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Does Apple Think Multitasking Is A Bug Not A Feature? And Other Questions....

2010-02-02T06:10:16-08:00

I wrote a little essay for Time.com on the iPad launch (and the reactions to it.) Here's the opening riff:

If you time-traveled back to 1995, and asked the leading futurists of that time where our machines were soon to take us, you might well have heard just as much rhapsodizing about document-centric interfaces as that about hypertext and the World Wide Web. The first generation of software interfaces forced the user to think too much about the tools, the story went, and too little about the task. If you wanted to write a memo, you had to think, "First I must launch Microsoft Word, my tool, and then create a new document." If you wanted to embed some piece of information that Microsoft Word wasn't optimized for, you had to launch another application, create and modify a new element there, and then move back to your original application environment, where you could deposit the alien data object. A number of proposed interfaces — most famously, Apple's failed OpenDoc initiative, shut down shortly after the company acquired NeXT — promised to reverse the priorities: our desktops would prioritize the tasks over the tools, the documents over the applications. The user wouldn't launch documents inside an application. They'd just create a document on its own, which would lie there like a surgical patient, and if you needed a specific tool — a little word-processing here, or some video-editing there — you just grabbed that tool and started working on the patient in front of you. In the application-centric model, you were constantly lugging organs into other operating rooms and then dragging them back.

The weird thing about the iPad is that it has landed us 180 degrees from where we thought we were heading. The iPad interface — like the iPhone's — tries to do everything in its power to do away with documents and files. There is no Finder or root-level file navigation. It's apps, apps, apps, as far as the eye can see. According to the demo last week, the main way to launch iWork documents is by an internal document-selection process after launch, where your files are presented to you in a gallery format.

I truly don't know how I feel about this. It might be genius. Maybe most users are more confused by Finders and File Explorers than I've realized. But I can't help thinking that if the iPad really wants to be a device that you might take on a business trip instead of the laptop, it's going to need a little more document-centrism. By a wide margin, the most disappointing element of the user interface, or UI, is the home screen, which is virtually unchanged from the original iPhone UI. (The iPad is far, far more than a blown-up iPod Touch, but you can't tell from the home screen.) Surely there's a better way to exploit multitouch and that extra screen real estate for navigating all the information that will be stored on these machines. I have no inside information on this, but given the inventiveness of the iWork user experience, I can't help thinking that an iPad-native home environment was a project that didn't make the ship dates, and that they slapped on the old iPhone screen for continuity at the last minute. But time will tell.

You can read the whole thing here.

CNN Invests in Outside.In

2009-12-08T06:45:08-08:00

I've been saying for a while now that for outside.in, 2009 has been the year of building platforms. We spent the first months of the year building out our Outside.in For Publishers platform, which is now used by more than a hundred news organizations around the country. This fall, we brought our core site over onto a new, lightning-fast architecture that enabled true geographic search. And now, this morning the Wall Street Journal is running the news that we've just closed a $7 million B round that gives us a financial platform for the next few years.

But the most exciting part of the announcement is the participation of CNN, who are both investing in the round and adopting the outside.in platform for their local coverage on CNN.com. Having such a respected news organization as a partner and investor is obviously a big deal for us. Specifically, it's a vote of confidence in the platform we've built at outside.in, but perhaps more important it's an endorsement of hyperlocal and the ecosystem model of news that many of us have been championing for years now. I've been hugely impressed with KC Estenson and the whole CNN.com team through this process; they really have a great gasp of what we're trying to do, and a wealth of experience that we have already begun to benefit from. I think it must be in their corporate DNA -- after all, they wrote the original book on entrepreneurial journalism and news aggregation thirty years ago.

Our CEO Mark Josephson and I have been working on this financing and partnership for five months now, so personally this morning is an exciting milestone for me. Having spent the year building a platform for the hyperlocal economy, I can't wait to see what gets built on top of that platform in 2010. If you'd like to help, we have a long list of open positions at outside.in that we are actively filling; the full list is here.

