text:
This was originally published in Hiut Denim's yearbook. I've republished it here, over on Hi and over at Medium because, well, the beauty of the web is multiplicity. More on that later.
I want them all to slow down. I want to whisper in their ears: pull back for a second. Just for a moment. Stop and refine. Refine and refine.
Refinement is hard because it requires faith. Faith in the thing you're refining — that the process of refinement will yield greater value; or faith that there is any value in the thing to begin with. To refine is some parts hubris, other parts humility, all parts vulnerability.
If you release the unrefined thing into the world and it doesn't do well, you can always tell yourself: Ah, if only I had refined, it would have been great.
To leave something important to you unrefined — uniterated, firstdrafted — is the laziest safety net you can deploy. It's almost lazier than not creating in the first place. It's also mean to those around you. Few things are meaner than foisting a lazy draft of a novel upon friends.
Creation without refinement is a vicious loop. When the unrefined thing fails or falters, you tell yourself it isn't worth refining anymore. And so you move onto the next thing. You build something else. You draft and release another thing sans refinement. And so on, and so forth.
To have faith in refinement, though, endows one with a certain private glory. There is a warmth found in the peeling back of rough onion layers to find that thing you felt but couldn't produce on first blush.
In the process of refinement lies also meditations. A calm meditation like that found in sanding a hulking wooden table by hand, slowly, over the course of a week. Or it can be a restive meditation filled with resignation — resignation to the need to rebuild and remake and possibly start over.
In refinement and iteration you finally get to know the thing you made. Really know it. Understand how bad it is. How great it could be. How much potential is still left unrealized. And within each iteration you move the thing forward; sometimes better, sometimes worse.
But first you have to stop. If just for a moment.
And so I keep whispering to all of them as I walk down the street: pull back and refine and refine.]]>
Note: This was also posted over at Medium. In part because I wanted to see how it felt to use Medium for editing (I invited a few friends to read this beforehand), and also to test the efficacy of margin commenting.
I love Facebook.
There, I've said it.
It's one of the very few "social" places I'd be genuinely sad to see gone from the internet.
That's crazy, right? I mean, Facebook is just a personal data farm, isn't it? It's just a not-too-coy set of dopamine-optimized actions to trick you into dumping information about yourself into the magic Zucker Woodchipper? And do you know what comes out of the Zucker Woodchipper? Gold nuggets. Made of advertising. And then leprechauns dump those gold nuggets into political lobbying — ha ha!
I'm not denying any of this. It is an ad machine, in part. But that doesn't mean Facebook can't also provide value. (We're partially to blame for these ad machines — we've given them permission to exist by not wanting to pay for things … but that's another post.)
Ad issues aside, there is the possibility that nobody else derives the same value from Facebook that I do. Fair enough. But let me tell you why I like Facebook so much. It's very simple.
Facebook keeps me connected to folks I care deeply about. And more specifically: folks I care deeply about who aren't nearby.
That's it. That's the core value Facebook provides me. It's one of my very few "emotive" online experiences. And it provides that experience daily and tangibly.
My newsfeed is almost all signal. This is, in part, because I am ruthless. If you are overtly negative (which is different than having opinions differing from my own), you get hidden. If I don't find value in your postings, you get hidden. If you're a high school friend I friended just to be nice, I hide.
I hide unhesitatingly.
I hide remorselessly.
Hiding is your super power. Hiding is one of those few pure joys of the internet through which — amidst the near endless entropy of online content — you can take a stand, push back in a way that meaningfully affects the data you see.
(Hiding from newsfeed, it should be noted, is different from unfriending — they'll never know.)
So, my feed is signal. Lots of signal. Lots of friends becoming parents. Getting engaged. Couples falling in love. Babies. Oh, god, the babies. (But I do like them so. If you don't like babies — hide!) Friends and acquaintances off on adventures. Beautiful mountain photos taken during weekend trail runs. Family outings. I keep track of the orphanage a good friend of mine runs in Nepal. I am able to see what my quirky Japanese "parents" are up to. I get updates on the dog back home on the east coast of the US. She is still cute, I can report.
Yes, my Facebook feed is like a Facebook commercial.
And, no. No other internet product, service, or platform provides anything near this experience.
Perhaps most importantly, these folks I love get to keep tabs on me.
There is a qualitative difference in meeting up with someone after six months to whom you're connected on Facebook (and actively watch) verses meeting up with someone to whom you're not connected. Call it creepy or what you will. But there's a lessening of perceived distance from that connection. Those six months don't feel quite as long. And you have a shared déjà vu of general knowledge of what's happened between you both. Artificial? I don't think so. It's part and parcel of the promise that social media brings to the table but rarely fulfills.
The more I use Facebook, the better it gets. And I find the quality of experience increases as I bring friends and family dear to my heart onto it. This is mostly because Facebook allows you to quietly prune as you go along.
So if you find your Facebook newsfeed full of inanity, start hiding. It's easy. If you're friends with a loudmouth, shut 'em up. Simple. This isn't magic. Facebook made it easy to hide for a reason — they know they won't always get it right. One person can only read so many status updates in a single day. Make 'em good.
Facebook algorithms are far from perfect — but they're spectacular creatures when you consider the amount of raw data flowing through the system everyday. It takes a little effort to help them along, but if you ruthlessly prune, the signal-to-noise ratio shifts in your favor very quickly.
I love Facebook. Or, more accurately, I love the experiences it provides me.
Complaining about its doom and demise won't make it — or the thing that follows it — better. The reality is we need algorithms to do a majority of heavy data lifting. But we also need to augment those algorithms with a little hand curation.
There's no complicated trick to making Facebook better: Just hide the noise.]]>
(This essay originally appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review's Spring 2013 issue.)
I take them all off, the covers. As soon as I've paid — swoosh! Gone! I don't have the heart to throw them in the garbage, but I certainly don't let them muddle my beautiful hardcover books.
Contemporary covers can be rancid things. Littered with sales copy and discount stickers. They crumple, they tear, they smudge, they catch when you dump them in your bag. Once you embrace the serenity of coverless books you can never go back. Without covers, hardcover books become confident blocks of wood — they don't shimmy or slide in your hands or atop tables. Try it. You'll love it. You'll never go back.
So it's a rare and wonderful thing to find a contemporary book wrapped in something I just can't remove. Or, rather, wrapped in something I love to keep on, to remove and replace, again and again. This is the case with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, my favorite book from Haruki Murakami. Designed by Chip Kidd, the cover contains only the barest of text: title and author's name. No blurbs or quotes or synopsis. The surface of the entire cover, front to back, is a full-bleed photograph of an orange wind-up bird toy against a baby-blue background gradient. Geoff Spear photographed the toy so that most of it looms just out of focus. Only the bird's eye — smack in the middle of the front cover — is sharp.
Despite such minimalism, the cover is alive. The circular path of the text, the positioning of the eye, and the sweeping patterns in the bird's design pull your attention first to the center, then along the edge to the spine, inviting you to flip the book over and try to parse just what it is you're looking at.
Now tilt the book: A translucent pattern shimmers across the surface. Look closer still and you'll notice that it is, in fact, a mechanical schematic of the bird. Curious. Unwrap the cover and beneath it — printed in white ink on royal-blue chipboard — is a blueprint drawn by Chris Ware revealing the hidden complexities behind wind-up-bird mechanics.
Had they stopped here, Kidd and Ware and Spear could have claimed abject book-cover domination. But Ware goes one subtle step further to render the mechanics of the eye as a water well — an outer rim and an inner rim, abstracting the pupil into a perfect circle. The figure–ground relationship in this well illustration can be read in both directions: Either you're at the bottom looking up and someone's head is peeking over the top, or you're at the top looking down, a small figure huddled against the well wall. Both are poignant to the story.
What a joy this cover is — its layers and materiality and physicality, made for print and print alone. In my library, it's one of the very few hardcover books that has survived my rule — take them all off! Well, all except this one. Take it off and then put it back on.]]>
A little over a week ago I published 'Subcompact Publishing'.
The essay is a consolidation of thoughts and prescriptions for tablet publishing. There is a manifesto bit, too. Which is something of an update to another manifesto I posted nearly three years ago: 'Books in the Age of the iPad'.
Responses to 'Subcompact Publishing' began appearing immediately.
First up was Ryan on 37Signals' Signal Vs. Noise blog with 'Tablets are waiting for their movable type':
Writers would love a way to push serialized content straight to tablets, and the experience would be a boon to readers. Tablets are the best way to read, and Newsstand is the equivalent of RSS for non-geeks. Hopefully apps like The Magazine inspire somebody to make this happen.
Elliot Jay Stocks quickly responded on Medium with the subcompact ethos as applied to music:
Craig is talking about magazines here, but actually I think this can be extended to all forms of digital publishing, and it sparked off a very specific thought in my mind: that the enjoyment of consuming digital media is increased when we only have a small amount to consume.
Then the prolific GigaOm writer, Matthew Ingram, up and slapped subcompact on everything in his 'Sub-compact Media' piece:
Why aren't more traditional publishers experimenting with features or services that are similar to Arment's magazine, or Tapestry's mobile approach, or a stripped-down experience like that offered by TL;DR or Circa? It's not because they can't — obviously they could if they wanted to. But as Craig Mod suggests in his essay, with reference to disruptive economics guru Clay Christensen, they don't do this for the same reason North American auto-makers didn't compete with Honda: they simply didn't see it as a competitor until it was almost too late, because they had defined their business in the wrong way.
