November 30, 2008

15 Nanoseconds of Fame

A friend of mine shared that he appeared on Google Street View while mowing his lawn. Ironically, he's the sort of guy who only has the vaguest idea what Google is--his girlfriend's father discovered it and showed him--so I think he is still puzzling over just what this Google thing is all about.


View Larger Map

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:52 PM

September 23, 2008

Google Book Previews

Testing, testing...


Read more here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:21 PM

September 8, 2008

Amazon Video on Demand

People are often so focused on Google's plan for world domination that they fail to notice how much content distribution capability Amazon is developing. Today they announced a video on demand service.

As my friend and Gilbane colleague David Guenette has noted, wouldn't it make sense for Kindle to be the device for all this content?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:24 AM

April 7, 2008

Blogging Reminder

As I mentioned recently, this blog has morphed, and I am now doing technical blogging over at Gilbane (see the XML Technologies & Content Strategies blog here and the Publishing Practice blog here). Just thought I would mention it in case you happened to drop in here expecting to see something else entirely!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:11 PM

February 13, 2008

We're Moving!

Well, sort of.

What I am actually doing is launching a new blog and practice as part of the Gilbane Group (press release here and the new blog, XML Technologies and Content Strategies, here). The new blog and practice are collaborations with my long-time Gilbane colleagues Mary Laplante and Leonor Ciarlone.

As we launch the new blog at Gilbane, I am transitioning this one to a personal blog, much like the one I had before, A Thousand Furnished Rooms. I will be discussing writing, literature, baseball, and life, not necessarily in that order.

I have been at this blog thing for more than four years, and it has always been an evolution. I started with a technology blog, Ideas in Technology and Publishing, then started A Thousand Furnished Rooms. Somewhere in there I briefly had a politics blog (an ugly undertaking in a nasty little world). Also somewhere in there, I began blogging at Gilbane's primary blog, folded the politics blog (oh, happy day!) and combined Ideas in Technology and Publishing and A Thousand Furnished Rooms into this blog.

So now I evolve again. If you want to read about content management, XML, and publishing technologies and strategies, check out the new Gilbane blog (Atom feed here). If you want to hear about more nebulous topics, stick around here. You are more than welcome.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:37 PM

January 7, 2008

Fun with Google Street View

I was playing around with Google Street View. They added greater Boston recently, so I've been hunting down my house, the house I grew up in, and a few other spots. I was prowling downtown Boston and came across a bit of an oddity in and around the Big Dig. To see it, go here and then click on the arrow to go north. Voila! You are in the Big Dig tunnel. Click north again, and you are back up on the street.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:50 PM | Comments (1)

January 6, 2008

Garmin Schmarmin

So my wife was nice enough to get me a GPS for Christmas. This was a really welcome gift, as I have a terrible sense of direction and get lost readily. I also travel a fair bit, and have this long, involved ritual of researching and printing out the directions to every drive I will have to make on my trip. From the airport to the hotel, from the hotel to my client's building, from my client's building to the hotel, and so on. So I was thrilled to get a GPS, a Garmin c530.

Two days after Christmas, I took it on some local errands and then used it on a drive out to my brother's house a few towns away. I was looking forward to the drive home, when I would let the Garmin guide me instead of taking the same, somewhat roundabout way I have always taken to and from his home. Back in the car, I plugged in the Garmin and... nothing. I checked to make sure the power adapter was correctly plugged in. I let it sit for a while. Tried it again. Nothing. I got home, read the manual, tried a few more things. Nothing.

So I plug "Garmin c530 failure" into Google and look what the very first post, in a forum on Amazon, tells me:

Santa brought this unit for my wife. Worked excellant (sic) for a few hours, then died. Acted like the battery went dead and charger wasn't working. Fuse checked OK. Returned unit to Amazon and the problem was handled quickly and painlessly. Amazon shipped a new unit immediately. This new unit worked one month and died. Acted just like the frst failure. Amazon has advised that the problem is more wide spread than first thought and has offered a full refund.

Oy vey.

As if this review isn't damning enough, check out the date--Feb 5, 2007(!).

So this was a widespread problem almost a year ago, and the company is still shipping these turkeys? How is that even possible?

We took it back to Sears. They were great, provided an immediate refund, and we got a TomTom One XL. So far, I am really pleased with it.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:30 PM

January 3, 2008

The Kindle Digital Text Platform

I was rooting around on Amazon the other day, seeing what other kind of (non-book) content was available for the Kindle when I discovered the Digital Text Platform Amazon has made available for publishing content in Kindle format. "DTP" is listed as Beta, but I found it functional and easy to use. Basically you create all the metadata for the title, including pricing information, and then upload the content for conversion to the Kindle format. To test it, I created an eBook out of a series of articles I have written on content management and XML. They seem to want HTML ("The preferred format for uploading content is as a single HTML file"), but I got impatient when I then read you needed to assemble linked images in a zip file using special instructions. So I went with a single Word .doc file ("standard .doc files will often convert without a hitch"). For the most part, it did convert without a hitch, though it did a woefully bad job with a small number of very simple tables. To work around that, I simplified a couple of the tables and deleted the others. In fairness to Amazon, I worked quickly, and could have experimented with HTML tables.

If you're a Kindle owner and happen to buy the title, I would love to hear from you about the experience. Since I don't own a Kindle yet, I had to rely on the preview capability in DTP, which basically gives you an HTML view of the content.

From the introduction to the eBook:

The following articles, white papers, and blog entries were written between 2000 and 2006. They appeared in one of several publications: The Gilbane Report, eContent Magazine, E-DOC Magazine, or Transform Magazine. Some appeared in my blog, www.billtrippe.com, or its predecessor blog, Ideas in Technology and Publishing. I undertook this compilation as an experiment in working with the beta version of Amazon.com's Digital Text Platform for creating content for the Kindle eBook reader.

I only edited the material lightly, so the articles are showing their age in places. Some links are likely out of date, some product references may be to versions of products that have since been superseded, and at least one product, XMetaL, has changed corporate ownership at least once since first written about in one or more of these articles. However, I chose these articles from many, many others I could have chosen because the material is evergreen and still useful, I think. I stand by what has been written here, especially for the price!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:56 AM

December 18, 2007

Call for Papers: Gilbane San Francisco 2008

They are now accepting proposals for panel participation and presentations for Gilbane San Francisco 2008, to be held at the Westin Market Hotel, San Francisco, June 17 - 19, 2008.

Join the content and information technology's leading analysts, IT strategists, and technologists at the industry's most popular and important conference this coming Spring. Share your expertise and experience, and network with the forward-thinking implementers and thought leaders.

How to be a speaker

Choose a topic area from the list below and see how to submit a proposal. The deadline is January 15, 2008. Topics to be covered in-depth include:

If you've never been to one of the Gilbane events and want see what we have been covering in our conferences, check-out the programs from the recent hugely successful Gilbane Boston 2007 and Gilbane San Francisco 2007.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:14 AM | Comments (1)

December 4, 2007

Meanwhile, Over at Gilbane...

Tomorrow, I will be part of a webinar, What Every Publisher Needs to Know About Content Management. It's being put on by Book Business Magazine and sponsored by Follett Digital Resources. Matt Steinmetz, Special Projects Editor for Book Business will be moderating, and I will be joined on the virtual dais by Jabin White, Vice President for Product Management at Silverchair.

I'm going to be presenting a market overview, offer some definitions, and discuss some recent and emerging trends. I'm going to leave most of the heavy lifting to Jabin, though. He is truly one of the smart guys in the business and an excellent presenter, and I am looking forward to hearing what he has to say.

You can go right to the registration page here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:40 PM

November 30, 2007

Kindle Still "Sold Out"

I keep seeing references to Kindle being sold out, but I have yet to find a number of how many sold. The main Kindle page at Amazon now says you won't get one by Christmas. This seems like a problem to me--missing Christmas sales and also not even promising a specific ship date.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:04 PM

November 28, 2007

Wall Street Hearts AMZN

It's been an up and down week or so in the market, but not so for Amazon. Wishful eBook fans might imagine it is all due to Kindle, but impressive online Christmas shopping numbers are the more likely booster.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:53 AM

So You Want to be an Author?

Chris Webb, executive editor at Wiley Publishing, has written and has now assembled some terrific advice on developing a book proposal. Chris has been writing these over time, and has now pulled them together. As he notes, Chris does work in technology publishing, so some of these will be specific to computer book publishing, but much of what he has written is useful for any type of non-fiction book.

Oh, did I mention Chris was the editor for an excellent book on Digital Rights Management?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:37 AM

Social Networks

I am at the opening keynote at Gilbane. The speakers:

There is quite a bit of discussion on social networks.

I just passed 500 connections on LinkedIn. I mention this because I have found LinkedIn to be a valuable resource. It's a great way to keep in touch of colleagues, especially if they are also active users. I have found long-lost colleagues and friends, made useful connections, helped other people make useful connections, and even found projects and prospects there. I compare this with Facebook, which I joined more recently. Facebook is a powerhouse, no doubt, and there seems like an endless number of applications and activities there. But I guess I am an old fart. I don't get half of the apps, and I don't like the default behavior where every new app and even every action on every app is to ask your entire network to do the same thing with that app--take the same movie quiz, answer the same question, and so forth. It strikes me as the equivalent of forwarding the same email to every person in your contact list. Of course, you don't have to ask every contact to do something--you can select some or one or none. You can even do nothing with any of the applications, which is what I tend to do.

I don't know what the effect of Google's OpenSocial initiative will be. Conventional wisdom seems to be that it won't make a dent in Facebook, and, aside from LinkedIn, the founding members seem to be a who's who of failed social networks, including Google's own orkut. And, generally, I am deeply skeptical of anything Google does outside of consumer search and pay-per-click advertising. But assuming not everyone in the world will join precisely one social network, doesn't it make perfect sense for these networks to have a common API?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:46 AM | Comments (1)

November 23, 2007

Movable Type Weirdness

So I republished my blog and now I have new design for my home page, out of the blue, but the rest of my pages look like they use to. What gives?

I haven't had a chance to look into this yet, but if you have some quick ideas, let me know.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:00 PM

November 19, 2007

Amazon Kindle

Amazon debuted Kindle, its eBook reader, today. I haven't seen it yet, of course, but I'm impressed by the number of titles they have available at launch. And the pricepoints--NYT's bestsellers at a standard price of $9.99.

Lots of interesting details about the feature set as well as the complementary content, like Wikipedia, newspapers, blogs. Another detail, reported by CNET, caught my eye:

Kindle, which was manufactured by an undisclosed Chinese original equipment manufacturer, connects to its specialized Amazon store via an EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimized) cellular network through "Amazon Whispernet," built atop Sprint's EV-DO network. No data plan or monthly bill is required. "We pay for all of that behind the scenes so that you can just read," Bezos said, adding that he estimated that it would take "less than a minute" to download a book.

If it is really that easy to use and keep up to date, they are on to something.

WSJ.com has a blog roundup (subscription), and proving that Kindle seems to be real news, it even made All Things Considered. And, last but not least, PW weighs in.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:52 PM

November 13, 2007

Digital Text Community

Jon Noring of Digital Pulp Publishing has announced the start of "The Digital Text Community" (DTC), a public mailing list (on YahooGroups) devoted to serious discussion of digitizing "ink-on-paper" publications.

The full group charter is found at the group's home page.

DTC will be lightly moderated primarily to ensure civil discourse, and a separate archive of the discussion will be started and maintained (Jon notes that YahooGroup's default archive is poor, to say the least.)

Jon explained his rationale for starting the group:

The primary reason why I am starting DTC is that there is, surprisingly, no independent and dedicated forum to discuss the various, interrelated technical and non-technical issues of digitizing "ink-on-paper" publications, such as books, periodicals, etc.

Current discussion on digitizing paper publications is disjointly spread around in various nooks and crannies. For example, there are forums for particular digitization projects such as Project Gutenberg (e.g. "gutvol-d") and Distributed Proofreaders (which maintains a set of online-only forums.)

And then there are more generalized forums which touch upon various topics of relevance to text digitization, but which is not their main focus. Examples are Book People (which John Mark Ockerbloom is sadly closing the end of the month) and The eBook Community (another YahooGroup which I administer.)

The summary purpose of DTC is given in the last paragraph of the DTC group charter:

"This group is not affiliated with any particular project or organization, but rather is independent. It is hoped this group will be a bridge between the various text digitization projects, enabling information exchange for everyone’s benefit."

This sounds like a great new resource, and I have already subscribed. You can too, here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:27 PM

Adobe Management Changes

Adobe's CEO Bruce Chizen steps down, and the market is reacting. But Adobe also said Monday that "fourth-quarter sales would be near the top end of its guidance of $860 million to $890 million."

