Musings of a Marketing Maven

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Kindle: Now at the Public Library

October 3rd, 2011 · Bookshelf, Tools & Technology

Despite being an avid reader, I’ve been a late­comer to the Kin­dle. A year ago I tried a Kin­dle DX but gave it up for var­i­ous reasons.

Amazon’s recent announce­ment of a Kin­dle beta test with pub­lic libraries rekin­dled my inter­est (so to speak), so I decided to try again — with the Kin­dle app for iPad.

Here’s my ini­tial take on bor­row­ing an ebook from the King County Library. It’s con­ve­nient, but not with­out issues for peo­ple who love the way books are designed…

A Match Made in Heaven?

My first attempt to bor­row a Kin­dle for­mat book from the pub­lic library went nowhere: it was too early — the local library had not yet updated its sys­tems for Kin­dle. On a sec­ond attempt a few days ago, I found the “entry point” in KCLS’ online cat­a­log, and iden­ti­fied a hand­ful of books to bor­row for use on the iPad/Kindle. But I’d have to wait; none were avail­able that day.

Today I received an email announc­ing that my first ebook was avail­able for down­load, but I’d have to act fast: it would expire within 4 days.

KCLS-Alerts-re-Kindle-Book

I clicked on the link, dis­cov­ered that the web page had kept my library card and pass­word cre­den­tials from the prior ses­sion, and I autho­rized the “dig­i­tal book loan” (a process that took sev­eral steps).

The lend­ing process takes you to Amazon’s web­site, where Ama­zon links the library’s ebook to the autho­rized Kin­dle reader (or your “cloud reader”). I imag­ine that this is part of the behind-the-scenes infra­struc­ture that enforces the DRM pol­icy pur­chased by KCLS — the lim­its on how many copies of this ebook may be in cir­cu­la­tion at the same time.

Kindle-Books-from-KCLS

So far the process worked smoothly (with a fast broad­band connection).

The only glitch occurred with the Kin­dle app on the iPad — and it was prob­a­bly just a tim­ing issue with syn­chro­niza­tion. That said, the first cou­ple of attempts to down­load the library’s ebook to the iPad yielded no result.

So I went back to Ama­zon to ensure the ebook showed up in my autho­rized Kin­dle repos­i­tory, and that this book was prop­erly linked to my iPad. I was pleased to see a clear indi­ca­tion that this was a library copy, ver­sus one that I have purchased…

Kindle-Manage-Library-on-Amazon

On my next attempt to down­load the library’s ebook to the iPad/Kindle, the process was quick and easy.

When the library’s online sys­tem is work­ing quickly (which is not always the case), I’d say this whole process would take 5 min­utes or less.

Much faster than get­ting in the car, and dri­ving to and from the near­est library branch.

Which leaves me with my remain­ing reser­va­tion about the cur­rent state-of-the-art for books on Kin­dle (or ePub for­mats): the lack of typo­graphic sophis­ti­ca­tion. The cur­rent stan­dards may be fine for pulp fic­tion, but they are a real dis­ap­point­ment for bib­lio­philes who pre­fer higher qual­ity “trade fic­tion” and books with an intrin­sic design sensibility.

For the book I bor­rowed, The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dun­nett, the loss of typo­graphic styling makes it dif­fi­cult in places to com­pre­hend the author’s intent — or even to dif­fer­en­ti­ate lit­er­ary embell­ish­ments from the flow of the narrative.

The Loss of Fidelity Detracts from the Story

To illus­trate what I mean, here is a cropped photo of the first page of The Game of Kings, as ren­dered by the Kin­dle app on my iPad 2. Except for the chap­ter head, all the text is styled the same. There’s no addi­tional white space as you would see in the print version.

The Kin­dle Ver­sion (via iPad)

Scan-Opening-Page

Although it’s not obvi­ous in the photo above, The Game of Kings begins with a poetry excerpt that pre­cedes the first line of nar­ra­tive. Unfor­tu­nately, there’s noth­ing in the typo­graphic treat­ment or page lay­out to sig­nal that this block of text func­tions dif­fer­ently from the main body of the story.

