Susan Mernit's Blog: Navigating the Info Jungle

Reader David Rothman: Actually the $10M figure is rather believable--it's a speck of total book biz sales. Each year Tom Clancy alone may be earning several times the revenue of the whole e-book biz. Why? Partly because of heavy-handed Digitial Rights Management schemes. (I've been advocating e-books for almost a dozen years, and I have yet to pay for a DRM-"protected" book (though I may succumb eventually).
More from David here.
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Jesse Kornbluth's baby says: "Madonna has only one name. So do I. If I were a New Age kid, I'd say it's "destiny" that I should write about her new book."
Only 18 months old, the fabulous Boogins publishes her first review--of Madonna's children's book and you can read it right here,

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According to the completely objective Open eBook Forum (OeBF), the electronic publishing industry's trade and standards organization, e-book sales are expected to top $10MM in 2003.
Just think, the year's 3/4 over? Does that mean the industry has already closed $7.3MM in sales?
Geeze, most people I know have never bought an e-book...would love to know where this audience is.
(Via Bay Area Tech Wire)
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One of my best traits is my persistance.
While creativity, business smarts, strategic sense, articulateness, and intiution are all qualities I have and value,I believe it is my persistance that helps me stand out.
When I want something--especially on behalf of a person, project, or cause I believe in--I'll try many approaches to get the 'right' result.
I'm sure my persistance played a role in getting Zack into the high school he so desperately wanted to attend, and it definitely helped me move the family back to California. And it's helped me develop all sorts of new businesses and products over the years.
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I got a call today from the San Jose School District Enrollment Center that the district would be able to offer Zack a transfer to Lincoln High School, his first choice, and one of the reasons we moved back here. The paperwork will happen next week, and he will be able to start by Wednesday.
So many people were working to help us make this happen, thank you to each and every one.

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From Scott Safran, Exec Producer, New England Cable News, via Lost Remote:

"I hope they'll take up more of the screen with data."

"I'm glad they clarified that it was 'ACTOR' Arnold
Schwarzenegger. I had no idea who they were talking about."

"It really helped my understanding of that story that they
asked a couple of random idiots on the street what THEY
thought of it."

More here.


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This is great! The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has a very interesting program to assist school districts to create smaller, more effective high schools, has just announced a $52.MM grant to New York City to create 67 new, smaller schools. The New York gift will be split among seven nonprofit organizations that will work with New York's Department of Education to open the schools, which will eventually replace a number of large, comprehensive high schools.

The American Institutes for Research and SRI have done some program evaluations that I have recently been reading for a project I am working on. High Time for High School Reform is a research paper from April 2003 that reports on an evaluation of the early stage of the initiative.

It is fascinating reading for anyone interested in improving America's high schools.
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So Spiers is going to NY Magazine, good for her. With Mark Malkin gone, they need someone with wit.
But does this mean La Spiers will still come to BloggerCon--or will the fabulous Choire Sicha attend in her place? If Bis comes, she may suddenly become the Big Media person at the conference.

I am impressed by the quantity and quality of the comments on her post about this. As Andrew Gatsby says on Spiers' comments page: Wow. In the rock-n-roll world of blogging, you just landed a major label deal.

And just think: More money for great shoes!

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Via Gawker: Awful Plastic Surgery-Enjoy photos of Tori Spelling, Victoria Principal and other B-listers whosse assets--along with their Q value--have dropped waay low.
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You can find photos and postings of Hurricane Isabel's might on blog-like mini-site at WEVC, Belo Interactive's web site in Norfolk Virgina.
The cool thing about this is letting citizens post photos and notes.
The frustrating thing is that it is not really a blog, it's a fake blog. A web page masquerading as a blog to seem trendy.
Why isn't it a blog?
Instead of having a group blog members could post to, this is the classic news site thing where would-be participants are asked to "submit their entries: via email to the news staff, who then post a compilation of entries. It's not fresh and on the scene, it's about as canned as it gets.

