JK Rowling jumps head first into self publishing

Harry Potter

I posted this from my kindle on twitter… Its awkward because it doesn’t post the source but its actually from Ars technica.

By publishing on her own website, Rowling adds: “We can guarantee that people everywhere are getting the same experience at the same time. That was extremely appealing to me. I am lucky to have the resources to do it myself and I think this is a fantastic and unique experience that I could afford to take my time over to make this come alive. There was really no way to do it for the fans or me than just do it myself. Not every author could do this, but it’s right for Harry Potter. It is so much fun to have direct content with my fans. It was an extension of the existing jkrowling.com.”

JK Rowling is sure to make a mint and even more from self publishing… Further more I was intrigued to hear Rowling is green lighting a non DRM format for publishing.

Rowling has opted to keep the e-books DRM-free, meaning that they are not locked into one device or platform. She is instead opting for digital watermarking that links the identity of the purchaser to the copy of the e-book. This doesn’t prevent copyright theft but does ensure that any copies will be traceable to a particular user. This is similar to how iTunes is DRM-free, but embeds user account information within each file purchased.

Great move, and I wonder how the shop owners such as Amazon or B&N feel about this? I’m also wondering if Amazon will finally sort out the disconnect between Amazon bought books and personal documents. For example link to non-Amazon bought books.

The disconnect between self published and mass published will hopefully get much smaller encouraging even more to attempt self publishing.

XBMC and Fan Art romps onwards

XBMC Fan Art logos

Found via the latest XBMC blog post.

Fan Art TV

…Joins the already amazing… The TVDB and The Movie DB, as great places to collect FanArt and add them to the already amazing XBMC experiences. Literary the XBMC guys and community are innovating like crazy and it doesn’t look like stopping anytime soon. Total Kudos to this amazing project, I can’t imagine consuming media without it.

These additional features would be dramatically less useful if not for fanart.tv. Fanart.tv is a crowd-sourced website, much like thetvdb and TMDb, designed to provide all the additional little features that we each would have to spend hours amassing on our own. Kode, the fanart.tv developer, is always appreciative of additional art or art requests, and asks only that you follow the rules that may be found here.

Its also worth metioning from the other end of the scale, the amazing Trak.tv and Sharethe.tv. Think of them as the last.FM of Films and TV.

When you look at other media centres, they just look plain and boring in comparison… There’s certainly something about making customising simple and easy which is very compelling…

Textuality almost the idea we had but poorly done

INST MSGS - Episode 11 - U H8 ME

A long time ago Channel4 posted a contest based around writing a play. Having never written a play before me and Sarah (my exwife) went about writing a play based around the interactions of people via social technologies.

The concept was simple, people interacted on stage in different ways, you could see what there really thinking about or mean via a large screen above them. Honestly quite a bit of the influence from my end came from the very early project by Jun Group called Welcome to the scene. (a candidate for something to re-look at me thinks)

I was intrigued when I read about textuality in my cousins movie collection of course in XBMC.

Now to be fair it only managed 3.4 stars out of 10 on IMDB so its not exactly inception but its worth watching to see how the concept we came to was executed by others. If I had the time and resources I would like to still see it as a play.

It was actually proposed to the contact theatre as their young and talented improv artists could maybe do something quite amazing with it, but I’ve never really picked up on it.

Lastly Revision3’s INST MSGS, rings a bell when re-looking at this whole area.

INST MSGS is a web anthology series that dramatizes social media. Based on everything from submitted instant message conversations to found Craigslists ads, INST MSGS shines a satirical light on modern (mis) communication.

The Shift and my own shift…

Near Death Experiences

When you have a near death experience (NDE) or I guess brush with death your meant to act or feel a certain way it would seem. I don’t seem to be acting or feeling that way (what ever way its meant to be) some suggest I might get posttraumatic stress disorder in years to come. If this is true, I’m certainly not looking forward to re-experiencing the original trauma through flashbacks.

I remember back in July last year talking to my social worker (I assume they get you one after a dramatic experience just in-case you decide to do something silly) the one and only time. He came to my flat and we talked generally about everything and how I felt. It was ok if a little weird (most of the conversation centered around my anger for the way I was treated at the hospital), but he said something which made me think.

