ReadWriteWeb

Like Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, rumors about Microsoft buying so-and-so just won't die. The latest rumor to keep floating across our desk is that Microsoft is buying second place content delivery network (CDN) Limelight Networks. In August, Microsoft entered into a technology sharing partnership with Limelight. Under the terms of that deal, the two companies would, "cross-license certain technologies, consider joint development projects in the future, and cooperate on extending and improving their respective technology infrastructures." Now it appears that Microsoft may be looking to buy the CDN outright.

In my post about internet-based mobility earlier this week, I mentioned that the hype around mobile devices we endured during the 90's and early 21st century is finally being realized in 2004. Mobile phone market penetration is running at 70% where I live, up from 10% in the mid-90's. Other devices such as PDA's, the iPod and the Tablet are also being increasingly used. Whichever mobile device or combination of devices you have, it seems that information increasingly wants to be not only free - but mobile.

Connecting the pieces

With all these devices and accompanying types of data I can now record - text, audio, video, photos, etc - it is apparent that I have a need to connect all the different pieces together. Not only that, I want to place myself at the center of my digital media.

Joining all the pieces together, using myself as the locus, is how I strive to retain a sense of control over my technological environment. So naturally I want the process to be as easy as possible, so that my sense (illusion?) of control is greater.

I want to be able to connect my mobile phone to my PC, for example. And connect to the Internet on my PDA, via a bluetooth connection on my mobile phone. And I want to synch PDA data with my PC. There are lots of other scenarios, particularly as there are an increasing number of software applications and services I can add to the mix. For example, I recently signed up to Flickr. So now I can take a photo on my phone, email it from there to the Flickr server, then copy it across to my Movable Type photoblog. To view it I can hook up my PDA or phone to the Internet, via my bluetooth phone connection, and view the result in a WAP browser. Or simply log on to my Tablet (if I had one).

Total Connectivity

We're approaching the long-held dream of total connectivity. Whether wired or wireless, we're at the stage now where we can connect a variety of devices together via a variety of software apps or services. The issue we're having in 2004 is that total connectivity is far from a polished reality. It still takes a fair bit of configuration effort to hook up your mobile phone to wirelessly connect to the Internet, for example. It takes some technical nous to automatically send your phone pics to your blog via Flickr, to use the example I quoted earlier. Things aren't as user friendly as we'd like them to be in this new Mobile Internet world. Which is to be expected - it takes time for new technologies to piece themselves together.

Even self-confessed geeks have trouble connecting all the bits together. I know I do - for example getting my Palm PDA to speak to my new mobile phone via bluetooth took a bit of to'ing and fro'ing (and googling). Another person who has been writing about connecting technology together is Lilia from Mathemegenic - in her case it is WiFi, Tablet PC SP2, SkypeOut and Bluetooth headsets. I think that even outgeeks me ;-)

So how do we make things user-friendly?

That's the six million dollar question. I think this is where the Digital Lifestyle Aggregation concept and similar ideas come in. The DLA is Marc Canter's baby and at heart it's all about making it simple for people to easily connect all their digital appliances and services together. In Marc and his company Broadband Mechanics's case, the DLA will be like a wrapper for all the open source digital services in the world - Flickr, blogs, Open Media and others. Well, there's more to it than that - but I'm trying to simplify it here :-)

Other companies, notably the "big co's" are taking a more proprietary approach. For example Apple's iLife suite of multimedia tools - made up of GarageBand, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and iTunes. According to Apple, they are "tightly-integrated applications that work together seamlessly". In other words, Apple is pushing the 'user-friendly connectivity' angle too. Further proof is that the word "easy" (or a derivative of it) is mentioned 10 times on the iLife homepage!

A key part of Apple's general strategy is to position themselves as a hip and trendy "digital lifestyle" company. The uber-cool and mega-successful iPod is the cornerstone (currently) of that strategy.

Microsoft shoehorns into DLA's

As for Microsoft, well their strategy has always been to bundle as many products and services as possible on top of their dominant OS. Exhibit 1: Windows and the attempt to integrate the Internet Explorer browser. Exhibit 2: Longhorn, which is being designed to be a kind of 'Desktop Web'. Which is to say: browsing, search and a lot of other Web things are going to be integrated into the Longhorn OS.