Oh, for the record, I don't own any stock or have any other financial interest in Adobe. As a rule, I avoid investing in companies that I cover or might do business with--partly to avoid a conflict of interest but also because I am terrible at picking tech stocks. They either go bust, or I sell them at a small loss or profit the second before they take off like a rocket.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:37 PM

November 2, 2007

Sentiment is for Girls

Not my sentiment, of course. Mark Twain's, as recently shown at a great new (and free!) repository launched by the University of California Press.

Damnation, (if you will allow the expression,) get up & take a turn around the block & let the sentiment blow off you. Sentiment is for girls—I mean the maudlin article, of course. Real sentiment is a very rare & godlike thing. You do not know anybody that has it; neither do I.
The homepage for the repository is here.

 

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:37 PM

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

October 25, 2007

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.

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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

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

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

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

Here and There

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 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

September 19, 2007

WSJ.com to go Free?

First Times Select, and now WSJ.com? WSJ.com is reporting that WSJ.com might drop its paid model in favor of an ad-supported one. And yes, the article is free, at least as of right now.

Meanwhile, ClickZ is reporting that mobile advertising is about to boom.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:40 PM

August 8, 2007

NY Times to Make TimesSelect Free

Barry Graubart weighs in on the decision at the New York Times to Make TimesSelect free.

Ny_times_logo

The Times has decided to stop charging a fee for its TimesSelect product. TimesSelect, which includes the Times Columnists and OpEd pieces, is free to print subscribers and costs $95 per year for others. There are approximately 220,000 paid TimesSelect subscribers, representing roughly $21 million in annual revenue. It also provides a perceived benefit to print subscribers... While I don't know if the Times will recoup that revenue simply from serving ads on the OpEd pages, this is clearly the right thing to do. Putting a wall up around Times columnists simply resulted in reducing the influence of the Times editorial page. In addition to limiting access for direct browsers, it also dramatically reduced the "pass-along" potential of Times content. Once the walls are down, I'd expect their editorial columns to often be at the top of the "most emailed" lists and also receive numerous links from bloggers, Facebook pages and more.

All good thoughts from Barry, so do read his entire entry. I just want to know if the crossword puzzle will now be available free.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:07 AM | TrackBack

July 17, 2007

The Dramatic Unity of Huckleberry Finn

ResearchBuzz offers up a nice find: The Ohio State University Press Makes Dozens Of Books Free

The Ohio State University Press has announced that it will be making “certain books” available for free download from its site. (You’ll need a PDF reader.) The books are available at here . There are actually over 60 books here, from Daniel Aaron’s Cincinnati: Queen City of the West, 1819–1838 to John Harold Wilson’s Court Satires of the Restoration. Click on the book title for additional information about the book and PDF files of various chapters. The books I looked at were out of paper print but still had very assertive copyright reminders.What I did NOT see was any way to actually search the content, so here’s the Google query you want: keyword inurl:books site:ohiostatepress.org. Add intitle:book title to the search if you want to restrict your results to a specific text.

If you want to go right to the Huck Finn book referenced in the title, click here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:10 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)

June 7, 2007

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

May 6, 2007

Meanwhile Over at Gilbane

I have been in one of those modes where I have been too busy to blog, and yet have been working on a lot of interesting things. My Gilbane colleague Mary Laplante and I did a webinar with Oracle (details here about where to view the recorded webinar and download the associated white paper). If you haven't been keeping a scorecard, Oracle acquired Stellent a few months ago, and while the webinar was more broadly about web content management, it does give you some insight into what Oracle will be doing with Stellent. Hat tip to David Guenette, who co-wrote the white paper, and really did the heavy lifting there.

Also at Gilbane, I wrote a case study about Autodesk and its efforts over the last several years integrating Idiom's globalization management system into its technical documentation workflow. We then did a Webinar with Minette Norman from Autodesk, and she did a fantastic job of explaining the project at both the technical and management level. The recorded webinar and presentation slides can be found here.

Finally, David Guenette and I recently updated a Gilbane white paper on Digital Asset Management. The paper, sponsored by DAM vendor ClearStory systems, asks (and answers) the question, has digital asset management “crossed the chasm” from a technology used only by early adopters to one that is more part of the IT mainstream?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:41 PM

May 2, 2007

Folksy Copywriting is OK

But the email from Delta airlines this morning was a little too chirpy for me.

We're delighted to be one of the first to tell you that we successfully emerged from Chapter 11 yesterday (hooray!) after improving almost every aspect of our airline ahead of schedule.

Maybe I hadn't had enough coffee yet, but there was something Monty Pythonesue about it (The guns on the firing squad jammed! Hooray!)


Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:05 AM

April 24, 2007

Multichannel Workflows in the Offing?

Over at the Really Strategies blog, Ed Stevenson comments on some print-CMS partnerships.

Last week, Lisa Bos posted on the fragmentation between different types of CMS.  Interestingly, this morning I stumbled upon two announcements on partnerships between companies in different CMS spaces:

Found on Gilbane, "Managing Editor Inc. (MEI) announced a joint development with Clickability to integrate the SoftCare K4 Publishing System with Clickability’s cmPublish."  So here we have an editorial and production system (or print CMS) integrating with a WebCMS.

And CMS Wire announces that Alfresco and WoodWing Software formed a partnership between WoodWing’s Smart Connection Enterprise editorial workflow system and the Alfresco 2.0 open source enterprise content management system. 

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:12 PM

April 17, 2007

Pricing Trends for Scholarly Journals

DigitalKoans is alerting readers about a new report, Trends in Scholarly Journal Prices 2000-2006

LISU, which is based in the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University, has released Trends in Scholarly Journal Prices 2000-2006, a report commissioned by Oxford Journals.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

The research updates the previous findings on pricing for biomedical journals, and has also been extended to analyze pricing for social science titles. Findings within the report show little variation to the original data published in 2004: there are continued trends in price variance across publishers, including median price increases ranging from 42% to 104% for biomedical titles, and 47% to 120% for social science titles.

The entire report can be downloaded for free here (PDF, 718K).

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:23 AM

April 12, 2007

Teleread Offers Kurt Vonnegut a Fond Goodbye

And includes a pointer to free downloads of some Vonnegut classics

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a sci-fi writer and satirist who wrote about heroics, vanities and greater sins, inspiring comparisons with Mark Twain, died yesterday at 84 with a full head of hair. You can read a Google News roundup and his New York Times obit along with a link-rich Wikipedia item.

Via Wowio, you can download free ad-supported copies of [a number of Vonnegut books].

I played around with Wowio, downloading Slaughter-House Five. Really, it is not much to write about--PDF files with ads stuffed in every so many pages. The ads are awkwardly placed--they look like full-page magazine ads--and in the default settings of the reader they are just disembodied page layouts. In Slaughter-House Five, it looked to me like the ads disrupted Vonnegut's intended pagination. In at least one place, an ad separates an illustration from Vonnegut's description. The effect is jarring, but if I were a starving college student again, I probably would put up with it in exchange for a free book.

Many, many publishing blogs weighed in on Vonnegut today, and for good reason. He was an oversized talent, and many people of my age and a little older read every Vonnegut book, often more than once. He will be missed.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:26 PM | TrackBack

April 9, 2007

Coming Soon to Widget Near You

Advertising. Proving once again there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:15 PM

A Great Question

Over at PersonaNonData, Michael Cairns asks, Why don't Libraries Have Publishing Programs?

My introduction to Charles Bukowski occurred via the display cases inside the Boston University library lobby, and I was drawn to them because I happened to be working in the library's special collections department at the time. The special collections department at BU is quite renowned and was established by Dr. Howard Gotlieb who recently died. (Gotlieb actually wrote one of my recommendations for business school). My job was less intellectual than hired muscle since the library was becoming so overwhelmed with boxed submissions they needed someone to unload the stuff and place the materials in uniform boxes on shelves. I didn't have too much time to peruse the material in some of these boxes but I do recall a wealth of material from from Herbert Swope and Fletcher Knebel, who's boxes were filled with photos of JFK and his family while they were all in the White House.
Some of the material deposited wasn't quite so moving or important (at least to my eyes) and in many cases it was clear that entire desk draws had been upended into a box and sent off to BU. These boxes often included things like gum, blank paper, pens, pennies, paper clips and other detritus which had minimal residual value to scholars. BU did have several archivists responsible for cataloging the vast amount of stuff that was deposited. They seemed to work fairly methodically (slowly) to identify the important material and provide tables of content for scholars. Increasingly, the material in formal special collections libraries like BU and in local libraries is being digitized and there is little doubt that this will accelerate.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:53 AM

A Tip of the Cap to...

... Project Gutenberg, for all its work, including a newly posted "eBook," The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866, which brings us, among other things, passages from Nathaniel Hawthorne's notebooks. Here, Hawthorne offers some thoughts about a trip along Maine's Kennebec River.

Saw by the river-side, late in the afternoon, one of the above-described boats going into the stream, with the water rippling at the prow, from the strength of the current and of the boat's motion. By-and-by comes down a raft, perhaps twenty yards long, guided by two men, one at each end,—the raft itself of boards sawed at Waterville, and laden with square bundles of shingles and round bundles of clapboards. "Friend," says one man, "how is the tide now?"—this being important to the onward progress. They make fast to a tree, in order to wait for the tide to rise a little higher. It would be pleasant enough to float down the Kennebec on one of these rafts, letting the[Pg 178] river conduct you onward at its own pace, leisurely displaying to you all the wild or ordered beauties along its banks, and perhaps running you aground in some peculiarly picturesque spot, for your longer enjoyment of it. Another object, perhaps, is a solitary man paddling himself down the river in a small canoe, the light, lonely touch of his paddle in the water making the silence seem deeper. Every few minutes a sturgeon leaps forth, sometimes behind you, so that you merely hear the splash, and, turning hastily around, see nothing but the disturbed water. Sometimes he darts straight on end out of a quiet black spot on which your eyes happen to be fixed, and, when even his tail is clear of the surface, he falls down on his side, and disappears.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:41 AM

April 4, 2007

Is Print Dying?

Ed Stevenson of Really Strategies has a roundup of recent news.

A small handful of publishers made recent announcements on their decisions to cease publishing in print and move to sole digital content delivery.

The most notable is, of course, InfoWorld's cessation of print this month. 

We are merely embracing a more efficient delivery mechanism --the Web -- at InfoWorld.com. You can still get all the news coverage, reviews, analysis, opinion, and commentary that InfoWorld is known for. You'll just have to access it in a browser (or RSS reader) -- something more than a million of you already do every month.

We also heard Time's announcement that it will discontinue the LIFE newspaper supplement, but still look to build online product offerings under the LIFE brand.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:42 PM

April 3, 2007

Free New York Times Select for Students?

Maybe, Maybe Not.

This problem has been just around the corner since NYT.com first offered academic discounts on premium TimesSelect last year but it didn’t become a real issue until the move to free for students and educators. Prodded by librarians irked at spending large chunks of money to gain access to the whole NYT database through services like Lexis-Nexis, the NYT is changing the offer: only students at colleges that subscribe to the databases will have access to the full archives, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. The change is being made “out of respect and compliance with these agreements that we already have in place,” Vivian Schiller, VP/GM, NYtimes.com, told the Chronicle. One library director said database provider ProQuest was surprised by the paper’s decision to make the archives available to student subscribers for free. Barbara Fister of Gustavus Adolphus College was among those raising the issue online; she told the Chronicle she was torn between wanting all students to have access to the Times online and the fact that she just spent nearly $20,000 to provide archives access through ProQuest.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:38 PM

More from Finetune.com

I'm having perhaps a little too much fun with finetune.com in the interest of "research." After producing my first playlist of acoustic favorites, I came up with another one, rock favorites.

The icon this time? My girl, Cleo, who, behind her gentle exterior, is a rocker at heart.

I am looking forward to trying the Apollo client that I mentioned earlier. Having the widget bound to a particular HTML page is a pain in the neck.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:00 PM | TrackBack

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 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 24, 2007

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

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

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

February 24, 2007

How About James Thurber Sponsored by Eukanuba®?

New Yorker Cartoons Available As Animated, Ad-Supported Podcasts

The New Yorker‘s famous cartoons can now be viewed as an animated, ad-supported video podcast on iTunes through RingTales, an online animation syndicator. As part of the deal with the Conde Nast publication (through its cartoon licensing arm, The Cartoon Bank), Santa Monica-based RingTales has the exclusive license to animate and distribute the New Yorker library of over 70,000 cartoons. Podcast subscribers will receive three new animations of The New Yorker “RingTales” each week. In addition to iTunes, which had 14 episodes 20-second episodes available as of Friday morning, the downloads will be available on the magazine’s site, newyorker.com, in March...

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:31 AM

February 18, 2007

But How Does Dear Author Really Feel About It?

