MobileOK checker

Tim Berner’s Lee recently announced that the mobileOK checker is available as a beta from the W3C at:

validator.w3.org/mobile

I tested this blog on it and got back:

The following failures are fatal and prevent the checker from doing any further test on that page:

This page failed on 1 tests

The page is not XML well-formed. This test is related to the following Best Practices: VALID_MARKUP (techniques)

Interesting. So is Blogger not compliant at all?

Enjoy!

Agile Publishing Presentation

Back in November, I gave a talk at a Mark Logic sponsored event about Agile Publishing. I thought it would be great to share the presentation given there. Later on I plan to index all of my presentations around the net.

The Agile Publishing Imperative: Accelerate the Creation of Information Products

Enjoy.

Google Develops Wikipedia Rival

Interesting. Googlie is challenging the annonymous/collective author principle of Wikipedia by developing a similar product with authored articles.

Belated Congrats

Congratulations to all of my students from NYU's Introduction to Interactive Publishing.

You were a terrific group to teach. Each of you made a real effort to participate each week in class and also on the class blog. Your final projects -- individual blogs -- were a real treat. I was very impressed with the progress made by each of you. I hope that you all keep your blogs alive. I will be looking!

I encourage you to keep posting to this blog too. You are what it made it special to begin with.

Stay in touch.

eBooks: Good for Publishing?

Tim O'Reilly on Amazon's Kindle: "My advice to publishers and authors is this: figure out what it costs to produce what you sell, estimate what kind of volume you'll be able to achieve using the best available data, and then set your prices at a level that will deliver a reasonable profit from your efforts. Sound familiar?"

Music blog aggregator

I surf through a lot of music blogs in my spare time, so I decided to try and compile what each of them are covering at AggRockBlog. The site focuses on NYC rock music. It's a little busy, but I wanted to get all of my favorite sites on there.

-B.Miller

Bayern Blog

This somehow became more of a homepage than a blog. I'd been wanting to make a site to put up a list of my husbands publications, and I thought I'd combine it with the class project. Let me just say in my defense that I am not one of those people who goes nuts and sends pics of their kids all over the place. BUT I find that people seem to think they have to ask me to send pics of my son, and then I have to bother sending them, and then they feel obliged to say something nice about how he looks. And worse: my mother-in-law has threatened to come and visit more often because she wants to see how her grandson develops. So I decided to make a blog where the family abroad can follow him along in his development. Since I just got a Mac I used the iWeb program, which turns out to be very Web 1.0 - it wouldn't really allow me to do anything fancy like cool widgets, voting, etc. But I did include a Google Ad to see if that would make me easier to google...

My Blog

My blog is Green Yard Escape and it's inspired by my efforts to make my suburban yard more "green." Let me know what you think.

NYU 2008 Continuing Education and Certificate Program

NYU’s Continuing Education and Certificate Program:
Highlights of the 2007-2008 Academic Year

This spring, the Continuing Education and Certificate program at NYU’s Center for Publishing is offering leading-edge courses designed to prepare you for a fast-paced industry in which traditional and digital media are rapidly converging. In addition to integrating digital publishing into our curriculum, we have created many "how to, hands-on" courses that will give you the practical knowledge you need to further your professional development.

Explore Editing, Marketing and Branding
Publishing has never been so captivating—and so complicated—as editors take on expanded roles creating brand extensions for their core products. The following new courses will help you refine and expand not only your editing skills and mindset, but grasp the latest print and online marketing and promotional tips from the pros.

• X59.9122 New! How to Be a Book Editor: An Inside Look at the Editorial Process
• X59.9521 New! Magazine Editing Workshop
• X59.9908 New! Promotional Writing That Works: How to Create Great Marketing Copy for Print and Online
• X59.9551 New! Brand Development: Maximizing Your Magazine's Potential
• X59.9580 New! Inside the Business of Magazines

Delve into Digital
Worried that you don’t have all those digital skills everyone says you need to succeed? There’s a whole new world of digital publishing and we invite you to explore it in these courses.

• X59.9960 New! Blogging Your Way to Profitability
• X59.9221 New! Everything You Need to Know about Digital Publishing in the Book Industry: An Introduction for the Non-Techie
• X59.9966 New! Crossing the Digital Divide: What Print Professionals Need to Know

Find Your Way Freelancing

Writing is the cornerstone of publishing careers. Develop your skills and discover additional opportunities for your career in these exciting new courses.

• X59.9192 New! Freelance Opportunities in Book Publishing
• X59.9530 New! Freelance Opportunities in Magazine Publishing
• X59.9141 New! How to Get Published: A Toolkit for Aspiring Authors

These new offerings are just a selection of our full roster of more than 40 courses. For a complete listing of our courses and to register, please visit the NYU website at http://scps.nyu.edu/publishing. If you have specific questions, please call 212-998-7171 or email pub.center@nyu.edu.

Build a Certificate
You can register for individual courses or start building a Certificate in Editing or Publishing. This valuable credential, recognized by the publishing industry, requires you to take at least five courses over a four-year period. Each of these new courses directly applies to the Editing and Publishing Certificate Programs.