To make mat­ters worse the poem uses archaic lan­guage — and the com­bi­na­tion could be off-putting as a first impression.

The Print Version

By way of com­par­i­son here is what this page looks like in the print ver­sion that’s cur­rently in circulation:

Book-opening-page

With this lay­out it’s easy for the reader to under­stand that the poem sets the theme for the chap­ter as a whole. It’s clearly set apart from the first line of the narrative.

The loss of typo­graphic and page lay­out fidelity in the Kin­dle ver­sion is a huge issue for books writ­ten by Dorothy Dun­nett, an author who lib­er­ally embell­ishes her sto­ries with poems and lit­er­ary allu­sions in mul­ti­ple languages.

Early Days — Or a Bat­tle for Control?

I under­stand that the dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing work­flow is still in embry­onic state, that it’s dif­fi­cult for pub­lish­ers to adapt the print ver­sions to Kin­dle and ePub for­mat with­out loss of fidelity.

Among other con­straints Apple and Ama­zon seri­ously limit the num­ber of type­faces avail­able, a huge obsta­cle to any designer who wants to pre­serve artis­tic intent across all ver­sions and ren­di­tions of the book. For the tech­ni­cally adept, there are workarounds with embed­ded fonts for authors and pub­lish­ers aim­ing at Apple’s iBook for­mat, but not for pub­lish­ers going to Kin­dle. (At present I sus­pect we’ll see embed­ded fonts pri­mar­ily from the self-publishing community…)

Here’s a won­der­ful dis­cus­sion of some of the issues, from my friend Bill Hill, for­merly of Aldus and Microsoft, a true pio­neer in elec­tronic publishing.

I look for­ward to the day when ebooks are full-fledged alter­na­tives, with addi­tional con­ve­nience ben­e­fits, rather than artis­tic com­pro­mises that trade off design intent for ease of adap­ta­tion. Leav­ing you with so much less of the orig­i­nal expres­sion of the author’s intent. And a dis­ap­point­ing read­ing experience.

I hope Bill Hill is wrong, that we won’t have to wait another 10 years before ebooks achieve typo­graphic and design lay­out fidelity.

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The Real Problem with Netflix

September 30th, 2011 · Brand Matters, Tools & Technology

Con­sumers are enraged at Net­flix’ steep price increases with good rea­son — a 60% increase is hard to take dur­ing a pro­longed reces­sion. As a result well over 1 mil­lion have already can­celled their subscription.

From the consumer’s POV, Net­flix’ lat­est plans to split the offer­ing into two unre­lated ser­vices, Net­flix and Qwik­ster, are utterly ridicu­lous. Infu­ri­at­ing. And per­haps fatal to the company’s longevity.

Net­flix has given its cus­tomers the rea­son — and the moti­va­tion — to look else­where for a bet­ter value.

A Bro­ken Brand Promise

The heavy-handed moves by the com­pany are caus­ing me to rethink how much, if any, I want of Net­flix’ ser­vice in the future. Like mil­lions of other Net­flix sub­scribers who have become dis­en­chanted with the brand.

One of the rea­sons for the furor that’s fuel­ing the con­sumer back­lash is Net­flix’ bro­ken brand promise. We used to believe Net­flix stood as a shin­ing exam­ple of a consumer-centered mod­ern corporation.

Now we real­ize it was just a big myth that we col­lec­tively bought into. Myself included.

Net­flix has squan­dered our trust and lost our loy­alty. They’ve pol­luted their brand. Can they over­come this damage?

Set­ting Up for Stream­ing Is Not Easy

Net­flix is clearly stak­ing its future on main­stream adop­tion of stream­ing and dig­i­tal down­loads as the pre­ferred way to “con­sume” movies, music, TV episodes, games, etc.

But there’s a lurk­ing prob­lem that no one has acknowl­edged in the furor that’s rag­ing across the blo­gos­phere. And that’s user expe­ri­ence.

