Anyone checking this blog lately has seen no new postings since Dec. 16, 2009. It’s not that I haven’t been blogging, it’s that I have been posting on several other blogs.
Why?
I am no longer in the business of creating elearning workshops;
I want to keep blogging, but in a simple, informal way.
So I have been exploring several different platforms. First I tried “light” blogging services Posterous and Tumblr. I decided Posterous felt more comfortable and friendly, so have stuck with it after creating (and deleting) a blog on Tumblr. Take a look at my Posterous blog, Explore-Tech.
Because I have been using WordPress for this blog (hosted separately) for 3 years, I decided to give WordPress.com a try, too. I found a template I liked and use the free hosting service. The switch to Jacque’s Journal has been easy because of my familiarity with WordPress. It also has a “press this” bookmarklet, making it easy to bring parts of web pages into a post, and my Explore-Tech blog posts can be added because of Posterous’ sharing features.
Earlier this month I read about Blgger’s deal with Amazon Associates and figured I might as well create a blog on that platform and see what I thought. I had trouble finding a template I liked even though Blogger has many more to choose from than Posterous. It’s a matter of taste, I guess. I chose one and have posted to it mostly by “sharing” my Explore-Tech posts with the site. I don’t expect to continue the blog so I won’t link to it here.
I’m sticking with two blogs (Explore-Tech and Jacque’s Journal) for now, especially since Posterous makes it so easy to share my posts on all my sites (including Twitter and Facebook) whenever I like.
I plan to experiment more with WordPress’s bookmarklet; so far I have mostly used Posterous’s bookmarklet because it is easy and flexible. Eventually, Jacque’s Journal may become more personal and less tech-heavy, although since technology is a major interest of mine, it also feels personal.
Posterous provides a lot of power for a relatively simple service. See the FAQ for a better idea of what you can do. I would like to see them continue developing more features while keeping user-friendliness uppermost.
Goodbye eLearning Service. I enjoyed blogging here, but it’s time for a “light” start for the new year.
The Contra Costa County Library has been awarded a $60,000 Bay Area Library and Information Systems (BALIS) Innovation grant to create a mobile platform that will push new and existing library content and services into the hands of cell phone users.
The “Snap & Go” project will allow Contra Costa County residents with mobile phones and a library card to access library materials, enhanced content, and manage their accounts without having to visit a library building or gain access to a computer.
Of particular interest to me since I just heard of QR Codes is that the project will utilize them — a two-dimensional barcode technology to encode information and automatically launch web-accessible functions.
The library will develop a Mobile Patron Support System that will link customers with cell phones to library services and information through QR codes that are attached to library materials including books, DVDs, flyers, posters, library cards, and the catalog.
By taking a picture of the barcode, the phone will launch the library’s mobile website and provide access to three functional areas: detailed, dynamically generated information on titles scanned including reviews, first chapters, and read-alike information; links to library mobile web pages including hours and location information; and links to patron account functions. Find out more about QR Codes here. [via ResourceShelf ]
This is a nifty innovation. Are there other libraries out there doing the same or something similar? By the way, if you have a QR code reader (such as Barcode Scanner from the Android Market) on your phone, take a snap of the barcode on this post.
Some book publishers fear of how e-books might change their bottom line is causing them to try to punish the consumer by delaying the publication of the electronic format of new books.
Nick Bilton, writing for the New York Times, believes that people don’t invest several hundred dollars in an e-reader in order to save money by not purchasing hard bound books. Instead, they are avid readers who like to have a library of books in one neat portable package.
If they can’t purchase the e-book format of a new book (because of publisher delays), they will just find another available e-book to purchase immediately — they won’t automatically rush off to the bookstore to buy the hard cover. The consumer understands that digital means immediate and infinite, and the limits imposed by paper no longer exist, he says. Bilton owns both an Amazon Kindle and a Sony Reader.
Some publishers, understandably wary about digital formats, are burying their heads in the sand, trying to pretend that the old business model isn’t changing. But “the next generation of book buyers won’t understand why they can’t access any information they want in a digital format. They have grown up in a world where everything, from movies to magazines, is basically just a collection of digital bytes,” warns Bilton.
Frankly, I don’t think it’s going to take as long as “the next generation of book buyers” to disprove the old model.
Who owns the electronic rights to older titles is in dispute, making it a rising source of conflict in one of the publishing industry’s last remaining areas of growth, reports the New York Times.
The family of William Styron wants to see e-book versions of titles like “Sophie’s Choice,” “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and Mr. Styron’s memoir of depression, “Darkness Visible” created. They believe they retain the rights to digital editions, but so does Styron’s publisher, Random House.
