. More important to Anderson, I think he was probably making a few thousand dollars per speech at the time (vs. the “you can’t afford it if you have to ask” levels he makes now) and he knew I’d probably speak to the group for something closer to their budget, say, several one dollars for airfare and a room at a Hampton Inn.

Of course, I spoke. And for that group, I decided to do it for free for the opportunity to one day post (I’m using up that opportunity right now) that I can speak when you can’t afford Chris Anderson. Fortunately, at the meeting, someone heard me who had a specific nugget of information that has turned into a very worthwhile return on my investment of giving something away for free.

The whole notion of “free” is whirling around the media business these days — especially whirling around newspapering executives who want to equate “the business model” of leveraged rolled-up national newspaper chains with some notion of “journalism” or “free press.”

The argument by the rolled-up leveraged media executive is this: Giving away something for “free” always means that something that’s “paid for” will get killed.

I on the other hand, believe this: Free always kills things that are charged for, except when it doesn’t.

It’s sort of like the last line in Gladwell’s review of Anderson’s book:

“The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.”

As for whether or not the book will be a big hit? I predict it will, but the money it makes will pale in comparison to the appearance fees Anderson will continue to receive.

*On another front, the book Free has already stirred some controversy over free content included in it without citation. That’s called plagarism when someone I don’t know does it. However, when it’s someone I respect and trust and whose magazine and blog I’ve read for years, I give them the benefit of the doubt when they explain what happened, admit the screwup and take time to explain — not trying to get excused, but to explain — the screwup in great detail.

Update: Anderson responds to Gladwell’s focus on “the future of journalism” debate. Great quote in the post: “My business card says ‘Editor in Chief’ but if one of my children follows in my footsteps, I suspect their business card will say ‘Community Manager.’ Both can be good careers.

It’s a little before 6:00 a.m. CST as I write this and I’ve been listening to the BBC World News stream on WPLN.org.

I’ve been struck by how the world is reacting to the news that Michael Jackson died. Not only is it the dominate story on the BBC broadcast, the report includes news of how TV networks in countries around the world broke into their regular programming to report the news. The flood of queries to Google from around the world led the service to interpret what was taking place as a malware attack. (Doc Searls, as a “live web” record, took a “snapshot” of a Google and Twitter search mashup at time the news of Jackson’s death was announced.)

There’s a big part of me that wants to ask, “What’s wrong with people?” Don’t they know Michael Jackson is bizarre?

But then, I think back to before Michael Jackson became so bizarre and the statement I heard someone make years before the fall of the Iron Curtain. They said, “If we want to defeat communism, we should forget nuclear weapons and load up cargo planes full of Levi jeans and Michael Jackson tapes (this was a pre-CD era) and drop them over eastern-bloc countries.”

Michael Jackson’s music, like it or not, is part of the essence of American culture (at least, the “pop-” kind of culture) that people all over the world find appealing, even when they’ve been programmed all their lives to believe America is the Great Satan.

It’s the music and incredible talent of Michael Jackson, not that bizarre person he became, that people are mourning today. That, and something a little more personal.

I was in high school when the Jackson Five hit the big time. You know what that means: Michael Jackson was a big part of the soundtrack of those years of my life. And the soundtrack of that part of your life sticks with you for the rest of your life. That soundtrack is engrained into you brain as a part of way too many important things in your life, you can never completely flip it off. It’s like a permanent playlist in your mind that starts playing whenever you encounter something that makes you think of anything related to that era.

I think we all get crazy in our obsession with the deaths of someone like Michael Jackson because he was there, singing in the background, when we experienced so many things we hold dear.

The music is still there. The memories are still there. But if Michael Jackson can die, does that mean a part of us dies with him?

I think that’s what we mourn.