Adobe Labs Cooks Up Worst Ebook Reader in Ebook Reader History

Adobe Digital Editions

Dear Adobe,

I have, often, derided the Adobe Acrobat format for ebooks. I have told people on this blog, in emails, on message boards, that this is my least favorite format and that you should only buy this format when there is NO OTHER OPTION. Buying an Adobe ebook, particularly one that requires authentication to read it, is akin to shaving your head when you are one of the most recognizable people in the world and, at one time, one of the most beautiful people in the world.

You’ve come out with a great new software called Adobe Digital Editions, for those people who love ebooks...

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:24 AM

February 9, 2007

Steve Jobs Speaks Out Against DRM for Music

But over at DRM Watch, Bill Rosenblatt is sure that Apple's latest "DRM strategy" is pure PR.

Speaking of DRM, there happens to be a very good book out there on the topic.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:43 PM

January 28, 2007

File this Under "Not Exactly News"

Dear Author has seen the Vision of the eBook Future via Google and Random House and It Stinks

In 2004, Google announced its plan to scan every book printed. They began working with university libraries such as Harvard, University of Michigan, and Oxford. This caused the publishing industry some great consternation because an author’s work …

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:56 PM

January 18, 2007

eBooks in the K-12 Classroom?

TeleRead offers some thoughts on a WiFied eInk machine and perhaps a K-12 push for the Sony eReader.

Spurred by the threat of the rumored Kindle E Ink machine from Amazon, Sony is considering a WiFi-enhanced successor to the Sony Reader, as well as a push to get E Ink machines into the classroom.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:02 PM

January 9, 2007

The Search Continues for Steve Arnold

Steve Arnold weighs in on search in the government sector.

Steven Arnold, a search engine consultant with a government focus, discusses how to get enterprise search to work and the benefits of FirstGov’s approach to indexing. Steven Arnold got an early start on search engines. In 1971, his employer, Halliburton Co., assigned him to digitize the company’s technical reports in order to make them searchable. He has worked in the field ever since. In the past decade, he has moved over to consultancy, starting his own practice, Arnold IT. In 2000, he helped generate the technical plan for the first iteration of the General Services Administration’s FirstGov government search engine. (His son, Erik Arnold, currently works on FirstGov.) More recently, he launched the Google Government Report, a newsletter and electronic information service offering tips on how to be better recognized by Google. We caught up with Arnold to get his views on what is happening with both enterprise and Web search.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:32 PM

December 29, 2006

1984

IT WAS a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:18 AM | TrackBack

December 17, 2006

Another Sign of Life for eBooks?

S&S news: Digital archive plans—and Claire Israel’s defense of DRM

Simon and Schuster plans to have 12,000+ books from its backlist digitized by the end of ‘07, according to Publishers’ Marketplace. Download sales tripled this year, and DearAuthor credibly believes that “competitive pricing” helped…

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:04 PM | TrackBack

December 11, 2006

More on Microsoft Book Search

Again, as I mentioned in another entry, I have not looked too closely at it yet, but Microsoft Book Search has nice behaviour in the basic interface, and the image in this page was clearly digitized with some care.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:45 PM | TrackBack

Borges Manuscripts Lost, Thought Stolen, Then Found

According to an article in the Boston Globe, two handwritten manuscripts by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges owned by a Harvard Square bookstore were found after being lost and presumed stolen. Store owner John W. Wronoski found the manuscripts Monday afternoon, stuck behind a photograph "just by weird chance," he said. "I am inordinately relieved."

The manuscripts included that of a favorite story of mine, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:36 PM | TrackBack

December 7, 2006

Microsoft Book Search

Microsoft has launched its book search product. My initial reaction is mixed, though I haven't spent much time with it yet. On the one hand, it doesn't seem to work in Firefox (get used to seeing the word "Loading..." if you try to launch it) and it is really slow to start, even in Internet Explorer 6 (I haven't tried it in Explorer 7 yet). On the other hand, the interface for browsing a found book is much more attractive than Google Book Search and the scanning, at a quick glance, seems to be of a signficantly better quality than that on Google Books. Of course, beating Google Books on scanning quality is not exactly difficult.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:50 PM

Download a Good Book Lately?

Late in the last millennium I went to grad school, getting my MA in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College. Recently, a writer from the alumni office, Christopher Hennessey, interviewed me about the eBook business, and he ended up writing an excellent article. You can download a PDF of the entire magazine here (about 2.7 MB). I also took the liberty of creating a PDF with just the article itself, which is about 500K.

A hat tip to Christopher for writing an excellent survey of the value of eBooks to date.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:48 PM | TrackBack

December 2, 2006

The Google Book "Nightmare"

Also from if:book, count Brewster Kahle among the people who are not fans of Google Books.

"Pretty much Google is trying to set themselves up as the only place to get to these materials; the only library; the only access. The idea of having only one company control the library of human knowledge is a nightmare.".

Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:15 PM

The State Of Magazine Websites

PaidContent.org points to some research, The State Of Magazine Websites.

(via Buzzmachine) The Bivings Group, which earlier this year did a comprehensive review of newspaper websites, has done it again with magazine websites: it researched the websites of the top 50 most circulated magazines in the U.S. and evaluated them.

Among the findings:

-- RSS feeds: 48 per cent of magazine websites.
-- Message boards/forums: 46 per cent
-- 38 per cent require registration to view all of the site’s content.
-- 38 per cent of the magazines offer at least one reporter blog.
-- Video is an offering on 34 per cent of websites.
-- Just 14 per cent of websites use podcasts and bookmarking; eight percent allow comments on articles; and six per cent use tags.

I want to know about the 52% of websites who have not implemeneted RSS yet. Hello, McFly!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:03 PM

November 30, 2006

DOIs for Books Gain Ground

Digital Koans alerts us to the news that DOIs for books are gaining ground.

According to CrossRef, the official DOI registration agency, over a half-million DOIs have been assigned to books or book chapters, and twenty of its members are using DOIs in this fashion. What’s a DOI? Here’s a short description from …

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:25 PM | TrackBack

November 10, 2006

Digitization at HarperCollins

If you are curious what HarperCollins is doing in terms of digitizing its content, this presentation (PDF) from the Frankfurt Book Fair spells it out some. HarperCollins is being aggressive with this. They cited the costs of digitization as an element in their recent disappointing quarterly profit, and clearly are committed to the efforts.

In addition to lower sales, [HarperCollins CEO Jane] Friedman attributed the drop in profits to continued investment in digital and global projects. HC has now digitized 12,000 titles as part of its digital warehouse, and during the quarter it converted 125 books to its new Browse Inside feature, which enables consumers to search HC books from the company's Web site. Friedman estimated HC will be adding 200 to 500 titles a week to the Browse feature. The company's Digital Media Café also launched in the period. "I remain excited by the digital world," Friedman said. HC's China initiatives also ate into profits in the period.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:33 PM

November 6, 2006

Wikipedia Woes

Perhaps another reason Wikipedia should consider an authentication process for authors.

This is likely a solvable problem, though hackers are determined folks. But the more I think about Wikipedia authoring, the more I think it makes sense for authors to be authenticated.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:15 PM

October 27, 2006

Revisiting Amazon aStore

I noticed recently some sales from my Andre Dubus Amazon aStore, so I spent some time today updating it and adding a couple of new features. Check it out, and shop early and often!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:38 AM

October 12, 2006

Simon & Schuster’s eBook Blog

TeleRead highlighted a new eBook-related blog at Simon & Schuster.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:58 PM

October 3, 2006

CrossRef Indicators

I remember when I first heard about Digital Object Identifiers DOIs and thinking, "great idea... needs critical mass." Well, according to the latest CrossRef Indicators, they have long since passed critical mass.

CROSSREF INDICATORS (September 29, 2006)

Total no. participating publishers & societies 1,683
% of non-profit publishers 64%
Total no. participating libraries 1,107
No. journals covered 15,215
No. DOIs registered to date 22,584,497
No. DOIs deposited in previous month 294,257
No. DOIs retrieved (matched references) in previous month 4,503,094
DOI resolutions (end-user clicks) in previous month 11,007,980

The 11 million plus DOI resolutions is staggering really. That is 11 million clicks on specialized, authoritative content in one month.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:57 PM

September 26, 2006

Sony eReader Available

The Sony Portable Reader System PRS-500 is now available. TeleRead has a very thoughtful article about some of the challenges Sony faces. Meanwhile, I keep offering to review the thing, but no word from Sony.

More here from paidContent.org.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:54 PM

September 21, 2006

Welcome Back, Peter Gammons

Peter Gammons returned to action for ESPN last night. Gammons, the Hall of Fame baseball writer, had a brain aneurysm in June, and the baseball season hasn't been the same without him. Gammons was the baseball beat writer for the Boston Globe when I was a kid and up through the time I flirted with the idea of being a sportswriter. I covered sports for my college newspaper and was a stringer for the New Bedford Standard-Times during a time when the Globe had an amazing array of sportswriting talent, including Gammons, Bob Ryan, Leigh Montville, and Ray Fitzgerald. Even among them, Gammons was in a class by himself. He created a feature that is now a staple of many sports pages, a weekend "notebook" of short items that runs a full page in the broadside Globe to this day (now written by the Globe's current beat writer, Gordon Edes). I can draw a line from that kind of short-form collection to today's blog. Gammons' blog (for ESPN Insider subscribers unfortunately) has been dormant since his illness, but he does have a new column up (and it's free!).

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:21 AM

September 19, 2006

Bookshare.org Founder Awarded Genius Grant

Jim Fruchterman, CEO of The Benetech Initiative, has been awarded a 2006 MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Each of this year’s 25 MacArthur Fellows learned this week that they will receive $500,000 in “no strings attached” funding over the next five years.

Jim Fruchterman, 47, is an electrical engineer turned social entrepreneur who adapts cutting-edge technology into affordable tools for the visually impaired and other underserved communities. In 1989, Fruchterman founded the nonprofit company Arkenstone to develop and manufacture a reading machine for the blind using optical character recognition technology. He delivered the reading tool in a dozen languages to 35,000 people in 60 countries.

In 2000, Fruchterman founded another nonprofit company, The Benetech Initiative, to create innovative technology solutions that address social needs. Benetech’s first project, Bookshare.org created the world’s largest accessible library of scanned books and periodicals providing people with visual or print disabilities access to a dramatically increased volume of print materials.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:45 PM

Russian Math Professor Bypasses Establishment Publishing to Share Breakthrough

Meanwhile, TeleRead shares some news about why hundreds-year old societies may not be the sole arbiter of scientific breakthroughs anymore.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:37 PM

Coming to a Browser Near You: 340 Years of Science, For Free

The complete archive of the England's Royal Society journals, including some of the most significant scientific papers ever published since 1665, is freely available electronically for a two month period that began on September 14th.

The archive contains seminal research papers including accounts of Michael Faraday's groundbreaking series of electrical experiments, Isaac Newton's invention of the reflecting telescope, and the first research paper published by Stephen Hawking.

The Society's online collection, which until now only extended back to 1997, contains every paper published in the Royal Society journals from the first ever peer-reviewed scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions in 1665, to the most recent addition, Interface.

I picked one article at random, from 1784. Would you be shocked to learn that the scanning and rendering are far superior to Google Books?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:22 PM

September 13, 2006

Britannica v Wikipedia

Dave Winer points to an an interesting back and forth between the leaders of Britannica and Wikipedia, and offers some thoughts. The direct link to the article is here.

Which reminds me of the journal Nature's article on the accuracy of the two works when it comes to science.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:26 PM

September 8, 2006

Note to Google Books

When you scan a page that has an illustration with an overlay, lift the overlay up so the illustration is actually visible. Oh, and make the book square on the scanner bed so the page is not crooked. Oh yeah, and decide whether to scan the whole book in color or in black and white. Of course, you should also be sure there isn't some bizarre problem with the scanner first. And, needless to say, if the scan you end up with is completely nonsensical, you might not want to include it.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:40 PM

September 2, 2006

Google Books Allowing Downloads: Blah, Blah, Blah

There was quite a buzz about Google allowing people to download PDFs of public domain books as of this week. Almost everything I read was incomplete, or wrong, and there was plenty of irrational exuberance. To me, any discussion of downloadable public domain books has to include Project Gutenberg, but few of the articles mentioned it. So much of the coverage is fawning, which means the project is doomed. It really is the dot.bomb era all over again. I suggest the cheerleaders start here and see how shoddy and incompetent the work is.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:18 PM

September 1, 2006

E-dictionary Studies

Does learning change when kids use electronic dictionaries instead of paper ones? TeleRead highlights some recent research.

