My students wanted to make sure to capture the conversation around the roundtable discussion we had on the subject of press freedom, so they set up the bagttered (but still serviceable) cameras outside the journalism department offices, and brought in all the accountrements of the formal coffee ceremony … the glowing coals in the brazier, [...] [...more]
My students wanted to make sure to capture the conversation around the roundtable discussion we had on the subject of press freedom, so they set up the bagttered (but still serviceable) cameras outside the journalism department offices, and brought in all the accountrements of the formal coffee ceremony … the glowing coals in the brazier, the clouds of thick incense, and platters of roasted barley and chewy bread.
So far, everyone is still in a good mood....
It’s always difficult to figure out what the settings should be on a prosumer video camera, particularly when the opaque menus are written in a foreign language.
Even in the somewhat gritty neighborhoods, the rooftops of Addis Ababa are adorned with satellite TV dishes. There is a great hunger here for high-quality content... [...more]
I met with the CEO of the Fana Broadcasting network this past week. We talked about the phenomenal growth occurring here in Ethiopia, and what that is going to mean for the traditional media here.
Right now, as in so many other developing countries, the media landscape is still ruled by King Radio; the largely rural population may not have reliable access to electricity, and newsprint distribution is neither economically feasible nor attractive to a population that still lags in literacy rates. But TV?
Ah, there’s the rub.
Even the most humble abode seems to sport a sophisticated satellite dish, capable of pulling in international TV signals.
“Even here, once people get TV sets, what they want and expect is the same high-quality, clear as a bell HD programs that they see from CNN, the BBC and on the movie channels. The problem we have is that we are simply not set up to deliver that kind of content right now. We don’t have the people with the expertise. So everybody just gets a satellite dish and puts it up on the roof of their house, no matter how humble.”
Well, that’s where I come in.
The push here is to try to develop a homegrown video content-production industry; not just as a point of national pride, but as a way of extending Ethiopia’s cultural (and thus, political) influence in the Horn of Africa. And looking ahead, the major media companies are already seeing the way that mobile media consumption is ramping up, and trying to figure out ways to incorporate web-based content sharing and discovery mechanisms (i.e. the social media aspects) into their planning.
Something that will make people of a certain age nostalgic: Pull-Tab soda cans. Some part of me wants to collect all the tabs and weave them together into a glittering metal vest … If you recall, the hippies used to do this, back when recycling was still this strange, exotic concept. [...more]
Something that will make people of a certain age nostalgic:
Pull-Tab soda cans.
Some part of me wants to collect all the tabs and weave them together into a glittering metal vest … If you recall, the hippies used to do this, back when recycling was still this strange, exotic concept.
We’re supposed to be at the LA Times Festival of Books today, but we’re having to skip that amazing opportunity to mingle with other ink-stained wretches (and the agents who *love* them), and instead finish up on the editing work on our own … er … somewhat overdue writing projects. What is the world coming [...] [...more]
We’re supposed to be at the LA Times Festival of Books today, but we’re having to skip that amazing opportunity to mingle with other ink-stained wretches (and the agents who *love* them), and instead finish up on the editing work on our own … er … somewhat overdue writing projects.
What is the world coming to when we have to sacrifice valuable drinking and goofing off time to actually meet deadlines, I ask?
In the meantime, here are a few shots from our travels in Moscow. We ran across these artists outside of the Moscow flea markets, doing portraits of the passers-by for a few thousand rubles. I was struck by how familiar the scene was … I’ve seen this in Caracas, Mexico City, San Francisco, Amsterdam … I’m convinced that if I ever do get to Antarctica, I will find a couple of artsy Emperor Penguins sitting on director’s chairs, working with mixed-medium herring guts and rancid walrus blubber. Which will no doubt immediately get snapped up by a hipster art collector and spawn the Next Big Wave in the art world…
There is a strange timeless quality that comes out when you walk the streets of Eastern Europe. The past is still very much with everyone there - such as the guy in suspenders, who looks like he walked right out of a 70s "glorious proletariat" propaganda movie, where he plays the crusty, but lovable truckdriver whose antics lead to much hilarity,
I tried to get a little fancier with this next shot – to sort of show how this art is a little piece of life and humanity, even in sometimes grim, gray surroundings.
