Interactive Publishing

Twitter

2008-09-29T04:44:00.004-04:00

I admit it. I have jumped onto Twitter. At first I was skeptical. I mean telling the world what I think on an up-to-the minute frequency. Then I was playing with it by jotting down some thoughts about things. Searched for some people I knew and was impressed by the number of other twitterers. When I look at my iPhone, I now check Twitter for the latest stuff. Amazingly, I often learn the breaking news faster this way than browsing one of my bookmarked online newspapers. Spooky. For now I am hooked. I know I won't be twittering all of the time and who knows how long I will keep with this, but hey you won't know unless you are looking.

If you are interested in following my musings, feel free to follow me there (as well as here) via my Twitter ID @hratner.

Great comment on the possible fate of all social networkers

2008-09-29T04:20:00.002-04:00

Nature.com Takes Home a Webby

2008-06-11T14:13:00.006-04:00

Whew! Quite the evening at the 12th Annual Webby Awards. Over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the Big Apple and everyone in their finest attire. NPG staff mingled with well over 1,000 attendees at this gala event at the famous Cipriani Wall Street.

The awards event was kicked off by David-Michel Davies, Executive Director for The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. The MC for the event was none other than the incredibly funny Seth Myers - head writer of SNL and co-anchor of Weekend Update. Great material with impeccable delivery. "If you don't know me, that's because I work on something you might not know: television." "We are here tonight to honor the 2% of the Internet that is not dedicated to pornography." He likened his current success on TV to the equivalent of being a dinosaur groomer. "Thanks a lot Internet."

Over 200 webby awards were handed out. Each recipient only saying five words max as their acceptance speech. Lots of Obama references, quite a number of Slinky jokes (after all the Webby is a dressed-up Slinky), and lots of acceptance speeches by TED and NY Times. The NYT won eight awards including best online newspaper.

Yours truly went up to accept the award for Nature.com. We won for Best in Science in the Society cluster. Sites that empower and educate people, facilitate civic participation and enable learned pursuits. Our ditty "Nature - the natural selection" was met with polite applause for cleverness. OK, it was not the best one of the night but my President Obama lines were all pretty well taken by previous winners (see Arianna Huffington below) but it was more thoughtful than many such as "Thank you very much, really" and "This thing smells like butt."

Highlights of the evening were:

* Onion on World of World of Warcraft
* Arianna Huffington's "President Obama. Sounds good, right?"
* NY Times': "Elliot Spitzer. We thank you."
* Flock announced: "No sh**, we beat Facebook?!"
* Lou Reed spotting
* Political Satirist Stephen Colbert's "Me, me, me, me, me" acceptance speech for Webby Award's Person of the Year
* Ludacris introducing Will.i.am (top producer and founder of The Black Eyed Peas) for his work on the "Yes we can" music video of Obama.
* Laurie Anderson (experimental performance artist and musician) introduced the legendary David Byrne for his lifetime achievement award
* David Byrne "DJ, Can't you play another tune?" (He was extremely gracious with autographs and photos)

It was a surreal yet exhilirating experience enjoyed by Jamie Sampson, Elliott Herman, Adam Horwitz, Scott McCool, Juan-Carlos Sobrino, Jessica Rainey, Hillary Spencer, Jude Robinson, and of course Glennis McGregor along with me. Quite a number of other winners gave us props about the coolness of design and our breadth of top-notch content.

Thank you to all of you who have made Nature.com a success! You all know the special contributions you have made. A special commendation to Glennis. Not only has she been our online design force, she also had the forethought to enter us into the contest. Now onto preparation to win again next year!

See more photos from the gala.

See www.webbyawards.com for even more!

Web 2.0 Expo comes to the Big Apple

2008-06-09T16:40:00.001-04:00

Web 2.0 Expo often brings along some mind blowing thinkers and cool new software and services. I went to this event on the West Coast in '07 and it was well worth the trip. Now that it's a local event for many publishers, how can you pass it up. Sign up here early.

The Future of Journalism!

2008-06-06T19:06:00.002-04:00

What will journalism look like in 2018? Our answer, albeit with a twinkle in the eye, is this film: Keep the Faith. Produced at Axel Springer, Europes largest newspaper publishing house. Happy to hear your thoughts. Howard - maybe this is far too Web 2.0 for you? :-) What is a realistic perspective on changes in the media in the coming ten years?

False Alarm

2008-04-21T19:20:00.002-04:00

Unfortunately, the scheduled Thursday nights in June and July conflicted with a lot of my business travel so I had to back out. I have given NYU some great leads on my replacement. The class is sure to be great even without yours truly.

I'm Teaching Again!

2008-03-21T21:41:00.003-04:00

Yes, its true. I am lined up to teach again this summer - June through July. The class is called
Crossing the Digital Divide What Print Professionals Need to Know. I am still trying to decide whether to host it at my place or at a NYU computer lab on 42nd Street. Any thoughts on this would be most appreciated. Have a look at the class description and let me know if you have any questions.