Master of Science in Publishing
Interested in making an even stronger commitment to the publishing industry? If so, you may want to consider NYU’s M.S. in Publishing. This 42-credit graduate degree provides an extensive and in-depth look at all aspects of the industry, including editing, marketing and branding, finance, sales, advertising, law, management and new business development—as well as all the digital skills needed to succeed in this era of multi-platform publishing. All classes are in the evenings and are taught by major leaders in the industry. You can mold the program to your schedule and needs, taking from one to four courses a semester. This valuable degree, recognized by the industry, is designed to educate a new generation

Credit for Class

Great News! I just received the following word from NYU:

At NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies, students in our non-degree program can register for individual courses or start building a Certificate in Editing or Publishing. This valuable credential, recognized by the publishing industry, requires you to take at least five courses over a four-year period. Introduction to Interactive Publishing (X59.9221) directly applies to the Publishing Certificate Program in either the book or magazine concentration.

For a complete listing of our courses and to register, please visit the NYU website at http://scps.nyu.edu/publishing. If you have specific questions, please call 212-998-7171 or email pub.center@nyu.edu.

No Place Like Home

My blog on home museums is at floortoceiling.blogspot.com. I'm hoping I'll get to find a few more cool features for it before class, but that might be wishful thinking. If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Thanks!

One Poem at a Time

You're all invited to visit my class project blog One Poem at a Time. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

The Ethical Blogger

The Ethical Blogger is a site dedicated to the issues surrounding authoring and editing in the blogoshere. According to the site description it "a joint project of Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies, the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, Demos—The Think Tank for Everyday Democracy, and Oxford University's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism." Good stuff. Worth a look.

Super-search site

Refdesk is an umbrella search site encorporating all the usual search engines, such as google and yahoo, lesser known search engines, and a host of tools that are great for editors. Links to dictionaries -- technical, medical, legal, and regular -- include the option of downloading software such that one need only highlight a dubious word in a piece of script to connect directly to its dictionary definition www.thefreedictionary.com/add2ie.htm.
There are also language translation apps., currency converters, quotation resources and a wealth of news feeds. Again, users can subscribe to free software that dynamically supplies a preferred type of quotation, specific currency conversion, or news item type, e.g. what happened on 'this' day 20 years ago.
Community users can bookmark refdesk and other favourites on del.icio.us.com. They are also invited give back to the free, educational resource -- the PBS of cyberspace -- by making an online donation to the site.

Leon and Noel

Who are Leon and Noel? I'll let you try to figure that out after looking at my blog. I look forward to discussing it tomorrow!

Getting Into... Transformers

Here is my blog for the class project... hope you guys can find some interest in it :) The toughest part for me was getting all the widgets to work properly ...there was a whole lot of trial and error... another issue I had was finding a XML template that actually worked(for the blog background) ... they all gave me problems.... so I ended up going with the BASIC black background that BLOGGER offers as part of it's settings.

Best Tennis World

Here is a link to Best Tennis World, the blog I put together for the final project.

I hope you all enjoy it. I may add another item or two before class tomorrow night.

widgets.amazon.com

I know Prof. Howard Ratner brought this up in class a few weeks ago already, but just as a reminder for anyone trying to find widgets…. Amazon has some pretty useful ones… I’m sure you might find that one fits well with the overall purposes of your blog. In my case I used the “My Favorites” WIDGET to link to specific books available on Amazon that I feel are interesting in relation to the MAIN topic I am writing about.... [EXAMPLE on lefthand side]

Megaputer Intelligence

I had an idea that data mining had something to do with tracking users' navigation histories to figure out who was coming to a given website, where they were coming from, and what products or paths to suggest to them while they were there. But on further consideration, and after consulting Wikipedia's intimidating article, I realized I wasn't quite sure what data mining actually was. I tried consulting some of the websites of some of the companies that actually provide data-mining services; and while I still feel a little vague, that was helpful, particularly when I looked at Megaputer's site.

Megaputer Intelligence gives a rundown of the various different uses to which companies might want to put data-mining services. Even more specific are the actual solution packages they sell, which encompass survey analysis, cross-sell analysis, complaint analysis, and so on.

In addition to data mining, Megaputer also offers text mining, which it defines as a way of "[automatically] eliciting knowledge from unstructured text. . . based on a combination of linguistic, semantic, statistical and machine learning techniques." If text mining is able to "understand" or categorize a text semantically, I wondered if it might evolve into an interesting online tool for book publishers.

Legal Searching

Justia Blawgsearch is a search engine for legal blogs. Blawgsearch also tracks and ranks the popularity of the blogs, search terms and blawg post tags. While going through the site, I also noticed that Justia recently launched a free database of federal district court cases that they put together using Google's hosted Business Custom Search Engine for the full text search. This is one of Google’s many search apps. The blog entry about this (http://onward.justia.com/ on 9/30/07) mentions that “Google is now OCRing PDF image files, so even PDF files that have images of scanned documents will be, in most cases, full text indexable and searchable (just like the OCR of Google's Book Search).”

Class Schedule

Just a reminder about the class schedule.

Session 7 - Thursday, November 15
Session 8 - Friday, November 29

I look forward to seeing you there!

Break the Confines of Keyword Search

An interesting new search engine is being developed based on natural language processing. The following is from their Press Release of September 17, 2007:

Powerset is building a consumer search engine based on breakthrough natural language processing technology licensed from PARC and developed internally. Unlike other search engines that index keywords, Powerset does a deep linguistic analysis on every sentence it reads. Powerset extracts and indexes facts about every sentence in every page, making its index the first truly robust semantic index of the web. Powerset will offer a transformative search experience, with better, more relevant results. Powerset Labs is an online community that will contribute to the development of Powerset and allow the company a direct line of communication with consumers to better understand the potential, possibilities, and challenges of building a large-scale search engine.

