I don’t understand the numerous interested and enthusiastic links to the LA Times’ story on mechanisms that permit libraries to lend ebooks to patrons.
The LAT calls it “Another Boost for E-Books”, which is fair. But it’s another step in the incremental destruction of libraries.
I just finished reading Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold and was shaken by his portrait of the library community’s embrace of microfilm and digitization — and their destruction of their collections of paper newspapers, magazines and books. Baker had already been pretty hard on librarians, when he took them on for moving from card catalogs to computerized catalogs.
One of Baker’s core ideas is that we’re moving away from a world in which libraries could acquire (or create) information in print and make it available free to patrons until it fell apart from use.
We moving into a world where access to information is metered and where libraries pass the cost on to us. In that world, taxpayers (who don’t want to pay for anything, anyway) are going to resist “subsidizing” the information needs of their fellow citizens. This was the reasoning behind closing the PubScience database (at the insistence of the private database industry).
When libraries start buying ebooks with licenses for a limited number of uses, it’s another step toward becoming retail channels and rent-collection agencies for copyright holders.
Everybody! Everybody!
OK, I’ve hammered Flash and the whole concept of Internet entertainment pretty savagely in recent weeks. Right after my last screed about Flash, I happened on Homestar Runner, the most entertaining site I’ve seen on the Net and a single-handed mitigation of Flash on the Web. (I wish I could remember where I found the link).
It’s so delightful that it’s easy to forgive its use of a Flash splash screen, and Flash for navigation.
Synergy Alert: Time Inc. contemplates exclusive deal with AOL
Time Inc. is thinking about making its magazines exclusively available on AOL. This is potentially a big play for synergy, and a sharp contrast to, say, the bickering between AOL and Roadrunner over the “broadband” access market.
According to the WSJ, Time thinks it’s too expensive to operate its web sites, is concerned that they’re cannibalizing print sales, and feels that there’s not enough advertising to compensate for those disadvantages.
It must be difficult for Time Inc. to sell advertising on their Web sites. With the (possible) exception of Fortune, their readers are undifferentiated Jane and Joe Twelve-Packs who live vicariously through the lives of celebrities.
They also know no one’s going to pay for access to the Entertainment Weekly web site.
Even granting this grim alternative scenario, it’s difficult to make the math work.
Doing a deal with AOL means making Time’s “content” available to only a third of US Internet users — a small enough audience to cut into their advertising reach but too big not to be source of cannibalization. And it isn’t exactly going to improve their chances of getting on Ralph Lauren’s (or even P&G’s) next media plan.
Sure, it would be nice (for AOL) to have control exclusive access to People, Entertainment Weekly, and In Style; but what are they really willing to pay Time for that exclusivity? Do they simply propose to relieve them from the cost of operating their Web sites? Will they compensate them for the cost of supporting AOL’s proprietary Rainman format? Does this mean break-even is the best Time can hope for online?
If the way you make this deal a win-win is to assume that Time Inc’s Web sites will always lose money and it might, theoretically, boost AOL customer loyalty by a few percentage points, then each company must value this deal pretty poorly.
Click here
“Click here” seems like a vestige of 1995. There are a lot of approaches for wording links; I favor complete thoughts that summarize the linked item. But “click here” is almost always the wrong choice, and there are some interesting arguments for in the replies.
Conventions change as we become more experienced. Right now, it’s still problematic because there are plenty of new users on the Web who are still unclear about how hypertext works.
When I joined IDC in 1998, their envelopes still proudly bore the dated declaration “Check us out on the World Wide Web http://www.idc.com”. They didn’t change them until some time in 2000, when it was seriously embarrassing.
That doesn’t mean we’re entirely sure how to use URL’s in our writing. I still use full URL’s in email
I recently had to decide how to show my Web address on my business cards. I chose “www.mediasavvy.com” over “http://mediasavvy.com”. Although the “www.” is unnecessary, “mediasavvy.com” by itself seems inadequate, and “http://” is still more fit for software than humans.
We’re still struggling with similar problems in writing telephone numbers. When long distance was a special occasion, putting the area code in parentheses made a lot more sense than it does now, when most cities have multiple area codes.
We have moved from electronic mail to e-mail to email in the last seven years. We no longer admonish print readers to “point your browser to” URL’s. The styles we use for writing on and about the Internet are in a state of flux and we need to reexamine them often.
The tragedy of the marketing commons
We should think of the market as a commons. The universe of customers, consumers, clients, end-users, partners, prospects, suspects, targets, pigeons, chumps, marks, rubes, and suckers is shared by the universe of marketers, each of whom is competing for the attention of the market.
Every time some twit at a brand-name advertiser or agency pushes the envelope of good marketing practice, we all pay. As marketers have tried to become “edgier” they have lost track of the edge itself.
First, legitimate marketers have abused click-wrap EULA’s (end-user license agreements) to get consumers to agree to things they haven’t read. Second, Gator and Kazaa use click-wrap EULA’s to trick unwitting users into agreeing to the installation of spyware and hidden P2P client, the redirection of affiliate commissions, and delivery of unwanted advertising. Finally, the FriendGreetings virus uses the pretense of email from a friend to get you to agree to install their software and let it spam your friends and business associates.