A few days following that post I noticed a strange referrer in my logs: The Periodical Co. It appeared to be a newly minted, suspiciously subcompact service. Hamish Mckenzie did a little sleuthing and covered this mysterious company in a post on Pando Daily:
It took Shahruz Shaukat (21), David Mancherje (28), and Cyrus Ghahremani (25) just 26 hours during the Los Angeles event of the AngelHack Hackathon to build a working demo of The Periodical Co, a product the men are calling "Digital Magazines as a Service."
And then:
To Shaukat, Mod's argument made total sense. "When I read the Craig Mod article where he defines subcompact publishing, every line I was reading I was nodding my head," he says. "I don't think my opinions on it were fully formed until I read that article." And so, they set to work on a publishing tool that, in their words, "would not offend readers with graphics or interactive elements that are just distractions." It's all about the reading, baby.
Which is — really — the whole point of posting these things: To inspire, clarify, and solidify ideas for other to take and run. I'm firmly of the belief that you can give away a lot and the peripheral benefits will fall into place. Seeing The Periodical Co., even in its nascent shell, made me smile something wide.
Jason Kottke — whose site I have been reading for nearly 13 years — responded with, 'Trend alert: small internet publications':
For the longest time, the web was all like "blog blog blog blog" and we were like "fave fave fave like like like" but a bunch of recent publications and publishing systems seem to be breaking out of that mode. Craig Mod calls it Subcompact Publishing. Not sure I like the name, but I dig his gist.
Bill Mickey over at Folio posted a 'Response to Subcompact Publishing', raising questions about the future landscape of tablet publishing:
I understand that with digital comes an expectation of disruption and re-invention. And not just an expectation, but actual disruption. But it's also a world where all sorts of business models live and play.
Om very kindly added 'Subcompact Publishing' to his list of '7 stories to read this weekend'. It was also picked up by The Association of Magazine Media in their piece, 'Disruption Through Simplicity in Digital Magazines'.
AND THEN: The Daily folded.
Murdoch's The Daily was — in nearly every respect — the polar opposite of a subcompact publishing tool, platform, or publisher. It didn't take long for others to notice that, either.
MG Siegler was first out the gate with, 'Why Magazine Apps Suck':
But the magazines and newspapers are stuck in the old way of doing things. They need to evolve … What if instead of pushing out all your content on a monthly basis, you released a weekly "mini" version with new content and live updates as needed? Instead of getting one giant dump of content one time a month (most of which people probably won't have time and/or desire to read), you'd get four manageable deliveries a month.
John Pavlus at MIT's Technology Review posted 'How To Publish a Minimum Viable Magazine Online':
Shocking no one, News Corporation's iPad-only publication "The Daily" kicked the bucket today. While future-of-journalism sites ponder the why's and wherefores, technologists like Marco Arment and Craig Mod may have already identified a working alternative. Their connections to the journalism or publishing "industry" as we've understood it for the past century are tenuous at best–Arment is a programmer who built Tumblr and Instapaper, while Mod was a product designer at Flipboard. And that outsider status is precisely why they're onto something.
Joshua Benton absolutely nails it in his The Daily post-mortem over at Nieman Labs — 'Some lessons from the demise of The Daily':
Here's the thing: The Daily had over 100,000 paying subscribers. That ain't nothing! With most subscribers paying $39.99 a year (others paid 99 cents a week), minus Apple's cut, that's around $3 million in annual revenue — and that's before you add in advertising revenue. At various points, it was the highest-grossing app in the App Store in 13 different countries. In the United States, it's been in the top 5 of news apps by gross since launch and, until this summer, consistently in the top 20 of all apps — even including Angry Birds and the rest.
In the end, The Daily chose the wrong slice from the tablet publishing distribution dichotomy. Right now (and certainly two years ago!) you get to choose one, and only one:
They went for the most ridiculous non-option: a huge publication with massive overhead, laser focused on a single platform.
An odd choice for a group that had the resources to pull off Large → Many. If The Daily had created a real open-web presence, and had considered — at the very least — an iPhone app, maybe things wouldn't have looked so bleak.
Regarding the other non-option — Small → Many — you could try to start a lean publication with small overhead distributed on every platform. Unfortunately the lack of cross platform tools means it's not trivially easy to do well (especially if you want subscriptions / payment options).
This right here: the difficulty in one-button, cross-tablet, cross-platform publishing, is a gaping hole in our digital publishing ecosystems, ready to be filled by a smart startup. The only real Small → Many option right now is the open web.
It also just so happened that The Awl launched their new Weekend Companion days before The Daily folded.
29th Street Publishing is the company that makes the software that powers The Awl. And low and behold — it's pretty darn subcompact. Nieman Labs covers them and The Awl in '29th Street Publishing wants to make selling magazines for iPads as easy as blogging':
"Very much like Movable Type and WordPress, we want to be a tool people can use to have their work go further and make deeper relationships with their readers," he said. That approach is something Jacobs and one of his 29th Street cofounders, Natalie Podrazik, understand, since both came from Six Apart, the company responsible for blogging software like Movable Type and TypePad. (29th Street's team also includes, among others, former NewYorker.com editor Blake Eskin and blogger-since-the-early-days Greg Knauss.)
Which is great, because this feels like the universe responding to Ryan over at SvN: ex-Movable Type folks making the next Movable Type for tablets.
Even the death of The Daily — though easy to label 'failure' — is anything, in my opinion, but a failure. What it's done is shown us you can't build a print island in the middle of our digital ocean. Yes: many of us knew that. But, still, to see an old-school structured publishing institution thrust upon this new space, have it willfully ignore many of the rules-of-engagement obvious to us, and then fail means we are, indeed, somewhere new. It's nice to be able to say that with reinforced confidence.
There's a lovely Jung-ian collective unconscious chaos-made-visible feeling when you map out thought streams like this. When I wrote Subcompact Publishing I had a hazy inkling that there was a growing interest in this kind of publishing tool, now it's much clearer.
Please let me know if I missed anything.
Here's a roundup (ordered, vaguely, in decreasing order by traffic) of subcompact related links:
My first exposure to James Turrell came sometime in winter 2003, after a harrowing drive through the Japanese night. I was in a van with two Americans, a Japanese, an older — supposedly famous — French illustrator, a Belgian artist, a Swedish photographer, and another Frenchman, drunk — quite obviously so — and driving.
That configuration didn't last very long.
Despite the fact that many of us had never met before, the consensus shifted quickly. The drunk Frenchman — against his vocal pleading that He was fine! He can drive just fine! — would be replaced as driver. I was the only other passenger with an international license.
So it came to be that I drove this group of rag-tag bohemians and artists and drunkards through the night — my first time driving such a large vehicle, and also my first time driving in Japan. We hurtled down freeways draped in countryside darkness, past rice fields, music blaring, joyful, multi-accented English bouncing all over the interior, the Frenchman snoring in a heap in the back.
We were bound for the newly opened 21st Century Museum in Kanazawa,1 butted against the harsh Sea of Japan on the northern coast. James Turrell had a room there.
I had never before heard of this Turrell fellow. Everyone spoke well of his work so I was excited — naturally.
His room at the 21st Century Museum is like many of his rooms — a tomb with a rectangular hole cut in the center of the ceiling. One of his 'Skyspaces.'
I arrived at dusk. I sat. I looked up at the hole. I watched the sky darken. I felt the freezing air pour in through the open roof. I pulled my scarf up around my face. Then I left.
Still curious, I returned the next morning and sat again. The hole framed a crisp, deep blue Japanese winter sky. Suddenly a cloud floated past. Then some birds flew over. The construction was such that the material forming the hole in the roof was tapered to almost nothing.
This tapering produced the optical illusion — as you continued to stare — that the sky was pulled down to the very ceiling of the room. You could touch it. And when something moved past, it felt compressed and unreal.
And so began my minor obsession with James' work. I've spent the night in his house in Niigata2 — a stunning collaboration with Japanese architect Daigo Ishii3 in which you sleep in a twelve mat tatatmi room. At the touch of a button, the roof slides off the house and a sky viewing timed perfectly to sunrise and sunset begins. You lie there, dazed, witness to the majesty of a darkness (as the sun sets) and color gradation (as the sun rises) you've never before seen.
This past summer I traveled to Naoshima on pilgrimage to James' installations in the Tadao Ando designed, Chichu Art Museum.4 And I've hunted down small collections of his less consuming light installations at various museums and galleries around the world.
It was within this lighthearted decade long investigation of James' work that I discovered his Roden project.5 Roden is the name of a crater in Arizona James bought in the 70s. It's become an icon not just for his Life Work but for the ideal to which — I believe — many of us strive as creators. It is a myth — far larger than life in both ideological scope and physicality.
Here's James' description of the project:
At Roden Crater I was interested in taking the cultural artifice of art out into the natural surround. I did not want the work to be a mark upon nature, but I wanted the work to be enfolded in nature in such a way that light from the sun, moon and stars empowered the spaces … I wanted an area where you had a sense of standing on the planet. I wanted an area of exposed geology like the Grand Canyon or the Painted Desert, where you could feel geologic time. Then in this stage set of geologic time, I wanted to make spaces that engaged celestial events in light so that the spaces performed a "music of the spheres" in light. The sequence of spaces, leading up to the final large space at the top of the crater, magnifies events. The work I do intensifies the experience of light by isolating it and occluding light from events not looked at. I have selected different portions of the sky and a limited number of events for each of the spaces. This is a reason for the large number of spaces.