Some related articles:

• The Risks to Google's Rise
• The Human Touch That May Loosen Google's Grip

Advertising in Facebook

Here are two interesting articles about the new Facebook model of advertising that came up in our class discussion this week:

http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/08/technology/facebook_ads.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2007110908

http://techland.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2007/11/06/big-advertisers-are-facebooks-new-friends/

Interactive scholarly edition of Roland

A scholarly edition that lets you "construct" or read your own version of the text based on your choices of theme, character, image, or section. This wouldn't work for me in IE, but did work for me in Firefox. Start by selecting an excerpt from the left-hand column, then scroll over the characters or themes in the center (sword) column and you'll see the relevant sections of the text are highlighted in the right column. Click on a center column link and you're given a selected group of excerpts to work with on the left.

Penguin's web 2.0 features

For books, I usually go to Barnes and Noble or Amazon, but this assignment prompted me to look around at some of the big book publishers. Penguin has a good site with a blog (doesn't look like a popular feature) and podcasts. They list 'top 5's' as well, but it isn't clear if this is from any rating system or not. I don't see a way to vote for them, but perhaps it is accumulated from what people buy from the site.

Random House also has blogs and podcasts, but the blogs again look like news clips written by staff to sell the books.

Making a standard blogger template into three columns

http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/2007/08/three-columns-dots-template.html
offers fairly simple directions for editing the XML code of several standard blogger templates to add a third column. I had no success trying to get downloaded non-blogger templates to work before I discovered this option.

Audible.com

I just signed up for an account at Audible.com after seeing an ad on the Subway train for it

Audible specializes in providing digital audio editions of books, newspapers and magazines, original programming, and TV and radio subscriptions. Consumers buy and download audio content from http://www.audible.com/

It's 14.95 a month to be a member ...but every month you get a FREE download of an audio book (most books run between $20 to $40 so it's a pretty good deal to go and get the audio version from audible dot com)

I downloaded 2 audio books:

I Am America (And So Can You!)
by Stephen Colbert

Hollywood Hulk Hogan
by (wrestler) Hulk Hogan

Most people download audio to their PCs and Macs and then transfer the audio to MP3 players, personal digital assistants (PDAs), or to smart mobile devices (SMDs) for listening on the go. Others "burn" the content to audio CDs.... many howevere simply listen at their computers.

you can listen to a SAMPLE of the following book for FREE off of the site
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More

HELP GUIDE: Installing Blogger XML Templates

The first thing you do is download the template from the website. Go to http://www.google.com/ and type in keywords like "XML, Blogger, Templates" (This is just one sample... feel free to try others) ....

This will lead you to webpages that offer "Templates" to download... after choosing one you like.... download and save the file to your desktop.

Once you’ve done that your file will be in a .xml or .txt format It’s not necessary to open the file though, you can use the automated file uploader built into Blogger’s control panel.

This makes it easy to install a new template.

BY THE WAY..... when building the BLOG... loading up the template should be the first thing you do... because as we saw in class that day... when you try to change the template ...you may loose some widgets in the process.

Hope this guide helps... I had a tough time with this last week.... looking foward to class on NOV 8th ! :)

Class Resumes 8 November

Session 6 is on for this Thursday!

Please remember to post any interesting "Book Publishing" sites that make use of interactive publishing techniques.

I look forward to seeing all of you there.

National Novel Writing Month

This site convinces would-be authors to stop procrastinating and just write something, anything that totals 50,000 words, in the month of November. It's kind of competition, but everyone who completes the word count wins the prize... which is, not really anything except the respect of your fellow NaNoWriMo'ers. I'm sure a lot of people have heard of this already, but the website has developed into its own community where you can read excerpts from users and check out who's been published, etc.

Roughly related—but not really relevant until February—is the RPM challenge where people attempt to write and record an entire album of music (10 songs or 35 minutes) in the month of February.

-B.Miller

Web 2.0 and Vanity Presses

Commercial book publishers have been criticized for fearing the paradigm shift of the Internet, and for being slow to integrate new technologies into their websites and their marketing strategies. Because I do freelance reviewing, I spend a lot of time wading through the websites of the larger presses, and I can attest that they're a real drag to search and navigate—fifteen different imprints of the same title to scroll past, genres with too much content to browse, etc. However, companies that offer self-publishing have apparently not been so lethargic. In fact, one of the prizes in the Books category of the 2007 Web 2.0 awards was given to www. lulu.com, a company that offers self-publishing services.

If you want to play around, you can log in as InteractivePublishing, with the password intpub. The site is definitely very Web 2.0—a web-based platform (with upselling of additional special services—marketing, translation, packaging, etc.), wherein they offer the technology, and you control your own content and design. Not only that, but you can sell your book right on the site and buy books from other self-publishers. You can join groups for children's authors, horror writers, etc., or you can create your own community. There's a blog, live chat, multimedia and so on.

Most importantly, there's a rating system. Usually vanity presses are disparaged because of the lack of quality control—scholarly and commercial reviews can't get involved with their lists because there'd be so much schlock to wade through. But although Lulu will facilitate the publication of anything and everything, there is a pre-screening process powered by its users, so it might actually have a shot at competing with commercial presses in terms of getting press and selling copies.

Project Gutenburg has nothing to do with vanity presses, but it is kind of Web. 2.0. They offer totally free access to online books that are no longer under copyright. It's accomplished almost entirely by volunteers. I used to be a volunteer proofreader with them, using their all-Web interface. There are cross-platform capabilities, and although there isn't actually voting, the site does track and publicize the top downloads. Moreover, the site is extremely vocal and committed about the freedom to download, share, distribute information, which seems almost as much Web 2.0 as RSS feeds.

