Rocket Bomber

Christmas is on a Wednesday this year (this upcoming Wednesday, in fact) so no doubt many of my readers have a whole week off.

— for those that don’t, thank you for taking that holiday bullet for the rest of us. You keep our nation running. *salutes*

If you do have the time off, don’t get too smug too soon: that’s a whole week and you’re going to be at home with family (possibly a largish sample of extended family) and you’re going to be stuck. You don’t get to pick the music, what’s running on the TV, or even who got invited to the big family get-together: you’ve nothing but an iPad and crappy wifi already overloaded by teen-aged relations sulking in corners with smart phones doing their best to ignore everyone.

Join them.

In deference to unknown and possibly crappy available internet (either at home or in the airports or wherever) the sites below are text-heavy — though there are some podcast, streaming audio, and YouTube options sprinkled in there too. All are good, long reads.

After you’ve exhausted your usual bookmarks and feeds but before you give up and, you know, talk to people, Try these links out and see what fits:

• http://thefeature.net/
  “A hand-picked selection of the finest articles and essays saved with Instapaper. articles and essays picked by richard dunlop-walters • operated by and for instapaper • powered by tumblr”
  

• http://longform.org/
  http://longform.org/pages/about
  “Longform.org recommends new and classic non-fiction from around the web. Articles can be read on a browser or saved to read later with Readability, Instapaper, Pocket or Kindle. Article suggestions, including writers and magazines submitting their own work, are encouraged. Longform considers pieces over 2,000 words that are freely available online.”
  

• http://longreads.com/
  http://longreads.com/about/
  “Longreads, founded in 2009, is dedicated to helping people find and share the best storytelling on the web, across both nonfiction and fiction. Longreads are defined as anything over 1,500 words. They’re stories that are best enjoyed away from your desk — whether it’s on a daily commute, an airplane, a subway, or your couch. Longreads features stories from hundreds of the best writers and publishers on the web, as well as exclusive stories never before published online.”
  

• http://boingboing.net/category/feature
  http://boingboing.net/about
  “Boing Boing is… weird, wonderful and wicked… Independent… a daily mix of… ‘all manner of posthuman irreverant things,’… a pioneering group blog… read by millions of readers every month.”
  

  We all know Boing Boing – if you don't I'm not sure how you're accessing the internet – but they also do long-form http://t.co/Qj5NLkRyfD

  — Matt Blind (@ProfessorBlind) December 23, 2013

• http://moreintelligentlife.com/features
  http://moreintelligentlife.com/about
  “More Intelligent Life (moreintelligentlife.com) is the online version of Intelligent Life, a lifestyle and culture magazine from The Economist. The website offers not only content from the print edition, trickled out over the course of its shelf-life, but also the Editors’ Blog, which carries daily posts from the editorial team—quickfire observations and opinions that allow readers to eavesdrop on the conversation in the office. Access is entirely free.”
  

• http://www.theverge.com/longform
  http://www.theverge.com/about-the-verge
  “The Verge was founded in 2011 in partnership with Vox Media, and covers the intersection of technology, science, art, and culture. Its mission is to offer in-depth reporting and long-form feature stories, breaking news coverage, product information, and community content in a unified and cohesive manner.”
  

  The Verge has a link for just their deep reads http://t.co/iwo8UbbPCC <- in case you like their stuff but not the firehose tech news feed

  — Matt Blind (@ProfessorBlind) December 23, 2013

• http://www.tested.com/
  http://www.tested.com/about/
  “‘So, what kind of stuff can I read about on Tested?’
  “The short, pithy answer is: We’ll cover anything that’s awesome. The longer answer is that we have many interests, ranging from breakthroughs in science, amazing tales of exploration, and discoveries in nature to emerging technologies and new consumer products that promise to change our everyday lives. Tested is the place where we’ll explore those topics in depth, asking the hows and the whys about the things that excite us the most. The number one rule of Tested is simple. We want to make Tested the site that we’d be most interested in reading. If you think there’s something we should be covering, but aren’t, please let us know!”
  

• http://arstechnica.com/features/
  http://arstechnica.com/about-us/
  “Ars Technica was founded in 1998 when Founder & Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher announced his plans for starting a publication devoted to technology that would cater to what he called “alpha geeks”: technologists and IT professionals. Ken’s vision was to build a publication with a simple editorial mission: be “technically savvy, up-to-date, and more fun” than what was currently popular in the space. In the ensuing years, with formidable contributions by a unique editorial staff, Ars Technica became a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, breakdowns of the latest scientific advancements, gadget reviews, software, hardware, and nearly everything else found in between layers of silicon.”
  

