Archive for the “media” Category

A rainy day near Haymarket…

Looks like it might spin.  Maybe the sign will help.

Maybe not.

PS It didn’t spin.

Nobody likes spam, but when it suddenly comes from a business that you like(d), it feels like a personal betrayal.  Check out this steaming pile of comment spam by Green’s Bakery, maker of my most favorite chocolate babka.

I don’t know what’s the worst part of this.  Is the the invasive nature of comment spam?  Is it the irritation that I have already blogged positively about this product and now get subjected to this?  Is it the dreadfully amateurish quality of the spamming?

Shame on you Green’s and your obnoxious, ignorant and ineffective attempt at social media marketing.  I hope your Hungarian grandmother haunts your operation.

I watched with interest as Barnes & Noble released the Nook, an electronic book reading thing that’s pretty similar to Amazon’s Kindle.  I immediately thought of Microsoft’s Zune music player, released well after Apple’s iPod had pretty much conquered the world.  There are some interesting similarities and also some differences.

Dominant Design

There are several models of iPod, ranging from the no-screen Shuffle to the all-screen Touch.  As with mobile phones, each of these styles is pretty well-established and I think it’s safe to say that the last time either category got real innovation was when Apple delivered the iPhone and then the iPod Touch.

The dominant design of an ebook reader seems to have crystalized with the Kindle and to a lesser extent, Sony’s reader products.  Black and white e-ink screen, super-long battery life, small or absent keyboard, book-like leather covers optional, and so forth.  In this respect, the Nook, like the Zune, adds maybe some incremental improvement, but little of substance or lasting advantage.

Complementary Assets

Most people agree that the first iPods were not that great as devices, but that it was the iTunes store and the integration of the two that won the day for Apple.  This comparison is more interesting for the book readers.  By the time Microsoft released the Zune, the iTunes store was huge and dominant, and Apple computers were gaining share against Windows boxes on the back of iPod and iPhone sales.

In the book world, Amazon and Barnes and Noble have pretty much the same assets.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a new book exclusive to either store, at least not with paper books.  Ebooks might turn out different, but at least for starters, it seems the two companies have the opportunity to offer the same media selection to their ebook reader customers.  Amazon’s store carries far more than books and music, and that might turn out to be important as they put more Amazon-dedication shopping machines into consumers’ hands.

Network Effect

If you can build a network effect into a product, you have a good chance at getting your users to do some serious marketing for you.  Social networks thrive on invitations, and they’re more useful as more of your friends join them.  Reading and listening to music are somewhat solitary pursuits (I would argue that the iPod and before that the walkman made music solitary when it had been quite social and that greedy music execs have prevented any device I know of having a second headphone jack) so it’s an interesting question how or if ebook readers can go viral.

Both Microsoft and Barnes and Noble tried making their challenger devices more social.  Microsoft’s “squirting” allowed you to send songs via wifi from your Zune to a friend’s Zune for three plays.  The songs you squirt are still available to you to listen to while they’re squirted and it seems you can squirt as many songs to as many friends as you like.  That seemed to have been too little too late.  Apple was allowing DRM-free downloads of some music, and three plays (with a three day time limit) seemed stingy.  Plus, with the wifi sending method (as cool as that might be) you have to be physically near your friend to squirt. And let’s not get into the wisdom of calling this “squirting.”

I speculate that Barnes and Noble did some focus research on heavy readers (like book clubbers, for example) and came up with a sharing feature that’s more like what we do with paper books.  As I’ve blogged before, I think lending and sharing paper books is a viral part of both reading and friendship.  With a Nook, you (the Nooker?) can loan an ebook to a fellow Nook owner (The Nookee?) for two weeks, during which time it is unavailable to you to read.  Seems pretty fair and similar to the reality of paper.  But then I read that Nook loans can be disabled on a book-by-book basis by the publisher, and even when enabled, allow only one loan of a given title – ever.  Not only does that fail to take full advantage of the capability of digital books, it adds a restriction that doesn’t even exist in the paper world.  Disappointing First Sale Doctrine Fail.