SeaDragon Rocks the Hard Rock

2008-03-17T22:27:00.001-04:00

Last year Microsoft demonstrated their SeaDragon software that easily allowed users to zoom in dynamically on images. This tech is now part of Silverlight 2 and referred to as Deep Zoom.

A great example can be found at the
Hard Rock Memorabilia site

John Udell also commented on this tech here going into some depth about the facility for making persistent links to parts of the images.

Definitely worth a look!

Ask.com Leaves General Search Market

2008-03-09T14:41:00.003-04:00

I was blown away to learn that just this week that Ask.com announced that it would be narrowing its search engine to focus on topics for women in their late 30s and older, who already make up a disproportionate amount of Ask’s users. According to newly appointed CEO Jim Safka. (Summary at TechCrunch) Ask will lay off about 40 employees, or 8 percent of its work force.
With Yahoo and Microsoft continuing to duke it out over a potential takeover, it certainly seems like Google has even more room now to continue to balloon further into the unstoppable monster that it has become.

A Unit of Knowledge

2008-03-05T13:44:00.004-05:00

KnolStuff.com is a new social networking community for Google's Open Encyclopedia.

From the site: The days of our beloved, AD-FREE, one-spot knowledge source for all our questions, Wikipedia, might be numbered. Google, the giant search and advertising company, has announced Knol ("which stands for a unit of knowledge") as an alternative to Wikipedia.

Netscape gone!?! The end of an era.

2008-03-02T22:42:00.002-05:00

While this probably comes as no surprise to anyone. "Netscape Navigator, now owned by AOL, will no longer be supported after 1 March 2008, the company has said." See article by BBC here. For those of us old timers it is a sad day. Mozilla/Netscape helped get many of us started. I remember eagerly awaiting the new release of Netscape to see what cool new HTML thing I could code. It was also fun riding the rapids between the HTML "standards" of IE and Netscape.

Well its legacy is not dead. It lives on in the Mozilla open source community. If you haven't already given Firefox and Flock a try. You may never go back to IE.

The lights may be out Netscape, but you will never be forgotten.

The Global Mashup, I mean Encyclopedia, of Life

2008-02-26T09:46:00.001-05:00

Amazing project spearheaded by E.O. Wilson; described in the NY Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/science/26ency.html

NYU SCPS Center New Course Catalog

2008-02-20T12:32:00.004-05:00

NYU has updated their course catalog.

Have a look at their new and improved site.

Enjoy.

5 Minute Videos

2008-02-14T16:45:00.002-05:00

5min.com is comprised of video shorts on all matter of practical topics. According to the site "5min is a place to find short video solutions for every practical question and is also a place for people who want to share their knowledge. 5min's vision is simple: any solution can be visually explained in 5 minutes. Show us your skills! Join 5min and spread your knowledge!"

Go check it out. It's fun and very interactive.

Knowledgebase on Common Models/Standards for Hosting Raw Data and Grey Literature

2008-02-14T16:41:00.003-05:00

The Future Lab Committee of the STM trade organization (of which I am part of) will likely be creating a knowledge base/wiki on the common models/standards that people are using for hosting raw research data and grey literature. This effort is not meant to create a central repository for this type of content but rather an information space for publishers and others to learn about efforts that are already underway. The intention is to categorize these initiatives but subject area.

If you know about any of the efforts around standardizing raw research data and grey literature, I would be happy to post any information you send me to the knowledge base. Additionally, the wiki will be open to the world for reading but invite only for contributing. So if you wish to be a contributor just let me know and I'll get you in.

MobileOK checker

2007-12-21T14:27:00.000-05:00

Tim Berner’s Lee recently announced that the mobileOK checker is available as a beta from the W3C at:

validator.w3.org/mobile

I tested this blog on it and got back:

The following failures are fatal and prevent the checker from doing any further test on that page:

This page failed on 1 tests

The page is not XML well-formed. This test is related to the following Best Practices: VALID_MARKUP (techniques)

Interesting. So is Blogger not compliant at all?

Enjoy!

Agile Publishing Presentation

2007-12-20T13:37:00.000-05:00

Back in November, I gave a talk at a Mark Logic sponsored event about Agile Publishing. I thought it would be great to share the presentation given there. Later on I plan to index all of my presentations around the net.

The Agile Publishing Imperative: Accelerate the Creation of Information Products

Enjoy.

Google Develops Wikipedia Rival

2007-12-14T14:23:00.000-05:00

Interesting. Googlie is challenging the annonymous/collective author principle of Wikipedia by developing a similar product with authored articles.

Belated Congrats

2007-12-08T20:42:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to all of my students from NYU's Introduction to Interactive Publishing.

You were a terrific group to teach. Each of you made a real effort to participate each week in class and also on the class blog. Your final projects -- individual blogs -- were a real treat. I was very impressed with the progress made by each of you. I hope that you all keep your blogs alive. I will be looking!

I encourage you to keep posting to this blog too. You are what it made it special to begin with.

Stay in touch.

eBooks: Good for Publishing?

