May
8
100 Years of Marshall McLuhan
Filed Under Blog, eBook, eLearning, internet, mobile content, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
Since I learnt this week that this is the centenary of the great Canadian scholar and mystifiers’ birth, I cannot resist using the fact, and using it to get back into a groove that seemed to escape me last week. I justify this by saying that I only write when I have something to say. On the other hand I have something to say far more often than I write, but I need an impulse to get me over the hump and force me to find time and concentration. That impulse is almost always the ability to use this to postpone starting something else equally important. In this way my life turns into a series of deadlines, each one creating pressure and driving activity. I dread to think what might happen if these pressures to perform were removed: would I sit down and read the whole of “Colonel Roosevelt”, the third volume of Edmund Morris’s grand life of the progressive President, and my current obsession, in one go, like some greedy schoolboy, the Fat Owl of the Remove, consuming chocolate cake? Probably. I am not a very refined person. And I do like to gloat.
Which brings me back to writing. This week’s impulsion came during the Publishers’ Forum in Berlin. I was listening to one of the beguiling masters of change, Robert Stein, describing his experimental work in his SocialBook Inc operation. I have no doubt that he is right: in a networked society reading becomes a social activity, and that I should not be secretively curling up with the Colonel, but actively debating with you and other readers (and I do know another current reader as it happens) whether Roosevelt was right to run against Taft in 1912. And was it Woodrow Wilson who was the true progressive? I know perhaps 5 people with whom I could have this discussion, and no doubt I could find 50 more online if this book were a social document. And it would be cream on my chocolate cake to have those talks, but they would slow down and retard the progress through the book, which now occupies late evenings and weekends. I read 37 books of this size last year: how many would I read in a social hall of mirrors? And would the conversation and friendship derived from Bob’s social vision, from his four styles of social reading embedded in a browser-type interface that allowed me to annotate pages, read other readers comments and interact with them, would all that compensate me for only reading 5 books a year?
Earlier in the session, part of an increasingly highly regarded meeting, put together by Klopotek, the publishing workflow specialist (http://www.klopotek.de/enindex.htm), I heard Liza Daly talking about ePub 3. I welcome this with open arms, delighted by the speed with which this revised standard is being produced, warmed by Liza’s clear and emphatic summation of its aims, and only depressed by the liklyhood that hardware vendors will take their time in introducing compliant devices. As Liza summarized it, the major advances, as well as using HTML5, are in language use (however did we persuade ourselves that vertical reading as well as horizontal left-right as well as right-left was not necessary – and thus exclude at a stroke Chinese, Korean and Japanese!); interactivity; audio and video; and design/layout conventions that allow pages to refocus themselves appropriately in terms of the screen size being used to view them. The gains here will be for graphic novels, the beginnings of multimedia in eBook, and, I would guess, for the further evolution of the eTextbook (whatever that may be). As Liza came to an end I found myself at once delighted by a real progress report by a real expert on real progress made, and straining to see the expression on Stein’s face to see if he was thinking what I was thinking: “Fifteen years on the Internet and we are only now installing the features that were so important, in the early 1990s, on multimedia CD-ROM”!
Unfortunately he was sitting in front of me, but in those days in the early ’90s when “bandwidth” meant “fixed disc”, not Broadband, Robert’s Voyager operation was the shining example of creativity in the US market in this sector. His example was very encouraging to people like me, an advisor to and non-executive director of Dorling Kindersley Ltd, who, through the drive and determination of Peter Kindersley (an impatient innovator whose background as a designer helped no end in the creation of this medium) were following rapidly along the same track to create a generation of interactive disc-based reference products whose ingenuity and use of content and software have not yet been emulated in the eBook world. DK also produced a publisher of real note in Peter’s colleague, Alan Buckingham, who proved a master at stitching together resources and effects to produce deeply engaging learning and reference materials. Alan was the first maestro to paint with the whole multimedia palette: when eBooks grow up and they start giving awards for them, they should call them the “Buckies”!
So here is one example of the way in which markets sometimes have to loop back and rediscover themselves: Marshall McCluhan knew all about that when he spoke of the effect of television on film. Another Publishers Forum speaker said something similar: “Longtail is not a lucrative market unless you are an aggregator” said David Hetherington of Baker and Taylor. Which is why print on demand providers are aggregators and why publishers surrender their digital files to them. Which heralds the day, which David did not say, when publishing margins are more rentals and royalties than retail, pushing publishing even further away from organizing the marketplace and imperilling its position.
