Tag: reading

December 15, 2011

“Phone” is to the iPhone as “RSS reader” is to ?

A reader is for engaging with information; it’s a tool for consuming, managing, and using knowledge. In addition to presenting new information to consume, I also want it to pay attention to, infer insights from, and make accessible in an evergreen matter what I’ve already read. For me, this presents the pinnacle of personal information management — an intelligent tool that can reinforce what I already know and help guide me towards what I need to know.

Daniel Bachhuber – “Phone” is to the iPhone as “RSS reader” is to ?.

November 26, 2011

Pub Rules. In a follow-up of sorts to the quote I posted yesterday Brent Simmons writes about what he would do if in charge of a publication. I think it will only be a matter of time before we see someone try this with a large-scale site. I bet that when they do they’ll supplant whatever the main source is for that community. The trick will be sticking to these principles as the site grows and not becoming a bloated mess of “business opportunities.”

November 25, 2011

News sites as “Angry fruit salad on meth”

Don’t let your drive for advertising dollars undercut your purpose:

I made the mistake of going to a website today. It’s understandable, of course — everybody does it, from time to time — and I’m sure I’ll forgive myself, eventually.

I don’t mean just any website, of course, I mean a publication. A place where a business publishes interesting things that I like to read.

I couldn’t hit the Reader button in Safari fast enough. In fact, I couldn’t hit it at all, so stunned was I by the flickering colorful circus the page presented. It was like angry fruit salad on meth.

Brent Simmons – The Pummeling Pages.

November 19, 2011

Post-hiking donut and coffee

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Just got back from an 8 mile hike with Daniel and Leah. Now for an afternoon of reading and relaxing.

November 19, 2011

What are your product’s goals?

Marco Arment writing about Amazon’s goals with the Kindle:

I agree: it does seem like those were Amazon’s goals. They now have an inexpensive tablet that makes it extremely easy for its users to buy more from Amazon.

Note the apparent absence of goals such as “Make a great reading experience” or “Make a great portable video player”. It serves Amazon’s business goals (assuming it sells), but it doesn’t serve its customers’ goals well.

November 2, 2011

The Future of the Book

If your book is 600 pages long, you are demanding more of my time than I feel free to give. And if I could accomplish the same change in my view of the world by reading a 60-page version of your argument, why didn’t you just publish a book this length instead?

The honest answer to this last question should disappoint everyone: Publishers can’t charge enough money for 60-page books to survive; thus, writers can’t make a living by writing them. But readers are beginning to feel that this shouldn’t be their problem. Worse, many readers believe that they can just jump on YouTube and watch the author speak at a conference, or skim his blog, and they will have absorbed most of what he has to say on a given subject. In some cases this is true and suggests an enduring problem for the business of publishing. In other cases it clearly isn’t true and suggests an enduring problem for our intellectual life.

Sam Harris – The Future of the Book.

October 31, 2011

The New Value of Text

Text lasts. It’s not platform-dependant, you don’t just get it from one source, read it in one place, understand it in one way. It is not dependent on technology: it is what we make technology out of. Code is text, it is the fundamental nature of technology. We’ve been trying for decades, since the advent of hypertext fiction, of media-rich CD-ROMs, to enhance the experience of literature with multimedia. And it has failed, every time.

Yet we are terrified that in the digital age, people are constantly distracted. That they’re shallower, lazier, more dazzled. If they are, then the text is not speaking clearly enough. We are not speaking clearly enough. Like over-stuffed attendees at a dull banquet, the mind wanders. We are terrified that people are dumbing down, and so we provide them with ever dumber entertainment. We sell them ever greater distractions, hoping to dazzle them further.

James Bridle – The New Value of Text.

October 28, 2011

Annual subscriptions are now available for The Manual. This was a Kickstarter project that I funded when it was live. The first issue was fantastic in every way. The design, writing, and feeling of the essays was well worth it.

October 18, 2011

A lesson in how not to design a content site

Boy, large news sites really don’t get it. This is Lewis DVorkin, a Forbes employee, in the comments thread of their Dropbox article today. Props to Nick Bergus for the pointer.

We do have a business to run, and page views help generate the revenue needed to provide our audience with great content and great products. In the last year we’ve totally re-architected our site, which has resulted in many, many priorities. We have received very few comments asking for single-page view options, perhaps because consumers experience pagination on nearly every other major news and information site. That said, we know it’s important and we are certainly moving to provide the experience that you and others would like.

Translation, reading on any major news site is a terrible experience. We know this but are doing nothing to distinguish ourselves because we’re quite happy with the revenue our ads bring in from artificially inflated pageviews created by a design that places our users’ reading experience somewhere between last and not even on the radar. In the meantime, can you please purchase the print magazine so that we can stay in business?

A single page view should be the default for any site building a business off content. If it’s not, don’t be surprised when people start reading elsewhere.

October 10, 2011

“Somebody else will not let me do anything”

The assertion that “somebody else will not let me do anything” should always be suspected as a cover-up for inertia.

Peter Drucker – The Effective Executive.