Book Publishing and Web 2.0

Chronicle Books, an innovative trade publisher based in San Francisco, has translated its quirky print products (e.g., gift items and clever kits) into an online bonanza. They feature podcasts, a blog, ePostcards, and videos, and they continually come up with ever more creative ways to make the Web a place to feature, display, and market their titles.

"21 Surefire tips" link fixed

Link fixed in 21 Surefire Tips Article and Sermo article below.

Apologies to those who were trying to follow the link before.

Pfizer and Sermo

Sermo is the largest online physician community devoted to sharing clinical information and trends in healthcare. Any member physician can pose questions, and get volunteer responses from other physicians. Pfizer and Sermo have just announced their commitment to a strategic collaboration in which Pfizer will share its knowledge base with the Sermo community. The expectation is faster and more focused communications that respond to specific clinical problems in real time.

Ad support as a complete business model for consumer mags

Since last week we talked about the viability of sponsorship as a sustainable business model for PLoS, I thought it would be interesting this week to look for a few consumer magazines that depend basically entirely on advertising, eschewing subscriptions altogether. I have to say that this was much harder than I'd thought.

Obviously, it's much easier for an online periodical than a print periodical to go totally over to advertising, asking for nothing from readers, but even the e-zines I looked at had small exceptions to the advertising-only rule. The Onion is an almost completely free publication that has had notable success both in print and digitally. Still, The Onion also makes some revenues from merchandise, though I can't imagine it's much; and people who live outside the free distribution range have to subscribe. Wired is a technology mag that sells the print version, but has completely free online content. It both recycles some features from the print mag and adds new stuff. The New Yorker has the same business model: it has completely free online access, which includes some but not all the print features, plus extras. Salon is an online-only magazine, without a print component. It upsells users, offering a huge amount of stuff for free (with the option, every now and then, to watch or to skip an advertisement), but it also suggests that you subscribe to Salon Premium.

Tangentially, here's an article (from last year) on how magazines are doing utilizing Web 2.0 constructively. It's kind of what you'd expect, but it's a nice summary.

Consumer Magazines

I looked at some of Rodale's magazines - Prevention, Women's Health, Runner's World, etc. They all have some Web 2.0 features (blogs, RSS feeds, videos, most popular ratings, etc.). I looked at these sites because previously I saw a video of an NYU conference last year on "Who's in Charge? Old Media, New Media... or the Consumer?" When I watched it, I thought it was interesting that Steve Murphy from Rodale talked about how the websites were deliberately decentralized and each magazine had an independent site. My company has gone back and forth about whether to focus online on the individual product brands or have everyone under a strong company brand.

21 Surefire Tips for a Successful Blog Launch

A really useful article on how to best promote your blog.
"The 21 points included in this checklist will cover the basics of what you need to do during those all-important first two weeks of your blog’s life. While there are no guarantees in the blogosphere, if you follow these launching tips closely, your chances of success are greatly improved."
See avivadirectory.

FYI. I stumbled on this using "StumbleUpon". It is also highly rated via Digg.

Some of you may want to use these tips for your own blogs.

Enjoy.

No Boundaries

Consumers have been enjoying National Geographic magazine since 1888. Now there's a TV channel (international and U.S.), as well as a web site and various other media associated with it, e.g., an Education site, Adventure magazine, National Geographic Explorer Classroom magazine, National Geographic Kids magazine, Traveler magazine, books, CDs, DVDs, maps, retail store, film projects and screenings, concerts, lectures, and exhibitions at the National Geographic Museum.

Their mission: Founded in 1888 to "increase and diffuse geographic knowledge," the Society works to inspire people to care about the planet.

Banks do Web 2.0

If a bank can do it, so can I. Techneophyte's first homework exercise: present a 2.0 site. Royal Bank's blog  meets several criteria. The student bloggers on it involve (1) people talking to machines, while voting on preferred bloggers is (2) "bottom up" and involves a (3) publish-and-subscribe mode vs. simple searching. Links to facebook and other social networking sites further make this site (4) relationship vs. transaction oriented. Users can link from there to a separate, student banking site on which Royal Bank offers (5) micro-aggregation -- pie charts, etc., representing that individual user's finances. Formerly, one would have to have a trust fund to merit such reporting. Now, in keeping with Web 2.0, it's power to the people!

STM Open Access Journals

The Public Library of Science offers an open-access collection of journals for the scientific community. The site hosts journals for Biology, Medicine, Computational Biology, Genetics, Pathogens, PLoS ONE (general science and medicine research), and Neglected Tropical Diseases.

The site is a model for how non-profit organizations (like the American Institute of Physics) could offer open-source access to their journals. PLoS charges the authors a fee to publish on their site to cover the cost of peer-reviewing among other costs.

For an idea of what open-source really means, this is from the site's FAQ:

Open access means everything published in PLoS journals is immediately available online for free. Read it, host it, print it, copy it, distribute it—all use is fair use, so long as the original authors and source are credited.

-B. Miller

Canada's GPHIN

The Global Public Health Intelligence Network uses machine-to-machine communication to search and filter Internet reports in various languages for information that may relate to public health threats—viral outbreaks, contaminated water supplies, famine, etc. It then passes the results on as HITs to be analyzed by officials at Canada's Public Health Agency.

Any organization may pay a fee to subscribe. While the subscription service is perhaps intended primarily for government or philanthropic health organizations, medical publishers could no doubt benefit from this service as well (as could anyone running a conspiracy theory website).