Until recently, Microsoft hasn't really challenged Apple on the Digital Media front. But their new MSN Music Service is a sign of a change in strategy and is a direct challenge to Apple. In a recent interview Bill Gates elucidates on where Microsoft is heading with digital media.

For example, Gates said (specifically about digital media in the living room): "We see these things as connected. But this isn't the point yet where consumers see those things totally connected. Over time, a lot of the advances will come through the simplicity of how those work together."

Emphasis in that last sentence mine. I think Bill Gates hit the nail on the head there - but then hitting things on the head is what Microsoft is good at. In 2004, there are too many media products and services to connect together and so mainstream users don't know where to begin. Not only that, connecting those things together can get complicated pretty quickly (Bluetooth is a prime example).

The key - for Broadband Mechanics, Apple, Microsoft and whoever else wants to jump in the ring - is to make connecting digital things together as simple as possible for the end-user.

Final Thought

Currently users are forced to fit technology products and services together like a jigsaw - except the pieces have jagged edges and often don't match. For this reason it's usually only geeks who attempt to fit together the jigsaw. That's the situation in 2004, but it's slowly getting better. DLA's hold the promise of making the jigsaw user-friendly for everybody and smoothing out those edges.

Lucas Gonze comments on my post from yesterday:

"Richard MacManus is throwing himself into eBooks. A synchronicity is that I ran across an excellent bit of non-fiction by Phillip K. Dick which is available freely on the net and couldn't figure out what to do with it. It's not desk reading -- it's too long, and it needs to be read with patience rather than the half-attention I usually give writing on the web. It needs to be read after work, with a beer, on the couch instead of at the desk. Like a videoblog, it's couch media, not desk media."

Couch media is a good term. I also think of it as mobile media, because I make most use of my PDA on the bus and train. I spend about 2 hours each weekday travelling to and from work, but I optimize that time by reading blog posts and other content on my PDA. I don't get anywhere near 2 hours of couch time per day (except in the weekend, when I'm likely to spend it watching rugby). So for me 'mobile media' is how I usually participate in the 'read' part of the read/write web.

I have to admit I'm not totally wirelessed up (if there is such a phrase!). I don't yet have a decent bluetooth or wireless internet-enabled mobile phone... although I have a birthday coming up, so maybe that is my opportunity! So what I do is save webpages from my desktop onto my PDA, so I can read them offline and when I'm on the move (bus, train).

This is why I've never objected to long-form blog posts, and in fact I favour reading them over the short and sharp 'shoot em up' linky style blogs. As Lucas alluded to, long-form style writing isn't designed to be read sitting at a desk. That's where PDA's and other mobile media devices (such as the iPod and the latest in mobile phones) come in. They're ideal tools to feed us our daily doses of media, in whatever format bakes your cake.

For me right now, eBooks on a PDA do it for me. But I also think of long-form blog posts as a kind of eBook. That's why I'm busy exploring the 'eBooks as social media' theory currently over on eBook Culture. It's a new take on eBooks and also a new take on blogs.

Summary: Microcontent in the form of sound bites, links and text extracts are the lingua franca of the Web. But the flipside is that context morphs very easily, so what are the moral and ethical implications of that?

Following on from my post the other day about Systems Builders, in which I touched on these themes: synthesis, analysis, visonaries, implementers. Some interesting trackbacks occured out of this. Let me first mention Jon Udell's post this morning, because his discussion of "sound bites" is particularly relevant to the points I want to make here. Paul Graham made a speech at Oscon 2004 that caused ripples of controversy around the Web. Ironically I haven't heard that particular speech yet, but I read Graham's 'Great Hackers' essay and listened to an earlier interview he did with Doug Kaye. Here's what Jon said about Graham's Oscon speech:

"Consider Paul Graham's remark. I suspect that most who commented on it did not actually hear it, but instead read it, or read about it. How much of its impact is conveyed by the text, and how much by the delivery? Whatever that ratio, access to the primary source -- the words as actually spoken -- is bound to affect the perception of the remark."