A hundred years ago a man was born who well described these and so many other changes in media marketplaces, and did it from the user viewpoint, creating a sort of sociological view of media access. Nothing here would surprize him in the least: he would have claimed it all as his.
PS. One very good reason for going to this conference, let alone the excellent content, is being inside Berlin’s wonderful conference centre, the Axica. Built by Frank Gehry for a bank that now cannot afford it, to our great advantage, the conference auditorium sits in the womb of the building beneath a glass canopy, while seminars are held in a wooden egg suspended above it. I got to use this, and can testify to its wonderful sound qualities: spectators sit in rising seating above the (?) bank’s board room table, for all the world like speaking in one of those anatomy theatres of the sixteenth century (Uppsala university has an outstanding example).
Mar
14
Catching Up on TV
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Search, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Reading blogs is seriously bad for morale. As a blogger, I do it compulsively, instinctively, and, too often, with a complete suspension of disbelief. “I read it on a blog” has become this century’s equivalent of “well, I read it in the newspaper”. Neither stand up completely to scrutiny, though nor do any other media outlets either. We may have to revert to “I met a man who knows about these things and he said..” And my finding from last week was that when you do meet a man who knows, it is really surprising how much there is to be learnt.
Last week there was an Open Day for IXXUS, an excellent UK integrator with a really good track record. They use MarkLogic, and in a very effective case study around the parliamentary publisher, Dods, Simon Thompson, who manages Dods, demonstrated how effectively you can reposition a media company like this once you have full control of all of its content, the ability to search unstructured data, and thus the ability to redefine services as solutions to user requirements. And if this was not a surprise as such, the neatness of the Dods solution was certainly impressive.
The day also brought in other elements. As an Alfesco user from time to time, I was quietly amazed to find that this UK-based operation, the second largest Open Source player in the world behind Red Hat, has now registered 3 million downloads and proudly boasts 19 quarters of consecutive revenue growth. If anyone doubts the importance of workflow then take a look at this, but the element that stuck out for me was Alfresco’s concern for content management in the context of social media. It is all at http://www.ixxus.com/webinar/ and well worth a look. It is also good to be reminded of the continually growing power of open source search, especially in vertical market contexts. On show here are Lucene/Solr. With customers like the Guardian, Cisco, Salesforce, Zappos, and publishers like Taylor and Francis, this presentation spoke volumes about how far open source search has travelled in the past few years, “They came for the cost, they stayed for the flexibility” quoth the man. And Lucene is now 10 years old.
So in a week that jolted from received impressions in so many different ways I was not entirely surprised to get a note from my friend, Ian Nairn, on Internet TV. Now I am not a regular watcher. Glued to the rugby matches I find, like the current candidate for Chairman of the BBC, Lord Patten, that it is fairly hard to watch most of the time. Yet Ian is a provider of good leads, so I followed this one to http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/the-heller-report/you-on-the-tube–the-internet-tv–channel–to-the-family-flat-screen.html and found plenty of nourishment. In schools one could readily imagine the television screen becoming an engine of integration, backed by Cloud-based storage. After all, we have had two generations of LMS and VLE, and while the technology is widely deployed in western schools it is neither simple to use for the demotivated (staff and students) and the service provision in schools is neither intuitive nor technician-free. In fact IT has created a new school power base and less than 10% of teachers are seen as natural users in the sense of creating, deploying and storing lessons online.
And one of the elements of this article which triggered my enthusiasm was its reference to Cambridge’s Global Grid for Learning (GGfL). Here is a context where a resource creating, permissions cleared global resource of actual and embryonic learning objects comes into its own. We know that Internet TV, strongly driven by Google, is happening and will change many relationships. I had not factored learning into this environment, but now that I have I certainly think it creates scenarios ready for dynamic change.
And do not even ask me what I was doing in the China Daily. But it produced this thought (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2011-03/13/content_12162539.htm) via the New York Times. There John Markoff has discovered e-discovery software for lawyers. No surprises fro those with their heads in this space, but a graphic example of how a $2.2 million dollar legal workflow process in 1978 can be done today for a fraction of the cost – $400,000 in fact. The fact that legal fees do not seem to decrease is a mystery that I may never crack, but here are witnesses to a truth that we must put into the centre of our considerations: the major professions are now rapidly automating, with an impact on society with which we have not yet come to terms. The article has some great examples of pattern recognition and linked me back to the IXXUS day, and to the man who said that 80% of corporate data is now email. Mike Lynch reckons that one lawyer will be able to do the work of 500… unless of course you met a man last week who said differently.
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