About a million years ago (1997, maybe?) I worked for a financial company that wanted to implement client-side digital certificates. No more passwords! At a time when all the web stuff was coded in Perl making external calls to a C library that talked to something called a "SafeKeypr" box to generate the actual certificates, it was pretty darned advanced. That crucial bit of hardware in middle was so secure that it literally had several WarGames-style keys that all had to be inserted simultaneously for the thing to work. At one point when it needed to be debugged, the tech wouldn't even let me see how she cracked it open, she just took the whole box back to her lab. (Neat - just found a link to a book on the project I never new existed. I wrote that code;)]
And yet, here we are almost 15 years later still using usernames and passwords. Oh, well. Was a fun project.:)
True story -- when the project launched we had a big event, with everybody gathered around the box to turn their keys. Then they all took their key and scattered off to wherever, what with the whole "must keep the keys off site and multiple locations" thing. What nobody realized is that the network center (we did our own hosting) had already posted plans for a scheduled power outage that weekend, and nobody'd connected these particular thoughts. So they cycled power in the room to do whatever it is that they did, and the box didn't come back online. Somebody contacted me. I told them to round everybody up to come back and turn their keys again.:)
Are you referring to the new super hero movies, or to Raiders of the Lost Ark? I certainly remember that "through a propeller" sequence - not to mention the whole "melting their faces off" thing. But that was 30 years ago - plus I'm pretty sure I was more like 8 or 9 when that movie came out.
My son is just 5 years old, and he's heavy into his superhero phase. I think it's a crime that all of these movies are rated PG-13 while the toys are clearly aimed at capturing a younger audience who may not even get to see anything but the tv commercials. He's got no less than 3 different Captain America shields (one that I made him, one that his grandfather made him, and one we bought from the store). The one his grandfather made him - out of wood! - came with a home made Thor hammer. He doesn't care. He's Captain Thor America.
So, somebody tell me - of this and all the other superhero movies this summer, would you take a 5 yr old? Just how scary/bloody is the violence? I expect that any "adult situations" will go right over his head (bordering on outright nudity and/or sex scenes, which I don't think these movies have). But a really scary monster/bad guy may give him nightmares. I know that most of the others will be gone from the theatre now, but as they start coming out on DVD, which would be the safest to let him watch?
Help me out. I desperately want him to have the memory of going to these movies when they were a big deal, like I remember going to see Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.
I was using ATG's products back in 1998. This was before even Java Server Pages had caught on (one of my great regrets in life was having the opportunity to write a JSP book and turning it down:( ). If I remember correctly they even told us that Sun used some of their patents in developing JSP (though don't hold me to that, it was a long time ago).
Their technology was very ColdFusion-like, trying to create an entire programming language complete with conditionals and looping structures all inside a markup syntax. But once you got used to it, it was very powerful. We ran our entire ecommerce platform on it for buying and selling mutual funds, encompassing 16 business units.
It was a fun company, founded by some wanna-be rockstars (Jeet, really - not so much Joe). They threw a heck of a party. At least one of them ended with a shirtless Jeet playing guitar inside a gogo-dancer's cage. Ah, memories. I think that was the party that took place in New Orleans, where I bumped into my very drunk "customer advocate" coming down Bourbon Street, who asked me if I was having a good time. Apparently not as good as he was.
Funny story - I got a tour of the place once. This was during a time when we were trying to use their brand new adapter for the content management system Documentum, and it was not going well. During the tour, before being shown engineering, my tour guide (Hi, Katja!) paused and asked me if I could identify my technical contact by sight. I said no, so the tour continued. I honestly think they were afraid I was going to make a scene.
I used to own some stock, I'll have to go see if I ever dumped it.
It'd be one thing if they just stuck a random graphic here and there. But I expect that the trend would go in the same direction as the multi-page web article. Namely, ads in between the pages that you can't skip. Can you imagine how annoying that would make your book?
"I've discovered the identity of the murderer. His name is....."
"...and now a word from our sponsor."
Brings to mind archaic memories of old radio shows where you really had no choice. I suppose if it's still just another page, you can hit just as fast and skip it. But how long before an ereader has some sort of Flash-like ability to play a quick movie? And then you're stuck.
Thanks Anne. I know that my topic is pretty specific, which makes it that much more important that I promote it far and wide. You never know when you're going to run into somebody who knows somebody who's getting married, after all!
It may be a little late for me to weigh in on this one, but I've just published an ebook (http://www.hearmysoulspeak.com) on Kindle within the last couple weeks, so I figured I'd offer my own experience from a different angle.
I'm not a traditional published author. This is my first book. Using the logic that an ebook has numerous formatting considerations that make it easier (far less worry about page numbers, page size, left/right concerns, etc...), I decided to go with the ebook in the hopes of making enough $$ that it'd be worth my time to properly format a print book.
The book is about Shakespeare (specifically, a collection of Shakespeare wedding material), and I knew two things - I should have some sort of credentials in the area I'm writing about, and some sort of way to market. I run a number of Shakespeare sites (http://www.shakespearegeek.com primarily among them), and have done so for a number of years. They've got a pretty good following. I thought I'd be all set there, at least as far as getting a jumpstart goes. I'm also a web guy for a living (though not a designer), so arranging a domain and getting some content on it was not much of a worry (http://www.hearmysoulspeak.com did I mention that?) My strategy has been "Have something acceptable up, then drive traffic, and then once you've got traffic up, worry about making a prettier site."