It's all about context. According to Jon's quote above, how you take Graham's remarks will depend largely on whether you heard them in the original audio or in text form (transcription, synthesis, extracts, etc). I'd go further and say that how you received Graham's remarks also depends on whether you listened to just an extract of the speech, or the whole thing. The most reliable context is listening to all of the original audio.

Jon Udell goes on to say:

"In the realm of public discourse, it's easy to imagine what this could mean. The presentation and analysis of sound bites has been almost entirely at the discretion of the broadcast media. Think how different it will be when we the media can choose the sound bites that we want to discuss."

Jon is putting a positive spin on the situation - every Joe and Jane Bloggs can now put things into their own contexts. We don't rely on broadcast media to do that so much now.

But... there's a flip side to that coin. Before I get to that, here's a bit more from Jon:

"Think about how we "write up" meetings today. Some people try to transcribe, and fail to synthesize. Others synthesize, at the risk of revising history. A collective synthesis rooted in the audio transcript seems like the best of both worlds."

It's true that a "collective synthesis" is very democratic and has wider breadth, because it's not just a product of a broadcasting elite (i.e. journalists). But let's not overlook the corollary of that: the more people you have transcribing, analyzing and synthesizing audio and text on the Web, the more things get taken out of their original context. For example, something that makes a great deal of sense within the context of the original source file, can take on a totally different meaning if you take a snippet of the original file and put it into your own post which is on a different subject.

Paul Graham wrote a number of controversial things in his 'Great Hackers' essay. For example, this paragraph:

"Hackers like to work for people with high standards. But it's not enough just to be exacting. You have to insist on the right things. Which usually means that you have to be a hacker yourself. I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up."

When I read that in the original essay, I understood the point he was trying to make: that to manage hackers you need to understand their spirit, to be in the same headspace. That theme was recurrent throughout his essay and therefore it strongly resonated with me. But when you take that paragraph out of the context of the rest of his essay (as I've done just now), it becomes much more blunt and the meaning changes. In fact when that paragraph is isolated from the rest of the 'Great Hackers' essay, as in Andrew's post yesterday, I now find I disagree with what Graham says. I don't agree that only programmers can manage other programmers - that's just plain wrong. In my view a visionary may not be a programmer, yet he or she can certainly lead a team of programmers in the implementation of his or her vision. Examples are Mitch Kapor and Marc Canter.

So you see my point? I had two different reactions to Paul Graham's paragraph on managing programmers - I agreed with him in the context of his original essay, but I disagreed with him when I read it again in Andrew's post.

Incidentally, at the end of his post Jon Udell mentioned Glenn Gould's The Idea of North (did he get that link from me, via my link to him?). The form of audio splicing that Gould did in The Idea of North is one method of putting things people say into new contexts and creating new meaning out of that. That was re-contextualizing as art, but what's happening now on the Web is context-morphing on a mass scale.

Microcontent in the form of sound bites, links and text extracts are the lingua franca of the Web. They enable us to bootstrap the Web of Ideas. But context on the Web is much more fluid and it morphs very easily. So when we link to something (a piece of audio or text) but give it a different meaning - what are the moral and ethical implications of that?

Open-Media.org is an Open Source Media Project launched today by Marc Canter and J.D. Lasica. It's going to be like the Internet Archive, only for multimedia files. In fact Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive (home of the The Wayback Machine) is providing free storage and free bandwidth for Open Media. Here is J.D.'s description:

"Open-Media.org is an open source media project that seeks to expose, preserve, and advance works of grassroots creativity (chiefly, but not limited to, amateur video). Individuals, communities and organizations have begun telling digital stories that enthrall, entertain and often move audiences to take positive action. Plain text or the cool detachment of "objective" media do not come close to matching the emotional power of multimedia stories laced with personal narrative."

I'm not sure why "amateur video" gets top billing? Audio, art, eBooks, photos, and mixing the whole lot together - these all seem to me to be just as important. Maybe it'll become clearer to me over time.

Here is Marc's description of Open Media:

"Then all this content at the Internet Archives can be accessed - built-right into your image gallery or jukebox (audio or video!) We're also going to establish a way for ANYBODY to contribute their media (via OpenMedia's and other orgs web sites) to this common Creative Commons pool of media."

Sounds great! I've joined the Open Media project, which is currently based on a SocialText wiki. You can ask Marc or J.D. to send you an invitation.