Brian Eno Renames My Book

2009-11-04T05:49:50-08:00

Two nights ago in London, Brian Eno and I did the second in what I hope will be a long series of public conversations at the wonderful ICA. It was a very special night, and I think everyone seemed to enjoy the discussion, which roamed from Joseph Priestley to the British art school scene of the late 1960s to Twitter and the iPhone application environment. I gather the ICA will upload a podcast of it shortly, and I'll link to that when they do.

But my favorite moment of the night came at the very beginning, when Brian announced that, after reading Invention of Air, he had sat down and tried to figure out what it would have been called, had it been released in Priestley's day, using the more elaborating titling conventions of the era. This is what he came up with:

Being a dissertation on the Life and Works of Dr Joseph Priestley of Leeds, including a Survey of his Experiments with Gasses; his Affiliations with the Revolutionary Forces in America; his Diverse Religious Heresies and subsequent Trials at the hands of the British; with digressions into the Formation of Coal, the History of Organic life on Earth; the effects of Energy Flows on Human Affairs; the Discovery of Ecology; all construed within a Novel Account of the Evolution of Human Knowledge.

I think that sounds just about right. When we go back for the next printing of the paperback, we'll have to make that change.

Searching The "Small Here"

2009-10-27T13:30:16-07:00

In his essay introducing The Long Now Foundation, Brian Eno tells the story of visiting a wealthy friend in her downtown loft, in an otherwise destitute Manhattan neighborhood circa 1978:

I just didn't understand. Why would anyone spend so much money building a place like that in a neighbourhood like this? Later I got into conversation with the hostess. "Do you like it here?" I asked. "It's the best place I've ever lived", she replied. "But I mean, you know, is it an interesting neighbourhood?" "Oh ? the neighbourhood? Well-- that's outside!" she laughed.
The incident stuck in my mind. How could you live so blind to your surroundings? How could you not think of "where I live" as including at least some of the space outside your four walls, some of the bits you couldn't lock up behind you? I felt this was something particular to New York: I called it "The Small Here". I realised that, like most Europeans, I was used to living in a bigger Here.

Part of Eno's point is that what we mean by "here" has a sliding scale to it. Sometimes "here" is the room you're sitting in; sometimes it's your block; sometimes it's your neighborhood; sometimes it's the Greater Metropolitan Area. We make those spatial adjustments all the time without thinking about it. When we're looking for a paperclip nearby, the "here" is even smaller than Eno's friend's; but when we're looking for a new apartment, the scope widens dramatically.

The trouble is that fluid sense of "here" hasn't entirely migrated online yet. Search doesn't yet reflect those shifting definitions of where we are, the true radius of our interest. Yes, you can search a map at Google or Bing or on your iPhone--along with a thousand other directory sites. But those results are almost exclusively made up of businesses: restaurants, dry cleaners, doctors. In fact, that kind of query is so dominant that it has become the standard definition of "local search." If you're doing local search, you're looking for a dentist or a car mechanic.

Ever since we launched the first public alpha of outside.in exactly three years ago, we've been animated by the idea that the quest for a good dry cleaner was going to be just one facet of local search. Our Radar feature, for instance, let you see all the news and blog posts and tweets within a thousand feet of any location in the U.S. But even Radar wasn't search proper, because you couldn't easily change the scale of the geographic query, and you couldn't restrict your search to a specific set of keywords.

For the past six months, our team has been working incredibly hard on an entirely new platform for outside.in, one that allows true geographic search at lightning speed. It went live on the site late last week. Now every page at outside.in contains two search fields: "what" and "where." This lets you do all kinds of queries that are impossible on other platforms that aren't natively aware of geography. You can do Radar-style queries: show me everything related to "crime" or "playgrounds" within one mile of my home address. You can search an entire neighborhood: "music" or "condos" in Adams Morgan, DC. You can search an entire city for the latest mass transit developments. Or if you're just looking for a nearby Italian restaurant, or a good pediatrician, you can do that as well.