2007-12-07T16:34:00.000-05:00

Tim O'Reilly on Amazon's Kindle: "My advice to publishers and authors is this: figure out what it costs to produce what you sell, estimate what kind of volume you'll be able to achieve using the best available data, and then set your prices at a level that will deliver a reasonable profit from your efforts. Sound familiar?"

Music blog aggregator

2007-11-29T02:34:00.000-05:00

I surf through a lot of music blogs in my spare time, so I decided to try and compile what each of them are covering at AggRockBlog. The site focuses on NYC rock music. It's a little busy, but I wanted to get all of my favorite sites on there.

-B.Miller

Bayern Blog

2007-11-28T14:45:00.000-05:00

This somehow became more of a homepage than a blog. I'd been wanting to make a site to put up a list of my husbands publications, and I thought I'd combine it with the class project. Let me just say in my defense that I am not one of those people who goes nuts and sends pics of their kids all over the place. BUT I find that people seem to think they have to ask me to send pics of my son, and then I have to bother sending them, and then they feel obliged to say something nice about how he looks. And worse: my mother-in-law has threatened to come and visit more often because she wants to see how her grandson develops. So I decided to make a blog where the family abroad can follow him along in his development. Since I just got a Mac I used the iWeb program, which turns out to be very Web 1.0 - it wouldn't really allow me to do anything fancy like cool widgets, voting, etc. But I did include a Google Ad to see if that would make me easier to google...

My Blog

2007-11-28T09:00:00.001-05:00

My blog is Green Yard Escape and it's inspired by my efforts to make my suburban yard more "green." Let me know what you think.

NYU 2008 Continuing Education and Certificate Program

2007-11-27T16:37:00.000-05:00

NYU’s Continuing Education and Certificate Program:
Highlights of the 2007-2008 Academic Year

This spring, the Continuing Education and Certificate program at NYU’s Center for Publishing is offering leading-edge courses designed to prepare you for a fast-paced industry in which traditional and digital media are rapidly converging. In addition to integrating digital publishing into our curriculum, we have created many "how to, hands-on" courses that will give you the practical knowledge you need to further your professional development.

Explore Editing, Marketing and Branding
Publishing has never been so captivating—and so complicated—as editors take on expanded roles creating brand extensions for their core products. The following new courses will help you refine and expand not only your editing skills and mindset, but grasp the latest print and online marketing and promotional tips from the pros.

X59.9122 New! How to Be a Book Editor: An Inside Look at the Editorial Process
X59.9521 New! Magazine Editing Workshop
X59.9908 New! Promotional Writing That Works: How to Create Great Marketing Copy for Print and Online
X59.9551 New! Brand Development: Maximizing Your Magazine's Potential
X59.9580 New! Inside the Business of Magazines

Delve into Digital
Worried that you don’t have all those digital skills everyone says you need to succeed? There’s a whole new world of digital publishing and we invite you to explore it in these courses.

X59.9960 New! Blogging Your Way to Profitability
X59.9221 New! Everything You Need to Know about Digital Publishing in the Book Industry: An Introduction for the Non-Techie
X59.9966 New! Crossing the Digital Divide: What Print Professionals Need to Know

Find Your Way Freelancing

Writing is the cornerstone of publishing careers. Develop your skills and discover additional opportunities for your career in these exciting new courses.

X59.9192 New! Freelance Opportunities in Book Publishing
X59.9530 New! Freelance Opportunities in Magazine Publishing
X59.9141 New! How to Get Published: A Toolkit for Aspiring Authors

These new offerings are just a selection of our full roster of more than 40 courses. For a complete listing of our courses and to register, please visit the NYU website at http://scps.nyu.edu/publishing. If you have specific questions, please call 212-998-7171 or email pub.center@nyu.edu.

Build a Certificate
You can register for individual courses or start building a Certificate in Editing or Publishing. This valuable credential, recognized by the publishing industry, requires you to take at least five courses over a four-year period. Each of these new courses directly applies to the Editing and Publishing Certificate Programs.

Master of Science in Publishing
Interested in making an even stronger commitment to the publishing industry? If so, you may want to consider NYU’s M.S. in Publishing. This 42-credit graduate degree provides an extensive and in-depth look at all aspects of the industry, including editing, marketing and branding, finance, sales, advertising, law, management and new business development—as well as all the digital skills needed to succeed in this era of multi-platform publishing. All classes are in the evenings and are taught by major leaders in the industry. You can mold the program to your schedule and needs, taking from one to four courses a semester. This valuable degree, recognized by the industry, is designed to educate a new generation

Credit for Class

2007-11-27T16:33:00.000-05:00

Great News! I just received the following word from NYU:

At NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies, students in our non-degree program can register for individual courses or start building a Certificate in Editing or Publishing. This valuable credential, recognized by the publishing industry, requires you to take at least five courses over a four-year period. Introduction to Interactive Publishing (X59.9221) directly applies to the Publishing Certificate Program in either the book or magazine concentration.

For a complete listing of our courses and to register, please visit the NYU website at http://scps.nyu.edu/publishing. If you have specific questions, please call 212-998-7171 or email pub.center@nyu.edu.