I did have an editor. You need an editor. You will make stupid typos, if nothing else, and you'll need another set of eyes to spot them. An editor also serves as your first reader, and can say things like "This part didn't make sense to me" or "You said the same thing here that you said over there." Get an editor. I lucked out, one of my regular readers who happens to be a college professor said he'd do it for me, and was very helpful.
The publishing part is actually the easiest. There are a zillion "ebook converter" apps out there. But instead of doing that, just go straight to Calibre (http://www.calibre-ebook.com), as it does everything. I originally started mine in LaTeX, because I was heading for print. Then I switched to PDF (easily converted) until eventually ending up with EPUB since it seemed popular. EPUB, for the curious, is basically just a zip file of HTML with some organizing context thrown in). See below, though, for thoughts on how to handle multiple formats.
Here's the tricky part of publishing, even if you do crank out multiple versions of your book : a) every publisher wants a different one, and b) you have to do it individually for each. I started out on Lulu, because that was the most efficient way I saw into the iPad store. iPad wants EPUB. Fine. But then I wanted to release a PDF version as well, to cover the wider case for people reading on a PC. Lulu can handle that - but it can't apparently associate them both on a singe page. So I'll forever have two products in their catalog. I can live with that.
Aha, but what about Kindle? Kindle has its own store, for one. And, it wants MOBI format. Ok, did that. Now I've got to maintain my book in two places.
Guess what happened last week? Barnes and Noble opened up their Pubit! store for the Nook. Yayyy, three places to maintain my book. I hear Borders has a project in the works as well.
I generated every format (EPUB, MOBI, PDF) of my book in Calibre, and then tweaked them by hand until they looked the way I wanted (or at least, as close as I could get). Although all of the ebook stores will do automatic conversion for you, keep in mind that your copy will end up looking terrible.
Your pages on all these stores will also look very plain, until you get some reviews. Seriously, go get some reviews. Give away as many copies as you can, and beg reviews. This is the stage I'm in now. I've got web reviews, but I'm trying to get people to take the time and go give Amazon or iPad reviews. They help. Nobody wants to feel like they're the first one taking a chance on what could be a piece of garbage.
I was in college from 1987-1991, and my "major qualifying project" (Worcester Polytech) was a workshop where I brought together local high school teachers from math, computer science and social studies for the day. I pitched the idea of a whole new type of computer classroom, state of the art, where everything was networked not just with their local counterparts but with similar schools all around the world. I talked to them about massive scale datasets, public information records, voting data, etc etc etc etc... the ability to run your own queries, to question what you're being handed in the newspaper every day. In other words, a whole bunch of stuff we take for granted these days - but a good number of years before the Web took off.
The computer science and math teachers heard "new computers" and said, "Great, we'll take it."
Then I dropped the surprise on them, and said that this new lab was for the social studies teachers. That this was about exploring all areas of study with computers - art, literature, politics, you name it. "Nonono," said the CS people, "You've been misinformed. *We* get the computers."
That did not surprise me. What surprised me is when the social studies teachers said "Yeah, they get the computers. We don't want them." All they saw was a burden, changes to the curriculum, technology they did not understand, and a new dependency on their coworkers to keep the machines up and running. They were perfectly happy to let the CS teachers teach programming and that would be that. No need for computers in any of the social studies (and, by extension, humanities) classrooms.
Funny how far we *have* come, honestly. If only we could take what's out there on the net at our fingertips, and integrate it more directly into students' education.
[ At the time, in my neighborhood, the "state of the art" schools had a Mac hooked up to a laser disc player, and the students would put together multimedia reports on John F Kennedy to present to the class. The more typical schools had text terminals of maybe the 286 variety, and would be taught keyboarding and other office skills. ]
I used to pick and choose podcasts carefully trying to get a balance of different areas I was interested in. Screw it. There's too many. Hit a directory, browse, and whenever you see anything that looks vaguely of interest, subscribe. If you find that you hate it, unsubscribe. There's really no commitment beyond that.
What I've found is that if I pick a top ten of podcasts I love, then there will be down periods where I've listened to all of them and then have nothing new. So instead I keep a very wide variety from stuff I just right to as soon as it comes in (Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, Squadcast, Scott Sigler, Startup Nation...) to stuff that makes good filler (Siskel and Ebert Reviews, The Onion, NPR Story of the Day...) to stuff that it's just good to have in case I have some time to sit and appreciate it (IT Conversations).
If you listen on a commute like I do, look for podcasts in the 8-20 minute time frame. Your odds of acutally listening to one or two podcasts in full is optimal. If you have many that are an hour or more, then you really have to be in some dedicated listening situation like the gym.
Maybe I missed something in my skimming, but what's the difference between sail.tv and, say, a video podcast of the same content? Surely they're not betting the whole farm on streaming video content. You'd think that with the rise of the video ipods and the whole timeshifting concept that new companies would immediately embrace the watch-whenever concept. After all, that's crucial to acting on the long tail. You don't just say "here's what I've got, showing at 9pm" you say "here's everything I've ever had, and if you happen to stumble across it and like it, then welcome."
Scene : John Doe, having just realized his "powers", is in some sort of mall taking questions from strangers.
Doe: "....010111010101101..1011."
Stranger: "Wow....he actually knows the assembly code for DOS."