If you plan to stream movies to a PC, Mac or an Apple-branded con­sumer device (like Apple TV or iPad), con­fig­ur­ing Net­flix and enter­ing your cre­den­tials are not too dif­fi­cult. It’s easy if you’re using a device that’s equipped with a keyboard.

But heaven help you if you’re using a tra­di­tional con­sumer elec­tron­ics device and must enter user cre­den­tials with a remote con­trol device. (You might want to con­sult a teenage geek who’s com­fort­able with remotes as an input device.)

To make things worse, just because you’ve got­ten it work­ing once doesn’t mean your Net­flix con­fig­u­ra­tion will keep work­ing indef­i­nitely. Soft­ware updates by Net­flix and/or your con­sumer elec­tron­ics device man­u­fac­turer can cause the con­fig­u­ra­tion to stop work­ing. So you con­front the user expe­ri­ence issues all over again.

Net­flix doesn’t exert much influ­ence over the con­sumer elec­tron­ics ecosys­tem, so the user expe­ri­ence prob­lems are sys­temic and likely to persist…

The Remote Was Not Designed as a Key­board Substitute

Over the past sev­eral months I’ve wasted hours try­ing to keep Net­flix stream­ing to our flat-screen TV, using Sony PlaySta­tion 3 and the PlaySta­tion net­work as the inter­face to Net­flix. My first attempt to con­fig­ure stream­ing took sev­eral hours (includ­ing sev­eral ses­sions on my Mac to get online help).

After the ini­tial setup it worked just fine — until Sony’s PlaySta­tion net­work was hacked and every­thing had to be reset. Since then I’ve had to reset the con­fig­u­ra­tion more than once. I’m not sure if this is caused by Sony’s fre­quent soft­ware updates or some con­flict between the PlaySta­tion net­work and Netflix.

Need­less to say, if your inter­face to a con­sumer elec­tron­ics device is a TV remote, hav­ing to enter mul­ti­ple sets of user IDs and pass­words is a non-trivial and frus­trat­ing exer­cise. The fact that what­ever you type when enter­ing your pass­word is masked with aster­isks — ******** — increases your chances of wast­ing your time due to typos that occur when you use a remote as an infe­rior key­board substitute.

My Net­flix Solu­tion on the PS3

To fix the bro­ken Net­flix con­fig­u­ra­tion required con­sult­ing both Net­flix’ and Sony’s sup­port resources online. Not sur­pris­ingly they weren’t coor­di­nated. Net­flix’ site turned out to be dis­tinctly unhelp­ful, and Sony’s site required some real dig­ging to find the solution.

Not to men­tion wait­ing until server main­te­nance was done (dur­ing prime time, I might add).

PlayStation Network Message

The even­tual solu­tion was:

  1. man­u­ally reset the date and time on the PS3
  2. unin­stall the Net­flix app on the PS3
  3. down­load and rein­stall the Net­flix app
  4. re-enter my user ID and pass­word for Net­flix (using the remote, of course).

Oh — and I for­got to men­tion that Sony required me to reset my pass­word to the PlaySta­tion net­work before begin­ning this whole pro­ce­dure — yet another frus­trat­ing bat­tle with the remote as key­board substitute.

This may sound sim­ple, but using the remote as an input device for activ­i­ties designed for a key­board meant that these steps took well over an hour — once I under­stood what was required to fix the prob­lem in first place. Find­ing the solu­tion required use of a computer.

Net net –

Given the on-going lack of coor­di­na­tion between Net­flix and con­sumer elec­tron­ics com­pa­nies when it comes to user expe­ri­ence, usabil­ity issues like these will prove to be Net­flix’ Achilles heel if their future depends on happy customers.

Thank­fully, Net­flix has lis­tened to their cus­tomers and responded. Plans for Qwik­ster have been aban­doned — the ser­vice will not be split in two.

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How to Survive a Summer Cold

July 31st, 2011 · Back to Basics, Bookshelf

A few days ago a new Vita­Mix 5200 arrived on our doorstep, fol­lowed within hours by the onset of a bad sum­mer cold. Per­fect timing.