You can see the dramatic difference this makes when you compare results for the same query at outside.in, Google, and Google News. Let's say you're looking for the latest news or conversation about real estate in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood. Type that query into outside.in, and this is what you see:

We've got more than 300 stories on this topic, with multiple stories from the past few days, many of which don't even mention the phrase "Back Bay." If it's a story about a building in Back Bay -- the Hancock Tower, for instance -- our system understands that the story belongs in the Back Bay neighborhood, even though the original text doesn't use the phrase.

Search Google with the same query and you get this:

The first six results might as well be ads: they're all just the home pages for real estate agents in the neighborhood. (Nothing wrong with that, of course: some people may indeed be looking for real estate agents.) Only the 7th result is an actual news story about Back Bay, which explicitly mentions the phrase "Back Bay" in the title. But of course, when you're searching geographically, you're not necessarily interested in the concept of Back Bay, you're interested in all the things contained by the region of Back Bay. Keyword-based indexing only gets you so far. You have to include geography in the index for the system to mirror the way we intuitively think about location. It's like asking your neighbor what the scoop is on local schools in Park Slope, and having him restrict his answer only to schools that include the word "Park" or "Slope" in their names.

You can see the limitations of non-geo search most clearly when you search Google News for the same query. You get more timely stories, of course, but more than half of them have nothing to do with Back Bay. The number one result happens to include the word "back" alongside the phrase "real estate."

Needless to say, if you're interested in an even smaller "here," and want to search for "crime" or "music" news around your exact home address, both Google and Google News just break down entirely. But thanks to our experience with Radar, we perform that kind of search as easily as we do any other geographic query.

Right now, outside.in geographic search is only available on our core site, but you should expect to see it rolled out soon out soon to the media partners and bloggers using our Outside.in For Publishers and Geo-Toolkit platforms. Yes, some markets have more data than others, and you'll find occasional errors in our geo-tagging -- and of course, for the time being we are U.S.-only. But this platform is going to incredibly fun to build on in the coming months and years. And, needless to say, all the advantages of true geographic search are going to be equally appealing to local advertisers, who have their own sliding definitions of what "here" means.

So whatever size your "here" happens to be, you can now search it at outside.in.

My fall speaking schedule

2009-09-18T06:54:26-07:00

Here's the lineup for this fall -- it's going to be a busy one! If you're in any of these locales, drop by and say hello...

September 21 Princeton, NJ
The Myth of the Echo Chamber: Politics in the Age of the Participatory Web
The Stafford Little Lecture at Princeton University.

September 24 Ottawa, Ontario
Keynote
National Cancer Leadership Forum

September 25 Saint Paul, MN
"The Ghost Map" Keynote
American Association for the History of Nursing Conference

September 30 New Haven, CT
Panel on "Best Technology Writing 2009" with Julian Dibbell and danah boyd
Yale University

October 1 Crete, NE
"The Invention Of Air"
Doane College

October 4 Ferrara, Italy
Internazionale a Ferrara
"The Future of News"
2pm Cinema Apollo
Via del Carbone 35

October 5 Milano, Italy
Meet the Media Guru
7pm Mediateca Santa Teresa
Via della Moscova 28

October 15 Grand Rapids, MI
"The Invention Of Air"
Grand Valley State University

October 22, Washington, DC
"The Invention of Air"
The Future of Reading at The Library of Congress

October 26 Wise, VA
"The Ghost Map"
University of Virginia

November 2 London, UK
Brian Eno and Steven Johnson on the art of accidental innovation
The ICA, 7PM

November 4 Sheffield, UK
Keynote
The Sheffield Documentary Festival

November 7th Mexico City, Mexico
Ciudad de las Ideas
Poder Civico

November 12 New York, NY
"Everything Bad Is Good For You"
Manhattan College

Skim and Plunge

2009-09-16T08:33:12-07:00

The editors at Yale University Press were nice enough to invite me to edit this year's edition of Best Technology Writing. It's a great collection of essays, by some of my very favorite writers, and I encourage you to pick up a copy. I wrote an opening essay for the book that tries to wrestle with the ways in which technology writing has changed over the past few decades. Here's a section of it:

