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September 12, 2009

Media Physics with Prof. Hova

Robin says,

Pretty amazingly trenchant observation from Jay-Z:

He now calls the old record companies "archaic," and says they made a huge error in 2000 when they sued to stop the original Napster, which popularized free file sharing: "They had it all in one place coming through one hole, where they could control it. They shut that down, and just opened the floodgates. Now everyone's running their own Napster. Now it's just a hole in the universe, and it's too late."

"Now it's just a hole in the universe." That really is the right image for the craziness we now face. Media space-time torn asunder. Well-established principles of album acceleration and movie momentum no longer apply. It's just a hole in the universe!

Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 2:40 PM

Kindle Metrics

Robin says,

Forgive me while I crow for just a moment: Mr. Penumbra just hit what I think is a new peak in the Kindle store. It's the 937th bestselling item in the entire Kindle universe. The fourth-bestselling short story. The third-bestselling "techno thriller."

The sad truth: As best I can figure, that rank was driven by about 30 copies over the past two days.

Alas, Kindle. Your universe is small indeed.

Comments (1) | Permasnark | Posted: 2:26 PM

September 11, 2009

Robin's thoughts: :-)... >>

Present at the Creation, Part Two

There's always been a funny connection between Snarkmarket and Current.

After all, introduction aside, my very first Snarkmarket post inaugurated the "Gore TV" category. More followed. November 2003. March 2004. ("Man, I thought I had put this behind me. But now I'm all excited about it again.") May.

But then what? How did I end up, not too many months later, here in San Francisco, working for what was then called INdTV?

off to work
Me in San Francisco, spring 2005. Current HQ in background.

On August 1, 2004, I sent an email to Joel Hyatt, INdTV's CEO. (I found his address on the web. After searching for days.) In the email, I introduced myself—a reporter/producer/blogger in St. Petersburg, Florida, with two years of experience at a non-profit journalism institute—and lobbed in an idea for how this new TV channel could use the web in an interesting way. And, more importantly, I promised (threatened?) to follow up with another idea, and another, and another. Thirty-one total. An August of ideas.

To his everlasting credit, and to my everlasting gratitude, Joel's reply did not say "never email me again, you weird kid." Rather: "OK, let's see what you've got."

Keep in mind that I had about four ideas cooked up when I sent that first message. And then my part of St. Petersburg got evacuated because of a hurricane. And then I drove cross-country, from Florida up to Michigan, then over to California, stopping at the wifi-enabled rest stops along I-80, dispatching ideas, racing to come up with more. It was a pretty crazy month.

The final idea, sent on August 31, was, perhaps, predictable: You should hire me!

And again, this is a point at which Joel could very reasonably have said "you weird kid." Instead, he invited me into the city for lunch.

At Current, I've been, successively, an interactive producer, a blogger, a channel manager, a futurist (note: bad title choice), ad sales adjunct faculty, and the vice president of strategy. I've been here for just a hair under five years.

But finally, there's just too much other cool stuff to do. Today is my last day.

Current is the company, the idea, that brought me to San Francisco, and I have a lot of people to thank for the depth and breadth of my Current experience. But none so centrally as Joel, who took a chance on a 24-year-old who sent a bunch of emails. I mean, guys: This is big. This is what makes lives happen, or not.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll have more reflections to share, but I'll leave it at that for now. Mostly, I wanted to tell the tale of that fall five years ago because it makes the step I'm about to take, in the fall of 2009, seem relatively conservative by comparison. Ha!

Here's the agenda:

First: Spend the next fifty days absolutely jamming on this book. On one level, this is just simple necessity. I sort of set a trap for myself here, didn't I? On another level, I had an epiphany the other day: There is nothing in the entire world I would rather do for the next two months than work my ass off to create something wonderful for the people on this list. Not sure I've ever had quite that level of clarity before. Gotta say: I like it.

Then: Consulting—for Current, for starters. Freelancing, in a few different domains. There's more writing in the works. And some bigger ideas, which I won't try to squeeze into this post. But I won't keep you waiting for too long, I promise. I'm going to need your help!

Update: Ha hahaha. I got a web-monitoring text message this morning saying that robinsloan.com was getting slammed with visitors, and I'm thinking to myself, "Wow, jeez, big news... I guess?" Nope, different reason. Shoulda known!