In Moscow, art looks at you. (click to see full-size)
If you look at the guys in the background, they wouldn’t really look out of place at the Harley ralley in Sturgis. But there are a lot of kinda sketchy-looking guys like this roaming the streets of Moscow. I was told that a lot of them were veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, or of the more recent conflict in Chechnya. Anyone who’s been around a VA hospital here in the States will have an eerie shock of familiarity looking at these guys; long hair, still wearing the odds and ends of their camouflage uniforms, too-intense eyes that don’t blink enough, and a constant sense of suppressed rage…
27 Print Dollars for $1 Digital; Social News; Papers in Trouble; Kodak v. Fuji I posted this picture via Twitpic earlier today, and my digital brethren quickly chimed in on how much they felt like this in their daily lives. And I get it. Working in the media industry these days is far, far different [...] [...more]
27 Print Dollars for $1 Digital; Social News; Papers in Trouble; Kodak v. Fuji
I posted this picture via Twitpic earlier today, and my digital brethren quickly chimed in on how much they felt like this in their daily lives. And I get it. Working in the media industry these days is far, far different from the way it was when the journalists of my generation got into the biz. Looking back at recordings from the early 90s, I am struck by how much free time we all seem to have had back then – these days, you feel like you can’t take your eyes off your Twitter feed for even a second, lest you miss the Next Big Meme and are thus branded as a digital troglodyte who “just doesn’t get it.”
Strung out and exhausted, journalists are wondering when this migration ends, or even when they might run across a handy signpost telling them which way to go. (click to embiggen)
So yeah, if you feel like you’re lost in the desert and that the only future involves your bones bleaching in the sun next to a steer skull … well, maybe it’s because most newsrooms these days evoke the feeling you get when wandering through any of the weathered ghost towns that dot the arid landscape in Arizona and Nevada, left behind when the seams of gold and silver petered out.
Today’s news of the antitrust suit filed by the DOJ against Apple and a consortium of large book publishers raises some interesting questions. First, here’s what the government alleges (h/t Wall St. Journal) In a civil antitrust lawsuit, the Justice Department alleged that CEOs of the publishing companies met regularly in private dining rooms of [...] [...more]
In a civil antitrust lawsuit, the Justice Department alleged that CEOs of the publishing companies met regularly in private dining rooms of upscale Manhattan restaurants to discuss how to respond to steep discounting of their e-books by Amazon.com Inc., a practice they disliked. The executives also called and emailed each other to craft a solution to what one of them called “the wretched $9.99 price point,” the suit said.
The five publishers and Apple hatched an arrangement that lifted the price of many best-selling e-books to $12.99 or $14.99, according to the suit. The publishers then banded together to impose that model on Amazon, the government alleged.
Note the diversity in prices for the books on this page; contrast that with the uniformity of pricing for songs on iTunes (i.e. 99 cents, no matter what).
Now, this can be read two ways:
1. The book publishers and Apple got together to put the vise on Amazon to fix the prices of books at a level that benefitted the publishers (and Apple) by allowing them to jack up the prices of ebooks to be more in line with the print versions (thus protecting what the publishers see as still their core business, dead-tree editions).
2. Amazon successfully lobbied to be allowed to reinstitute its price-cutting schemes that allow Amazon to consistently have lower prices on the stuff they sell.
What does this mean for indie authors, and larger startup publishers, such as small-to-midsize newspapers that want to bundle up special editions and monetize their content by selling it via as an eBook (as enthusiastically proposed by the estimable Robert Niles)? Nothing good, I’m afraid.
A certain champion of self-publishing recently decried all of the “whiny bitches” complaining about Amazon, and argued how Amazon treats authors so much better than commercial publishers.