  Nearly everything at Ars is a good long read, but they've a "features" link also http://t.co/pE4NpCrnUh I know folks have time off this week

  — Matt Blind (@ProfessorBlind) December 23, 2013

• http://freakonomics.com/blog/
  http://freakonomics.com/about/
  “Q: What is “Freakonomics,” anyway?
  “A: It’s a book we wrote back in 2005. It exceeded our expectations by a factor of about 100, which is why we are still here, carrying on the conversation on our blog and elsewhere. It also spawned a variety of offspring – a second book, SuperFreakonomics; a radio show; a film; even a pair of pants. Some people think we are smarter than we are.”
  

• http://www.monocle.com/
  http://monocle.com/about/
  “Launched in February 2007, Monocle is a global briefing on international affairs, business, culture and design headquartered in London. In print Monocle’s 10 issues a year are dense, book-ish and collectable and call on a global team of staff editors and over 30 correspondents from Beirut to Milan, Washington to Singapore.
  “Online Monocle focuses on broadcast and has become one of the most viewed news sources in many of our key markets. Our journalists report from around the world and craft films that are more documentary in form rather than a collection of clips. And we have made over 250 of them to date.
  “And then there’s Monocle 24, our round-the-clock radio station that launched in October 2011 and is broadcast from our headquarters at Midori House in Marylebone. You can listen live via our player at monocle.com, as well as downloading shows from our site or iTunes; we also have a handy app. The station delivers news and comment, plus magazine shows covering a range of topics including food and drink, urbanism, design and print media. Our newsgathering operation will soon stretch to new bureaux in São Paulo and across Asia, as well as more correspondents in emerging and established territories.”
  

  Monocle Radio has moved well past the 'podcast' – The Curator weekly show is the best way to sample the channel http://t.co/3wqsnVJqqt

  — Matt Blind (@ProfessorBlind) December 23, 2013

  
  [In the past I’ve also characterized Monocle as “the global hipster rag” and I stand by that.]

↓… two examples of publishers doing fan outreach – more than just a listing or a catalog: Stuff we want to read and share.

— Matt Blind (@ProfessorBlind) December 23, 2013

• http://www.tor.com/
  http://www.tor.com/page/about-us
  “Tor.com, a site for science fiction, fantasy, and all the things that interest SF and fantasy readers, presents original short fiction, new sequential art, extensive art galleries, and commentary on science fiction and related subjects by a wide range of writers from all corners of the science fiction and fantasy field; both professionals working in the genres and fans. Its aim is to provoke, encourage, and enable interesting and rewarding conversations with and between its readers.
  “Tor.com’s philosophy is one of publisher agnosticism, and as such, boasts contributors and content from many different SF/F publishers, as well as fans from all corners of fandom.”
  

• http://suvudu.com/
  http://suvudu.com/2008/07/do-you-suvudu.html
  “Suvudu is a new [14 July 2008. -M.] website catering to news from all sci-fi and fantasy creative media–books, audiobooks, gaming, manga, comic books and movies! Content will include podcasts, videos, reviews, interviews and original blog posts, all brought to you by some of the best talents in the sci-fi, fantasy, graphic novel and gaming industries. Imagine the San Diego Comic Con–but on a website all year round! Sounds great, right?
  “That’s just the beginning. Sci-fi and fantasy fans will also play a role in Suvudu. Visitors are encouraged to comment on the posted content, contribute information they deem pertinent, and send in suggestions to make Suvudu the best it can be. Links to offsite blog and website content will be highlighted. As a community sharing and growing with one another, every relevant bit of news will have benefit–given voice on Suvudu for those who would hear it.”

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Merry Christmas, and happy web surfing this week (and possibly next). And remember, if my website recommendations don’t work out, there’s always potential eggnog abuse to see you through. Cheers!

I read too much.

In a different day-and-age, I likely would have subscribed to a half dozen newspapers and as many of the news weeklies as I could get my hands on. Unless I were exceptionally good about throwing things out (or only saving the clippings, not the whole) I’d quickly be buried under a mass of words.

On the internet, things are easier in some ways, but the base problem remains: I can quickly be buried under a mass of words. I still keep up with bookselling and new books, and new trends in books — but that also means I’m reading many “tech” blogs, too. I follow online streaming trends these days, as much as I do publishing or books.

Our World Of Books includes much more than slabs of pressed wood pulp, dirtied with a smudge or two of ink. For a little over four years, people have been talking about Barnes & Noble, bookseller, as a ‘tech’ firm, and there’s no way to talk about publishing anymore without considering both dot-com-boom-survivor Amazon and the growth of self-publishing — ebooks, sure, but also Instagram and Tumblr. [Yes, both count as publishing.]