The ubiquity of the digital lifestyle has forced us to write and think about technology in a different way. Think back, for example, to Stewart Brand’s classic 1973 Rolling Stone essay on the first video gamers, “SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among The Computer Bums.” When Brand stumbled across those Stanford proto-gamers, battling each other via command line, it was clear to him that he’d just glimpsed the future. Of course, it took a true visionary like Brand to recognize what he’d encountered, and to write about it with such clarity and infectious curiosity--in the process inventing a whole genre of technology writing that could do justice to the encounter. But there is something about that experience that is also by definition short-sighted: any given technology will mean very different things, and have very different effects, when it is restricted to a small slice of the population. Brand’s opening line was “Computers are coming to the people.” That was prescient enough. But as it turned out, what he saw on those screens actually had very little to do with gaming culture today. SPACEWAR let Brand sense before just about anyone else that information technology would become as mainstream as rock-and-roll or television. But he couldn’t have imagined a culture where games like Spore or Grand Theft Auto -- both of which are deftly dissected in this volume -- are far more complex, open-ended and popular than many Hollywood blockbusters.

Likewise, hypertext, until mid-1994, was an emerging technology whose power users were almost all writers of experimental fiction. You could look at those links on the screen, and begin to imagine what might happen if billions of people started clicking on them. But mostly you were guessing. A shocking amount of the early commentary on hypertext--some of it, in all honesty, written by me--focused on the radical effect hypertext would have on storytelling. Once hypertext went mainstream, however, that turned out to one of the least interesting things about it. (We’re still reading novels the old-fashioned way, one page after another.) And that’s precisely the trouble with writing about a technology when it’s still in leading indicator mode. You could look at those hyperlinks on the screen, and if you really concentrated, you might imagine a future where, say, newspaper articles linked to each other. But you could never imagine Wikipedia or YouPorn.

Now we don’t have to imagine it at all: the digital future, to paraphrase William Gibson, is so much more evenly distributed among us. We don’t have to gaze into a crystal ball; we can just watch ourselves, self-reflecting as we interact with this vast new ecosystem. Some of my favorite passages in this collection have this introspective quality: the mind examining its own strange adaptation to a world that has been transformed by information technology.

Consider this paragraph, from the opening section of Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”:

I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Carr intends this as a critique, of course, and his observations will no doubt ring true for anyone who spends hours each day in front of a networked computer screen. I feel it myself right now, as I write this essay, with my open Gmail inbox hovering in the background behind the word processor, and a text message buzzing on my phone, and a whole universe of links tempting me. It is harder to sit down and focus on a linear argument or narrative for an hour at a time. In a way, our prophecies about the impact of hypertext on storytelling had it half right; it’s not that people now tell stories using branching hypertext links: it’s that we actively miss those links when we pick up an old-fashioned book.

Carr is right, too, that there is something regrettable about this shift. The kind of deep, immersive understanding that one gets from spending three hundred pages occupying another person’s consciousness is undeniably powerful and essential. And no medium rivals the book for that particular kind of thinking. But it should also be said that this kind of thinking has not simply gone away; people still read books and magazines in vast numbers. It may be harder to enter the kind of slow, contemplative state that Carr cherishes, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I think of our present situation as somewhat analogous to the mass migration from the country to the city that started several centuries ago in Europe: the bustle and stimulation and diversity of urban life made it harder to enjoy the slower, organic pleasures of rural living. Still, those pleasures didn’t disappear. People continue to cherish them in mass numbers to this day.

And like urban life, the new consciousness of digital culture has many benefits; it may dull certain cognitive skills, but it undoubtedly sharpens others. In his essay, Carr derides the “skimming” habits of online readers. It’s an easy target, particularly when pitted against the hallowed activity of reading a four-hundred page novel. But skimming is an immensely valuable skill. Most of the information we interact with in our lives -- online or off -- lacks the profundity and complexity of a Great Book. We don’t need deep contemplation to assess an interoffice memo or quarterly financial report from a company we’re vaguely interested in. If we can process that information quickly and move on to more important things, so much the better.