Obviously I don’t remember exactly what he said but basically it was something like “such an experience will make you re-evaluate your life and your faith.” To which I answered… “Like faith as in God?” he answered, “…yes I turned to god when something like this happened to me for example.”

That was the last time I saw him really, not because he was bad. Just didn’t really need him. I’ve been figuring stuff out myself in my own time but to be honest I’ve not really been thinking about turning to god or anything like that. But every once in a while I come up against (for a better word) something which makes me think (not necessarily in favor of god or religion).

Bobby

This time, it was when I went to the Thinking Digital university/workshop on happie.st with Bobby Patterson. I wasn’t looking for happiness or even seeking happiness, since the near death experience I’ve come to appreciate life on a totally different level.

Its hard to explain… but I’ll try

I view life on a slightly amazed scale. The miracle of life is so precious and I’m in totally ore we even exist at all (thanks to evolution). We scuttle around and worry so much about our own problems while the rhythm of life marches on regardless.

Our brains are wildly complex and able to conjure up the greatest dreams and darkest nightmares. The mind can set you free or imprison you for life.

Its genuinely a wonder and thirst for life…

And I’m reminded of this quote… (no idea who from)

Your just a thought away from changing your life…

So when Bobby talked about happie.st and some of the thinking behind and why, it struck a cord with me and my recent thinking.

One of the many links he suggested was a link to a film called the shift by Wayne Dyer

From the creators of You Can Heal Your Life: The Movie comes a compelling portrait of three modern lives in need of new direction and new meaning. In his first-ever movie, Wayne Dyer explores the spiritual journey in the second half of life when we long to find the purpose that is our unique contribution to the world. The powerful shift from the ego constructs we are taught early in life by parents and society—which promote an emphasis on achievement and accumulation—are shown in contrast to a life of meaning, focused on serving and giving back. Filmed on coastal California’s spectacular Monterey Peninsula, The Shift captures every person’s mid-life longing for a more purposeful, soul-directed life.

I watched the shift and I thought about it. I wasn’t sure quite what to say about it.

It felt quite religious in parts but in other not so much. There’s a air of cheesy self helpness to it but actually its not as bad as it would seem to be. The hard thing is wanting to know, what its end game (as such) is? I felt looking at Wayne Dyer’s wikipedia page would help, and it did. The interesting parts included…

Although Dyer resisted the spiritual tag, by the 1990s he was altering his message to include more components of spirituality, in Real Magic, and higher consciousness, in Your Sacred Self.

My belief is that the truth is a truth until you organize it, and then becomes a lie. I don’t think that Jesus was teaching Christianity, Jesus was teaching kindness, love, concern, and peace. What I tell people is don’t be Christian, be Christ-like. Don’t be Buddhist, be Buddha-like. [cited interview]

“Religion is orthodoxy, rules and historical scriptures maintained by people over long periods of time. Generally people are raised to obey the customs and practices of that religion without question. These are customs and expectations from outside the person and do not fit my definition of spiritual.” [cited post]

I feel that should be going for this self help stuff, but I’m still feeling very uneasy about it. Some of the things from the shift are interesting but the overall tone is closer to something I can imagine someone with an agenda or religious view would have. I’ve certainly not damaged the part of my brain which deals with rational thought thats for sure. I expect Dyer if he read this and saw me, would suggest its ego talking but I certainly don’t think it is.

Anyway, I didn’t quite know what to think at the end but I certainly felt a bit like oh well thats a shame…

I guess I’m hardly changed in certain ways but forever changed in others. I do feel like I should be more changed that I actually am, but maybe thats the fighting response holding on to what I am or something… Who knows…

Grassroots Innovation & Creativity

Composition: King x Knight

People have been wondering what am I up to since Backstage closed down.

Well its kind of hard to describe but generally I’ve become the resident troublemaker, breaking all types of rules and really etching a new kind of path for myself. If I was going to explain it in a buzz word compliant way, it would be something like… Senior Emerging and Disruptive Grassroots Specialist for BBC R&D.

