LB's Rambles

Almost Funny

Transparency Revolution hosts a visit from the Man of the Future...or rather the man from today, as he might have appeared to folks half a century ago...to explain the future of communications.

This struck me as hilarious...until I realized that it's just a little too close to the truth...

Hat tip: Instapundit

Nostalgia for the CD-ROM

Being only slightly older than dirt, I am overcome from time to time by a nostalgia for technologies past. I still have my old manual typewriter somewhere in my basement, an Olympia portable typewriter acquired in college that served me well for many long years. I moved on to computers some time in the early 1980s and never looked back.

But my nostalgia at the moment is for what was a much newer, and, for a brief time, commercially successful form of computer technology - the CD-ROM encyclopedia. This wave of nostalgia was triggered by a marvelous column by Steve Smith for MediaPost's Mobile Insider blog called "The Revenge of the CD-ROM." Smith looks back at those early experiments in packing entire encyclopedias, complete with low-motion low-action videos, into what was then the unbelievably spacious memory of a CD-ROM.

I know what he means. Back in the early 1990s, I worked on one of those projects for the news organization where I was employed as a producer and writer. I researched and wrote a series of video reports for the CD-ROM about several different nations and the role they might be playing in the news of the day. With hundreds of megabytes available to us (how in the world could we ever fill all that space!), we were able to cram a lot of material - and some slow, jerky video - into a good, if instantly dated, reference package.

This was before the World Wide Web really took off, of course. When that happened, the CD-ROM was eclipsed, because information could be exchanged - and updated - instantly, rather than waiting a year or two for the next edition of your CD-ROM encyclopedia to come out. Read Steve Smith's piece - it captures a lot of the excitement of those early projects, and it looks at some of today's reference projects which really are successors to those old discs.

 

When is a Waste Land Not a Waste?

I suspect that when many people think of T. S. Eliot - if they think of him at all - they may remember him mostly as the author of "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," the book of poems on which the musical "Cats" is based. Those of us who were English majors in school (and a fair number of our more literate and/or scholoarly friends) will know him as the author of really fine, but difficult, first-half-of-the-twentieth-century poetry, such as "The Waste Land." Eliot used all kinds of quotations and cultural allusions within his work, and some of it can be pretty daunting to the average reader.

So along comes Eliot's publisher, Faber and Faber with an iPad app that features a video of Eliot's "The Waste Land" that - according to Steve Smith at MediaPost's VidBlog - actually helps make sense out of that extremely difficult poem. The video, featuring actress Fiona Shaw, is interactive, allowing access to all kinds of extras and features, as Smith describes it.

It sounds fascinating, and, again speaking as a former English major, I'd really like to see it. Smith makes some fascinating points about the kind of thinking that went into this project - and draws some interesting conclusions about lessons here that marketers might want to consider.

Look Who's Reading the eBooks

Here's another interesting set of statistics about eBook readers - who they are and what they're reading. This set comes from the Book Industry Study Group, via MediaPost's Research Brief blog/newsletter. The money quote:

Today's e-book power buyer, someone who buys an e-book at least once a week, is a 44-year-old woman who loves romance and is spending more on buying books now than in the past. She uses a dedicated e-reader like a Kindle instead of reading on her computer.

 And what is she reading? Fiction - lots of fiction. Good to know - I (obviously) don't fit the profile of that "e-book power buyer," but when I read on my Kindle, it's mostly classic mysteries.

There are more interesting stats at the link.

eReaders in Bed

Okay, so perhaps this is not too surprising: MediaPost's daily Research Brief cites the latest Nielsen study on mobile device usage as showing that 61% of eReader owners use their devices in bed.

Well sure, why not? A lot of us read in bed. That's where I do a lot of my reading, too.

It's interesting to note that while 70% of tablet owners and 68% of smartphone owners are watching TV while using their devices, only 35% of eReader users say they're watching TV at the same time. How on earth do you concentrate on reading and watch TV at the same time? I can't do it.

I still think that one of the best ways to use an eReader is on long-distance trips, where I can carry dozens of books with me on my reader without breaking my back or running into baggage weight restrictions. The Nielsen numbers don't really break that out. Take a look at the charts - there are some interesting comparisons there.

Back to Normal

Last week was quite a week for fun-loving readers and bloggers. At the same time and in the same place, there were three interconnected events: Book Expo America, the annual celebration of books, authors and readers; BlogWorld/New Media Expo, at the heart of social media; and the Book Bloggers' Convention, where several hundred dedicated book bloggers gathered to exchange ideas.