It's so effective that in February of 2006, Larry Brilliant, head of Google's philanthropic division, committed a $100,000 grant from the Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference to a project that will use GPHIN as the basis for an International System for Total Early Disease Detection.

I didn't find any info on how that's progressing so far—it may be one of those projects for which a 2–4 month time-to-launch does not apply.

iOpenAccess

Taylor & Francis, a leading publisher in scholarly sciences, announces that its "iOpenAccess" option has been extended to cover 31 journals in environmental and agricultural sciences, behavioral sciences, and development studies. This is in addition to the 175 journals from T&F's Chemistry, Mathematics, and Physics portfolios, 7 behavioral science journals from Psychology Press, and medical and bioscience journals from Informa Healthcare.

All authors whose manuscripts are accepted for publication in one of these iOpenAccess journals will have the option to make their articles available to all via the Journal's website, and to post to repositories, for a one-off fee.

Blogging at the New York Times

Since I work for a newspaper (Die Welt) I'm very interested in what the "traditional" media is doing on the internet. Our online site offers RSS feeds on many different topics, just like the NY Times does. However, it seems unattractive to download any of these feeds as each one (as I understand it) only focuses on one topic. What the reader needs is an indiviudalised RSS feed that knows his / her interests. Is anyone doing that yet / what would it take? -I also have another question relating to housingmaps.com, which I wrote about last week. I mentioned that people put mashed up maps on their websites, and that google lets them use googleearth etc. for it. I was wondering when "mash ups" are legal? Are they usually done by users - or does something like Facebook qualify as a giant mash up? Still trying to figure out what exactly the term entails...

Acclaim's DANCE Online (Possible "Mashups"?)

LUIS MORENO - I'm having a little trouble finding an appropriate example of either a "Really Simple Syndication" , "Mashups", "Social Bookmarking"or a "AJAX" because I am still getting myself familiar with the terms. Maybe I can better understand their meanings by the next class. I can across a website that may or may not fall under the "Mashups" descriptions... but I do know it's definitely WEB 2.0.

Acclaim's DANCE Online is a a free-to-play multiplayer online dancing game. It is considered to be a Massively multiplayer online game (also called MMO) meaning a computer game which is capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously.

DANCE Online enables players to cooperate and compete with each other on a grand scale, and at times interact with people around the world over an INSTANT MESSAGING feature that is also a "built-in" part of the game. (People usually talk to each other before and after dance battles)

These type of games started out in ASIA, however what makes DANCE! Online original is the fact that it features top talent and master recordings from Warner Music Group Corp , making it the first free multiplayer online dance game to feature major label content and artists.

During the launch of the game ....Atlantic Records recording artist Cupid, with his hit single “Cupid Shuffle,” made a personal virtual appearance in the game. The idea is to have more recording artists create their own avatar and play the game live online and chat with fans.

HOW TO PLAY & DETAILS: Players of DANCE! Online can create their own avatar (create a character) and use either the keyboard or most PC compatible dance pads to match the beat of the song and to make their character perform choreographed dance steps.

Within DANCE Online , there is virtual currency where the player can earn and accumulate money. Players are able to purchase optional items from the game shop to customize their virtual characters with clothing and various accessories. Players can also purchase “song packs” to dance to even more songs from WMG’s catalog. The game is free and will be supported by in-game advertising provided by IGA Worldwide.

VIDEO: THE GAME IN ACTION



COUPLE BATTLES:

Collections of RSS Feeds

I have to admit that I have never signed up for RSS feeds, so I was looking around to find some that I found interesting. I found a few sites that list multiple RSS feeds for various types of information. One is Chordata which lists thousands of different feeds from areas of sports, business, health, etc. Registered users can also rate the feeds. You can also recommend other feeds to the site.

RSS Benefits

I kept this article for my file on "things we should be doing but aren't doing." It's written by a law librarian and discusses how it would be helpful to her if more publishers used RSS feeds to inform her about new titles instead of using direct mail, email alerts, etc. For example, the article mentions that John Wiley has a RSS feed for new titles by subject. What I'm interested in finding out is how hard this is to get started.

Get Any Content from the Web

Dapper.net aims to make it easy and possible for anyone to extract and reuse content from any website. By doing so, the hope is to allow others to realize their creativity and implement new and exciting services and applications.

This provides new means for people to access content (e.g., RSS) from an individual site. Dapper can be used to create feeds, widgets, and APIs with the content and links.

Interesting Sites

http://www.mla.org/map_single An interactive mashup of US census data on languages with maps via a proprietary software (GIS). You can get a tour of the varous features at http://www.mla.org/map_tour106.

http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=9TSZK4G35XEZJZG21T60 This seems like Web 2.0. but what do you call it? This particular example enables users to volunteer to examine satellite photos of the Nevada landscape to help find the missing flier Steve Fossett; one more way of using the web to harness the collective energy of a large number of people (and their computers). The whole framework is a confusing Amazon beta site called "Mechanical Turk" that lets you use their APIs to build applications to do this sort of thing; you can even pay people to take on these tasks, called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks). The site already has 66,179 projects that you can work on.

http://essay.blogs.nytimes.com/ An interesting blog based on a NYTimes essay, "What's the Matter With College," published in July + the responding essays solicited from college students + a growing file of reader comments on the winning essays + "popular tags" of the essays (weighted by frequency?) + audio files of the original essay and the first-prize winner + a search function to search all 600 submitted essays (by word, state, institution, and year of graduation) + (and let's not forget this) interactive and ever-changing advertising. Using the web as a platform--kind of a digital soap box where millions of people can comment on six people commenting on an essay commenting on millions of people. This resource becomes richer the more it is used, but at some point it becomes pretty unwieldy--already there are hundreds of posted comments with no organizational principle other than chronology.

http://www.nform.ca/publications/social-software-building-block A helpful description of how "social software" works, not technically, but in terms of what it allows people to do.

