Category Archives: Technology

Choose your own appventure, publishing edition

Actor and comedian Stephen Fry is proving his love of technology with the release of volume two of his autobiography, The Fry Chronicles, as a hardback, e-book, iPhone app, and audio book.

Why the variety of publishing platforms? Jeremy Ettinghausen, digital publisher at Penguin, explains:

“We’ve created the perfect format for dipping in and out of and exploring books in a more playful way. […] the design and technology have allowed us to create an experience that would not be possible in print, and discover a new way to present an author’s work.”

The iPhone app, dubbed myFry, includes the entire autobiography, but has a color-coded index so readers can read sections in any order. The app and the e-book also include additional photos and eight videos of Fry discussing events in the book.

Fry isn’t the first writer to take advantage of digital publishing. In July, Japanese author Ryu Murakami announced a deal with Apple to release his new novel directly to the iPad — bypassing his traditional print publisher completely. A Singing Whale (Utau Kujira in Japanese) will include video content set to music by Academy Award-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. And in August, marketing entrepreneur and author Seth Godin announced that he’s no longer publishing his books the traditional way.

“[…] my mission is to figure out who the audience is, and take them where they want and need to go, in whatever format works, even if it’s not a traditionally published book.”

It is yet to be seen how many writers will choose to follow Murakami’s and Godin’s lead. After all, these are two established authors (Murakami has published more than 15 novels, Godin has published 12) with devoted audiences, so their decision isn’t as risky as it would be for a lesser-known writer. But the number of authors experimenting with digital publishing will only continue to increase given the interactive content options and the demand for books on both e-readers and mobile devices. It will be interesting to see which of the four platforms will be the most profitable for Fry — numbers that I’m sure other authors will be watching closely as they consider the future of their own publishing endeavors.

The phone is the new pen and paper

Online writing is the new normal for students who are often blogging, commenting, and tweeting outside of class. But how does writing really work in the lives of students?

That was the question the Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center at Michigan State University sought to answer in a new study, Revisualizing Composition: Mapping the Writing Lives of First-Year College Students.

Working from the assumption that students lead complex writing lives, this study is interested in a broad range of writing practices and values both for the classroom and beyond it, as well as the technologies, collaborators, spaces, and audiences they draw upon in writing.

The study asked students in first-year writing classes from seven institutions to identify the types of writing they do, with “writing” encompassing everything from writing academic papers to sending text messages.

I know what you’re thinking…texting is writing?

Yes, texting is writing, along with making lists and taking lecture notes. That’s not all—texting is the type of writing that students report doing and valuing the most, making cell phones the top writing platform.

Other key findings:

Students write for personal fulfillment nearly as often as for school assignments.
Students prefer to write alone instead of collaboratively.
Blogs, Twitter, and Wikis are not used by many of the students surveyed, but those who use these technologies do so frequently.

You can read more about the study’s initial findings and the researchers behind it on the WIDE site or download the complete white paper here (PDF).

UPDATE: Check out WILX Radio’s interview with Jeff Grabill, co-director of the WIDE Center, about the Revisualizing Composition study.

The Wilderness Downtown

Google Chrome and Arcade Fire recently teamed up to create The Wilderness Downtown. Using HTML5 and the Chrome browser, this “interactive film” is personalized with images of the viewer’s childhood home.

Choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing, 3D canvas rendering… this Chrome Experiment has them all. “The Wilderness Downtown” is an interactive interpretation of Arcade Fire’s song “We Used To Wait” and was built entirely with the latest open web technologies, including HTML5 video, audio, and canvas.

Check out the video for yourself, and then learn more about the process at Chrome Experiments.

From digital to print in less than 5 minutes

The Espresso Book Machine makes it possible to “print over 3 million titles or any author manuscript within minutes.” Hello, self-publishing.

E-readability

If you’re in the market for an e-reader and you’re concerned about readability, check out the test recently conducted by usability expert Jakob Nielsen where users were asked to read a short story by Hemingway on four devices: PC, iPad, Kindle 2, and printed book.

ereader-readability2

Users hated reading on the PC because it reminded them of work, but the tablets actually scored higher than the printed book in terms of satisfaction—even though the printed book won out in reading speed and level of relaxation. Nielsen predicts a promising future for e-readers as technology continues to close the readability gap. Check out his site to learn more about the study’s methods and findings.

Gourmet lives on in new app

Condé Naste made headlines last fall when it announced the closure of four magazines, including Gourmet. The oldest culinary magazine in America, which ceased print publication and moved entirely online, is now making another move in the digital publishing world with the launch of the Gourmet Live app.

Gourmet Live will bring together the usual print content—articles, menus, and photos—with interactivity such as videos, social networking, location-based technology, and monetization structures typical in gaming. While Gourmet Live won’t launch until later this year, Condé Naste has already released a preview of what’s to come.

President and CEO Charles H. Townsend had this to say about the new digital content:

By focusing on a new way to meet consumer needs, tap into our deep branding, and approach our content differently, we came up with a product that reimagines Gourmet and revalues engagement. We approached this like a tech company, utilizing the rich assets of a media company, keeping Condé Nast at the forefront of content innovation.

Part of that revaluation of engagement is the rewards concept of the new app. Tagged as “your reward for exploring great food and good living,” the app will be a free download with paid content options. Users will also be able to earn rewards by connecting and sharing the content with their friends via sites like Twitter and Facebook.

This app is pretty daring when you consider that just nine months ago, Gourmet was following a fairly traditional publishing model. At the time, Townsend said, “We know that we have to be more than simply a magazine publisher.” It looks like Condé Nast is doing just that, starting with Gourmet Live.

