David Emery OnlineThe Decline and Fall of E-Mail
I have in my computer every e-mail message I have sent or received since 1992. Minus the obvious spam, this database comes to about half a million messages from people as varied (or similar, if you think about it) as Larry Ellison and Larry Flynt. But lately my e-mail seems to be dying.
The latest in a long line of ‘email is dead’ articles; there’s some grain of truth to it – I certainly receive a tiny amount of personal emails these days, with Twitter, Facebook and SMS (in order of least personal to most personal) picking up the slack.
What these communication methods don’t account for though is work – I wouldn’t dream of using Facebook for work communications and I’m sure I’m not the only one (do you want to be friends with everyone you work with?). Email for work purposes seems pretty unchallenged to me.
Visit ➔Generation Why?
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.
A fascinating – albeit long – article by Zadie Smith for the New York Review of Books on The Social Network (a film which you really should go and see if you haven’t already).
Lots of good points are raised, but I’ve picked this quote out as it represents a feeling that I’ve seen crop up in a few places – that being that in someway online communications are in someway lesser then traditional forms – and it’s a feeling that I think is seriously wrongheaded.
Social network presences for me are not a replacement for physical interaction but an additional representation of yourself. In fact, I think often they can represent a person better then they do in real life, depending on the character.
Another point worth pointing out – there’s also an underlying tone of ‘all your data belongs to facebook’ but that’s no more relevant then what phone network you use; it’s just the delivery method – it’s the content, which can be (often simultaneously) on all sorts of sites, that matters.
Visit ➔Some thoughts on the value of music, fan-funding and the bizniz of music
One the biggest things I’ve found in my shift from fan to blogger to running a label, to whatever the hell it is I am now, mixed with growing up with P2P, is my perception and understanding of the value of music.
Don’t agree with all of it – from where I’m sitting the recorded music industry isn’t really having anything like as many problems as is commonly made out – but certainly a lot interesting points in here.
Visit ➔Designing media?
What’s going on here?
A communication film. Music and a book for fans to purchase. An iPhone app to do it yourself, and a place to socialise. Two video sketches, and a broad discussion.
What I think we’re doing is designing media.
I’ve already linked to several o the things referenced in this post; what they’re doing over at BERG is very interesting indeed.
This is marketing – a word often with negative connotations – at its best.
Visit ➔Why the Daily, Murdoch’s “tablet newspaper,” will be DOA
When I first heard the phrase “iPad newspaper” — shorthand for Rupert Murdoch’s not-so-secret-any-more new project — I puzzled over its oxymoronic implications. Forget about the, you know, iPad/paper contradiction and think about the business. Murdoch is reportedly spending $30 million on this thing. Could that possibly pay off with a product that’s tethered to a single, new platform? Puzzled, I tweeted, “Will they stop me from reading it on my desktop?”
I certainly think there’s room for tablet based publications – and money to be made – but not for news-based ones; on an internet enabled device there’s no way to compete against the practically endless supply of free (and quality) news sources.
Visit ➔Benjamin De Cock’s vCard
Fancy CSS
Very nice example of CSS 3 animations and transitions – love the little clouds of smoke.
Visit ➔iTunes Ping integration with Twitter = embedable iTunes widget
Twitter and Apple recently announced a nice-ish integration between iTunes Ping and Twitter – I say ‘ish’ as auto-tweeting should never be a default on things like this, and the use of long iTunes urls is a bit baffling. Anyhow, the nicest bit is that on twitter.com in the new Tweet side pane you get a nifty little embeded preview box, where you can see the release artwork, track listing and track previews.
After a bit of digging it turns out that it’s very straight forward to pull this code out and use it on your own site:
Or a single track:
Sadly I can’t quite decipher the URL structure iframe uses – it’s easy enough to get the ‘id’ (which referrers to an album) and the ‘i’ which refers to a track from the share links you get out of iTunes, but the ‘wdId’ remains a mystery to me, so to make the embeds you’ll need to post to twitter from iTunes, then right click on the iFrame embed on Twitter.com and get it’s SRC.
Hopefully might be useful to someone!
My iPad Magazine Stand
My opinion about iPad-based magazines is that they run counter to how people use tablets today and, unless something changes, will remain at odds with the way people will use tablets as the medium matures. They’re bloated, user-unfriendly and map to a tired pattern of mass media brands trying vainly to establish beachheads on new platforms without really understanding the platforms at all.
Khoi picks on (quite fairly) all sorts of problems with current eMagazines, like pricing models and the lack of sharing, copy and paste etc but it strikes me these are all very straight forward to solve.
We mustn’t forget that eMagazines are only about 6 months old (the Wired one launched the end of May, for example) – personally I already prefer them to physical ones, but they’re only going to get better.
Visit ➔iPad as the new Flash
Too many designers and publishers see the iPad as an opportunity to do all the wrong things—things they once did in Flash—without the taint of Flash.
I still firmly think that tablet magazines – in some form, at least – make sense, although there’s starting to be a large chorus of people I respect saying otherwise. They make sense in the same way that eBooks make sense – I don’t want to buy paper magazines any more, I want to buy them on my iPad; I like reading articles in a specifically designed context and I’m happy to pay for them.
Interesting also that Jeffrey picks up on an app that makes Wikipedia look and function nicer – isn’t that in effect what an eMagazine is doing?
Visit ➔