Celebrating a do-it-yourself Web apprenticeship

Updated Jan.15, the day of Aaron Swartz’s funeral; I changed the headline and added a few more links

About finding things out for yourself.

I first saw Aaron Swartz in 2000, when he visited MIT as a runner-up in a youth programming contest, having accomplished at 13 something I couldn’t do at 50 — and me with most of a Ph.D. I don’t remember whether I had a chance to say “congratulations.” At least I got to applaud, and shake my head in wonder.

Many heads are shaking this weekend at the news that Aaron apparently took his own life on Friday, at 26, beset by a federal prosecution over his copying a lot of files from an MIT computer without permission, and probably suffering from depression.

The “why” of his death is just terrible and sad. I would rather celebrate his life by sharing some of his writing, especially items that reflect his passion for tracking down information, asking questions, learning and building things.

In his own words, here’s how a 7th grade assignment helped Aaron find his heroes. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/mylifewithtim

About a dozen paragraphs down, that page’s picture of Aaron and “TimBL” (Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web) speaks volumes, but so does his unnecessary apology for the quality of his writing — which was already excellent.

I suspect his skill with words — posting curious questions and articulate arguments in email lists — is what set in motion his brilliant, passionate and much too short career.

When he was 14 or so, he wrote an essay on self-education and Web apprenticeship that is no longer at its original address on a family website, but I quickly found a copy in the Internet Archive using its Wayback Machine. Here originally: swartzfam.com/aaron/school/2001/02/19/

From writing he eventually moved on to public speaking, again with self-effacing comments, and posted this script from an online talk he gave to a gathering in India. He borrowed the title from Kurt Vonnegut, another hint of how well-read this young man was: How to get a job like mine.

He was even more public after a successful campaign against legislation he saw as online censorship, and you can see him talk about it on YouTube.

I lost track of Aaron for years. I used Creative Commons and the OpenLibrary.org and the followed the campaign against SOPA and PIPA; I probably used other tools, sites and projects he was involved with, but I didn’t make the connection back to that 13-year-old visiting MIT. When news of his death started spreading from the MIT Tech newspaper to Twitter and beyond, I spent a day following his links and being amazed.

I remembered that I heard from him in 2005 or 2006 after I linked my blog to an automated “river of news” style aggregator for New York Times news stories — something he had set in 2002, using the paper’s first RSS feed. It’s probably not what the feed’s creators had in mind; I think the original idea was to help bloggers link directly to Times stories for discussion purposes, not to build alternatives to the paper’s own front page and archives. But the RSS feed system made it possible, so Aaron did it.

(At 14, his age entirely irrelevant at the keyboard, Aaron had joined an email-list working group of Web experts drafting a formal specification for a more complex “RDF Site Summary” version of RSS, but the Times earlier “Really Simple Syndication” version was good enough for this project.)

In fact, his nytimes.blogspace.com site kept running until September 2009, when the Times changed its feed hosting system. You can still find a scattering of seven years’ worth of Times links through the archive.org Wayback Machine’s copies of that aggregator page.

Even back in 2005, Aaron seemed pleased that someone in Tennessee was using the site to point journalism students to stories they might have missed.

Most of his career, before and since, was about getting people access to information online — through projects including Wikipedia, Creative Commons copyright, campaigns to make court cases and library books available for free, and a startup that became part of Reddit.com.

More recently, in the months preceding his untimely death this weekend, he had been sharing a lot of information in his @aaronsw Twitter feed and blog, on everything from economics to the deeper meanings of the Batman movies.
http://www.aaronsw.com/
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog

There’s a little consolation in knowing his work and words will be kept online through the efforts of friends at the Internet Archive and around the World Wide Web, and that his life and work may inspire more activism on behalf of the open-information causes he supported.

For now there is mostly sadness.

Tim Berners-Lee posted to Twitter:

“Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.”

Others:

• Doc Searls pulled more of the responses together.
• Danah Boyd wrote eloquently about Processing the loss.
• Glenn Fleishman on his contributions to the ‘commons’.
• David Weinberger contributed Why the Net grieves to CNN.
• Dave Winer put it concisely, Aaron Swartz was curious.
• Matt Stoller explained more about Aaron Swartz’s politics

Info overload: Web journalism tools and events

I’ve been spending more time in Twitter — and reading Web pages linked to it — than I have in my blog lately, but even among my own students I think Twitter and this blog are reaching slightly different audiences.