I'm not sure yet what I can contribute, but with my analytical mind and vision for multimedia and the read/write web - I'm sure I can help! I'm particularly interested in the "digital storytelling" aspect and the potential to promote electracy (21st century media literacy). I'd like to think eBooks have a place in this project too, so maybe I can contribute my ideas on that.

I recently wrote about a new kind of literacy, one in which Generation Y is more fluent than the rest of us. It is transforming the act of reading and it's also re-defining Knowledge Management, I believe. In my travels (on the Web) I came across a new term that may help us grasp this new 21st century literacy: Electracy. It's a neologism, a new word to describe something that didn't exist before. In this case, electracy is seemingly a combination of the words Electricity and Literacy. Here's a better definition:

"Electracy is to computing what literacy is to print. [...] In the history of human culture there are but three apparatuses: orality, literacy, and now electracy."

A fair warning: there's a lot of icky terminology to wade through when discussing elactracy. The word 'apparatus' is but one example. This is because it's the domain of philosophers (especially a bloke called Derrida), linguists and other academics. I'm going to try and avoid such terms and write about it in plain english.

I came across the word 'electracy' when reading this conversation between Talan Memmott (editor of a Hypertext/Hypermedia Journal called Beehive) and theorist Gregory Ulmer, who wrote a book entitled Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. Here's how it's described in the book blurb:

"Ulmer uses the invention of literacy by the Ancient Greeks as a model for the invention of "electracy" (which is to digital media what literacy is to print)."

So it seems Ulmer is the originator of the word. Who better to explain it to us then.

[incidentally, if you're looking for a musical accompaniment to reading my post - try Loveless, by My Bloody Valentine. I'm listening to it as I write this and it's like a soundtrack for electracy]

It seems I can't get away from defining what "apparatus" means, as it turns out to be quite crucial. Here's Ulmer:

"Literacy is an "apparatus," which is not a neologism but a common term given specialized meaning in media studies. I borrowed it from media studies to name the matrix of a language machine, partly social and partly technological, that operates in a given epoch. An apparatus is not only a technology (e.g. the alphabet, paper, ink etc) but also an institution and its practices developed along with the technology."

Got that? Well the important point for me is that an apparatus is not just a technology, but a set of practices. This is partly what I'm exploring at my new topic-focused blog eBook Culture, where I'm setting the scene of eBooks as: not objects, but a culture. That is, eBooks are social practices and activities. (I'm also exploring eBooks from a practical sense too).

Ulmer goes on to define electracy as "a neologism, then, to give a name to the apparatus of the emerging digital epoch."

He draws comparisons between the shift from orality to literacy in Plato's time, suggesting that at the beginning of the 21st century we're experiencing a similar shift from literacy to electracy. He says there will "come a time when we are 'native' to the apparatus of electracy."

This is why I keep harping on about Generation Y, because they're the first generation to be steeped in computing and two-way social media technologies. The generation of my daughter, who'll be 3 soon, will be even more native to "electracy". As for us oldies, including Generation X (aging slackers!), we're going to have to adjust to this new world or risk being left behind on Planet Broadcast Media.

So what are some of the elements of electracy? Ulmer suggests that cinema and then advertising have been the torchbearers for electracy. He says:

"What is important for electracy is the creation of MOOD or atmosphere, the logic of which is fundamentally poetic or imagistic."

[this is why I suggested My Bloody Valentine as soundtrack]

In terms of learning, especially for the new generation (but this can also be applied to the world of KM I think), Ulmer has this advice:

"I am not saying to forget literacy, but to include aesthetic and performance experience in the educational process [...] [children] relate to the story not so much in terms of meaning but doing. High schools to become electrate need to add this aesthetic performance dimension to learning as well."

The keyword to me is "doing". I myself have a maxim that I try to follow in my life and on my weblog: learn by doing. It's the way of the Web, and it seems to be the way of education if we're to prepare our children for the new media world. This again from Ulmer:

"Electrate learning is structured like creativity, and does not replace the pedagogy of verification that structures most literate education, but supplements it with the structure of discovery."

