In a world where we have infinite possible outputs for our content, it’s time to move beyond tools that rely on visual styling to convey semantic meaning. If we want true separation of content from form, it has to start in the CMS.
Publishing
Topics:
Building Medium
The making of Medium.com is a truly great insight into how a team of paid designers and developers lead by one vision and visionary try to build a modern day publishing platform.
While the idea behind Medium might be good, I think that at the current iteration the interface for consuming the content is really terrible and confusing. All posts are grouped into “collections” (which are just glorified categories) and they are almost impossible to navigate. It doesn’t provide any sense of the amount of collections there is or a way to see most popular / populated collections.
Update: It looks like they have recently added a dedicated page for all collections which makes it a lot easier to navigate and explore.
Brian Shih on Google Reader
Reader has been fighting for approval/survival at Google since long before I was a PM for the product. I’m pretty sure Reader was threatened with de-staffing at least three times before it actually happened.
Death of CMS for Personal Publishing
Content management systems are content management systems — tools that provide both the user interface and workflow for how we create, edit and publish online. In the past year or so I feel that personal (!) publishing is moving away from the all-encompassing systems and replacing them with individual utilities for each step of the workflow that are tied together in a way that provides leaner and faster publishing.
Dropbox with its extensive API and tools built on top of it has been a key utility (and service) in shifting our understanding of hassle free “cloud” storage that can be used for everything from sharing photos and documents to hosting a personal website. With tools such as pancake.io and calepin.co publishing a blog means nothing more than having a set of text documents (probably Markdown formatted) in a Dropbox folder that is accesible seamlessly from any device. To me Dropbox feels more like a well made file synchronisation client (like rsync) than a hosted service.
The increasing popularity of static site generators for creating personal websites and blogs has demonstrated that people don’t want to put more effort into publishing online than it is to create a new file on a computer or push a file to a Git repository. While Dropbox, Git and static site generators will appeal mostly to the hacker and developer community, it is clear that the rest of us feel like Facebook and Twitter is our modern day blog and online presence.
There is a lot of appeal for the social aspect of having a Tumblr blog, WordPress.com blog or a Facebook page with a community around it and ways to discover new content and people through a centralised dashboard. This has always been a key feature of a hosted platform where users can share a common tool and experience.
But personal publishing is so much more than posting a few sentences and photos in a walled garden owned by one company. It is about having your ideas written down in a format that is universally accesible and available on any platform and device. There is nothing more accesible than a semantic text document with a set of related images and files that are made available on the web via standardised methods and protocols.
This is why I created Orbiter.
Chrome OS vs Android for Tablets
Android’s strength is cellular voice and data transfer and its low power consumption while Chrome OS has better support for various hardware architectures, and they are both based on the Linux kernel.
If you were to build a tablet that has a touch screen not bigger than 9 inches and a modern browser as its only application, GSM + data connection, instant startup and a batter life of 12 hours, which OS would you choose?
I can’t understand why Google needs Chrome OS. Is it only for devices that don’t have touchscreens?
Digital Britain and USB Flash Drives
Digital Britain logo
While the ideas behind the Digital Britain initiative are really great and noble, its logo is quite the opposite — what is the connection between a flash drive and an open access to information and its distribution networks?
Every letter in the logo is supposed to symbolize a node attached to Britain’s information network, which sounds like a good explanation until you put it on a USB thumb drive.
Update: maybe it is meant to be a wireless modem?
p.s. Links on Britain’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport website are set in dark purple and are not underlined, which makes it hard even for me to distinguish them from normal text.
The Future of Media is Linux
All e-book readers to be released in 2009 will have Linux as their operating system. Can it really be that Microsoft and Apple have already missed it? Could they have not realized that all traditional media as we know it today will be on these devices in just a few years time? Is Linux really becoming the industry standard? Read more »
Rights to Read a Book Out Loud
“They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.” — New Kindle Audio Feature Causes a Stir
Yeah. It’s like saying “You can’t sing that Beatles song”.
We don’t pay for the individual letters or words in the book, but rather for the whole content, the idea and the story. Words spoken out loud are not derivate work of the same words in writing.
What Makes a Great Journalist
[P]art of what makes a great journalist is having a good BS detector.
From a comment by John on “It’s worth fighting for”.
Time Magazine’s Blind Love for Apple
What do you think is the Invention Of the Year according to the Time Magazine and it’s Best inventions team that has been arguing about the nominees and speaking to the actual inventors since the early September?
It is a mobile phone with which you can make calls, write messages, add phone numbers in a contacts list, listen to music and watch videos, access the web and view the street maps. I am not kidding.
The list was chosen by a team of experts lead by Lev Grossman. In this video he explains the process of choosing The Best Inventions Of the Year. Just a note: at the very beginning you can clearly see how the Macintosh computer and the iPhone has made his work much more organized. I kid, I kid. Read more »
Page 1 of 2