I recall as a first-year English teacher, with a focus on lingusitics, I walked into an 11th grade classroom and said I wanted us to examine descriptive and generative grammars rather than traditional grammar that had its roots in Latin. While the latter taught students how to create pretty diagrams with a place for every part of speech and interjection placed smartly somewhere in that grammar cloud, it really did not teach them about how language was generated and did not actually describe actual language use cases.
My department chairman didn't understand the need to replace a pedagogy that had been taught for a century, but to his credit didn't get in the way of this experimentation and even sat in on some of my uneven classes where we discussed lingusitic, semantics, and generative language with luster if not always precision.
I read on Twitter this morning that the Kane Academy, an online video tutorial, since 2006 has delivered 86.6 million lessons and more than 100 million exercises. The site has approximately 3,000 videos and attracts 3,700,000 unique users per month. To say Kane is rethinking the world of education is an understatement. Founder Salman Khan boldly offers a free world class education in math, the sciences, and the humanities. So, if you want help in solving linear equations, learn more about Newton, Leibnitz and Usain Bolt, or get to the heart of Descartes and Cartesian logic, this is the place to be. The beauty of these videos is that they are fun, easy to follow, and a long way from my generative grammar classes.
As I write this I'm listening to yet another discussion of the challenges facing the teaching profession in New York and find it, as a lifelong educator, somewhat medieval. Beyond chesting-thumping by politicians and teacher unions, a sobering truth remains, perhaps best described in Tom Friedman's book, "That Used to Be Us." American students lag far behind China, Korea, Finland, Singapore, and Japan in math, reading and science. Resolving tenure and retention issues do not get to the heart of the matter.
Of course, the new online offerings could not exist without search engine advances but they are more focused, driven by consumer needs and appetites, emphasizing knowledge over search. Verge.com, discussing Wolfram Alpha, puts it nicely. "First released in 2009, Wolfram Alpha presents a different way of interacting with knowledge and data than anything else out there on the web. Built on the foundation of Wolfram's Mathematica product. Wolfram Alpha is a 'knowledge engine' instead of a 'search engine' that we've all become familiar with. What that means is that Wolfram Alpha is more structured in the query field you use to access it, the data it uses as a source, and the results that it gives you."
So Wolfram Alpha can return answers to math or scientific queries and provide answers to its structured data. People don't want answers; they want reports. The company will accept up to sixty file types, vector graphics, 3D geometry filles, audio files, spread sheets and custom formats from science, medicine and mathematics. If Wolfram offers any magic it is the ability to find the narrative in the data.
I acknowledge the Wolfram example, while interesting, might be esoteric. We know that education is undergoing a digital transformation and it's reasonable to ask, as Forbes.com has done, if we are to stay with the current notion of public education, who is going to teach students the necessary programming and coding skills. In a way, much as educational videos might be useful adjuncts to the classroom, what is becoming more fundamental for both teachers and students is the ability to write or at least understand code. For example, Codeacademy, a New York-based online training academy, told Forbes that "Coding is the literacy of the 21st century."
More than 500,000 students from 200 countries have signed up for this academy primarily through Facebook and Twitter, though the number is surely larger since you don't have to open an account to take a course.
I have talked to students and educators in China and India about these offerings. China seems to have particular advantages. The country's commitment to science and math education is well established. China also has a huge resource problem and simply can't afford to print textbooks for hundreds of millions of students. Thus the push to use smartphones, tablets and e-readers for educational purposes. Moreover, I'm told the numbers of high school students in China learning to write code is increasing at a fast pace. The Chinese government might censor speech, but it seems to understand that coding and related skills indeed represent the literacy of the 21st century. America still does not seem to understand the advantages of China's state capitalism.
This is not an esoteric skill. As a point of reference I regularly check job postings at Google, Amazon, B&N, Twitter, Facebook and a raft of tech start-up companies. In my informal survey I note that a large percentage of positions require coding and programming skills and facility with data fields.
I've been told that Google-and this is likely tribal storytelling--has asked job candidates to discuss HTML5 and Emerson's "Ode to Beauty," preferably in the same sentence.
No word on the casualty rate.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Friday, February 3, 2012
Rebranding CBS This Morning
The media world is full of talk about brand repositioning but rarely do we see this play out on such a large canvas we are seeing at CBS. This rebranding is most obvious with CBS This Morning and the experiment with Charlie Rose and Gayle King. But the effort started earlier at CBS Interactive with an attempt to rebrand and harness its diverse content sites under one umbrella, with a muscular white label assist from App Carousel, a Canadian startup that in effect creates "carousels" for branded apps that are typically lost in the mainline app stores. This move makes sense as the future of in-app purchasing looks rosy indeed.
The WSJ has reported that, in a similar vein, CBS Sports is opening up its website to outside developers in an attempt to garner a piece of the $1 billion fantasy sports business. As the Journal notes this is an attempt to emulate efforts by Facebook that has created a breeding ground for products, music and games. The plan would be to offer outside developers tools that can help launch startups, with perhaps Zynga one of the best examples. CBS is looking for other revenue streams in addition to advertising.
In the long run these modest changes might have profound effects on the CBS balance sheet but it is the changes at the morning show that will have much to say about the public face of the corporate soul. Frankly, I wasn't sure how these two notables would fare in the bubbly early hour where ABC and NBC move like clockwork from breaking news, politics, missing babies and pretty blonde white women missing, the requisite attorney and ex-FBI agent,; then, after a half-a-dozen commercials, the menu, the music, and celebrity segment in no particuular order.
