Archive for the 'Society' Category

I usually focus on blogging for business so it’s nice to be reminded that most of the 170 million blogs out there are by ordinary people writing about their daily lives and personal feelings. It was the We Feel Fine project that was the big reminder - it’s a project led by computer scientist, Jonathan Harris, that explores “human emotion on a global scale” by harvesting emotions expressed on blogs whenever the words “I feel…” are found.

The emotions are gathered and sorted in different ways and shown in six “movements” - madness, murmurs, montage, mobs, metrics and mounds - which are essentially different visualisations of the data. You can see good feelings and bad feelings as well as the geographic location, age and gender of the person expressing those feelings. The project’s website suggests that this living artwork can offer specific answers to questions like: “Do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest?”

You need to launch an applet - which can take up to 20 seconds to load - in order to experience this amazing artwork. Click on the image below and it should take you to the We Feel Fine page: to launch the applet from there, click on the last sentence of the first paragraph (”We Feel Fine is divided into six discrete movements, each illuminating a different aspect of the chosen population. These movements are represented in the We Feel Fine applet.”)

I love the way the bubble of feelings cluster round the mouse cursor when you click on the screen in Madness - if you hover it over one of the bubbles, it will show you the location of the feeling and a brief idea of what the feeling is.

Then in Murmurs, you can see each latest feeling expressed somewhere out there in the world appear on the screen and if you click on the phrase, you’ll be taken to the blog. So “i feel so detached from everything i used to stand for” takes me to a blog post You Are My Brand Of Heroin - tonight is the night to let it go by xshadowsoflovex.

So how does this artwork make me feel? I feel more connected with the millions of people out there in the world.

The postal strikes continue here in the UK and with Xmas looming, it’s decision time for those of us who send Xmas cards. While I conduct most of my business and personal communications digitally these days - by email, instant message, Facebook messaging and Twitter - every Xmas so far, I’ve made the effort to sit down and write Xmas cards, enclosing a printed newsletter with some cheery reports and photos of what we’ve been up to in the past year.

This dead-tree method of keeping in touch with about 100 or more friends is a bit of a chore and often, we’re usually so busy that we only manage to do it all in a mad rush in the last weekend before the cut-off date for posting our cards in time for the festive season. Every year, during that pressurised weekend, I wonder, why don’t I just scribble a link to my blog where all my up to date news is already waiting anyway….? But many of my friends seem to live their lives un-digitised (though how on earth they manage that is beyond me….!) and anyway, if we’re shelling out lots of money on stamps, it makes sense to include something more than a couple of signatures to a pre-printed card.

But with the postal strike about to force us to make the choice of either sending out our Xmas cards ludicrously early this year or risk them arriving in January next year, we’re wondering about switching over completely to sending e-cards with perhaps a pdf newsletter or a link to my blog. And even as we were discussing this option at the weekend, The Times reported today that “people may snub postal service because of dispute“. Royal Mail’s chief executive Adam Crozier is quoted in the piece as saying, “The danger of the strike is that the trend that is there already gets exacerbated by this and that people speed up [the move away from] not just sending Christmas cards but paying bills by direct debit or standing order. People all over the country have changed the way they communicate.”

The thing is, in this time of digital communications, Xmas cards are still the one last remnant of that excitement we used to get when the postie arrived.

Back in the old days, it was an exciting moment, especially if you were in love or waiting for news (like whether your novel had been accepted by an agent) - you’d grab the post and sift through it, hoping to find the handwriting of your beloved or an envelope that might be from a literary agent. Now, the post just brings junk mail and bills and all the excitement has been transferred to the beep of a text message from your honey bun or a silent email slipping into your inbox from the one person who can make or break your writing career.

But at least once a year, at Xmas time, the traces of that old thrill is awakened. Amongst the junk are white or coloured envelopes, handwritten in script that you vaguely recognise. You put all those in a pile and bin the rest, then play a little game of guessing who each one is from. That looks like so-and-so’s writing; this one has a stamp from Oz, so it must from my cousin; wait, I recognise that writing - is it X or is it Y, they have such similar styles… And of course, the colourful cards are great to hang around the house or stand up on any flat surface, adding to the festive air of the season.