Discovery, learn by doing, creativity. These are all participatory and productive things - not passive like 20th century consumerism. Come to think of it, maybe Gen X slackers were rebelling by being extreme consumers. That is, they were characterized in the 1990's (mostly as a stereotype, it has to be said) as being lazy and cynical. Which in reality often meant consuming things rather than producing things. What if, instead of being extreme consumers, they went the other way and became extreme producers? I know, the technology wasn't ripe until the very late 90's - way after flannel shirts and goatees were the rage.

...on that note the My Bloody Valentine CD is fading to a close, so I'll wrap up this post. It's the best song on the album too, called 'Soon'. Turn it up and feel the mood wash over you. It's electracy, baby!

p.s. bonus points for telling me what song the title of this post refers to.

Jon Udell has kicked off a series of articles at O'Reilly Network on what he calls "hypermedia blogging":

"The two-way Web unleashed by the blogging revolution is, and will remain, largely a textual medium. And yet we're clearly at an inflection point. It's increasingly feasible to create and share media content. If you needed special AV skills and instincts in order to do that, it would be a non-starter. But I've never been an AV guy. What motivates me to explore the subject now is a profound sense that it's ready to become part of mainstream communication on the Web. I'm not sure where this series of columns will lead, but let's take it one step at a time."

2004 for me has been the year that multimedia has finally started to live up to its promise - as a medium of expression for everyday people. I've dipped a toe into the waters with my recent audio blogging experiments. However I'm ashamed to say I still don't have a decent mobile phone, so photo blogging is something I haven't got into yet. It's a matter of time though. Like Jon Udell, I'm not naturally an "AV guy". But I am artsy-fartsy by nature and in 2004 I'm able to express that using any number of inexpensive and accessible mainstream AV tools - such as digital cameras, PDA's, pxt mobile phones, software such as Garageband - and services such as Flickr and Audioblog. And blogging of course is the foundation.

One of my multimedia heroes is the late great Glenn Gould, who in the 60's and 70's recorded some amazing contrapuntal audio tapestries. The best known is a trilogy of recordings called The Solitude Trilogy. Here's an excerpt of the first of them, called "The Idea of North". The interweaving of voices mirrors the counterpoint that Gould so loved to play in his music (Bach's Goldberg Variations being the most famous example - coincidentally I listened to Gould's rendition of Bach's The Well-Tempered Klavier just last night, for the first time in ages). Gould himself referred to his audio work for CBC Radio as "contrapuntal documentaries".

I guess what I'm saying in this post is that I'll be closely following Jon Udell's series of columns on the mechanics of multimedia blogging. At the same time, I hope to explore the creative side of multimedia - building on the foundation of Glenn Gould and many other multimedia visionaries. I see lots of bloggers posting photos, mixing audio, and even composing original music. The time is ripe for multimedia.

Audio and video blogging seem to be hot topics currently. I myself have done two, pretty low-tech, audio blog posts. Both were readings of textual posts, one of a Read/Write Web classic from January 2004 - The Fractal Blogosphere. And the second audio post was something I wrote just last week - A New Kind of Literacy. The results of my experiment? Ahem, it's fair to say my audio blogging has underwhelmed the blogosphere.

At first I was a bit perplexed by this, because I had thought that hearing a blogger's voice would give an extra dimension to blogging and bridge the gap even more between writer and reader. Audio blogging, I'd theorised, would bring the weblog as avatar concept one step closer.

However the reality turned out different. For a start I didn't get as much feedback on my experiments as I'd hoped for. Despite my C-List status, I expected at least 1-2 "so that's what you sound like!" type comments. Eventually I managed to coax a couple of blog buddies to give me some feedback. And it was then that the penny dropped. Thank-you Andrew and Liam!

Here's a summary then of what I did wrong and why audio blogging isn't for me, at least right now:

1. Reading out long-form blog posts, of a technical nature, isn't optimising the audio format. Each of my audio posts was 9-12 minutes long and dry in content - too long and boring to hold peoples attention. The optimal use of audio blogging is short, sharp and off-the-cuff commenting. Liam put this best:

"It's totally cool to hear your voice and all but I think it works best in short blasts - reading out the blog is a bit redundant and right now I think audio blogging is great for spur of the moment reports from the field."