Personalized Start Pages

Traditionally, to subscribe to an RSS feed, you first had to install a news or feed reader on your computer (or you could use most browsers' favorites/bookmarks menu functions). Personalized start pages will also manage the RSS feeds for you though, as well as providing a place to put all your downloaded widgets. I like igoogle best because I can see my gmail inside it, and because you can consolidate all your feeds into google reader so you don't have quite so many boxes floating around. But pages like Netvibes and Pageflakes are also quite popular (for some more background, see Mashable's review of Pageflakes).

As you can see, although these start pages are infinitely customizable, they generally come with some RSS feeds pre-loaded, from big publishers like the New York Times or Flickr, as well as with some of the most popular widgets pre-installed, like the Wikipedia or amazon search bars. I was wondering how the developers of these start pages determine which feeds and widgets to put on the default template for all new users - whether it's just based on popularity and dependability, or whether the publishers actually pay for that placement. I wasn't able to find out much (anything), but it did start me thinking about what would be involved for a publisher that wanted to offer its own version of a personalized start page. I don't know how involved an endeavour that is or whether there is or will be Open Source technology to facilitate it, but it struck me as something that could substantially benefit companies that have existing websites and an existence beyond the start page.

For example, the company I work for full-time is a membership organization that provides educational and career services to the financial industry. If we offered a personalized start page to members and non-members, it could not only include a feed about our upcoming events and member benefits, but could pull feeds from online industry publications like Crain's, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and so on. Constant updates for various exchanges could run in our space, and members who were logged in to their accounts could also have special free access to subscription feeds from Reuters, Bloomberg, Capital IQ, and so forth. Special widgets to calculate stock values, exchange rates, etc., could be pre-installed. Convincing industry professionals to set NYSSA as their home page and to use us as the portal through which a whole realm of online tools and information is accessed would be a substantial benefit in terms of general visibility, in terms of ease of publicizing upcoming events and other special offers, and in terms of promoting (paid) membership in our organization to current non-members in the financial community.

On the other hand, the small literary journal where I'm an editor could benefit from the same scheme in quite a different way. If we set up a personalized start page, it could include a feed for our weekly web-exclusive publications of poetry, prose, and interviews; feeds for updates to the blogs and home sites of our contributors and editors; and feeds for updates to comparable journals and small-press publishers. If we made it interesting and effective enough, people who had never heard of or read our journal might come to it simply as a personalized start page, and might then be drawn to become part of our audience or even a print subscriber.

So it struck me that, as feeds and widgets and stuff like that grows increasingly popular, actually creating and managing personalized start pages holds a lot more marketing and revenue potential for companies than simply putting their info out there in a feed. On the other hand, there are doubtless drawbacks -- technological? expenditure related? -- that I haven't considered.

Vox.com blogsite

Sixapart.com hosts a blog site very similar to blogger called Vox.com. The biggest difference is that you can make blog posts and include your own information that you've already uploaded to flickr.com, photobucket.com, youtube, amazon and several more. You can even use public image sites like imagehost.com to insert their available images into your posts.

The site also combines the blogs together into a social networking site like myspace or facebook. The site takes advantage of metadata by tagging words in your profile, as well as any books, videos, images, etc. that you post.

Check out the page I set up.

The site tour may also be of interest.

-B.Miller

Online Word Processor

This software-as-a-service (SaaS) application will work online or offline, in a browser or on a desktop, on Windows, Macintosh or Linux, and provide the exact same experience regardless of platform or connection status. Adobe is promising that Buzzword will be the next generation in online, collaborative document creation and management.

Session 2 Homework Assignment

Thanks for all of the great contribution to the Session 1 assignment. You all found some really interesting sites and did an excellent job explaining them in class.

Here is the Session 2 class assignment. As before, please have fun with it. There are no wrong answers!

Explore the web trying to find 1-2 sites relevant and interesting for Session 3: The Technologies -- Expanded Definitions and Impact

• RSS - Really Simple Syndication - Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts


• Mashups - a combination of two or more web-based resources to create a new application


• Social Bookmarking - a way for users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages


• AJAX - Asychronous Javascript and XML

Post each link and a brief description to this blog by end of day Wednesday, October 3. We will then discuss as many of these sites as possible at Class Session 3 on Thursday, October 4.

Potential of the Geoweb

Two years ago, Paul Rademacher merged data from craigslist and google maps to create housingmaps.com. Originally a hacker, he has since been employed by google. Google now allows everybody to fill their maps with information such as coordinates or addresses, and about 4 million people have already put such "personalised" or "mashed-up" maps on their homepages. What is interesting about this page and the success of googleearth is that location has become more important on the internet. Although space has often been thought to be of no relevance on the web, users are now discovering what is called the geoweb. More than 250 million people have downloaded googleearth, in addition to those using virtual earth by Microsoft. They all contribute to the data and produce their own maps. Openstreetmap is something of a geographical Wikipedia. There seem to be a lot of risks with geographical information that's been pieced together by pretty much anyone. Do I really want to trust that information when travelling or building a house? On the other hand, there is probably a lot of potential in gathering the local information of users. Once cell phone companies provide a service to users that makes their location known, they could for example be updated about the best pizza place in their proximity. Or, with regards to the popular social networking sites, be notified if an old friend happens to be in the same neighborhood. This provides huge potential for advertisers, but also bears the risk for the user to become too transparent and traceable.

