Published on Monday, May 11 2009
Last week, a number of articles appeared with additional entries in the search for new media business models for existing, old media companies.
Hope. Which Way? (Photo by bixentro, cc-by license, click through for details)
Mass High Tech, which I still read in print, featured on its front page Richard Anderson from Village Soup and Alan Baker of the Ellsworth American. (The article is online here: Two Maine newspapers test the future of newspapers’ plans). Additionally, there were a number of articles about Amazon’s new Kindle, and how e-Readers in general might represent new hope for publishers.
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Published on Saturday, May 9 2009
I’ve often thought that if I hadn’t left academia to work in web development and consulting, I’d have become a professional analyst of Internet memes. Instead, I get to just be a fan.
A few videos to spark (or reinforce) your interest. First, (via Biella) a two-part series from an event by the Meme Factory, from March 24th of this year, in which they give a ~45 minute overview of internet memes. (Warning: much of the content may be NSFW – remember the Internet is Serious Business).
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Published on Thursday, May 7 2009
The spring of 2009 has been a difficult one for publishers – newspapers especially – in the U.S., with many sizable metropolitan papers moving to online only, closing, or facing the possibility of closing. It’s lead many to wonder (again) what the future holds for publishers – whose value has arguably been derived from information scarcity – in the age of information ubiquity.
What should newspaper publishers, and other content-centered businesses, do? How should publishing evolve to accommodate the tremendous shift in publishing power represented by the fact that every internet user has a technical capability to create and distribute content never before seen? How should they adapt to the assembled web, in which users expect to interact with content in contexts they choose, rather than in contexts publishers control?
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Published on Tuesday, May 5 2009
Making Ice Cream
(Photo by Rachel J)
This weekend, freshly jet-lagged by back-to-back trips to the UK and Switzerland, with a brief stop in between for BarCampBoston 4, I attended the Northeast User Group Leader Summit, sponsored (thanks!) by O’Reilly Media and Microsoft. (Although I don’t technically lead a user group, I play host to BostonPHP at Optaros, volunteer for BarCampBoston, and participate in Boston’s Drupal and WordPress groups, as well as North Shore Web Geeks up in Newburyport.
The event, hosted in the new Microsoft NERD facility, brought together user group leaders from across the technology spectrum, and from New York to Maine. (See a shortlist of user groups represented in the wiki).
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