“We can be very optimistic of the potential of these students proving that there will be no detriment to learning using eBooks. This optimism obviously begs continuing research.” - Prof. Richard Ballaver and Nicole Adams, Ball State University

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:07 PM

August 27, 2006

‘The Complete New Yorker Solves the DVD-swapping Problem

Via TeleRead The New Yorker will soon offer “a collection of all 4,000+ back issues stored on a 3-by-5-inch 80GB portable hard drive."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:42 PM

August 26, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

I don't know, but maybe they were going for an aerial view here? Every page I looked at in this book is badly done. Is this what some of the top libraries in the world want done with books that are nearly 200 years old? And when Willis A. Boughton donated this book to the Harvard libraries in 1933, did he expect the book to be manhandled this way? I go back to an earlier post I wrote, reflecting on how the president of the University of Michigan gushed about the role of Google Books in historic preservation. Did it ever occur to anyone that Google might know how to build a search engine, but they might not have a clue about how to handle and digitize books?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:28 AM | TrackBack

August 22, 2006

Amazon's aStore Feature

I do the Amazon.com affiliate thing, and noticed today they have a new feaure, currently in Beta, called an aStore. As Amazon describes it, "aStore by Amazon is a new Associates product that gives you the power to create a professional online store, in minutes and without the need for programming skills, that can be embedded within or linked to from your website." It really is easy to create one, and I did a bare-bones one in a few minutes, highlighting the work of my favorite author, Andre Dubus.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:23 PM

August 20, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

The thing I have noticed, scanning so many pages of Google Books, is that when the scanning of a book starts to go wrong, it goes very, very wrong.

But, hey, they've got hyperlinks!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:06 PM

August 13, 2006

Dear Sony: Please listen to Jane...

If you have a keen interest in eBook markets and technology, you really should follow the TeleRead blog. This weekend it has a number of fine entries, including Dear Sony: Please listen to Jane about your eBabel problem—if you want to woo romance readers. The advice applies to all kinds of readers, including romance readers.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:38 PM

August 12, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

Check this out. And then the frontispiece photo, where they apparently failed to notice--or failed to do anything about--an overlay over the page. Once again, Project Gutenberg does it much, much better.

UPDATE: It also occurs to me that Google Books does nothing for the visually impaired, but other eBook efforts do.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:37 AM

August 11, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

Oy vey. Start here, and keep paging forward. Maybe the person scanning this book was drinking.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:15 PM | Comments (1)

August 10, 2006

But Did Anyone Bother to Check if Google Has a Clue?

University of Calif. Joins Google Book Scan Push

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:54 PM

August 6, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

One could guess at what this page is supposed to include on it, but, then again, maybe not. All of which makes this sound like a good idea.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:22 PM

Improving eBook Reading

Jon Udell has a practical suggestion for improving the reading experience with eBooks.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:00 PM

July 26, 2006

Wikipedia

Well, on any given day, this could be true. Then again, maybe not.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:53 PM

July 17, 2006

eBooks Done Well

Andrew Pace, head of information technology for the North Carolina State University Libraries, likes what he sees from Springer's new eBook platform. You can check out SpringerLink for yourself here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:00 PM

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

I subscribe to an RSS feed from Project Gutenberg, which tells me about titles that have been added to their library. One caught my eye today, Fairies and Folk Tales of Ireland, by William Henry Frost. Check out the Frontispiece art, which is just below the fold when you open the eBook. Now check out the same image on Google Books. Heck of a job, Google!

UPDATE: Goodness. What happened to this page? And this one? Those darned verso pages.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:02 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 7, 2006

Amateur Hour at Google

The more I look at Google Books, the more dismayed I am. Check out the following book about Nathaniel Hawthorne, An Analytical Index to the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: With a Sketch of His Life. Start here, and then scroll back a page. Why don't they just throw up on the scanner and reproduce that instead?

And what to say about this page? And this one? Do the people at Harvard know their books are being manhandled like this?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 27, 2006

Blog or Perish?

Ernie Landante of Novita Issue Communications has a podcast interview with Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, who wrote the recent study about blogging, Behind the Scenes in the Blogosphere.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:29 PM | TrackBack

June 26, 2006

Comcast Fires Employee Caught Sleeping on Camera

Since the technician was at a customer's home when he fell asleep after spending an hour on the phone waiting for his own company's customer service, I think the better idea would be to fire Comcast. You can see the video here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:41 PM

June 15, 2006

Google Hacks Together a Shakespeare Site

The eWeek headline was actually Google Launches Shakespeare Site, but like so many of Google's efforts, this is thrown together. I had heard a presentation recently about the flaws in Google's scanning processes. It was done by Lofti Belkhir, whose company, Kirtas Technologies, has amazing book scanning equipment that Google does not use. (Watch the video here, if you have never seen this kind of technology at work. It is very cool.)

Belkhir showed some woefully bad examples of scanned pages at Google Books. I have written about this before, but Belkhir's arguments were really good and his examples were hilarious--especially the visible thumbs on scanned pages. So I decided to take a quick look at the Shakespeare titles in the Google site, and the work is very poor. See the following examples, found in only a few minutes of browsing:

-- Check out the smeared type at the bottom of this page, where the book was clearly not placed on the scanner properly.
-- Look at the faint type in several points on this page. You can find hundreds of pages like this, as they clearly have no method of ensuring consistent quality in the scanning. Note the smeared type at the bottom of this page as well.
-- In fact, just keep advancing through that book, and pretty much all the pages have the same problems.
-- Then you get about ten more pages into it and you have this page, which is much more grey than black and white, as if they made a one-time adjustment in the darkness setting and then went back to the setting where the type is barely legible in places.
-- Check out this page, also with the darkness setting set to high, where you can also see the outline of the text from the opposite side of the page.
-- Flip through Othello starting about here and notice the switch back and forth on brightness controls.
-- What is at the bottom of this page? Fingers?
-- I like this page. What kind of QA process allows that to slip through?
-- Look at the right-hand margin of this page, and, yes, I think that is a finger at the bottom.
-- Ouch. Keep browsing forward; it's bad.

Want a better collection of Shakespeare? Just go here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here.

Lots of people do far better work than Google at this kind of thing.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:50 PM | Comments (2)

Google Hacks Together a Shakespeare Site

The eWeek headline was actually Google Launches Shakespeare Site, but like so many of Google's efforts, this is thrown together. I had heard a presentation recently about the flaws in Google's scanning processes. It was done by Lofti Belkhir, whose company, Kirtas Technologies, has amazing book scanning equipment that Google does not use. (Watch the video here, if you have never seen this kind of technology at work. It is very cool.)

Belkhir showed some woefully bad examples of scanned pages at Google Books. I have written about this before, but Belkhir's arguments were really good and his examples were hilarious--especially the visible thumbs on scanned pages. So I decided to take a quick look at the Shakespeare titles in the Google site, and the work is very poor. See the following examples, found in only a few minutes of browsing:

-- Check out the smeared type at the bottom of this page, where the book was clearly not placed on the scanner properly.
-- Look at the faint type in several points on this page. You can find hundreds of pages like this, as they clearly have no method of ensuring consistent quality in the scanning. Note the smeared type at the bottom of this page as well.
-- In fact, just keep advancing through that book, and pretty much all the pages have the same problems.
-- Then you get about ten more pages into it and you have this page, which is much more grey than black and white, as if they made a one-time adjustment in the darkness setting and then went back to the setting where the type is barely legible in places.
-- Check out this page, also with the darkness setting set to high, where you can also see the outline of the text from the opposite side of the page.
-- Flip through Othello starting about here and notice the switch back and forth on brightness controls.
-- What is at the bottom of this page? Fingers?
-- I like this page. What kind of QA process allows that to slip through?
-- Look at the right-hand margin of this page, and, yes, I think that is a finger at the bottom.
-- Ouch. Keep browsing forward; it's bad.

Want a better collection of Shakespeare? Just go here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here.

Lots of people do far better work than Google at this kind of thing.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:50 PM | Comments (2)

June 14, 2006

Behind the Scenes in the Blogosphere

Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg discusses a new study, Behind the Scenes in the Blogosphere. It offers "advice from established bloggers," and focuses on business blogs. I have only skimmed it, but it looks quite good. It's a pretty big PDF download (1.3MB). Hey, maybe they should blog about it!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:36 PM

Behind the Scenes in the Blogosphere

Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg discusses a new study, Behind the Scenes in the Blogosphere. It offers "advice from established bloggers," and focuses on business blogs. I have only skimmed it, but it looks quite good. It's a pretty big PDF download (1.3MB). Hey, maybe they should blog about it!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:36 PM

June 8, 2006

Keeping Ratings Trustworthy

Barry Graubart asks some good questions about the value of user ratings such as those at Amazon. His thoughts are similar to ones I offered at my NFAIS presentation last week, but he does a better job of explaining it than I did.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:53 PM

June 7, 2006

Publishing to iTunes

Via PaidContent.org, news of PDF Magazine Downloads in iTunes. I have been hearing rumblings about publishing books and magazines to iTunes and, by extension, iPods. Obviously the screen size is an issue right now, but perhaps this suggests some future directions for iPods and other, similar, devices.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:32 PM

May 22, 2006

Folkways Recordings

According to paidContent.org, this wonderful collection of music will soon be digitized and made widely available.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:05 AM

Publisher Agonistes

AP reporter Hillel Italie gives us a view into angst at Book Expo America. As much as I love the technology of publishing, one phrase caught my eye--"the shrinkage of reading time." That is something we should all worry about, if true. But are people reading less, or are they reading differently?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:45 AM

May 20, 2006

MySpace Hallucinations

Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 has a great piece on irrational exuberance over MySpace.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:40 AM

May 17, 2006

Proceed Calmly to the Nearest Exit

A confession. I don't own an iPod or any other kind of MP3 player. Clearly, the whole music download business has been doing fine without me. But I have been interested in podcasts, so I decided to download iTunes and start playing around.

This led me to the Podcast directory on Apple's Music Store. There, among the "New and Notable" podcasts was "Pajamas Media: Blog Week in Review"--thirty minute hairballs featuring the likes of Glenn Reynolds and Tammy Bruce.

I have stayed away from the political blogs, which only make my blood boil. Pajamas Media was coming into being as I was signing off from political blogging. I looked at it once, and fell asleep. As James Wolcott has said, the site is the Web's first Edsel, and that is being really, really kind. So, faced with the prospect of listening to these Karl Rove automotons prattle on, I decided to do something much more interesting and productive and got my teeth cleaned.

I mention all this not to lapse back into the political realm--not going there--but to observe that the new media technologies allow anyone to publish anything, anytime. Sometimes this is a good thing--indeed it can be a great thing--but sometimes it means wading through the dross to find something good.

UPDATE: Those Pajamas Media investors can't be very happy. More thoughts on that here.
The politics of the various sites aside, the difference in popularity is simple to explain. The writing on the Huffington Post is simply better. Most of the Pajamas Media authors are mediocre at best, and some of them are really dreadful (check out this bizarro one for an example). A worthwhile publishing project starts with good writing, if you ask me. This is why Slate has done well. The writing is uniformly very good and often excellent. Maybe they use editors. Maybe their investors had a clue.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:57 PM

May 15, 2006

7500 Words and Nothing's On

What happens when you write 7500 words about digitizing books without mentioning the words "markup" or "XML"? You get a breathless conclusion that, "the technology of search will transform isolated books into the universal library of all human knowledge."

Why do so many people who discuss this issue ignore the fact that there are better ways to develop digital text, and that the approach of Google, et al, could reasonably be judged to be mediocre at best? All you have to do is look at the average journal publisher today to see much better, more flexible, and more powerful ways to do this job.

And, by the way, this is old news. In fact, it is really old news.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:27 PM | TrackBack

May 11, 2006

Stock Voting Rights Plan Hits Brick Wall at Google

I don't understand a lot of things about Google, but one of the main things is how the stockholders tolerate not having a fair share of the voting rights in the stock. Apparently, some of the actual stockholders feel this way, too, but eWeek reports that a proposal to change the status quo was recently voted down.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:15 PM

April 29, 2006

Microsoft Gets Into eNews Business

Via Dave Winer, I learn that Microsoft is getting into the newspaper facsimile business. This is a space now occupied by folks like Zinio and Newsstand. Zinio and Newsstand have had modest success. Will Microsoft enjoy more simply because they are Microsoft? The reader being built right into Vista helps of course, but the functionality will have to be attractive and useful. I wonder if a demo is available out there...

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis is unimpressed. I left a comment over there.

