Category: Technology

WSJ.com – Magazines Further Experiment With Print’s Digital Format

Sorry, but I’ve got to unload on this current revived infatuation with "digital" editions of magazines. For the past year and half I’ve been subscribing to the MIT Technology Review via Zinio — the technology that delivers a digital rendition of the print product into my PC via yet another content delivery system.

I get to "turn" pages, see the actual ads (my heart be still), search for text, and have fun playing with my very own "glass" copy of the dead-tree version.

It sucks. Let me repeat — it really sucks. It’s either a bone thrown to the Quark jockeys in the design department, a way to justify the big fee paid to the redesign firm, or some inter-generational stop-gap that makes the old farts who go around saying "I can’t read a magazine on the toilet" happy with their honest-to-god brave new world format. This is plain and simple a sop to advertisers and a stop-gap solution.

It’s wrong. It’s a kludge. If we must hang onto to our precious kerning and leading and big glossy ads, then let’s do it within the fricking browser.  PDF the damn things and be done with it. Digital editions are so yesterday. Up there with the wonderful CueCat: as yet another desperate life-ring for the 19th century world of print.

I won’t slag Zinio. They keep drumming along. Mike Edelhart — my old boss at PC Week in the 80s used to run it. Now Scott Kauffman,  ex-Time Warner and CompuServe is at the helm. I’m looking at Texterity for some custom publishing applications, and expect to get pestered yet again by some digital print stop-gap vendor.

Don’t bother. I’m looking over the hill at a post-pageview world and after a decade of butting my head against the print-online transition am too grumpy to care.

 

 

 

chicagocrime.org: Chicago crime database

This is very cool example of integrating RSS with the Google Maps API to create a truly useful tool. In a nutshell — take crime stats, integrate into a simple interface that permits the user to browse by type (murder, assault, arson, etc.), address, route, date, zip code, etc. And then display the results on a Google map.

 The applications are endless — find a safe neighborhood before buying. See if the neighbors are fond of domestic disturbances. Find a better way to walk to and from the subway stop.

I pre-ordered John Battelle’s new book, The Search, a few months ago, and returned home on Friday to find that Amazon had delivered it. I took it with me to the beach on Saturday and got the first two chapters in before some ankle-biters took up camp behind my beach chair and tried to bury themselves in a storm of flying sand.

First impressions — good book on the way to becoming a great book as I read further. I hope to knock it off this week and will post a full review when I’m finished. The first chapter tries to put a big too heavy an import on the role of search as the ne plus ultra of all technology. While I certainly won’t contest that search is central to navigating information, I think the next book should be titled The Understanding, following through with the ever brilliant insight by Danny Hillis that it isn’t the finding and locating of information that is important, but ultimately leading the seeker to some understanding that is the driving goal.

This has been a good year for tech writing with this and Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said making for some great reading these past six months.