Trends From Eric Schmidt's New Book

Trends You Can't Afford to Ignore--From Eric Schmidt's New Book - Forbes: " . . . . An explosion of self-styled journalists.While traditional media institutions decline, more lay people are diving into reporting their take on the news–and often doing it very quickly using services like Twitter. “As language barriers break down and cell towers rise, there will be no end to the number of new voices, potential sources, citizen journalists and amateur photographers looking to contribute,” the authors write. This is a long-term trend that will have both positive and negative implications. We’ll have access to more information and to points of view that have been ignored. At the same time, we’ll be exposed to more news from unreliable and irresponsible sources. What it means for you: Many companies already reach out continually to bloggers and those with active social media followings to tell their stories, as part of their PR efforts . . . as members of the public, we’ll all need to become a lot more skeptical about anything we read, see or hear on the web . . . . "

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What is Tumblr?

What is Tumblr--a blogging site, a microblogging ecosystem, a social media site?

" . . . . register for an account and an entire microblogging ecosystem materialises. Photos, videos, text and other entries can be "reblogged" and marked with "likes", and individual Tumblr blogs (rather than users) can be followed. Popular posts may accrue hundreds or thousands of "notes": short comments, likes and reblogs. Mr Karp said in 2012 that each original item posted to Tumblr is reblogged nine times on average, which means about 10% of items posted on Tumblr are original; most are reblogs of items posted by others. Tumblr lets the mash-up/remix generation express themselves by sharing, curating and collating items of interest.A survey of American internet users found that Tumblr was the most popular site among those aged 13-25.This seems to stem from its embrace of sharing, combined with its social looseness: unlike on Facebook, real names aren't required (only an e-mail address), and users can present different personalities to the world through different blogs. Tumblr is, in a way, the anti-Facebook—a social network where you do not have to be friends with your mother. Buying Tumblr thus gives Yahoo a much stronger position in the field of social networking . . ."  (source The Economist)

All of the above.
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Free Speech and the Harm Principle

Counterpoint: Free Speech and the Harm Principle | MIT Technology Review: " . . . The only principle I can imagine working is yours, where “harm” is interpreted to mean physical or commercial injury but excludes personal, religious, or ideological offense.

Pontin’s version is clearly correct insofar as it excludes “religious or ideological offense” from the category of what lawyers call “cognizable” harms. That odd term “cognizable” is meant to capture this dual understanding. The offense that people take at the conduct of others cannot be dismissed with a wave of the hand, given that these feelings are often deep and long–lasting. They are in fact real harms, subjectively experienced. So the willingness to cut them out of the harm principle cannot rest on a simple denial of the fact, but must rest on the awareness that for the long-term success of the system, each person must waive that claim against all others, no matter how acute the feeling. . . ."


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Appeal of suit against Google e-book project

US court scrutinises suit against Google e-book project - Technology News | TVNZ: " . . . .If the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals bars the plaintiffs from suing collectively, it likely would be much harder for them to win a large damages award against Google. Circuit Judge Pierre Leval, one of three judges hearing Google's appeal, said the company's project could benefit many authors. It could particularly help writers whose works are more obscure, by telling readers where they could buy their books, he said. "A lot of authors would say, 'Hey, that's great for me,'" Leval said. Robert LaRocca, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, argued that a survey of class members that Google conducted was flawed. That survey, plaintiffs said in court papers, showed that 500 authors, or 58 percent of those surveyed, approved of Google's project. . . ."


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Slow Death of the American Author

The new, global electronic marketplace is rapidly depleting authors’ income streams--

The Slow Death of the American Author - NYTimes.com: "Last October, I visited Moscow and met with a group of authors who described the sad fate of writing as a livelihood in Russia. There is only a handful of publishers left, while e-publishing is savaged by instantaneous piracy that goes almost completely unpoliced. As a result, in the country of Tolstoy and Chekhov, few Russians, let alone Westerners, can name a contemporary Russian author whose work regularly affects the national conversation.The Constitution’s framers had it right. Soviet-style repression is not necessary to diminish authors’ output and influence. Just devalue their copyrights."

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Newspaper business leaves the Miami Herald Building

Sign of the times--

A look back at the Miami causeways and shoreline — before The Miami Herald | Belle Isle Blog: "The Miami Herald printed its last newspapers  two weeks ago at 1 Herald Plaza, on the mainland between the Venetian and MacArthur causeways. . . . The final newsroom employees — and few from other departments — are scheduled to finish packing this week and all will be working in Doral by Friday afternoon. . . . The Herald moved to One Herald Plaza from a location on South Miami Avenue in April 1963."