BBC News

For news I like to read the BBC. In addition to decent world news, they track and show what people have been searching for on their site. They also have a fun (if you like celeb 'news') feature called celebdaq (http://www.bbc.co.uk/celebdaq/) where people rate celebrities and it is tracked like a stock with their value going up and down.

I am curious about how often the information is updated on these sites that track and show you what other people have searched. Is it updated after every search or do they tally up a particular time range? Meaning, do they take a 24 hour timeshot and report what the top searches were for that day?

Technology Review Weekly Update

Technology Review is published by MIT to share with a broad general audience news about significant developments in technology. Weekly updates are available at no cost by subscribing to alerts delivered by email. Among other features, the publishers have built a community of experts who share opinions about technology-related products and services.

Richard Chase

Online Gaming Theory Book

The Insitute for the Future of the Book collects several interesting sites, my favorite being an online book about online gaming. The book collects the chapters in short pages so they can be easily and quickly read. On top of that, users can comment and discuss each section.

The site also includes the site The Googlization of Everything, another online book in progress, dealing with how the author believes that Google is "disrupting culture, commerce, and community."

Movie Reviews

For movie reviews I have relied on rottentomatoes for a while. The site has changed a bit over the years, but they have essentially been using the 2.0 concept for years. People write their own reviews of a movie and grade them. The site averages the grades and gives the movie an overall rating that changes daily based on the reviews sent in by users.

Recently I find myself using the site more for the basic movie times and locations as the overall ranking of movies has shifted from my ideals. A few years ago I generally agreed with the ratings they gave movies, but lately I seem to like some movies that get the 'rotten tomato' ranking and vice versa. I'm sure my likes/dislikes have changed, but I think the people writing reviews has changed. It really shows how a site I really liked in the past is becoming out of date for me.

Reviews and Ratings

My site picks are ones that rely on reviews and ratings. Amazon and epinions are good. I also like Zagat which expanded on what they already accomplished in print by soliciting opinions from “us”. However I still admit to using the print guide and so do a lot of people I know (they do have zagat-to-go for your phone, etc., but I don’t know anyone who has used it). For travel information, I’ve used Trip Advisor. The site is easy to use. It combines information on travel deals with user opinions and ratings. Users can post reviews, photos and video and ask questions. They can also create “goLists” and travel blogs. There are a lot of other good travel sites, but this one usually has the most posts and the most recent.

Enriching

These are small, visually dynamic, easily configurable widgets that allow you to feature products from Amazon on blogs, websites, and social networking pages.

ShowBuzz.com

CBS NEWS has a fun entertainment site called www.TheShowBuzz.com… it’s full of rich content… maybe too much content… it’s interesting because it caters to people that like MOVIES, TV, MUSIC, FASHION, GAMES, COMEDY, THEATER, LIVE ONLINE RADIO…wow!... pretty much covers a lot of ground as far as the entertainment goes. Each article on this site is basically set up in TWO parts.

The first upper-half is what a writer at CBS NEWS wrote… and the lower half is what The People had to say… here is an example More Vanessa Hudgens Pics Surface Online . The area in WHITE is your regular article done by a reporter… the area in PINK is what the registered readers have to say regarding the article… I love the disclaimer… it’s humorous “Now you're in the public comment zone. What follows is not The Showbuzz stuff; it comes from other people and we don't vouch for it.”

I have gotten so used to seeing the articles set up that way that it’s the one big reason why I keep coming back to this particular site … I come back to see if there are NEW COMMENTS by the user regarding a certain article … it’s much more interesting than the article itself…. In fact, when there are no comments at all… For example in the “Marc Anthony and J.Lo going back to school” … it makes the article look like it’s lacking something.

LuisMoreno

Why not Fiction?

I find it interesting that, if collaboration is one of the defining tropes of Web 2.0, it is taking place primarily in the realm of non-fiction, among newsies, techies, and other aficionados of facts. Collaboration used to be a particular hallmark of creative artists—painters, poets, musicians—but artists are leery of the Web, nervous (with some justification) of having their work degraded by unskilled practitioners.

The creative collaborations that do take place are often low-brow, lo-fi, and in a sense unambitious projects, like somethingawful's photoshop phridays. These are dadaistically hilarious, but they only take you so far. Concepts like wikifiction have somehow gotten pigeonholed into fantasy role-playing genre novels, and it's hard to get too excited about something as massively derivative as fanfiction (see also http://www.fanfiction.net ), though that's certainly a genuine and intriguing Web 2.0 phenom. It's a shame that the art of Web collaboration works so well in the domain of facts but has created such uninspiring results in the online arts, and it's confusing, too, from the standpoint of potential profit.