Yeah feel free to be sick all over your screens.

But one aspect I certainly want to focus on is new types disruption and innovation from the edges or grassroots.

So part of my new job will be seeking the seeds of disruption and innovation before they get to the point of broad adoption.

I come with examples…

Most of the people reading this have been on Twitter at least 4 years, and we could see something interesting was going on with Microblogging but no one really knew what? About 4.5 years ago I met the guys from Twitter (Ev and Biz) and I did talk about what we (BBC) could do with Twitter. Unfortunately I working on Backstage, meant my focus was on data. Although we did talk about what the opportunities Twitter might give the BBC. Of course most of that went up in smoke and Twitter marched on to establish a business model (ok not a very good one but its still something) and a certain amount of dominance in the microblogging and social fields.

Just imagine what would have happened if things turned out different. The point is there was something there and with a good trial someone else could have identified it as something interesting that the BBC should look deeper into.

How I find interesting stuff?

I mostly rely on the people around me for pointers. Thats why I tend to only follow a small number of people on twitter. But I also look at what certain people are up to. In actual fact, its this aspect which bough me to the BBC. Seeing what Tom Coates, Paul Hammond, Matt Patterson, Ben Metcalfe etc were up to really got me going. I had no idea who they were originally but most of them were pretty accessible in person, which really helped.

But as I’ve noticed and you would expect the list of innovators changes all the time. Not that I’m not saying these guys are not doing anything interesting. Actually they may be but new people come along all the time.

I’ve ping’ed a few people about the idea of what I’ll be doing into the future and had various comments back. Some positive, some quite negative but all a great help with lots of ideas and thoughts. One of the most provoking has to be the idea of it being an inbreed network. It really got me thinking… How do you have a network of trusted people but not make it your friends and keep the signal strong?

The obvious example seems to be keep it open… But with openness comes the trouble of keeping the noise out. Its a challenge but I’m hoping to tackle it in a social sciency kind of way.

I really like what Mozilla has done with there Drumbeat projects. But there is a theme which means people are rally around an idea or concept at least. But its wide open, which means you can get right to the edge, no messing. The best way to get stuff from very left-field. Actually I’ve been thinking instead of copying Mozilla, maybe there’s a way to leverage or even work with Mozilla for the benefit of both organisations?

Documenting stuff no matter what

Theres lot of things BBC R&D does which it classes as a throw away experiment and then years later I see something which resembles the original concept or idea. Its critically important to document and I would say share the successes as well as the failures. In R&D right now, we tend to bury this in obscure papers which don’t get to see the light of day. I always wanted to get away from writing papers but have fallen into the trap of writing papers too.

There are better ways, be it prototypes, a series of detailed blog entries, whatever works to document experiments and projects. I don’t doubt a properly authored paper with many citations are a better that a blog post. But if the paper becomes the reason why documentation isn’t done, then maybe its a problem? Right?

I’ve noticed a whole bunch of new ways to document stuff, most of them are simply prototypes filmed and put on youtube. It won’t stand up to much scrutiny but at the point it needs to, then thats when the paper can be written. Its like that all too familiar innovation funnel. Things are cheaper at the start than the end. Maybe you don’t want to commit to writing a lengthy paper when a series of blog post will aid writing the paper at a later date. The blog post can also function as prior art too.

What I have to recognize is that I work in the Emergence stage of innovation.

Emergence – (also known as embryonic stage) shows little improvement in key performance characteristic. Technology operates far below its potential. Neither the characteristics of technology nor its applicability to market needs may be well understood. A long gestation period exists before attempts are made to produce a technology. This new invention period is characterized by a period of slow initial growth. This is the time when experimentation and initial bugs are worked out of the system.

Its ok to be wrong

its ok to be haphazard

Its ok to not have all the answers

its ok to bounce from one thing to another.

Just as long as the experiments are cheap, documented and understanding is formed and shared internally and sometimes externally.

So with all that, spilled out across the this blog entry… I’m coming around to something which is I think very impressive and fundamentally what the BBC really needs now and for the future.

I guess its exactly what the guys behind Backstage were thinking before backstage was formed in 2004.