Going back as a time-traveler to 1988, you might be able to describe YouTube to the pre-internet natives, but Facebook? Smart phones? How about cloud storage, software-as-a-service, hashtags, memes, and Rickrolling?

##

Digital Book World has a list of 10 “predictions” for 2014. One is about trouble at Barnes & Noble (obvious), a point is made about libraries and ebooks (also looking fairly obvious as we know where the readers and demand are; the argument is about money), and of course there is the perennial prediction that Amazon will open up its own stores. The other seven items boil down to, “publishers will engage in business and attempt to make money”—which is now and has always been true—and those that do it well will, in fact, make money. Those that don’t will fail. I mean, it’s an OK list otherwise and it can occasionally be nice to see a itemized list, but I don’t think I saw any deep insight there, just a lot of 20/20 hindsight.

Ten Bold Predictions for Ebooks and Digital Publishing in 2014 : Jeremy Greenfield, 20 December 2013, Digital Book World

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The Library Designed Like a Bookstore : 19 December 2013, Book Riot

“Everyone knows about the popularity of eBooks and tablet readers. But mastering this brave new world is still a mystery to most small presses and indie self-published authors. So, let’s start with the most basic truth in this new world order of book selling: Amazon is a search engine.“
Amazon is a Search Engine : Ron Gavalik, 16 December 2013, Pittsburgh Writer Blog

“If you think hard about your experience purchasing a physical book from a bookstore, then opening the book to read it, you will not recall ever entering into a click-to-accept license. You buy the physical copy of the book, you don’t license it. The book is protected solely by copyright laws, not a license. Under those copyright laws, because you own the physical book, you can sell your copy. You’re not licensed to do that with ebooks downloaded through the Entitle service.”
Subscription Ebook Services Scribd, Oyster and Entitle Duke It Out For Early Dominance : 20 December 2013, The Passive Voice — commenting on Jeremy Greenfield’s blog post (of the same name) at Forbes

“We appear to still be somewhere in middle of the learning chute when it comes to addressing the new realities of book promotion. Authors and publishers are still readjusting expectations in a digital era where ‘what’s your platform’ has become a question of vital importance, and the ‘marathon, not a sprint’ mantra is still looked upon as an abject alibi, rather than a legitimate marketing strategy.”
Marketing for the Long Haul: The Shifting Ground of Book PR in 2014 : Rich Fahle, 16 December 2013, Digital Book World

“Readers don’t purchase books based on who the publisher is and don’t necessarily care. As a result, they might not even know if they’re buying a book that was professionally edited versus one that was self-published. Publishers are devaluing their own content as well by even adding to the confusion. All publishers will discount the first title in a series, and these get mixed in with the other less expensive books and just add to the clutter.” (Emphasis mine, and I’d counter that actually Readers Do Know when they buy self-published-vs-edited, if that distinction matters at all to us, but more often readers don’t care: the most avid readers who are driving the most explosive growth in the most e-prone genres are quite happy buying novels split into multipart dirt-cheap novellas—and lots of them—and the lack of editing is either quaint or beside the point.) (And quality will out, anyway.)
Self-Publishing: The Myth and the Reality : Steven Zacharius, 16 December 2013, Huffington Post : via The Passive Voice

“As I’ve said before, if today’s digital content designers were in charge back then we’d all be driving cars with steering reigns, not steering wheels.”
Our fixation on containers : Joe Wikert, 16 December 2013, Olive Software

“Many papers have had the same old-guard ownership and management for decades. These men are complacent, see no serious fault with their papers. They live in the past; in theory, they agree that to thrive a daily must present more and better local news but they hire no extra reporters. They still run columnists who are not even scanned by the present generation. And when questioned about their newspapers, they go off the record, as if publishing were the most sacred of cows.” … “Nearly 50 years ago, Newsweek lodged these complaints against newspaper bosses” [emphasis mine, quotes presented out of original order to make the punchline]
What Was Wrong with Newspapers in 1965 : Jim Romenesko, 16 December 2013, jimromenesko.com

“Today’s technology shift has many parallels with the arrivals of mass-printed books at universities. At the time, teachers at universities were horrified that the availability of books undermined their ability to charge students for reading aloud. There is something to learn from history here.”
Today’s Technology Shift Has Parallels To When Universities Were Threatened By… Textbooks : Henrik Brändén, 17 December 2013, Falkvinge on Infopolicy