Did you read that? Then in this stage set of geologic time …
It's with this work in mind I'd like to start a mailing list: The Roden Explorers Club.
It'll be a little more private than posting on this site. A little more ephemeral, perhaps. Like a crater in the desert: there if you look on Google Maps, but usually out of sight.
I'd like for it to be a place for me to announce small projects built with a pinch of James' ethos in mind. Somewhere to ask folks for feedback. Somewhere to share off-the-cuff thinking about the future of books and publishing. A place for you to hit 'reply' outside of the public spectacle of comments and tweets.
The mailing list will have almost nothing to do explicitly with Roden, of course. Roden is just a guiding star, far off in our desert sky.
If any of this interests you, then please consider joining me and becoming an Explorer. The messages will be infrequent, and you can unsubscribe at anytime.
Together we'll hurtle out under the darkness of the interwebs towards whispers of who knows what. Hopefully joyful, joyfully hopeful, and, perhaps, a bit drunk.
So, see you out there?
Subscribed — thanks!
… Zip drives ate floppies.
CDs ate Zips.
DVDs ate CDs.
SD cards ate film.
LCDs ate CRTs.
Telephony ate telegraphy.
Text messaging ate talking.
Tablets are eating our paper …
On January 1, 2013, Newsweek goes unbound, but perhaps more interestingly, it becomes unbounded: Diffuse … Etherial … Digital!1
It's worth taking a moment to meditate on this — the unbinding. It's a phenomenon particular to our liminal stage in digital publishing. One in which we move from physical to digital. It hasn't really happened before — there was no digital to move to.2 And, in a few years, it probably won't happen very often, if ever — all publications will start with digital.
I wrote an op-ed over on CNN last week called, How magazines will be changed forever.3
The intent wasn't to wax overly nostalgic,4 but instead to focus our attention on the one quality inherent to physical that I believe is underrepresented in digital: edges.
The CNN piece begins:
Forget everything we know and love about physical magazines. Forget their length. Forget their size. Forget their weekly or monthly publishing schedule. Forget all these qualities except for one: What it's like to come to an end, and to take a deep breath.
What does a bookend — an edge — mean for narrative arc? Broadly, it helps define the shape of the arc. The experience of a bundle of content changes depending on how it's packaged.
Storify exemplifies this: By bookending a cohort of tweets, you remove them from the firehose and create a coherent, consumable narrative.
In other words: It's difficult to shape a narrative without a pause, just as it's hard to craft a beautiful page without whitespace. Possible, but unlikely.
Related: Is Gangnam Style as potent if it never resolves itself?
Nicholas Carr (The Shallows) posted a followup to my CNN piece on his blog. It begins:
One of the advantages of embedding culture in nature, of requiring that works of reason and imagination be given physical shape, is that it imposes on artists and thinkers the rigor of form, particularly the iron constraints of a beginning and an ending, and it gives to the rest of us the aesthetic, intellectual, and psychological satisfactions of having a rounded experience, of seeing the finish line in the distance, approaching it, arriving at it.
The 'rigor of form' is part and parcel of physical output, but it is something we have to work harder for in digital.
You can apply rigor of form beyond creative output — to all data.
Facebook, for example, works really hard to shave down your ~10,000+ daily newsfeed items to a high-signal:low-noise ratio stream. It tells an eminently consumable version of the story of your friends' lives over the past day. And if you don't like how the algorithm is working, Facebook offers users a host of manual levers to further increase signal. All of these levers and tunnels in the algorithm manifest as edges. And those edges make the unconsumable, consumable.
In 2010, the New York Times showcased an app during the iPad launch event. It was called "Editors Choice" and was available when iPad went on sale. Editors Choice was simple. Delightful, even. It contained just a few dozen articles. Selected daily by — one would assume — a cadre of Times editors. This limited selection made it feel handpicked. Filtered by a higher power that said, "This! This is all you need today!"
As you read each article, it turned grey. Once they were all grey, you were done. You could breathe.
Ask us if we want more and we often say yes. More timeline. More newsfeed. More articles.
iOS star developer Loren Brichter (creator of the original OS X and iOS Twitter clients) is credited with inventing the now ubiquitous pull-to-refresh. In some ways it's a near perfect gesture — attuned to our endless appetite.
We pull a lever. We get more [insert delicious content]. Pull pull pull. More more more.
The New York Times app has long since been replaced with its current version containing all of the newspaper. And while I understand the need for a completely inclusive reading space — especially across a news machine as big as The Times — I still admire the short lived — if, possibly, accidental — philosophical stand taken in Editor's Choice.
There's a reason Most Emailed and Top Ten article lists are so very popular: They're one of the few bounded datasets on a newspaper home page. They're high-signal lists, infrequently updated, that you know you can complete.
In the CNN piece I continue:
Linda Stone created the term "e-mail apnea" to describe holding your breath as you traverse the horrors of your inbox. I find myself experiencing digital apnea of all sorts. Google News apnea. Twitter apnea. Facebook newsfeed apnea. RSS reader apnea. In the face of endless content streams, it's hard to stop and take a breath.
There is no print apnea. Perhaps, at worst, one may experience library apnea -- standing before the vast greatness of the reading room in the British Museum, for example. But even then, it's different. There's the cozy smell of old books and the softness of the aged pages. It's more akin to basking in grandeur than to suffocating under information overload. It's hard to feel the same reverence for our 24/7 Twitter feeds.
It's easy for conversations around these topics to devolve into diatribes against information overload, self control, 32oz sodas, etc. Ignoring lurking moral quagmires, there's certainly a time and place for the endless slurping of tweets. But, generally, I also think most of us would be grateful for less noise and more signal. For clearer narratives around amorphous data blobs.
Bringing the ethos of physical edges to digital spaces is all about increasing that signal.
Newsweek may soon be unbound, but just because it's digital doesn't mean it has to be unbounded.
When I was a child I believed in a heaven.
One of the best features in my little heaven was a magic VCR (I'm a child of the 80s). This VCR had every moment of your life in it. You could go back and relive any of them. You could also get inside the heads of other people at any moment, and you could change perspective. You could jump inside of their VCRs and play their lives.
Paris and the data mind is about a little slice of that heaven (or hell, for some). Andrew Womack at The Morning News took it on as editor and we threw it back and forth for a month. Check it out — it was a blast to work on.
Buying a Fitbit inspired much of the thinking that led to the essay. Even now, months after my experience in Paris, I continue to dutifully clip it on. Which is to say: I wholeheartedly recommend the product, strange little thing it may be.
More generally though, Paris and the data mind is an essay about our digital squirreling. About that heaven I dreamt of as a child.
It's about awareness — both taken and given — by digital devices. It's about the Church of the Data Mind; a church we're all subscribing to, whether or not we acknowledge it. It's about making sense of this digital-self detritus we're amassing.
From the essay:
I think of our checkins, our food photos, our tagged friends. I think of our steps, our Fuel Points. I think of the myriad and nearly endless stream of data — data now actively collected but becoming increasingly passive. I think of all of this and I can't help but see a hologram projected somewhere off in the distance. A reconstitution of something, someone, miles away, years out.
Who is that hologram?
It's us, right? I mean, it's not a 1:1 precise reconstitution, but it's something. We're currently in the 'self-selection' phase of personal data collection. Meaning, we have a bit of control over what goes into our collection. But this phase is transitory and fleeting, dovetailing into the totally passive, collect-it-all phase. Which raises the question: what does 1:1 look like?
In recent speaking engagements I've mentioned a 'corpus' — a corpus of data as created by publishers, and the corpus of data as collected by us. And I've spoken about how we are slowly habituating the collection of events — 'real' events in meat space. And how, psychically, I've felt an unexpected twist amidst all this collecting. I've felt that things not recorded in the ether, not tagged or checked in don't feel quite as real. They're fleeting. Given to the whim of my ever degrading memory.
And that — that feeling of 'real' events added to digital space becoming, somehow, more real, more existent, is a very strange thing indeed. A reverse flip-flop from that which I wrote about in The Digital⇄Physical.
The more I collect — the larger my corpus becomes — the more I think back to that data heaven I had seen as a child. The cyber punk'd, fluffy, bright, cloud filled expanse of endless VCRs and dusty CRT screens.
In imagining this heaven I would make lists of all the amazing lives into which I'd hop. Not just hop into, of course, but also scrub through. How I'd get lost down the sub-lives of other people who would appear in main streams. How those sub-lives would become main-lives and the sequence would continue on down an infinite recursion.
To me, it was a no brainer: exploring these fractals could easily fill up an eternity, however long that was. And man, oh man, did that sound like some fun magic.
So how close are we to this? This kind of scrubbing. Once gone, in what format do we leave our lives? And what is the value of a life spent exploring other lives?
All of this weirdness is wrapped up somewhere in Paris and the data mind. Tugging at strange corners of our hearts. All starting with a simple number, on a simple device.]]>
Content Magazine recently published an essay of mine, "Our New Shrines." Take a peek. It's a fun little thing …
Back? Weird, right? It's unusual. But the circumstances that led me to think about Facebook from a publisher's perspective have been unusual. So I thought I'd go into that a bit here ...