First, the Direct Marketing Association fights a master opt-out list and confirmed opt-in for commercial email lists. Then, Yahoo, eBay, and others set your account to opt-in by default. Finally, spammers pretend to have your opt-in and insist that you reply to their fake addresses to opt of their mailing lists.
The DMA’s renunciation of responsibility for spam will result in the destruction of email as a marketing medium, if not the destruction of email itself.
Until big Internet marketers agree to a binding, concrete, bright-line code of conduct, they will continue to provide unintended cover to the destruction of the marketing commons.
Recommended Reading
I’m still fascinated by applications that pull useful information out of link patterns.
The latest is Mark Pilgrim’s Recommended Reading, which suggests sites you should read, based on the links on a page you’re interested in.
It’s the best application I’ve seen so far for finding interesting blogs. The only disadvantage is that it (understandably) favors popular sites.
'Tis a gift to be simple
I’m not going to pretend to understand the issues that Dave Winer is talking about in this essay on RDF, but something he said really hit home for me:
It’s a cute, and all-too-common tactic to say that people who don’t get it are dumb. I’m not dumb, but RDF makes me feel that way. After all these years, I’ve concluded that if I can’t understand it, it doesn’t have much of a chance in the market. All the powerfully successful technologies of the past have had simple explanations anyone could understand.
If you look back at what really works on the Net, despite the Law of Leaky Abstractions, simplicity always seems to be the big winner. This may be at the expense of technical excellence, but it’s also very liberating and democratic.
I don’t think I’ve ever regretted choosing simplicity over technology in my personal or professional life.
Flash is junking up the Web
KikkoMan to the contrary (and you simply must check it out), I’m beginning to feel that Flash is a cancer on the Web.
In response to Jeremy Zawodny’s note about Flashturbation, Marc Canter posted a unconvincing defense of Flash. The essence his argument seems to be that although Flash is the source of a lot of commercial and noncommercial crappiness on the Web right now, rich media clients are going to be the future of the Web and we should keep Flash around so that Macromedia will own the format when that day dawns. Besides, those crappy Flash ads are paying the bills. He concludes:
Lets just close this diatribe by saying: “Please don’t turn off your Flash – it’s taken Macromedia 10 years to get to the point where we can START to define a new world. Now that we’ve finally gotten beyond straw sipping – don’t shoot yourself in the foot by getting rid of your Flash. Give us a chance to change your world – again.”
Marc doesn’t explain why we should put up with flashturbation in the meantime, just so his proprietary format will be the winner in the long run.
A couple of days ago, I was going to post a more moderate entry, motivated primarily by the abovementioned KikkoMan– which I reiterate if you do nothing else today, you must check out. Then I followed another link from Jeremy to an interesting-sounding flash animation on a local TV station’s site that shows Bay Area cell-phone dead zones. The Flash crashes both Chimera and Internet Explorer on a Mac. Interestingly, it crashes with a error message that says I should increase Flash’s memory allocation, despite the fact that OS X doesn’t work that way.
So, I can’t tell you whether the designer needed Flash to convey the information. But I can tell you that Flash (1) is a proprietary format, (2) locks non-Windows users out, and (3) still brings more junk than information to the Web.
One of my favorite press mentions is this from an article about Shockwave.com in Forbes in April of 2000. With the exception of adding “communication” to the list of Web attributes, I stand by this today:
As a reminder, Shockwave.com prominently posts a trash-talking billboard in its lobby as psychological motivation for its 125 employees. “The Web is not going to be an entertainment medium for a long time, if ever,” the sign says, quoting analyst Barry Parr. “It is a news and information and shopping medium.”
“When will they ever get it?” [Shockwave.com leader Rob] Burgess says, shaking his head.
When will they get it, indeed.
I need a new color scheme
“K” is right in the comments on the previous item. Now that I’ve changed the body copy on my site to black, I need to rethink the MediaSavvy’s color scheme.
I’m not convinced that gray is the wrong color for either the navigation headers or the information at the end of each entry. All that stuff is subsidiary to the content. You can find it and use it if you need it, but I don’t think it should draw attention to itself. The color of the links is another matter and they definitely need a boost.
Rather than do any more incremental tweaking, I’m going to rethink the color scheme (and maybe the design) over the Thanksgiving holiday.
Is gray text evil?
MediaSavvy Looks a little different today. I’ve been using Moveable Type’s Plain Jane template with a few modifications. I really like the way it look. However, I began to realize that it gets some of its good looks by making text gray, instead of black.
I’ve been noticing more and more gray-text sites lately and it appears to be a mini-trend, even among those who don’t use MT. Poynter’s new site is the latest example.
Unfortunately, this design gets a lot of its power from reducing text to a gray block–just another design element instead of something to read. I’ve decided to strike a blow for contrast and change the color of the blog body from #666 (coincidence?) to #000.
It’s not quite as beautiful, but it’s a lot more readable