Update: Google played one of these during the Super Bowl. Nice!

Like Joanne, I noticed the big Google banners on NYTimes.com and, er, totally clicked one. (Isn’t that funny? The one product in the universe that I absolutely don’t need to learn more about is the one that got my click-through.)

The ads lead you to Google’s new Search Stories videos, which are really shockingly clever and watchable. Major props to the team that conceived and executed them. (Check one out, even for just a couple of seconds, so you’ll understand the rest of this.)

These videos are the newest examples of a distinct and important genre, and I think we can take it even further. But first, a quick tour.

Start with something super-minimal like Humble Pied, which totally celebrates its video-chat origins. The nod to the iChat interface is what makes it work for me; compare/contrast to something like Bloggingheads, which is much more, you know, faces-in-abstract-rectangles.

Next. Did you ever see The Monitor circa 2008? I don’t think they produce it anymore. I won’t bend over backwards trying to explain it; you should just click over and take a peek. Basically they use the Mac OS X desktop as a stage, pulling familiar objects on and off—web pages, sticky notes, video clips in little brushed-steel Quicktime frames. The fact that the view is so familiar makes it all instantly understandable. The fact that the view is so familiar also makes it pretty spectacular—you realize just what a trick it is to coordinate that kind of screen choreography.

(More on The Monitor from Virginia Heffernan and from John Pavlus, the show’s creator.)

Michael Wesch’s sublime The Machine is Us/ing Us isn’t quite in this genre, but it uses a lot of the same techniques to great effect.

It all begins, of course, with the screencast. You might have seen this screencast of a producer assembling a Prodigy song in Ableton Live; here’s another one that’s a little more straightforward. It’s kinda amazing how watchable they are. Turns out a rich interface being used in real-time is pretty interesting to watch. (And the music doesn’t hurt.)

This genre makes absolutely no sense on TV. I love things that make absolutely no sense on TV.

So I actually think Google has vaulted to the front of the field with these videos. For one thing, their use of sound is subtle and brilliant; it lights up your brain. They also just really deliver on the fundamentals: they are 100% faithful to the interface (no exceptions!) but they present it in a super-dynamic way. And finally, they’ve invented a brand-new narrative technique: autocomplete suspense. (Seriously: it’s their secret weapon. G-E-N-I-U-S.)

But where does it go from here? Is this really just a micro-genre best suited to ads for internet companies? Or does the fact that we spend so much time on this stage ourselves mean that it really can be the venue for more (and more kinds of) storytelling?

Mash this up with fantasy UI. Is there a great science fiction story waiting to be told with UI not at the periphery—not on Tom Cruise’s touchscreen—but at the core?

I’m torn. On the one hand, you’ve got the Neal Gaiman quote Robin pulled:

[T]he bar­ri­ers [between so-called ‘lit­er­ary fic­tion’ and ‘genre fic­tion’] are imag­i­nary, the walls have already been breached and the key to lit­er­a­ture in the early 21st cen­tury is one of con­flu­ence. There’s not much high and low cul­ture any more: there’s just min­gling streams of art and what mat­ters is whether it’s good art or bad art.

And then you’ve got this NYT magazine profile of James Patterson, who isn’t an author in the traditional sense so much as an empire:

Patterson may lack the name recognition of a Stephen King, a John Grisham or a Dan Brown, but he outsells them all. Really, it’s not even close. (According to Nielsen BookScan, Grisham’s, King’s and Brown’s combined U.S. sales in recent years still don’t match Patterson’s.) This is partly because Patterson is so prolific: with the help of his stable of co-authors, he published nine original hardcover books in 2009 and will publish at least nine more in 2010.

There are many different ways to catalog Patterson’s staggering success. Here are just a few: Since 2006, one out of every 17 novels bought in the United States was written by James Patterson. He is listed in the latest edition of “Guinness World Records,” published last fall, as the author with the most New York Times best sellers, 45, but that number is already out of date: he now has 51 — 35 of which went to No. 1.