Robin-sig.gif
Posted September 11, 2009 at 1:13 | Comments (8) | Permasnark
File under: Gore TV, Media Galaxy, Self-Disclosure

September 8, 2009

Saheli's thoughts: Facebook could do it, with it's lists, but it's not an intuitive interface. This is basically wha... >>

The Slider of Trust

I just wrote a quick update over at Kickstarter, accessible to my project backers only, and I have to say, it was an interesting experience. It felt different; more than usual, I could picture somewhat specifically who I was writing for. And this post is about the music I've been listening to, so I could include a few MP3s without feeling like a pirate.

What if more web writing had this kind of thing built into it? Imagine—I'm brainstorming real-time right now, so this probably won't make any sense—imagine a little slider on the blog entry editing screen that goes from "free / full public access" to "bulk subs / high access" to "patrons only / inner circle." It's a question (I'm discovering) not primarily of "content value" (like, "save the good stuff for the paying customers!") but rather of intimacy and voice. In one mode, the vast howling weirdness of the public web. In the other, a defined group of people you know and, on some level, trust.

So forget the payment thing, explicit in Kickstarter and implicit in my scenario above. What if it was entirely about concentric circles of trust and—what else? Helpfulness? Constructiveness? "Propensity to read, understand, improve and articulate"? You want to try an idea out, you want a bit of freedom to think out loud—to suggest something stupid, to fail! So you set the slider to "friends and allies." You'll write a fully-baked, armor-plated public version later. But not yet.

Robin-sig.gif
Posted September 8, 2009 at 10:47 | Comments (3) | Permasnark
File under: Media Galaxy

September 7, 2009

Tim's thoughts: I contend that it is impossible to give a meaningful side-view of a round coin. For minimal cover... >>

American Numismatic Society, I Salute You

We've been talking a lot about the future of digitization, about how much digitization needs to improve, about the severe limits that digitization still imposes on many things—books, for instance.

So, here's a change of pace. Here is the almost perfectly digitizable object, almost perfectly digitized.

20090906_coin1.png

Small objects, easy to photograph in their entirety? Check.

20090906_coin2.png

Defined number of important views? Check. (Obviously two.)

20090906_coin3.png

Standard set of metadata? Check. (And click on one of the images above to see an example.)

So, given the ideal material for a digital archive, the American Numismatic Society delivers. There's a powerful search engine but their collection is pretty browsable, too. And, listen, I only collect coins that I intend to spend on the train, but I defy you not to get a little lost in these pages.

And every coin has its own stable permalink! Swoon!

The only thing missing is that you can't heft the coins, feel their contours. Fair enough. But I'll bet you could even generate 3D models from these images, using the depth information implied by the shadows. When I finally have a home 3D printer I'll crank out some of these guys and send 'em around.

And you know, ancient coins are perfect tokens of historical imagination, especially when captured so crisply. They're totally familiar but deeply strange. You can imagine keeping one in your pocket, feeling it in your hand.

Check these off the list. Now we just gotta get those books right.

Robin-sig.gif
Posted September 7, 2009 at 5:26 | Comments (3) | Permasnark
File under: Gleeful Miscellany, Media Galaxy

September 1, 2009

Peter's thoughts: They're not very similar, but somehow this reminded me of: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?... >>

Radiolab the Movie

How, how, did it take me two weeks to post this Radiolab-esque, Radiolab-inspired video? It's called "Moments" and it lives up to its name. The snippets that Will Hoffman has captured are non-trivial and non-clichéd. Many of them are brain-sparking and smile-inducing. (I think I liked the frisbee on the roof best of all. Is that weird?)

What this is not is the Radiolab of video. That designation, that honor, remains unbestowed. It awaits an entrant that breaks from the cut-cut-cut of traditional video (Hoffman's style is great, but it's... straight cuts) and reimagines that glowing frame as fully as Radiolab has reimagined the stuff that comes out of two speakers.

However, "Moments" is still terrific, so watch it.

Robin-sig.gif
Posted September 1, 2009 at 11:16 | Comments (3) | Permasnark
File under: Media Galaxy

August 3, 2009

Tim's thoughts: Re: Robin's point about the NYT above. It's weird. Just biographically, I didn't see it in the Ti... >>

The Stupidity of Serendipity

Having just two weeks ago posted a link to what I think is a reasonably intelligent take on the importance of serendipitous discoveries in old and new media, Damon Darlin's not-quite-an-essay in the NYT is by comparison offensively stupid.

Let's just juxtapose these two excerpts:

  1. When we walk into other people