In February of this year I found out I was one of twenty individuals chosen as a TechFellow. The TechFellow awards is a grant that you're asked to use to invest in startups. No strings attached.
I've always tried to live lean, and so outside of slowly building my small portfolio of publicly traded tech stocks,1 the idea of investing in early stage companies never crossed my mind; I simply never had latent capital sitting around to do such a thing.
Money dropping out of the sky — earmarked for investing — changes that pretty quickly. So, grant in hand, I decided to embrace this as an unexpected chance to learn to think more critically about startups from the outside.
Over the last decade I've engaged books and publishing on almost every level — from physical production and distribution, to working with printers and coaching authors, to international and domestic (US) sales. I've been involved as an author, a producer, a designer, a technologist, a cheerleader. I've organized events and helped build online communities. And all of that was just for 'classic' books.
I've spent the last four years digging into the digital side of books and publishing. From essays, to Kickstarter projects (to essays about Kickstarter projects), to product design on a startup team. I've tried to make a point of doing.
Naturally, when I began to look for startup investments, my focus was squarely on books and publishing (and, tangentially, education) related companies.
In the searches and meetings that have emerged over these past few months, I find myself drawing on all of the above — from a holistic theory of physical book production, to an empathy born from authorship, to the understanding of digital product design.
Startups — books and publishing startups inclusive — are mostly small groups of motivated people trying to give shape and form to ideas yet actualized. 2
What if everyone in the world had access to every book in the world?
How does that access change engagement?
How does it change business models?
What does it mean to read 'socially'?
How do publishers and authors modify their behavior when distance to readers is zero?
Lurking behind all of these questions are even more atomic questions about tools. It's necessary to question all of our tools. Almost every publishing focused writing, editing or design tool we use today was born in an age of unnetworked physicality. Will Adobe have a place in the future of digital publishing? Probably. Will InDesign be the end-all-be-all of digital publishing? Probably not.
How much of the old do we throw out to find the new?
All of the above are the sorts of questions publishing startups ask themselves. We don't know the full answers because the platforms upon which answers may lie have yet to be built. And it's hard to tell what other more interesting questions will emerge by tackling some of these more obvious questions. Sometimes seemingly boring questions lead to utterly fascinating ones.
In my head, I call all of this the great fuzziness.
The process of assessing or mentoring a publishing startup feels like looking at a pool of abstraction through the lens of a decade of doing. Book doing, in my case. There's a balance you need to strike between total open-mindedness (because sometimes your experience blocks your ability to see) and framing the questions within the context of all of your experience (because sometimes your experiences helps skip unnecessarily circuitous routes).
The end goal in all of this being: help the great fuzziness coalesce into useful, sustainable, cogent things. Hopefully things that make books and publishing more pleasureful, engaging, sustainable, and, generally, socially better (which is, admittedly, a difficult thing to quantify).
Finally, one hopes books are more accessible — not less — because of technology.
The shift from an engaged making and doing into a more meditative, high-level space has been — so far — a deeply fun and satisfying adventure. Thinking about startups from a macro-level is, unsurprisingly, unlike working on a single product. It's given me an entirely different kind of empathy for companies raising money and investors contributing money. And I count anything that increases empathy as something valuable.
So it is I came to write, "Our New Shrines." Already — even from just a few months of conversations around this domain — I find myself questioning the how and why we publish as we do, as we have. A year ago I wouldn't have pegged Facebook as a viable platform to start a publishing enterprise. Now, I recognize there's a subset of content creators that are crazy not to start with Facebook.
I love Twitter.app (Tweetie for Mac). With the exception of a few posts from my phone, I'd bet 95% of all of my interactions with Twitter over the past few years have been through that application. It's fast. Supports multiple accounts effortlessly. And is, perhaps most importantly, streamlined and clean.
Suffice to say: I grew to love Twitter because of Tweetie, somewhat in spite of twitter.com.
Try as I might, I don't enjoy using twitter.com. There are parts of it I adore, but to speak in generalities, it's too busy. Too complex. Too far away. Twitter for me is useful only when it's close and quick. So when Twitter.app's death-knell was rung recently,1 I began to try and figure out how to love twitter.com.
For years, my go-to solution for daily-use web applications has been Fluid. I have Fluid instances of gmail, Google Calendar, Workflowy and a host of other web-only applications. Generally, it works really well. The webapps load quickly via Spotlight like any other application, and you can quickly
CMD-TAB into them without hunting through browser tabs.
Of course you can dump twitter.com into a Fluid instance but it feels pretty kludgy. Twitter buddy Max Fenton whipped together a set of simple CSS rules removing a lot of the kludge. We went back and forth a couple times and the end result is pleasing. Twitter.com in a Fluid instance, with this set of user styles applied is actually usable. And I dare say it's almost worthy of replacing Twitter.app, were we forced to abandon it.
Here's the gist of the CSS:
To use it:
window > user styles
CSS from above
To give your Fluid instance an 'official' Twitter icon, simply do the following:
CMD-A to select all,
CMD-C to copy it
CMD-I to see the application's info panel
CMD-V to paste the logo
Unfortunately, the biggest failure of this solution is that multiple accounts are still woefully difficult to handle; the sign-out/sign-in dance is the only solution. But as Twitter moves to further consolidate their experience to optimize around revenue maximization, twitter.com will be the only guaranteed way to get access to the service's latest features.
The biggest benefit of minimal twitter.com in a Fluid instance over Twitter.app is that you get the updated and far-superior @connect tab showing all interactions, not just mentions. Twitter's @connect work has been just fantastic. I hope they continue to polish and optimize the data flowing into that space.
This is hardly a perfect solution, but for those of us Twitter.app lovers wondering what we'll have to use next,2 this simple hack might be a bridge worth testing.
And, if you don't like the styling, fork it and make your own!
In the last two years a simple, strong truth has emerged: The future of books is built upon networked platforms, not islands.
An essay about what a contemporary digital book looks like — scattered and disjointed, spread across multiple platforms in various states of open and closed.]]>
Ahab! is a simple template for producing Kindle specific .mobi files.
Available on github.com/cmod/ahab/.
I spent a few weeks reformatting and publishing four of my longer essays on the Kindle Direct Publishing platform. The process was a hodge-podge of snippets and trial and error. I wish I had this template from the start. Now I do. So I hope it helps you. (Disclaimer: I am by no means a .mobi wizard, which is why it's on github — hack away and please suggest changes!)
This is all — clearly — a bit geeky. It's for those of us who like to hand-code websites. Who want to know what's going on under the hood. Who are obsessive about CSS class names and indent technique and derive pleasure from knowing that the innards of the machines they produce are as beautiful and effecient as possible. 1
Mobi is Kindle's ebook format. It's sort of like epub's step-brother. With a properly formatted
.mobi file you can publish on the Kindle Direct Publishing platform.
Pareto pricinple (80/20 rule). I want to leverage existing marketplaces for digital publishing, and Amazon covers 80%+ of the market I'm interested in reaching. iBooks just doesn't have the audience, nor is the platform presently inviting (IMO) from a systems and ubiquity perspective. Kindle hits iPad, iPhone, Android, web, desktop ... EVERYWHERE. And it does seamless syncing. I like all that. Readers like all that.
There's other engaged and energized communities emerging around products like Readmill but I don't want to have to deal with selling stuff on my own. And I do want to sell stuff. That's part of the experiment. And, I think it behooves anyone interested in the future of publishing to know the biggest guy in the room really well, even if you don't like them. (I've got nothing against Amazon but it seems like a lot of other folks do.)
This template is meant to get you from thinking about publishing a piece of text you have to actually publishing it on Kindle Direct Publishing. If you have a long-form blog post composed mainly of text, I suspect you could convert it to a proper
.mobi file using this template in fifteen minutes. Obviously, more complex texts (and cover production, etc) take more time.
So, this template is mainly about minimizing friction.
Yes — you're correct! You have to use a
COMMAND LINE PROGRAM to make
.mobi files for Kindle Previewer to preview them.
At the risk of this file turning into a horribly complex tutorial, after you
install Kindlegen, open your
Terminal program (assuming OS X), type
kindlegen content.opf" from inside the
ahab directory and Kindle Previewer should be able to open the
content.mobi file it spits out.
Kindle Previewer is pretty kludgy, but it gets the job done. It saves you from
trying to send
.mobi files to seven different devices. And speeds up development /
testing / iteration time.
You will, at some point, want to send something to a bunch of Kindles. This utility is useful for that:
So Amazon revised their cover guidelines in early 2012. Here's the latest:
Here are the base requirements:
Requirements for the size of your cover art:
- Minimum of 1000 pixels on the longest side
- Ideal height/width ratio of 1.6
For better quality, we recommend that images be 2500 pixels on the longest side.
The 1.6 ratio bit is weird. It's the dimensions for the Kindle Fire. It is doubly awkward because hardware eink Kindles have a screen ratio closer to 1.3.
Amazon currently doesn't offer the ability to include multiple, device specific covers. I feel most comfortable designing for hardware Kindles since I'm still not convinced anyone actually uses/reads on Kindle Fires. 2
For some reason,
.png is not allowed for cover images. So make sure you stick with
.jpg or
.pngs are allowed elsewhere in a
.mobi file.