Yawn, didn't we see this back in 1996 when we had the great big snowstorm on the East coast? And about 1,000 times since then? Oh yeah, if you call it a blog, then you're cutting edge, I forgot.

Come one guys, you are all terrific online journalists--loosen up a little & let the people post--they won't disappoint you.
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Dave Winer's posted a blogroll for the BloggerCon participants with nice little feed buttons for almost all.
If you're going to BloggerCon and want to add yourself to the blogoll, this is the link.
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Really good piece by Peter Argenti in this Globe this am on the anticipated name change. Some snippets:

"...But since the company reported a US record $98.9 billion net loss last year -- and became mired in multiple federal investigations of aggressive AOL accounting for advertising deals -- the AOL name has come to be seen as a millstone dragging down what remain generally strong and growing Time Warner movie, magazine, music, news, and cable television operations. The company's stock has fallen 66 percent since the merger closed in January 2001. Their reputations battered, Case and Levin have stepped down.

The AOL Net access service, which has lost more than 1 million US subscribers in the last year, now represents barely 20 percent of the company's revenues and 17 percent of its net income. Few "synergies" expected from delivering Time Warner content over AOL "pipes" have emerged. Nor has AOL been able to develop any major new service for Time Warner Cable high-speed modem subscribers to fend off its own losses of dial-up Net customers. Some investors and industry analysts have even proposed the company undo the merger and spin off AOL as a stand-alone company."

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Berkeley, CA--Went to Bezerkley last night to see Christopher Riley perform his pieces for solo piano based on Radiohead songs. It was terrific--on one hand, the cynic in me says Riley could be the Rachmaninoff of his generation, playing emotional versions of popular songs; on the other hand, Riley could be a truly authentic voice--a pianist who is not afraid to merge his love of an alternative band with his classical training.

What is the music like? Melodic, intense, precise. Music I had always wished 'd heard, but didn't know it till that moment. Music I wanted to hear again, to own, and to have a part of my inner life.

Listen here and see for yourself. For all my criticism, I think I've become a total fan...Listening to Riley play Radiohead made made me feel great.--I've got his music going on real player as I write this.

P.S. If you are a Radiohead fan, and are interested in Riley, he said he hangs out at atease.web and his screen name is Blaster.
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Here it California, it's easy to forget that much of the East Coast is leaving town--or battening down---in preperation for Hurrican Isabel. A story on Forbes.com points out that the hurrican can impact several nuclear power plants directly in its wake.
More on Isabel here.
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AOLTW's board of directors is planning to vote to remove the AOL from the corporate name when they meet on Thursday. Touted as the heart of the company at the disastrous merger, this name shift is a correction of sorts, signaling that to the corporation, the public, and most important, to the analysts, AOL is a nice little product that belongs to a big media conglomerate, nothing more.
Ironically, this downgrade is taking place at a point when they've finally created a really new client with nice features. Even better, many of my friends on the inside have all expressed the sense that things are now on the upswing and they're finally getting the business on track. Either they're poisoning the drinking water down there in Dulles, or many people actually do feel newly encouraged.
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AOL News director Gary Kebbel and crew just launched a newly redesigned AOL News. Locked up behind the subscriber firewall, the new service offers video news along with a new look and feel. Most notably, the design is built in HTML and is published with a new editorial tool designed by the Publishing team. One of the difficulties in keeping AOL News current was the heavy demands the Rainman publishing system made on the production team. This new system supports both scheduled and real time updates.

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From Tidepool.org. Global warming confuses the caribou and other observations from long time Arctic researchers who come up to Toolik Lake every summer to do research on the ecosystem.
Meanwhile, Alaska is melting--over the past few years, temperatures have risen about 8 degrees in the winter.
Meanwhile, the world's largest tsunami simulation tank has just been opened in Corvallis, Oregon. This week emergency response folks in Oregon will practice what to do in case the big one comes.
And George Bush's horrendous environmental record is is still being discussed. Mother Jones weighs in here on how Bush had hidden the bad stuff away from the public.
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Here's what Phil Wolf says at a klog apart:

10 million people doing it.