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‘I Wish I Hadn’t Bought Newsweek, It Was a Mistake’

Most of us could have told Barry Diller this before he found out the "hard way"--


Newsweek/Daily Beast Owner: ‘I Wish I Hadn’t Bought Newsweek, It Was a Mistake’ | The Weekly Standard: " . . . for a news magazine … it was not possible to print it any longer. So we said we will offer a digital product. We have a very, very solid newsroom, and we’ll see. I don’t have great expectations. I wish I hadn’t bought Newsweek. It was a mistake.”"

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Making money publishing on the web

Despite all the crying and whining from newspaper publishers, you CAN make money publishing on the internet--

So who's making money publishing on the web? - Fortune Tech: "The web has given rise to a number of notable digital publishers serving almost everyone's tastes, from straightforward news to guilty pleasures. For every Pulitzer-winning 10-part series on wounded war veterans, there are just as many frothy posts like the "10 funniest cat GIFs of the week." What about earnings? Some like The Awl have been profitable from the outset; others like Vox Media predict they'll be in the black soon. Here's a snapshot of just several new media businesses and how they're doing." (read more at link above)

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Tumblr Advertisers Have To Get Creative

How Tumblr Forces Advertisers to Get Creative | MIT Technology Review: " . . . Tumblr recently allowed advertisers to feature content on its site. But unlike Facebook, say, or the New York Times website, Tumblr doesn’t rely on simple banner ads (founder David Karp is said to loathe them). Rather, Tumblr is forcing advertisers to play the same game as Tumblr’s own users. Advertisers have to create Tumblrs (pared-down blogs) of their own, in effect; the content of those blogs can then be featured prominently through the site. As Bloomberg put it last month: “Tumblr tells advertisers to come up with campaigns that will spread through the network like its other content.”. . ." (read more at link)

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Buzzfeed's Secret

Does Buzzfeed Know the Secret? -- New York Magazine: " . . . Peretti wanted to fabricate memes, and after years of experimentation, he built BuzzFeed as a shop to do so. He didn’t do it for the news, or the movie gossip, or the cute pictures of pandas. Beneath BuzzFeed’s cheery gloss lies a data-driven apparatus designed to figure out what makes you click. Peretti is aware that if he really has divined that secret—if he can reliably manufacture, at mass scale, content you will want to share—he will have developed an asset of immense value. . . . "(read more at link)

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Ghost's Blogging Dashboard

Ghost's Blogging Dashboard Doesn't Need to Exist | MIT Technology Review: " . . . don’t know whether Dash’s anti-dashboard argument is realistic for managing the content-related activities of large organizations, but it seems pretty convincing for someone using a system like Ghost. Why? Because dashboards assume that you want to interface with them, manage them, interpret them–when really what you’re using the software for is something else completely: “blogging.” After all, what are analytics for, really? Not just monitoring them for the sake of monitoring them–but for extracting insight to act upon, when necessary. “I know [dashboards] demo well and look great in investor pitch decks or screencast videos,” Dash writes, “but they don’t actually help me make decisions, or get better at what I’m doing.”. . . "(read more at link)


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Publishing Industry Atomization

Shatzkin: Soon, Most People Working in Publishing Won’t Be Working at Publishing Companies | Digital Book World: "The publishing industry is going through “atomization,” according to industry consultant and DBW partner Mike Shatzkin. He writes in his latest blog post at The Shatzkin Files: Soon — in the next 5 or 10 years — every university (perhaps most departments within a university), every law firm and accounting firm and consulting firm, certainly every content creator in other media, as well as most manufacturers and retailers will become book publishers too. . . . Read more at The Shatzkin Files.


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3 forces shaping 21st century book publishing

The three forces that are shaping 21st century book publishing: scale, verticalization, and atomization - The Shatzkin Files: "There are three overarching realities that are determining the future course of book publishing. They are clear and they are inexorable:

  • Scale, and its close cousin “critical mass”, is the ability to use size as a competitive advantage in any endeavor;
  • Verticalization, or being in sync with the inherent capability of the Internet to deliver anything of interest in an audience-specific way; and
  • Atomization, or the ability for any person or entity to perform the most critical component of publishing — making content available and accessible to anybody anywhere — without capital and without an organization dedicated to distribution." (read more at link above)


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Mediagazer

publishing - Google News

self-publish - Google News

content creation - Google News

content curation - Google News