June 27, 2007
Adobe Max 2007
Speaking of the major content technology companies, registration for Adobe Max 2007 is now open. I went to last year's fall event in Vegas (this year it is in Chicago), and my first impression is that this year's event has much more for the traditional Adobe Creative Suite community than last year's did.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:45 PM
The Content Management 500?
I was reading PersonaNonData today and noticed he has one of those Yahoo Finance widgets that track certain stocks. He has the big publishers (Pearson, Wiley, McGraw Hill, et al) and the big book sellers (Amazon, B&N, Borders).
I had been thinking for a while of doing one for content management companies, so I did, adding it to the right side of the page. To start with I have Adobe, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Vignette, EMC, Open Text, and Interwoven. It was striking to me how few of the CMS vendors are publicly traded companies--and further striking to me how the recent consolidation has shortened the list further.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:11 PM
June 24, 2007
Geometry
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 117
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
The subdivision; it's all around us. Here Nancy Botkin of Indiana presents a telling picture of life in such a neighborhood, the parents downstairs in their stultifying dailiness, the children enjoying their youth under the eaves before the passing years force them to join the adults.
Geometry
All the roofs sloped at the same angle.
The distance between the houses was the same.
There were so many feet from each front door
to the curb. My father mowed the lawn
straight up and down and then diagonally.
And then he lined up beer bottles on the kitchen table.
We knew them only in summer when the air
passed through the screens. The neighbor girls
talked to us across the great divide: attic window
to attic window. We started with our names.
Our whispers wobbled along a tightrope,
and below was the rest of our lives.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2006 by Nancy Botkin. Reprinted from "Poetry East," Spring, 2006, by permission of the author, whose full-length book of poems, Parts That Were Once Whole, is available from Mayapple Press, 2007. Introduction copyright (c) 2006 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
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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 1:41 PM
June 12, 2007
eBooks for Kids: BookFlix and More
This is interesting.
Two leading children's publishers, Scholastic, Inc., and Disney, will soon discover whether the laptop compares to the lap in the hearts of young readers.
Scholastic is officially launching BookFlix, an educational Web site pairing short films based on popular picture books along with nonfiction e-books that allow early readers to follow the text online.
Update: fixed the link.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:29 PM | Comments (2)
The Future of Publishing
Thad McIlroy has his web site, The Future of Publishing, up and in full swing. It is really well done.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:14 PM | Comments (3)
June 7, 2007
Echo
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 114
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Poetry can be thought of as an act of persuasion: a poem attempts to bring about some kind of change in its reader, perhaps no more than a moment of clarity amidst the disorder of everyday life. And successful poems not only make use of the meanings and sounds of words, as well as the images those words conjure up, but may also take advantage of the arrangement of type on a page. Notice how this little poem by Mississippi poet Robert West makes the very best use of the empty space around it to help convey the nature of its subject.
Echo
A lone
voice
in the
right
empty space
makes
its own
best
company.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2005 by Robert West. Reprinted from Best Company, Blink Chapbooks, Chapel Hill, NC, 2005, with permission of the author. Introduction copyright (c) 2006 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
******************************
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 12:37 PM
Steal this Laptop!
Abbie Hoffman would be proud. Ironically, Abbie's book is flagged as Copyright Protected on Google Books.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:14 AM | Comments (1)
June 1, 2007
Center for Future Civic Media
I get an excellent weekly news and analysis roundup, Outsell/EPS Insights (subscription required). This week they alerted me that the Knight Foundation had handed out its first News Challenge winners.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, top young computer programmers and bloggers, and MTV are among the 25 first-year winners of the Knight News Challenge, announced at the Editor & Publisher/Mediaweek Interactive Media Conference and Trade Show in Miami. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation funded the contest with $25 million over five years to help lead journalism into its digital future. The first-year winners all proposed innovative ideas for using digital news and information to build and bind community in specific geographic areas.
That led me to check out the folks at MIT who were awarded the biggest chunk, $5M to fund a new Center for Future Civic Media. The idea is intriguing to me, as it seems to go beyond the dreary notion of citizen journalists to instead, "helping to provide people with the necessary skills to process, evaluate, and act upon the knowledge in circulation, civic media ensures the diversity of inputs and mutual respect necessary for democratic deliberation."
They need to work on their "about page," though. Whatever "Future Civic Media" might become, I doubt it includes tar.gz files.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:32 PM