Nearly universal literacy is a defining characteristic of today’s modern civilization; nearly universal authorship will shape tomorrow’s. : Denis G. Pelli & Charles Bigelow, 20 October 2009, Seed Magazine

Between a quarter and a third of everything on the web is copied from somewhere else : Leo Mirani, 18 December 2013, Quartz

notational.tumblr.com : 17 December 2013

“How did I get all of that from one sentence? My immersion learning of Tumblr-Internet-speak was so gradual that I hadn’t even noticed it was happening. One day, scrolling through Facebook I happened to notice that this phrase, a fairly non-standard sentence, was itself a variation of another Internet expression. I was only able to understand it because of a wealth of reference points from other places on the Internet. The friend who posted the comment was tapping into a shared cultural knowledge that I understood. I was fairly certain that someone lacking this shared reference point would not only find the sentence jarring but also mildly confusing.” (Internet English as a new Language, I like that)
Your Ability to Can Even: A Defense of Internet Linguistics : Tia Baheri, 20 November 2013, The Toast (the-toast.net)

“Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice.”
The blog is dead, long live the blog, subtitled “The Stream might be on the wane but still it dominates. All media on the web and in mobile apps has blog DNA in it and will continue to for a long while.” : Jason Kottke, 19 December 2013, Nieman Journalism Lab — of course many will recognize Kottke as the blogger of epoynous Kottke.org; he posted a followup there as well. Read both.

“The overall problem here, of course, is that our social channels are trying to be the middleman, the same way as newspapers acts as middlemen for news. And as long as they keep focusing on that (which is in their best interest), we will experience this growing sense of friction between creators/ brands and the people who follow them. Social should not be a destination. It’s a connection. It should not be a platform that we rent. It should be a service that we add to enhance the connection.”
We Are Losing Control of Social : Thomas Baekdal, 16 December 2013, baekdal.com

5 Reasons Millennials Are Quitting Facebook : Taylor Casti, 16 December 2013, Mashable

“The News Feed is where Facebook users get updates on what family and friends are up to. The ads will begin playing as soon as they scroll into view, although they will be muted.”
Facebook Forces Video Ads on You Because Marketers Told It To : Ryan Tate, 17 December 2013, Wired Business

“There’s no way to stop or prevent an autoplaying video, and Facebook suggests that you simply scroll past it if you don’t want to watch it.”
Facebook Now Testing Intrusive Autoplay Video Ads In Your Newsfeed: This handwriting has been on your Wall for months now. : Selena Larson, 17 December 2013, ReadWrite

“What do photo sharing, social networking, and mobile payments have in common? They represent hot trends that VCs have piled onto in recent years without regard for how small these markets really are. Put plainly, there’s only room for a few (successful) photo sharing apps in the world. Yet we’ve watched it happen again and again. When Groupon took off, up sprang LivingSocial, then Bloomspot. Before you could blink, every VC firm in Silicon Valley had the ‘daily deals’ space checked off on its portfolio. We all know how that turned out. This herd mentality is siphoning capital from more promising start-ups and sandbagging the creativity for which Silicon Valley — and the startup scene more broadly — has long been known. Venture capitalists have become so risk-averse, it seems they’ve forgotten that risk-taking is the whole point of their jobs.”
Why VCs should stop investing in ‘Internet’ startups and start investing in ‘tech’ : Sergei Kouzmine, 17 December 2013, Venture Beat

“Perhaps most importantly, Foursquare has become the favorite way for mobile-app developers to add location as a feature. Everyone from Uber to Pinterest and WhatsApp uses Foursquare’s directory of places. So who ends up with this prize?”
2014: The Year Foursquare Will Finally Be In The Right Place At The Right Time: As an indispensable part of the plumbing of the social Web, someone will want to own it. : David Hamilton, 20 December 2013, ReadWrite — see also: The Brilliant Hack That Brought Foursquare Back From the Dead : Ryan Tate, 9 December 2013, Wired Business

“One of our favorite things to ask these executives was for their views of the American tech industry. Sometimes, the clearest view of your backyard is the one from the other side of the globe. The most interesting thought we heard was from an executive we met who visited Silicon Valley earlier this year. He said the over-riding impression he got from the visit was that Google is kicking everyone’s butt, and all of its competition is just rolling over.”
In China, They Wonder Why Everyone Over Here Is Letting Google Kick Their Butts : Nicholas Carlson, 28 December 2013, Business Insider

LG’s “Chromebase” : Ars Technica, The Verge, Geek.com, Engadget, PCWorld, SlashGear, The Next Web : Winner of the headline contest goes to ExtremeTech, “LG’s all-in-one Chromebase will bring Chrome OS, unfortunately, to the desktop.” (For three years now, I’ve advocated for ChromeOS tablets – as the always-in-web-broswer restriction of Chrome seemed well suited for a nice, big lap tablet to, um, web on the couch with. With the success of the Nexus tabs, though, I know the answer to that is ain’t-never-gonna-happen.)