It was an amazing week.

I had never been to BEA before, and it was a revelation: more than a thousand exhibitors, including publishers, authors, influence groups, technical types, etc., all gathered in a hall more than large enough to hold a political convention. One separate area was set up as an organized place to collect autographs from favorite authors, many of whom also signed books at their publishers' exhibition spaces. I stood in more lines than I like to remember and came away with many, MANY autographed books and galleys. The galleys were probably the best part - free, advance copies of books to be published later this year.

I had been to past BlogWorlds, and I was glad to see it join forces with BEA this year. I ran into a couple of my social media cronies there and checked out those exhibitors as well.

And I probably had the most fun at the Book Bloggers' Conference. The panels, as always, were entertaining and informative, although the real fun comes at the breaks and meals, sitting around tables with several hundred other bloggers to talk about books and blogs.

Preliminary plans call for a repeat performance, complete with cohabitation, next year. If you're in the New York City area, it's worth being there. In the meantime, it's back to normal for these blogs.

(Co-posted at Classic Mysteries and LB's Rambles.)

This should be an interesting week. At the Javits Convention Center in New York, there are a couple of events going on simultaneously. It's Book Expo America week - BEA, as it's known - when book publishers and authors go all-out to promote their newest and best books to a huge crowd of visitors.

At the same time, the Javits Center will host BlogWorld/New Media Expo, which I've attended in the past. It's always exciting and interesting to meet so many other people who share a passion for new media. This year, a pass for one of these events gets you into the other as well. Not too shabby.

And then on Friday, in conjunction with BEA, comes BBC - the Book Bloggers Convention, for people like me who clutter up the Internet with blogs like this one. Some of my friends will be on panels there, and I'm really looking forward to meeting other book bloggers.

So it will be a good week for sharing passions. Blogging is likely to suffer a bit as a result, which sounds ironic considering the events. We'll see.

(Cross-posted to both Classic Mysteries and LB's Rambles)

Getting Social with eBooks

Perhaps I'm just old-fashioned, but I still don't pay nearly as much attention to how I'm reading a book as I do to what I'm reading. Maybe a lifetime of working in what is now grandly termed "content management" - meaning a career as a writer, editor and producer - makes me see my Amazon Kindle as just a useful tool for carrying and reading books.

But I do think that David Berkowitz of the digital marketing agency 360i makes some interesting points in an article on MediaPost's Social Media Insider blog, called "The Social Life of Books." He has some interesting statistics about the ways that some people appear to be choosing and using the books on their Kindles, including the ability to make highlighted passages and notes public.

I can also see why he feels that, to some degree, his social enjoyment of a book may be diminished because others riding on the subway with him can't see the cover of his book and know what he's reading! On the other hand, given my own preferences for old and classic mysteries, I'm not sure how useful or "social" it would be for others to know that I've been reading "At the Villa Rose" on my Kindle.

How about you? Do you use any of the Kindle's social features to share your reading or your notes? The comments are open...

Fun in Bed

You've GOT to be kidding me.

 Network World quotes a new study from telecom equipment manufacturer Ericsson as saying that the most popular activity in bed is...accessing social networks.

REALLY?

Even if, as Ericsson says, 35 percent of Android and iPhone users in the US use mobile apps such as Facebook before getting out of bed...is it really the most popular activity?

I can think of a few I'd rather be doing...

Either this survey is a bit...er...skewed or there are an awful lot of people out there in urgent need of lives.

Hat tip (if that's the right expression for it): MediaPost

2D or Not 2D?

...That is the question? Well...maybe and maybe not, Prince Hamlet. I'm talking here about 2D codes, those matrix barcodes which are suddenly appearing everywhere, and the QR codes which are a subset of 2D codes - you can read all about them in Wikipedia, but they have become the latest gimmick in mobile marketing. Stores, products, you name it, all are displaying these codes, which are designed to be read by your mobile phone, which will then...

Ah, there's the rub. A lot of what we are seeing, when marketers use these codes, doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. That's summed up really well by Steve Smith at MediaPost's MobileInsider blog. If you're sitting in a store, and you see one of these codes on a product and use your cell phone to grab it...why on earth would the company behind that code simply run a 3-minute ad for the product you've already decided to buy? Are you going to stand in the store for three minutes and watch it? How about a seven-minute movie trailer?

Read the whole thing; it's hilarious and well-written - and more than a little sad. And it's really not just about 2D codes - as one commenter on MobileInsider points out, it's a problem with virtually all kinds of marketing - you need to create value, not clutter.