Kindle Format 8 supports CSS media queries. It seems a little bit out of the scope of a baseline template, but if you're interested, Liz Castro explains all.
@font-face rules only work on Kindle Fire.
Actually, a lot of css rules only work on Fire. Floats, for example. The simpler you keep your CSS, the saner you'll be.
Here's the full list of KF8 HTML and CSS support:
toc.ncx and
content.opf are the two slightly alien files of this collection.
OPF means "Open Page Format". From Wikipedia:
The OPF file, traditionally named content.opf houses the EPUB book's metadata, file manifest, and linear reading order. This file has a root element package and four child elements: metadata, manifest, spine, and guide. All of these except guide are required. Furthermore, the package node must have the unique-identifier attribute. The .opf file's mimetype is application/oebps-package+xml.
The .ncx file is explained thusly:
The NCX file (Navigation Control file for XML), traditionally named toc.ncx, contains the hierarchical table of contents for the EPUB file. The specification for NCX was developed for Digital Talking Book (DTB), is maintained by the DAISY Consortium, and is not a part of the EPUB specification. The NCX file has a mimetype of application/x-dtbncx+xml.
Exciting stuff! *zzzzzz*
I've done my best to obviate thinking too much about those files.
So you have your cover. You have your properly formated
.mobi. You've tested it
in Kindle Previewer and it looks pretty good on all devices. Now, how do you
You can just mail the
.mobi file to friends, put it up on a server, upload it
to a forum — distribute any way — and any Kindle will be able to open the file.
But if you want to "publish" it on Amazon — set prices and get it properly listed — then Kindle Direct Publishing is what you want. It should be pretty self explainatory.
This is by no means exhaustive. It's meant to give anyone interested in
.mobi a
little boost. I've tried to strip away all the unnecessary gunk. What's remaining
should be relatively self explanatory.
If you do end up publishing something with this, please let me know. Post about it in the github project or shoot firstname.lastname@example.com an email.
If digital covers as we know them are so 'dead,' why do we hold them so gingerly? Treat them like print covers? We can't hurt them. They're dead. So let's start hacking. Pull them apart, cut them into bits and see what we come up with.]]>
Monkey Business is here in my hands, printed. Solid. A brick. I understand it. It's real. But from our corpus perspective, it's deflated. It doesn't have legs. The author's words start and end on the page. I can't point. It's not "close" like digital text. It isn't adjacent to anything. All I can do is create a simulacrum here, on my website. And legally I'm only allowed to simulacrumize a few things.
So this — those blockquotes floating over in part one — is me adding Murakami's conversation to the corpus. Our corpus. Putting it in a public space. Making it searchable. Pointable. Taking it out of my underlined, dog-eared pages, dumping it into Simple Note / Notational Velocity,1 and embedding a slice of that here on my public home.
Which brings us to The Really Controversial Question a lot of print focused publishers grapple with: how much should be put online for free? And when? But I don't think those are the right questions. It's not about content being free or not, it's about content existing or not. Can I point? No? Then it's kinda not really there. At least not in the way we now expect. Undeniably, it's certainly not doing the work it could be doing.
All this ties back into the importance of platforms in digital publishing. The web, of course, is the largest, most open, device agnostic, and most pervasive (and thereby a great place to start). But this doesn't preclude others from emerging.2
This lack of platforminess is what makes many iPad magazine apps impotent. They end up in no better a position than a printed magazine. There are no routes by which you can directly get to their content. You can't point in. You're forced to go through the "front door" to get anywhere. And it's a door usually weighing several hundred megabytes and infuriatingly difficult to unlock.
The reality is — because of the way in which we share content — we almost never even see the "front door" anymore. (Which indicates that the long-term value of an 'issue' drops precipitously with time.) If you find a piece of great content inside one of these apps, at most you can say: Hey! There's something interesting in there! Just download the app, swipe right ten times, up three, then tap to remove the text, rotate to landscape mode and I swear there's a great article in there! You gotta trust me. Which, of course, almost no one follows all the way to the interesting thing.
In a best case scenario the article you want to point at also exists on a website somewhere. But there's often no obvious connection between the closed (unpointable) article in the app, and the open (pointable) article on the web.
Which is to say: the loops are left open. The reading-enjoying-sharing-engaging-reading loop can't be closed when your platform doesn't have universally, publicly accessible points.3 And right now, those points — to be truly universally accessible and pointable — need to be web based. It's our lowest common denominator of pointability.
So that feeling: if a text isn't online, then it doesn't exist. This needs a little amendment: If a text isn't online and publicly pointable, then it doesn't exist.
Commercially, it gets sticky. But Amazon and their Kindle-as-platform solves a bit of that.4 The New York Time's pay-fence is another alternative.
Just as I was about to publish this satellite entry, apropos this discussion, Harvard announced their massive meta-data injection into the corpus:
Harvard is making public the information on more than 12 million books, videos, audio recordings, images, manuscripts, maps, and more things inside its 73 libraries ... "This is Big Data for books," said David Weinberger, co-director of Harvard's Library Lab. "There might be 100 different attributes for a single object." At a one-day test run with 15 hackers working with information on 600,000 items, he said, people created things like visual timelines of when ideas became broadly published, maps showing locations of different items, and a "virtual stack" of related volumes garnered from various locations.5
It seemed remiss of me not to point at that.
All I know is the more I read digitally, the more this feeling — the strange joy of adding to the corpus6 and seeing where it takes us — grows inside me, and I can't be the only one to feel this. Adding to the corpus — making things pointable — has become habitual, and aspects of it are becoming more and more passive. These habits and expectations aren't going anywhere.
As a publisher your text is either in the corpus or it's not. And so there is no better time for great, print-locked publications like Monkey Business or countless other app-locked publications to show others what happens when their texts "exist," when they're made open and pointable.
We've built up a habit of pointing — effortlessly — through links, tweets, reblogs, and likes. And this is really efficient. Super easy. We all do it all the time. Pointing is embedded all over our digital surfaces. It's an incredible vector for spreading ideas and pushing or pulling attention towards or away from things.
Most importantly though, is that digital pointing is nearly frictionless. Not only is the energy between seeing a pointer and clicking it almost zero, but so too is the energy required to create that pointer.1 The less friction, the easier it is to form a habit.
Connected to this, and more explicitly to do with reading, is the now exhaustively discussed idea of the digital public commonplace book.2
Findings provides tools for commonplace capturing across all of the web. Amazon has created an actual commonplace-book-social-network (although still a minimum viable product). They both give public addresses to our little nut collections.3
Traditional links allow us to point at whole documents or collections of documents.
These services let us point into documents.
Our notes and highlights get special powers as data in the public corpus. Search, of course. And increased accessibility. But also, they're votes. You're voting on interestingness within a particular text. There's a feeling that this is valuable data.4
Because of this, as you're highlighting your book, there's an unmistakable and growing sense of social usefulness to the act. The highlight is doing some work (or will be doing some work), not just sitting there to (hopefully) help you remember something later.5
In a recent interview, Clive Thompson, writer for Wired, mentions one tangible digital→physical example of leveraging his corpus of digital annotations:
I annotate aggressively. If I'm reading a piece of really long fiction, I often find that there are these fabulous things I want to remember. I want to take notes on it, so I highlight it, and if I have a thought about it, I'll type it out quickly. Then I dump all these clippings into a format that I can look at later. In the case of War and Peace, I actually had 16,000 words worth of notes and clippings at the end of it. So I printed it out as a print-on-demand book. In short, I have a physical copy of all of my favorite parts of War and Peace that I can flip through, with my notes, but I don't actually own a physical copy of War and Peace. 6
The generalized takeaway is that we're evolving a set of habits and language (once active and now increasingly ambient and passive)7 around capturing "real world" stuff — not just book or reading related — in digital space.
Some core differences between a captured or uncaptured — networked (in the context of open platforms) or unnetworked — action is:
The culmination of these qualities is a networked action ("I read", "I visited", "I saw", etc) on an open platform is persistent in a way totally different from its physical or closed or unnetworked counterpart. Each time we add an action to our public corpus, we perform a little act of faith ...
In part 3, we'll tie this back into Monkey Business and publishing platforms.
Where we've been.
What we're thinking about.
What we're reading.
We're networking, digitizing, and indexing all of this. Building a corpus. And the growing bizarro emotional quandary is: if an act — a checkin, a highlight, a note, a meal — isn't in the corpus, then is it real? If a tree falls in the forest …
I'm sitting here in a little cafe reading the first issue of Monkey Business.1 Edited by Motoyuki Shibata and Ted Goossen, and published by A Public Space,2 Monkey Business "is a newly founded journal of new writing from Japan and abroad with a few not-so-new works strategically slipped in."
In this inaugural English issue there's a conversation between Hideko Furukawa and Murakami Haruki. It's long. It's intimate. In fact, I can't ever remember reading such a raw conversation with Murakami in English. Here's some of my favorite passages.
On after the quake and Murakami's systematic easing into third-person narrative:
Before I began I decided I'd write one story every one or two weeks, that each would feature characters that would be named, that I would write in the third person, and that the earthquake would link them all together.
On discipline and pace:
The lady who used to work at the club was amazed by how hard I worked — no other writer could match me, she said. For me, though, it was par for the course.
And then Furukawa on that pace:
I can see the athlete in you at work. It's as if the act of running and writing had merged together.
