October 29, 2007
Baseball
I've used this before, but what the heck. It is a good one, and it is fitting for today if you are a Red Sox fan.
I see great things in baseball. It’s our game — the American game. It will take our people out of doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair those losses, and be a blessing to us.
—Walt Whitman
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:48 AM
October 28, 2007
A Story That Never Gets Old
In more ways than one.
Some stats on tonight's game, for those so inclined.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:29 PM
October 27, 2007
Leading Off, Playing Center Field
Jacoby Ellsbury. The picture is from a game this year when Jacoby scored from second base on a passed ball, something I have never seen before in 40 years of watching baseball.
Of course, now he is much better known because of the taco thing.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:19 AM
October 26, 2007
The Discoverability Wars
Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press has some thoughts about how discoverability and other publishing-oriented technologies have put book publishers in the catbird seat.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:52 PM
Pledge Your Allegiance
At the United Countries of Baseball. A cool app.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:33 PM
October 25, 2007
Even the Lion in Winter...
... was once a cub.
No, not that kind of cub.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:45 PM
The Crossing
American Life in Poetry: Column 135
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
What motivates us to keep moving forward through our lives, despite all the effort required to do so? Here, North Carolina poet Ruth Moose attributes human characteristics to an animal to speculate upon what that force might be.
The Crossing
The snail at the edge of the road
inches forward, a trim gray finger
of a fellow in pinstripe suit.
He's burdened by his house
that has to follow
where he goes. Every inch,
he pulls together
all he is,
all he owns,
all he was given.
The road is wide
but he is called
by something
that knows him
on the other side.
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) 2004 by Ruth Moose, whose most recent book of poetry is The Sleepwalker, Main Street Rag, 2007. Reprinted from 75 Poems on Retirement, edited by Robin Chapman and Judith Strasser, published by University of Iowa Press, 2007, by permission of the author and publisher. Introduction copyright (c) 2007 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.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:08 AM
All the News that's Fit to Click?
eMarketer says that, "It’s wake-up time for the publishing industry. Like it or not, readers and advertisers are turning to the Internet, and print brands must follow." The numbers are compelling.
You can read some of the summary and purchase the report here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:52 AM
October 24, 2007
"We're thrilled with the early results from customers"
Jeff Bezos says Amazon's customers like DRM-free music. Not a word about eBooks though. David Rothman from TeleRead has some thoughts about the eBook angle.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:26 PM
Docmetrics Trial: Free $250 Credit
I've mentioned protectedpdf from Vitrium Systems in the past. I saw a demo and was impressed. They now have a companion technology, docmetrics, which allows you to measure reader behavior. They have a free docmetrics trial if you are interested.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:12 PM
A Billion Here, A Billion There
And sooner or later, you start talking about some serious revenue.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) released the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report covering the second quarter and the first six months of 2007. Internet advertising revenues (U.S.) for the first six months of 2007 were nearly $10 billion, setting yet another new record and representing a nearly 27 percent increase over the first half of 2006. Internet advertising revenue totaled nearly $5.1 billion for the second quarter of 2007, exceeding the $5 billion mark for the first time in a quarter, a 25.4 percent increase over the same period in 2006.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:06 PM
The Impossible Dream
I became a Red Sox fan in 1967. I was 8 years old, grew up 8.2 miles from Fenway Park, and had a Dad, Mom, and two older brothers who loved the Sox. My allegiance was foreordained. By dumb luck, that was also the year the hapless Red Sox turned it all around to become The Cardiac Kids, the Impossible Dream Team that won the AL pennant on the last day of the season and went on to take the mighty St. Louis Cardinals to a full seven-game World Series before they lost. To this day, I consider Bob Gibson to be the greatest picture of all time and the name Julian Javier makes me want to curl up into a ball. The seventh-game loss broke my 8-year-old heart, but I was hooked, and have lived and died with the Red Sox ever since.
Nothing is more astonishing than the passage of time, and this year marks the 40th anniversary of that Red Sox season. At opening day this year, the Red Sox staged a nice tribute to that team. They're old men now--how on earth did that happen?--and some of them have even passed on, but many of them were there. Yaz, Rico, Gentleman Jim, even the Hawk. The Boston Herald put together a nice photo montage.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:28 AM
October 21, 2007
TimesSelectors and TimesRejectors
Over at Civilities, Jon Garfunkel continues his thoughtful analysis of what the changing media mix might mean for the Old Gray Lady.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:54 PM
Another Reason to Hate Comcast
Not that you needed one, but here it is.
More thoughts from Vindu Goel and Dave Winer, and some rationale from Comcast.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:47 PM
Dice-K
First pitch at about 8:20 EST tonight, all happening right here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:13 PM
October 20, 2007
Boston's Tenth Man Could Not be Wrong
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:22 PM
October 19, 2007
Does XForms Technology Have Momentum?