UPDATE: Jarvis's post has a number of excellent comments, and led me to a great new (for me) publishing blog, Hammorati. Make that two new blogs, as I missed the personal blog of Rex Hammock.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:12 PM

April 28, 2006

Maine Blogger Sued

A Maine blogger is being sued for his comments about an advertising campaign for the Maine tourism bureau. As far as I can tell, the blogger, Lance Dutson, has done nothing more than exercise his constitutional right to free speech. He feels the advertising agency hired by the state is doing a shoddy job, and "pissing away" his tax dollars. I think 99% of Americans feel that way about their local, state, or federal government at times, and almost as many have said so (perhaps not in those exact words). He tell his story here, and includes the phone numbers of the right people to call. I looked at the agency's Web site. It is laughably bad--the sort of Web site that was in vogue for about a week in 1999. Maybe the agency is terribly clever and it's a parody of bad Web sites? Or maybe the agency is just not very good? I don't dare speculate any further, for fear I might be sued.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:43 AM

April 27, 2006

HarperCollins First Looks

I signed up for HarperCollins First Looks a few weeks ago, and found out today I would receive my first book soon. It's The Devil and Miss Prym, by Paulo Coelho.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:06 PM

April 16, 2006

More Poetry Podcasts

So I remarked briefly on the poetry podcasts that Houghton Mifflin will be hosting, but of course they are not the first in the pool. I found a great poetry podcast site at the University of Chicago, which includes a favorite, C. D. Wright. Favorite line, "If I were a felon, I would be home now."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:06 PM

April 11, 2006

Sony Reader: Borders Yes, B&N No

The news about Sony Reader continues to be mixed. Borders will stock it, but Barnes & Noble won't.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:38 AM

April 6, 2006

Poetry Podcasts

Yes, there are. (Apparently the web site is not up yet; I will try to follow up on this.) And, yes, the title is alliteration, though a poor example it be.

UPDATE: The site seems to be up now and lists upcoming podcasts from Ron Slate, Natasha Trethewey, Michael Collier, David Tucker, and, a favorite of mine, Galway Kinnell.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:05 PM

April 4, 2006

Publishers Weekly: Borders to Sell Sony eBook Reader

According to Publishers Weekly, Sony has signed a deal with Borders for that retailer to sell the Sony Reader at 200 stores when the e-book device comes out this summer. This sounds like a good retail channel for the reader itself, but the article also says the content will all be sold through Sony Connect, which is not a very strong portal.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:21 PM

April 3, 2006

Safari Books Online Announces Executive Hires

I don't know how Safari Books Online is doing specifically, but they did just announce some executive hires.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:44 PM

March 19, 2006

American Memory

Next time you find yourself thinking about how amazing Google Print is, go spend an hour or two at the American Memory collection and see how wonderful digital preservation really can be.

This is my fundamental arguement against Google Print, Google Video, Google Scholar, and so many other things Google does. The efforts are mediocre at best. There are far better examples out there in every category. People seem to have this uncritical adoration for anything Google announces or does. It reminds me, eerily, of the uncritical thinking people had at the height of the dot.com boom, where any idea, as long as it was on the Web, was a winner. We all know how that turned out.

At this writing, Google has a good search engine and makes a lot of money through advertising. It also has Google Mail, which seems sturdy, but is not exactly revolutionary. It also has the Google Appliance, which is just goofy, if you ask me. (And if you look at Google's total licensing revenues, which includes the Appliance-related revenues, they total just $73 million dollars for the year just finished, with only a 19% growth year-to-year in revenues for the fourth quarter. There are faster-growing enterprise search companies, which tells me that Google is not really impacting the enterprise search market in a signficant way. In other words, I am not the only person to see little value in the Google enterprise applications.)

But enough grousing and back to American Memory. Check out the Walt Whitman notebooks being featured and a personal favorite, the photography collection from Detroit Publishing.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:27 PM

March 18, 2006

Google and Amazon

John Battelle suggests Amazon and Google are on a collision course. I get his point, especially given the example he cites. But Amazon has built perhaps the best eCommerce engine in the world, and Google has coughed up dross like this.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:54 AM

March 8, 2006

The More Things Change

My old company, Xyvision, just moved back into a building it occupied--egads--17 years ago when I first when to work there. It was a great building. I can still picture my office there, and the grounds around it were woodsy and pleasant. In the summer, you could take a long walk and see little or no pavement, and in the winter a group of us would grab our skates and sticks and play hockey on the frozen pond outside the cafeteria. I wish my friends and colleagues there well. Maybe I could bring my skates by sometime?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:37 PM

March 2, 2006

Napster Points a Finger at Microsoft

From PaidContent.org, I learned that Napster CEO Chris Gorog "blames the Microsoft partner device makers and Microsoft for Napster's inability to make great strides in its battle with Apple's iTunes."

My recent experience tells me Naspter is right to be frustrated with Microsoft, but I don't blame the device makers as much as Gorog does. So I offered the following comment over at PaidContent.org:

I just spent the better part of a couple of days dealing with a Napster/Microsoft DRM/Creative Zen Micro problem. It began with a hiccup in my son's Napster account, and after essentially zero help from the Napster technical support team, it took an excellent technical support engineer from Creative to walk me through a labyrinth of Microsoft DRM upgrades and driver changes. The upshot was that I _still_ had to reinstall the Creative firmware and resynchronize the device with my son's Napster library. I was left convinced that the real culprit was the Microsoft DRM technology _and_ how it is implemented in the Napster client.

So there is plenty of guilt to go around here, but let's not forget that Microsoft has a long and famous history of not dealing well with third-party devices. This goes back to the earliest days of Windows. So if Microsoft intends to be a serious player in the music and entertainment business, it needs to master this requirement of its operating systems.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:46 PM | Comments (1)

February 27, 2006

Get me Rewrite!

Judging from this, we know why they need an editor.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:57 PM

February 13, 2006

Amateur Hour at T-Mobile Redux

Gosh, I thought I had resolved the customer support snafus at T-Mobile. At the conclusion of round 1, I wrote: "So the corporate person, Carsia Johnson, called me today and said, on further reflection, they are going to eliminate the second early termination fee, and will send me a bill for the remaining service charges, which I will pay."

This was last Tuesday, February 7. Today I get a call saying my bill is overdue and will be referred to collections if not paid promptly. I was miffed, of course. I have an excellent credit rating, and am compulsive, in fact, about paying bills on time. So I explained, cheerily at first, that this issue had been decided with customer support and I was expecting a final bill, which I would promptly pay.

No dice.

The first person I spoke with, a Candace, employee number 1725431, said that they had no way of regenerating a bill, and by the time the next bill came out, it would be referred to collections. Well, I said, please talk to Carsia Johnson at 877 290 6323, x8029, and she can explain the arrangement we came to.

No dice again.

So I asked to speak to a supervisor, Mike, employee number 1725778, and he said the same thing, more or less. I impressed on him that this had been resolved, that Carsia Johnson agreed to have a final bill sent out, and I asked him again to contact her. I tried, several times, to read the phone number to him, but he refused to take it. Instead, he went to some lengths to find her email, but couldn't. I offered the phone number again; he refused. I said that under no circumstances would I accept this being sent to collections, but he said repeatedly that he had no control over when and how accounts are sent to collections. I said this was impossible, but he insisted. (More on this later, as it turned out to be false.)

So I said, ok, you're not going to call Carsia Johnson, so I will, and I picked up another phone and called her with him listening. I explained that he was demanding payment and threatening collections, despite the agreement she and I reached before, and I needed to hear from her as soon as possible. When I hung up, poor Mike was frothing. I had lied. He never threatened collections. But of course he had, saying that if the bill was not paid it would be sent to collections. That, my friend, is threatening collections.

So after a not so veiled threat from Mike, employee #1725778, ("If you are going to lie, maybe we should meet"), he hung up the phone. I burst out laughing at his threat, and asked him if he were threatening me, but he hung up before he could answer. So I called Carsia Johnson back and updated her on the new angle to this story.

In the first entry, I wrote, "When does shoddy customer service become abuse?" I think I know the answer to that question now.

This is just silly, really. Not only do these people not talk to each other, but they refuse to talk to each other. So, remembering how everyone I spoke to before had a different spin on the policies and the facts, I decided to call and talk to a different payments supervisor. This time I got an incredibly helpful guy, Bill (maybe it's the name), employee #1724182. I gave him the story, explained that I was waiting on a final printed bill, and my main concern was this idea of the account being referred to collections. No problem, Bill tells me (emphasis mine), you just have to set up a payment plan with as little as ten dollars up front, and the account will not be referred. (This after being told by Mike repeatedly that "he had no control over when and how accounts are sent to collections." Moreover, Bill told me, the new bill would then be generated tonight, and I could review it before paying the final balance.)

So I happily agreed to pay $100 today by credit card, and would pay the balance (another $150 or so upon receipt of the bill). Done deal (for now!).

One interesting detail emerged though, which tells me again how slipshod T-Mobile is at articulating and applying their policies. Part of the balance due is from a charge back that I insisted American Express make because T-Mobile had charged my credit card after I told them to stop charging my card. You might remember that the first person never told me the charging would continue. The second person told me that it can take 60 days for EasyPay to stop charging your credit card. Bill told me today, flatly, that T-Mobile should have immediately stopped charging my credit card. Bill is a supervisor, and the other two weren't, so I have to assume he knows the rules a little better. Why the three views of the same policy, and all so different?

So I have a call back into Carsia Johnson. No return call yet. I hope the remaining billing goes as agreed to today with Bill, but, gosh, who knows.

I will keep you up to date.

UPDATE: I got a call from a senior person today who promised to be my point of contact until this gets resolved. I expect a final bill shortly, which I will then pay. I will then request a letter explaining that all commitments have been met, nothing more is owed, etc, etc.

What a lot of grief...

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:57 PM | Comments (1)

February 7, 2006

UMichigan Stands up for Google Print

I am not a fan of Google Print, but some people are. Via John Battelle's SearchBlog, here is a speech (PDF) by Mary Sue Coleman, President of the University of Michigan. She addressed the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers yesterday and explained the university's enthusiastic participation in the program. She makes some great points--and is very eloquent. I share her enthusiasm for digital preservation, but I still don't get why it's Google's job, especially when they are doing a mediocre job of it. If I were President Coleman, I would contain my enthusiasm until better partners--and better processes--come along.

UPDATE: I am clearly in the minority on this one. Peter Morville at findability.org was also very impressed with President Coleman's remarks.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:33 AM

February 6, 2006

Amateur Hour at T-Mobile

So I had T-Mobile for several years, mainly because I was addicted to my Palm device, and T-Mobile for a while was the only company around here that supported it. But then my Treos started breaking with too much regularity, so I went back to a good old cell phone. At that point, I stuck with T-Mobile mainly out of inertia--and for a while because cellular numbers were not portable. But, honestly, I was never that happy with the service. Coverage was terrible near my house and along certain highways that I traveled.

Christmas 2004 comes around, and I decide it is time for my boys to have their own cell phones, and, once again, I let inertia get the best of me. I signed up for a T-Mobile family plan--four phones, $80 or so bucks a month for minutes, and an average monthly bill of $160 or so with the per-phone fees, etc.

I knew right away it was a terrible mistake. Since my wife and boys were around the house a lot, service was miserable. We had all kinds of dropped calls, calls that didn't connect, long periods where we couldn't get through to each other. I called, they tried various lame ways to troubleshoot the problem. It never got better.

So I resolved to ride out the one-year contract I agreed to and then sign up with someone else in Christmas 2005. My sons broke one phone, lost another--both times I ponied up full price for the new phones rather than take a free or discounted phone and extend the contract. I was quite specific about this in my conversations with T-Mobile. Apparently I should have got this in writing, but more on that later.

Meanwhile, I continued to have serious problems. Once on a business trip to exotic Stamford, CT, I went through about three days where I had, literally, dozens of dropped calls and dozens more calls that never went through. My wife had similar problems on several days. We would call; the T-Mobile folks would wave their arms a little. Nothing would happen. I remember the problems in Stamford went away spontaneously when I was on the hotel phone with T-Mobile technical support. The fellow suggested it was because my phone had just traveled to a new zone, but I had been sitting on my bed with the phone in my hand for an hour.

Another time, also in exotic Connecticut, I was first on the scene of a horrific truck accident. Coming around a bend, I saw a truck careen out of the lane, through the guardrail, and down a ditch. I stopped, dialed 911--nothing. I dialed again--nothing. You can guess the rest. The call never went through. I called T-Mobile technical support. Lots of arm waving. Lots of lame guesses. No resolution.

So Christmas 2005 comes around, and I know I am leaving T-Mobile. I call them, asking if any early termination charges will apply if I cancel my service on or around December 25th. I am told no. I remind them that I have a family plan with four numbers. Are they sure no early termination charges will apply? No, I am cheerily told.

So I shop, pick Verizon, pick some cool new phones for my sons. I cancel the T-Mobile phones. I make an extra point of calling T-Mobile to tell them to no longer automatically charge my credit card.

You would think this would all work, no?

Well, here is what T-Mobile has done in response to my years of business and timely payments.

-- They sent me a final bill that included two early termination fees associated with the two phone lines where I replaced phones, paid for the replacement phones in full, and was specifically told my contract would not extend beyone December 2005. The total of the two early termination fees? $400.
-- They have continued to charge my credit card, despite my express request to stop doing this.