“Tech companies are scrambling to move into cities — there are rumors that Google is going to move here, to San Francisco, from Mountain View. VISA and Akamai have ditched the suburbs to come here. Tech tenants now fill 22 percent of all occupied office space in San Francisco — and represented a whopping 61 percent of all office leasing in the city last year. But they might as well have stayed in their suburban corporate settings for all the interacting they do with the outside world. The oft-referred-to ‘serendipitous encounters’ that supposedly drive the engine of innovation tend to happen only with others who work for the same company. Which is weird.
“There’s been no shortage of published laments on the changing nature of San Francisco over the past several weeks, so I’m loath to add another complaint to the list. And yet… I keep coming across instances where the tech sector flocks to the city and talks of community yet isolates itself from the urban experience it presumably couldn’t wait to be a part of.”
What Tech Hasn’t Learned From Urban Planning : Allison Arieff, 13 December 2013, New York Times

“At 68 dense pages, SPUR’s work is detailed and substantive, with many of its recommendations and reminders familiar to students of urbanism. Short blocks are better than long ones. Buildings should face the street whenever possible. Make this human-scale at every opportunity. Enforce minimum density requirements. Focus on building up the areas around public transportation. Hire in-house designers and use government buildings and land as demonstration sites for how a city should look. This hammer-to-the-head approach makes sense when you consider that SPUR is of the mind that Silicon Valley has forgotten — or perhaps more to the point, never learned — some of the now-conventional wisdom about city-making.”
San Francisco City-Makers Say the Tech Sector Is No Good at Urbanism : Nancy Scola, 17 December 2013, Next City

“‘All over America, communities are failing.’ It is this claim of failure that dominates Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone story “Apocalypse, New Jersey”, which positions Camden as that claim’s most vivid depiction. Taibbi is right to note that Camden cannot support itself. The city depends on massive subsidies from New Jersey in order to stay out of the red. He calls these subsidies ‘life support,’ but if he’d have taken a step back, he would have seen them as the natural result of a history of predatory practices toward the region’s most vulnerable population. State subsidies are not signs of Camden’s failure, but of its exploitation. Camden’s story is one of the surrounding region dumping its waste, its trash, its drugs and, yes, its poor into a city and then looking the other way. Whose failure is that?”
Letter from Camden: Who Is to Blame for “America’s Most Desperate Town”? : Stephen Danley, 20 December 2013, Next City (nextcity.org)

“We all know what happened next, unfortunately. Nearly every American city, along with most small towns, hollowed out in the decades to follow. Except for cities with a long history of multifamily residential buildings downtown such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco, walkable central districts lost their shopping pizzazz along with their department stores and high-end retail (and a lot more).”
Is the ‘Traditional Downtown’ Dead? : Kaid Benfield, 18 December 2013, The Atlantic Cities blog

“Too often, after years of neglect, depopulation, crime, and disinvestment, cities have viewed recruiting richer residents as the essence of successful renewal. But a revival of urban America as a whole means that more people, from all walks of life, should be able to live safely, affordably, and comfortably in our cities.”
Pushing Poor People to the Suburbs Is Bad for the Environment : Ben Adler, 16 December 2013, Mother Jones

A Whole Foods Grows in Brooklyn : Elizabeth Greenspan, 17 December 2013, The New Yorker Currency Blog

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Will 2014 Be the Year the Tech Bubble Bursts? : Marcus Wohlsen, 16 December 2013, Wired Business

For most headlines that end in a question mark, the answer is “no”. In this case, the article is a bit more nuanced — the tech bubble coming is a different one from the 1990s. The companies are smarter, the tech ecosystem is bigger, the business models are more realistic, and the old scars from the last bubble still hurt. That said, investors who are seeing little to no gains elsewhere in this recession will pile on like lemmings—all together and at the wrong time—so there will be some sort of correction and reckoning. The chumps and marks will get taken, again, and the smart/lucky will cash the checks and start planning the bubble after that. 2028, anyone?

Tech is different this time, though. And much more thoroughly integrated with the rest of our lives.