Patterson and his publisher, Little, Brown & Co., a division of the Hachette Book Group, have an unconventional relationship. In addition to his two editors, Patterson has three full-time Hachette employees (plus assistants) devoted exclusively to him: a so-called brand manager who shepherds Patterson’s adult books through the production process, a marketing director for his young-adult titles and a sales manager for all his books. Despite this support staff and his prodigious output, Patterson is intimately involved in the publication of his books. A former ad executive — Patterson ran J. Walter Thompson’s North American branch before becoming a full-time writer in 1996 — he handles all of his own advertising and closely monitors just about every other step of the publication process, from the design of his jackets to the timing of his books’ release to their placement in stores. “Jim is at the very least co-publisher of his own books,” Michael Pietsch, Patterson’s editor and the publisher of Little, Brown, told me.

Like Robin pointed out a year ago, all that literary stuff, even all of that cultural stuff — the Harry Potters and Da Vinci Codes that crack the popular consciousness — sits on top of the real book business, where the Pattersons and Nora Robertses move product like Wal-Mart.

At nine books a year, collaborating with and supervising “five regular co-authors, each one specializing in a different Patterson series or genre,” it almost doesn’t even make sense to talk about it in terms of stock and flow anymore, at least in the way Robin mapped it for writers working at a different scale — although Patterson deftly managed his own marketing that way at the beginning. But now, the production and publication of the book becomes its own marketing. It’s just… grinding.

I also love the idea that even blockbuster fiction of the last thirty years has its own history (again, a history that tunnels beneath but supports the rest of the entire book industry):

When Patterson published his breakout book, “Along Came a Spider,” in 1993, Little, Brown was still a largely literary house, whose more commercial authors included the historian William Manchester, biographer of Winston Churchill. Patterson’s success in the subsequent years encouraged Little, Brown to fully embrace mass-market fiction. But more than that, Patterson almost single-handedly created a template for the modern blockbuster author.

There were, of course, blockbuster authors before Patterson, among them Mario Puzo, James Michener and Danielle Steel. But never had authors been marketed essentially as consumer goods, paving the way for a small group of writers, from Charlaine Harris to Malcolm Gladwell, to dominate best-seller lists — often with several titles at a time — in the same way that brands like Skippy and Grey Poupon dominate supermarket shelves. “Until the last 15 years or so, the thought that you could mass-merchandise authors had always been resisted,” says Larry Kirshbaum, former C.E.O. of the Time Warner Book Group, which owned Little, Brown until 2006. “Jim was at the forefront of changing that.”

Scott Eric Kaufman has written two good posts about Mad Men at the Valve, but I want instead to pull what he quotes from Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography, because it is true and because Gavin will like it:

Identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself. That is really the trouble with an autobiography you do not of course really believe yourself why should you, you know so well so very well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself because you cannot remember right and if you do remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right. You are of course never yourself.

If anyone was ever equal parts Jacques Derrida and William James, it was Gertrude Stein.

I was an economics major in college, and I’ve been grateful ever since for a few key concepts those courses drilled into me: things like opportunity cost, sunk cost, and marginal cost. I think about this stuff all the time in my everyday life. I think about the sunk cost of waiting for a slow elevator; I think about the marginal cost of making myself another sandwich.

I think most of all about the concept of stock and flow.

Do you know about this? It couldn’t be simpler. There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank or trees in the forest. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour or three thousand toothpicks a day. Easy. Too easy.

But I actually think stock and flow is a useful metaphor for media in the 21st century. Here’s what I mean:

• Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.
• Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

Flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons—but I think we neglect stock at our peril. I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: oh man. I’ve got nothing here.

I’m not saying you should ignore flow! This is no time to hole up and work in isolation, emerging after years with your work in hand. Everybody will go: huh? Who are you? And even if they don’t—even if your exquisite opus is the talk of the tumblrs for two whole days—if you don’t have flow to plug your new fans into, you’re suffering a huge (get ready for it!) opportunity cost. You’ll have to find those fans all over again next time you emerge from your cave.

Here’s a case study. My pal Alexis Madrigal has got the stock/flow balance down. On one end of the spectrum, he’s a Twitter natural and a fast-paced writer. Madrigal’s got mad flow; you plug in, and you get a steady stream of interesting stuff. But on the other end of the spectrum—and man, this is just so important—he’s written a deep, nuanced history of green tech in America. This is a book intended to stand the test of time.