I called them today, and after a series of calls, finally reached someone in the executive office who agreed that one of the two $200 fees was incorrect and would be deleted. She refused to agree to waive the other one, so I left a message for Sue Nokes, senior vice president of Customer Service for T-Mobile (425-378-4991 for those of you who are also having problems). I haven't heard back from her yet.

(By the way, I love how the T-Mobile, corporate person, Carsia Johnson, avoided the point about the second charge being incorrect. I pointed out, correctly, that I paid full price for the second phone in order to avoid extending my contract. She did not dispute that, but instead said repeatedly, my record was "notated" to indicate I had agreed to extend the contract. So she is implying that I both paid full price to avoid extending the contract AND agreed to extend the contract. Talk about a "lose-lose.")

American Express was just very helpful, charging T-Mobile back for the money that T-Mobile charged against my credit card after I told them to stop charging my credit card and bill me directly. Unfortunately, American Express does not have a mechanism for blocking future charges by a specific company. So I called T-Mobile and asked why they had done this, and was told it can take more than two months for this kind of automatic payment to be cancelled (they call it EasyPay--I suggest EasyGouge instead).

Two months? Why on earth would something so simple take so long? More importantly, why was I not told this on December 26, 2005 when I called T-Mobile to cancel EasyPay and bill me directly for the last payment? I specifically told the person to cancel EasyPay so I could pay the final bills myself. This person said nothing, and on January 6, 2006 T-Mobile charged my American Express card against my authorization.

So here is my offer to T-Mobile. Drop the additional incorrect $200 early termination charge, and I will pay the remaining usage charges on my phone. If not, I will not pay any additional money to T-Mobile and will refer this to arbitration at the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office.

I eagerly await their call. They know how to reach me.

UPDATE: I emailed Sue Nokes, senior vice president of Customer Service for T-Mobile, this blog link. I also emailed their media relations folks. No word back yet. But I hope Ms. Nokes reads my explanation here. It will be the substance of my complaint to the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office and the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Energy.

FURTHER THOUGHTS: In one of my initial calls with the regular customer support folks, a woman named Erin, employee #7139360 tried to tell me that I had been told about the termination fees during a call with T-Mobile in December. This is not true, of course, and she would have no way of knowing this. During this call, I specifically asked about termination fees and was told there would be none, and she is claiming the exact opposite with no proof. Why on earth would she say this then? Is this a matter of defensiveness on her part, or are they told to say such things in an attempt to get people to back off?

Also to a similar point. Why was the corporate person, Carsia Johnson, able to so quickly determine that one of the $200 early termination charges was incorrect? Why wasn't Erin able to make this same determination? And how did the original charge get on my bill if it was ultimately incorrect? And since both charges are incorrect, how did the second one get on my bill?

And to the question of why the person failed to tell me that my credit card would still be charged when I specifically said I did not want it to be charged: Was she simply unaware? Was she aware and trained to not say so?

When does this kind of "customer service" become abusive? The more I think about it, the more I see systematic problems in T-Mobile's customer billing and service--or worse.

I worked in customer support for years. You keep customers happy by empowering employees to do the right things by customers. I am guessing I spent somewhere between $5000 to $7000 over the years with T-Mobile. (I asked Carsia Johnson to look up how much I had spent on T-Mobile over the years and she said it had nothing to do with the matter at hand. That speaks volumes to me.) I have never disputed another charge with them. Wouldn't you think, given my long history as a customer and my consistent and well-documented story, they would give me the benefit of the doubt and rectify this situation?

UPDATE: I just got a call from someone else from T-Mobile, a Kelly, who sounded like she was going to take a good look at this. She promised a follow-up in 72 hours. I will keep you posted.

RESOLUTION: (2/7/06) So the corporate person, Carsia Johnson, called me today and said, on further reflection, they are going to eliminate the second early termination fee, and will send me a bill for the remaining service charges, which I will pay. She said she realized, after more digging, that I had had two accounts with T-Mobile. This explains some of their hostility, I think. When I signed up for the family plan in December 2004, it apparently kicked off a new account number. So they were treating me as someone who had service for a year and then was quitting on them, instead of someone who had service for several years (five I think, not exactly sure) who had finally had enough.

So I have to thank T-Mobile for resolving the immediate problem they created, but I suggest they look at the underlying problems that caused this series of mishaps.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:41 PM | Comments (3)

January 23, 2006

Safari's Rough Cuts

Via Joe Wikert, I learned about a new offering from O'Reilly's Safari service, where readers can get an advanced look at manuscripts in process. According to the press release, "Readers who buy a Rough Cuts title get immediate access to an evolving manuscript. They can read the book online or download and print a PDF version. The initial version of a Rough Cuts book will not be fully edited, subjected to final technical review, or completely formatted." Joe likes the idea, but wonders whether enough early adopters will want to pay for it.

I think it is a great way for O'Reilly to get people to pay for the privilege of editing their books. Also noted in the press release, "Using the Rough Cuts service’s built-in Notes feature, readers can send feedback, suggestions, bug fixes, and comments directly to the author and editor."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:56 AM

January 17, 2006

Open Content Alliance

The Open Content Alliance has posted its work plan for 2006. It certainly looks like a lot of work.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:40 PM

January 10, 2006

Google Books: The Other Shoe Drops?

This article seems to suggest yes and, um, no. If they do go into the online bookstore business, they need to do a better job than they have with Google Video. And, once again, a major company manages to misstep on DRM.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:22 PM

January 3, 2006

Udell and Tufte

I really enjoy Jon Udell's writing, and he has a great new entry today using some of Tufte's thinking to pick apart some Washington Post infographics.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:27 PM

December 27, 2005

Sony Connect: How Not to Run a Content Site?

So far, my experience with Sony Connect has been pathetic. We bought my younger son a Sony MP3 player. On Christmas day, I signed up for Sony Connect, after installing the client software from the CD that came with the MP3 player. I then dutifully entered the code for the five free downloads that came with the MP3 player, along with a second coupon for two free downloads that I received from some other shopping. That gave us seven downloads. My son then picked four songs to download, we followed the instructions, tried to download them and--poof!--the download failed with a cryptic popup message. There was no way to abort the download, retrace our steps, or otherwise recover from the failure. The songs didn't download, but our account was debited the four downloads.

So I dutifully found my way to a mechanism to contact technical support with the problem. I filled out the form with a description of the problem, and I also noted that this was not an auspicious start.

OK. This is technology. Shit happens. This is where customer support kicks in. Almost immediately, I get an email response saying they received my report, "Your question has been received. You should expect a response from us within 24 hours." So far so good.

Unfortunately, this was 48 hours ago. Not a peep since.

So I dug out the auto-generated email just now. It includes a place to update the incident report via email, so I did. I wrote the following note, and I wonder what kind of response I will get now.

48 hours and no response…

So my initial attempt to use the site failed miserably, and now I have waited 2 days without a word of response.

Is this what I should expect in terms of quality of the service and customer response? I will wait a few more hours, but then you will lose my business for good.

I should note that I have historically been a big fan of Sony products. I have had Sony televisions, stereos, Walkmen, and other electronics that have served me really well. (I did have a miserable experience with a Vaio purchase this year, but I had decided that was an isolated incident...) But this experience with Sony Connect, so far, is really poor. Wouldn't you imagine that they would have extra staffing around Christmas to deal with the many people who would do exactly what I did--configure a new MP3 player, join their service, and try to download a few tracks? And wouldn't you imagine that they would be ready to respond in their promised timeframe when some of these connections predictably failed? Given the cost of acquiring new customers, wouldn't Sony Connect want to do everything in its power to make these opportunities work well?

UPDATE: 72 hours after my initial contact, Sony Connect emailed me a work-around, but I haven't tried it yet.

MUCH DELAYED UPDATE: I tried the workaround eventually, and it worked. But I was so unimpressed with the initial behavior and so put off by the customer support, that we never did any other business on that site. My son decided to rip his existing CDs onto the Sony MP3 player we bought him, and has made do with that. Now he is shopping for a new MP3 player, and is not looking at Sony. So even though the device is fine, the lack of a decent experience with the Web site made him give up on it right away, and now he is giving up on the device. This doesn't bode well for the Sony eBook device, which apparently will require purchases of content through Sony Connect.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:06 PM

December 9, 2005

Currently Reading (and Reviewing)

The Complete New Yorker, a collection of 80 years of, to my thinking, the greatest magazine of the past century. I had installed it and have been using it for a couple of months, but I am reviewing it now, so I want through the installation process again. Even that is a kick for a fan. As it copies the cover images onto your hard drive, the 20th century goes racing by. (Click on the image to see what I mean.)

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:30 PM

November 12, 2005

Flexible, Powerful Publishing for Small- and Mid-Sized Organizations

The SSP seminar this week reminded me that I had spoken at the SSP annual conference this past June. Shortly after the presentation, my notebook blew up, but Mark Anderson of Cadmus, who moderated the panel, was kind enough to dig up a copy of the presentation.

The presentation asks and answers a few basic questions. Isn't it reasonable to be able to do electronic publishing of appropriate quality at a reasonable cost? And isn't it also reasonable to be able to respond to new electronic publishing channels and opportunities without breaking the bank, giving too much away, ruining your health, or setting your hair on fire?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:59 PM

October 10, 2005

Content Management and Manufacturing

Do you work in manufacturing and are you involved with implementing content management to support sales, marketing, and customer support? If so, I would like to talk with you about some writing I am doing. Please email me.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:22 PM

November 24, 2004

Multiple Content Repositories

My colleague Mark Walter has an excellent new case study over at the Gilbane Report web site. The case study is entitled, Wachovia's CAS: Harnessing the Value of Multiple Content Repositories Across a Large Enterprise. The abstract:

Wachovia's Content Access Services (CAS) infrastructure is a layer of middleware that provides a unified programming interface to a variety of content repositories spread across multiple business units of a large financial services company. Developed over a series of projects, CAS illustrates the speed to market that an effective enterprise content integration strategy can bring to organizations that grow through mergers and acquisitions. It also shows how content integration eases the transitions that organizations face as they retire aging systems and bring in new ones. Lastly, CAS demonstrates how content-integration services provide ongoing payback, cutting development costs by enabling new capabilities that leverage at a corporate level the investments that individual business units make in content management. Wachovia's recipe for success includes a pay-as-you-go approach to developing the architecture, a noninvasive approach to deploying it, and a progressive approach to continually improving it.

Mark is always worth reading, and Wachovia is an interesting case study.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:24 AM

November 11, 2004

Manufacturing and Content Management

I am doing some writing on content management and manufacturing companies. My premise is that more B2B Ecommerce is happening impersonally, so a manufacturer's or distributor's web site has to be rich with product information.

I would love to speak with people who have some persective on this. Please post here or email me at btrippe@nmpub.com if you would like to discuss this.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:19 AM

November 9, 2004

XML and Multilingual Documentation

I have a new article in Transform magazine about how Mercury Marine is using XML and a content management system from Vasont to improve development of multilingual documentation. To quote briefly from the article:

People who know boats probably know Mercury Marine, and if they own one of the company's sterndrive, outboard or inboard engines, they also know that it comes with a lot of documentation. What they probably don't know is just how hard it is to deliver those documents.

Like most durable goods manufacturers, Mercury has to develop owner's manuals, service manuals, parts catalogs and other owner and dealer publications both in print and online, and in as many as 15 languages. With so much publishing, Mercury faced growing problems. A legacy Interleaf system simply could not produce some of the foreign languages. Moreover, the company discovered that many groups were handling publishing on their own, and there were multiple authoring and composition systems in use.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:18 PM

September 3, 2004

New Article for The Seybold Report

I wrote an article for the most recent Seybold Report about an effort by power tool company DeWALT to automate their catalog production process by using XML. The following is a brief excerpt from the article, which is only available by subscription.

DeWALT Industrial Tool Company of Baltimore manufactures and markets high-performance power tools and accessories for woodworking. A growing company with a growing product line, DeWALT's tools are used in residential and industrial construction, professional remodeling and woodworking. Chances are, you have a DeWALT power tool or two in your workshop, and it's almost certain that something in your home was built with DeWALT tools.

In the early days of the company, DeWALT produced a single, all-purpose product, the universal woodworking machine known as the "DeWALT Wonder-Worker." Times have changed since the 1920s, of course, and woodworking has changed along with it. DeWALT now makes more than 200 specialized machines, with more than 800 accessories and thousands of parts.

It's no wonder that for a product company such as DeWALT, timely and efficient production of catalogs has been an increasing challenge. In recent years, as the
product line grew, DeWALT found itself doing more tailored and segmented marketing. As a result, the company's small graphics department has had to produce more catalogs tailored to different markets and audiences. This targeted marketing has led DeWALT to look even more closely at automating and gaining efficiency in the catalog production process.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:23 PM

June 23, 2004

Time to Redesign

I am finally sick of this bare-bones design and would like to redesign. Of course, I dojn't have time to actually do this. I would be interested in hearing from developers who use MovableType and would be interested in taking on the task of helping me choose a new design and then implementing it. Should I upgrade MT at the same time?