When Murakami finished work on his book, Sydney! about the Sydney Olympics, he had a writing epiphany:
I came away from that process finally convinced I really knew how to write: in concrete terms, I no longer had to stop and question whether I was capable of handling a particular scene — I could go on and write whatever came into my head, even if I had no familiarity with the subject matter.
And the interview goes on and on. They discuss the alternate Muakami-esque un-real reality of post-9/11 America, and Murakami's sense of looming mortality:
… at sixty, I pretty much know how many [novels] are left. All I have to do is count backwards.
And on and on and on some more. It's a wonderful text that was part of a print publication released last year. And I want to point point point at it for you. But I can't. At least not in the way we've become accustomed — digitally; into the publication. And I realize how entitled this may sound — but not being able to point means it feels like the text is not really out there. Like it doesn't exist.
To not exist means in part to be offline. Which is why it's so easy to understand this by using a print publication as an example. But the offline metaphor also extends into the digital world.
To not exist digitally means to be walled off. Silo'd. Unpointable. It means a text feels flat or lifeless or limp. Unnetworked (even if it's on the network). It's means to not be part of that growing corpus. Which, today, feels more damning than ever.
More in part [2/3] ...
On Building Flipboard for iPhone and Finding the Edges of Our Digital Narratives.]]>
Note: I wrote this a few days after Steve's death, but due to an intense work schedule, and being generally overwhelmed and wanting respectful distance from his death, I've finally now, as a cap to this long, winding year, properly edited and published this.
The sound is always explosive.
Shortly after one a.m. each night, the last southbound Caltrain passes between the Palo Alto and California Ave stations. Sometimes it whistles, but more often than not, it simply rushes down the tracks. Its clacking cacophonous. A signal to finally end my day.
I'm usually in my room when the violent clacking floods our house, filling the otherwise silent night of Old Palo Alto. And each time that train passes, I find myself wondering if Steve, too, is still awake. If he also heard that train.
Through matters of coincidence, when I moved to California last year, I landed just two blocks from Steve Jobs.
Despite being so close, I never met the man. Occasionally I saw him walk through the neighborhood, or eat at local restaurants, but we never interacted. I always assumed that at some point there'd be a natural, professional introduction. There was no need to invade or disrupt his privacy in public.
And so this train was, in my mind, our one constant connection. Every night it would pass. And if he was awake, surely, he too could hear the clacking or whistling, the rush of energy down the tracks.
I found myself wondering what he thought as it passed. If he even noticed it anymore, having lived here for so many years. Regardless, this shared train sound — however tenuous and grasping might such a connection be — helped humanize for me a man who was often painted nothing of the sort.
As I've written previously, Silicon Valley is where the gods very much eat yogurt with mortals.1 And Steve was no exception. His house has no visible security, no gate. It is modest. Nestled in a very tony neighborhood. But not so tony as to exclude three enterprising rag-tag entrepreneurs from also living here. The blinds are almost always open (as most tend to be in Old Palo Alto). TVs flicker at night. Lights go on and off. There is no mystery. Humans live there, certainly.
Time and time again, I found myself biking past Steve's house — simply by the nature of it being on my path home. And time and time again I found myself drawing tremendous inspiration from the hyper-reality of his presence.
I've always felt — the quicker you can kill a dream by making it real, the quicker you see bigger, more important dreams once blocked by the first. The same goes for celebrity: the deconstruction of celebrity removes excuses. With mystery, and thereby celebrity gone, so also goes the pedestal. Their achievements can be more easily assessed at human scale.
The hagiographic accounts after the passing of Steve this year understandably cast his accomplishments in an otherworldly light. But in my mind, he will be, as he became to me in this past year, that guy over there also eating brunch at Calafia. The neighbor in a comfortable neighborhood who happened to posses a beautiful, driven mind. Not a saint or a god but simply a someone who had a vision and executed, methodically and consistently and unrelentingly.
After his cancer diagnosis, I can't help but wonder if the sound of that train took on a new meaning for Steve. The gravity of his work yet done — and now with so little time in which to do it — must have washed over him. A set of visions to be made real, for which he had only to build a clear, unwavering path before his passing. I wonder if he heard that train rushing, its steel and iron hurtling through the dead of night, and felt a kinship. Knew that that was what he had to be. Focused, moving forward as fast as he possibly could. On the edge of a certain chaos. Alone in his journey. Pulling those ideas forward. Crassly devoid of nostalgia.
Now, for the first time since moving here, I am certain he doesn't hear it.
Steve may no longer be here, but that train is. And each night it passes I'll remember how much he accomplished in so little time, carrying so much weight. I'll remember how he chose to pursue ideas that inspired a man staring down death. A man who absolutely would not and did not give up. Driven by vision, exploding ever forward down his path.
"... the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there."
Marco Polo, talking to Genghis Khan
Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities
Note: This essay is the extended version of the talk I gave at the dConstruct conference in Brighton, UK, September 2011.
Over the last ten months of working at a startup, I've noticed that it's very easy to lose perspective. That is, it's easy to forget to stick your head up and get context for the work at which your're cranking away. This is especially true while working on front-line digital content design problems.
The notion of a "new," digital kind of book scares a lot of folks because there is such a rich fabric of romanticism, nostalgia and myth built up around the physical book. These qualities — romantic, nostalgic, mythical — are really indicative of emotion. And we don't want to lose that emotion. It's easy to forget this; I know I do. I forget how the weight of those myths (some real, some imagined) can and should be informing the work I'm doing now.
As designers working with ebooks, we are at a point of special convergence: many of the promises of digital books (promises that have been spoken for decades) are coming to fruition. Not the least of which being almost everyone carries with them a digital device capable of smartly displaying ebooks. But even more powerful is that all books in the world are being smooshed into a single point, and we finally have enough of a semblance of standards and distribution of devices to seriously consider interesting things to do with that point.
So I asked myself — how does one view the emotional weight of books in the context of our current excitement? And in asking myself this I found an image growing in my mind over the last few months. As I was doing the work of "now," this image of the "past" grew stronger. That image manifested as a story — an imagined myth of the history of the book, converging with reality around the turn of the 20th century.
I'll be the first to admit that this is odd. But I found it to be tremendously useful as a framing device for the work I'm doing now. And my intent is to share this story as a model for creatively thinking about our kind of work — work that is so new, as to be shaping unseen experiences, but simultaneously connected directly with a weighty past.
Before the story, however, there are some ideas to keep in mind.
Our basic truths:
The current surface forms for digital books are far from perfect, but they work and are getting better with each device and software iteration. So, in my opinion, many of the critical future questions digital books designers will have to address don't directly involve pure content layout. Future-book design is not merely about font sizes and leading. Instead, our hardest (and possibly most rewarding) problems will involve the intermingling of content and data.
Over the past ten months of working on digital content containers, I find myself keeping in mind — from a design perspective — three overlapping precepts:
There are already any number of startups working to tame unfiltered data streams.2 The easiest way to think about this is to consider the current Twitter timeline view — if you follow even a reasonably small number of people, it's nearly impossible to regularly consume the entire stream. The net result is obvious: information overload. We are left with a constant sense of maybe having missed something. Hence, one of the primary roles for an iPad application like Flipboard becomes to evoke a feeling of having made tame, the unfiltered. In concrete terms: we must smartly curate raw streams. And raw streams of data are starting to grow wider and deeper just beneath the surface of almost all digital reading experiences.
Tom Armitage wrote a great post while he was working at BERG in London about the "quiet confidence" of the Kindle compared to the iPad.3
Attention-seeking is something we often do when we're uncomfortable, though – when we need to remind the world we're still there. And the strongest feeling I get from my recently-acquired Kindle is that it's comfortable in the world.
And then:
If this device is to replace, for many people, a book, it needs to manifest some of those qualities: safe, nonthreatening, no more distracting than a few hundred of pages of text intend to be. It needs a quiet confidence to make you trust it more.
I think the same concept of "quiet confidence" can be applied to data. Namely — in designing user experiences we need to produce data that doesn't draw attention to itself explicitly as data.
These first two precepts are wrapped in the third — to corral data. Which is to say, the results of taming unfiltered streams and quiet data shouldn't detract with the content experience.
As an example, Kindle public highlights straddle the edge of quiet — they're there but can be turned off. And they're also corralled — unlike hyperlinks leading away from the text, they don't really lead you anywhere; they're just a "Hey! Lotsa folks find this interesting." sorta reminder.
The obvious followup question to all of this is: what do these data precepts have to do with digital books? Well, as it turns out, our reading applications are growing more data sophisticated with each release. They are collecting more information about what we do inside of a book. How long we read. What we read. Put simply: large, passive sets of metrics around our reading activities are being produced.
Peter Collingridge gave a wonderful talk4 at the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference in early 2010 about how his company collects and uses metrics around reading experience:
From the moment the very first printed book was sold, there has always been a relationship between publishers, readers, and marketing activity. It's just been invisible. Short of breaking into people's houses there is very little a publisher knows about a book after it is sold.
Now they (publishers, digital reading devices) know significantly more.
One result of the collection or sharing of reading metrics (both passive and active data) is the development of communities. Amazon's Kindle site is evidence that Amazon is clearly moving in this direction. Readmill is another startup looking to capture and surface the same sorts of community reading data.5 There are many others, of course.