Or something like that. But it did actually get good, especially as it progressed toward the eventual cliffhanger that others have mentioned. If SciFi channel has ordered new episodes I'd be thrilled, but I don't think they have.
It seems like the vast majority of myths are busted, which is fine, given that they're supposed to be myths in the first place. But sometimes it seems like the entire show has gone the way of a confirmation, only to have the rules of the game be stretched toward the end -- "Welllllll, we have to look at *exactly* what the myth said, and our experiment did not duplicate it *exactly*, so therefore even though it worked, it's busted." Those feel like we've been cheated, like you're going out of your way to call them busted despite your experiment. Comment?
I noticed this back in the early 90's when one of the shuttle astronauts spoke at my college graduation. They always say "reached out his gloved hand."
Man's in the vacuum of space. Isn't it sort of implied that he's got gloves on? I always wanted the story to go, "He reached out his hand and thought, 'Oh shit I've forgotten my gloves.'"
I agree completely that there are great, born-to-it programmers that are capable of creating things that "in it for the money" average programmers will never achieve.
However, when you're talking about somebody who is maybe 2-3 years out of college versus somebody who is 15 years out, it becomes a much different question. Would you rather have an average coder with major experience, or a junior kid that shows flashes of brilliance?
Personally I like having a couple of young, bright people on the team who want to be mentored. You just can't fill a team with nothing but that. It's the balance between the two that is most important, to me. I don't want a team of 20yr industry grumpy guys any more than I want a team of 2yr know-nothings.
Surely somebody has already optioned the rights to this little mission by now. I wonder if this guy was out there in space wondering whether Gary Sinise would play him in the movie?
When I speak to my boss of being in a mode where I need to crank out furious amounts of code I use the expression "head down, headphones on." In other words, so I will see no distractions and hear no distractions. I have no audio alarm on either my email or im, so unless they visually catch my attention, I do not get distracted by them, either.
I've gotten some of my best coding work done in the strangest of places....planes and trains. Why? Well, for one, you've got no internet (usually), therefore no distraction from email and IM. You're also unlikely to have anybody to talk to, or anyplace to get up and walk to. It's just you and Emacs. It is a very purifying experience.
My previous boss once said in total seriousness that he would pay to just put me on a train and drive me back and forth from Boston to New York if it meant that much of an increase in my productivity. I offered to take him up on it, but the higher ups didn't understand the idea.
An idea that just occurred to me is a reminder program that finds me. Say that it runs on my work desktop, and pops up a window. And that window sits there for a period of time. Probably means that I didn't see it, or I'm not at that computer. I want a reminder program that's smart enough to do something like escalate the reminder to my cell phone, which I'm more likely to see/answer.
In the background it could even send an email saying "Hey, I tried to remind you, but you never acknowledged me." An app that covers its own ass.
The TV Guide channel, and RSS have to be less annoying because they're supposed to be convenient ways to find out about something else. If they're not convenient, there's no longer any point.
Makes perfect sense, although I would probably lean more on the "must be more useful/efficient" rather than "less annoying", but the end result is the same. But you're seeing just plain old web browsing as the alternative if RSS is too annoying, and I'm seeing it as the opposite -- I already find the regular web too annoying and look to RSS to be the solution. RSS already offers me enough bonus in terms of structure and consistency that I've made the switch. There are times when you need to go back to the web itself (like for Slashdot comments), but the whole browsing/surfing thing has changed.
New analogy. Imagine that you're commuting to work, and all you have is the radio. You're coming up on the major highway split and you want to check the traffic. You have no idea when the channel that you're listening to will do traffic. But you know that another channel does "traffic on the 3's", and it's 8:02, so you put that channel on and get the traffic report. Structured and consistent is more useful to you than "We'll give you the information on whatever terms we decide."
Now, what if that traffic report starts out and ends with a simple "This traffic report brought to you by Pepsi. Ice-cold, refreshing Pepsi. Try one today." Did it make the information less useful, or more annoying? Annoying enough to not use that channel of information anymore? Not for me. At least, not yet.
For the real bonus brain teaser, how do you know that I'm not part of a grass roots campaign paid for by Pepsi who just snuck an ad in on you? Ha!;)
If it's fine tuned to my tastes then i'd have an RSS for every widget in my house.
Amen to that. I can't remember where I read it, but somewhere I saw the idea of those warranty registration cards you get with every new device you buy behaving like RSS feeds. That way you could get a notice when your warranty expires, or a product recall is in effect, etc... Once again, sure, you can get that stuff with email or snail mail, but you're in better control with an RSS feed because you can opt not to look instead of getting spammed. And, as a benefit for the provider of the info, they only have to push it out onto the feed once and cut back on their costs (at least, for snail mail).
What we need, though, are better aggregators that can manage when to show me what. I don't want 500 individual feeds. Nor do I want to sort by most recent story, or to put them into folders. Quite frankly I don't know what I want well enough that I'd be able to write an algorithm for it. It'll probably have something to do with tagging and then using Bayesian filtering to track which sorts of stories I read most often. But this isn't the place to talk about stuff like that.:)
Actually, what I meant is that RSS is used to circumvent advertising. If you are able to watch 50x more sites with RSS than the web, that's because you're just looking at content. Correct me if I'm wrong, please, cause I only look at a couple of feeds. Right now RSS is a delivery mechanism for content and not advertising. You can scan so much content because you don't have to filter out advertisements, images, differing layouts, etc.