Over the years I've appeared on all these morning shows and, even with some format changes, I recognize the rhythm: be in the green room by 5 am and if your specialty is health and fitness, as mine was, expect to be on in the 8 o'clock hour, unless some disaster trumps. The most significant change in the morning scene has been the addition of celebrity news, with ABC the unabashed leader, along with the integration of social media.
I haven't see any ratings that measure this experiment to date. I would be surprised if there was a significant shift in demographic given the hard news emphasis. Still, I have been pleasantly surprised after watching the show from a media perspecitive on-and-off for a month at the hosts ability to deal with meaty subjects early in the morning in a relaxed manner.
This morning Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Erica Hill discussed with a scientist recent findings about how proteins that become "tangled" in areas of the brain might contribute to Alhzeimer's disease. The discussion was brisk, congenial, and without the customary slipping into bathos so common on the morning sets. The program returns to the health theme often and this seems a wise editorial decision.
One segment about Garden and Gun magazine caught my fancy because Jeff Glor, the reporter, seemed to capture the essence of the magazine, both as history and business. And he understood that the magazine was about neither gardens nor guns per se; these are metaphors for the Southern soul. Garden and Guns, we learned, is a "gutsy title launched at a gut-wrenching time, just as the great recession hit in 2007." Indeed, I recall the launch news being received somewhat incredulously by the publishing powers that be--or were.
It was great to hear that historical insight and corrective during the 7 o'clock news show, told in an easy, almost-unhurried narrative style, acknowledging that the South has a sense of time, place, and pace.
If had were alive and awake, William Faulner might have cheered.
The WSJ has reported that, in a similar vein, CBS Sports is opening up its website to outside developers in an attempt to garner a piece of the $1 billion fantasy sports business. As the Journal notes this is an attempt to emulate efforts by Facebook that has created a breeding ground for products, music and games. The plan would be to offer outside developers tools that can help launch startups, with perhaps Zynga one of the best examples. CBS is looking for other revenue streams in addition to advertising.
In the long run these modest changes might have profound effects on the CBS balance sheet but it is the changes at the morning show that will have much to say about the public face of the corporate soul. Frankly, I wasn't sure how these two notables would fare in the bubbly early hour where ABC and NBC move like clockwork from breaking news, politics, missing babies and pretty blonde white women missing, the requisite attorney and ex-FBI agent,; then, after a half-a-dozen commercials, the menu, the music, and celebrity segment in no particuular order.
Over the years I've appeared on all these morning shows and, even with some format changes, I recognize the rhythm: be in the green room by 5 am and if your specialty is health and fitness, as mine was, expect to be on in the 8 o'clock hour, unless some disaster trumps. The most significant change in the morning scene has been the addition of celebrity news, with ABC the unabashed leader, along with the integration of social media.
I haven't see any ratings that measure this experiment to date. I would be surprised if there was a significant shift in demographic given the hard news emphasis. Still, I have been pleasantly surprised after watching the show from a media perspecitive on-and-off for a month at the hosts ability to deal with meaty subjects early in the morning in a relaxed manner.
This morning Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Erica Hill discussed with a scientist recent findings about how proteins that become "tangled" in areas of the brain might contribute to Alhzeimer's disease. The discussion was brisk, congenial, and without the customary slipping into bathos so common on the morning sets. The program returns to the health theme often and this seems a wise editorial decision.
One segment about Garden and Gun magazine caught my fancy because Jeff Glor, the reporter, seemed to capture the essence of the magazine, both as history and business. And he understood that the magazine was about neither gardens nor guns per se; these are metaphors for the Southern soul. Garden and Guns, we learned, is a "gutsy title launched at a gut-wrenching time, just as the great recession hit in 2007." Indeed, I recall the launch news being received somewhat incredulously by the publishing powers that be--or were.
It was great to hear that historical insight and corrective during the 7 o'clock news show, told in an easy, almost-unhurried narrative style, acknowledging that the South has a sense of time, place, and pace.
If had were alive and awake, William Faulner might have cheered.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Apple and the China Syndrome
The latest threat to Steve Jobs' legacy has been the news that workers laboring in Apple factories in China work long hours, are paid little and are required to perform the same function thousands of time during a long shift as they bring iPhones and other products to market. The question raised in American media is whether Apple's reputation can survive this latest blemish. Will American consumers continue to buy Apple products that are brought to market on the backs of Chinese workers who are little more than slaves in service to a brand and the Chinese Comunist state?
Say what?
I would suggest those asking these questions spend some time visiting factories in Asia. I've been visiting bike, car, and electronic factories in Asia for twenty-five years and find the above story, without the hyperbole, predictable and economically necessary. My first visits to factories in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea--in that order--turned up similar stories about working conditions and low wages. Even then the dynamic was clear. American manufacturers outsourced the low-end products and as Japan, for example, moved up the product value chain, production of the these items moved to countries such as Taiwan and Korea. In time these countries developed the necessary workforce skills, computer aided design, and overall tech sophistication so that few would suggest today that products sourced in these parts of Asia are in anyway inferior to what we produce in the states. It's actually been the inverse.
And this is just not an Asia story. One of my favorite pieces of geography is the stretch in northern Italy from Milan to Venice, where one can draw a rhumb line through the heart of traditional bicycle country of craftmen and artists, including Columbus, Campagnola and Cinelli. By and large manufacturers were slower than their American counterparts to outsource to Asia but they eventually followed the same pattern, grumbling all the way. They subsequently focused on high-end products that Americans and others will continue to pay for because of the brand, the craftmanship and the history that is incarnated annually in the spendor of the Tour de France.
