ENTRIES TAGGED "news"

If it's important, the news will find me

Which works better: gulping from the info firehose or letting news come to you?

Facing info overload, Peter Meyers ponders more efficient ways to find what’s newsworthy. What works for you?

Publishing News: Rebooting online news presentation

Publishing News: Rebooting online news presentation

Ben Huh has a fling with news, checking in on the Twitter archive, and readers can now fund authors directly.

In the latest Publishing News: Ben Huh dishes on news organizations moving in the right direction; one year later, the Library of Congress' Twitter Archive is still being built; and the Unbound.co.uk publishing platform launched with some big-name authors.

News organizations still party like it's 1899

News organizations still party like it's 1899

Ben Huh's new project focuses on news presentation. Here he talks about who's doing it well.

Ben Huh, the CEO of Cheezburger, Inc., loves his Cheezburger project but is ready to engage in a fling with news. Huh's new Moby Dick project will address the limitations and frustrations of stagnant news presentation. In this short interview, Huh discusses news outlets that are headed in the right direction.

Aggregation apps respond to consumer personalization demands

Aggregation apps respond to consumer personalization demands

Flipboard and other apps aggregate content in a user-friendly style. But are publishers on board?

Gathering a flurry of news content into one neat and orderly place is nothing new, but recent app releases and new announcements show developers are embracing the user-specific demands of the consumer. Whether publishers go along with these apps is another matter.

Content is a Service Business

What you're selling as an artist (or an author, or a publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing something that the customer/reader/fan wants. That may be entertainment, it may be information, it may be a souvenir of an event or of who they were at a particular moment in their life (Kelly describes something similar as his eight "qualities that can't be copied": Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability). Note that that list doesn't include "content." The thing that most publishers (and authors) spend most of their time fretting about (making it, selling it, distributing it, "protecting" it) isn't the thing that their customers are actually buying. Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business.

Peter Brantley Joins Internet Archive

Longtime "Foo" (Friend-of-O'Reilly) and TOC Conference adviser and blogger Peter Brantley has joined the Internet Archive as its Director. From the news release: In this role, he will direct our efforts and help coordinate with partners in building an open library and distributed publishing system. Congrats Peter!…

O'Reilly Ebooks: 130 Top Titles Now Available, Plus an iPhone App and Head First PDFs

While there will always be a demand for printed books, few of those books will have a life entirely disconnected from the wider digital Web. In that sense, all publishing is becoming digital publishing, and all writing is writing for the Web. That's a big shift, and it will take time for the existing players to make the transition (and…

TOC Recommended Reading

On Being Positive in August (Adam Hodgkin, Exact Editions) Publishers need to consider the possibility that anything that can be published, will certainly be published digitally, and will, in principle, be available anywhere from many devices. That does not mean that it all will be free (why should it mean that?). But it does mean that it will either…

News Roundup: Google's Book Scanning, Kindle's Future Path, Authorship Increases Exponentially, Amazon Takes on "Amazon Tax," 5 DRM Messes

A Glimpse into Google's Book Scanning Google doesn't divulge specifics about its proprietary book scanning set-up, but the Associated Press offers a brief look into the manual scanning process used for old/fragile titles. (Continue reading) Kindle's All-Encompassing Future Path Jeff Nolan writes about the path of the Kindle: It's clear that [Jeff] Bezos sees a day when any and all…

News Roundup: Kindle 2.0 Speculation, Wikipedia: The Book, "Dilbert" Embraces User-Generated Content, Mobile Audiobook Downloads, Tracking Drafts and Revisions

Speculation on Kindle 2.0 Ars Technica speculates on what the Kindle 2.0 might provide: … the general hardware configuration appears to be here for a while. The fact that they're still selling the current version also suggests that they have committed to this design in all its white-plastic glory. In the long term, there's still the option of moving some…