Well, certainly half right - the bit about the differing layouts and stuff. The fact that all my site summaries appear in the same format for me (two columns, clickable header, "Read more.." link, etc...) is huge on that front.
But they can still have ads. Here, let me check something...a quick skim tells me that about 3 out of 12 have Google adwords in them. Doesn't kill me.
Let me ask you one, since you're keen to differentiate ads from content. If I say "Hey, Harry Potter was a good movie", is that an ad? What if I got paid behind the scenes to just push a certain product? What if I made "Harry Potter" a link? With an affiliate code? Where is the line drawn? Are you arguing against the concept of advertising, or about the obtrusiveness of the presentation? Is it only an ad if it is in an offset box in a different color and font? Is it only a tv commecial if the screen goes black for a second first, and then comes up in a different segment? Or when a tv character says "Is that Campbell's soup, mom?"?
As soon as your RSS feeds get full of advertising, you'll find them much, much less useable.
As soon as your television channels get full of advertising, you'll find them much, much less useable. Some things end up self-regulating. If nobody watches it because of the advertising, then the value of the advertising falls through the floor and there is less advertising.
There's a difference between what is technically possible, what you fear might happen, and what ultimately does happen.
Maybe you're right, maybe there will be a period where RSS gets so swamped with advertising that we all bail out on it until some other technology comes along to fix the problem. Just like we all hated the "This site optimized for IE" era and the wonderful X10 popups. But those didn't kill the web, they just surfaced for a time and then died back out as technology addressed the problem.
Actually I'm far more impressed with the usefulness of RSS monitoring feeds for ebay, amazon, Fedex, etc... then I've ever been with news headlines. I see the logical leap (maybe not the next, but in the very near future) as getting us that much close to the concept of the personal agent who can monitor the state of various information sources and do our bidding.
Bear with me a second. There's already a movement underway to create "structured blogging" (which really needs a better name), and Microsoft already has a similar concept, where you attempt to state up front what is in an RSS item. So say that you're watching new movie releases at your local cinema, then you would be able to tell that each item might have title, stars, description, rating, and show times. It's really not hard to make that leap, it's the same argument people make now for the "Semantic Web" (and hopefully will be adopted quicker as we learn our lessons:)).
Great, so now I'm in a position to have a piece of software on my machine that is watching that feed for new movie releases. It sees that a new Shakespeare movie is opening this weekend, so it alerts me on my cell phone to this fact and asks for permission to go ahead and buy the tickets. Or maybe, if I have a properly enabled phone, it sends me a link where I can do it for myself.
Like I said, this isn't going to happen tomorrow, but there's nothing technically stopping it.
Or how about a froogle watcher that keeps track of the average price on item X, and then knows that when it spots somebody offering more than 30% off that price, it goes ahead and buys it (again, or alerts me so I can do it). Even better, it spots it cheap, buys it and then immediately puts it up on ebay at a profit for automatic flipping.
Or a weather agent that sees, at 3am, that the hurricane has changed direction and is now headed straight for my hometown, so when I wake up at 7am there's a message waiting for me that maybe I should cancel my golf game.
Or a traffic monitoring agent that sees a truck has rolled over on Rt93 south, and tells my alarm clock to wake me up half an hour earlier so that I can take the backroads.
Is there anything special about RSS that enables any of what I just said? Nah, not really. It's more about the notion of polling information feeds and being able to automatically act on them. There's nothing new under the sun there. The question has always been one of technological adoption. You can't create the perfect technology and then tell the world "Why won't you use it!?! Use it now!" It has to prove itself, and grow over time. So if it takes going from blogs to RSS to Structured RSS to Smart Agents, I can wait.
Hey wow look! It's a brand new wheel! It's round like the old one, and goes round and round like the old one.
Actually by your very argument, this comment is irrelevant. The "don't re-invent the wheel" argument works in situations where you already had a perfectly valid, working solution. But you're arguing that the original push concept sucked. Therefore it does indeed deserve to be reinvented, if possible, in a better way.
Very rarely is any specific technology so revolutionary that it brings with it all new ideas and immediately catapults to the front of the pack and changes the world. You can't pick out one bit , place it in a vacuum, and say "Been done before, didn't work." The world around everybody changed. The original push notion, if I remember correctly was really pushed (ha!) at the corporate desktop with things like Pointcast.
But RSS is coming back into the mainstream because of the blog revolution, which is being driven by a very different audience, who will have very different standards for what they accept and what they reject. Advertising in RSS is a perfect example of changing ideology, not changing technology. You *can* do it. But most of the people who are receiving feeds right now simply won't let you do it, because they'll drop you. But that doesn't mean it can't technologically be done, or that it won't ultimately find a home.
The better question to be asking right now isn't whether it will happen, but rather what form it will take. Good ideas never die, especially when there's a chance they can make money for somebody. Resistance isn't necessarily futile, it just helps evolve the idea into a palatable implementation.
And RSS won't help content publishers (like many bloggers and newspapers) because it circumvents advertising.
RSS does not circumvent advertising, it's easy to drop an ad in an RSS feed. What you meant to say, I think, was that blogging circumvents advertising. Which has nothing to do with RSS as a delivery mechanism and everything to do with the ideology of the "it's my voice and I won't let it appear to be biased" authors.