So, for the information starved — or information-overload-starved — here is an aggregation of major things that have been distracting me in tweetland for the past few days.

Most of them were mentioned by participants in the Online News Association meeting in San Francisco and/or the Society of Professional Journalists “Excellence in Journalism” conference in Florida. For a hint of how much tweeting has been going on, see this SPJ Storify Page of EIJ12 tweets and the ONA tweets list of ONA12 Awards.

Next, a PBS video, parts of which sound like things I’ve been saying in my intro Web production class this semester. It’s here so that I can play it in class if I need to catch my breath.

It’s being discussed at lots of blogs, and the discussion comments may be informative. I’ll keep the URLs visible so that you can see where they are coming from:
http://www.pbs.org/arts/gallery/off-book-%7C-season-two/offbook-webdesign/
http://www.zeldman.com/2012/09/21/pbs-off-book-video-the-art-of-web-design/
http://boingboing.net/2012/09/20/the-art-of-web-design-video.html
http://gizmodo.com/5945138/the-art-of-web-design-explained
http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/22/3372276/pbs-off-book-web-design-art

Two tools or topics that I really do want to catch up with, because they may help journalists (or journalism consumers) keep on top of a firehose of news information. “Spunge” discussion at one or both conferences reminded me that I’ve lost track of something with a similar goal, Dave Winer’s OPML editor and River of News project.

The other links below will have to stand for themselves with very little introduction… while I go look for the bottle of eyedrops and a 10-page to-do list hidden somewhere in the rubble here at home.

Spunge:
http://blog.spundge.com/post/31984648190/a-bloomberg-terminal-for-journalists
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/09/first-look-spundge-is-software-to-help-journalists-to-manage-real-time-data-streams/
http://davidhiggerson.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/spundge-a-tool-all-journalists-should-try-and-10-ways-to-use-it/

Dave Winer’s OPML Editor, News Rivers and Outline Comments:
(Dave mentioned in Twitter that it only would take 10 minutes to give the new tool a try. He was right. Very neat outline commenting; will have to see how it couples with news-rivering.)
http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/september/aTestOfOutlineComments
http://tabs.mediahackers.org/?panel=dave
http://river2.newsriver.org/
http://quick.newsriver.org/
http://home.opml.org/
http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/september/anOpenNoteToDoc

Social Media tips from Liz Heron (WSJ, formerly with NYT, ABC, Washington Post):
http://newsroom.journalists.org/2012/09/22/q-and-a-with-liz-heron-on-her-share-worthy-strategies/

Internet energy explored by the NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html?hp

How to be a journalism student — a wiki:
http://howtobeajournalismstudent.pbworks.com/w/page/19612154/FrontPage

The bad news: Gallup reports distrust in media
http://www.gallup.com/poll/157589/distrust-media-hits-new-high.aspx?utm_source=google&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=syndication

Closer to home, a documentary film maker will be in town talking about her latest in a free event at Blacksburg’s Lyric Theatre:
http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2012/09/091712-sopac-detropia.html

Generation C – for “connected”?

“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the alphabet…” was my first reaction to the news that Nielsen has decided to assign another letter to a cohort of younger-than-me people.

Some students might find “Generation C” too reminiscent of their grades. Thinking bigger, perhaps the current college-age-and-just-beyond generation doesn’t need yet another “generation” label.

Or maybe “N” for “Networked,” “L” for “Linked,” or “S” for “Socialnet” would spare them the “grade C” association.

In any case, I’m sure glad the Internet brought me this data for free. The Nielsen results are so not-surprising that they may represent another generation, “Generation D’oh,” consisting of marketing execs scrambling to label, quantify and sell to the demographic du jour.

Personally, I have that old, hippie-era “don’t label me” reaction, which I guess is now an “old hippie” reaction. Does that mean I’m part of “Generation H”? Sigh. “Generation,” “preparation,” what’s the difference…

Anyhow, I’m tempted to look into this “C” research, after my Twitter feed brought these two weighty reports within an hour of each other… The Harvard one — at first glance — looks more interesting; or maybe it’s just that I’m more interested in the conversations and creativity than the consumerism:

• Youth and Digital Media: From Credibility to Information Quality from a team at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society; a study online information users 18 and under (150 pages, 30 of them citations, 4 of them footnotes). Included: “content creation,
  levels of new literacies, general digital media usage, and social patterns.”
• State of the Media: Consumer Usage Report from Nielsen, the NielsenWire blog about it, (16 pages of colorful but exhausting charts and graphs highlighting facts like “Asians stream more videos on Hulu than on Netflix.”)
• For good measure, here’s  The Mashable Tech blog’s comments on that report.
• And, finally, a quote:

“Born sometime between the launch of the VCR and the commercialization of the Internet, Americans 18-34 are redefining media consumption with their unique embrace of all things digital. According to Nielsen and NM Incite’s U.S. Digital Consumer Report, this group—dubbed “Generation C” by Nielsen—is taking their personal connection—with each other and content—to new levels, new devices and new experiences like no other age group.”

