The following was clipped from the blog of Digital Edition provider nxtbook media. In it is a link to my last post on the role the iPad and traditional publishers might play in the development of digital information products that provide a bit of focused yin to the web’s (or more accurately the desktop’s) inevitable yang of distraction.

Backstory: In the past I have been fairly critical of digital editions of the sort that nxtbook produces. However, my criticisms of the format were never based on the fact that digital editions are focusing, but rather that they were forcing a type of experience into a medium that just did not support it well. In simplified terms digital editions promote a lean back experience in a lean forward environment. DE’s also use certain platform technologies that are at odds with the evolving nature of the open web in order to simulate that lean back experience (in case you can’t read between the lines I’m talking about Flash).

The one thing that these digital editions had going for them was their focusing aspect and I often wrote that this *could* be the saving grace of the industry. In order to demonstrate that this has been on my mind for some time I give you an excerpt from a post I wrote on December 11, 2007 - The Magazine and the Mobile Web - http://mturro.com/2007/12/11/the-magazine-and-the-mobile-web/

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The mobile web offers up the chance to step away from the small pieces loosely joined and return to something that resembles a unit… an information product. On the world wide web… in a browser… magazines diffuse. Edited information sprawls and becomes part of the information soup… perspective, point of view and editorial voice splinter into bytes. In that world magazines stop making sense. Issues, themes, linear development are washed away by granular expedience and ambient findability. The reader becomes a user, an active participant sitting upright at a desk, studying, searching, learning, reveling in the mode of inquiry the desk space creates.

In the mobile world, pod world… where devices rule… content thrives in packages. Losing yourself in an iPod is like getting lost in a great issue of your favorite magazine. On the iPod we trend away from continuous partial attention and toward something approaching focus. We revert back to listener, we become the reader, relaxed in the mode of contemplation that the mobile world invokes.

It is this focus, this contemplative mode of repose inherent in mobility that affords the magazine its best chance at survival. When we are mobile we are in a mode that print has primed us for… we are relapsing to patterns of behavior that have been cultivated by centuries of ingesting printed media. In the world away from the desk we find a return to form. In that world entrenched media patterns still hold sway. In that world the self-contained media unit, the podcast, the song, the magazine is still vital.
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Let’s be clear about something: this idea that magazine publishers are hesitant to get into a relationship with Apple because the publishers won’t be able to “control the consumer relationship” is essentially horse-shit.

While I’m not sure how many publishers are actually operating under that assumption (would not be surprised if it were an over done media meme), I am sure that those who are might as well pack up and go home now - they don’t understand what’s happening and quite possibly never will.

While it is true that the data that Apple provides about iTunes users is somewhat sparse it’s a cop-out to point to that as a flaw in the system. After all, how much does Vanity Fair know about the guy who paid cash for a copy of their rag at the train station?

To the magazine publishers who do feel as if Apple somehow owes them more data I say this: grow a pair. This is the 21st century. We can do amazing things. We can start a million conversations today. We can know more about the folks reading our iPad editions than Apple does. We can get so deep into our reader’s social graphs that Apple will come asking us for data.

So please stop thinking of your readers as numbers, names, addresses. These are people - talk to them. You may be surprised what there is to learn.

[As a side note: I downloaded the Vanity Fair iPad edition and it is not revolting! It's fairly well done with appropriate room for improvement - pretty much what you expect at this stage in the game.]

Both Clay Shirky and Kent Anderson (who does a masterful job of illuminating Shirky’s original “Complexity” argument in the clip below) expose what’s really happening in the great 21C media shakeout. It’s an argument I’m familiar with and it’s an argument I’ve been trying to make for some time - media (or more specific to my case, magazine publishing) is not being threatened by shifting output formats, but by an inability to adapt and shrink.

As shifting technology makes a once necessary operational complexity more of an albatross, publishers simply do not have the either the awareness or the stomach to re-imagine their organizations as significantly smaller, inherently agile, media operations.

As a result it makes no difference how slick devices like the iPad are, or how they provide a more controlled, billable content environment - if publishers insist on feeding it with a complex, bloated, press oriented supply chain they will always be vulnerable to digitally native start-ups.

Detroit has taken a beating— it’s essentially dead. With median home prices hanging around used car territory much of the city’s real estate sits empty and decaying. Jobs are few and far between. When looked at through the prism of any traditional economic marker the situation is bleak.

This is despair.
This is darkness.
This is poverty.
This is art.
Or at least the engine of art.

To see what I mean - to see how what’s happening in Detroit is providing a fertile ecology for completely mind blowing art - to see how Detroit is the one true setting for the undiluted telling of the American story - click through to see more images like the ones below.

Maybe it’s just me - just my over active imagination (I mean, I’ve never even been to Detroit) - but work like this is an indication that something is happening in that ghost of a city - something real. So keep an ear to Detroit… it’s saying something.

Aside from the usual problems I have with publishers getting all obsessed with output format something else about this beautiful demo really irks me: the fact that this thing will NOT run on an iPad. It’s an AIR/Flash/Adobe creation and I’m sure nobody needs reminding on the current status of the Apple/Adobe relationship. So, given that status, why would Wired partner with Adobe to make an app that may never run (properly) on the 800lb gorilla of the tablet space?

The answer is simple enough - Adobe OWNS print workflow. Working with Adobe means that Wired’s designers don’t really need to be pushed too far outside their comfort zone. In fact the designs you see in the video below started life as InDesign docs. In some ways this is a sensible move. Yet making sensible moves in nonsensical times may not always be smart.

In embracing Adobe as their tablet technology partner Wired is taking a rather large gamble that Flash’s iPhone export feature due in CS5 (which according to Apple Blog isn’t working in beta - http://theappleblog.com/2010/02/16/adobe-creative-suite-5-details-revealed/) will not only be accepted by Apple, but will work without incident. I don’t care how slick the design is - if the thing crashes or is slow or buggy overall experience will suffer. Based on personal past experience with Adobe’s code export features in other CS products I’d say the chances of the iPhone code being usable, let alone good, is remote at best. Add to all of this the rather high profiles of Wired, their parent company Conde Nast, and Apple and you’re not looking at your average everyday fail - this would be big time fail.

The following clip from Hutch Carpenter drips with insight on how ideas can operate as social objects in the enterprise. One of the things I wrestle with on a daily basis is how to use social tools and technology to organically stimulate innovation and collaboration across the organization. It’s a tragic mistake to think that social tools in and of themselves, implemented without any real thought as to how they may naturally fit within current cultural processes, can have any real positive effect. In the post below Carpenter does a good job of showing why - when trying to implement social tools in the enterprise - it’s smart to not worry so much about the tool’s feature set and instead emphasize its ability to naturally elicit and nurture the truly valuable social object - the idea.