So I’m undecided. Shall I send Xmas cards but do so in November? Or shall I go entirely digital and send some sparkly pixels instead?

What’s your advice? What will you be doing about your Xmas cards this year?

Photo: thanks to a.drian from flickr.com (CCL)

Everyone is talking about the power of citizen journalism these days. Social media tools that allow instant publication, such as blogging and Twitter, enable anyone with access to the Internet to report on what is happening around them. In many cases citizen journalists have scooped the news ahead of traditional news media — e.g. the ordinary guy who happened to be at the right place at the right time with his mobile phone to take a photo of the plane that crashed into the Hudson River in New York earlier this year.

There has been a lot of hand wringing by media commentators and the traditional newsgathering organisations. If anyone can be a journalist nowadays — and be happy to report on events for free — then what is the future for professional journalists with years of training who need to earn a living while reporting the news?

Last night, watching the rising tidal wave of news and speculation on the Internet about Michael Jackson’s death was an object lesson in why we still need serious journalists and why we need to find a way to continue properly remunerating them for fact-checked investigative reporting of the news.

I checked out my Twitter stream late last night after dinner and noticed a lot of Twitterers mourning the passing of Michael Jackson, posting “RIP Michael Jackson” and honouring his memory with reminiscences of his wonderful music and talent. Naturally, I checked out the news websites immediately — the BBC, CNN in particular, as well as newspaper sites such as The Guardian. None of the news websites were actually making the statement that Michael Jackson was dead — instead, they were reporting that he had been rushed to hospital and was not breathing. A couple of them said that he was in a coma.

I set up a live blogging event using Scribble Live to record my “in the moment” responses to the unfolding news and speculation: Michael Jackson – Dead or Alive? (The complete live blog post also updated in real time here on my blog). At the same time, I had the BBC live video stream open on another tab in my browser and was listening to their continuing commentary and updates. I tweeted my own comments on what was happening — that the news sources were not saying that he was dead although the Twitterverse were already mourning him.

The BBC news report was very careful to use phrases such as “it is reported that Michael Jackson is dead ” or “reports say”. They kept emphasising that they did not themselves yet have “independent confirmation”. What was particularly interesting to me was that it was another traditional news website that was reporting the death, the LA times, as well as an online entertainment site, TMZ. The BBC WAS at pains to say that these news sources were very well respected and were reputable sites. However, they were unwilling to make the definitive statement that Michael Jackson was dead until they had obtained their own independent confirmation.

While I was live blogging all this, a number of other people on the Internet had obviously found my site as Scribble Live was telling me that up to 38 people were “watching” my life blogging. Some of them added their own comments to say that Jackson was in a coma and others were wanting to know whether he was dead or not, and whether it was 100% confirmed that he was dead.

This was a fascinating experience. If I had been at work or in a party space and we had heard this kind of news, we’d have turned on the TV or radio and while the reports would be coming in, we’d all be wondering and chatting and talking about Michael Jackson and what was the latest moment by moment news. As I live blogged my views and what I was hearing from the BBC, it felt exactly as if I was in that sort of environment, albeit with people I didn’t personally know. It is such a human instinct to gather at times of crisis to find out what’s going on. And tools like Twitter and Scribble Live make it so easy to gather in a way that makes geography irrelevant.

In terms of the news sourcing, what was interesting to me was this. The LA Times, a respected and reputable news source, said that Michael Jackson was dead. Did I — and many others around the world — believe them? Instinctively, I was waiting for the BBC’s confirmation so at some level, I evidently did not trust the LA Times as much as I trust the BBC. From the reaction of other people online, this seems to have been their response as well. I believe that the LA Times reported the death at around 10:30 PM London time but the BBC only confirmed this fact through their independent verification at approximately 11:46 PM. So in terms of news reporting, the LA Times scooped the BBC on this story — but it was only when I heard the BBC’s, authoritative voice say “It has now been confirmed that Michael Jackson is in fact dead” that I was ready to face the reality of the pop star’s passing.

It was also interesting to note that the BBC’s live report remarked that there was a lot of rumour and speculation on the Internet and via Twitter during the few hours following Jackson’s admission to hospital. It seemed a very 21st century moment — while we were watching the news, the news was also watching us.