While there are certainly advantages to Amazon’s program, anyone who thinks Amazon is in this to help authors is a fool. Amazon, like pretty much any other business, is in this to make money. As for how they treat authors, let me share what I’ve experienced over the past week and a half.
Amazon can and will adjust your price as they see fit.
(snip)
So what’s the big deal? Don’t retailers put things on sale all the time? Well, sure … which leads me to my second lesson.
Amazon can calculate royalties based on the sale price, not your list price.
With my DAW books, if a bookstore offers a sale, I still get my royalties based on the cover price. Amazon is selling Libriomancer for pre-order at almost half-off, but I’ll get paid my full amount for every copy sold. Not so with self-published titles. Looking at my reports for last week, my royalties were slashed by 2/3 for every copy sold, because Amazon paid me 70% of the $.99 sale price, not my list price.
The lesson here is that when you’re looking to get paid for the creative work that you do, and when the opportunities for you to sell said work are increasingly running through only two channels (Amazon or Apple), then you are going to get paid what they feel like paying you. And they are going to take just as big a cut out of your earnings as they feel like taking.
Yeah, sure, they built up the stores. But those stores would have nothing to sell without the efforts of millions of creative people. Amazon and Apple are benefiting from being classic middlemen. They are the bottleneck between the consumers and the content that audience wants to consume. And they are starting to throw some very, very sharp elbows.
The DOJ says Apple “knowingly served as a critical conspiracy participant” by promising all the publishers the exact same deal and keeping everyone informed about the status of negotiations. When Penguin explicitly said that it wouldn’t sign unless at least three other companies signed, Apple “supplied the needed assurances.”
To persuade other publishers, Steve Jobs himself had to get involved. He wrote an email to one publishing CEO saying that the only existing choices were to “keep going with Amazon at $9.99″ or “hold back your books.” He then offered a third choice: “Throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream ebooks market at $12.99 and $14.99.”
The details read like some kind of overheated Mafia book by a cut-rate author – secret meetings at restaurants, high-level collusion, contemptuous disregard for the customers, and finally – yes – DOJ wiretaps on the guilty parties. Christ. It’s like they were dealing with garbage-hauling contracts in New Jersey.
It’s hard to know who to root for in this situation. Both sides seem to have rapaciously eyed the book-buying consumers the way velociraptors eyed up the poor heifer being lowered into their pen.
OK, I’ll admit it. I’m as guilty of assigning myself a made-up title as anyone. But c’mon – “Digital Alchemist” is pretty cool. And it’s a nice shorthand for what I do – which is to research, study, broadcast via social media, write case studies, write blog posts, take still photos, work on mobile web [...] [...more]
OK, I’ll admit it. I’m as guilty of assigning myself a made-up title as anyone.
But c’mon – “Digital Alchemist” is pretty cool. And it’s a nice shorthand for what I do – which is to research, study, broadcast via social media, write case studies, write blog posts, take still photos, work on mobile web designs, shoot video, compose music tracks, publish to the web, craft a monetization strategy … and then travel the world teaching other people to do as I do. And at least the basic idea is there in the two words: Digital. Alchemist. I take existing media forms and I transfer them to the web medium, and in the process transmute the experience to something that is (in theory, at least) greater than the sum of the parts.
Janitors are the guys who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. School janitors are the longsuffering guys who come in with their gray, tattered mops and buckets of cloying sawdust to clean up in the lunchroom after some poor kid yarfs up the spoiled Mystery Meatloaf. Social Media Janitors are the guys who patiently answer the n00b questions while keep the message threads clear of trolls, and soothing hurt feelings after flame wars.
Janitors are willing to put in long, hard days at work. The school janitors are there in the mornings, chipping away at the ice on the sidewalk, and there at the end of the day, checking the mousetraps in the crawlspaces. Social Media Janitors are always on, either with their butts at their workstations, creating content, or setting alerts to go to their cellphones 24/7, just to make certain nothing is blowing up on the message boards.