I would have thought marketers in publishing and advertisers in general would have seen the monetary possibilities of creative collaborations. If mass-market publishers or even smaller houses were to sponsor and advertise their own fanfiction rings they might significantly increase traffic to their sites. Small presses and online literary journals could definitely up their numbers by initiating collaborative projects for their readers. It should be possible for publishing houses (or other kinds of labels or distributors) to open fee-based subscription fanfiction sites in which the original author (or recording artist, or animator) participates with subscribers in creating an online serialized novel (or other artwork), or in which participants would vote on the best annual efforts, and the winners would go on to be read by the author, and selected for a prize (I'm sure, actually, that this must have been done somewhere by someone). Think the Heinz Ketchup campaign on You Tube, but with one massive ad-space in constant flux, growing and (hopefully) improving, rather than thousands of individually produced advertisements, most of which are garbage. Obviously copyright and IP issues are the real bogeys turning artists from avant-gardists into reactionaries . Envious of the vitality of the Web space, covetous of its potential, but jealously guarding their sacred texts and graven images, creative artists are the despicable conservatives in the Age of Information. Issues of collaboration aside, I'm shocked that there are poets refusing to publish in online journals for fear someone should copy and paste their work to a blog, and artists defacing their own work with gallery or distributor logos stamped over the images lest a home printer be put to nefarious uses. According to "The Machine Is Us/Ing Us," we're going to have to re-think copyright. I think, actually, that an irrevocable shift toward the total devaluation of copyright and intellectual property could already have taken place. You probably remember how in April Internet activists led "cyber riots," plowing down all attempts to stop them from disseminating a DVD/Blu-Ray encryption key. For the first historical moment that I can think of, activists and individuals are indisputably on equal ground or in a stronger position that the powers they threaten. The encryption key activists were not protesting the suppression of the cryptographic key; they were publishing it, unstoppably. Of course online activists have acted out in support of individual authorship as well. Besides, the AACS riots, the other notable act of cyberactivism that comes to mind are the denial-of service attacks enacted against ebaum when it blatantly republished a site from ytmnd (see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YTMND) as ebaum's own work. Protestors from across the Web (and notably from somethingawful) joined forces to crash ebaum.

Interestingly, the site that was stolen from ytmnd was itself a parody drawn from (and basically just consisting of) stolen material. Also interestingly, even this old-fashioned protest in favor of individuality, authorship, and IP rights was an act of spontaneous collaboration, a creative collaborative act from the collective.

- Micaela

Audiostreet.net

One of the websites I would like to discuss is … audiostreet.net it’s a perfect example of Web 2.0 being brought to life by musicians in need of exposure. According to Audiostreet.net they offer “a complete solution for bands & artists looking to make a strong internet presence.” They basically take the concept behind MYSPACE MUSIC but add the elements of TOP TEN LISTs and ONLINE “RADIO” PLAY. It amazes me how sites like these are changing the way musicians feel about posting and sharing their material… taking into consideration that most artists have a fear of having their work “stolen” in one way of another if posted on the internet. Ideas that have changed the world usually emerge from “necessity” …

I feel that the need to get “good music” out there is what is making musician seriously consider the internet for building up a fan-base. From one end of the spectrum music-fans no longer have to relay of territorial radio to “tell you” what you should listen to…. The Internet gives them more choices. While at the other end, artists and bands that can’t land that major labels are looking for alternatives to getting their music out there. Places like Audiostreet.net bring those two” needs” together….
1) They give the MUSICIAN, free music hosting with a basic account (which includes 3 songs) for a fee they can SELL their music on their own through the site….
2) And for the MUSIC-FAN it puts the music choices in their hands… all music on this sites is split up by genre and top ten lists (and languages) …the fan browses the site based on their musical tastes and interest…. You add music to your own playlist (your own radios station)TOP TEN lists are generated by how many times people have clicked on a track and there are always new songs being added as long as there are musicians willing to post their music….

The MACHINE is feed by the users… The MACHINE replaces (on the Internet) the traditional “Radio Programming Director”

LuisMoreno

Net Generation: Digital natives

Considerations for the Ne(x)t Generation workplace.

Session 1 Homework Assignment

Please remember to do your class assignment. It should be fun and there are no wrong answers!

Explore the web trying to find 2-3 sites relevant and interesting for Session 2: Characteristics of Web 2.0 Businesses including the seven core competencies.

1. Services -- not packaged software -- with cost effective scalability
2. Control over unique, hard to create data sources that get richer as more people use them
3. Trusting users as co-developers
4. Harnessing collective intelligence
5. Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
6. Software above the level of a single device
7. Lightweight user interfaces, development models, and business models

Post each link and a brief description to this blog by end of day Wednesday, September 26. We will then discuss as many of these sites as possible at Class Session 2 on Thursday, September 27.

Session 1

Thanks to everyone for a really interactive class session class tonight. I hope you all got quite a bit out of it.

Please be sure to check your email for invites to author the blog.

Also be sure to watch "The Machine is Us/ing Us" -- it is the first video in the Web 2.0 Videos clip list below but can also be found here.

Also have a look at the Session 1 links list. These are sites that we covered in class.

I will let you know where next week's class will be held in the next day or so.

NYU Introduction to Interactive Publishing Course Description

This course is designed to show publishing professionals the latest structural and content changes on the Internet, and to give them a thorough understanding of the concepts behind Web 2.0 in relation to content development, searching, data mining, repositories, bookmarking, tagging, social networking, blogs, and video usage. Topics are covered through lectures, case studies, guest speakers, and open discussion of strategies and practical applications of web technology to different publishing businesses. Students explore key technologies including RSS, mashups, and AJAX.

A new blog is born

The spirit of this blog is to track interactive online publishing innovations. It is primarily to be used as a reference for students of my class Introduction to Interactive Publishing to be taught at NYU starting September 20, 2007.

If you are interested in this class you can sign up at
http://www.scps.nyu.edu/departments/course.jsp?catId=56&courseId=79222

Feel free to ping me for more information.