Imagine, for a moment, the perfect ad targeted to the perfect audience. There's really nothing wrong with that. Advertising does work, in some forms but not others. Just the other day we were all talking about Tivo's new "send my personal info to ads of my choice" feature, which people admitted to liking in small doses.
Advertising has not yet worked for RSS for a few reasons, most notably because RSS is neither email nor web page and thus neither model will work. Since it has been done badly (in general) for both, people naturally assume that when you say "advertising in RSS" you mean "bad advertising."
But that's not necessarily true. You can't really spam an RSS feed, since only the people that want it will get it. It inherently honors all "unsubs" because people just stop going to get updates. So you can logically assume that everybody getting your message has at least a passing interest in the subject. Sure, I may be anonymous to you, you may not have my demographic and thus not know whether I like to take cruises or golf or just reread Harry Potter. But how different is that from television advertising where you have to take a guess at the demographics based on the show content itself?
I think RSS is indeed revolutionary because it changes web browsing from being on the site's terms and puts it on mine. I'm telling a given site, "You summarize for me what you've got to say, and if I'm interested, I'll come check it out. If you piss me off, I'll just drop your feed and you'll never darken my door again." Sure, the latter half of that statement can be true for regular websites that I'll just choose not to visit anymore, but the first part is the revolutionary bit. I can watch 50x more sites with RSS feeds than I can by individually navigating every single one of them.
Not graduation, though. I think it was a homecoming or something. Although it was an engineering school (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) he gave a lecture entirely on how to succeed as a writer. This included drawing the classic "plot curve" for several literary masterpieces, including Hamlet (which he drew as a straight line, claiming that there was no real build, climax or resolution) and Kafka's Metamorphosis, which he drew as a vertical line straight down (Man wakes up, sees that he's become a bug, and eventually dies.)
Slashdot Mirror
And yet, here we are almost 15 years later still using usernames and passwords. Oh, well. Was a fun project. :)
True story -- when the project launched we had a big event, with everybody gathered around the box to turn their keys. Then they all took their key and scattered off to wherever, what with the whole "must keep the keys off site and multiple locations" thing. What nobody realized is that the network center (we did our own hosting) had already posted plans for a scheduled power outage that weekend, and nobody'd connected these particular thoughts. So they cycled power in the room to do whatever it is that they did, and the box didn't come back online. Somebody contacted me. I told them to round everybody up to come back and turn their keys again. :)
Are you referring to the new super hero movies, or to Raiders of the Lost Ark? I certainly remember that "through a propeller" sequence - not to mention the whole "melting their faces off" thing. But that was 30 years ago - plus I'm pretty sure I was more like 8 or 9 when that movie came out.
My son is just 5 years old, and he's heavy into his superhero phase. I think it's a crime that all of these movies are rated PG-13 while the toys are clearly aimed at capturing a younger audience who may not even get to see anything but the tv commercials. He's got no less than 3 different Captain America shields (one that I made him, one that his grandfather made him, and one we bought from the store). The one his grandfather made him - out of wood! - came with a home made Thor hammer. He doesn't care. He's Captain Thor America. So, somebody tell me - of this and all the other superhero movies this summer, would you take a 5 yr old? Just how scary/bloody is the violence? I expect that any "adult situations" will go right over his head (bordering on outright nudity and/or sex scenes, which I don't think these movies have). But a really scary monster/bad guy may give him nightmares. I know that most of the others will be gone from the theatre now, but as they start coming out on DVD, which would be the safest to let him watch? Help me out. I desperately want him to have the memory of going to these movies when they were a big deal, like I remember going to see Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.
I was using ATG's products back in 1998. This was before even Java Server Pages had caught on (one of my great regrets in life was having the opportunity to write a JSP book and turning it down :( ). If I remember correctly they even told us that Sun used some of their patents in developing JSP (though don't hold me to that, it was a long time ago).
Their technology was very ColdFusion-like, trying to create an entire programming language complete with conditionals and looping structures all inside a markup syntax. But once you got used to it, it was very powerful. We ran our entire ecommerce platform on it for buying and selling mutual funds, encompassing 16 business units.
It was a fun company, founded by some wanna-be rockstars (Jeet, really - not so much Joe). They threw a heck of a party. At least one of them ended with a shirtless Jeet playing guitar inside a gogo-dancer's cage. Ah, memories. I think that was the party that took place in New Orleans, where I bumped into my very drunk "customer advocate" coming down Bourbon Street, who asked me if I was having a good time. Apparently not as good as he was.
Funny story - I got a tour of the place once. This was during a time when we were trying to use their brand new adapter for the content management system Documentum, and it was not going well. During the tour, before being shown engineering, my tour guide (Hi, Katja!) paused and asked me if I could identify my technical contact by sight. I said no, so the tour continued. I honestly think they were afraid I was going to make a scene.
I used to own some stock, I'll have to go see if I ever dumped it.
It'd be one thing if they just stuck a random graphic here and there. But I expect that the trend would go in the same direction as the multi-page web article. Namely, ads in between the pages that you can't skip. Can you imagine how annoying that would make your book? "I've discovered the identity of the murderer. His name is....." "...and now a word from our sponsor." Brings to mind archaic memories of old radio shows where you really had no choice. I suppose if it's still just another page, you can hit just as fast and skip it. But how long before an ereader has some sort of Flash-like ability to play a quick movie? And then you're stuck.