For me, the significance of this is event that, while many of us “ordinary folk” can publish our views and opinions online instantaneously, this kind of interaction is rife with the potential for rumour and speculation. At best, we are generally at one remove from the news. There are of course ordinary people who are caught up in extraordinary events and have the opportunity to blog or twitter about their experience in the moment — such as what has been happening in Iran — and I do not mean at all to disrespect what they’re communicating to the world about their personal experiences. I just want to emphasise that trained journalists adhere to a rigourous code of ethics, including vigourous fact checking before making their reports and this is an important and valuable function — it is sometimes better to be late with the correct facts than early with a sensational scoop.

Photo: thanks to groupieblog

• 11:16 PM fusionview - Watching unfolding news and speculation online about whether Michael Jackson has died
• 11:17 PM fusionview - Saw people saying how tragic it was on Twitter about 20 mins ago
• 11:18 PM fusionview - Checked out news sites BBC and CNN and all they said was that he had been rushed to hospital not breathing
• 11:19 PM fusionview - Ustream claimed live coverage - “Ustream Michael Jackson passes away- live coverage- www.ustream.tv“
• 11:19 PM fusionview - But too many people on the Ustream site made streaming freeze
• 11:20 PM fusionview - Many in Twitterverse claiming he’s dead and posting RIP etc
• 11:29 PM fusionview - Michael Jackson taken to hospital bit.ly
• 11:30 PM fusionview - Interesting to see difference between professional journalists and social media observers.
• 11:30 PM fusionview - Journos cautious until facts confirmed
• 11:30 PM fusionview - Journos use terms like “reports”/ “reported”. Cautious tone. BBC report what other news agencies said. But “no independent confirmation”
• 11:34 PM fusionview - CNN reporting Jackson in coma. BBC “not clear what the position is”
• 11:35 PM fusionview - Live BBC online stream now filling time with review of Michael Jackson’s career while waiting for more news
• 11:38 PM fusionview - LA Times reported Jackson dead but BBC don’t believe them. They want “independent confirmation”
• 11:38 PM fusionview - Is LA Times less reputable than BBC?
• 11:39 PM fusionview - Perhaps that’s why the world tends to believe BBC as dependable? They won’t say anything till they themselves are absolutely sure
• 11:39 PM fusionview - This is a fascinating object lesson in why we need real journos
• 11:40 PM fusionview - Fans gathering outside hospital
• 11:40 PM fusionview - TMZ and LA Times apparently have inside line to hospital staff, say BBC
• 11:41 PM fusionview - BBC careful to emphasise TMZ and LA Times very respected
• 11:41 PM fusionview - Assoc Press also now reporting Jackson dead
• 11:41 PM fusionview - BBC still not committing
• 11:41 PM fusionview - Hospital wouldn’t give info to BBC
• 11:42 PM fusionview - Anyone else out there have any views?
• 11:43 PM fusionview - Yes, coma seems a certainty
• 11:44 PM fusionview - BBC just confirming he’s dead
• 11:44 PM fusionview - BBC: “We can now confirm…”
• 11:44 PM fusionview - BBC: we have confirmaiton now he has died aged 50
• 11:45 PM fusionview - Is news true and 100% only when BBC confirms it?
• 11:45 PM fusionview - BBC: rumours spreading before confirmation due to Twitter & social media
• 11:45 PM fusionview - So even while we’re watching BBC, they are watching us
• 11:46 PM fusionview - RIP Michael Jackson
• 11:46 PM Courtney Rafter - hearing he’s in a coma
• 11:47 PM fusionview - Yes, BBC has confirmed he’s dead
• 11:48 PM fusionview - BBC live stream news.bbc.co.uk
• 11:52 PM fusionview - I’m now closing this live blogging feed. Thanks to everyone who has been watching and adding comments. My condolences to Michael Jackson’s family, friends & fans

The Dulwich Picture Gallery is running an exhibition on the theme of What Are You Like?, based on a Victorian parlor game where you create an image of yourself based on a number of your favorite things e.g. your favorite book, animal, music, place etc. Some friends were telling me about it the other evening and someone said, “The modern equivalent is Facebook, isnt it?” - which started me thinking…

On social networks like Facebook and MySpace, you can show off to the world your favourite music, movies, books and interests as well as who your friends are. On MySpace in particular, you can redesign the look of your page with wallpaper that reflects your personality and you can play actual music that plays when your visit to comes to your page. On both social networks, you can add a picture of yourselfand people often change this photo to reflect their current mood or status. Some people use a photo of their dog or a cartoon image of themselves. All of it is a way of saying to the world: this is who I am.