Even loftier pursuits benefit from well-developed skimming muscles. I think many of us who feel, unlike Carr, that Google has actually made us smarter operate in what I call “skim-and-plunge” mode. We skim through pages of search results or hyperlinked articles, getting a sense of the waters, and then, when we find something interesting, we dive in and read in a slower, more engaged mode. Yes, it is probably a bit harder to become immersed in deep contemplation today than it was sitting in library in 1985, But that kind of rapid-fire skimming and discovery would have been, for all intents and purposes, impossible before the web came along.

The benefits of this new consciousness go far beyond skimming of course, especially when you consider that many of the distractions are not tantalizing hyperlinks but other human beings. Here’s Andrew Sullivan describing one of the defining aspects of the experience of blogging, in his revealing essay, “Why I Blog”:

Within minutes of my posting something, even in the earliest days, readers responded. E-mail seemed to unleash their inner beast. They were more brutal than any editor, more persnickety than any copy editor, and more emotionally unstable than any colleague. Again, it’s hard to overrate how different this is... [B]efore the blogosphere, reporters and columnists were largely shielded from this kind of direct hazing. Yes, letters to the editor would arrive in due course and subscriptions would be canceled. But reporters and columnists tended to operate in a relative sanctuary, answerable mainly to their editors, not readers. For a long time, columns were essentially monologues published to applause, muffled murmurs, silence, or a distant heckle. I’d gotten blowback from pieces before—but in an amorphous, time-delayed, distant way. Now the feedback was instant, personal, and brutal.

No doubt the intensity and immediacy of the feedback has its own disruptive force, making it harder for the blogger to enter the contemplative state that his forebears in the print magazine era might have enjoyed more easily. Sullivan’s description could in fact easily be marshaled in defense of Carr’s dumbing-down argument--except that where Carr sees chaos and distraction, Sullivan sees a new kind of engagement between the author and the audience. Sullivan would be the first to admit that this new kind of engagement is noisier, more offensive, and often more idiotic than any traditional interaction between author and editor. But there is so much useful signal in that noise that most of us who have sampled it find it hard to imagine going back. After all, the countryside was more polite, too. But in the end, most of us chose the city, despite all the chaos and distractions. I think we've made a similar choice with the Web today.

(Excerpted from The Best Technology Writing 2009. Now go buy a copy!)

OIP and the news ecosystem

2009-06-24T06:59:51-07:00

Today's an exciting day at outside.in: we're rolling out the beta release of Outside.in for Publishers, a suite of tools for organizing and curating hyperlocal news pages for US cities and towns. There's a great post from our CEO Mark Josephson here explaining the service and the vision behind it. A few months ago I gave a talk at SXSW talking about the ways in which the news business was moving towards an ecosystem model.

OIP is our bid to help make that ecosystem healthier and more diverse: by giving consumers easier access to far more content about their communities; by giving publishers a more cost-efficient means of creating local content optimized for local advertisers; and by promoting the neighborhood bloggers that are inventing a whole new model of hyperlocal reporting.

Since we started rolling out these neighborhood pages for media partners six months ago, outside.in's audience has skyrocketed from 1 million monthly uniques to nearly 5 million. The launch of Outside.in for Publishers should accelerate that growth. And of course, this is only the beginning: we have a great list of new features in the pipeline for publishers, bloggers, and even local advertisers.

Me On Twitter On TIME On Twitter

2009-06-04T19:30:34-07:00

This week's cover of TIME features a story that I wrote about Twitter and innovation. Actually, that's not quite right: this week's cover features a tweet that I posted about the cover story I wrote for TIME about Twitter. I've been chuckling about this cover ever since the folks at TIME proposed it. What I love is that we actually synced everything up so that the cover shows an actual word-for-word tweet that I posted this morning, right before TIME's Rick Stengel revealed the cover on Morning Joe. We had one version where it also showed my current lat-long from my iPhone location, and we were contemplating having the location be something funny, as a little easter egg for the geo-nerds, but I think the final version came out better the way it is.