How do they know? Among other things, NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company tracked over 181 million blogs around the world by the end of 2011. Glad to know someone is reading this stuff. The report also mentions that Pinterest reached 4.5 million unique U.S. visitors during October 2011, which is around the time I first saw a student using it in class.

If midterm grades weren’t due next week, I might find time for a more in-depth reading of both of these reports. Maybe that’s what spring break is for? Maybe that’s what my retirement years will be for?

Thinking about the future of news, with or without newspapers

Darn… Cyber scholar and new media thinker Clay Shirky was almost in town today and I missed him… When someone who was there posts a report, I’ll link to it here. Until then, I’ll let this ramble from link to link.

As promised follow these links: Beth Macy and Carole Tarrant both shared their accounts of Shirky’s visit to The Roanoke Times, the “almost in town” I referred to above. I wish I’d been able to make it, but I was off at the doctor’s office learning how to avoid having a stroke — not entirely unrelated to this business of keeping up with a dozen new Web technologies at once.

Meanwhile, even a near-miss is a good enough excuse to post this link to a speech by “Digital First” newspaper publisher John Paton, who mentions Shirky in a recent speech gently titled “Old Dogs New Tricks and Crappy Newspaper Executives.”

Paton doesn’t actually link his Web post to the article by Shirky that he mentions — not that anyone reading his speech couldn’t slap the title into Google and be there in an instant: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.

I can’t help but think Paton is right about community knowledge and identification with local news, and I love his idea about the newsroom as public coffee shop… but I wonder about the extent to which the audience has to have the news habit in the first place.

Torrington, Conn., is home of his open-newsroom-coffeeshop experiment and, coincidentally, I’ve spent some time there back before the Web was spun. Back then, the two papers (Torrington Register and Winsted Citizen), apparently now merged at http://www.registercitizen.com, probably benefitted from the disappearance of The Hartford Times (RIP c. 1976) and the decline of The Hartford Courant under Tribune co. ownership since 2000. When it had The Hartford Times as well as these smaller papers to compete with, the Courant had strong bureaus in both Torrington and Winsted and stringers in all the smaller towns surrounding both cities. (I was a bureau reporter, later bureau chief, in two comparable bureaus on the other side of the state.)

For my students and colleagues in southwest Virginia: Imagine a city of 20,000 to 40,000, about the size of Radford, with FOUR competing daily papers, three of them with full-time resident reporters, plus a strong local news radio station!

Some people still living in Torrington or Willimantic, where I was a reporter, grew up with that kind of news-consumer-culture. Add a strong League-of-Women-Voters and New England Town Meeting civic culture, and whether it’s “digital first” or “print-only,” a news organization has something to tap into. (That “print-only” link goes to a recent Nieman Reports article about The Boston Courant, a small weekly that is no relation to the Hartford institution.)

How do you “grow” a civic-minded news culture or revive one that has been dormant? Before the end of the semester, I hope to get students thinking and talking about that — and this page’s links should help.

Here are a few more links for good measure: “The Washington Post — a Newspaper, and a Legacy, Reordered,” a New York Times piece from last week, and a Times letter to the editor by Rachel Davis Mersey, author of Can Journalism Be Saved? She apparently is almost a former classmate of mine. (I was pointed to her letter by Philip Meyer, who admits to having both of us as students, and who has just added an autobiography to his list of publications, and a Twitter feed. )

Finally, it dawned on me that I’ve written blog posts about these issues off and on over the years, so I’ve started my own “Old News” aggregation page — on the menu at the top of this blog.