Designers working on the future form of the book need to be aware of these emerging datasets. It's only through an awareness that we can surface them without harming the reading experience. And data, in my opinion, "harms" the reading experience whenever it pulls the reader away from the text, or forces them to concentrate harder than they would with a physical book.
But, still, with all of this in mind, it's critical not to forget we're working at the tip of the edge of a field with a tremendously rich past. Working on these startup-like problems can lead to lack of perspective. And lack of perspective makes us forget about the evocative experiences the physicality of printed books brought to reading. Matt Might has a wonderful illustration of what it means to get a Ph.D.6
Working in a startup context is pretty similar to working on a Ph.D. Startups are startups because they're pushing on the edge of some field. And if you're working with digital books, by default you're doing startup work. We have to make sure we don't get stuck in that "knowledge nipple" in Matt's illustration — we need tools to zoom back out and remember the greater whole.
And so — the story. The myth. A framing, imagined, yes, but still a framing. There are many myths around books, but this is mine. And for me, this sort of exercise becomes a tool for grounding; stepping back; and if not seeing, hopefully feeling the whole.
In the opening quote — "... the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there." — Marco Polo was responding to Khan's question of "Why do you travel?" Khan criticized Polo of failing to bring back riches, just stories. And Polo's response is about perspective. Perspective was riches enough for him. As it turns out, Polo was never traveling anyway — his stories, too, were imagined.
Really, in presenting this, I'm asking you to consider your myth around the book. What emotion does the book of the past evoke for you? What does it mean for you as a designer? Is there a way to carry some of that feeling forward into the work we're doing today? There's a plethora of wonderful things digital brings to books, but they shouldn't come at the expense of the confident experiences already embedded within the idea of books.
Thousands of years ago and thousands of miles outside of the port village of Shanghai, in the strange hot cold deserts of the Gobi — the endless sea — deep in the heart of Mongolia, it was discovered.
At first, nobody knew what it was. It was too large to be immediately understood. The precise dimensions, while at the time unknown, ended up measuring roughly five kilometers long (north-south) by two kilometers wide (east-west), with a depth into the sands of nearly half a kilometer. The speculation is that it had been buried much, much deeper but with time the sand had shifted and the world had, slowly, lifted the object up from the desert floor.
Nobody knows who, exactly, was the first person to stumble upon a piece of it. But each village has their own theories and their own mythologies have evolved around the discovery. For some it was a child, others an old woman. There are tales of wanderers with visions and conquerors with nightmares.
Regardless, who found it or how it was found is of no concern. There is only now, the result of the finding, and how we arrived here into which we need to look.
From the point of first discovery to understanding the enormity of the object took nearly two hundred years.
Word spread slowly through sub-mythologies about this object — coarse and dark, sometimes poking through the sands of the valleys of the desert. Unnaturally straight, level. Over time, it became the focus of countless speculations.
For many generations it simply loomed in the contradictions of evolving mythology — a thing, a nothing, an everything. Something worth investigating or ignoring. Dismissed, considered.
Still, slowly the people found the edges. Mapping technology improved and information was shared. Lines triangulated. Expeditions sent to measure. To look for other instances. It was large enough to confuse generations but not large enough to be entirely impenetrable.
Once a general sense of the size was achieved, primitive technologies — but technologies none the less — were invented to move sand and earth more efficiently for the purpose of excavation. Thousands worked in concert over generations to displace what was covering this thing.
Finally, the earth alongside and above the thing was moved. The totality of the size of the object could be fully understood. From the crest of the Alashan Plateau on the outer edges of the Gobi, it was visible — stark, the contrast of its deep brown surface beautiful against the golden and light brown sands. Something demanding absolute consideration.
It was tremendous in volume, and looked to be covered entirely in a seamless layer of animal skin. The scientists of the time worked out that there was a hinge along the western long edge. And that maybe, just maybe if they could work out a system by which to apply force, the top layer could be moved about that hinge.
Again — calculations. A generation. It had now been hundreds of years since the first discovery of this thing. Its existence had embedded itself into the very fabric of the desert societies living near and around it. Stories of the object had spread as travelers moved along the silk road. Traders described the rough surface, it's impossibility of form to family back home. You could find it in the ghost stories of children. In the bedtime chatter between parents. In the whimsical remembrances of the elderly. Songs were sung about it, to it and for it.
The great push to move about the hinge began. Consider the mere size of the object! How could this ever be moved?, many said. But still, the scientists understood the simple mechanics of a simple machine to multiply force. They understood leverage and pulley systems. Certainly, they thought, through mechanical advantage this could be done.
The calculation was that it would take 20,000 men of peak physical strength7 to move the top layer. It would take them a coordinated effort over a period of years. But these villages, these societies were now accustomed to these efforts, these sacrifices. They remembered the years of mapping. The expeditions to understand the breath of the thing. The generations of digging and displacement. Their cities were surrounded by the walls of excavated sand and earth that had once encased the object.
They had heard from their parents, and parent's parents. From great gandparents and beggars of the desert. From mystics and scientists alike. From all of these people they had heard of the object. It had been a part of their lives, always present, always demanding attention, evoking questions. Providing no answers. Nourishing only a mythology of speculation. Else, nothing. And so this had become a society comforted by and habituated into sacrifice. With this in mind, the training began.
Boys were taken from families and sent to camps. These desert nations were building armies of pushers and pullers. A massive human can opener. At these camps, technologies of leverage were iterated on, tested. Systems by which to announce the PUSH and PULL across kilometers and kilometers of desert were devised. Everything had to move in perfect synchronicity.
Finally, they were ready.
Thousands of camps were setup around the object. Food supply chains established. Endless streams of water diverted to fuel the efforts. It was determined that the pushing and pulling would take weeks, if not months, to get the lid of the object to a state of total verticality. Because of the volatility of the desert — the hot and cold, the night frost, the unbearable afternoon heat — the movements would take place only at dusk and dawn, timed precisely to intervals of the moon rising or setting, during the hour in which the sky cycles into or out of nothingness.
Thousands of ropes were attached to the outer lip of the top of the object, ropes kilometers and kilometers in length. Each the diameter of a man's thigh. They were draped across the burning animals skins, now beginning to fade from a dark to light brown as they had been exposed to the harsh desert sun for nearly a hundred years. Skins that screamed and screeched to the undulating temperatures of the Gobi.
Ten thousand men lined up on one side of the object. Two kilometers away, another ten thousand other men lined up with ropes. Wedges ground out from the bones of massive animals, now extinct — had been made extinct in the process of tool production — were in hand. Scholars draped in saffron robes waited anxiously, notepads held closely. Everyone was ready.
The signals were sent — combinations of fugue-like iterations of song, with specially understood points of phase overlap on which the pushing and pulling would happen. Under the first full-moon of the 6th month of this year — the year of the opening — beneath billions of bits of cosmic information, the song rippled out across the deep blue of the night that is so characteristic of an open, endless desert.
The men on the side of the hinge pulled, the men on the side of the flap, pushed. Wedges were inserted, a creaking that was said to be heard as far as the plateaus of Tibet was released from the object. A painful groan.
That first night they managed to move the top of the object almost a meter into the air before men were passing out, hands bleeding. They rested for a day and then again, the songs rippled out. Children remember those nights — the haunting music coming from far off in the desert. For months they moved the object centimeter by centimeter higher. A few times they lost their grip, men were crushed under the weight. Limbs were severed as the song would sometimes fall off rhythm and the efforts become uncoordinated. But they had trained precisely for this pain. For this exertion. For the sacrifice of opening this thing that had haunted them for generations.
After months the top of the object reached peak verticality and with one last heave, one last ho, the hinge let out of massive sigh — this time, of total relief — as the lid, the cover, if you can imagine, this vertical tower two kilometers high and five kilometers long, teetered for a moment as the first morning light exploded from the east, casting a shadow hundreds of kilometers long, as this object then came crashing down the other side of the desert.
Nobody had anticipated the force with which that object would attack the desert floor. Millions of pounds of animal skin, dried and smoothed smashed the sands with such impact, that all of the men on the side of the hinge who didn't make it into shelter were killed. The sand ripped through the air like a trillion needles — evaporating nearly everything in its path.
Still — it was open. And this wasn't the first sacrifice to have been made.
Once opened, once the dust had settled, as it were — the scholars poured in en mass. Revealed beneath that top skin were perfectly smooth sheets of pulp with huge, thick marks of deep, black ink. The marks were multitudinous — billions upon billions of them. It wasn't until months later, when someone looked upon the object from the Altai Mountains, that they realized just what had been unearthed — a fractal of information. The billions of tiny marks on each page, when viewed from afar, formed larger, individual marks. Stories embedded within stories. Each layer of pulp a page in a greater story, and each character on each page composed of a thousand sub-stories.
It took hundreds more years to get through the first few layers. Despite the best attempts at protecting the object, there were countless problems. Theft was rampant — large swarths of pulp were cut off in the dead of the night. Some folks revered the object, other loathed it. There were any number of attempts to destroy the entire thing with fire.
It wasn't long before the nearby governments realized the pulp was useful for a number of things and so they began to harvest it. The excess of pages, once categorized and filed away to the best of the ability of the scholars were sliced into millions of pieces.