“The discussions about the digital fate of Mr. Styron’s work are similar to the negotiations playing out across the book industry as publishers hustle to capture the rights to release e-book versions of so-called backlist books. Indeed, the same new e-book venture Mr. Styron’s family hopes to use has run into similar resistance from the print publisher of “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller,” says the NY Times.
While most traditional publishers have included e-book rights in new author contracts for 15 years, many titles were originally published before e-books were explicitly included in contracts. Random House has sent a letter to dozens of literary agents, writing that the company’s older agreements gave it “the exclusive right to publish in electronic book publishing formats.”
Some authors or their estates are seeking alternatives for e-books partly because they are dissatisfied with the digital royalty rate, typically 25% of net proceeds, offered by most traditional publishers. The argument is that because it costs publishers less to produce and distribute e-books, authors should receive more, not less, in digital royalties.
“I think the potential danger that publishers run by not talking this through carefully,” said Andrew Wylie, a literary agent who represents the estates of authors of backlist titles not yet in digital form, including Ralph Ellison and Vladimir Nabokov, “is that they will be excluded from e-book rights in a significant way.”
At paid.Content.org, there’s an article with predictions from Forrester Research for the E-Reader and the Ebook market in the coming year.
They note that this “has been a breakout year for e-readers and e-books—device sales will have more than tripled by the end of this year, and content sales are up 176% for the year. But next year will be anything but boring.” Here’s what they are saying:
E Ink will lose its claim to near-100% market share for e-reader displays. Competition will come in three forms: 1) cheaper substitutions for E Ink that use the same electrophoretic display technology; 2) dual-screen devices that have both an E Ink and an LCD screen; and 3) devices that use an entirely different display technology, such as transflective LCD or OLED.
Dual-screen mobile phones and netbooks will eat into e-reader demand. Consumer electronics manufacturers will tap into the growing digital reading trend by launching new versions of their devices with reading-optimized screens. For instance, mobile phones like the Samsung Alias 2 already have secondary E Ink screens, which could be repurposed for reading rather than typing or time-telling. Netbooks will also launch with dual E Ink/LCD screens, like the Asus EEE PC prototype that debuted at CeBIT in 2009.
Apps will make non-reading devices more e-book-friendly. Next year will see more e-book apps on more devices. These apps will make it easier to view reading content on non-reading-optimized devices, which will provide a “good enough” experience for the majority of consumers who don’t read enough to justify buying a single-function e-reader, and will provide multiplatform convenience for consumers who do own e-readers.
eReaders will get apps, too. As anyone with an iPhone knows, apps are where the magic happens: They make the device infinitely more useful.
Amazon will launch a suite of new touchscreen e-readers. Awkward Kindle keyboard, begone! We think 2010 will bring several entirely new e-readers from Amazon, featuring touchscreens, color (by the end of the year), and flexibility.
B&N will steal market share from Amazon and Sony. This year was a setup year for B&N, and 2010 will see its efforts start to pay off. In 2009, B&N acquired Fictionwise, launched its own eBookstore and reading app for mobile phones and PCs, announced partnerships with e-reader manufacturers Plastic Logic and iRex, and launched its own Nook e-reader (which it promptly sold out of). In 2010, B&N will rack up significant sales of Nooks and e-books, as some consumers look for an Amazon alternative. Sony will launch its own new devices, and will work on improving the software and book-buying experience. B&N will end up taking market share from both Amazon and Sony, but Amazon will retain its dominant position as market leader.
E-book content sales will top $500 million in the U.S.
E-textbooks will become more accessible, but sales will be modest.
Magazine and newspaper publishers will launch their own apps and devices. Magazine and newspaper publishers aren’t satisfied with the way their content looks and acts on the Kindle and Sony Readers—they want color, video, interactivity, the ability to sell ads and control the subscriber relationship.
China, India, Brazil, and the EU will propel global growth, but the U.S. will still be the biggest market. Right now, the U.S. is the biggest market for e-readers and e-books, and that won’t change in 2010. But the rest of the world will start to catch up.
Living Stories is the name of a new experimental collaboration between Google Labs, the New York Times and the Washington Post that seeks to transcend that 500 year-old metaphor with a parsable flow of news content around big stories, says ReadWriteWeb.
Google’s video tour below explains how it works. At last, someone is rethinking the old news paradigm.
Mix together bar codes, your mobile phone, and “Favorite Places on Google” to get a new way to window shop.
100,000 local businesses (and more in the future) have received window decals with QR bar codes that can be scanned by hundreds of mobile devices, including iPhone, Android-powered phones, BlackBerry and more, to take you directly to the business’s Place Page where you may find reviews or coupons, if they are being offered. See how it works in the video below.