Janitors always have lots of keys. The school janitor has one of those shiny metal belt ziplines that holds enough metal to make a Studebaker engine block. He can be trusted to always open the doors that need opening, get you into your locker when you forget the com, and move quietly and unobtrusively around the building, going about his business. Social Media Janitors are the ones opening the doors to new users, making sure they are directed to the content they need, and who keep all the passwords secure for you.
Janitors don’t grandstand; they just quietly go about the task of spiffing the school up a bit before they leave, making sure that the doors and windows are cleaned and closed, and that nobody left a fire burning in a garbage can. Social Media Janitors keep all the various social media presences on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, etc., up to date, without making it all about them.
A good Social Media Janitor understands that it’s not about her. It’s about the audience, the users. Maybe there’s some time for fun here and there – goofing with the users, enjoying the give and take of a good conversation.
So here we see Matt Meeks, one of the smarter users of social media in the LA area, at the Los Angeles Web Professionals Group meeting, talking about how to pick which platform to use to put out your social media messaging … or just to have some fun.
Live-Blogging the Oscars and Tracking the Tweet Clouds I was hoping that the real-time geo-Tweet maps would show something interesting in and around Los Angeles during the Oscars telecast. No such luck. Meanwhile, the rest of the world didn’t seem too interested in the Oscars: Drilling down a bit more, we can see some other [...] [...more]
Live-Blogging the Oscars and Tracking the Tweet Clouds
I was hoping that the real-time geo-Tweet maps would show something interesting in and around Los Angeles during the Oscars telecast. No such luck.
Apparently, not that many people in and around Hollywood were actually Tweeting during the Oscars telecast - at least, not enough to compete with some of the other topics showing up on a Sunday night.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world didn’t seem too interested in the Oscars:
Strange that despite all the traffic about the Oscars, on Twitter that still didn't compete with some of the other trending news topics around the world -- such as the elections in Australia, or the massacres in Syria.
Drilling down a bit more, we can see some other names start showing up – although the Los Angeles area still isn’t #1 in Twitter activity. Guess our fingers are too busy here ferrying Scorcese-related cocktails to our mouths to actually type in a Twitter update.
Looking at the tag cloud, you can see that once you drill down past just "the Oscars," the names of the celebrities start showing up as trending topics.
Dep’t of Vaporware: New Super-Duper HTML5 Video Players Will Solve All Your Problems I’m starting to get more than a little annoyed at the incessant blithe assurances that keep coming up around the (now) universally agreed-upon proposition that Flash Is Bad, All Right-Thinking Humans Must Avoid It. The problem is that the people making these [...] [...more]
Dep’t of Vaporware: New Super-Duper HTML5 Video Players Will Solve All Your Problems
I’m starting to get more than a little annoyed at the incessant blithe assurances that keep coming up around the (now) universally agreed-upon proposition that Flash Is Bad, All Right-Thinking Humans Must Avoid It.
Here's the problem: Playing video in a browser using the (still nonexistent) HTML5 standard is far more resource-hungry than you realize.
The problem is that the people making these statements haven’t really gotten their hands dirty with the actual workflows that the (non-existent) HTML5 video standard has inflicted on us poor A/V dorks trying to keep up with the chaos in the online/mobile video space. What’s getting my goat, you ask?
Check out the strain on system resources that playing video using the HTML5 tag puts on a Mac Pro with 8 cores, running at 3 gHz, with 9 GB of RAM and a upgraded ATI Radeo 4870 video card. Note the system temp. The fan was blowing hard enough to power a C130 cargo plane.
By means of comparison, this is what I got for usage stats when playing a Flash video in a web browser. Note the system temp. Also, the little blue graphs to the right of CPU are not pinned to the max for all eight cores, the way they are in the HTML5 playback example, above. Each one of those little graphs is a representation of the amount of strain being put on a core from the dual quad-cores.