It seems to me that this is a very human instinct going back beyond the Victorians playing their parlour games to time immemorial. Wherever we humans have been, we have wanted others to know us. Perhaps those ancient hand prints and paintings of buffalo in dark primeval caves are no more than a prehistoric people’s way of saying, “This is who we are. This is what we are like.” Archaelogist usually interpret these markings as religious symbols or cultural totems but perhaps they might be no more than the graffiti of a Neanderthal teenager who might have been trying to impress a girl… (”Me, I like bison, you like too? Look, me have big hands, you - hands so small and sweet.”)

We tell each other what we are like when we first meet as friends or when we go on a date. We want to find common interests and we want the other person to like us. We often present ourselves in the best light or at least, in light of that we think will appeal to the other person. I guess this is what we are doing on Facebook and MySpace when we share our music and favourite things online for our friends and also the world to see. On the Indian marriage and dating site Shaadi.com, users can include information about themselves such as their hobbies, interests and also there Indian astrological signs. They can also add photos and videos, and in fact the more information they include in their profile of the more helpful this is to the “eMatchmaker” that will be searching the database to find mutual matches for them. So, In the same way that the Victorians bonded with their friends - and perhaps grew closer to potential love matches - during the fun and flirtation of their evening parlour games, these days we find friends and modern day love matches via the pixels of online digital parlours.

So, lets see - what I would put on my Facebook or MySpace profile ( if I ever got round to filling those boxes in):

• My favourite animal - hmm, the problem is I dont really like animals.
• My favourite clothes - a pair of old, comfy jeans.
• My favourite place - home.
• My favourite pastime - writing and blogging.

Picture: thanks to mrnizz.blogspot.com

You don’t have to be glued to the telly this summer to follow the Olympics. You can watch it online from your desk at work or on your mobile phone anywhere you can access the mobile internet. According to Fierce Mobile Content, an up to the minute study by NBC Universal reports that, “74.6 million viewers tuned in for Friday’s Opening Ceremonies–while television accounted for 94 percent of the audience, online viewing represented 5.7 percent, mobile TV accounted for 0.03 percent and only about 36,000 viewers (0 percent) watched via video-on-demand.”

This is likely to be the first time that many people are using their mobiles to watch TV, according to the report, and no doubt a lot more people are watching online who cannot get to a TV. So the increased viewer numbers overall is good news for the US TV channel NBC as they are one of the key US broadcasters offering live coverage of the Olympics online and via mobile - once people get the hang of using new technology and get used to having that universal access, they are likely to want more. Increased access to content via a variety of media means, of course, increased viewer numbers overall and that’s good for advertising revenue - and may even translate into people willing to pay in the future for the convenience of, say, mobile content delivery.

The NBC online site offers viewers the option to be alerted when an event starts as well as “video to go” if you missed it. There are also downloads of highlights, results and medals listings, information about competing countries and online games to play. And, evidence of the growing Hispanic demographic in the US, a Spanish version of the site.

In the UK, the BBC also offers live video coverage of the Olympics online with a live text commentary. You can receive video masterclasses on your mobile phone - eg explaining the art of tae kwan do - and also take part in a live streaming discussion via text (Text 81111 with “OLYMPICS” as first word - UK users only). You can also receive text alerts for the events you want to watch live. For the mobile site, type http://news.bbc.co.uk/mobile/ into your phone’s browser. Like the NBC site, there are medal and results listings. There is also a section featuring BBC Sport’s Olympics Monkey - a cartoon mascot of sorts derived from the Chinese mythic hero Monkey - with games and quizes.

In fact, checking out the BBC mobile page opened up to me a whole world of mobile BBC content beyond the Olympics - including previews of the thriller series Spooks, text recipes from a cookery programme and the chance to share your snapshot of a newsworthy event direct from your mobile phone.