The stand-up reporter and the question Siri won’t answer

March 16 update: Retraction There were fabrications in Mike Daisey’s story about Apple’s Chinese factory workers. See Ira Glass’s retraction: This American Life Retracts Story; Says It Can’t Vouch for the Truth of Mike Daisey’s Monologue about Apple in China

“We didn’t think that he was lying to us and to audiences about the details of his story. That was a mistake.” – Ira Glass

Marketplace program caught the error, interviewed original interpreter.

“Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn’t excuse the fact that we never should’ve put this on the air. — Ira Glass”

Washington Post blog about the story

Bob Garfield on feeling betrayed.

I’m keeping my original post about the program below. The issues of “storytelling style,” making emotional connections, and journalism as truth-telling are still the topic. Making a story more entertaining does not have to include fabricating details.

Call it “art” or “sensationalism,” or “yellow journalism” or “laziness.” It’s a shame Daisey did it that way and gave the story to a program known for telling the truth in a personal, affective way.

In his interview with Glass and in his own blog, Daisey says he regrets using his monologue on Glass’s This American Life: “What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue.”

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I regret that in showing what a good storyteller he is, Deasey couldn’t show us better skill as an honest reporter… or, like Hunter Thompson, show us enough clues to make us respond, “This is too wild to be 100% true, but there’s some truth in here, maybe even big-T Truth and, what the hell, it’s a great ride.”

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Jan 26 post

This American Life host Ira Glass starts this program “interviewing” the Siri talking interface of the latest iPhone, cleverly getting it to refuse to answer one question: Where was the phone manufactured?

Of course the phone is stamped with a place of assembly, major manufacturers have been well-known, and Apple earlier this month disclosed a list of its suppliers.

But Glass has another point to make. His little dialogue with the iPhone introduces a 40-minute audio performance, in front of a live audience, by Mike Daisey, titled “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” It’s a story I’d like my news writing students to hear, although we probably won’t get around to discussing it for a week or two.

Daisey’s amazing narrative tells how he visited a Chinese manufacturing city that “looks like ‘Blade Runner’ threw up on itself,” and getting Apple factory workers to talk to him about their work and their lives. We usually tell beginning journalism students to “stay out of the story” and write in the third-person. That’s the standard approach in print and Web narratives, and in a lot of broadcast reporting. It separates “opinion” and “interpretation” from “the facts.” But here — as in some feature stories and op-edit columns — a reporter’s experience in getting the story is part of the story.

The NPR site lets you stream Daisey’s piece of stand-up news storytelling — or should we call it “performance journalism”? — plus a 20-minute fact-checking follow-up by This American Life, with links to research reports on Apple manufacturing.

You also can buy the full hour as a single download from, ironically, iTunes.

Related:

Jan. 13 blog  after Apple’s release of the supplier list.

Jan. 25 New York Times story, In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad

Mike Daisey’s blog:

In its first week the episode was the most downloaded in THIS AMERICAN LIFE’s history. The internet exploded, and the story went everywhere—I received over a thousand emails in just a few days; the response was overwhelming.

Celebrating first “summer of code,” Web launchings, 15 and 20 years ago

A few months more than 20 years ago, the pleasure boating monthly Soundings published an article headlined “Computers link boaters oceans apart,” probably the first time I managed to get something about the Internet into good-old-fashioned print.  The piece actually had more to do with commercial computer networks like CompuServe, Prodigy and BIX than the free-for-all Internet, but it did mention the ARPANET, BITNET and UUCP, all components of the pre-Web ‘net.

That was February of 1990, the year that computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee started defining the HyperText Markup Language and HyperText Transfer Protocol that would link Internet resources together like never before. I guess that means this is the 20th anniversary of the Web’s first “summer of code,” now an annual ritual for programmers.

Berners-Lee had proposed his “World Wide Web” idea in 1989 and spent a year at it, delivering the first browser and server by Christmas, and introducing it to an audience of physics researchers and technologists over the next year or two. The thing really took off in 1993 and 1994, after the University of Illinois’ NCSA released Mosaic, a free browser that used graphics and worked on  PCs and Macintoshes, as well as the Unix machines the research community used in the Web’s inaugural years.

That was enough to send me back to grad school — for a faster Internet connection — at the University of North Carolina, home of some of the first hypertext research and some of the first Web servers in the U.S., including sunsite.unc.edu, which I had been reaching from a Connecticut boatyard over a modem, a service called BIX and a text-only browser link to “laUNChpad.unc.edu.”