The quest for wellness

Since then I’ve been liv­ing on fruit smooth­ies and roasted gar­lic soup. The Vita­Mix has offered a refresh­ing way to deal with the unpleas­ant side-effects of a nasty cold. I’ve also tried other uncon­ven­tional remedies.

My friend Jenny brought a box of Well­ness Fizz tablets, Vitamin-C plus herbal sup­ple­ments to dis­solve in warm water. Con­sumed 3 or 4 times a day, Well­ness Fizz claims to boost the immune system’s abil­ity to fight back. Even so I’ve had to resort to Zicam, decon­ges­tants, restora­tive yoga and lots of sleep…

No mir­a­cle cures, only mod­est relief — but I’ve found some pleas­ant distractions.

With the Help of a Few Good Books

When too ill to social­ize, exer­cise or work, lis­ten­ing to jazz and clas­si­cal music can be won­der­fully dis­tract­ing. Like­wise a good book or a riv­et­ing movie. Forced to slow down while recov­er­ing, I’ve found time for some fine books.

I loved Camilla Gibb’s The Beauty of Human­ity Move­ment: A Novel.  Set in Viet­nam, the story intro­duces an aging cook — an itin­er­ant street ven­dor — famous through­out Hanoi for his pho. You learn about Old Man Hung, his his­tory, the proper way to make a bowl of pho — and the expe­ri­ences and peo­ple who’ve touched his life over the years. The story is richly embell­ished with the details of every­day life in Hanoi, thanks to the author’s back­ground as a social anthro­pol­o­gist. You can almost smell the lemon­grass and cilantro on every page…

From Viet­nam to Paris, in just a few hun­dred pages.

“It’s so lovely here it hurts.” — Ernest Hem­ing­way, 1922

This week­end I immersed myself in 1920s Paris with the Lost Gen­er­a­tion, thanks to Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife. Her novel deals with Ernest Hemingway’s early strug­gles to become an author, and his years in Paris with his first wife, Hadley, “who loved him before he was famous,” as an Ama­zon reviewer wrote.

Although told from Hadley’s point of view, the story sheds some light on the expe­ri­ences, adven­tures and trou­bled rela­tion­ships that inspired Hem­ing­way to write his first two nov­els, includ­ing the ground-breaking Amer­i­can novel, The Sun Also Rises. You’ll meet some of the lumi­nar­ies of 20th cen­tury lit­er­a­ture such as F. Scott Fitzger­ald, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, John Dos Pas­sos, Sher­wood Ander­son, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, among others.

After a vic­ar­i­ous week­end in Paris with artists and famous writ­ers, I’m anx­ious to re-read Hemingway’s mem­oir of this period, The Move­able Feast — and learn the story through his eyes.

And as for this cold — Enough, already.

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Is It Time for Reading to Be Reinvented?

May 15th, 2011 · Bookshelf, Tools & Technology

Why do peo­ple read books? For plea­sure or dis­trac­tion? For self-improvement or to learn some­thing new? For class assign­ments: text­books, literature?

Are eBooks best suited for use cases that are fun­da­men­tally util­i­tar­ian, rather than plea­sure seeking?

Why do peo­ple read eBooks?

I’ve been pon­der­ing these ques­tions for a few days, sparked by an entrepreneur’s pitch. He dreams of rein­vent­ing how peo­ple read and expe­ri­ence books, at least among young peo­ple. He wants to host the con­ver­sa­tions that take place around books, via a new “social eBook app” for the iPad and other tablet devices.

A New App for eBooks

His eBook app will be enhanced by “a social wrap­per” — in order to encour­age online con­ver­sa­tions among read­ers of a book, or exchanges between book fans and the author. In brief, here’s the concept.