In China, too, mobile coverage of the Olympics is ubiquitous, according to Reuters. The report quotes Yun Weijie, president and chief executive of Telegent Systems, a Silicon Valley semiconductor maker: “TV will become a standard feature for cellphones in China by the end of this year, just like cameras.”

Nicholas Bennett is the creator and founder of BooksInMyPhone.com - and also husband of my fav cousin. Whenever we’ve visited them in Melbourne, Australia, Nick has always had his nose in a book, magazine or computer. I never really knew what he did - only that it was something clever involving computer code. So when he unveiled BooksInMyPhone.com, a project he had been working on alongside his day job, I was really Wow-ed! Continuing my current investigation into ebooks and the future of reading/ publishing, here is an interview with Nick which we conducted by email.

Can you tell us something about yourself?

A life long bibliophile, I am renowned / infamous for reading while walking. I always get shtick for the time a family fireman friend happened to be driving past with the boys in the fire engine. He started up the sirens to attract my attention so he could give me a ‘hale well met my friend’ wave - I was of course oblivious, engrossed in some book and unable to imagine the passing siren could have anything to do with me. Apart form loving books my day job is creating large complex internet delivered software systems.

How did you come to get the idea for BooksInMyPhone?

Since I was the archetypical 13 year old SciFi reader I’d know that one day you’d be able to carry ‘the library of congress’ (the international unit for ‘large amounts of information’) in a handheld - they just never seemed to arrive.

My wife gifted me a new phone and I noticed the specs mentioned “Java Capable” - it just made me wonder if I could write the reader I wanted. After a few prototypes I realized that it was actually a really good reading experience.

The future had arrived.

There is huge amount of information available on the net, and more and more each year. Initiatives like archive.org, Project Gutenberg, distributed proofreaders project, and Google’s book scanning are digitising mountains of texts. I love that, I love that it’s there. But I’m never going to sit down and read
a book at my computer - I spend too much time there as it is - and I’m never going to lug a laptop wherever I go.

Everything really flowed out of those two sources.

What did it take to build the site for BooksInMyPhone?

There was a LONG list of capabilities we had to get up to speed on: MySQL, PHP, Sun mobile java, Web Hosting, copyright law, international law, html, ccs, ip geo location, sourcing books, choosing books, reviews, licensing, cryptography, browser architecture, phone capability models, over the air provisioning, …

While modern phones are powerful they are often ‘hobbled’ in mysterious ways, even high end phones with file systems and .doc file viewers are not really suitable for reading books - “was I on page 2506 or 2605?” They also tend to waste screen real estate on info junk. I wanted a spare clean experience that made the most of the phone to connect with the author’s voice. I went through many prototypes; playing with different feature sets till I found something I really enjoyed reading with. Once I’d decided to share I cut it down to make it as simple as possible to use: ’start it up, turn the pages, back and forward by chapter’.

Given a reader the next question was ‘which books?’ 100,000 is ‘better’ than 50,000 - but sometimes less is more, we decided to focus on works that had stood the test of time and formed the core of the western literary tradition. Tiny phone screens are very unforgiving, source texts are not guaranteed to read well; tables, quotations, and odd typographic usage can destroy readability; large files can ‘choke’ phones or make the reader feel lost in a Kafkaesque stream of text. We wanted to provider blurbs/reviews to help people find book they did not already have in mind. I think an important part of the site is supporting this ‘content discovery’.

I think the most amazing part of the whole experience was the fantastic range of resources / capabilities available through the Internet. With some starting skills, an awful lot of trial and error and research in the middle of the night (day job! family!) anyone with perseverance can go from a vision while sitting at the kitchen table to providing a service with global reach. It’s really mind blowing…and it’s really just ‘the end of the beginning’.

What are the most popular downloads?

In no particular order: Lena Rivers from our ‘Best Sellers’ collection, Charles Stross’s Accelerando, Hamlet, Cory Doctorow’s works, A Christmas Carol, Peter Watts Blindsight (which I’d highly recommend - diamond hard SciFi with tight plot and characterizations caught up in an explosion of novel ideas), The Importance of Being Ernest, Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, Anna Karenina, Madam Bovary, Ben Hur, Pride and Prejudice, Moby Dick.