Please contact me via email.

btrippe@nmpub.com

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:41 PM

May 22, 2004

XML as a Tool for Getting More Value from Your Content

Publishers with marketable archived content have an opportunity to market the content on the Web. In this presentation from Seybold Europe, Aimee Potter, co-founder and COO of Paris-based Rosebud Technologies, presents an interesting case study of how a consumer publication is using XML to help profitably market archived content via the Web.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:08 PM

May 21, 2004

Digging In

When I am writing about content management for publication, the most useful thing to be able to convey to readers is how end user organizations are actually implementing technology. What problem are they trying to solve, and how have they actually done with the technology they have chosen to implement.

Getting end users to talk about their projects has always been a challenge. To begin with, these are busy people. Plus, it isn't necessarily in their interest to discuss what they are doing. In some cases, it may be competitively sensitive. They may be building out some functionality that is to their competitive advantage. Indeed, the very fact that they are spending money on a certain technology is, at the end of the day, their business and not necessarily ours.

It appears that end users now have a new reason to be tightlipped. Larger companies, especially, seem to view public comments about technology efforts to be too much exposure. While no one has come right out and said this (I think), some people seem to view public comments about technology efforts to be material to the operations of the company.

Needless to say, the larger community would benefit from more information and not less. So I have been thinking of an idea.

Government efforts to implement content management technology should be spotlighted more. My presumption here is that, except in cases like the Defense Department or the intelligence agencies, government operations should all be an open book. I would love to see someone blog a major installation of content management technology at a government agency. Soup to nuts. From the earliest point in the project through to its conclusion. In all its detail--what has gone wrong, what has gone right, what decisions had to be made, what decisions had to be amended along the way.

Has this been done?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:35 PM | Comments (1)

April 27, 2004

DRM for Electronic Editions

One of the more interesting DRM and electronic publishing applications I have seen recently is the combined product and service offering from NewsStand, Inc..

NewsStand offers, essentially, WYSIWYG distribution of periodicals through a secure reader. They have some prominent publishers already, including major newspapers such as The New York Times and Boston Globe and high-value periodicals such as The Harvard Business Review.

For an indepth presentation about NewsStand from Michele Chaboudy, Chief Marketing Officer, please click here. This presentation was originally given at the DRM conference in New York City earlier this month.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:30 PM

XML and the Airlines

I have a new article in Transform magazine about how Contintal Airlines has used XML and Web Services to automate some routine publishing and document review tasks. To quote briefly from the introduction:

Aircraft maintenance is an especially content-centric process. The typical aircraft comprises thousands of systems, subsystems and parts, each with its own documentation. Moreover, these parts are often changed over time; an engineering change or new safety requirement may modify the part, necessitating a change in the related documentation.

Safety is paramount in commercial aviation, so federal regulations require that the documentation be comprehensive and up to date. Like other airlines, Houston-based Continental Airlines faced the problem of ensuring that its 4,000 maintenance personnel, spread over four hubs and 23 other maintenance facilities, receive and read critical updates to maintenance documents. In the past, circulating such changes to documentation was a largely manual, and thus time-consuming and costly, process.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:04 PM

April 10, 2004

eBooks Show Life

Remember when everyone thought eBooks would be the next big thing? The apex of the hype was the fall of 2000 when there were two e-book conferences in New York one week apart. At the same moment speakers were trumpeting the advent of a billion dollar market, someone at the other end of the hall was already calling in the sell orders to their broker.

Here we are more than three years later, and there is, in fact, en eBook market. It is smaller than hyped of course, but it has proven to be some nice incremental revenue for some of the trade publishers. The Open eBook Forum (OeB) reported that retailers enjoyed $2.59M in eBook revenue for the quarter ended September 30, 2003 (their latest public numbers), an increase of 37% over the same quarter the year before. Not billions clearly, but modestly good numbers that are trending in the right direction.

I also like the latest news from OeB, their decision to produce a monthly eBook Bestseller List. The first published list is notable for how much it looks like any other bestseller list, and also where it differs. Thus we have books such as The Da Vinci Code (#1, go figure!) and Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, which came in at #8. However, you also have books that don't often appear on general bestseller lists, such as Peter Hamilton's space opera, Pandora's Star, at #3.

More significant to the list are the refererence books—a bible, a dictionary, and a thesaurus. We all know bibles to be perennial good sellers, but so too are staple reference works such as dictionaries. Everyone has to have a dictionary in their home, and I like the idea that many people apply the same rule to their computers and PDAs. There is room in these devices for other reference materials as well.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:13 PM

March 15, 2004

Eye Believe Productions

I don't talk too much about my company and capabilities in the context of the blog. However, one of the companies I work with is moving back to the Boston area after a couple of years in New York and San Francisco. Eye Believe Productions provides an array of multimedia services, including Web design, application development, and multimedia production. Past clients range from Fortune 500 pharmaceutical companies to small- and medium-sized businesses.

Feel free to contact me or visit their Web site for more information and a portfolio of recent work.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:14 PM | Comments (1)

February 26, 2004

Employing a Software Development Process in Content Management Projects

One of the the lists I subscribe to is for technical writers and others in the technical communication field (techwr-l@lists.raycomm.com). I responded to a posting today that asked the list to weigh in on how engineers and technical writers can effectively collaborate as software is developed. You can imagine the problems technical writers face as software hurtles through the development process; can the documentation keep pace with such change?

As I point out in my reply, the poster asked the question and answered it, at least in part, because his organization has already identified that they need a more orderly development process, perhaps something along the lines of ISO 9001.

It occurred to me that the advice for keeping technical communicators in step with software development is identical to advice I would give to keep any stakeholder in step with a CMS implementation project. I welcome your thoughts.

What a great question, and even better that you answered it yourself already, because the answer is "process." I have worked for two successful software companies where we redesigned our process to conform to something like ISO 9001 and the Capability Maturity Model for Software (CMM, see some background herehttp://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmm/cmm.html, and note also that CMM is being sunsetted in favor of CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration)).

A great deal has been written about such processes, but I would like to offer some highlights of what I learned from going through the process twice--once on the customer support side of the business (including training and documentation) and once on the software development side of the business.

The highlights for me were:

  1. There should be detailed specifications (including functional and design specifications) that are highly readable and meaningful to all interested parties (including documentation).
  2. Such specifications should be subject to regular and formal reviews by all interested parties.
  3. Such specifications should be under a rigorous and visible change control process. (We even went so far as to have the Director of Customer Support, which included training and documentation, be one of the signatures on an approved change.)
  4. The entire product development process should be managed in visible and meaningful phases, and that transitions from phase to phase should be an explicit event. Thus, you don't consider the product to be in design phase until the functional specifications have been approved (pretty obvious, yes, but not always honored).
  5. Perhaps most importantly, that the transition from one phase to another be subject to an official declaration that the project has reached a state of readiness to be at the next stage. And that this state of readiness be defined by a number of meaningful criteria. (For instance, for release out of the design phase, you could require that the GUI be frozen; for release to Alpha that the installation scripts and documentation be complete. Again, pretty obvious, but the details are important.)

There is more of course (and I would be happy to discuss off line), but I think these highlights suggest the gist of it, which is that the software development process be orderly, open, and visible, and (here is the key) that all interested parties are fully involved and fully empowered to help manage the process to ensure their own organization's success in the ultimate release and use of the product.

One more quick thought. If you haven't already, you might consider an outside consultant to help your organization with this process. In one case, we did it on our own, and it worked because we had a _very_ senior and excellent engineering team. In the other case, we were all pretty junior, and we hired an outside consultant who did an excellent job of "herding the cats," as they say.

Hope this helps, and as I said, I would be happy to discuss offline.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:02 PM | Comments (4)

February 9, 2004

Who Should Manage your CMS?

The question came up recently--where in your organization should a CMS be managed? This particular client was not interested in an ASP model (which is an excellent one for some), but is raising the question of which group should manage a growing CMS implementation in a growing company.

I offered the following preliminary (and general) answer. Your mileage will vary.

1. The CMS software, repository, interfaces, and customized tools should be managed by a centralized technical organization that is resposible for other business applications (back office, ERP, etc.) It is risky to not have a group that specifically worries about the software and all the administravia that goes along with it (OS versions, database versions, upgrades, etc.)

2. The content of the CMS content and how it displays to its various audiences should then be controlled by those people who own the different communication products and different audiences. Thus, tech doc should own its sections, marketing its sections, and so on. Some organizations are very focused on branding (e.g., use of the corporate logo and name, colors, etc); in this case, a good CMS will allow templating of such items so that they can be easily controlled and administered by a central group.

Hope this helps, and I would be happy to discuss more, either here or offline.

Bill
btrippe@nmpub.com

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:57 PM

December 3, 2003

A Brief Microsoft Rant

I am generally neutral about Microsoft. That is, I don't see them either as an evil empire or as the greatest technology company ever. If anything, I like their office products, worry about the dominance of Windows, and keep wishing for better security from them. Overall, Microsoft has received more of my software dollars than any other company (go figure!), and I have been satisfied with what I get for the money. But I was stunned by my recent experience with the end of the Beta period for Microsoft Office. On Monday morning, which was December 1st and apparently D-day for the Beta to end, Microsoft left me high and dry.

I paid for and installed the Beta sometime in June as I recall. I remember noting that it would expire in or around November, but I assumed there would be some orderly transition to the full product. I also assumed, apparently incorrectly, that I would be informed of the need to upgrade or uninstall the Beta in advance of its expiration. Perhaps an email would arrive, or some sort of pop-up would appear informing me of my options.

Sadly, no. Instead, Monday morning comes, I turn on Outlook, and I get a message informing me that I need to upgrade the Beta, or remove it. The pop-up, as I recall, offered no other information. There was a link in the Help area to the Beta web site. Silly me, I figured it would have information about how to purchase the upgrade.

Sadly, no again. Not a word (pun intended).

I then went to the main site for Microsoft Office. Still nothing.

I then went to the main site for Microsoft support. Still nothing.

Now, I will admit that I was not my normally patient self. I had work to get done, and my "productivity" software was dead in its tracks. So I put away my credit card, and went with option B: uninstalling the software.

It was simple enough to uninstall, and it was clear that my (earlier) Office 2000 was still on the computer—at least according to the Control Panel function.

But, guess what? With the Beta uninstalled, Office 2000 no longer worked. Dead in the water. Up the creek without a paddle. (Had enough water analogies yet?)

So I had to reinstall Office 2000. For me, this means reinstalling Office 97 (full version) and then installing the Office 2000 upgrade (both bought and paid for, still in their original jewel case, etc. and never installed anywhere else but on my own machine).

I then faced a small series of problems that you get when you do this kind of thing. First I couldn't properly synchronize my Treo with Outlook. I had to settle for a synchronization that puked some redundant records into both my Outlook and my Treo. Then I had to get email to actually work in Outlook again—a controlling .dat file had been corrupted in the process. This last problem I solved myself through the knowledge base on the Microsoft support site. By the end of the day, I was back to normal, sort of, but a full day behind on my work.

Isn't software wonderful?

I was comparing this to other bad days I have had. For instance, the subzero February morning when, recovering from the flu, I discover one of my tires is flat. I try to change it myself, but between the cold and my weakened condition, I almost snap in half trying to loosen the first lug nut. I retire to my warm kitchen, call AAA, and wait 40 minutes until they show up with a big honking jack and a power tool to remove and replace the tire. Next thing I know, I am motoring off to work.

Cars were very hard to maintain when they were first introduced. I understand that early owners of automobiles had to be just as skilled at fixing their machines as they were at driving them. The prognosis at the time was that automobiles would never thrive with such a burden. Eventually, cars became nearly automatic. As have refrigerators, TVs, microwave ovens, and virtually every other device and appliance. Isn't it time we expected that of basic computers and productivity tools?

At they very least, couldn't Microsoft have made it easier for me to give them my credit card number?

(For the record, I am now two days into using my older version of Office, and I only miss a couple of things—a nice auto-fill feature in the Outlook "To" window, and the way that Word allows you better control over formatting when you cut and paste between different documents and applications. I am going to live without them for now. Microsoft is free to call, though, if they have an easy way for me to upgrade.)

Bill Trippe
btrippe@nmpub.com

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:44 PM

November 20, 2003

Another Archiving Tale

In the course of researching the use of metadata standards for the long-term archiving of information, I spent time researching GILS--the Government Information Locator Service. The following is a brief case study on how the state of Texas is using GILS for government records.