Read­ing as a social experience

Imag­ine a book opened in front of you. Each page of the book is dis­played on the right — pretty much what you’d see if you were using Apple’s iBook app on an iPad. On the left, where you’d nor­mally see the fac­ing page, his app’s UI dis­plays short mes­sages exchanged among read­ers of that par­tic­u­lar book — sim­i­lar to a Twit­ter mes­sage stream or a chat window.

His notion of read­ing plus online con­ver­sa­tion may offer real ben­e­fits to stu­dents who must read the same book for a class assign­ment. As long as his plat­form allows peo­ple to express their ideas or ques­tions with­out the arti­fi­cial con­straint of the 140-character tweet, this tech­nol­ogy may lead to enhanced learn­ing and stu­dent engage­ment. Assum­ing, that is, that the books they need to read are made avail­able for his eBook app.

But I’d like to share my impres­sion about the impli­ca­tions of this approach for peo­ple who read for pleasure.

First Impres­sion — Not for Me

My reac­tion to the new con­cept was tepid, even though I own an iPad 2 and have been col­lect­ing apps for it. I’m a vora­cious reader: con­sum­ing between 100–200 books a year, for plea­sure, plus sev­eral dozen busi­ness books. You’d think I’d be the ideal cus­tomer for this enhanced eBook app given the value I place on reading.

But here’s why the propo­si­tion doesn’t appeal to me:

  • At my level of “addic­tion to read­ing,” the pub­lic library is the most cost-effective source of books for me.
  • I love the look and feel of a well-designed book. So far, the eBooks that I’ve seen (iBook and Kin­dle for­mats) lack any real typo­graphic ele­gance — each page looks pretty much the same. Books become bor­ing as a result.
  • When con­verted to EPUB® for­mat, the book’s orig­i­nal page lay­out is dras­ti­cally scaled back when ren­dered by the dig­i­tal book reader. This sim­pli­fi­ca­tion can reduce mean­ing or com­pre­hen­sion — what­ever was intended by the way the designer laid out text, head­lines and images on the page to be printed.

For exam­ple, the sam­ple shown here con­denses a lot of infor­ma­tion to a sin­gle page, thanks to the design choices that are expressed through this layout.

sample-book-page-layout

But my most impor­tant rea­son for pre­fer­ring today’s book for­mat to a “social eBook Reader” is the desire to pre­serve the holy grail of read­ing: the state of flow, a won­der­ful emo­tional state that is the hall­mark of the world’s best books.

Read­ing & The Joys of “Flow”

When read­ing a well-told story, I’m immersed in the expe­ri­ence — caught up in the state of “flow.” My per­sonal bound­aries dis­solve when I enter the storyteller’s world: I feel the heat and dust of the North African souk, or the pen­e­trat­ing cold and damp of the Scot­tish highlands.

Psy­chol­o­gists describe flow as a very desir­able state of mind (source: WikiPedia):

Accord­ing to Csík­szent­mi­há­lyi, flow is com­pletely focused moti­va­tion. It is a single-minded immer­sion and rep­re­sents per­haps the ulti­mate in har­ness­ing the emo­tions in the ser­vice of per­form­ing and learn­ing. In flow, the emo­tions are not just con­tained and chan­neled, but pos­i­tive, ener­gized, and aligned with the task at hand…. The hall­mark of flow is a feel­ing of spon­ta­neous joy, even rap­ture, while per­form­ing a task although flow is also described as a deep focus on noth­ing but the activ­ity — not even one­self or one’s emotions.

While it’s pos­si­ble to achieve flow while read­ing an eBook, the expe­ri­ence of flow is so reward­ing that choos­ing to inter­rupt it for chat mes­sages is the last thing I can imag­ine doing when read­ing for pleasure.

But this may be a gen­er­a­tional pref­er­ence… Per­haps teenagers and young adults are will­ing to sac­ri­fice the expe­ri­ence of flow in order to check in with each other. Or maybe their hyper-active, multi-tasking world is not one that’s amenable to flow; not hav­ing expe­ri­enced it, they have no rea­son to want it. For them, is con­nec­tion prefer­able to flow?