The preservation of Twitter

It doesn’t matter if you’re a person talking about drinking coffee, a celebrity promoting new work, or a politician announcing a historical victory—your tweets are now permanently saved. Today the Library of Congress announced, via Twitter, that it will archive all public tweets. Twitter soon followed with its own announcement:

Since Twitter began, billions of tweets have been created. Today, fifty-five million tweets a day are sent to Twitter and that number is climbing sharply. A tiny percentage of accounts are protected but most of these tweets are created with the intent that they will be publicly available. Over the years, tweets have become part of significant global events around the world—from historic elections to devastating disasters.

It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It’s very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history.

Now, not only am I an avid Twitter user, but I am also married to a history buff who has repeatedly denounced Twitter as a “waste of time” because the data wasn’t being stored for research purposes. But Twitter’s API has limits on how many of your tweets you can personally archive using applications such as Tweetbook. The fact that now all future and past data from the social networking tool will be publicly archived is a huge step forward in terms of scholarly research.

But that’s not all—Google also announced Google Replay today.

Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful. Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter.

While Google Replay currently only searches tweets from the past few months, it will soon allow real-time search of the entire Twitter archive. As for the Library’s archive, Twitter says, “Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.”

It’s still unclear as to why the Library of Congress has to wait and Google doesn’t, but that’s just one of many questions raised by Twitter’s digital preservation—like what my husband’s excuse for not tweeting will be now.

Interactive media, Texas style

sxswi What do Muse, Michel Gondry, and Ashton Kutcher have in common? They were among the thousands who flocked to South By Southwest (SXSW) this past week.

Based in Austin, SXSW draws those in the music, film, and interactive media industries for a week of presentations, networking, and all the Texas BBQ you can eat.

The interactive portion, dubbed SXSWi, brings together web developers, designers, bloggers, content producers, and new media entrepreneurs to share ideas about content strategy, social media marketing, publishing, emerging technologies, and more.

To get a sense of the SXSWi experience, we asked first-timers Lish Dorset and Kristen Byers to share their thoughts on the “spring break for geeks”.

As a newbie to SXSW this year, I blogged the conference for the Detroit Weber Shandwick office. While the entire week was amazing, attending fascinating panels and meeting hilarious folks, listening to Devo talk about rebranding themselves in the social media sphere was fantastic. I’m a big Devo fan and I love the idea that my idea might contribute to the greater whole. Because, after all, isn’t that what social media is all about?
— Lish Dorset, Digital Strategist

Wow…this was my first time attending SXSW, and I must say it was quite the whirlwind! No amount of research could have adequately prepared me for the awesomeness. My friend (and SXSW roommate) Nikki wrote a great post over on lalawag about being a SXSW first-timer, so I encourage you to check out her advice.

There was a great mix of panels, many of which catered to my professional and personal interests, and I attended loads of great sessions (and a couple not-so-great ones). Many reinforced the idea that geolocation services and mobile apps are hot trends at the moment. I brought back some ideas for my web strategy team about how we can improve the content of miis.edu. I think my favorite panels were “How the Other Half Lives: Touring the Digital Divide” and “Selling Subculture Without Selling Out”.

I definitely hope to attend again next year, although there are a few things I will do differently: research restaurants ahead of time, select panels based on speakers as opposed to topics/titles, and RSVP to more parties!

— Kristen Byers, New Media Development Specialist, Monterey Institute of International Studies

If you’re like me and the closest you got to SXSWi was your Twitter stream, be sure to check out the links above along with audio podcasts of the sessions and highlights on YouTube. Cowboy boots optional.

The Journal for Undergraduate Multimedia Projects (TheJUMP)

If you’re a student doing digital writing projects for class, check out The Journal for Undergraduate Multimedia Projects (TheJUMP).

thejump

Launched by the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, TheJUMP will feature students’ work and promote discussion on the rhetorical decisions made in the creative process.

No longer are the best multimedia works from our undergraduates doomed to fade to oblivion, doomed to be lost forever in digital storage, filed under the archival category of “class-projects-never-to-be-heard-from-again.” They can now find scholarly home at TheJUMP, which will showcase the digital and rhetorical talents our students develop in courses across disciplines, from coast to coast, and which will give rise to a discursive community committed to examining and exploring the potentialities for multimedia rhetoric in the digital age.

The first issue will be published in March, and TheJUMP is currently accepting digital video projects for the second issue. This is a great chance for students to share their work with a larger audience and see what others are doing with multimedia. To get involved, make a submission and join the discussion.

Dante’s Inferno, for gamers

You know you are reading a great story when you find yourself lost in the world the writer has created. Literary worlds have been explored in film, but now one is available on your Xbox or PlayStation: Dante’s Inferno.

Inspired by the real Dante Alighieri, the video game tells the story of a soldier who defies death and fights against impossible odds — for love.

What made Electronic Arts choose Inferno as source material? Creative director and executive producer Jonathan Knight explains why the epic poem works so well as a video game:

[Dante] fundamentally mapped hell with this poem. He’s created a visual topography, and there’s a tremendous amount of structure, geography, weather — and monsters.

Electronic Arts is also releasing a print edition of the poem with illustrations from the game to “encourage a new generation of gamers to read Dante’s original work”. While I find it doubtful this will actually happen, it is interesting to think of other literary and gaming mashups like the ones on Wired Magazine’s list of 10 classics that should be video games. Who’s up for a game of The Metamorphosis?