You can tell that I want you to stop and think about stock here. I feel like we all got really good at flow, really fast. But flow is ephemeral, while stock sticks around. Stock is capital. Stock is protein.

And the real magic trick is to put them both together. To keep the ball bouncing with your flow—to maintain that open channel of communication—while you work on some kick-ass stock in the background. Sacrifice neither. The hybrid strategy.

So, I was thinking about stock and flow just now while I was standing in my kitchen doing the dishes, and I thought, wait, there are all these super-successful artists and media people today who don’t think about flow at all. Like, Wes Anderson? Come on. He’s all stock. And he seems to be doing okay.

But I think the secret is that somebody else does his flow for him. I mean, what are PR and advertising but flow, bought and paid for? Rewind history and put Wes Anderson on his own—proprietor of an extremely symmetrical YouTube channel—and I don’t think you get the same result, not if it’s one video every three years.

So, if you’re in the position to have somebody else handle your flow while you tend to your stock: great. But that’s true for almost no one, and will I think be true for even fewer over time, so you need to have your own plan for this stuff.

Anyway, this is not a huge insight, I know. Mostly I just wanted to share the terminology, because it’s been echoing in my head since my first microeconomics course. Today, whenever I put my hands on the keyboard, I’m asking myself: Is this stock? Is this flow? How’s my mix? Do I have enough of both?

I agree with Tim O’Reilly; David Weinberger’s statement on net neutrality is pretty danged good:

The Net as a medium is not for anything in particular — not for making calls, sending videos, etc… Because everything we encounter in this world is something that we as humans made (albeit sometimes indirectly), it feels like it’s ours. Obviously it’s not ours in the property sense. Rather, it’s ours in the way that our government is ours and our culture is ours. There aren’t too many other things that are ours in that way.

If we allow others to make decisions about what the Net is for — preferring some content and services to others — the Net won’t feel like it’s ours, and we’ll lose some of the enthusiasm (= love) that drives our participation, innovation, and collaborative efforts.

I think if you had to summarize how Jaron Lanier feels about the Internet now, you could do worse than say, “it used to be OURS, but it’s THEIRS now.” For Lanier, he means the early freewheeling individualist-humanist pioneers, as opposed to the corporate peddlers of alleged community. Not everyone experiences everything in today’s internet that way, but for someone who came up during the wide-open, small-community period, it probably has to feel like something important’s been lost.

Now imagine that in five years, we (us, here, listening, this community, and all communities networked to it) all feel the way Lanier does. That none of it is ours anymore, all the way down to data packets. That’s what we face today.

One of my favorite language blogs, Fritinancy, recently flagged Frank Rich’s use of the word “buckraker” in his column:

[Michael] Steele is representative of a fascinating but little noted development on the right: the rise of buckrakers who are exploiting the party’s anarchic confusion and divisions to cash in for their own private gain. In this cause, Steele is emulating no one if not Sarah Palin, whose hunger for celebrity and money outstrips even his own.

I think it was either Daniel Larison or Andrew Sullivan last year who noted that conservative pundits’ power and profit tends to go up whenever the Republican Party does worse. If you control the White House and/or Congress, you don’t really need a radio host or non-office-holding former candidate as a spokesman. But buckraking isn’t limited to the right — as Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald, and Wonkette point out, it’s kind of hard to see Harold Ford’s Senate run in NY as anything but an attempt at self-promotion. (Ford probably won’t win the primary nomination, but his place as a guy who gets interviewed on cable news is safe for years.)

In fact, “buckraker” is probably best reserved for pseudo-journalists, i.e., pundits who act as political hacks — but for their own benefit, over and above that of their media network or political party. That (as Word Wizard points out) is closer to the origin of the term, both as a variation on “muckraker” and its (probable) coinage by Jacob Weisberg in The New Republic, all the way back in 1986, in an essay called “The buckrakers: Washington journalism enters a new era”:

[M]ark February 1985 as the start of the next era. That was when Patrick J. Buchanan went to work at the White House and his financial disclosure statement revealed, to widespread astonishment and envy, that he had made $400,000 as a journalist in 1984. This included $60,000 for his syndicated column, $25,000 for his weekly appearance on ‘The McLaughlin Group,’ $94,000 for Cable News Network’s ‘Crossfire,’ $81,000 for a radio show, and more than $135,000 for 37 speeches. Welcome to the era of the buckraker.