This launch is part of Google’s overall effort to provide you with the best local business results whenever you’re trying to figure out where to go, “whether it’s a trendy Cuban restaurant in Philly, a comics shop in L.A., a hip hotel in NYC or a little bit of photographic history in Rochester, N.Y,” says The Official Google Blog.
They plan to periodically send out new waves of window decals to qualifying businesses. If you own or manage a business and weren’t selected in this round, your first step is to claim your listing with Google’s Local Business Center for free. That will help them determine that your business information is correct. Then, you can enhance your local business listing by adding enhanced content like photos and videos.
To explore a gallery of several hundred Favorite Places in 20 U.S. cities, to learn more about how to use the QR codes and to find out how your business can get involved, check out Google’s Favorite Places. One of my Seattle favorites is seen in the image below.
In between — or to go along with — holiday shopping, we’re starting to see 2009’s “top” products, services, applications, etc. being touted.
Yesterday, ReadWriteWeb listed their top mobile web apps and have followed up today with their list of the top 10 consumer web apps of the year.
With regard to the consumer apps, they note that there are hundreds of new ones to choose from but “occasionally, we come across a service that stands out from the pack because it offers a novel solution, disrupts the way incumbent market leaders do business or changes the way we experience the Web.” Not all the apps are newly launched, but reached a mainstream audience this year.
The mobile web apps heavily feature those for the iPhone as one might expect, but there is a mix of others.
Briefly, the mobile group includes: Facebook 3.0 (iPhone), Tweetie 2 (iPhone), Twidroid – see image – (Android), Foursquare (Cross-platform), Google Voice, (Blackberry, Android), Spotify (Cross-Platform), Google Maps Navigation (Android), Layer (iPhone, Android), and a couple more. See the article for details.
Among the top consumer apps are 2 search engines, Bing and WolframAlpha. A couple of my favorites are included: light blogging site Posterous (here’s an example) and Tweetdeck, which I’ve recently posted about. Of course, RWW didn’t leave off huge favorites like Twitter and Facebook. See the article for more apps and information.
Twitter desktop client, Tweetdeck, has carried through in a big way on its promises to bring us desirable new features.
I use Tweetdeck regularly on my laptop, having found some of its basic features such as the ability to create groups and view them in columns, a big jump up from Twitter.com. There are other desktop clients, but I hooked onto Tweetdeck and I’m sticking with it (for now anyway). I use Twidroid on my Android-based T-Mobile MyTouch phone.
The new features let you integrate Twitter’s list function, view lists in columns and edit them easily. You also have a choice of how to Retweet (RT) — stay with the previous Tweetdeck version which is editable, or go with the new Twitter version which emphasizes the original tweet. The new version is not editable but shows the icon of both the original tweeter and the that of the retweeter (see image for example of both).
Those were the features I was mainly interested in, but there are more that may be important to you. Take a look at the brief video to see what is new and how it works.
Then download Tweetdeck here and try it for yourself.
As soon as I started following more than a dozen people on Twitter I realized that I needed more help than the Twitter.com site could offer (at the time). I saw recommendations for several Twitter desktop clients and after some experimentation, settled on Tweetdeck. Thank goodness, since my “follow” list just keeps growing. Tweetdeck helps me manage my Twitter stream (and my own updates from several accounts) with ease.
When Twitter_Tips mentioned this site with 10 very useful videos on how to get more out of Tweetdeck, I learned just how little of the power of Tweetdeck I was using. These brief, well done tutorials are definitely worth your time if you are a Tweetdeck user. If you aren’t, and feel that Twitter is overwhelming you, you might want to give Tweetdeck a try.
So I have been exploring several different platforms. First I tried “light” blogging services Posterous and Tumblr. I decided Posterous felt more comfortable and friendly, so have stuck with it after creating (and deleting) a blog on Tumblr. Take a look at my Posterous blog, Explore-Tech.
Some book publishers fear of how e-books might 
Who owns the electronic rights to older titles is in dispute, making it a rising source of conflict in one of the publishing industry’s last remaining areas of growth, 
They note that this “has been a breakout year for e-readers and e-books—device sales will have more than tripled by the end of this year, and content sales are up 176% for the year. But next year will be anything but boring.” Here’s what they are saying:
With regard to the consumer apps, they note that there are hundreds of new ones to choose from but “occasionally, we come across a service that stands out from the pack because it offers a novel solution, disrupts the way incumbent market leaders do business or changes the way we experience the Web.” Not all the apps are newly launched, but reached a mainstream audience this year.
I use Tweetdeck regularly on my laptop, having found some of its basic features such as the ability to create groups and view them in columns, a big jump up from Twitter.com. There are other desktop clients, but I hooked onto Tweetdeck and I’m sticking with it (for now anyway). I use Twidroid on my Android-based T-Mobile MyTouch phone.
As soon as I started following more than a dozen people on