Well. I keep seeing & hearing about these new players that will supposedly make it possible to custom-design a video player into a web page that will then adapt & play that video on any device, on any platform. The latest: thePlatform. Viz:
thePlatform is pushing cross-platform compatibility with a new offering that will let its customers create one video player that can be delivered to any device or browser that is trying to access it. That capability is being rolled out due to increased demand for HTML5 video, despite a lack of real standards across browsers for the display and rendering of video players.
(from GigaOm)
OK, fine. What’s the big deal, right?
I shot the video below at the Social Media Club-LA meeting in January – it shows Tim Street, one of the early adopters of mobile video monetization, talking about the challenges of trying to deal with video across the profusion of platforms we’re now having to deal with.
My test of an HTML5 player, taking this video, putting it into a sandbox page in Dreamweaver, and playing it in a web browser returned the kind of usage stats seen in the screen captures above.
Flash had a lot of faults. I still think that it’s responsible for some of the heinous memory leakages that cause Firefox to take up to 1.6 Gigs of memory space if I leave it open for more than a day in the background as I do work. But fer crissake, at least it’s not melting down my CPUs when I’m just trying to play one video. If the average user starts seeing this kind of load on their systems just for playing a video, that means that there is going to be serious hits on the battery life of laptops/tablets, and some pretty bad lag times when trying to multitask – or even fast-forward, pause or (shudder) rewind.
Let me know if you get any of the same warning signs on your machine when playing back this video, eh?
The Teleprompter is Us Tonight’s State of the Union address is being billed as “the most interactive political act ever.” Well, other than the crowdsourcing that brought people to the guillotine during the French Revolution. Although, if you read through the comments sections on some of the danker political blogs, there’s certainly reason to look [...] [...more]
The Teleprompter is Us
Tonight’s State of the Union address is being billed as “the most interactive political act ever.”
Anyway – it appears that Obama’s web team has spent the past year (or more) preparing to swing into full campaign mode.
From ReadWriteWeb:
In December 2011, I wrote in the ReadWriteWeb Predictions for 2012 that the presidential candidate with the best social media campaign would be the one to win the White House in November 2012. I also said that President Obama would likely be reelected. While social media is not the be all, end all factor in determining the results of elections, pundits will argue that it has greater weight now than it ever has. Candidates pay attention to what their Twitter followers are saying.
(snip)
To a certain extent, tonight’s State Of The Union will be the biggest campaign stump speech that Obama will give all year, except for maybe the Democratic National Convention. Around the State of the Union speech, the President has built a robust social media campaign to give citizens a voice. This is how government should be run. Open. Transparent. Interactive. Go to where the people are as opposed to making them come to you.
UPDATE:
Let’s see how that interactive thingy worked, shall we? ue
The YouTube questions were pretty much what you’d expect – a mix of the rude, the longwinded, the unanswerable and the insane.
Tell EMINEM to Put another Album out..(Name is E=Mc2)
What are you going to do with all the police who think they are all that, just because they can do almost anything they want without getting caught doesn’t make them better. Also my friend told me a police was setting a role model of cussing a 5 grdr
Will you tell us why you passed the SOPA? Do you have anything againsy gay people? Can YOU stop making Cigars? What do people have to have in order to become the president? Is the world gonna end in 2012? PLEASE ANSWER ALL THESE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS!!
I would love to know why marijuana not legal. It is really good for you they said on cnn News it don’t do anything to your lungs compared to people who smoke cigarettes. Also it kills Brain cancer cells and blocks heart blockages.
Why you are spending more money to grab genitles at airports, sell children, traffic weapons, drugs, eugincs depopulation…rather than allowing non corrupt technicians associated with The Venus Project to solve every human need including yours?
Mr. President, if you want my vote again this November, please answer this: WHERE IS THE CHANGE!?Minimum wage still doesn’t cover our basic necessities.A human being cannot survive on these wages with children. How are your children doing? Quite well
Because surfing the Internet is like drinking from a firehose, David LaFontaine braves the torrent to tell you what trends and technologies to gulp down, swirl in your mouth, or spit out.