This shedding of low-end, low-value products continues apace. China is losing business to Vietnam, Thailand, and the Malay Peninsula. The 100 million Chinese workers who have just returned home, largely in the west, to celebrate the Year of the Dragon, will need these jobs to return to if China is to continue to fan its version of state capitalism and hold our debt. Ironically, the assembly of electronics, including iPhones, is made-to-order for a workforce like China's which does not want a labor pool that literally has time on its hands.
This is a delicate dance of course, as China has made remarkable strides up the product value chain. The dance is really about maintaining and growing types of businesses, especially in electronics, that require millions of hands to do the numbing, repetitious piece work that is the shadow side of product manufacturing. The last thing China wants to do is to introduce too much technology, too fast when there is a restive work force that has already shown its contempt for a system that has created a cadre of billionaires overnight. Labor unrest, especially in the west, is China's great worry.
My guess is that Apple consumers won't care too much about this shadow side and might even point to China's burgeoning middle class of 300 million, literally up-from-poverty in a generation, as an example of wise capitalism at work.
But there are other economic and market forces at play. Mobile phone companies shipped 500 million smartphones in 2011 with Apple and Samsung leading the way. There is every reason to believe the predictions that use of mobile phones will surpass desk top computers for Internet access by 2014.
Add to this that the business model for mobile networks continues to change. For example, according to IGR research, in 2009 almost 58% of AT&T's new subscribers were postpaid. In 2010 this number fell to 24% and continues to decline.
With the introduction of the iPad there was a sense--and perhaps a desire--among publishers that consumers would settle on three devices: a smartphone. a tablet and an e-reader. The world doesn't seem to be unfolding out that way. We know that data consumption is expected to increase by 530% from 2010 to 2014. And given consumers' movement away from postpaid to pre-paid plans, carriers have made it very clear they will bring more devices on line and that they are interested in pre-loaded content and enterprise offers to help differentiate a device. It is not unreasonable to think that families will have 5-7 mobile devices on average in the household by 2013. The carriers are counting on this.
Harrison Research has suggested that the most important by-product of this multiple-device adoption is that it is being led by consumers, rather than technology companies. To that end there is an element of fashion to device acquisition, one for every pocket and purse, shed frequently. Asia hands should be busy for a while.
And times change. My local wine merchant in Nyack, New York tells me that China is importing the bulk of the expensive wines from Italy, Spain and France. Also vines. His prediction: get ready for the Great Wall brand, led by a robust cabernet. Almost hand-made.
Say what?
I would suggest those asking these questions spend some time visiting factories in Asia. I've been visiting bike, car, and electronic factories in Asia for twenty-five years and find the above story, without the hyperbole, predictable and economically necessary. My first visits to factories in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea--in that order--turned up similar stories about working conditions and low wages. Even then the dynamic was clear. American manufacturers outsourced the low-end products and as Japan, for example, moved up the product value chain, production of the these items moved to countries such as Taiwan and Korea. In time these countries developed the necessary workforce skills, computer aided design, and overall tech sophistication so that few would suggest today that products sourced in these parts of Asia are in anyway inferior to what we produce in the states. It's actually been the inverse.
And this is just not an Asia story. One of my favorite pieces of geography is the stretch in northern Italy from Milan to Venice, where one can draw a rhumb line through the heart of traditional bicycle country of craftmen and artists, including Columbus, Campagnola and Cinelli. By and large manufacturers were slower than their American counterparts to outsource to Asia but they eventually followed the same pattern, grumbling all the way. They subsequently focused on high-end products that Americans and others will continue to pay for because of the brand, the craftmanship and the history that is incarnated annually in the spendor of the Tour de France.
This shedding of low-end, low-value products continues apace. China is losing business to Vietnam, Thailand, and the Malay Peninsula. The 100 million Chinese workers who have just returned home, largely in the west, to celebrate the Year of the Dragon, will need these jobs to return to if China is to continue to fan its version of state capitalism and hold our debt. Ironically, the assembly of electronics, including iPhones, is made-to-order for a workforce like China's which does not want a labor pool that literally has time on its hands.
This is a delicate dance of course, as China has made remarkable strides up the product value chain. The dance is really about maintaining and growing types of businesses, especially in electronics, that require millions of hands to do the numbing, repetitious piece work that is the shadow side of product manufacturing. The last thing China wants to do is to introduce too much technology, too fast when there is a restive work force that has already shown its contempt for a system that has created a cadre of billionaires overnight. Labor unrest, especially in the west, is China's great worry.
My guess is that Apple consumers won't care too much about this shadow side and might even point to China's burgeoning middle class of 300 million, literally up-from-poverty in a generation, as an example of wise capitalism at work.
But there are other economic and market forces at play. Mobile phone companies shipped 500 million smartphones in 2011 with Apple and Samsung leading the way. There is every reason to believe the predictions that use of mobile phones will surpass desk top computers for Internet access by 2014.
Add to this that the business model for mobile networks continues to change. For example, according to IGR research, in 2009 almost 58% of AT&T's new subscribers were postpaid. In 2010 this number fell to 24% and continues to decline.
With the introduction of the iPad there was a sense--and perhaps a desire--among publishers that consumers would settle on three devices: a smartphone. a tablet and an e-reader. The world doesn't seem to be unfolding out that way. We know that data consumption is expected to increase by 530% from 2010 to 2014. And given consumers' movement away from postpaid to pre-paid plans, carriers have made it very clear they will bring more devices on line and that they are interested in pre-loaded content and enterprise offers to help differentiate a device. It is not unreasonable to think that families will have 5-7 mobile devices on average in the household by 2013. The carriers are counting on this.