The name shifted from blogs to journals.

Boutique consultants helping non-writers write, managers manage, marketers market, until everyone realizes it's just like email.

At least three blogging jokes on Letterman.

All the presidential campaigns will have team blogs. And so will most congressional campaigns.

The Governor of California will start a weblog.

Ghost blogging will pick up.

Universities will issue blogging tools with admission and with registration for each course.

AOL, Google, Yahoo and MSN will badly pay designers for creating cool blogging templates for their new blogspaces.

And everyone will become a political blogger after the Democratic primary

My two cents on this:
Blog tools will be tweaked to make blogging a fast and cheap publishing platform for academia, small business, and local community group.

Google will develop an AdSense type blogging network with seperate pricing, and AOL will copy the concept

New York media types currently marvelling over odd posts on Craig's List move on to celebrity blogs by folks like JT LeRoy and Chloe Sevigny. Can you spell 'This is so over?'

At least 3 novels will appear written as blogs. Two wil be chicklit paperbacks. One will be serious literature by a young maverick.

Want to play? Post your predictions/wish list here.



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Anya Kamenetzin the Village Voice: "Thanks to his Internet-centered campaigning, presidential contender Howard Dean appears to be far more wired into the wired electorate than his Democratic rivals or George W. Bush. Dean's innovative use of the Web has gotten plaudits from the press, and his courting of the wired crowd seems to be paying off—10,000 people showed up for an August 24 rally in cybercity Seattle. But if Dean is to keep the goodwill of blogocrats, he must find the message to match their medium....
When the unofficial, but large, Dean Nation blog submitted a list of readers' 10 most popular questions to the Dean campaign in April, the DMCA made it, along with "9-11 Investigation" and "Cutting Gov't Spending." Yet in the five short entries that Dean posted on Lessig's blog, he managed to avoid the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Act, though hundreds of posters both during the week and later mentioned the issue or asked him to state a position. "

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Fox News is running a story suggesting that the Ben Affleck-J Lo wedding was called off after Ben's pals, including Matt Damon and brother Casey Affleck, staged a "Skip this wedding" intervention.
"Ben had wanted to call off the engagement even before (his well-publicized foray to a Vancouver strip club), but after that, he didn't want to look like the bad guy, so he went ahead with (plans for the wedding)," was one of the quotes from NY Daily News gossipeuses.
Consider this: the guy was in rehab cause he couldn't say no to booze.
He's lost a bundle at the gambling tables because he can't say no to cards.
He almost got married because he couldn't say no to J-Lo.

Yep, that sounds possible.


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JD Lasica, one of the finest online journalists in the business, has just published a chuck of New Direction for News series: We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information. This series builds on the thinking in JD's widely discussed Participatory Journalism a series and explores how participatory journalism and traditional journalism are converging.
I'm in the middle of reading Chapter 4, The Rules of Participation, but I jumped ahead to the end and checked out the absolutely through Appendix, which is a great snapshot of blogging and social network resources circa September, 2003.
I'm curious to see where Dale and New Directions for News are going to go with from this report, but my sense is this will accredit NDN as a thinktank for a broader audience than in the past. Meanwhile, the recently announced affiliation/merger with the Media Center of the American Press Institute strengthens their position in the online newspaper world from whence they came.
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From Mark H. McCormack: Staying Street Smart in the Internet Age:
I can keep a secret.
This was a rational decision.
I want totally honest feedback.
The check is in the mail.
You're the only one we're talking to.
It's business, it's not personal.
The customer comes first.
I'll call you right back.
We judge people on their performance.
The boss is clueless.