In Chapel Hill, Sunsite’s boss, Paul Jones, told me to give him my resume in HTML, so I figured out just enough of the language, using (I think) an early ncsa.uiuc.edu tutorial. But before Sunsite came up with an opening, the Raleigh News & Observer launched NandO.net, and I landed a part-time job preparing news stories for the Web at what was one of the Internet’s first 24/7 news sites.

In the beginning, we were publishing Web versions of stories from all or most of the wire services the N&O subscribed to for its print editions — treating the Web site as just another edition of the newspaper, but one that could handle dozens of new or updated stories every hour, drawing on the Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times wire service, Bloomberg News and more. (There must have been some very interesting executive discussions of just what publication rights were covered by those wire contracts!)

The real surprise for me came as the school year was wrapping up — a call from Soundings‘ editor, Marleah Ross, announcing that my old employer, the monthly tabloid subtitled “The nation’s boating newspaper,” was launching a Web site of its own, and that I was invited to write the cover story for the August 1995 issue, then follow up with a regular column called “Data Waves.” The goal was to tell boaters why on earth they should care about the World Wide Web.

Fifteen years later, Soundingspub.com is still online, and I’ve just spent some nostalgic weeks documenting its online beginnings, and paying tribute to its late publisher, Jack Turner. See the current issue of the aptly titled Journal of Magazine and New Media Research. My essay “Getting Under Way in New Media” is downloadable as a PDF file here, but I also recommend the other articles in the journal, including editor Carol Schwalbe’s essay on “Finishability: An Antidote to Information Overload.” (Note, as of this writing the edition’s directory is at a “current issue” address, but it will be moved to an archival page in the fall, when a new edition comes out.)

iPad rhymes with ‘ad’; Droid ‘app’ rhymes with ‘usability gap’

An AP story in Editor & Publisher says advertising in newspapers’ iPad apps is doing better for publishers than website ads.

Does that also extend to iPhone and Android phone app ads?

After a month with a Droid phone I’m underwhelmed by the newspaper apps I’ve tried. I’m more impressed with the mobile versions of some Web pages, including the NYTimes.com and WordPress.

I don’t have an iPad yet, and hope its app designers aren’t building in the same annoyances:

Biggest flaw in the specialized apps:
Providing no “cut and paste” to allow smartphone-based bloggers (or other readers) to quote selectively from a story. All browsers let you copy and paste. Why don’t apps? If this is a content copy-protection scheme, I’m against it. “Freedom to quote and share” should be written into the Constitution of Apps.

Second most annoying app limitation: Providing fewer ways to enlarge text and graphics than the Web browsers do.

Third: Not using the Droid’s “landscape” layout for larger-font column views, graphic zoom, etc.

Back to advertising: By far the most annoying thing about the Times app for Droid is that it repeats the same ad on all pages and, in this early version, the ad is for something that I WANT, but know I can’t buy — home delivery of the Times, which is not available in my southwest Virginia mountain-valley neighborhood. The irony has stopped being funny.

Related things I’ve read, Tweeted about, bookmarked with Delicious or posted to some other blog in recent weeks, but neglected to mention here:

• USA Today Droid app
• NYTimes mobile apps
• The Death of the Open Web
• Death of ‘Open Web’: Greatly Exaggerated
• How the real-time Web has changed news
• Web shatters focus etc.
• Experiments in delinkification

So many interesting sites and places shouting “look at me,” so little time

With nearly 70 website categories (from “activism” to “weird” and “youth”) and 17 advertising categories, the Webby Awards give themselves so much room for collaborative-self-promotion that I hate to encourage the annual excuse for a big party I don’t have time to go to.

But the project did give Roger Ebert a 2010 “Person of the Year” award, and cited Vinton Cerf for “Lifetime Achievement,” which are good things.

In the “News” category (one of the 70), don’t hold your breath: The NYTimes.com was the winner, with BBC.com/news getting a People’s Voice award.

NewYorker.com won for “Best Copy/Writing” with NYTimes.com getting that category’s People’s Voice award.

Similarly, under “Best Practices,” Twitter.com (Webby) and NPR.org (People’s Voice)

I agree with all of the above as excellent sites, but, is it me, or does  much of the project appear to be figuring out which category name to put over some of these usual suspects?

Still, every year I browse around the Webby pages and find some things that had been completely off my radar and others that were on it, but that I’ve neglected to visit or use.

