Do the Test — Friday Fun for Sharp-eyed Editors
Think you have sharp eyes, Mr. or Ms. Editor? Try this test, from a Web site in the UK: How did you do?
Rockefeller Press Policy Leaves Open Questions
This is a bit off-topic for this blog, but of interest to scholarly publishers, and I found myself doing a lot of thinking and digging about this for some reason. The announcement by Rockefeller Press that they will leave copyright […]
New Internet Trends — Social, Mobile, Robust, and Profitable
Morgan Stanley has updated its Internet trends report. You can view it below: Some interesting items stand out on what has become the de facto publishing medium for scholarly publishers: Consumers rule! Not only will consumer Internet bandwidth traffic surpass […]
ShopText Melds Magazines With Digital
Image via Wikipedia Hearst Magazines recently announced it’s rolling out ShopText, a system that uses text messaging to link print products with online. Readers of print can text a keyword to a number, and receive samples, buy products, or access […]
Is Twitter’s Hockey Stick Meaningful?
While it may be a fluke, it may be meaningful that, as Hitwise notes, Twitter has hit the hockey stick in growth, a tipping point of adoption and use that may herald a more mainstream place for the micro-blogging platform.: […]
The Printed Wikipedia — A Prediction Comes True!
A recent news report from Germany confirms an idea I’d been toying with for a couple of years (apparently along with a few other people) — that printing online content can be a good business. To quote from the Associated […]
Web 2.0 — The Vital Echo Chamber
Skeptics keep you honest, and should be celebrated. A skeptic about Web 2.0 is David Crotty, author of the Cold Spring Harbor Protocols blog “Benchmarks.” In a recent post, he pointed me to a review of Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes […]
Free and Not Free: The $500K iPod
Last week, I wrote about the new “racetrack memory” described in a recent Science paper. The commercial application of such high-capacity devices naturally falls toward high-demand media like music and movies. An interesting tangent of this is that while the […]
Students Cave When Asked to Give Up Digital Tools
A recent exercise at the University of Central Florida in which students could earn extra credit by giving up their digital devices for a week (5 days) ended with only 2 of the 28 earning the bonus points. The digital devices […]
Fed Up, Librarians Feed the Patrons
In a display of customer-centric thinking, librarians are allowing food in their buildings and even introducing cafes, according to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. As libraries change, they are catering more to their customers. Taking down the […]
MLA Seeking Conference Bloggers
The Medical Library Association (MLA) is seeking 15 bloggers to cover their conference in Chicago, May 16-21. As an incentive, the MLA is offering its bloggers free wireless access at the hotel throughout the conference. As the MLA puts it: […]
Friday Fun at Phatfusion: Drive Google Maps!
Looking for that vicarious feeling of freedom on a Friday at your desk? Try GoogleDrive at Phatfusion, a nifty little time-wasting mashup that lets you drive Google Maps. It’s a little fussy, and you should read the instructions, but you’ll […]
Will Texting and Twitters Kill Email?
There are many signs that email is threatened as the primary mode of communication between individuals. From record levels of spam (96.4% of all email is spam, some claim) to its incompatibility with cell phones, email is threatened with being […]
Zemanta – Augmented Authorship Arrives!
In the book, “The Design of Future Things,” Donald Norman observes that automation is a dangerous goal because pursuing it usually passes the point of diminishing returns. In contrast, augmentation of human effort (e.g., bicycling as augmented walking, writing/drawing/painting/composing as […]
Clicks Over Bricks for HarperCollins’ New Venture
In a blend of savvy commercial sense and forward-thinking strategy, HarperCollins is launching a book division that won’t pay advances to authors, won’t pay “bricks” stores a premium for upfront retail space, and won’t accept returns. Instead, it will focus […]