The future of publishing is writable

Newsweek book are not dead bezos

Imran posted a link on his facebook wall.

The future of publishing is writable, Trends of smaller, easier, and more personal content signal a shift away from read-only publishing.

There are three convergence trends in publishing that are already apparent.

One clear long-term trend is that smaller pieces of information are being published. Considering just modern digital forms of publishing, there is a roughly chronological progression toward smaller publications: emails, Usenet postings, web pages, blog posts, blog comments, tweets, tags.

A second trend is a reduction in friction. As access to easy-to-use and inexpensive publishing technology increases, it becomes economically feasible to publish smaller and less valuable pieces of content. We have reached the point where anyone with access to the Internet can easily and cheaply publish trivial, tiny pieces of information — even single words.

The third trend is the rise of publishing personal information. Our inescapable sociability is driving us to shape the Internet into a mechanism for publishing information about ourselves.

These three trends — smaller, easier, more personal — provide a framework to examine the development of online information publishing.

Absolutely…

In a session at BarCampManchester4 titled Ebooks, I was invited to talk about my Kindle ebook reader. I said I have never bought a book from the Amazon Kindle store and may never do.

So the obvious thing people thought was that I download ebooks from questionable sources. But in actual fact most of my ebook collection is either creative commons licensed ebooks such as cory doctorow’s books or there self published content formed from scraping websites using the much loved calibre and its scripts. Its scripts work with everything from standard sites, google reader, instapaper, readitlater, etc, etc.

I’m not saying I’m a self publisher but if you do look at the percentage of ebooks I’ve made/republished compared to the ones I’ve bought or downloaded. Its clear going by my own habits is we going towards a writable, self publishing future.

Online dating goes a little like this

Me on how to have more sex

According to Stephen Mount, online dating goes something a little like this.

Person A: Hi

Person B: Hi

Person A: What’s your financial circumstances?

Person B: I’m skint

Person A: Bye

In my experience this is certainly not true. It would be interesting to hear where Stephen is meeting these ladies? The only time I’ve ever had someone challenge me about how much I actually earn is when I went speed dating for the first time and it ended up on ITV 1 primetime.

The woman (who I won’t screen shot for her own sake, although I really would like to) who is person A in the following role-play and I’m person B.

Person A: So what do you do?

Person B: I work for the BBC on a special project which I love

Person A: Oh thats a shame, I heard the BBC don’t pay very well

After a slight delay (I was weighing up in my mind how this would play out)

Person B: Well that only matters if your a gold digging ******

Person A: **** ******* ******** ******

Lets say the next 2.5 mins were some of the most difficult conversation you could have with a stranger…

Luckily its only ever happened once and even more luckily it was not caught by the camera for the ITV viewing public, because that would be too embarrassing at the time but ever so funny now.

Discovering lovely workplaces

The old twitter offices

I had message on my flickr mail today. The subject read awesome workplaces. I though it may have been spam at first but I checked it out.

Dear Ian,

I found some great pictures of the Citizen Space workplace here: http://www.officedesigngallery.com/template_permalink.asp?id=154#comments

I would really like to add these pictures to my website: WOVOX.com.

WOVOX is a free and open platform for anyone to show and find workplaces. We want to help people find the workplace of their dreams more easily, but also learn from others and find inspiration for their own workplace.

There is room for credits and a link back to your website or social media profile. Your pictures will be available under an attribute & share alike creative commons license.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Thank you,

Arjen Hoekstra

I totally forgot about the pictures I took of the CitizenSpace, the old twitter offices (see the photo above – yes that how twitter use to look back in 2006ish) and the creative commons office, all in San Francisco. I’ve lot loads more which I forgot about. Good thing about flickr keeping all these photos and of course the creative commons license which is a sign that I’m willing to share.

Wovox.com actually looks pretty sweet. The ethos seems pretty well thought out too. For example heres a bit from the user guideline page.

Authenticity! Better show a few things with spirit than a lot of stuff without depth. A mobile phone pic in the heat of the moment is worth much more than a non-descript €1000 pose shot.

Plus its really good seeing Creative Commons licenses being baked in from day one rather that being an after thought (i’m looking at you mixcloud.com crew).

Seeing all these work places in one place, has somewhat inspired me. I hope to add the BBC media city office to the mix in the near future, it will be interesting to see how it grows as we get more people too.