“Guys like William Gibson knew this before the rest of us, and his fiction reflects that. He doesn’t even consider what he’s doing now to be science fiction now, because the present has become absurdly sci fi.”
We’re Living In The World Cyberpunk Tried To Warn Us About : Matt Staggs, 16 December 2013, Suvudu.com

“Emphases of the Hometown Plan included transit-oriented development (South Miami has a rail rapid transit station by its downtown), protection for historic structures, pedestrian improvements, and adding residential uses to accommodate a diverse range of incomes. South Miami’s downtown now has revitalized commercial activity, several new and renovated buildings, wider sidewalks, traffic calming features, and a new municipal parking garage lined with restaurants.

…

“But the imperfections are part of what makes this example so important. We must be able to show progress even where we are unable to show perfection. Like it or not, rapid and comprehensive change isn’t available in much of America. In the case of South Miami’s Hometown District, the city has a great master plan that will continue to guide further investment and progress toward walkability as more opportunities come up. Meanwhile, what the suburb has achieved so far is really impressive.”

Revitalizing the Suburb Without Giving Up the Car : Kaid Benfield, 9 December 2013, The Atlantic Cities

“When Selena Savic walks down a city street, she sees it differently to most people. Whereas other designers might admire the architecture, Savic sees a host of hidden tricks intended to manipulate our behaviour and choices without us realising – from benches that are deliberately uncomfortable to sculptures that keep certain citizens away.

“Modern cities are rife with these ‘unpleasant designs’, says Savic, a PhD student at the Ecole Polytechnique Federerale de Lausanne in Switzerland, who co-authored a book on the subject this year. Once you know these secret tricks are there, it will transform how you see your surroundings. ‘We call this a silent agent,’ says Savic. ‘These designs are hidden, or not apparent to people they don’t target.’ Are you aware of how your city is manipulating you?”

Secret city design tricks manipulate your behaviour : Frank Swain, 2 December 2013, BBC Future

Pics at link; if you have the time I’d also re-recommend the following video:

William H. Whyte: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces – The Street Corner from MASNYC [The Municipal Art Society of New York] on Vimeo.
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces was also (or perhaps I should say, was primarily) a book in 1980, ISBN 9780970632418, available used these days; though now also available in a new edition from PPS, The Project for Public Spaces.

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The BBC article references Selena Savic’s book as well, Unpleasant Design, which she also currently expands upon with a blog of the same name.

[blockquote]

If modern American popular culture was built on a central pillar of mainstream entertainment flanked by smaller subcultures, what stands to replace it is a very different infrastructure, one comprising islands of fandom. With no standard daily cultural diet, we’ll tilt even more from a country united by shows like “I Love Lucy” or “Friends” toward one where people claim more personalized allegiances, such as to the particular bunch of viewers who are obsessed with “Game of Thrones” or who somehow find Ricky Gervais unfailingly hysterical, as opposed to painfully offensive.

The baby-boomer intellectuals who lament the erosion of shared values are right: Something will be lost in the transition. At the water cooler or wedding reception or cocktail party or kid’s soccer game, conversations that were once a venue for mutual experiences will become even more strained as chatter about last night’s overtime thriller or “Seinfeld” shenanigans is replaced by grasping for common ground. (“Have you heard of ‘The Defenders’? Yeah? What episode are you on?”) At a deeper level, a country already polarized by the echo chambers of ideologically driven journalism and social media will find itself with even less to agree on.

But it’s not all cause for dismay. Community lost can be community gained, and as mass culture weakens, it creates openings for the cohorts that can otherwise get crowded out. When you meet someone with the same particular passions and sensibility, the sense of connection can be profound. Smaller communities of fans, forged from shared perspectives, offer a more genuine sense of belonging than a national identity born of geographical happenstance.

“Islands of Fandom” – anyone else on the internet feel like we’ve been striking out into uncharted waters and colonizing these islands for at least a couple of decades now?

Netflix’s War on Mass Culture: Binge-viewing was just the beginning. Netflix has a plan to rewire our entire culture : Tim Wu, 4 December 2013, The New Republic

[a longer read worth your time]

“This is where universities can help. Universities can work in their local area to develop high-potential entrepreneurs; make them world-class; help them take advantage of emerging trends; help them add value globally, and help them export. This includes helping with technology, products, productivity, trends, marketing and sales, and focusing on the entrepreneurs’ ability to export.