Our ‘most downloaded authors’ are: Jules Verne, Charles Dickens, Cory Doctorow, H.G. Wells, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Leo Tolstoy, and Oscar Wilde.

You focus mainly on out of copyright books. Why?

There are a number of reasons.

One is that there is a huge resource of public domain texts that people don’t really appreciate can be freely used for any purpose. Lawrence Lessig wrote a great book Free Culture that charts the trajectory of copyright law (recent massive expansion of copyright duration) and where it is heading. He discusses the big difference between a free (as in speech) culture and a permission culture (don’t do anything till you have spoken to some lawyer$). One of the reasons to focus on out of copyright works is to promote free culture by making free culture available and compelling and demonstrating the potential of free culture.

Another reason is rooted in law. Current copyright law says that as soon as something is ‘fixed in a tangible medium’ it is protected from unauthorized copying for the life of the author + 50/70/90/… years. That means that unless the work is explicitly licensed for free distribution or the copyright has lapsed you need to negotiate with the rights holder before distributing the work. Negotiation with rights holders can be complex and time consuming, out of copyright works gave us an immediate critical mass of (great/timeless) works.

We have a small but growing collection of Creative Commons licensed works. The Creative Commons set of licences were created by Lawrence Lessig to allow creators to quickly and cheaply control which rights they reserve in a legally binding way. For example we have many ‘Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives’ licensed works - anyone can copy and distribute these works as long as they attribute the author, do not make money from the work, and do not make derivatives of the work (see the Creative Commons site for the full legal ‘code’). These works are a little harder to source as they are scattered around, but once found we know we can share them.

What is the future / scope for current authors who would like to distribute their books via digital means? What issues do they need to consider?

I think we are at the point where ‘distribution’ is solved; right now you can distribute directly to billions ‘from your living room’. The hard parts are making sure you get paid, making sure people find out they want your work, and making sure people will actually read digital works.

There have been a number of hardware approaches to liberating text from the computer, Amazon’s Kindle being only the latest in a long line of reader hardware. I think the phone as reader will eventually win out, your phone will become so powerful you will think it is a laptop, your laptop will become so small you’ll call it a phone - but right now as you read this there are literally billions of mobile phones that people could be using to read your work on - as soon as they stop fetishizing the book/codex form.

I think Tim O’Reily said something like ‘authors don’t need to worry about piracy, they need to worry about obscurity’. With our current technology it’s easy to set something free, but it’s hard to ensure that you *actually get paid* for *every copy*. One approach to this conundrum is to use free as part of the climb out of obscurity, use freely sharable work to drive buzz and allow social networks to spread the word about you. There is a whole spectrum of this approach from Penguin UK’s ‘Taster’ program of first chapters only, through Cory Doctorow’s ‘all my books are creative commons non commercial as well as proper/paper books for money’. It seems like the biggest decision point in digital distribution is where you want to sit in this spectrum.

The only way to ‘*make sure* you will get paid for *every copy*’ is using Digital Right Management, essentially using technical means backed by laws against breaking the protection (DMCA anti-circumvention - pioneered in the US of A and rolling out worldwide) to lock the digital content. This approach has a long history of putting out content under one protection scheme and then cancelling it leaving consumers unable to access content they paid for - this means it has a bad reputation with the consumers who are aware of it. There are also all sorts of strange double standards and grey areas; for example iTunes has some DRM scheme protecting music downloads but they tell you protected works can be written as an audio CD and then ripped DRM free - is that circumvention under DMCA? did they authorise you by telling you? did they not? what’s the DRM for then?…. Some hold that in the long run DRM is bad for both producer and consumer, some that without DRM the economics of content production would collapse.

The most important thing of all is getting mind share, putting that spark in someone’s head that makes them need to read your book. That is a big area and fairly well out of our scope and experience. What we can do is help translate that spark into an action - if someone hears about your work and has internet connectivity on their phone they could literally be reading it within minutes. We also aim to help people go from a book they enjoyed on our site to other books they might enjoy.

Are there any upgrades you are working on?