Harrison Research has suggested that the most important by-product of this multiple-device adoption is that it is being led by consumers, rather than technology companies. To that end there is an element of fashion to device acquisition, one for every pocket and purse, shed frequently. Asia hands should be busy for a while.
And times change. My local wine merchant in Nyack, New York tells me that China is importing the bulk of the expensive wines from Italy, Spain and France. Also vines. His prediction: get ready for the Great Wall brand, led by a robust cabernet. Almost hand-made.
Friday, January 13, 2012
On the Language of Culture and Code
We are coming up on the Chinese New Year so it's a good time for rivals to criticize Republican Presidential candidate John Huntsman for speaking Mandarin. Slipping into Chinese during a New Hampshire primary debate might not have been politically wise, but he might been better off doubling down and adding an instructive coda: given China's ascendancy, we would all profit from learning Chinese.
I've worked in China, on-and-off, for years and am increasingly struck by the interest there in English-language education. No wonder Reader's Digest. Macmillan, Scholastic Magazine, Highlights for Children, among others, are so engaged in developing English language learning activities in China, especially in Beijing and Shanghai but increasingly in second and third-tier cities. I have consulted with Chinese ereader companies and there is a high interest in bundled English-language content on devices at birth as a differentiator in a very competitive product marketplace. The Chinese government might paint American pop culture influence as demonic--and indeed, has just severely restricted similar fare on national television, but officials are very clear about the need to understand the language of the foe. Obviously, there is a lot of interest in speaking Chinese in America, but it is not as deep-rooted, pervasive and as well-funded as learning English in China.
I have been thinking about what happens when the language of culture, discourse, and vocation fails us. In her Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, Kathleen Fitzpatrick explores the future of scholarship within the Humanities, calling for a kind of community scholarship she had explored extensively through Media Commons. Digital, of course, is the great leveler and shines the cold light of day on the lone scholar examining the individual linear text. For Fitzpatrick the answer seems to be in social, sharing, and the scholarly version of remix. I think she's on the right track.
My dissertation advisor has spent most of his career assembling a comprehensive bibliography of John Updike. Most of this work was done the old fashion way--by hand. Given Updike's brand, I see this as a worthy effort and mean no criticism. But with sophisticated search tools one might be able to do this in far less time.
As an former University English professor I'm not sure if the textual criticism of literature, whether from a psychological, mythological, or archetypal perspective, fundamental to the discipline for more than fifty years, makes much sense any more. I remained amused years later that a fellow graduate student was able to write her PhD dissertation on the medical imagery in John Donne's poetry. More fool me for writing the following dissertation: Aesthetics and the Religious Mind in Three Catholic Novelists: Francois Mauriac, Graham Greene, and Flannery O'Connor. This august work found its way, along with thousands like it, forever entombed, in a decaying, undigital file.
I think English Departments would be better off teaching writing, semantics, structural grammar, lingustics, and with help, coding, electronic publishing, and archive construction. The discipline has largely abandoned the structure of language, grammar, and linguistics in favor of publishing literary criticism for job security and tenure.
Not surprisingly interest in programming skills, once considered the province of the geek in the corner office, have taken center stage in an increasing digital economy. Ironically, the Computer Science Teachers Association, reports that the number of high schools in the US offering introductory courses in programming dropped from 78% to 69% since 2005. This might say more about our schools than digital opportunities.
That said, there is a growing interest in the investment community to fund online and physical schools that teach programming and related skills, including Treehouse Island Inc., Competitor Codecademy, and General Assembly. That Greylock Partners, Union Square Ventures, and Jeff Bezos are funding these efforts underscores the seriousness.
Yesterday I attended a Big Data Visualization event, organized by NYC Media Lab and hosted by Bloomberg LLP. Speakers included data scientists from bit.ly, Seed Media, Foursquare and NYU-Poly. I will devote another post to this extraordinary event, but here I want to say a key takeaway was how important the technologist, designer and scientist have become as we try to better understand and visualize massive data sources that for magazine publishers will increasingly come from outside their traditional sectors and relationships, mashed up in ways we have yet to understand.
The next generation of publishers will likely be more scientist and less English major.
I've worked in China, on-and-off, for years and am increasingly struck by the interest there in English-language education. No wonder Reader's Digest. Macmillan, Scholastic Magazine, Highlights for Children, among others, are so engaged in developing English language learning activities in China, especially in Beijing and Shanghai but increasingly in second and third-tier cities. I have consulted with Chinese ereader companies and there is a high interest in bundled English-language content on devices at birth as a differentiator in a very competitive product marketplace. The Chinese government might paint American pop culture influence as demonic--and indeed, has just severely restricted similar fare on national television, but officials are very clear about the need to understand the language of the foe. Obviously, there is a lot of interest in speaking Chinese in America, but it is not as deep-rooted, pervasive and as well-funded as learning English in China.
I have been thinking about what happens when the language of culture, discourse, and vocation fails us. In her Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, Kathleen Fitzpatrick explores the future of scholarship within the Humanities, calling for a kind of community scholarship she had explored extensively through Media Commons. Digital, of course, is the great leveler and shines the cold light of day on the lone scholar examining the individual linear text. For Fitzpatrick the answer seems to be in social, sharing, and the scholarly version of remix. I think she's on the right track.
My dissertation advisor has spent most of his career assembling a comprehensive bibliography of John Updike. Most of this work was done the old fashion way--by hand. Given Updike's brand, I see this as a worthy effort and mean no criticism. But with sophisticated search tools one might be able to do this in far less time.