Thanks Anne. I know that my topic is pretty specific, which makes it that much more important that I promote it far and wide. You never know when you're going to run into somebody who knows somebody who's getting married, after all!
I'm not a traditional published author. This is my first book. Using the logic that an ebook has numerous formatting considerations that make it easier (far less worry about page numbers, page size, left/right concerns, etc...), I decided to go with the ebook in the hopes of making enough $$ that it'd be worth my time to properly format a print book.
The book is about Shakespeare (specifically, a collection of Shakespeare wedding material), and I knew two things - I should have some sort of credentials in the area I'm writing about, and some sort of way to market. I run a number of Shakespeare sites (http://www.shakespearegeek.com primarily among them), and have done so for a number of years. They've got a pretty good following. I thought I'd be all set there, at least as far as getting a jumpstart goes. I'm also a web guy for a living (though not a designer), so arranging a domain and getting some content on it was not much of a worry (http://www.hearmysoulspeak.com did I mention that?) My strategy has been "Have something acceptable up, then drive traffic, and then once you've got traffic up, worry about making a prettier site."
I did have an editor. You need an editor. You will make stupid typos, if nothing else, and you'll need another set of eyes to spot them. An editor also serves as your first reader, and can say things like "This part didn't make sense to me" or "You said the same thing here that you said over there." Get an editor. I lucked out, one of my regular readers who happens to be a college professor said he'd do it for me, and was very helpful.
The publishing part is actually the easiest. There are a zillion "ebook converter" apps out there. But instead of doing that, just go straight to Calibre (http://www.calibre-ebook.com), as it does everything. I originally started mine in LaTeX, because I was heading for print. Then I switched to PDF (easily converted) until eventually ending up with EPUB since it seemed popular. EPUB, for the curious, is basically just a zip file of HTML with some organizing context thrown in). See below, though, for thoughts on how to handle multiple formats.
Here's the tricky part of publishing, even if you do crank out multiple versions of your book : a) every publisher wants a different one, and b) you have to do it individually for each. I started out on Lulu, because that was the most efficient way I saw into the iPad store. iPad wants EPUB. Fine. But then I wanted to release a PDF version as well, to cover the wider case for people reading on a PC. Lulu can handle that - but it can't apparently associate them both on a singe page. So I'll forever have two products in their catalog. I can live with that.
Aha, but what about Kindle? Kindle has its own store, for one. And, it wants MOBI format. Ok, did that. Now I've got to maintain my book in two places.
Guess what happened last week? Barnes and Noble opened up their Pubit! store for the Nook. Yayyy, three places to maintain my book. I hear Borders has a project in the works as well.
I generated every format (EPUB, MOBI, PDF) of my book in Calibre, and then tweaked them by hand until they looked the way I wanted (or at least, as close as I could get). Although all of the ebook stores will do automatic conversion for you, keep in mind that your copy will end up looking terrible.
Your pages on all these stores will also look very plain, until you get some reviews. Seriously, go get some reviews. Give away as many copies as you can, and beg reviews. This is the stage I'm in now. I've got web reviews, but I'm trying to get people to take the time and go give Amazon or iPad reviews. They help. Nobody wants to feel like they're the first one taking a chance on what could be a piece of garbage.
Lessons learned so
The computer science and math teachers heard "new computers" and said, "Great, we'll take it."
Then I dropped the surprise on them, and said that this new lab was for the social studies teachers. That this was about exploring all areas of study with computers - art, literature, politics, you name it. "Nonono," said the CS people, "You've been misinformed. *We* get the computers."
That did not surprise me. What surprised me is when the social studies teachers said "Yeah, they get the computers. We don't want them." All they saw was a burden, changes to the curriculum, technology they did not understand, and a new dependency on their coworkers to keep the machines up and running. They were perfectly happy to let the CS teachers teach programming and that would be that. No need for computers in any of the social studies (and, by extension, humanities) classrooms.
Funny how far we *have* come, honestly. If only we could take what's out there on the net at our fingertips, and integrate it more directly into students' education.
[ At the time, in my neighborhood, the "state of the art" schools had a Mac hooked up to a laser disc player, and the students would put together multimedia reports on John F Kennedy to present to the class. The more typical schools had text terminals of maybe the 286 variety, and would be taught keyboarding and other office skills. ]
I used to pick and choose podcasts carefully trying to get a balance of different areas I was interested in. Screw it. There's too many. Hit a directory, browse, and whenever you see anything that looks vaguely of interest, subscribe. If you find that you hate it, unsubscribe. There's really no commitment beyond that. What I've found is that if I pick a top ten of podcasts I love, then there will be down periods where I've listened to all of them and then have nothing new. So instead I keep a very wide variety from stuff I just right to as soon as it comes in (Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, Squadcast, Scott Sigler, Startup Nation...) to stuff that makes good filler (Siskel and Ebert Reviews, The Onion, NPR Story of the Day...) to stuff that it's just good to have in case I have some time to sit and appreciate it (IT Conversations). If you listen on a commute like I do, look for podcasts in the 8-20 minute time frame. Your odds of acutally listening to one or two podcasts in full is optimal. If you have many that are an hour or more, then you really have to be in some dedicated listening situation like the gym.