Wish me luck…

Mozilla Media Festival meet Dj Hackday?

Mozilla Festival — Media, Freedom and the Web
London, November 4 – 6, 2011

A gathering of passionate, creative people using the web to bend, hack and reinvent media. We’re solving real problems and building prototypes with talented designers, world-class journalists, resourceful media-makers, and cutting-edge developers.

The prolific Desigan Chinniah who now works for Mozilla and the always ever so sweet Michelle Thorn came to Manchester recently to kick start one of Mozilla’s Drumbeat projects. This one was centred a collaboration with the Knight foundation and trying to change the Newsrooms of the best companies with a good harsh look at Comments, People powered news and Better Video. The badly named Mojo project, is now in its closing stages and all the efforts are being judged. I am a little ashamed that more of the Manchester digital lot didn’t turn out but I’ve already made my feelings be known on Twitter. I did also say to the guys that I would write a blog post but never got around to it, so hopefully this will be a good sub for that.

The Mojo project was and is a very interesting open innovation project but more about this in a later to be written blog post…

When Desigan and Michelle were up in Manchester, I showed them around a little. We ended up after dinner having a late drink or a night cap if you prefer. So on a late night Tuesday we headed into the Northern Quarter for drinks ending up at Noho in Stephens Square.

We talked for ages  about many things including the idea of me Djing on my pacemaker at the Mozilla Media Festival in London in November. Of course I agreed… So if you want to see me djing live and you don’t live in and around Manchester, you can see The Cubicgarden working the dance floor with his pacemaker in London.

I’ve been thinking also as part of the media festivals innovation challenges it could be possible to run Dj Hackday as one of the challenge?

I’ve contacted many people regarding the concept of Dj Hackday including SoundCloud and MixCloud. And although there behind the idea and even see the point of having a hackday just for djs oppose to a music hackday. They seem less eustatic about coming up to Manchester for it, even with the great venue we may have for it. So this could work out quite well for everyone interested… I also like the idea of “a gathering of passionate, creative people using the web to bend, hack and reinvent djing

Lytro’s light field camera

I first heard about Light Field Cameras from a industral trainee called Matthew Shotton. Although as Tony points out on Twitter, it was the idea of using it for video which drive the project.  He built a system for Makerfaire 2010 which pushed a DSLR along a short track and take pictures at certain intervals.  Once taken he pulled them into a application he built which turns them into a camera which has endless focus points… (we really should have documented this better, oh well next time for sure)

Of course theres many people working in this area and my focus is more about the grassroots and open, but its interesting to see the commercial play.

Lytro are going to release a product soon they say

TV show and a MMO in one universe

Defiance

I like the idea of Defiance

Defiance is a number of things. It’s a third-person shooter, but it’s also an MMO. It’s a PC game, but it’s also coming to consoles. It’s a video game, but it’s also a television show. A multimedia collaboration between Trion Worlds—the developer behind the MMORPG Rift, launched earlier this year—and the SyFy network, Defiance is nothing if not ambitious; events from the game will have an impact on the show, and vice versa.

Although not a totally new concept, its a good tie up and certainly something which more TV companies and maybe broadcasters will/should follow suit. The worry is that SyFy/Trion won’t get the tone right and it won’t be a success in broadcast terms or even in gaming terms. It needs to be very strong and each one should be great experiences in themselves.

However, Hill was quick to point out that even though the game and show work best in tandem, both Trion and SyFy are working hard to ensure that they also stand on their own as pieces of entertainment. “To get the full experience, though, you’re going to want to do both.”

One of the obvious ones I was thinking about when you think of this concept is The Sims. On the TV show, you could get people who play characters and interact as virtual characters in the game. The best interactions become storylines on the show… But there is the notion of who’s leading who?

How would the BBC be able to pull off such a project? Well with BBC Childrens and BBC Games Grid based in MediaCityUK, I don’t think it will be too long before it starts to naturally happen… You can certainly imagine a Radio Drama based around a live playscape.