…

“The level of assistance to implement this mission requires a higher level of focus and sophistication than that currently practiced by most universities and cities. But this type of partnership can bring more benefits to cities than just working with small, local businesses. Universities can offer the missing link to help high-potential entrepreneurs. They can help the transition from local entrepreneur to global CEO, and keep the benefits local. This means changing the focus from ‘all’ entrepreneurs and small business to high-potential entrepreneurs who export from your area to other areas, states and countries”

How Universities Can Help Cities Create Good Jobs : Dileep Rao, 2 December 2013, Forbes

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The author of the above piece from Forbes lies in his article title: The main thrust of the article (after listing old chesnuts like “good jobs are good” and “gov’t debt is bad”) is that Universities Can Help Cities Create Good Jobs without describing HOW. Also, past an emphasis on “exports” (really? which kind, what industries, products or services, software or hardware? ANY hints at all, Mr. Rao?) the author also neglects to tell us what ‘good’ jobs are.

Still I agree with the sentiment, Universities Can Help Cities Create Good Jobs, mostly by existing and education people in all fields (not just entrepreneurs and techies) because you never know what skill is going to be important later. And that was enough reason to link.

“Lately, two recent trends are taking place in e-book publishing. First, several articles in the past few months indicate that e-book returns have grown among readers. Some readers are abusing Amazon’s generous Kindle book return policy in order to get their money back after purchasing a book.

“While it’s important for Amazon and other online retailers to have a mechanism in place to allow readers to return books — due to publishing errors or technical problems — the idea of reading a book then returning it is a big problem. It hampers self-published author sales and minimizes the purpose of a return policy.”

E-Book Returns and the Problem With the Subscription Model : Kevin Eagan, 2 December 2013, Critical Margins

“Have you ever returned a Kindle ebook? That option might soon be going away, thanks to a petition over at Change.org.

“The petition calls on Amazon to change their customer-friendly Kindle ebook return policy. Even though this petition is only 4 days old it has over 2 thousand signatures from authors and publishers, all of whom want Amazon to now block some types of returns.

“The petitioners don’t see the return policy as reassurance to readers that we can return a poorly written or poorly formatted ebook. Instead they view it as a loophole that is being gamed by serial returnees.

“There is some truth to this idea, but would it surprise you to know that Amazon is a step ahead of serial returnees?”

There’s No Need to Change Amazon’s Kindle eBook Return Policy : Nate Hoffelder, 3 April 2013, The Digital Reader

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Amazon’s Kindle Publishing programs are not (despite the name) publishing platforms — ebooks are a format, not a publishing platform — blogging software running on a domain you own is a publishing platform, a working knowledge of CSS, HTML, and FTP along with a text editor is a publishing platform. In fact, ebooks are just web pages (right down to the CSS, XHTML, and XML.)

Amazon makes things easier to publish (hey, just like Wordpress) and goes to great lengths to hide the fact that text delivered over an internet connection isn’t a html document, but the real secret sauce is money.

It’s not that Amazon makes it easier to publish: they make it much easier to get paid. …well, until you don’t get paid, at any rate (see the foofaraw over ebook returns, cited above).

Authors using KDP are trading control for convenience. (In a way, authors have always made this devil’s bargain with publishers, but in the past there seemed to be more work done on the publisher side to justify giving up control) (you know, plus money) — Amazon makes money off the transaction, and doesn’t know or care which books are “transacted”, so long as there are plenty of transactions in aggregate. Amazon has the system all set up: manuscripts in one end, downloads out the other, and the rest is accounting. No quality control, no editorial voice, no plagiarism filters, just the bookkeeping.

And yes I know it’s stupid to publish an ebook and ignore Amazon: Amazon is a big damn user base, and right now a lot of ebook affectionados exclusively buy from Amazon (because they’re lazy, perhaps, or more likely because they don’t know better, don’t care, and no one else is offering anything compelling that might persuade them to switch).

Amazon makes payment easy: taking payments from readers, making payments to authors. But processing credit card transactions is a far cry from running a publishing business and the real ‘digital disruption’ in publishing is not Amazon. Digital Disruption in Publishing is Facebook. Twitter. Blogs. Buzzfeed and Huffpo. Napster and Limewire. Torrents, Tor, Pirate Bays and Pirate Parties.

Here’s the conclusion to a piece I wrote 4 months ago:

What we have here is a stalemate: On the one side, we have ebooks. Apparently everyone, even my Mom [true fact], is buying ebooks — and I, the Lone (old-school, physical bookshop) Bookseller Left on the Internet… I’m just a plaintive, fading voice in the e-wilderness, unable to see the e-forest for the e-trees.

I’ve been assured that the digital revolution has already taken place and we’re just taking a decade or two to sort through digital winners and losers, and well: nothing I’ve said or can say will shake your convictions.

