Bricks vs. Clicks

Apropos of nothing in particular, a curious juxtaposition:

On the one hand, as part of the remodel and expansion of Morris Library, university officials open a time capsule originally placed in 1955 and find, among other things, three issues of Time magazine.

On the other hand, not long ago Time magazine put all of its back issues online in a searchable index available free to subscribers.



On the one hand, $41 million is the projected cost of the renovation that led to the discovery of three old issues of Time magazine

On the other hand, $15.12 is the cost of a six-month individual subscription to Time magazine, giving you unlimited access to their archives during that time.



On the one hand, you can now see the actual magazines retrieved from the capsule resting securely behind the glass of a display case in the library.

On the other hand, you can go online and read every article from those issues, as well as every other article from every other issue, at Time.com.





By the way, if you want to see an interesting example of an online time capsule, go to the Business Plan Archive and read all those overly ambitious business plans from the early dot com era, a time when nerd was undisputed king.

Fast, Cheap and Under Your Control

MIT's media lab released photos of its proposed $100 laptop computer, which is designed for flexible use and durability and aimed at widespread distribution in developing nations and educational environments.

By the way, the computer will have a hand crank for emergency use in environments without electrical access. What's not cool about that?

Zone of Recrimination

I wish I could regularly attend the Carbondale to Cyberdale meetings, if only to help justify the name of this blog. In particular, I would have benefited from yesterday's discussion. (In the absence of any published proceedings, I am just assuming that it wasn't postponed or cancelled and that the topic remaind VoIP [Voice over Internet Protocol].) VoIP, in spite of some continued concerns, has been revolutionizing the telcom industry. The most notable of these concerns has been access for VoIP customers to adequate 911 service. Providers are evidently working quickly to resolve this issue because new FCC regulations have essentially forced them to do so. Point is, VoIP may not be fully a replacement for traditional phone service yet, but it may be very soon (but only for those lucky enough to have [both geographic and budgetary] access to a high speed internet connection).

Perhaps meeting participants also discussed the recent purchase by Ebay of Skype, which the Washington Post calls in a recent article, "the world leader in telephony on the Internet". I mentioned having tried skype in a comment to Dave's post about the meeting ( and no, grammar nerds, I wasn't literally trying out skype in the comment itself. However, if this aside is confusing to you, consider yourself lucky: you are most likely NOT a grammar nerd; your life is likely a full and rewarding one; and I must therefore apologize for this needless aside.), so I can acknowledge that the software at least works. In addition, because it wasn't a U.S. company, the FCC's new rules don't apply. Does it make a difference in terms of those rules that skype is now owned by Ebay? I have no idea, but would be curious to find out. Bottom line is, an essentially free product like Skype undermines the business models of the VoIP companies that were in turn undermining the business models of the traditional telcoms. (Crazy, isn't it?) Heck, you can now even make free skype calls from your cell phone (allegedly).

The larger point about VoIP and about Ebay's purchase of Skype seems to be that here is the bleeding edge of the current trend towards the flattening of the business world because it is getting cheaper and cheaper to connect even geographically far-flung workers. This means an exponential increase in global competition for even the most highly technical and creativity-intensive types of work.

And the iterations are almost infinite. You've already outsourced your business to an Indian tech company? Well, why not outsource your life? That's the service being offered by YourManInIndia. It's called GetFriday, and it allows you to have someone else handle those pesky "non-essential time-consuming tasks" that clutter up your mundane existence. For a recent article in Esquire Magazine, writer A.J. Jacobs did precisely that and seems to have started a trend.

But what if I outsourced my life and discovered that those non-essential time-consuming tasks were the only thing holding my fragile self together? What if I discover once I remove the quotidian that all I have left is something that even Nietzsche's abyss can't look at for very long without become depressed, if I discover that - in terms of me - there's never been a there there? What if I finally got a lever that was long enough and found a place to stand, but didn't have anything that needed moving?

Perhaps there really are some problems that still can't be solved with technology. Therapy, maybe, but not technology.

The New Book

It looks like the new TK3 is still about a year away from its release, if a November 2004 article by Bob Stein, the mastermind behind the revolutionary e-book authoring environment, is to be believed. Stein writes:

Recently, the Mellon Foundation made a $1.4 million grant to the Institute for the Future of the Book, co-located at the University of Southern California and Columbia University, to develop a completely new version of the TK3 software. TK4 is planned for release in the fall of 2006. It will be completely open source and free to educational institutions, so users can extend the features of TK4 as needed.

If I were an educational institution, and you know that I am, I would be lining up now to get in on the testing phase of this software. Here we have a potential revolution that is about empowering students, not simply upsetting the status quo. Its about learning as creating as collaborating as film as text as audio as integrating knowledge.

If its true that the future of our personal tech devices will be about combining all of the functions we want into one device with a single, simple interface, why can't we imagine that educational media will undergo a similar consolidation?

If tk4 proves to be as useful as it promises, there is no reason why we can't.

Bloogle

Google Lets Surfers Sift Through Blogs

Voices from the Commons

For anyone interested in creating, remixing or just plain consuming media from the web, this goofy-but-great cartoon explains the basics of the creative commons license.