Completely off my radar until today:

• The Economist’s Thinking Space
• Isabella Rossellin on Squid Sex
• ThisIsIndexed
• BrokenSecrets
• glympse.com
• 99Designs

On the screen and impressive, amusing or useful, but neglected by me:

• David Lynch Interview Project
• Roger Ebert’s Journal
• ColbertNation.com
• TruthDig
• BarelyPolitical
• Tumblr
• EverNote

For categories they won in, see: Webby Nominees & Winners.

There may be others you find interesting; but I didn’t go there if (a) I clicked a link, counted to 10 and didn’t see anything or (b) the name of the link suggested the destination was trying to sell me something I don’t want, or have enough of already.

A combination of the above kept me from seeing hboimagine.com or Miroslaw Balka‘s exhibition at the Tate… not just because they are massive, slow-loading Flash “art” things, but because the Webbyawards.com link text started with “HBO” for one and “The Unilever Series 2009…” for the other, and I have enough TV and soap.

Tell Clyde I’m on the road to Floyd with a Droid

It was a tough decision, but having an excuse to write that headline made it all worthwhile.

My first “smartphone” was a Handspring Treo 180, almost 10 years ago. When I moved to Knoxville a few years later, the lack of T-Mobile service disabled most of the smartness, so I regressed to a Palm TX paired to a Cingular Razr Bluetooth phone, a semi-smart setup.

Last weekend, I wrestled the “iPhone vs. Droid” decision to a conclusion. With a Droid, I get Floyd: Verizon covers the neighboring county, AT&T doesn’t, and Floyd has some of my favorite folks and music stops on the crooked road. (I made the decision despite this horrible Droid website.)

Now I just have to convince my friend Clyde that I ordered the new smartphone (smart new phone?) before reading his blog saying that news folks should get smartphone-savvy right away. “Honest, Clyde, I got the Droid because of Floyd” sounds like one of those 1940s novelty songs.

Maybe I’ll get an iPad next month.

Anyhow, I’ll point AEJMC Newspaper readers to Clyde Bentley at the University of Missouri for a timeline for “Mobile Newspaper Success”…  The road to 2013: A timeline for newspapers.

Responding to a Gartner Research study that forecast  mobile devices would  replace PCs in Web access by 2013, Bentley built a timeline from the endpoint to the present.

If you’re a “key editor” at a newspaper, you should get a smartphone this month, or you’re already playing catch-up.

By August-September, Clyde says, newspapers should be training their news and ad staff on “mobile potential,” if they want to stay on track with the Gartner deadline. Within a year, mobile reporters should be producing niche-market features for mobile customers. Clyde’s examples: “Smoke-break wraps, during-game scores, pre-commute weather.”

He doesn’t mention one  crossover: Twitter (or Facebook status updates), whether Twitter’s  140-character limit is really enough for a “nugget of news” or not. Newspapers, broadcasters and online-only newsies are already tweeting away to anyone with a smartphone Twitter app, including Clyde’s own blog. So obvious it went without saying, I guess.

(I’m @bobstep on Twitter.)

(Note: If anyone from Verizon offers me a “referrer” bonus check for the slogan “Get Floyd with a Droid,” I’ll take it.)

Future of the book, pad, tablet, literature etc.

Wired has  Steven Levy and a baker’s dozen authors, publishers and spirit-channels (how else to include McLuhan?) reacting to the Apple  iPad’s arrival this month: “How the tablet will change the world.”

Over at FutureOfTheBook.org, Bob Stein adds to what he had to say in Wired, under the heading “Follow the gamers.”  See this for background on Bob.

I still have a stack of Stein’s pioneering e-books, which combined text, graphics, audio and video on CD-ROMS or DVDs before we had devices that allowed comfortable reading from a screen. I wish my new OS-X Macintosh would run OS-9 to play them.

See if:book: follow the gamers — my piece in the april Wired.

I met Bob Stein almost 10 years ago, when he was working on an e-book authoring/reading system called TK3 (more about it here), but somehow I lost track of his projects. Archive.org shows his company’s last page here. I wonder what happened. It looks like Sophie is its new incarnation. In fact, checking my bookmark lists, I see I saved a link to it in 2006! So much software, so little time. Still, it will be good to catch up when I have time for more browsing.

Speaking of catching up, Stein’s observation about how long it took to get from Gutenberg to Cervantes reminded me someone else I met around the same time — Mitchell Stephens, whose “the rise of the image, the fall of the word“  would be a great candidate for a multimedia e-book treatment itself.