The stories became currencies, peopled used it for barter, you could buy a basket of rice for a pound of story. The more black ink the more valuable. At first it was trade through nostalgia — the value of simply owning a piece of the core of now nearly a thousand years of their own culture. The ethereality of their myth made tangible. Culture folding into culture. As uses for it grew, so did the value.
Clothes were fashioned from the stories. They wore the promise of the myths of their great-grandparents to the market, the temples. Ground in water and boiled, the stories made a fine, earthy stew. Little children slept between sheets of the stories. Above and below a piece of a piece of a story. Their new dreams mixed with the old dreams, sleeping between both the myth of the object — something about which now dozens of generations had dreamt — and atop the myths contained within the object, still unknown, still under scrutiny.
New traditions sprung up. New romanticisms. When babies were born they were given a piece of the story. As the children grew older they would carry the piece with them, and upon making a new friend, a new lover, an enemy they would compare pieces, see if they were adjacent. An infinitesimally small chance of rebuilding an impossible puzzle.
Time passed. Large pieces of the object were lost in wars. It took hundreds more years to understand the languages. The symbols in artists' renditions of the larger pages — the macro story — were used to decipher the micro languages. Slowly the mythologies of the stories were united with the actual stories themselves.
They were reproduced. Commoditized. Through the age of mechanical reproduction all nostalgic quality of the stories was lost. The myths of the myths were produced alongside the actual myths. People forgot which were the originals, which were invented.
They became further atomized. The objects were called books. The age of mechanical reproduction gave way to the age of photographic reproduction and the books were reproduced once more. Made small, nearly invisible. Such so that almost all of them would fit atop a reasonably sized desk.
They were getting closer to nothing.
At first glance these microscopic books photographed and atop a table were more similar than ever to their idea of that object embedded in the desert so long ago. But the atomization process, while making them untouchable — the physicality of the content directly inaccessible to human senses — had compressed them into a single dimensional point in the eyes of our tools.
In this the book is no longer a package
— it's information service.
Said of course in 1967, by, of course, Marshall McLuhan.8
What happened in the forty years following has been a mere formalization of this atomization. An attempt to agree upon and codify that single point into which all books — and content — have been compressed.
It seems as if we are now, once again, on the edge of something buried in a desert. There is the myth of what that object might be. There is a dissemination within our culture through devices and distribution channels of varying iterations on that myth. We see it everyday, all around us. And are presently building tools to excavate that object, but we've yet to find the right ones.
While similar in idea to that imagined desert book, the difference now is that the object or objects we're pulling out are no longer just the stories themselves — they're also our interactions with the stories. Each time we turn the page, a machine knows. Records. Triangulates.
New mappings are being constructed — for an object of which we don't yet know the size. Of which doesn't have a determinate size.
For these mappings, as designers and engineers, we're building a container. We're looking for a new form. And it's frustrating and scary at times, but I think for everyone working in this space, there is an overwhelming sense of gratitude to be here now, at this particular moment in time, working on this problem. Searching out the future book.


text:
Super Summarizing
A Reading to Learn Lesson Design
Rebecca Tarleton
Rationale: When students read, the main goal is comprehension. This is most important because it shows that they have understood what they have read. One of the key strategies for comprehension is summarizing. By summarizing, students are getting the main ideas of the text and getting the important facts. This helps them understand all of the text in a more condensed form. This lesson is designed to help and teach students the skills on how to summarize an article, in order for them to understand the main idea of a text. Students will use these summarization rules to guide them in summarizing a text: take out unimportant or repeated information, reduce parts of the text into fewer words, and make a topic sentence.
· Copies of the article, "Crabs Clean Up" (one per student, one for teacher) Catherine Clarke Fox. Published by National Geographic Kids.
· Copies of the article, "Drinking Water: Bottled or From the Tap?" (one per student, one for teacher) Catherine Clarke Fox. Published by National Geographic Kids.
· White board
· List of summarization rules
· Highlighters for each student
· Pencil and paper for each student
· Assessment checklist
1. "To become great readers and completely understand what we're reading, remember we must know all the words in the text. If we don't know a word, stop, decode it, and then reread it. This helps our fluency so we can read smooth and fast. This will help us build our reading skills so that we can summarize texts when we read them. Today we're going to be practicing a new strategy as we read. We will summarize what we read so that we can better understand the main idea of the text. Great readers summarize to get the shorter version of the text, yet still get the full understanding of the main ideas. The summary of a text describes the main details and important facts of a text." Show diagram of an umbrella with Main Idea at the top and Details in the sections of the umbrella. "Summarizing is like using an umbrella. We have the main idea of the text and then the details below it that give us more information, but we really only need to know the main idea to understand what it is about. The details just help us to better understand what they want us to know about."
2. "When we summarize we use these three rules: take out unimportant or repeated information, highlight important information and reduce parts of the text into fewer words, and make a topic sentence. Today we will use these three rules to help us come up with summaries of two articles. We need to make sure we use these rules as we are summarizing and making sure that the summary is in our own words."
3. "Now I'm going to give you an article to show you how to summarize and use these three rules." (Pass out copies of "Crabs Clean Up") "This article is about how tiny crabs that are only a centimeter long help keep coral reefs alive by cleaning them. How do you think the crab cleans the reef? Lets all read the article to see what they suggest we do." (Students read article. Article should not take long to read because it is short.)
4. First, I want to pick out any information that I don't think is important or has been repeated. I don't think we need to know the first sentence in the second paragraph, the third, or last paragraph because they are just repeating what the paragraph before it is saying. Lets take our pencils and cross out that first sentence in the second paragraph, the third paragraph, and then last paragraph."
5. "Next, we need find some places where we can shorten the paragraphs. In the first and second paragraph we can shorten it by saying, "Tiny crabs about one centimeter long keep coral reefs alive. Particles of dirt, or sediment, are bad for living coral." So lets get our highlighters and highlight those parts of the two paragraphs because those are the more important parts. In the fourth paragraph we can shorten this by highlighting on the part that says, "Like many living things, they each help the other. The coral provides a home for the crab, and the crab protects the coral." This condenses our five paragraphs into four sentences."
6. "Last, we need to make a topic sentence. We know that the tiny crabs help clean the coral so that it does not get damaged and it can stay alive. Maybe our topic sentence should be Tiny crabs help keep coral reefs alive by cleaning dirt that builds on them. Now we can use our topic sentence and the sentences we highlighted to make our summary. On your own paper, write the topic sentence and then our highlighted information in your own words. (Walk around room to observe writing.)
7. "You have done a great job so far. Now I am going to let you practice summarizing on your own. I am going to give you an article called "Drinking Water: Bottled or From the Tap?" This article is about the difference of bottled water and drinking water from your kitchen sink. Bottled water is dangerous for our planet and there are many ways to help stop this. What do you think are some ways we can prevent this? You are going to use the three rules to help you summarize this article just like we did together. Remember, read the article first, then cross out information that is not important or that is repeated, reduce parts of it to fewer words, compose a topic sentence, and write your summary on your own paper. Also remember to write the summary in your own words. Raise your hand if you need any help."
Assessment: Take up student's summarizations from the article. Use this rubric to evaluate:
In summarization, did the student:
Take out unimportant information? Yes / No
Take out repeated information? Yes / No
Reduce text to fewer words? Yes / No
Write a simple topic sentence? Yes / No
Also ask QAR's after writing summaries:
How is drinking from the sink better than water bottles? (right there)
How do plastic bottles pollute the environment? (putting it together)
Why do you think people don't realize how much of a problem water bottles cause? (writer and me)
How can you make a difference and help the problem with pollution? (on my own)
Taylor Bullard, Let's be Sensational Summarizers! http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/awakenings/bullardrl.htm
National Geographic Kids. Catherine Clarke Fox. "Crabs Clean Up" http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/stories/animalsnature/crabs-clean-up/
National Geographic Kids. Catherine Clarke Fox. "Drinking Water: Bottled or From the Tap?" http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/stories/spacescience/water-bottle-pollution/
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
The Peace Within
wooded areas along Lake Talquin
By Honey Bordeaux
Beautiful landscapes surrounding Lake Talquin and Jackson Bluff Dam.
Jackson Bluff Dam was created in the year 1927 to give hydroelectric power. In turn, causing Lake Talquin to be born. Incidentally, the lake is titled as such for the two cities surrounding it, Tallahassee and Quincy.
About the Author
Here at Honey Creatives we specialize in Photography, Web Design, Joomla!, Graphic Design, Illustrations, Videography, Stop-motion and Flash Animation. We will create anything you can imagine, give life to your visions.
Our company delivers quality work, from concept to completion. Whether you need photographs, a simple webpage or a larger website, a graphic or illustration, existing video editing or capturing of a new video moment, or a stop-motion or flash animation we are here for you.
With our mediums of expertise and design elements we will create the right piece for your business or personal use.
Publish Date November 11, 2007
Dimensions Large Format Landscape 64 pgs
Standard Paper
Category Fine Art Photography
Tags Fine Art, Honey Bordeaux, state park, jackson bluff, highway 20, hwy 20, bloxham cutoff, hwy 267, highway 267, Photography, Talquin, lake, Tallahassee, Quincy, Florida, nature, dam, trees, woods, forest, ethereal, dreamlike, dream, peace, Ochlocknee, river, water, honey, bordeaux, photo, camping, wooded, wood, trail, park, state, bloxham, leon, wakulla, county, landscape
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