Per­haps my real issue with this con­cept is that I pre­fer asyn­chro­nous to syn­chro­nous social­iz­ing, when it comes to the expe­ri­ence of read­ing a book.

Yes, We Engage Socially around Books

My friends and I are highly likely to talk with each other when it comes to books or mag­a­zines we’ve enjoyed. Books are com­mon top­ics of con­ver­sa­tion among us. We bring bags of books to social events, for shar­ing with each other — our own lend­ing library, if you will.

We always talk about books (or movies) when we go for hikes or long walks, and often over a glass of wine or a shared meal.

Some are avid book club mem­bers, and love talk­ing about a book with oth­ers dur­ing semi-structured club meetings.

After fin­ish­ing a book that’s made a huge impres­sion, we’re quite likely to email a recommendation.

Most of us already own an iPad or a Kin­dle; all of us have com­put­ers. So it’s not the device that’s the issue.

It’s just hard to imag­ine that we’d want to chat in real-time while read­ing for plea­sure, when we so enjoy talk­ing about books face to face…

The entre­pre­neur is actively seek­ing financ­ing, so I chose not to iden­tify his com­pany nor his prod­uct. I wish him the best of luck, as long as there are enough peo­ple who will value dig­i­tal books enhanced by a social experience.

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On Love and Miracles

April 21st, 2011 · Back to Basics

LaurenMy brother and his fam­ily are bat­tling can­cer again: the third time for his 19-year-old step­daugh­ter, Lau­ren. Just over a year since my brother recov­ered from his own bout with tongue and throat cancer.

Theirs is an inspir­ing story.

Lala, The War­rior Princess

They fight back with love and hope, with prayer­ful bless­ings from thou­sands of old and new friends and fam­ily. They use social net­work­ing to chan­nel the love and fuel my niece’s spir­its. My brother keeps us posted with his blog. While opti­mistic, they rec­og­nize that Lau­ren has begun a marathon, so they’re doing every­thing they can to stoke her fires and guide the energy in pro­duc­tive forms of healing…

Last week they feared for Lauren’s life: the tumors had become so aggres­sive and inva­sive that they were chok­ing her very breath. It was a sud­den onset: she checked into the ICU 10 days ago with what might have been pneu­mo­nia, but was instead a recur­rence of nerve sheath can­cer, this time wrapped around her bronchia.

This is deadly seri­ous busi­ness, but my brother and his fam­ily look for affir­ma­tions of joy and well­ness wher­ever they can.

Thanks to what my brother calls her war­rior princess spirit, my niece fought back, regained con­trol over her breath­ing, and got her­self dis­charged from the hos­pi­tal. This week she’s recu­per­at­ing at home, and tak­ing calls from Lyle Lovett and other celebri­ties who are inspired by her story. (She reacts as only a teenager would…)

No one on her med­ical team would have believed this to be pos­si­ble last week. Her oncol­o­gist can only ascribe it to a mir­a­cle of love and com­mu­nity — the power of the human spirit — rather than the won­ders of med­ical science.

Lala Needs You

You can help too. Join Lala, “the war­rior princess,” and shower her with love and hope­ful bless­ings. Join her Face­book group… Pray for her.

Ded­i­cate your yoga prac­tice to her.

You’ll be amazed at what might happen.

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Tangled Up in Green

April 21st, 2011 · Back to Basics, Creativity

Over cof­fee last week I was rem­i­nisc­ing with a friend who’s pas­sion­ate about music, par­tic­u­larly Bob Dylan and other artists from the folk-rock era. While sip­ping lattes, Dave told the story of what inspired Dylan’s song, Tan­gled Up in Blue — a recent foray into paint­ing. Appar­ently Dylan adapted a remark from his art teacher: that begin­ners often get “tan­gled up in the blue” sec­tion of their palette.

Dave was enchanted by a recent biog­ra­phy of Dylan, writ­ten by a his­to­rian and Dylan fan, result­ing in a fas­ci­nat­ing explo­ration of the polit­i­cal, social and cul­tural milieu that informed Dylan’s art. Some­how we kept return­ing to the “tan­gled up” phrase dur­ing our conversation.