It seems unlikely that the Nook could win the day on the basis of the sharing feature, even if it did everything I want it to, but the hobbling of that feature looks like just another indicator that the Nook will go the way of the Zune – not gone, but forgotten.

As you may have noticed, October was a pretty poor month posting-wise here at limeduck world headquarters.  I was therefore quite excited to see a new inbound link in my dashboard.  I followed it and found another example of an all-too-common blogging phenomenon: grabbing peoples’ photos to illustrate your posts without permission or attribution.

Since the post was about being laid off from working at a bakery (and as of this writing, the author is still unemployed), I felt sort of bad dropping a stink bomb in the comments. I can’t stay mad at the unemployed knitting blogger, but I can complain that this practice is widespread in personal and even corporate blogs, and it really must stop.  I often cite Fair Use, but this is not it.  Fair Use is, among other things, publishing a portion of  a copyrighted work to illuminate a discussion or review of that work.  The attribution is clear because you’re discussing that work.

Blogging about how frustrated you are by  your cell phone carrier (a common enough blog topic) does not mean you can just search the net for “frustration” or “cell phone plan” and clip one of the image results for your post.  You’ve got to make an attempt to find out the copyright status of the image and do the right thing.

I’m sure you can find times when I’ve done it wrong (do let me know, I’d like to fix them), but here’s what I try to do these days:

• Try to use my own work as much as possible
• Sample others’ works when discussing them, but keep it clear what’s quoted and keep images and media small/short or embedded
• Use product images when discussing those products
• Always link the image to the source (source web page, not source image) and attribute with at least <alt> text, preferably caption or nearby copy

Copyright and Fair Use are not quite fully adapted to the internets yet, but I’m trying to hold up my end.  I hope other bloggers will think a little more about their image-acquisition habits.

There hasn’t been a halloween themed post proper on the ‘duck yet, but a series of random events (and the annual invite to GP’s house o’ horrors) have conspired to make it so.    I was up at Tufts for a panel discussion called Framed: Contemporary Art and the Museum last week and picked up a card that reminded me of a great show on view in the University Art Gallery, Sacred Monsters: Everyday Animism in Contemporary Japanese Art and Anime, which is on view through November 22.  You should go.  It’s spooky and entertaining.

The show includes work by eight artists – Chiho Aoshima, Nobuhiro Ishihara, Kenjiro Kitade, Mahomi Kunikata, Tomokazu Matsuyama, Mr., Oscar Oiwa and TOKYO KAMEN - and screenings of eight films, both animated and live action: Akira, Beautiful Dreamer, Ghost in the Shell II: Innocence, My Neighbor Totoro, Paprika, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and The Grudge.  As the catalog says:

This exhibition examines representations of mythical spirits, gods, monsters, and other mutant, sentient beings in contemporary Japanese art and film as expressions of animist belief through the work of eight emerging and mid-career artists. The theme is also explored through a complementary program of continuous anime screenings presented in the Gallery.

Many contemporary Japanese visual artists and animators incorporate animist beliefs in their work as cultural rather than religious expression. A shared iconography connects the artists and anime included in this exhibition, ranging from kami (gods) to yokai (monsters), sentient and non-sentient beings with supernatural powers, and hybrid mythical creatures. These traditionally Japanese representations – visible, tangible, and ubiquitous – actively dissolve boundaries between the living and the dead, the human and non-human realms.

Interestingly, especially in light of the Framed discussion, there is an additional exhibit, in a separate but attached gallery, called Ghost Stories, featuring scary woodblock prints by Yoshitoshi and other ukiyo-e masters of the 19th Century.  With titles such as Omori Notices a Demon, Yoshihara’s Ghost Attacks, Oiwa and the Sash Serpent, and Greedy Old Woman Chooses the Heavy Box, this work is clearly ancestral or inspirational to many of the nearby Sacred Monsters.  When you’re recovered from Halloween and need a fresh scare, see both shows.