Maybe I missed something in my skimming, but what's the difference between sail.tv and, say, a video podcast of the same content? Surely they're not betting the whole farm on streaming video content. You'd think that with the rise of the video ipods and the whole timeshifting concept that new companies would immediately embrace the watch-whenever concept. After all, that's crucial to acting on the long tail. You don't just say "here's what I've got, showing at 9pm" you say "here's everything I've ever had, and if you happen to stumble across it and like it, then welcome."
Doe: "....010111010101101..1011."
Stranger: "Wow....he actually knows the assembly code for DOS."
Or something like that. But it did actually get good, especially as it progressed toward the eventual cliffhanger that others have mentioned. If SciFi channel has ordered new episodes I'd be thrilled, but I don't think they have.
It seems like the vast majority of myths are busted, which is fine, given that they're supposed to be myths in the first place. But sometimes it seems like the entire show has gone the way of a confirmation, only to have the rules of the game be stretched toward the end -- "Welllllll, we have to look at *exactly* what the myth said, and our experiment did not duplicate it *exactly*, so therefore even though it worked, it's busted." Those feel like we've been cheated, like you're going out of your way to call them busted despite your experiment. Comment?
Geez, I was making fun of this thing back in January. I'm used to seeing stories on Slashdot 3 days or so after they break, but 8 months is a little long.
Man's in the vacuum of space. Isn't it sort of implied that he's got gloves on? I always wanted the story to go, "He reached out his hand and thought, 'Oh shit I've forgotten my gloves.'"
However, when you're talking about somebody who is maybe 2-3 years out of college versus somebody who is 15 years out, it becomes a much different question. Would you rather have an average coder with major experience, or a junior kid that shows flashes of brilliance?
Personally I like having a couple of young, bright people on the team who want to be mentored. You just can't fill a team with nothing but that. It's the balance between the two that is most important, to me. I don't want a team of 20yr industry grumpy guys any more than I want a team of 2yr know-nothings.
Surely somebody has already optioned the rights to this little mission by now. I wonder if this guy was out there in space wondering whether Gary Sinise would play him in the movie?
I've gotten some of my best coding work done in the strangest of places....planes and trains. Why? Well, for one, you've got no internet (usually), therefore no distraction from email and IM. You're also unlikely to have anybody to talk to, or anyplace to get up and walk to. It's just you and Emacs. It is a very purifying experience.
My previous boss once said in total seriousness that he would pay to just put me on a train and drive me back and forth from Boston to New York if it meant that much of an increase in my productivity. I offered to take him up on it, but the higher ups didn't understand the idea.
In the background it could even send an email saying "Hey, I tried to remind you, but you never acknowledged me." An app that covers its own ass.
Makes perfect sense, although I would probably lean more on the "must be more useful/efficient" rather than "less annoying", but the end result is the same. But you're seeing just plain old web browsing as the alternative if RSS is too annoying, and I'm seeing it as the opposite -- I already find the regular web too annoying and look to RSS to be the solution. RSS already offers me enough bonus in terms of structure and consistency that I've made the switch. There are times when you need to go back to the web itself (like for Slashdot comments), but the whole browsing/surfing thing has changed.
New analogy. Imagine that you're commuting to work, and all you have is the radio. You're coming up on the major highway split and you want to check the traffic. You have no idea when the channel that you're listening to will do traffic. But you know that another channel does "traffic on the 3's", and it's 8:02, so you put that channel on and get the traffic report. Structured and consistent is more useful to you than "We'll give you the information on whatever terms we decide."
Now, what if that traffic report starts out and ends with a simple "This traffic report brought to you by Pepsi. Ice-cold, refreshing Pepsi. Try one today." Did it make the information less useful, or more annoying? Annoying enough to not use that channel of information anymore? Not for me. At least, not yet.
For the real bonus brain teaser, how do you know that I'm not part of a grass roots campaign paid for by Pepsi who just snuck an ad in on you? Ha! ;)
Amen to that. I can't remember where I read it, but somewhere I saw the idea of those warranty registration cards you get with every new device you buy behaving like RSS feeds. That way you could get a notice when your warranty expires, or a product recall is in effect, etc... Once again, sure, you can get that stuff with email or snail mail, but you're in better control with an RSS feed because you can opt not to look instead of getting spammed. And, as a benefit for the provider of the info, they only have to push it out onto the feed once and cut back on their costs (at least, for snail mail).
What we need, though, are better aggregators that can manage when to show me what. I don't want 500 individual feeds. Nor do I want to sort by most recent story, or to put them into folders. Quite frankly I don't know what I want well enough that I'd be able to write an algorithm for it. It'll probably have something to do with tagging and then using Bayesian filtering to track which sorts of stories I read most often. But this isn't the place to talk about stuff like that. :)
Well, certainly half right - the bit about the differing layouts and stuff. The fact that all my site summaries appear in the same format for me (two columns, clickable header, "Read more.." link, etc...) is huge on that front.
But they can still have ads. Here, let me check something...a quick skim tells me that about 3 out of 12 have Google adwords in them. Doesn't kill me.
Let me ask you one, since you're keen to differentiate ads from content. If I say "Hey, Harry Potter was a good movie", is that an ad? What if I got paid behind the scenes to just push a certain product? What if I made "Harry Potter" a link? With an affiliate code? Where is the line drawn? Are you arguing against the concept of advertising, or about the obtrusiveness of the presentation? Is it only an ad if it is in an offset box in a different color and font? Is it only a tv commecial if the screen goes black for a second first, and then comes up in a different segment? Or when a tv character says "Is that Campbell's soup, mom?"?