As an former University English professor I'm not sure if the textual criticism of literature, whether from a psychological, mythological, or archetypal perspective, fundamental to the discipline for more than fifty years, makes much sense any more. I remained amused years later that a fellow graduate student was able to write her PhD dissertation on the medical imagery in John Donne's poetry. More fool me for writing the following dissertation: Aesthetics and the Religious Mind in Three Catholic Novelists: Francois Mauriac, Graham Greene, and Flannery O'Connor. This august work found its way, along with thousands like it, forever entombed, in a decaying, undigital file.
I think English Departments would be better off teaching writing, semantics, structural grammar, lingustics, and with help, coding, electronic publishing, and archive construction. The discipline has largely abandoned the structure of language, grammar, and linguistics in favor of publishing literary criticism for job security and tenure.
Not surprisingly interest in programming skills, once considered the province of the geek in the corner office, have taken center stage in an increasing digital economy. Ironically, the Computer Science Teachers Association, reports that the number of high schools in the US offering introductory courses in programming dropped from 78% to 69% since 2005. This might say more about our schools than digital opportunities.
That said, there is a growing interest in the investment community to fund online and physical schools that teach programming and related skills, including Treehouse Island Inc., Competitor Codecademy, and General Assembly. That Greylock Partners, Union Square Ventures, and Jeff Bezos are funding these efforts underscores the seriousness.
Yesterday I attended a Big Data Visualization event, organized by NYC Media Lab and hosted by Bloomberg LLP. Speakers included data scientists from bit.ly, Seed Media, Foursquare and NYU-Poly. I will devote another post to this extraordinary event, but here I want to say a key takeaway was how important the technologist, designer and scientist have become as we try to better understand and visualize massive data sources that for magazine publishers will increasingly come from outside their traditional sectors and relationships, mashed up in ways we have yet to understand.
The next generation of publishers will likely be more scientist and less English major.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Curation Nation
I found this book, written by Steven Rosenbaum, founder of Magnify.net, under my Christmas tree and figured I had better read it before the digital world turns again. And this is the challenge associated with writing about curating the web and other brave new worlds. There are always enough technology-challenged folks in the US Congress who want to adopt draconian measures like SOPA, that will finally bring Internet piracy to heel. So you never know.
That said, I like this book, the keen insights and the solid research. I'll hand it to Rosenbaum: it's not easy to discuss curation, an art that has long been exiled to the local museum, as the new post-aggregation tool that will finally put human intelligence where it belongs: shoulder-to-shoulder with the muscular algorithm.
The author's history of curation is interesting and useful. Everything old is new again--if you throw in a few million videos. He is certainly correct about Reader's Digest being one of the first and best magazine examples of curation; classic in every way. The challenges Reader's Digest faces today are more about demographics and digital extensions than the business of creation. One could argue the publisher was in a better position than most, early on, to develop curation as an important part of its cross-platform growth. Rosenbaum gets it right: content makers have to become content curators to grow. The Huffington Post understands this. People don't want to just consume information; they want to participate.
The content entrepreneurs the author invokes are well-known. Rosenbaum gives About.com good coverage. About, with subject guides for about 750 content areas, seemed a very good idea from the beginning. I cut my teeth on special interest magazines and thought this company had found the perfect content and advertising formula that was testimony to a familiar mantra: specialists win. About appears not to have lived up to earlier expectations, at least on the part of investors.
The author seems to understand that it is a little trickier for glossy magazines at the top of the editorial food chain to embrace curation in the fullest sense. For the sake of discussion Rosenbaum differentiates between content creation, content aggregation, and content curation, with the acknowledgement that these are not neat categories and magazines to varying degrees have been in the game of aggregation and curation for some time. New York Magazine and NY Media are rightfully cited as an example of a business that has successfully curated content across the magazine, blogs, and various web sites. NYmag.com has significantly enlarged the practice of curation by incorporating a sizable number of appropriate web videos on the site. Digital revenues are through the roof.
So, curation without expertise is just scrapbooking. It's not about magazines per se. Rather about "magazining--a fun reading experience with great design and all the audio and video links that the Web makes possible." Curation is an evolutionary step beyond blogging.
The book examines a few of the machines that create content, such as Demand Media, Yahoo's Associated Content and AOL's Seed. It is no longer news that these services, especially Demand, are considered by many a race to the bottom and an insult to mainline journalists. The Man vs. Machine is a good headline but at the end of the day I suspect the market will address these offerings.
For the last five years I've been watching blog networks such as Blogher, Glam Media, and SB Nation as examples of curated, blog networks. These represent three different approaches to finding, curating, and monetizing content. I have long thought that magazines publishers paid insufficient attention to these businesses.
I get the sense that the author thinks the verticals are the best content areas for curation and that micronets for video sharing, such as Web Video 2.0 and especially Blip.TV, offer a huge potential for content creators. The latter hosts and delivers more than 50,000 Web series on its network. In 2009 the average running time for the blip.tv's top 25 shows was 4 minutes. A year later viewers were watching videos that averaged 14 minutes.
In a way all of the above is just prelude to Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and the like. Social media is a curation mechanism, both accidental and purposeful. Facebook's Open Graph gives rise to presentation software like Flipboard, according to Rosenbaum. We are all accidental curators. And as Bill Gates is supposed to have said, the future of search is verbs, not nouns. People want to find something to do something.
Whether the world is ready for Stocktwits, a trader-focused social network with all the personal data sharing implied. I'm not sure. Given developments of the last decade it does seem plausible that certain demographics would be open to a Facebook of Finance, with all the attendant risks.