Budding local podcasters looking for music to include in their programs can go to Magnatune, a record company for the digital age (motto: "We are not evil"). They specifically allow much of their artists' music to be used free in podcasts (with some attribution, of course).

If you are using Windows 2000/XP, you can also attend the Pawtucket Film Festival's filmcast. They are releasing some of the festival's films online for free viewing one film at a time throughout the festival. I'm using Windows ME so can not download Quicktime 7 and cannot watch the films (or I'm simply too lazy to look for another way to watch them). Of course, being that it is a filmcast (and not simply streaming or downloadable-files-on-a-server), you can subscribe to a feed which will bring the films to your computer as they are released. Just another new wrinkle for our local artists, filmmakers and festival producers to consider. I wonder if the Big Muddy knows about this?

This is the Way a Blog Ends

...and so Jim Syler's experiment in first person narration of a country's response to disaster ends with a whimper (but with pictures!).

Slipping through our Grasp

Dave says it's all coming together. But is that a good thing? Not necessarily, argues writer Michael Joyce. Academic Commons prints the text of a talk Joyce gave at U of Wash in which he argues that our lives are actually lived in the spaces between things. (If you want to listen to a stream of the talk, go here.) You thought you were wasting your time driving to attend the city council meetings in person? Nope. You were just exercising your consciousness in the interspace. Turns out, the instant-on, google-powered internet - for all its apparent utility - may actually be a form of false consciousness perpetuated by the international corporations who would like us to imagine ourselves existing in a space minus distance, where everything we want (to buy) is no farther from us than the ends of our fingers. By the way, what's a false consciousness? I don't know. I was hoping you would. Or at least that you wouldn't ask about it. Give me some interspace, please.

And this relates locally because...

It relates locally because I've been trumpeting the benefits of bringing the community together online as a way of breaking down barriers, increasing knowledge and understanding, of forging those mysterious habits of the heart that make us so dependent upon each other. And soon peace and love reigned throughout the land.

I guess I feel that online apps and tools that make us feel less alone in our offline space -- and educate us about the outlines of the larger space we all share -- are good (for lack of a better word). The part of the nets that encourages us to forget about our realspace or encourages us to be alone, but with our consumer toys is - at best - a mixed blessing.

So Carbondale's streaming of council meetings is a net good (and is part of the good net), while Walmart.com's fun and easy-to-use tool for uploading your photos for having them printed cheaply at their stores is a wash, netishly speaking. And anyway, where at Walmart.com will you learn that Mayor Cole needs a new credenza or that Counselwoman (Counselperson?) Simon likes to buy her furniture at flea markets and yard sales? Seriously, you cannot buy that kind of local insight.

haven't you heard . . . the City Council meeting?

Have you seen the list of public meetings now available on the City of Carbondale web site? The mayor recently issued a press release announcing it. In small part, this is due to prompting by the authors of this blog, but mostly through the efforts of Mark Jones, the city's technical guy, who's been capturing the audio portion of video recordings of meetings and transferring them to digital format -- either .mp3 or .wma. (As I type these words, my old computer is downloading the .mp3 version on a high speed connection. Estimated 11 minutes. Dialup would be much longer -- probably too long?)

While waiting, I've been following Rob's suggestion (below), reading how "TK3 Author" and "TK3 Reader" can be used to write interactive e-documents, such as the "blook" (blog-based book) I'm writing about Carbondale. The program also requires buying and learning QuickTime Pro. It looks promising. The next step might be to interview prominent persons in the community . . . on the record about local matters. "Podcast" files that can be included in the blook with the help of TK3.

Haven't you heard? It's all coming together.

The Postmodern Book

I've been playing around with tk3, which is authoring software that allows you to create - with very little fuss -- functionally deep and content-rich e-books. I myself used the tk3 software to create an e-book of the first year of my daughter's life. It was a simple, little book that included photos, text, a few annotations, a couple of links and some short videos shot with a digital camera. However, the potential for this software is much greater than that.

In fact, for me its greatest potential is in education. Even teachers with limited computer experience can use it to make "personalized" textbooks for their classes, textbooks that can include audio, video, photos, weblinks and text in a single, simple interface. Students can use tk3 to create media-rich, interactive projects on topics that range from the personal to the political and beyond. For the reader, Tk3 has a powerful set of built in functions that allow you to highlight, annotate, bookmark and otherwise deface your book as you see fit and as fits your particular learning style.

But even more exciting is that a group at USC is creating an open-source sequel to tk3, a sequel they call Sophie. I've been having some trouble finding out exactly when Sophie will be made available (The original, proposed timeline suggested the first version would be out this August). As an open-source sequel, I assume it will be available free for download, ala Firefox (although "open-source" and "free" are not necessarily synonyms).

In any case, I will be tracking the development of Sophie very carefully. But in the meantime, I recommend that educators, artists and writers with a high-speed connection (and all the people looking for a way to create a different kind of family album) go to the Night Kitchen's website and download the trial version of tk3. You can also download the tk3 reader for free and download sample books (click on the "education" section at www.futureofthebook.org) created using the tk3 authoring software.

Perhaps Dave can create an e-book version of his new book?