The state of Texas built a GILS-based system to provide easy access to information from over 180 state agencies. Each agency operated as an isolated information silo and could not communicate with one another. It is important to note that the Texas archivists were only interested in making sure that metadata would be created for the legacy data, and the data would be available from a centrally searchable location. The project did not deal with the conversion of legacy data from one format into another, but is considered here because it was concerned with the conversion of Web pages into resources that could be archived and repeatedly accessed over time, even if certain web pages were no longer being maintained online. This allows a user - for legal or cultural reasons - complete access to the collection of pages.

When the state of Texas first instituted the project, it relied on the participating agencies to alert archivists to any changes on their Web sites. In this manner, 8,000 records - representing either a single Web page or a collection of Web pages (whatever the agency considered to be a Web "publication") were harvested for archiving.

However, the Texas archivists have been finding that relying on the state agencies is not reliable; many records are missed. They are currently upgrading their software to include a "harvesting" application that will automatically "crawl" the state's web sites and identify any changed, deleted, or added publications that need to be archived and tracked. Kevin Marsh of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TLSAC), who is overseeing the project, said that a test of the new system harvested 32,000 records, a four-fold improvement over the manually-intensive older system.

Harvested publications are preserved on a TSLAC server and published on request through a server at the University of North Texas (UNT). TRAIL records for currently online publications or Web sites are linked directly to the Web sites in question. Non-current records are moved into TSLAC's Electronic Depository Program and matching publications are moved to the UNT server. Users can search by subject, agency, keyword, and descriptor fields, as well as by date range and full text. Additionally, MARC records are automatically generated and provided to UNT for their catalog.

TRAIL is based on Blue Angel Technology's MetaStar Enterprise Suite. This software provides the following functionality:
Data entry.
Database management.
Database search and retrieval utilizing Z39.50 (an ISO standard defining a protocol for computer-to computer information retrieval).
User gateway design and management.

MetaStar Enterprise utilizes Oracle 8i as the underlying database. The data is formatted and manipulated with XML tagging. MetaStar Enterprise also utilizes PCDocs Fulcrum technology for harvesting data directly from web servers.
This software was selected for the following capabilities:
Z39.50 compliance.
Ability to work effectively with multiple metadata formats including Dublin Core.
Capability to blend targeted record searching and full-text harvest and searching.

TRAIL runs on two Sun Enterprise 450 servers under Solaris7.

The State of Texas estimated that the Blue Angel Technologies solution cost less than one-quarter of the price it would have incurred to develop the system internally and took far less time. Just as importantly, the cost to maintain the system is extremely low. Currently, less than one full time person within the Texas State Library and Archives Department manages TRAIL.

Lessons learned include :
GILS metadata is difficult to capture.
Limited updating and maintenance of GILS records is necessary.
No clear agreement could be reached on the adequacy of GILS record data elements (perhaps the richer structure provide by EAD could allay this problem).
Different types of resources are represented in GILS records and user community is sometimes confused by:
o An inordinately high degree of user sophistication required to exploit GILS.
o Users were interested in or expecting to gain access to full text.
o GILS records were hard to read, contained unnecessary information, and were not linked to the actual source identified.
o Variances existed in the extent of information contained in GILS records.
o The service seemed qualitatively and quantitatively unpredictable and uneven.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:08 PM

November 11, 2003

Houghton Mifflin eReference

One of my clients, Houghton Mifflin, has launched a new e-commerce Web site for their eReference product line. eReference is a downloadable version of the Fourth Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary and a companion thesaurus, Roget's II: The New Thesaurus. eReference has the full databases of each of these two fine books, with a number of interactive features including search, spell correction, and spoken pronunciations.

The databases have been created and maintained in XML, and the electronic version stores XML-encoded entries that are converted to HTML on the fly for display and printing. The database, supporting software, and multimedia elements make this, in my opinion, the best tool of its kind on the market. The eReference tool is downloaded to your hard drive, and will eventually accommodate other reference works that Houghton is producing. My congratulations to Houghton Mifflin on the successful launch of this new product.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:01 PM

November 6, 2003

Full-Text Indexing of Books at Amazon

Amazon.com has rolled out a new feature, where the full text of about 100,000 books is indexed. I did some basic testing with the DRM book I co-wrote, and am pleased with the results. The idea of so much "finished" text being available on the Web is an intriguing one. This does bring the Web (a small step) closer to being an interconnected network of essential human knowledge, and it will be interesting to see how people end up using the search.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:29 PM | Comments (2)

October 28, 2003

Long-term Archiving of Digital Content

I had never given much thought to long-term storage and archiving of content. Well, I did to the extent that I typically advocated XML and other standards-based technology--mainly so content and data would outlast any particular software system or application.
But I had never thought much about truly long-term storage—what some in the field like to refer to as the "100 year digital object"—until I was engaged by the State of Washington to help study the feasibility of creating a digital archive. Part of my analysis was to interview other organizations that had undertaken similar initiatives. The most interesting interview was with Harvard University. I have included a summary of the case study here.

The central administration of Harvard University is four years into a project, The Library Digital Initiative, to bring the handling, archiving, and preservation of digital material up to par with the handling of analog material. Harvard has a centralized library services organization that supports the university archives and over 20 independent research and specialized libraries on the Harvard campus and elsewhere in the world. This centralized library services organization, known as the Office for Information Systems, has been developing the physical infrastructure, storage, software, tools, and professional services for digital archiving.

To date, the project has focused on the core infrastructure and on "challenge grants" that have funded archiving efforts in various libraries. The infrastructure in place includes servers, storage, and a wide array of supporting hardware and software falling into three general categories:

Hardware and software to support the collection of digital material. This ranges from hardware and software for digitizing and converting analog materials, software for cataloging the digital materials with the inclusion of metadata, hardware and software to support the data repository, and software for indexing the digital text and metadata.
Hardware and software to support the access to digital material. This includes access tools such as portals, catalogs, and other finding aids, as well as delivery tools allowing users to download and view textual, image-based, multimedia, and cartographic data.
Core software for functions such as authentication and authorization, name administration, and name resolution.

The projects completed and in development under the challenge grant program represent a wide variety of data and content types, reflective of the many research specialties at an organization such as Harvard. They include:
A project to digitize and catalog biomedical images such as CAT scans and MRIs that have lasting value to researchers and educators. Images have been converted to high resolution Tag Image File Format (TIFF), with lower-resolution Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG) images used for Web distribution. Metadata is being captured in a specialized eXtensible Markup Language (XML) vocabulary that was designed by Harvard.
A project to digitize, catalog, and index the annual reports of the University, since they began producing formal annual reports in the 1800s. Over 100,000 pages have been scanned to high resolution TIFF (again using JPG for the Web distribution), with structural metadata being captured using the METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) XML vocabulary. The resulting reports can be viewed in a Web-based page turning application that uses the METS metadata for navigation. Sections or entire reports can then be automatically collected into Portable Document Format (PDF) files for printing and distribution.
A project to digitize and index older directories of United State and United Kingdom businesses. Printed directories are being re-keyed into an XML vocabulary that captures elements such as company name and address. The XML is then rendered into HTML for viewing through the use of an XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) style sheet.
Projects to digitize, catalog, and index primary field research materials in such diverse fields as botany, Slavic languages, and music. In most of these cases, image data is captured as TIFF, audio data as AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) and metadata in an XML vocabulary such as METS.

While the projects represent a wide variety of material, there are a number of common attributes to the projects when it comes to issues of digitization, data conversion, and application of metadata. These attributes include:
There is not a single, monolithic approach to conversion. Researchers and archivists have a number of options for content conversion methods and target formats. In some cases, document material is captured as page images only (always TIFF), sometimes as page images with full text captured through OCR for search and retrieval, and sometimes in XML as a neutral format for later reprocessing. The archivists make the decision on approach, often in consultation with technical staff from the centralized Office for Information Systems.
The greater "intellectual" emphasis seems to be on metadata. Whatever format the data is captured in, Harvard is promulgating standards for metadata. As mentioned above, they favor the METS Document Type Definition (DTD) for structural, administrative, and technical metadata. For finding aids, they have based their tools on the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) DTD; all content contributed to the central repository and catalog is submitted with an EAD-based finding aid.
Their approach is pragmatic. While they do have substantial resources for digital archiving, they are faced with practical decisions on every project. For example, the annual reports project uses TIFF pages supported by OCR-captured text for indexing. They use the OCR text "as is," without correction, knowing that the accuracy is somewhere around 95 percent. However, because the OCR text is used for search and retrieval of pages, the results of using it are better than the specific accuracy of the text. That is, OCR-scanned text with some errors will still successfully return 99 percent of pages because the hits are based on page boundaries. (For example, a word appearing more than once on a page is incorrectly captured once and correctly captured once. The page is still correctly returned on a full-text search.)
They have relied heavily on commercial applications for the repository and indexing applications themselves, while the submission, discovery, and delivery applications have been largely custom Java applets and Java servlets accessed through browser interfaces. Thus, the full text indexes are managed in Oracle 9i's Text feature, and the XML metadata repository is managed in Software AG's Tamino.

It is worth noting that, while Harvard's efforts to date have been substantial, they are largely based on the conversion of non-digital legacy data. That is, there is very little "born digital" data in Harvard's Library Digital Initiative. In fact, the university archives still have an official policy of not accepting digital material, so the challenge grant projects have fallen outside this official purview of the archives.

Despite this, Harvard's efforts are still very instructive, and have positioned the institution very well to continue with digital archiving projects. To date, they have 350,000 digital objects under management, totaling some three terabytes of content. They also have impressive infrastructure for collecting, digitizing, cataloging, storing, and distributing digital material.

Harvard also looked at costs associated with fee-for-service archives, something other projects did not do. In particular they looked at what the Online Computer Library Center, Inc (OCLC) charges for storage. OCLC stores on a "bag of bytes" basis; they do not provide viewing technology. Onus for that is on the customer. OCLC's charges:
$60 per GB if < 100 GB.
$32 per GB if 101-1000 GB.
$15 per GB if > 1000 GB.

Harvard also figured the cost per year of physical storage versus digital storage, based on a collection of 2,202 volumes (729,000 pages, 322 pages per volume).

The conclusion is that, wherever possible, store only the ASCII data (including metadata markup). The metadata capture and/or creation will cost more up front, but the payoff in access and cost savings over the long run will be enormous.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:42 PM

September 26, 2003

Continuous Improvement in Content

The obvious advantage of single-source publishing is the ability to "write once and publish many times." This begins to show benefits even if your goal is simply publishing to many formats, such as print and Web. The ROI becomes greater if you are also doing things like localization and translation of the single-source content. Larger organizations are beginning to reap great benefit from atomizing content in such a way that translation, as an example, can be better managed through a change control process. Write it once, translate it once, and use it many times.

But the real bang for the buck in content management will likely come when organizations reach a point where they are in a mode of continuous improvement on managed content. I have seen this a few times in my career, and the results were impressive.

I worked for a specialized software development and information publishing company in the early 1990s. We maintained large databases of dictionary and thesaurus data in English and a number of other languages. Because the data was highly structured (in SGML and in some relational tables), we could derive many forms of the data, including subsets of individual databases and supersets of multiple databases. As a result, we were able to help develop whole new product lines for the company, very efficiently.

This didn't happen all at once of course. In many cases, the content had to first be digitized, then structured. Little or no digitization and structuring happens without manual cleanup, and because we were doing specialized work in multiple languages, the cleanup could be expensive and time-consuming. But once structured, ongoing enhancement to the content became efficient. If we wanted to add a field, or amplify an existing field, we could easily extract the existing content and set up an editorial tool for staff or outside contributors to use. The edits were then made in a structured form as well, so re-import to the database was then automatic.

Over time, we developed comprehensive, structured, and editorially enhanced databases that drove significant new product development for the company. We also were able to do scores of ad hoc, quick turn-around projects for little or no additional cost. We could easily extract or subset a database, for example, with a single query or script. We also had an excellent set of metrics for estimating ongoing and future work. Moreover, most of the internal tools we developed were reusable, given that the data was so consistent

This is a model that both commercial publishers and organizations that use content in product support should consider. Long-living content benefits from continuous improvement, and such continuous improvement works best with structured content.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:12 PM

September 25, 2003

Why Content Management Projects Succeed or Fail

Someone raised an excellent new topic on cms-list, seeking input on why CMS projects sometimes fail. This has already sparked some lively discussion. If you have a technical take on CMS efforts, cms-list is an especially useful list.

I have seen both successes and failures in content management projects. While I have not attempted to formally catalog the reasons, certain things seem to be consistent, at least on the "successful" side. I have noticed at least three major things in common with successful projects.

I realized the three elements listed here also have something in common—they are all related to a high-level of engagement, communication, and consistency in management style. That same group of champions knows and works with the organization's metrics and is committed to ROI from major initiatives. That same group of champions is skeptical about what vendors (and consultants!) tell them and takes ownership themselves. I have been struck by how successful projects have open and ongoing communication. Skepticism is a healthy thing.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:23 PM | Comments (3)

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