I called my Dad to tell him about it this morning, and his -- typically droll -- response was, "Well, that's a pretty roundabout way to get your face on the cover of Time."

It's hard to write about Twitter right now, because obviously so much is being said about it, but I tried to use the piece both to explain some of the new attributes of Twitter that have become visible in the past half-year (particularly revolving around search), and at the same use Twitter as a case study in how innovation increasingly happens today. The original draft had about an even balance between the two, but in the edits the piece became a bit more focused on Twitter itself and how we have started using it. I think those were smart changes to make, but there was some material that got cut on Columbia professor Amar Bhidé's super-interesting idea of "venturesome consumption" that I will try to resurrect elsewhere.

eBooks in the WSJ

2009-04-20T07:25:56-07:00

The folks at the Wall Street Journal very nicely asked me to write a cover story for their Journal Report on technology, which is on the stands today. The piece is here online, but if you get a chance, check in out in print (ironic, I know.) They dedicated the whole front page of the section to the story, which is really cool to see. (It's also teased above the masthead on the front page.) There are about a dozen different predictions running through the piece, some of the positive, some negative. It will be interesting to see which ones get picked up, and whether people read it as an optimistic piece, or more mixed:

Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked. The unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google's attention.

In this world, citation will become as powerful a sales engine as promotion is today. An author will write an arresting description of Thomas Edison's controversial invention of the light bulb, and thanks to hundreds of inbound links from bookloggers quoting the passage, those pages will rise to the top of Google's results for anyone searching "invention of light bulb." Each day, Google will deposit a hundred potential book buyers on that page, eager for information about Edison's breakthrough. Those hundred readers might pale compared with the tens of thousands of prospective buyers an author gets from an NPR appearance, but that Google ranking doesn't fade away overnight. It becomes a kind of permanent annuity for the author.

Also, if you didn't get to read it, be sure to check out Kevin Kelly's excellent piece on digital books from the Times Magazine last year, which I quote in the Journal essay. We focus on some different angles, but like much of what Kevin and I write, the two pieces are complementary.

Bill Clinton On The Invention Of Air

2009-04-16T06:45:40-07:00

A few weeks after the book tour for The Invention of Air started to wind down, I got an email from an old friend who had spent some time with Bill Clinton at Davos. It was a quick note to report that Clinton had apparently spontaneously brought up my book in conversation, and had said some nice things about it.

That was very cool to hear, obviously, but hearing it immediately introduced a whole new set of questions: how had he heard about the book? What exactly did he like about it? And was this news that I should post to the blog? What were the ethical standards for posting about someone’s private conversation with a public figure about your book? (I opted to wait until I had more material to report.)

A week or two later a fellow author whom I had met during the tour wrote in to say that he’d attended a speech that Clinton gave in New York where he’d talked about the book a little. But apparently he had slightly mangled the title, calling it Into Thin Air, the name of John Krakauer’s excellent, but not-at-all-about-Joseph-Priestley bestseller from a few years back.

All this was extremely flattering, of course, but the name slip was slightly alarming. Was he using the wrong name at other occasions? Could we send out some signal to his people that Into Thin Air was a book about people dying on Mount Everest, not Enlightenment science? I imagined his audiences racing out to the bookstore to pick up that Priestley biography, sitting down to read, and after a few chapters saying: “You know, it’s a great book, but I wonder when he’s going to stop with all the mountain climbing.”

