March 31, 2007

Finetune.com

Playing around with finetune.com. This is their standard embed playlist widget.

They are coming out with an Apollo-based widget soon. I will be checking that out.

The icon? My little man, Petey.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:15 PM | TrackBack

March 30, 2007

Adobe Analyst Meetings

Back from a couple of days in New York, where I attended the Adobe Analyst meetings. Impressive stuff, as I relate over at the Gilbane Group blog.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:11 PM

March 29, 2007

Laundry

Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.

American Life in Poetry: Column 105

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

I've talked often in this column about how poetry can hold a mirror up to life, and I'm especially fond of poems that hold those mirrors up to our most ordinary activities, showing them at their best and brightest. Here Ruth Moose hangs out some laundry and, in an instant, an everyday chore that might have seemed to us to be quite plain is fresh and lovely.

Laundry

All our life
so much laundry;
each day's doing or not
comes clean,
flows off and away
to blend with other sins
of this world. Each day
begins in new skin,
blessed by the elements
charged to take us
out again to do or undo
what's been assigned.
From socks to shirts
the selves we shed
lift off the line
as if they own
a life apart
from the one we offer.
There is joy in clean laundry.
All is forgiven in water, sun
and air. We offer our day's deeds
to the blue-eyed sky, with soap and prayer,
our arms up, then lowered in supplication.

Reprinted from Making the Bed, Main Street Rag Press, 2004, by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 1995 by Ruth Moose, whose latest book of poetry, "The Sleepwalker," Main Street Rag, due out in 2007. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.

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American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:25 PM | TrackBack

March 28, 2007

Time Inc. Cancels Life Newspaper Insert; Will Focus On Digital

Another Life for Life

Just last night over drinks in Orlando a media executive, who knows I was associated with Life for many years but has not mag ties himself, asked me why Time Inc. didn’t just focus on Life’s photography and forget efforts like the weekly newspaper insert. The Life brand and legacy could be the draw for a photo-centric website, he argued, wondering why they had never managed to do just that. This morning brings news that Time Inc. is going to do just that—shutter the newspaper insert, which never came close—and wasn’t intended to—the Life weekly of days gone by, and will focus on various digital platforms as well as books.

Online plans already in progress call for a major portal to launch later this year; the plan is to get its entire collection of 10 million photos online. From the release: “The most important collection of imagery covering the events and the people of the 20th century will be made available to the public for personal use at no cost. More than 97 percent of this collection has never been seen by the public and contains the works of such master photographers as Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White and Gordon Parks, among others.”

Is it me, or is the shift from print to digital accelerating before our eyes? This announcement follows closely on the heels of IDG announcing that they are ending the print version of InfoWorld.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:51 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 25, 2007

Guest House

This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-- Rumi

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:16 AM

March 24, 2007

Where They Lived

Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.

American Life in Poetry: Column 104

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

At some time many of us will have to make a last visit to a house where aged parents lived out their days. Here Marge Saiser beautifully compresses one such farewell.

Where They Lived

One last time I unlock
the house where they lived

and fought and tried again:
the air of the place,

carpet with its unchanging green,
chair with its back to me.

On the TV set, the Christmas cactus
has bloomed, has spilled its pink flowers

down its scraggly arms
and died, drying into paper.

At the round oak table,
ghosts lean toward one another,

almost a bow, before rising,
before ambling away.


Reprinted by permission of Marjorie Saiser, whose most recent book of poems is Lost in Seward County, Backwaters Press, 2001. Copyright (c) 2006 by Marjorie Saiser. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.

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American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:54 PM | TrackBack

Currently Reading

...er, watching, The Merchant of Venice.

My son has to read it for school, so I went shopping for the CD, as shown, and also the audio. When I was an English major in college, I read all my Shakespeare while listening to the great Caedmon recordings. It looks like the Caedmon versions are downloadable from Audible.com. I sort of doubt he will put the 2.5 hours on his MP3 player, but I will sneak it on to his notebook computer and see what he does with it.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:19 PM

OUP on Google

OUP Behaves in the Sandbox

OUP's blog today, in a response to the Financial Times article (subscription required) of a couple days ago, talks about what Google's digitization effort is doing for publishing - and how they are responding to it in-house.

What we publishers have come to realize is that Google and friends have opened up the world to our content by showing us that discoverability and access leads to interest and opportunity. Every major media company is now thinking they need to figure out their share of the digital space.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:00 AM

March 21, 2007

More Thoughts on Google Books

Michael Cairns from the blog PersonaNonData wrote to highlight two recent articles on Google, one he wrote and one written by his colleague Peter Grabois. Both are skeptical of Google Books, for different reasons, and both articles are well written and very thoughtful. Michael also pointed me to a related article by Peter Brantley, who is one of the truly smart guys in the digital library world.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:00 PM

And a Busy Year it Was

The 2006 Year in Review for DITA

by Don Day, Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
IBM Lead DITA Architect

The OASIS DITA standard:
The current standard is at DITA 1.0.  During 2006, committee work was focused on developing the proposed DITA 1.1 features (see "Roadmap for DITA development.). Just last month, the committee released a Public Review draft for DITA 1.1, which is expected to be approved later this year.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:35 PM

March 19, 2007

The Power of the Pocketbook

Also known as MIT and DRM:

It seems like a small thing - MIT Libraries announced that they would not carry material by the Society of Automotive Engineers - but it has pretty big implications.

