MEDIA ABC Blog

if:book's tribute to Blake and experiment in mutimedia book forms:

http://futureofthebook.org.uk/blake/book.html

From the NYT:

"Bradley Inman wants to create great fiction, dramatic online video and compelling Twitter stream ? and then roll them all into a multimedia hybrid that is tailored to the rapidly growing number of digital reading devices. Mr. Inman, a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, calls this digital amalgam a ?Vook,? (vook.tv) and the fledgling company he has created with that name just might represent a possible future for the beleaguered book industry."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/business/05stream.html?_r=1

The expansion of Facebook....

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1889298,00.html?cnn=yes

hmm.. Traditional vs. Web

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/06/print.on.demand.publishing/index.html

Here are a couple of stories that caught my eye over the weekend. Rupert Murdoch appears to be investing in a four-color Kindle competitor, and Google revealed its secret in-house server design in the hopes that other data storers will improve their efficiency.

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090402/live-from-the-cable-show-rupert-murdoch-and-jeff-bewkes/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

read more about it here:

http://toc.oreilly.com/2009/04/readers-boycotting-kindle-titlles-above-999.html

From what I can tell, the Euro-competition with the Kindle is Bookeen's Cybook Gen3 ("La lecture en liberte" "Read in freedom").
http://www.bookeen.com/ebook/ebook-reading-device.aspx
I saw one (but it was fastened to its display mount, so I couldn't fondle it) a few days ago at a bookstore. Looks much the same, though it has a different set of features. Haven't seen anything to suggest how successful it's been.

I came across this article from the website of "The Detroit News" chronicling the dramatic changes in newspaper format that are on the horizon. Apparently, "The Detroit News" and "The Detroit Free Press" will be experimenting with e-reader editions throughout the year. In addition, free copies of yesterday's edition of "The Detroit News" were handed out at stores and on street corners in the city to garner public interest and awareness of their format and delivery changes. It will be interesting to see if the e-reader experiment will change the landscape of daily newspapers in Detroit, and if this will set a precedent for change in other national publications in the near future.

http://www.detnews.com/article/20090331/BIZ/903310328/News+to+try+out+e-reader+device

per our discussion of the term "e-book" and Siracusa's analogy of the car vs. horse debate....

(from nextnature.net)

This remarkable proposal for a steam powered street locomotive was invented by Mathewson in 1876. According to the inventor the goal was to make a machine resembling a horse in form, so as not to frighten the horses on the streets. I may be wrong, but I think it would be a pretty dim horse that would be fooled by this biomimicmarketing avant la lettre. Perhaps another purpose was to make the steam powered carriage more acceptable to people.

Surely, this steam horse illustrates the notion that new media (steam powered carriages in this case) often try to mimic an older medium in order to become accepted more easily. Yet over time, the older medium is superseded and transformed into a cultural relic (horse powered carriages in this case). Other examples of this principle are the electric candle light, electronic mail, and the record collection on your mp3-player.

an interesting post about screen reading and slowness of books...

http://aworkinglibrary.com/library/archives/on_feeding/

David Scott's entry about the possible future of books got me thinking about online magazines. Here is one that I read regularly. It's got the look of a printed magazine, with the seamless navigation of a web page. Although this (and other similar publications) seem stuck somewhere in the gap between blogs and printed magazines, I like the compromise that they represent. Top-notch graphic design (it looks like it was meant to be read, not "screen-read," and free and easy digital access.

http://www.nextautos.com/Winding-Road-Magazine/

Our time map for Dryden's The Assignation: or, Love in a Nunnery can be found here:
http://courses.ats.rochester.edu/eaves/timeline/polan/TimeMap_Lab.html

Our timemap of William Congreve's "The Way of the World" is here.

I just read an article in the International Herald Tribune about a new movie by the makers of _Helvetica_. This one is _Objectified_, about product design. Sounded like something I'd definitely want to see. From the web:

Objectified: Gary's New Film - Objectified is the next film from director Gary Hustwit. It's about industrial design, and the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It's about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It's about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them. Visit the website for more info!

Per our discussion yesterday of DIY, crafting, making things, etc.


Mark Frauenfelder & Carla Sinclair
Authors, journalists, webloggers, new media magnates; Mark co-founded Boing Boing & Make magazine; Carla is ?Net Chick,? & edits Craft magazine

Presents:
?The Happy Mutant?s Guide to the Modern Maker Movement.?
When: Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 8:00 p.m.
Where: Webb Auditorium
(James E. Booth Memorial Building - 7A)
Workshop (jointly with the RIT Make Club)
When: Friday, March 27, 2009 at 9:00a.m.-12:00p.m.
Where: Carlson Auditorium
(Building 76, Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science)

http://courses.ats.rochester.edu/eaves/timeline/harmand/stavlasharmand3.html

Considering our turn toward images, here's an interesting-sounding presentation this Thursday:

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2009 09:15:22 -0400
From: Shirley Wersinger
Subject: Lecture at the Memorial Art Gallery

LECTURE AT THE MEMORIAL ART GALLERY

Thursday, March 26 at 7 pm at the Memorial Art Gallery, David G. Stork
speaks on "When Computers Look at Art: Image Analysis in Humanistic Studies
of the Visual Arts." Stork is chief scientist at Ricoh Innovations and
consulting professor of statistics at Stanford University. His lecture, for
non-scientists, examines works by such masters as Jackson Pollock, Vincent
van Gogh, Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling and Lorenzo Lotto.

Cosponsored by the Memorial Art Gallery and the RIT Department of Computer
Science and included in Gallery admission.

MAG ON THE WEB:

This video was created for an assignment to create a new interpretation of "Little Red Riding Hood." Pretty cool. I like the emphasis put on tiny details, which stands in amusing contrast to the simple nature of nursery rhymes and children's stories like this.

http://vimeo.com/3514904

From http://www.theawesomer.com

The projects are coming along nicely but I've come accross a small fix that I think most of you will benefit from. The timeline code is set up in intervals of months on the top and years on the bottom. If your data points (dates) are far apart (and most of them are) you can change the top interval to years or even decades- just replace Timeline.DateTime.MONTH with Timeline.DateTime.YEAR or imeline.DateTime.DECADE. Then change the next band Timeline.DateTime.YEAR to Timeline.DateTime.DECADE or Timeline.DateTime.CENTURY.

You can change the colors by changing this part of the code:

this.ether = {
backgroundColors: [
"#B27",
"#367",
"#CCC",
"#AAA"
],

#B27 is that purple and #367 is the turquoise. Feel free to change them- here is a website with colorcodes: http://www.w3schools.com/HTML/html_colornames.asp

I'll be in my office from 9-12 tomorrow to help with the TimeMap projects. Email me if you'd like me to look at yours and see if I can help.

Nora