And then Ron Hogan blogged from the American Association of Publishers conference that Clinton had spoken at some length about the book at his keynote there. And he’d referred to it as Into Thin Air yet again. This news was even more exciting, given the context of the speech, but surreal at the same time. It seemed uncannily like one of those slightly off-kilter celebrity dreams you (okay, I) have every now and then: “I had this crazy dream that Bill Clinton really liked my book and kept talking in public about it, but every time he did, he called it by the wrong name…”

A few days later, my editor tracked down the transcript of the AAP speech. I think maybe it has been cleaned up slightly, because it doesn’t refer directly to the title of the book at all – he just refers to “Steven Johnson’s book about Joseph Priestley.” At any rate, I forgot all about the title slipup when I actually read through the text. It’s a great speech, and seems to have been delivered extemporaneously. (I’ve always thought that Clinton’s off-the-cuff skills actually exceeded Obama’s formidable skills with the teleprompter.) He talks about a thousand things, and has a very nice shout-out to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which he describes as his “favorite” Gladwell book. (How cool is Malcolm that he has Bill Clinton sitting around thinking, “Hmmm, do I like this one better than Blink?”) And then, near the very end, he turns to Invention of Air.

I love so much about what he said, but the coolest thing by far was seeing how close and connecting a reader he was of my book. That was just immensely satisfying as an author. There’s more to say about his remarks, but I think it’s best to just quote the relevant passages (starting with two paragraphs from earlier in the speech for context) and leave it at that.

I'm going to make this point later as I wrap up about the importance of books. But the things books do -- I would argue books are more important in the age of blog sites and tweaks and whatever else they call it -- I read a bunch of them -- because there's more information than ever before, but you can have all the facts in the world in your head. If you don't know how to organize and evaluate, construct an argument, get from A to Z, what you know in your head doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

We need perspective and linear argument. That's why I think books are important…

I spend all my time in the "how" business now. I predict to you that there will be a big demand in the future for books that deal not with how to become a millionaire in 36 days or two and a half hours. Not those. Serious "how" books. Books that answer the "how" question. How do you turn your good intentions into positive changes in other people's lives so that our common life is better for our children and grandchildren? The "how" question…

All of you can answer a "how" question. I read Steven Johnson's fascinating book about Joseph Priestley and all the things going on in 18th-century science, and I realized while Priestley apparently wrongly gets credit for being the discoverer of oxygen, most school children do not know that he had the first experiment that showed us our symbiotic relationships on Planet Earth between animals and plants. And they breathe in what we breathe out and vice-versa.

He found it out by accident. He was seeing how long animals could live in a vacuum glass that he covered them with, and he tried not to kill them. But when they collapsed, he'd take them out.

He put the cover over a little plant and he expected that the animal would die more quickly, but in fact it lived longer because the plant was emitting more oxygen and therefore it wasn't used up as quick.

And that explains why we probably should change our thinking about what to do about the carbon dioxide component of global warming. Almost all the debate today on carbon -- and I've been part of it -- is on the dilemma we face because the only known big storage site in the world where carbon won't come back and surface is in that vast stone cave off the North Sea where the Norwegians are pumping CO2.

It's a dangerous operation but very well done. It's physically dangerous for the workers. There's enough space there with enough weight on rock that's hard enough, not permeable, to hold all of Europe's CO2 for a century. It's amazing.

But it's just Europe. China and the U.S. are now the world's biggest emitters. They'd have to have elaborate pipelines going all over everywhere to take it there. We've been trying to find some sites. There's one in Pennsylvania that might work, believe it or not. Not that big. There's one in Western Australia. And there's one or two more, including one in the Atlantic nearer to the Netherlands but smaller than the one in Norway.

Increasingly, people are saying, "Why don't we recreate Priestley's experiment on a vast scale?"

One person proposes to build huge glass towers next to coal-fired plants and fill them with algae and just hook up the CO2 emissions and plow them into the plant; let the algae absorb the CO2, in sunlight conditions -- they have to be in sun, I don't want to get into weeds.

There's one place where people are growing bio material in the dark, but it's messy. You have to do it in the sunlight, and when the algae breathes, you release the oxygen in the air.

Obviously there are problems with scale here. And we may have a planet covered in algae unless we prepare to use it in biofuels or otherwise some constructive way.

The point I'm making is, you wouldn't even think about that if you never read a book; if you had no sense of history; if you were under the illusion that because you were on the Internet everything about you was new and everything was special and all that mattered was what you blurted out in the moment that was on your mind…