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A timely little service for US citizens, and a new project by MoveOn.org--Mislead.org, a site that allowed me to sign up for a daily email of the untrue things Bush a d his staffers have said.
Question: So may many days will it take for this list to have 100,000 subscribers? 500,000 subscribers? 1.5 MM?
Bets taken here...I will award my 1994 WW3 conference tote bag to the person who post, the first, most accurate prediction of what the numbers will be.
Deadlines for betting: October 1st.
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From my friend Mi Won:

Bush/Cheney '04: Because the truth just isn't good enough
Bush/Cheney '04: Putting the "con" in conservatism
Bush/Cheney '04: The last vote you'll ever have to cast
Bush/Cheney: 1984 Now
and

WWJB: Who would Jesus Bomb?
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So Ben and Jen spent what would have been their wedding day 3,000 miles apart, according to a story in the Evening Standard.
The backstory on this one is going to be very interesting...thanks for making your lives spectacles for the rest of us, you publicity hounds, you.
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Did Ben Affleck give Jennifer Lopz the boot right before the wedding, or did the still-steaming-about-the-strippers seductress toss out her mannish boy? The tabloids are going nuts on this, as Hollywoods' most-hyped couple edges toward flameout. The People.com piece and the subscequent AP story say that Ben dumped Jen.
There are already 202 stories running online on this topic--many of them edits of the AP piece--and the press is camped out watching these two, waiting for more.
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For the past 2 years, I've been a 100k flyer working for a big company, one of those people, usually men, who say their family is their first priority, but they're really not home, so the big thing has gotta be their job, eh?
When I left AOL, I resolved that the coming year would be about more balance, especially since this is the year my only child has to a) apply to college and b) actually get in somewhere he'd like to go. Only I had no idea that putting time into making those things happen would involve running the equivalent of a tropical island taxi service.
You see--the kid doesn't drive. He's 17, but he flunked his drivers test and then we moved to NJ where he didn't need to drive and now we're back in Cali and his girlfriend lives 3.9 miles from our house in one direction, and his school is 9.3 miles in another direction, and the gym is is 5.4 miles in another direction, and there is only one bus that goes directly from near where we live to any one of these places, and the schedule is shot on Sundays.
I said I wanted closeness, right? And to be around and enjoy him during what is probably his last year living full time at home. I just didn't know togetherness would be in the front seat of a car, tooling back and forth across Main Street.
Given that I will be out of town half of October, it's time for a session with the bus maps, a trip to the DMV to renew the learner's permit, and cleaning up the rusty old bike.
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It's good when your mail service shuts down a spammer operating from your account, right? But how about when your service shuts you down for sending out more emails than usual? That's what happened to me this morning with my AOL accounts--the system put a block on my account so that I could not get online.
No explanation, no message--just no access to any of my accounts.
It turns out that I hadn't been hacked--which is what I thought had happened, since my machine was bombarded by Trojan horses yesterday according to my firewall--instead, my provider has shut me off for trying to send 60 emails one after the other (sounds like serious spam to me).
I got through on the phone and found out from the rep in Florida that all the email accounts are monitored, and this atypical activity on mine had triggered a shut down.
Wild with relief that I had NOT been hacked, I explained that I had prepared an email with the web address of my new company and my new real-world contact info, to send to 100 or so of my nearest and dearest and put it into my Mail to be sent folder. When I instructed the system to let'er rip, wham! the system reached out to this spaminator and SHUT HER DOWN.
Now, here's the funny part:
I get a new password from the nice lady and go back online. I have 4 emails waiting for me from AOL TOS.
--One is about Harassment (how did I get that one?)
--Another is about terms of service (okay, makes sense)
'--Another is about sending bulk email--this one gives me pause. It says that I complained because someone was sending bulk mail from my account at high speeds and here are my rights. Uh-duh? 60 emails in a queue? That spaminator program sounds just silly and broken now.-
-And the last one? The last one pretended to be from the nice lady from Jacksonville who helped me on the phone, and talked about how nice it was to talk to me--but it was really AOL SPAM--the fitting end to a spam story.

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