Since then the phrase, snatches of the song and images of blue have been rever­ber­at­ing in my head. A pleas­ing form of blues obsession…

And now the con­cept has mor­phed into “tan­gled up in green,” sparked the visual explo­sion of spring green every­where I look here in the Pacific Northwest.

Green-Leaves-of-Spring

After a long grey and insanely rainy win­ter, this ver­dant fire is a feast for warmth-starved eyes.

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Watch Those Service Fees!

April 6th, 2011 · Back to Basics

I was on the verge of buy­ing 4 con­cert tick­ets today, but aban­doned my shop­ping cart when I saw how out­ra­geous the “con­ve­nience fee” is for this online transaction.

For a sin­gle pur­chase trans­ac­tion of 4 tick­ets at $68.00 each, the ticket pro­cess­ing ser­vice will impose a $38 fee ($9.50 a ticket). Rel­a­tive to value deliv­ered, a 14% “tax” on each ticket is way out of proportion.

So the Early Music Guild and Seat­tle Baroque Orches­tra lost out on 4 con­cert patrons, because their ticket pro­cess­ing ser­vice is too greedy (STG).

Too bad: it might have been a great performance.

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Blogging Is Dead. Oh, Really?

March 4th, 2011 · Social Media for Business

You can always tell when it’s been a slow news day. There’s yet another provoca­tive news story, pro­nounc­ing the death of email, or blog­ging, or Twit­ter. You name it.

Sev­eral weeks ago the New York Times wrote that blog­ging among young peo­ple was on the decline, accord­ing to research from the Pew Center’s Inter­net and Amer­i­can Life Project. Later, more thought­ful com­men­taries appeared, not­ing that blog­ging isn’t dead; it is just evolving.

The obser­va­tion I found most per­ti­nent is from GigaOm:

Blog­ging… has evolved into much more of a con­tin­uum of publishing

My expe­ri­ence, although far from sci­en­tific, is that blog­ging and tweet­ing have become part of a con­tin­uum of con­ver­sa­tion. Peo­ple choose the means of expres­sion that is most com­fort­able, per­haps most con­ve­nient at the moment — the means that best suits what they want to say — and to whom.

With both my per­sonal blog and my pro­fes­sional blog, I’ve been sur­prised by the num­ber of com­ments that arrive via email rather than as com­ments posted directly in the blog. It takes an extra step or two for some­one to con­tact me by email, rather than Word­Press’ built-in com­ment forms. This sug­gests some­thing about the person’s motivation.

The more thought­ful the com­ment, or the more it per­tains to the writer’s spe­cific busi­ness issues, the more likely it is to arrive in my email in-box, rather than appear as a pub­lic com­ment on my blog. More than once I’ve found myself encour­ag­ing the comment’s author to share it from within the blog, because I believed it would res­onate with others.

I also rec­og­nize that, at times, people’s only recourse is to com­mu­ni­cate with me via email, because the oppor­tu­nity to com­ment on a post has expired.

Sadly, I’ve been forced to stop accept­ing blog com­ments within a month or so of post­ing a new entry, to avoid inces­sant spam­ming by the East­ern Euro­pean link farms. Some­how I just haven’t been able to swal­low the need to add a Captcha form, the auto­mated alter­na­tive to fend­ing off the spammers.

The fact that spam­mers have become so active says that there’s con­tin­u­ing value in blogs.

And then there was the mes­sage on 2/26 from pro­lific tweeter Jere­miah Owyang:

Tweet more than 20 times a day? You should blog. Pay your­self first.

No, blog­ging isn’t dead: it’s just part of a con­tin­uum of con­ver­sa­tion options.

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On Photo Booths and Identity

January 29th, 2011 · Back to Basics, Tools & Technology

When I lived in Paris, it seemed there was a photo booth on every cor­ner. The French, quin­tes­sen­tial bureau­crats, required photo doc­u­men­ta­tion on all kinds of per­mits and appli­ca­tions. Per­haps they still do.