[*ahem*]

“To me, it seems like the revolution already occurred back in 1993 and you all missed it. Every argument made for ebooks is also an argument that could be made about web pages: text served up via html and http actually has numerous advantages over .mobi, epub, and pdf (the current ‘e book’ formats available to us).”

The digital revolution already happened. I’m defending one payment structure: distribution and sales of books through bookstores. Ebook partisans are merely defending a different payment structure, Amazon et al. and the “electronic book” — but both models are susceptible to digital disruption.

“Modern” publishing (I’m going to pick 1836) had a good run, 1836-2007 — 172 years. Over the course of that run, corporations lived and died, business models rose and fell, new and cheaper book formats were born, and at the tail-end of that era: the internet came to prominence. We are now 5 years into the “new” publishing model…

Or, we are 5 years into a dead cat bounce. Are “Kindle ebooks” the future, or merely that last gasp of 200 years of publishing business?

I think the current environment has much more in common with the post-Gutenberg early era of newspapers (1605-1700): we are still figuring out what the platform can be used for, what we want to use it for, and how we can use internet publishing to make money. (I’ll remind you again here: Dickens’ first book was serialized in an 1836 magazine.) Straight, non-DRM web distribution is still the disrupting factor that has yet to be felt in Amazon’s KDP biodome, and however enamored one is of Amazon’s ebook payment structure — the payments have nothing to do with books or publishing.

Project Gutenberg predates the Kindle by 37 years, the Internet Archive hosts 4.4 Million ebooks, and facilitates 15 Million downloads each month [hattip] — so, yeah. Amazon’s e- efforts almost seem like a sideline in comparison.

The book is dead. Long live the book.

And before you come at me as obviously wrong [I am, as always, obviously wrong], ask yourself: “Am I about to defend books, digital distribution, or merely the new payment models that have been laid over the old publishing model?”

and with that parting shot: I open the floor for discussion.

[…some new emphasis added by me, but since I also wrote the original do I really need to make a note?]

PLEASE do me a favor: DON'T pick out any gifts for your loved ones. Don't buy the book you know they'll love, DON'T get that one gadget you know they've been droping hints about for the last six months, DON'T even bother with gift cards.

You’re going to pick wrong.

I absolutely guarantee you’re going to pick wrong — just like you did last year, just like you’ve done for many, many years. Everyone has just been too polite to say anything.

And then I have to spend days of my life, after the holidays, doing nothing but processing returns. At least once an hour I’ll be asked, “Can’t I just get cash back?”

And sadly, the answer is no.

So let’s all agree: The Perfect Gift Is an Envelope Full of Cash.

I’d love to get cash. Anyone aged 14-28 would definitely prefer cash. Do a gut check: what do you want? Sure, that surprise gift, the exact right thing is great when it comes from the one person in your life (spouse, partner, boyfriend, girlfriend) but for everyone else?

I say: If you’re not sleeping with them, they just get cash.

[If you are sleeping with them, this seems appropriate]

Imagine the time you’ll save. Imagine the lack of stress. If you think cash is too impersonal, put the cash envelope inside of a tin of home-made cookies. That would be fantastic because, c’mon, *cookies* (AND cash!) That would be a holiday gift I’d be talking about for decades. The folks in the retirement home will be sick of hearing about it.

[cash is even traditional in some cultures]

So do yourself a favor. Do your loved ones a favor. Most Importantly, take the pressure and the hassle away from the poor retail clerks who have to process all those damn returns for clothes and other crap gifts: Just give cash this holiday.

Thank you for you time and polite consideration. And I’ll be back in 2014 to repeat this message in RocketBomber’s next Holiday Gift Guide!

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image credits:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/beglen/157929769/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ashevillein/2421648773/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10899777@N02/1250836095/

“Some of what the researchers found with regard to the city design shouldn’t come as a surprise. Street connectivity was a significant predictor of transit ridership in the area. As the number of intersections within a half mile of a resident’s home went up, so did the likelihood that person rode transit. Simply put, neighborhood walkability promotes transit use.

“Of the behavioral factors in play, only preconceived attitudes and safety concerns had significant impacts on whether or not a person rode mass transit.”

Why Correcting Misperceptions About Mass Transit May Be More Important Than Improving Service : Eric Jaffe, 27 November 2013, The Atlantic Cities blog

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There are many biased against transit, and some who have fears (legitimate or not) regarding its use. Sadly, the unpopularity of transit negatively impacts the ability of transit to work as designed — and the biases and fears are often unfounded.

I hate to use the trite cliche, but: try it, you’ll like it.