I have a few Google news and blog alerts that help me keep track of some technologies of interest. One is for XForms, which I receive as a daily digest, and I always get something every day, usually four or five items, almost all from blogs. Almost every item is technical and fairly in-depth, usually about something the blogger is prototyping or developing. I compare this to my alert for InfoPath, which doesn't come every day, and the items that do trickle in are rarely technical. Usually they are PR about a product, where InfoPath is mentioned in a list of technologies that the product works with. In fairness to Microsoft, I just played with a search for "forms services" in blogs, and got more hits from that, so I will set up an alert. Interestingly though, in Google blog search, I get a total of 2,016 hits for "forms services" and 35,585 for XForms.
In today's XForms alert, John Boyer of IBM offers some ideas for talking to C-Level types about XForms. For John, the business value of XForms comes down to this:
Read the whole thing.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:28 AM
October 18, 2007
100 Best Blogs
A list, from PC Magazine. Gosh, I don't recognize most of these. Some blogger I am.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:48 PM
October 13, 2007
Afterwards
American Life in Poetry: Column 133
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
It may be that we are most alone when attending funerals, at least that's how it seems to me. By alone I mean that even among throngs of mourners we pull back within ourselves and peer out at life as if through a window. David Baker, an Ohio poet, offers us a picture of a funeral that could be anybody's.
Afterwards
A short ride in the van, then the eight of us
there in the heat—white shirtsleeves sticking,
the women's gloves off—fanning our faces.
The workers had set up a big blue tent
to help us at graveside tolerate the sun,
which was brutal all afternoon as if
stationed above us, though it moved limb
to limb through two huge, covering elms.
The long processional of neighbors, friends,
the town's elderly, her beauty-shop patrons,
her club's notables. . . The world is full of
prayers arrived at from afterwards, he said.
Look up through the trees—the hands, the leaves
curled as in self-control or quietly hurting,
or now open, flat-palmed, many-fine-veined,
and whether from heat or sadness, waving.
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 © 2004 by David Baker, whose most recent book of poetry is Midwest Eclogue, W. W. Norton, 2006. Reprinted from "Virginia Quarterly Review," Winter, 2004, by permission of David Baker. Introduction copyright © 2007 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.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:00 PM
Here and There
- Apparently, if it's online, it's trustworthy..
- MarketingSherpa has an interesting case study of how a newspaper tackled a redesign as it entered its 10th year online.
- Innondata Isogen offers a Post-Hype Playbook for the eBook marketplace.
- Imagine a whole evening of presentations on XForms.
- Adobe unveils "Thermo" and some other new technologies
- Quark users might be interested in a new resource site, Planet Quark.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:08 PM
October 12, 2007
Banned Books
A website called the Alternative Reel lists the top ten banned books of the 20th century, and I am proud to say I've read seven of them. Time to read the remaining three!
I like the cover art, and I recognize several of the bindings from my own library.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:02 PM
October 6, 2007
Harmony
One of the marvels of singing. Two voices with absolutely nothing in common, except perhaps sharing a little twang, blend, to my ear, into near perfection.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:03 PM
October 5, 2007
Bugged
I've watched a lot of baseball over the years, and I have to say the plague of mayflies that rattled the Yankees into a loss against the Indians last night was maybe the strangest thing I have seen. It did bring to mind another Cleveland baseball oddity though. Back in 1986, the Red Sox and Indians once had a game postponed due to fog, which led Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd to famously observe, "That's what you get for building a ballpark on the ocean."
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:20 PM
October 4, 2007
Meanwhile, Over at Gilbane...
The sessions that I have been organizing on enterprise publishing technology have been coming together. For the session on DITA and related standards like S1000D, we have Bob Doyle of the Boston DITA Group and Don Bridges of Data Conversion Labs. We have another speaker from industry who will be talking about S1000D, but he is still awaiting the go-ahead from his corporate communications folks.
For the session on multi-channel publishing, John Parsons, Editorial Director of The Seybold Report will be moderating, and two speakers are on board, again with a third likely to be joining soon. Rich Pasewark, a former colleague of mine from XyEnterprise and more recently with Quark, is working independently now on some very interesting projects. The second speaker is Mark Laroche, who is Director of Production for Digital Media at Random House. He is going to be talking about some very forward-thinking work they have been doing withe the Fodor's travel guides.
Finally, for the metadata session we have two speakers, with a third to be announced shortly. We were very happy to talk our client Richard Ferrie from Pearson into speaking. Rick is Senior Vice President, Publishing Operations and Content Management for all of Pearson, and has some top-level lessons learned on what works and what doesn't in bringing metadata into publishing workflows and systems. Gilbane analyst Bill Rosenblatt will also be speaking, bringing his perspective on metadata efforts at some of the largest publishers and media companies out there.
Keep an eye on the conference session descriptions page and the Gilbane events blog as we add new speakers and elements to the conference.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:05 AM
October 3, 2007
Back, I Think
I had some problems with my Movable Type installation which led me to upgrade to MT 4, but only after I had migrated to a new server at my hosting company.
Fun, fun, fun!
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:53 PM