Intriguing…

A house and trance night like no other…

When I first moved to Manchester, I hoped to hear more trance… There wasn’t that much in London and to be honest London’s never really been a city for Trance. So with the move, the hope of trance. I mean all those great super clubs such as Gatecrasher, Cream, etc are from around the north of england.

But its not happen… I’ve been to a couple of nights run by Rong… but its gone quiet.

So in my usual way I don’t like to stand by and let it go. Instead I’ve setup my own night at Arcadia on Great Ancoats Street.

Of course its not just me, its Simon Lumb better known as Dirty Si is my partner in crime on this jump into the unknown. I’ve not played out for a while now but a long time ago I use to play regularly in Bristol but running your own night (even a bar night) is something else.

Others DJs are going to join us and we’re looking at going every week… Expect flyers, surprises and a full on promotion soon enough…. Now we just need a name for the night. I’m backing “Startup.”

Social steganography with Securebook?

Rob Best wrote to me after seeing my post on Social Steganography.

I read your article on social steganography and I have also become interested in it even if it is old news by now. So intrigued I decided to write my first Android app (Securebook) with the sole purpose of letting you hide secret messages in seemingly normal Facebook status updates. Hope you’ll check it out: https://market.android.com/search?q=securebook&so=1&c=apps

I wrote back to Rob and said, I’ll check it out and I did. I got the Free ad-supported version…

Securebook required my facebook login which was done via a web login, so it shouldn’t worried too much. Once in the application was pretty simplistic. You can look at your wall or post something. When you post, you get the option to write something publicly and something hidden.

So I thought i’d test it and posted something on my facebook wall.

testing securebook lite the first social steganography app

Can’t read the message in the message? Download Securebook to see what you’re missing.

395AF95D1586A6C9A4258B2BCC6091CE19A3074721106FD591C7A366F135FD12E874725056814E63F1AF60E49681197C

Before long I received some interesting comments from friends (Combination of Micheal, Tim, Marcus, Maria, Paul) who were less that impressed… Of course you can’t see my wall (one of the problems with Facebook), so I finally did a summary and posted it to Rob Best as a email.

Having had a look about, it looks like securebook don’t understand what stenography means because they’re the ones adding lots of that text saying “Hey look, it’s encrypted”. Also, how would securebook know they’re the first social stenography app? There could be loads, and by definition you shouldn’t know if someone was using it! 🙂

Securebook isn’t doing stenography. Simple as that. Shoving the ciphertext in the exif comment data of a JPEG, and then posting the JPEG on a website, and linking to that from a facebook post (for example) would be stenography (after a fashion), because the message would not be visible. Simply adding the ciphertext clearly visible in the body of a status update is not stenography. If the person writing this app doesn’t understand that basic difference, stay away from the app, since they simply do not understand stenography.

Rob wrote back to me in this reply…

 

The paid version removes the “Can’t see the message …” text. And if you use the link functionality as your carrier, the only “give away” is that Facebook will show that the message was posted using Securebook (I may change this though).

And in reply to the rest of the comment…

Again, the cyphertext is not visible when a link is used as the carrier.

I actually had this in my first draft version. Actually, I first was encoding the message in the lower 4 bits of the photo and uploading it to Facebook. Problem is I couldn’t nail down Facebook’s compression so the message was lost. I then thought to put it in the exif data but Facebook strips that too! I then was forced to decide if I wanted to pursue this path or do something else.

I found that I could put the message in a Facebook link (replacing the actual URL) and since only the caption is displayed the message remained hidden, but of course the link was broken. I think this still constituted steganography though.

Lastly I looked into encoding the message using whitespace and also using the letter of each word in the message to do a dictionary lookup and find a word starting with that letter. The posts were of course non-nonsensical at that point so I scrapped that idea.

Going back to your comments, perhaps in version 2.0 I’ll add the ability to upload a photo to a site where I can manage the compression therefore saving the message encoded in the last 4 bits (or exif data) and link to it from Facebook.

So I think its a noble attempt and hopefully the feedback is helping Rob. Its a really great and useful first application, I’ll certainly keep it on my android device and look forward to the updates of Securebook. Good work Rob, interesting application and I’m sure once you get it cracked, people will flock to download it…