As soon as your RSS feeds get full of advertising, you'll find them much, much less useable.
As soon as your television channels get full of advertising, you'll find them much, much less useable. Some things end up self-regulating. If nobody watches it because of the advertising, then the value of the advertising falls through the floor and there is less advertising.
There's a difference between what is technically possible, what you fear might happen, and what ultimately does happen.
Maybe you're right, maybe there will be a period where RSS gets so swamped with advertising that we all bail out on it until some other technology comes along to fix the problem. Just like we all hated the "This site optimized for IE" era and the wonderful X10 popups. But those didn't kill the web, they just surfaced for a time and then died back out as technology addressed the problem.
Bear with me a second. There's already a movement underway to create "structured blogging" (which really needs a better name), and Microsoft already has a similar concept, where you attempt to state up front what is in an RSS item. So say that you're watching new movie releases at your local cinema, then you would be able to tell that each item might have title, stars, description, rating, and show times. It's really not hard to make that leap, it's the same argument people make now for the "Semantic Web" (and hopefully will be adopted quicker as we learn our lessons :)).
Great, so now I'm in a position to have a piece of software on my machine that is watching that feed for new movie releases. It sees that a new Shakespeare movie is opening this weekend, so it alerts me on my cell phone to this fact and asks for permission to go ahead and buy the tickets. Or maybe, if I have a properly enabled phone, it sends me a link where I can do it for myself. Like I said, this isn't going to happen tomorrow, but there's nothing technically stopping it.
Or how about a froogle watcher that keeps track of the average price on item X, and then knows that when it spots somebody offering more than 30% off that price, it goes ahead and buys it (again, or alerts me so I can do it). Even better, it spots it cheap, buys it and then immediately puts it up on ebay at a profit for automatic flipping.
Or a weather agent that sees, at 3am, that the hurricane has changed direction and is now headed straight for my hometown, so when I wake up at 7am there's a message waiting for me that maybe I should cancel my golf game.
Or a traffic monitoring agent that sees a truck has rolled over on Rt93 south, and tells my alarm clock to wake me up half an hour earlier so that I can take the backroads.
Is there anything special about RSS that enables any of what I just said? Nah, not really. It's more about the notion of polling information feeds and being able to automatically act on them. There's nothing new under the sun there. The question has always been one of technological adoption. You can't create the perfect technology and then tell the world "Why won't you use it!?! Use it now!" It has to prove itself, and grow over time. So if it takes going from blogs to RSS to Structured RSS to Smart Agents, I can wait.
Actually by your very argument, this comment is irrelevant. The "don't re-invent the wheel" argument works in situations where you already had a perfectly valid, working solution. But you're arguing that the original push concept sucked. Therefore it does indeed deserve to be reinvented, if possible, in a better way.
Very rarely is any specific technology so revolutionary that it brings with it all new ideas and immediately catapults to the front of the pack and changes the world. You can't pick out one bit , place it in a vacuum, and say "Been done before, didn't work." The world around everybody changed. The original push notion, if I remember correctly was really pushed (ha!) at the corporate desktop with things like Pointcast.
But RSS is coming back into the mainstream because of the blog revolution, which is being driven by a very different audience, who will have very different standards for what they accept and what they reject. Advertising in RSS is a perfect example of changing ideology, not changing technology. You *can* do it. But most of the people who are receiving feeds right now simply won't let you do it, because they'll drop you. But that doesn't mean it can't technologically be done, or that it won't ultimately find a home.
The better question to be asking right now isn't whether it will happen, but rather what form it will take. Good ideas never die, especially when there's a chance they can make money for somebody. Resistance isn't necessarily futile, it just helps evolve the idea into a palatable implementation.
RSS does not circumvent advertising, it's easy to drop an ad in an RSS feed. What you meant to say, I think, was that blogging circumvents advertising. Which has nothing to do with RSS as a delivery mechanism and everything to do with the ideology of the "it's my voice and I won't let it appear to be biased" authors.
Imagine, for a moment, the perfect ad targeted to the perfect audience. There's really nothing wrong with that. Advertising does work, in some forms but not others. Just the other day we were all talking about Tivo's new "send my personal info to ads of my choice" feature, which people admitted to liking in small doses.
Advertising has not yet worked for RSS for a few reasons, most notably because RSS is neither email nor web page and thus neither model will work. Since it has been done badly (in general) for both, people naturally assume that when you say "advertising in RSS" you mean "bad advertising."
But that's not necessarily true. You can't really spam an RSS feed, since only the people that want it will get it. It inherently honors all "unsubs" because people just stop going to get updates. So you can logically assume that everybody getting your message has at least a passing interest in the subject. Sure, I may be anonymous to you, you may not have my demographic and thus not know whether I like to take cruises or golf or just reread Harry Potter. But how different is that from television advertising where you have to take a guess at the demographics based on the show content itself?
I think RSS is indeed revolutionary because it changes web browsing from being on the site's terms and puts it on mine. I'm telling a given site, "You summarize for me what you've got to say, and if I'm interested, I'll come check it out. If you piss me off, I'll just drop your feed and you'll never darken my door again." Sure, the latter half of that statement can be true for regular websites that I'll just choose not to visit anymore, but the first part is the revolutionary bit. I can watch 50x more sites with RSS feeds than I can by individually navigating every single one of them.
Rumor on campus was that he was drunk.