I have my quibbles but this is a meaty book and a worthy read for anyone in the content business.
That said, I like this book, the keen insights and the solid research. I'll hand it to Rosenbaum: it's not easy to discuss curation, an art that has long been exiled to the local museum, as the new post-aggregation tool that will finally put human intelligence where it belongs: shoulder-to-shoulder with the muscular algorithm.
The author's history of curation is interesting and useful. Everything old is new again--if you throw in a few million videos. He is certainly correct about Reader's Digest being one of the first and best magazine examples of curation; classic in every way. The challenges Reader's Digest faces today are more about demographics and digital extensions than the business of creation. One could argue the publisher was in a better position than most, early on, to develop curation as an important part of its cross-platform growth. Rosenbaum gets it right: content makers have to become content curators to grow. The Huffington Post understands this. People don't want to just consume information; they want to participate.
The content entrepreneurs the author invokes are well-known. Rosenbaum gives About.com good coverage. About, with subject guides for about 750 content areas, seemed a very good idea from the beginning. I cut my teeth on special interest magazines and thought this company had found the perfect content and advertising formula that was testimony to a familiar mantra: specialists win. About appears not to have lived up to earlier expectations, at least on the part of investors.
The author seems to understand that it is a little trickier for glossy magazines at the top of the editorial food chain to embrace curation in the fullest sense. For the sake of discussion Rosenbaum differentiates between content creation, content aggregation, and content curation, with the acknowledgement that these are not neat categories and magazines to varying degrees have been in the game of aggregation and curation for some time. New York Magazine and NY Media are rightfully cited as an example of a business that has successfully curated content across the magazine, blogs, and various web sites. NYmag.com has significantly enlarged the practice of curation by incorporating a sizable number of appropriate web videos on the site. Digital revenues are through the roof.
So, curation without expertise is just scrapbooking. It's not about magazines per se. Rather about "magazining--a fun reading experience with great design and all the audio and video links that the Web makes possible." Curation is an evolutionary step beyond blogging.
The book examines a few of the machines that create content, such as Demand Media, Yahoo's Associated Content and AOL's Seed. It is no longer news that these services, especially Demand, are considered by many a race to the bottom and an insult to mainline journalists. The Man vs. Machine is a good headline but at the end of the day I suspect the market will address these offerings.
For the last five years I've been watching blog networks such as Blogher, Glam Media, and SB Nation as examples of curated, blog networks. These represent three different approaches to finding, curating, and monetizing content. I have long thought that magazines publishers paid insufficient attention to these businesses.
I get the sense that the author thinks the verticals are the best content areas for curation and that micronets for video sharing, such as Web Video 2.0 and especially Blip.TV, offer a huge potential for content creators. The latter hosts and delivers more than 50,000 Web series on its network. In 2009 the average running time for the blip.tv's top 25 shows was 4 minutes. A year later viewers were watching videos that averaged 14 minutes.
In a way all of the above is just prelude to Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and the like. Social media is a curation mechanism, both accidental and purposeful. Facebook's Open Graph gives rise to presentation software like Flipboard, according to Rosenbaum. We are all accidental curators. And as Bill Gates is supposed to have said, the future of search is verbs, not nouns. People want to find something to do something.
Whether the world is ready for Stocktwits, a trader-focused social network with all the personal data sharing implied. I'm not sure. Given developments of the last decade it does seem plausible that certain demographics would be open to a Facebook of Finance, with all the attendant risks.
I have my quibbles but this is a meaty book and a worthy read for anyone in the content business.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Aggregators Gone Wild
I wasn't completely surprised to learn the content discovery engine Thoora had closed down after two years in beta. Frankly, with so many aggregators coming to town and Flipboard, Zite and Float rising to the top, I hadn't spent too much time thinking about Thoora. The offering, such as it was, was not entirely remarkable, provided selected topic aggregated from across the web. Techcrunch notes that 'The design was dry and unintuitive, and the content surfaced was often too old or not relevant enough."
Thoora is on record saying the delay to launch was due to the explosion of social media and the need to integrate that function. Compare this to Flipboard's CEO Mike McCue who said in a recent LA Times interview their new mission was "to crawl the social networks." This task has been made easier by Flipboard's acquisition of Ellerdale, a company that has already indexed 6 billion messages from the Twitter firehose.
Joseph Constantine of Techcrunch points to Thoora's "failure to get a working smartphone app out the door" as allowing Flipboard and others to solve the information overload problem. He added: "The shuttering should serve as a lession to entreprenuers; you can't spend forever perfecting your product."
In a way this might be the most useful takeaway from the shuttering. It was not so long ago--say 2009--that publishers were faced with a dearth of digital platforms. The web was not delivering in the business sense. The Kindle was interesting as were others entrants such as Plastic Logic. Behind this fine frenzy of product introductions was a calculus that companies had ample time to perfect their products. I brought at least a dozen companies into the magazine association during the period and the mantra was pretty much the same: we have time to improve the UI and bring an acceptable color screen to market. I recall a spokeman for Skiff, a product of Hearst Interactive, saying that the market would be comfortable in a black-and-white world for the near term. A few months later Skiff was killed and the rest is history.
If two-plus years ago publisher faced a dearth of digital platforms, today they face an embarrassment of riches--and the launch rate shows no signs of slowing down. At the 2011 CES show I examined dozens of devices--smartphones, e-readers and tablets--and most were dependent on robust content for a successful launch. No wonder so many of these devices never made it. That Samsung just appointed David Eun, late of Google and AOL, as EVP of Digital Content, suggests they understand the importance of acquiring content at birth.