Chris-Identity-Card-for-Sorbonne

The police required a photo on my carte d’identité, a doc­u­ment to be car­ried at all times (or risk depor­ta­tion). It was not enough to have a stu­dent visa… So dupli­cate pho­tos, and a trip to the neigh­bor­hood photo booth.

To live in Paris as a legally doc­u­mented res­i­dent meant sup­ply­ing dozens of pho­tos to a vari­ety of insti­tu­tions. (And often mul­ti­ple copies for each piece of documentation.)

Photo IDs clipped to purpose-specific doc­u­ments were required by the uni­ver­sity, for class enroll­ment, stu­dent meals, etc. But they also afforded access to dis­counts on bus and metro passes, museum entry tick­ets, school books and stu­dent supplies.

French-identity

It kept those photo booths busy…

Some of the pho­tos were SO ugly that all you could do was laugh. So bad they could almost be taken for police mug shots…

So when Apple intro­duced Apple Photo Booth, a free app for devices with a built-in iSight cam­era, I had to laugh. To me shots taken in a photo booth reveal peo­ple in the least flat­ter­ing ways pos­si­ble. And no sur­prise: most pho­tos shared via Apple Photo Booth are indeed unflat­ter­ing… You won’t find me using that app.

Update 3/2/2011: Given Apple’s intro­duc­tion of the new iPad 2 today, I may have to eat my words. Apple has promised a “new and improved” ver­sion of Photo Booth for the iPad 2 — an app that Apple claims is both lots of fun, as well as visu­ally com­pelling. If that’s the case, you may find me back in “the vir­tual photo booth.”

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Where Has the Magic Gone?

January 28th, 2011 · Back to Basics

I’ve been wal­low­ing in nos­tal­gia for the past sev­eral evenings, a side ben­e­fit of prun­ing files, orga­niz­ing pho­tos, and reduc­ing clut­ter. When you’ve mar­ried into a fam­ily of pack rats, as I have, this is a never-ending chore. But it has its pecu­liar joys. (Think, Mar­cel Proust.)

While wad­ing through fam­ily records, I’ve redis­cov­ered travel doc­u­ments from my time as a stu­dent in Paris. They have trig­gered fond mem­o­ries, and led to shared sto­ries over din­ner and a glass of wine.

Now that so much of the world has gone dig­i­tal, some of the nos­tal­gic magic of for­eign travel has been lost. Does this imply our per­sonal his­to­ries will be less rich, less redo­lent of mem­o­ries trig­gered by old documents?

Just look at my stu­dent visa, for exam­ple. The col­or­ful stamps, the dis­tinc­tive shapes of dif­fer­ent coun­tries’ imprints. The hand­writ­ten details. It’s a cul­tural arti­fact from the pre-digital mod­ern era.

French-student-visa

Rhap­sody in Blue

From the appear­ance of the orig­i­nal doc­u­ment, it’s clear that the French con­sular clerk was using a foun­tain pen to write my par­tic­u­lars on the visa. The style and color of the hand­writ­ten details are dis­tinc­tively French. When I lived in Paris, every­one used foun­tain pens; and almost all pen car­tridges were filled with the same shade of blue ink.

That per­va­sive shade of blue is inex­tri­ca­bly linked to that milieu, my stu­dent note­books, the peo­ple of that time and place. To the love let­ters I wrote my boyfriend, now hus­band, from Paris — writ­ten with a foun­tain pen that often bled through the flimsy air­mail sta­tionery. Let­ters that appeared dur­ing my “arche­o­log­i­cal dig” into our fam­ily files.

Despite the con­ve­nience of writ­ing on a key­board, computer-generated doc­u­ments lack the mys­tique of those penned let­ters. The for­eign stamps, the sketches in the margins.

And with today’s dig­i­tally scanned and recorded bor­der cross­ing pro­to­cols, my pass­port remains empty, no mat­ter how many trips I take. So it’s hard to remem­ber when I’ve trav­eled where…

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