2. There was little in the way of added value in my audio renditions of textual posts. I pretty much orated word for word what I'd written, so for people who'd read it on the screen there was nothing extra to be gained by listening to it. Except of course, for the curiousity value of hearing my voice (which turned out to be pretty low value). If I was to audio-blog again in the future, I'd look at purchasing software such as Garageband and try to add things that complement the text - background music, sound landscapes, voice sampling, digital recording trickery. In other words, mix in some media!

Andrew Chen summed this up well:

"If I were to really want to listen to it, it would be for value-added-ness in which the quality of your tone, rate of speaking, and so on would actually tell me more about the content than was conveyed in the text. Of course, given the nature of what you're writing about in those posts, there isn't supposed to be much more than what is conveyed in the text."

3. Lack of excitement. OK, I admit I'm not exactly a Barack Obama-like orator. My delivery was monotone, although I did try to inject some enthusiasm into the second post. There was even a brief moment of hilarity when I read out the 2blowhards.com quotes... wasn't there? Why are you shaking your head? Ok ok, Eddie Murphy's donkey in Shrek I am not.

4. Audio didn't reveal as much about my personality as I thought it might. Andrew summed this up best:

"It doesn't reveal much about you as a blogger or as a person - it just reveals something about you as a reader."

5. I was too low-tech and MP3 would've been a better format than WAV. Basically I just spoke into my Palm PDA, using its in-built Voice Mail software, and transferred it to my PC. I knew this would produce a lowish quality recording, but Doug Kaye of IT Conversations confirmed this in a comment he left on my first audio post:

"Your WAV was recorded at only 8,000bps/16-bit, so your quality is roughly that of a telephone. (8,000bps sample rate captures audio to ~4kHz.) If you record your WAV files at, say, 48,000bps, you'll get much better audio quality, most of which will be preserved when you compress to a 48kbps MP3. You won't get a smaller file than you have now, but you'll get one that sounds better. Then you still have the option of making an even more compressed MP3, such as 32,000bps or even 22,100bps if you want to give up some quality for file size."

So the upshot of all this? Well I learned a bit about audio and about my own limitations in the field at this point in time. I think I will come back to it later though, when I have the tools to play with it more and make decent quality recordings. For now, I'll stick to my knitting and keep on producing the long-form textual posts that you've come to expect from Read/Write Web.

Note: This post is also available in audio format (.wav file, 2.9MB).

"Literary Reading in Dramatic Decline" announced the headline at the National Endowment for the Arts website on 8 July 2004. On that day the NEA published a report entitled "Reading at Risk" (PDF), which outlined the findings of a 2002 survey of the reading habits of 17,000 Americans. The survey was also done in 1982 and 1992. The resulting trends? According to the report, literary reading (i.e. novels, short stories, poetry, plays) has declined by 10% since 1982, with 18-24 year olds declining the most - 28%! Or as the preface to the report summarized it:

"...literary reading in America is not only declining rapidly among all groups, but the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young."

I read through the report and although the analysis was a bit too alarmist in tone, the numbers are indeed sobering. However the analysis of Internet and digital media trends was very thin - Grand Text Auto did a good write-up of this particular aspect.

In this post I want to put the NEA report in a new light. A light that shines from the 21st century. I think the changes in reading habits that were reported are directly related to digital media and the Internet. But, unlike the NEA, I don't think the Internet is a "culprit" or that it "competes" with reading (those are both words used on page 30 of the report). No, what's happening is that reading is changing, metamorphosing. Reading is no longer just a paper-based, solitary activity that people do for leisure. Reading in the 21st century is increasingly digital, social and creative.

Literary Types

Some background about me and where I'm coming from... I'm an English Lit major from the early 90's, so literacy is one of my core interests (along with web technology). One thing I've always been uncomfortable with regarding literature is the snobbishness exhibited by many Literary Types. It may be because there isn't much consumer demand for Literature and so literary types feel they have to defend their niche by emphasizing its worth as an intellectual and cultural activity. In other words: sure studying literature doesn't make money, but it makes you more intelligent and a more rounded individual. 