There is so much one could do, and only limited time and resource - knowing what people value before build out the functionality would really help. I’d really value any inputs and comments on what we currently do and what we could do. I’d encourage everyone to take a look at the site and try reading on their phone. Here are some of he possibilities I have in mind:

• A site makeover is in the final stages. This will give us a new look, improve ‘content discovery’, and open up some space for collaborative / user driven contributions.
• We would like to include collaborative filtering and inputs for tagging and reviews.
• User sharable reading lists might be interesting, see who is reading and has read what and why.
• There are a number of things that we are looking at to extend the current reader:
• nice typography / formatting in the books - plain text is a great start, but sometimes authors use italics etc to good effect.
• ‘Read Aloud’. I think I’d love this, the idea would be to let you seamlessly switch between reading the book and having the book read itself to you from where you left off. Imagine; you can snuggle up in bed reading till you fall asleep, wake up early and have the book continue reading itself to you while you do a morning run, and then pick up where it left off on the train as you go to work. Audio files have a quality voice synthesis won’t match for a long time but can be 80MB (that will bulk up your mobile bill).
• Java on phones has ‘hooks’ to open a web-browser, for example to open wikipedia on some word or phrase from the book. However the support for this is so patchy that we would have to build a simple web-browser within the reader. I have played with a prototype - but I’m not sure how compelling it would be relative to the effort to bring it up to a ‘beta’ standard.
• Distributed tagging - from within the book rate it, tag it, bookmark it, comment on it, have all the inputs posted to the web and incorporated in the ongoing user experience - sort of a twitter + bookglutton = ‘booktwitt’?
• Distributed proofreading - readers could click to ‘mark’ a page that does not format well or has some errors.

ebk

For ebooks to succeed, the creators of digital versions of books need to think about books in a new way.

I’ve been checking out the different ebook softwares that you can download to your PC to read ebooks, since my post the other day about ebooks generally. I professed then to be a fan of the MobiPocket reader and after testing out Adobe Digital Editions reader, my views have not changed - Adobe’s reader is miles behind in its concept and that shows in its lack of usability.

MobiPocket seems to have succeeded in thinking about books in a new way in order to offer a multi-faceted experience of reading books on a digital device. It uses reflowable text so you can control not just the font size but also the line spacing, the actual font itself and you can zoom in and out on both text and images. All of these functions are intuitively laid out on the navigation pane and you can also use the mouse to control the page movements - which means you can sit back at a distance with your laptop on a coffee table and use just the mouse on one arm of your armchair to control page turning and accessing the controls.

Adobe has its main strength in creating pdfs of print documents - what you get on screen with a pdf is a copy or replica of the print document. Its Digital Editions readers shows that heritage. You can increase the font size but not to such a great degree as in MobiPocket. And you cannot zoom. At all. You cannot choose the font and you cannot change line spacing. Essentially, you get a glorified replica of a print page. There is no easy way to get a full screen - you have to click a few times through a menu to get there - whereas on MobiPocket, a simple button gets you to full screen mode and you can easily get back to the dashboard by hovering your cursor at the top of the screen.

Unfortunately, there appear to be many more digital books in Adobe format than in MobiPocket format. This is bad news for the reputation of ebooks - if it’s clunky and awkward to read and maneovre round an ebook because of ill-thoughtout software, then people are not going to take to ebooks as readily as if the digital reading experience is a joy. For me, MobiPocket reading is a joy - because of the control I as reader have on the formatting of the text to make it the most ergonomically suitable for my personal comfort and of the ease of usability of the dashboard. Publishers of ebooks need to think in a new way about books - forget the old paper version and focus on how the content of the books can best be delivered to the consumer in a new medium.

We as consumers are becoming increasingly used to controlling our user experience. Think about movies, television and radio. At one time, it was expected that we had to go to the movie theatre at the specific time the movie was being shown, or organise our evenings around a TV show we wanted to watch at a certain time, or tune in to listen to our favourite radio program when the broadcaster decided to put it on. Now, we can choose where and when to watch via DVDs which we can pause, rewind and also personalise in terms of sound and colour etc. We can download podcasts of radio shows to listen to whenever we please.