But Buchanan was always a marginal figure, a good interview but someone who was always at the outside of the Republican party and national politics. The fact that Michael Steele has essentially refashioned the national chairmanship of his party — which (national political figures like Howard Dean aside) used to be a pretty low-profile, behind-the-scenes, support job — into a me-out-front full-time media position seems significant — Steele doesn’t have an incentive to promote the party at the expense of himself.

Serving as party chair is always a short-term gig. As Buchanan and now Palin and Ford have shown, buckraking is forever.

Tom Bissell (Go State!) reviews a new cultural history of Playboy magazine:

The early Playboy sought the eyes and minds of what Fraterrigo calls “the young, affluent, urban bachelor,” and the first issue was pitched by Hefner as “a little diversion from the anxieties of the Atomic Age.” These anxieties were not only about being barbequed by Soviet nukes; for the American male, they included having to marry the first woman you had sex with, living with your parents (thanks to a dire postwar housing shortage), and feeling emasculated by the new nature of American work, no longer artisanal or rugged or self-determining but managerial and inchoate and soul-stranglingly indoor. This was, in fact, the young Hefner’s life, and he loathed it. In 1953, he was a struggling cartoonist with a wife and child; the Chicago Daily News profiled him in a lifestyles piece as a model of suburban bonhomie. A year later, Playboy was launched…

It was Hefner’s great insight that girly pictures divorced from any kind of human individuality could not be anything except dirty. And so his Playmates had names, jobs, personalities, and fact sheets, however illusory these often were. In some crucial way, then, Playboy gave what was previously considered pornography a kind of dignity. It was a deeply limiting, dingbat dignity, to be sure, but to allow the mid-century American woman any identity beyond that of mother, virgin, or whore increased her available social options by 25 percent. Women would naturally revolt against this, and no one could blame them, but the fact remains that Playboy helped liberate female sexuality from a Bastille of iniquitous morality, in the long run surely doing more to help women than harm them…

Playboy was the first men’s magazine to use the crueler tricks of wish fulfillment previously relegated to women’s magazines. Before Playboy, as Fraterrigo observes, the typical men’s magazine trafficked in rustic stories about bear wrestling: vicarious was all you wanted the stories to be. Playboy sold a lot of things, but it also sold soft young bodies, and it suggested that if its readers purchased its things, and lived by its code, those bodies might be touched and caressed. Playboy pushed, issue after issue, decade after decade, ways of thinking about desire that were neither emotionally realistic nor experientially viable. Meanwhile it epitomized and, indeed, calcified mainstream ideas of beauty to such an extent that Hefner could reasonably demand a commission on every breast augmentation performed since 1965.

I love the plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose consequences of this. “Let’s destroy the reigning ideals of both genders, but keep the underlying capitalism and exploitation.” Now THAT is a magazine.

For some reason, I was thinking about pagers today. (I think it was something in the news about Motorola, a company that for me just always conjures memories of pagers). Here’s some nice info from Wikipedia:

Some common environments in which pagers are still used are:

* Pagers remain in use to notify emergency personnel. For example, they are required to be used by UK lifeboat crew and retained firefighters.
* Police, coast, local government emergency co-ordinators and other emergency services also carry pagers as a back-up system in the event of civil emergencies when mobile transmitters or networks may be unavailable.
* Security services use pagers (including global satellite pagers) as the signal is broadcast nationally (or across a global region in the case of satellite pagers) and there is thus no way of interceptors tracking the location of the pager-holder. Encrypted messages are also used in this scenario.
* Pagers are mostly carried by staff in medical establishments, allowing them to be summoned to emergencies. This is particularly important as one-way pagers do not interfere with medical equipment.
* Some construction and mining staff have to use one-way ‘intrinsically safe’ pagers as opposed to mobiles, as these do not risk triggering explosions in certain environments.
* Pagers are also widely used in the IT world, especially in cases where on-call technicians cannot rely on more modern cellular telephone systems. A good example would be in a cellular telephone company, where a service interruption in the cellular network would also mean that it would not be possible to notify a technician due to the outage in the network. Therefore, in these companies, engineers are usually equipped with a pager that uses another telco’s mobile network to ensure reachability in case of emergency. Pagers are also frequently used by non-telco IT departments.
* Railway staff (for example those working for rail companies in the UK) use pagers because of their consistency of signal, to supplement mobile usage.
* Deaf people who have no use for mobile voice services sometimes use two-way pagers.
* Pagers are widely used by rare bird-chasing “twitchers”, paying for rare bird information companies to send them messages telling them up-to-the-minute details of the latest rarity sightings across Britain.[citation needed] …