That's the theory anyway and it's backed up by my own experience as an English Lit major. Back when I was at University, all my mates were doing Commerce or Computer Science degrees. I was the only one doing a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree... and yes I was the 'artsy-fartsy' one in my crowd. The standing joke amongst my friends was that I was actually doing a BFA - a 'Bachelor of Fuck All'. And in hindsight unfortunately it's true that my BA has counted for next to nothing in my career. Nevertheless I'm glad I did it for the things I learned, plus I think it gave me an excellent grounding for analytical work.

Blogs vs Books?

So yes, Literary Types do have a snobbish and elitist attitude. A recent example of this is in the comments posted to a popular blog post over at 2blowhards.com. The post was entitled Tacit Knowledge -- Writing a Book and it attracted a huuuge number of comments. One of the interesting sub-threads was 'blogs vs books' and here's a selection of comments about that:

1. "When I've been doing mostly surfing, I'll start to miss the coherence and focus and depth of a good book. On the other hand, lordy it's fun to surf the web, and it can be mighty nourishing in its own way."

2. "Books are the meat, pototoes and vegetables of my internal intellectual life. Reading blogs on the web is like coffee and dessert--ok for a treat but not something I expect to nurture or sustain me."

3. "I find blogs definitely dessert! But am an avid reader of almost any mystery fiction."

4. "There is a certain sense of satisfaction I get from reading a book that I don't get from keeping up with my favourite blogg, or even Salon.com for that matter."

5. "I prefer reading novels over reading blogs because I like dropping into other worlds that have been crafted to make a whole, coherant sense. I do like reading blogs, too. Mostly in the morning, before I write. They're like the morning paper or something."

6. "With regard to the book versus blog debate. I found myself analogising it with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as opposed to the three-minute pop song. Pop songs are great - entertaining and mood settling - but they'll never go anywhere near the spiritual depths, the intellectual and emotional fulfilment, and sheer power, of Beethoven."

7. "Blogs are fine, a nice cup of coffee, but for sustained thought, phrased in sentences that you'd read by choice, developed, extended, subjected to intense self-scrutiny, wrought with a consciousness of what has preceded them in the culture - for that you need a book. And for a book you need a mind. Life without books is just televison upstairs." (RM: that's the pretentious pick of the bunch - and it was written by a New Zealander no less!)

8. "I would agree that surfing the web and Blogging are very entertaining. I would also agree blogging will never replace a well written book, though Chat rooms can be very deep and help someone put concepts into words."

9. "Re blogs vs books - One thing I've always noticed when working with computers and children, is that children (especially young children) will nine times out of ten respond far far better to a book than to a screen full of writing."

Now... I'll give you a moment to digest that, as frankly it is a bit rich! (ho ho, another food pun!) The gist of it is that those people think of blogs - and text on a computer screen in general, it seems - as fun and entertaining, but shallow and not filling or nourishing. A 3-minute pop song, as opposed to a symphany. Whereas reading proper paper books - according to these pundits - is an activity that is deep, profound, spiritual, nourishing.

Two-Way Literacy

What all those people are missing is that books aren't necessarily an object you consume. Electronic text - including blogs and ebooks - enables a true two-way reading experience. Ebooks for example often have exactly the same words as a paper book - but you can do so much more with them. Note that in the previous sentence I used the word "you" (as in the reader) and "do" (as in produce something). With a paper book you can scribble in the margins and make some notes of your own, I suppose. But there's not a whole lot else you can actively contribute to the reading process, because a paper book is an object that is pretty much static. An Ebook, on the other hand, is dynamic - you can cut and paste text, add notations, re-format it, search it, electronically send it to your mate on the other side of the world, converse with other people reading the same text, contribute to the story, and many many other creative acts that we haven't even discovered yet. 

A word on the last comment I quoted from 2blowhards - about children responding better to books than "to a screen full of writing". I agree that books are very important for children - my own daughter (who is going on 3) loves it when we read books together. But she's just as keen on multimedia on the computer, because she can interact with it, make choices, create things. I'd suggest that this future generation will want to have their cake and eat it too - they'll want books, but in a format more suited to creativity and 2-way communication.