With ebooks, we can be freed from the constraints of the font size, the layout, weight of paper, and choice of binding selected by the publisher and the reading experience can be transformed into a much more user-centred one, especially if embedded links and other additonal electronic data are included in the digital version of the book. For example, I was reading a physical book (p-book) the other day and it mentioned the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem - there was no accompanying photo and I could not remember what it looked like. Imagine if I had been reading an ebook version which enabled me to go online with a click on the phrase to see some photos and also to find out any other background information. As we all get used to reading blogs and online newspapers etc, that active way of reading - to follow links or go online to search for more information - is going to become an increasingly instinctive and natural response. If publishers want to tap into the digital book market, that is the way to go - rather than trying to replicate the experience of reading a p-book.

Photo: thanks to trishalyn.com

What if we were to hook up with old friends in real life the way we do on Facebook? What if we related to our friends in the real world as if we were on Facebook?

This video gives us a taste of what may lie ahead for our friendships…

I’m not reading books anymore - I’m trying to “go shelfless”. With the technology available these days, it seemed to us likely that you could abandon all shelving with the consequential enlargement of your living space. That’s an attractive idea, especially if, like me, your home is already jam-packed with books, CDS and papers that have taken up all the shelving space available already - what do you do as you buy new items?

One friend is very efficient at monetizing her acquisitions - once she’s finished reading her books, she sells them off again on Ebay. She used to rip the music of CDS and then sell the discs on Ebay too. She also gets rid of old clothes and other items the same way.

I’ve been wondering if one could minimise the clutter at an earlier point ie at the acquisition point - by going virtual or electronic.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about taking virtual notes using Evernote, which has so far been a great way to cut back on the bits of paper and physical notebooks that I would normally use. I “write” notes on my mobile phone-PDA using the letter recognizer function so it feels just like scribbling in a physical notebook or on the back of an envelope and zap it across to my online account.

I’ve recently discovered audiobooks via Audible.co.uk, which is a subsidiary of the US-based company Audible.com. So I’m not reading books but I’m listening to them. With Audible, you pay for each book you download just like you might if you bought a physical book from Amazon. But you can also sign up an account and pay a monthly fee of around £8 - each month you can download one title. The latter option is good value as you can download a book that otherwise costs more at that £8 price. Once you’ve downloaded it, the audiobook is yours forever and you can stream it from the online site or download it as many times as you like. The only limitation is that you can only play it on up to 4 computers/ devices that you register with your account - this is to stop you sending an e-version to all your friends and doing Audible out of business.

I’m really enjoying my first two audiobooks. I can listen to them while gardening or sitting on the bus. It’s so much more time efficient being able to listen to a book and do something else at the same time. And activities that used to be boring and painful to do are now quite pleasurable. Also, lying in the garden staring up at the blue sky while someone reads to me in my ears is just delightful - I don’t have to strain my arms lifting the book to read it as I lie down or crick my neck to get the reading angle right. And the books don’t take up any physical space - although you can burn CD versions of them if you want to.

My only complaint about Audible UK is that they have only 18,000 titles compared to the US company which has 40,000 titles. Many of the UK titles are older titles and / or of the WH Smith variety ie non-intellectual easy reading (though there are a few exceptions). I tend to prefer Waterstones or Blackwells which have more academic selections - or Amazon where you can get the most obscure books so long as they are in print. I was very excited when I first discovered Audible.com, the US site, as it had loads of books I wanted. For example, the US company has Naomi Klein’s latest book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Stephen Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature and Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. My excitement fizzled out when I came to the UK site - where none of these books are available. The UK site has lots on Churchill, how to make a million, chick lit and the latest popular non-fiction, which is fine if your tastes are limited to those topics.

So why don’t I just sign up for the US site? The frustrating thing is that if you try that from the UK, it refuses to allow you to do that and shoots you over to the UK site. Their support team explained to me, “The availability of certain book titles is linked the geographic digital download rights set by the publishers. A title can have different publishers in different countries and the rights are set on a country by country basis. Where possible, we try and secure rights on a world wide basis (for our US, UK, French and German sites) but there are times when this is either not possible or discussions are currently ongoing to secure the rights.” So I have to keep checking back to the UK site in the hope that the UK publishers will at some point issue the UK version of the audiobook.

Still, I have found a few books on the UK site that will keep me going for the next few months - hopefully as time passes more of the kinds of books that interest me will find their way onto the UK site and I won’t have to terminate my experiment with virtual books anytime soon.

Illustration: thanks to Drylcon from Flickr.com (CCL)

ebk