Content aggregators have entered this space with a vengeance. I keep an eye on about a dozen and suggest PaidContent as an up-to-date source. Flipboard seem to top most lists due to its $60 million in funding, strong management, aggressive social strategy and top-shelf content partners. It won Apple's iPad app of the year in 2010. Their new iPhone app is getting a lot of attention and raising interesting questions about "flip engagement" on mobile devices.
I have looked at Zite, Pulse, Float, Yahoo's Livestand and AOL Editions. It will be interesting to see what CNN does with Zite. Editions has received praise because it offers a highly personalized content experience, not dependent on AOL per se. The Livestand app utilizes HTML5 with some UI benefits. Float reports 250 content partners and has close to $30 million in funding. From parent company Scribd, this is a serious effort.
The most recent entrant is Google Currents for both iOS and Anroid. Google has said that its initial focus will be on the UI and will pay more attention to advertising and formats later. The company is in a good position to aggregate its trending data and use Google+ as well as Twitter and Facebook. Consumers can link to their Google Analytics account.
The blogs have had a go at Google Currents calling it not ready for prime time and a Flipboard knockoff. I haven't found that to be the case. Google certainly doesn't lack content partners, claiming more than 150 partners from Dwell to TMZ to Al Jazeera English.
The mantra we have been hearing from publishers for the last 4-5 years is that they want to be platform and channel agnostic. The task has been made easier with the introduction of the Nook and Kindle Fire. While business models for aggregators are no so clear, publishers have responded to the challenge with alacrity.
And we are seeing some interesting developments with apps for mobile phones. My6Sense, a mobile app startup, employs what it calls "digital intuition" that requires little of the consumer other than using the app itself. In short the technology lets the user find content in a way that suits the device employing a proprietary form of artificial intelligence.
I haven't played with this app yet but it sounds promising. Given the understandable focus on tablets, the mobile space, for content and enterprise, has not seen requisite attention. Now that we are seeing that consumer flip engagement with apps on mobile phones can be quite impressive, this is sure to change.
Thoora is on record saying the delay to launch was due to the explosion of social media and the need to integrate that function. Compare this to Flipboard's CEO Mike McCue who said in a recent LA Times interview their new mission was "to crawl the social networks." This task has been made easier by Flipboard's acquisition of Ellerdale, a company that has already indexed 6 billion messages from the Twitter firehose.
Joseph Constantine of Techcrunch points to Thoora's "failure to get a working smartphone app out the door" as allowing Flipboard and others to solve the information overload problem. He added: "The shuttering should serve as a lession to entreprenuers; you can't spend forever perfecting your product."
In a way this might be the most useful takeaway from the shuttering. It was not so long ago--say 2009--that publishers were faced with a dearth of digital platforms. The web was not delivering in the business sense. The Kindle was interesting as were others entrants such as Plastic Logic. Behind this fine frenzy of product introductions was a calculus that companies had ample time to perfect their products. I brought at least a dozen companies into the magazine association during the period and the mantra was pretty much the same: we have time to improve the UI and bring an acceptable color screen to market. I recall a spokeman for Skiff, a product of Hearst Interactive, saying that the market would be comfortable in a black-and-white world for the near term. A few months later Skiff was killed and the rest is history.
If two-plus years ago publisher faced a dearth of digital platforms, today they face an embarrassment of riches--and the launch rate shows no signs of slowing down. At the 2011 CES show I examined dozens of devices--smartphones, e-readers and tablets--and most were dependent on robust content for a successful launch. No wonder so many of these devices never made it. That Samsung just appointed David Eun, late of Google and AOL, as EVP of Digital Content, suggests they understand the importance of acquiring content at birth.
Content aggregators have entered this space with a vengeance. I keep an eye on about a dozen and suggest PaidContent as an up-to-date source. Flipboard seem to top most lists due to its $60 million in funding, strong management, aggressive social strategy and top-shelf content partners. It won Apple's iPad app of the year in 2010. Their new iPhone app is getting a lot of attention and raising interesting questions about "flip engagement" on mobile devices.
I have looked at Zite, Pulse, Float, Yahoo's Livestand and AOL Editions. It will be interesting to see what CNN does with Zite. Editions has received praise because it offers a highly personalized content experience, not dependent on AOL per se. The Livestand app utilizes HTML5 with some UI benefits. Float reports 250 content partners and has close to $30 million in funding. From parent company Scribd, this is a serious effort.
The most recent entrant is Google Currents for both iOS and Anroid. Google has said that its initial focus will be on the UI and will pay more attention to advertising and formats later. The company is in a good position to aggregate its trending data and use Google+ as well as Twitter and Facebook. Consumers can link to their Google Analytics account.
The blogs have had a go at Google Currents calling it not ready for prime time and a Flipboard knockoff. I haven't found that to be the case. Google certainly doesn't lack content partners, claiming more than 150 partners from Dwell to TMZ to Al Jazeera English.
The mantra we have been hearing from publishers for the last 4-5 years is that they want to be platform and channel agnostic. The task has been made easier with the introduction of the Nook and Kindle Fire. While business models for aggregators are no so clear, publishers have responded to the challenge with alacrity.
And we are seeing some interesting developments with apps for mobile phones. My6Sense, a mobile app startup, employs what it calls "digital intuition" that requires little of the consumer other than using the app itself. In short the technology lets the user find content in a way that suits the device employing a proprietary form of artificial intelligence.