Another pager technology in wide use today is the call or tone pager. Mainly used in the hospitality industry, customers are given a theft-protected portable receiver which usually vibrates, flashes or beeps when a table becomes free, or when their meal is ready.

I love that last example, because it’s 1) something most of us still wind up experiencing and 2) it shows the value of information technology even when it can’t display anything we’d recognize as information.

Also, the range and reliability on those things is just terrible. So you have ultra-reliable, ultra-secure satellite-driven text technology used by emergency personnel — and crummy cheap pieces of plastic running on a radio signal that can’t reach the lobby outside the hotel bar.

But it’s still there. We still need it.

This is a long-standing question for Geekdads of all kinds: 1) WHEN do you introduce your children to the Star Wars movies and 2) In what sequence should you show the films?

Different generations have generally experienced the films differently, often with different judgments as to their value, as George Lucas explains in this interview:

The dilemmas may seem obvious, but let me explain. There are two dominant schools of thought on the issue. In the first, you present the films in their strict production order, i.e., the original trilogy first and prequels I-III later. (Since most parents who love the Star Wars films experienced the films in this order, that’s the overwhelming favorite.)

The other, minority view, says that you should present the films in their narrative sequence, beginning with Episode I and continuing through to VI. This is often disregarded out of hand, but there are several arguments for it:

• This is the order of the story as Lucas conceived it, and which he’s generally endorsed;
• It’s easier for a child to understand a story told from beginning to end, rather than one with an extended flashback;
• The prequels, especially the first two, are targeted for small children. Do you really want to wait until your son or daughter ages out of the period where The Phantom Menace is totally awesome?

There’s a third position, which holds that the three prequels are apocryphal perversions of the original trilogy and best kept away from children at all costs.

Let me make the case for an alternate sequence. Tell the story according to the age-appropriateness of the films. Essentially, you make the trilogy a big parallel montage, matching archetypes across different times, generations, and places — kind of like LOST.

On this theory, you begin with Star Wars IV: A New Hope. It’s the best stand-alone movie in the series, and if your kid isn’t into it, it’ll probably take a while for them to be into the rest.

Then, jump to I: The Phantom Menace. You can explain that this is the story of Luke’s father Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and C-Threepio. No spoilers necessary!

From here you can go to either II or V, depending on your child’s relative interest in either story, or which of the two DVDs you have ready at hand. You can even wait one-to-three years (as we who saw the films theatrically had to) for your son or daughter to age into them.

Then you introduce them to the Indiana Jones movies, as is right and just.

Finally, you show them VI and III, terminating both trilogies simultaneously, showing how Luke and Anakin make different choices, and how Anakin/Vader is finally redeemed.

You can work in the Clone Wars cartoons, the Lego Star Wars games, as well as the novels, encyclopedias, etc., as appropriate, based on your child’s approximate level of interest.

Alternative solution: you watch the movies as I’ve done with my son, haphazardly depending on my mood, and letting them tag along (covering their eyes as needed), trusting that they’ll sort it out for themselves later. Easy, and has as much to recommend it as most other approaches.

One blogger who’s been quietly humming lately on the curatorial front is Christopher Shea at Brainiac. Really smart choices, well-summarized, and he never hesitates to throw in a short comment, reaction, or question mark where it’s needed. It’s hard to pull off that balance, especially every day, but I think he’s been doing it really well.

Brainiac’s always been a go-to blog for me, but Shea’s consistency has bumped it from my “Ideas” folder to my “_must reads” (the underscore puts it at the top).