New Generation of Readers

To return to the NEA 'Reading at Risk' report. While it is disturbing that reading is apparently declining, there is a new kind of literacy that I believe is rising to take its place. It's like media literacy, but there's more to it as well... The new generation of readers aren't content to be passive consumers of books. They want to be able to interact and communicate with words and other media. The NEA report actually has a little clue that helps confirm this trend: it states that creative writing has increased over the last 20 years (almost the only thing that did increase!).

I've noted before on this blog that Generation Y is very community-oriented. They use media to form social bonds and reading books doesn't necessarily meet those needs. Maybe that explains the 28% drop in readership among 18-24 year olds.

Two-way media such as blogs and ebooks are the future of reading, because literacy is no longer a one-way consumer culture of 'we write, you read'. Creativity is half the equation now and the new generation want reading books to be a social and productive activity. Digital media and the Internet are the enablers of this new kind of read/write literacy.

Yesterday I did my first audio blogging post. I think audio has the potential to be a key part of the so-called Social Web, or Social Media as it's being called now. And I like the term 'Social Media', over the more tradional term 'Social Software'. It emphasizes that the current revolution of the Two-Way Web is all about multimedia. That is, publishing on the Web in whatever form of media most suits you. For a lot of folks it's weblogging, predominantly a textual media but increasingly photos and audio. For other folks it's music, using tools such as Garageband to publish their compositions on the Web. There's also video, which will become increasingly viable as broadband becomes a ubiquitous and cheap commodity (it's still a ways away). And of course mixing all those medias together is where the real excitement is.

Which brings me back to audio blogging and how it complements textual blogging. The reason I published an audio recording of myself was to connect a little more intimately with my audience. I've only heard a few other bloggers in audio format - Dave Winer, Jason Kottke, the Gillmor Gang, plus Andrew Chen did a test audio post recently. In all those cases I've felt I've got to know a little more about those people, just by hearing their voices. And isn't that what the Social Web is all about - getting to know people better?

Audio blogging hasn't really taken off yet. Dave Winer and Steve Gillmor are the only two of my subscriptions that I can think of who audio blog regularly. I can't help feeling that it would be great if more of my loosely-joined community published audio recordings. I'd like to hear all those accents - French, English, American (and all the sub-accents - West Coast, East Coast, etc), Italian, Russian, Indian, Canadian, etc. Heck, even Australian ;-) It would increase my appreciation I think of the truly international flavour of blogging. It still amazes me that someone from a little country on the wrong side of the world, New Zealand, can connect to so many people in other countries - just by publishing a weblog. Hearing your voices would add an extra dimension to the virtual community we're all part of (btw I'm reading Howard Rheingold's classic early 90's book The Virtual Community at the moment).

Having said that, there are still technical barriers with audio blogging. For one thing, the file size of each audio post will be measured in megabytes instead of kilobytes. I don't know about you, but I'd have to upgrade my current web server package if I want to continue audio blogging. I only have 16MB of space left right now (enough for about 6-7 audio posts) and my bandwidth transfer allowance would need bumping up. There are potential bandwidth-saving solutions out there - e.g. Freecache, which I'll be looking into.

The other major obstacle for bloggers to overcome is the actual recording. I'm still finding my way in this regard. I recorded yesterday's post on the built-in Voice Memo software on my Palm PDA, which only records in .wav format. I understand MP3 provides a more compact file, plus it is far and away the preferred format of Web users (hat tip to Lucas Gonze for that bit of info). I've yet to discover how to record in MP3 on my PDA, which I'd prefer to keep using as my recording device. And I haven't found a decent software app that converts wav to MP3 on my PC. So I've got a lot to learn before I get to grips with audio blogging.

But technical issues aside, audio blogging is a good way to get to know more about a person. Textual blogging is still the best way to outline ideas and structure your thoughts. And of course you can't link to people (yet!) in an audio post. So text blogging is and will continue to be the foundation of the Social Web, which is good news for people like me who love to write! But text blogging can be augmented by audio blogging and photos (which is something I also intend to do at some point). In the future maybe even video.

Don't take my word for it... I'd like to hear your feedback. Did my audio post last night help you get to know me better as a blogger? When you heard my kiwi accent reading The Fractal Blogosphere article, did it alter your perception of me as a blogger - or of the article itself (assuming you'd read it before)? I'm interested to know your thoughts on audio blogging and whether you will take it up.