I haven't played with this app yet but it sounds promising. Given the understandable focus on tablets, the mobile space, for content and enterprise, has not seen requisite attention. Now that we are seeing that consumer flip engagement with apps on mobile phones can be quite impressive, this is sure to change.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Agent in the Amazon Jungle
A book agent friend lamented about how much his business is being disrupted by Amazon. He has a penchant for understatement. A better description can be found in Richard Russo's NYT article today, titled "Amazon's Jungle Logic." He is referring to Amazon encouraging customers to go into physical stores and use their price-check app to see if they can get a better deal online. Russo sees this as capitalism gone wild and Amazon as an example of this year's bully.
He has a point. Amazon indeed sells everything. I have family members with two year-olds who buy literally everything on Amazon, including diapers by the truck load. Given the free shipping and the time saved, this seems like a very good deal for young professionals with toddlers. I suspect allegiance to the brand with remain even when the children are potty trained.
Obviously, Russo is not really talking about diapers or the generator I purchased from Amazon before the recent Hurricane Irene. He is more concerned with the independent bookstore and the long term effect on literature. I share those concerns.
This is where I say I have a PhD in Literature, have published extensively with small presses and journals, and from time-to-time provide financial support. It's heartbreaking to see what has happened to the Sewanee Review and The Partisan Review where I published my first work.
Over the last twenty years I have published books with Warner, Dell, Rodale and the Lightning Tree Press, a small publisher that went out of business. The game began to change about fifteen years ago. For my first book I went on a national tour and had some muscular marketing support. For subsequent books I was largely responsible for marketing and promotion. Since that time more of the burden has shifted to the author.
At the same time it has become increasingly difficult to find a home for mid-list books that sell 25-30,000. Publishers are less likely to use the revenue from blockbuster books to help fund other titles.
For these and other reasons I decided to test Amazon's CreateSpace, its self-publishing platform. To date I have published two novels, Limey Down and the Sirens of Vulture Creek, as well as a volume of poetry, Set Pieces of the Feminine. I am in the process of submitting another poetry book, In the Shadow of the DMZ, about my war experiences and 9/11. I'm on the Kindle for the first three books and also getting exposure in France, Italy and Spain. I plan to take advantage of the option to be a part of Kindle's Owners Lending Library.
Amazon makes money on these ventures by providing editorial, marketing and promotional services. The CreateSpace UI leaves a lot to be desired and, as I have mentioned to my associates there, I should not have to be a tenured production director to follow their prompts. But this is just the beginning. Titles will languish without a social media campaign.
Amazon just announced that two titles in the 10 top best-selling books of 2011 (The Mill River Recluse and The Abbey) ranked #4 and #6 solely on Kindle sales and were independently published using Kindle Direct Publishiing.
Amazon also announced KDP Select, a $6 million dollar fund for the Kindle Direct Publishing authors and publishers. A week ago Amazon said it plans to acquire Marshall Cavendish US children's book titles. Earlier the company announced a video licensing deal with Disney-ABC television, a UK movie partnership with Warner brothers, and the fifth annual breakthrough novel partnership with Penguin (US).
No wonder Amazon can sell the Kindle and Kindle Fire at a small loss. Content is king but only if you have tons of it.
He has a point. Amazon indeed sells everything. I have family members with two year-olds who buy literally everything on Amazon, including diapers by the truck load. Given the free shipping and the time saved, this seems like a very good deal for young professionals with toddlers. I suspect allegiance to the brand with remain even when the children are potty trained.
Obviously, Russo is not really talking about diapers or the generator I purchased from Amazon before the recent Hurricane Irene. He is more concerned with the independent bookstore and the long term effect on literature. I share those concerns.
This is where I say I have a PhD in Literature, have published extensively with small presses and journals, and from time-to-time provide financial support. It's heartbreaking to see what has happened to the Sewanee Review and The Partisan Review where I published my first work.
Over the last twenty years I have published books with Warner, Dell, Rodale and the Lightning Tree Press, a small publisher that went out of business. The game began to change about fifteen years ago. For my first book I went on a national tour and had some muscular marketing support. For subsequent books I was largely responsible for marketing and promotion. Since that time more of the burden has shifted to the author.
At the same time it has become increasingly difficult to find a home for mid-list books that sell 25-30,000. Publishers are less likely to use the revenue from blockbuster books to help fund other titles.
For these and other reasons I decided to test Amazon's CreateSpace, its self-publishing platform. To date I have published two novels, Limey Down and the Sirens of Vulture Creek, as well as a volume of poetry, Set Pieces of the Feminine. I am in the process of submitting another poetry book, In the Shadow of the DMZ, about my war experiences and 9/11. I'm on the Kindle for the first three books and also getting exposure in France, Italy and Spain. I plan to take advantage of the option to be a part of Kindle's Owners Lending Library.
Amazon makes money on these ventures by providing editorial, marketing and promotional services. The CreateSpace UI leaves a lot to be desired and, as I have mentioned to my associates there, I should not have to be a tenured production director to follow their prompts. But this is just the beginning. Titles will languish without a social media campaign.
Amazon just announced that two titles in the 10 top best-selling books of 2011 (The Mill River Recluse and The Abbey) ranked #4 and #6 solely on Kindle sales and were independently published using Kindle Direct Publishiing.
Amazon also announced KDP Select, a $6 million dollar fund for the Kindle Direct Publishing authors and publishers. A week ago Amazon said it plans to acquire Marshall Cavendish US children's book titles. Earlier the company announced a video licensing deal with Disney-ABC television, a UK movie partnership with Warner brothers, and the fifth annual breakthrough novel partnership with Penguin (US).
No wonder Amazon can sell the Kindle and Kindle Fire at a small loss. Content is king but only if you have tons of it.
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