SAE's database of technical papers apparently comes girded with a layer of DRM. The library website states:

SAE's DRM technology severely limits use of SAE papers and imposes unnecessary burdens on readers. With this technology, users must download a DRM plugin, Adobe's "FileOpen," in order to read SAE papers. This plugin limits use to on-screen viewing and making a single printed copy, and does not work on Linux or Unix platforms.

Many of MIT's faculty are fellows of the Society, which does not pay its members for the papers it publishes...and yet which restricts access to these papers via that "severe" DRM technology and a subscription fee - in fact, it restricts the mention of these papers in other databases as well...

I should note that FileOpen is not an Adobe product, but a separate company that makes DRM technology.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:06 PM

Grazr

An article in Mass High Tech about RSS startup Grazr caught my eye, so I went to the Web site and played around with their widget.

It seems pretty cool. You can build your own here if you have an OPML files to start with.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Thought for the Day

I am so small I can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside me?

Look at your eyes. They are small,
but they see enormous things.

- Rumi

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:40 AM

March 17, 2007

Those eBook Widgets

I haven't hidden my low opinion of Google's book scanning efforts. So I am intrigued that some of the larger trade publishers are stepping up and attempting to do their own digitization--and, notably, establishing their own methods of providing access to the digitized books. The efforts from Random House and HarperCollins have received a lot of attention, mainly because the two companies are such dominant presences in trade publishing. But a lot of the attention has been on their eBook "widgets," the viewing applications they have begun sharing. However, the real story is behind the scenes. Both Random House and HarperCollins are much more interested in having platforms that control the access to the content--allowing models like "look inside the book" and other kinds of partial access. To understand these offerings, you need to look beyond the widgets themselves.

As far as I can tell so far, these are really for promoting the print books and not for selling eBooks per se. The Random House site says, “The Random House Digital Page Initiative is an on-going project to index, digitize, distribute and set the terms for using book content online. As part of that initiative, Random House has developed Insight, a service that gives search engines and online retailers access to digitized book content over the Web.”

Both offerings are addressed to balance the need for access and publisher’s concerns about control and insight into how the content is used. For example, Random House’s documentation says, “For the publisher, Insight is a tool to get the publisher's digital content onto the websites of retail partners, search engines, publicity outlets, authors, blogs, and readers … the publisher's digital book content remains in the hands of the publisher. It … implements business rules to guarantee that ownership and management of the digitized content remains with the publisher; and it manages access to the content from third-party websites.”

Also:

In terms of differences:

The HarperCollins/LibreDigital widget is based on the NewsStand technology. According to Todd Eckler, VP of Sales at LibreDigital, the primary difference with the HarperCollins version over the NewsStand version is more functionality for DRM and reporting.

The Random House widget is a Flash client. It looks an awful lot like Adobe’s Digital Editions, but it does not seem to be the same technology.

To my best understanding at this point, they both display PDF files, though LibreDigital does accept other formats (including OEB), and the Random House widget accepts all kinds of image formats as page files (their specifications say at one point “JPG, PDF, indexed text, etc.” and “jpeg, gif, png, pdf” at another point.) So I think it is fair to say that the LibreDigital tool is more of a conventional eBook platform that looks to ingest whole eBook files and the Random House tool is more of a page-turning device that is happy to manage and display page files of several different formats. Having said this, I can’t imagine too many people handing over a bunch of, say, JPG files to Random House with some kind of page manifest, but I may be missing something.

Interestingly, the early reviews on the industry blogs really seemed to favor the Random House widget. Fran Toolan of Issues in Publishing wrote of Random House’s widget, “It also has multiple features not found in Harper's. Some of the features include, displaying multiple sizes, searching for text strings inside the widget (using a Google text search), and offering ways to buy the book.” And C. Max Magee at Millions Blog wrote, “At a glance, the Random House offering is much nicer to look at, faster to load pages, and offers additional functions like search. So, if you want to know who winds the first round of the “Widget Wars,” Random House does.”

I think the real question down the road is who wins the next few rounds of the digital access wars. Google fired the first shot, but the major publishers are firing back--and trying to bring the smaller publishers along as allies.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:20 PM | TrackBack

How Are You Doing?

Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.

American Life in Poetry: Column 103

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

One of the ways a poet makes art from his or her experience is through the use of unique, specific and particular detail. This poem by Rick Snyder thrives on such details. It's not just baseball caps, it's Tasmanian Devil caps; it's not just music on the intercom, it's James Taylor. And Snyder's poem also caught my interest with the humor of its flat, sardonic tone.


How Are You Doing?

As much as you deserve it,
I wouldn't wish this
Sunday night on you--
not the Osco at closing,
not its two tired women
and shaky security guard,
not its bin of flip-flops
and Tasmanian Devil
baseball caps,
not its freshly mopped floors
and fluorescent lights,
not its endless James Taylor
song on the intercom,
and not its last pint of
chocolate mint ice cream,
which I carried
down Milwaukee Ave.
past a man in an unbuttoned
baseball shirt, who stepped
out of a shadow to whisper,
How are you doing?


Reprinted from "Barrow Street," Winter, 2005, by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2005 by Rick Snyder. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.

******************************

American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:44 PM

March 14, 2007

Playing Around...

with the Random House eBook Widget.


Oh, click on it so you can actually read the thing.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:31 AM

March 13, 2007

Slow Blogging

I have been swamped with work, so I have been slow to blog. There are a few items of note, though.

Premium content does indeed seem to have a life. One of the interesting things about these three items is that two of them are top-shelf traditional publishers and the third is a top-shelf TV network. The lesson for me is that people will pay for premium content when the content is very good.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:56 PM

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