Author: john

If the Glee kids can do it, why can’t I

An interesting post at Balkinization poses some questions I’ve been wondering myself:

So what should you do in real life if you and your friends, inspired by Glee, want to make a mash-up, or a new music video for a popular song? Should you just leave this creativity to the professionals, or should you become dirty, rotten copyright violators?

Glee is a fun show that is doing a great job of encouraging kids to be creative and be themselves.  Unfortunately, this poster is right in questioning what kind of message the show sends about acceptable boundaries of copyright.  While the show is (I would assume) getting permission or paying royalties to mash songs up, this fact is invisible to the uninitiated viewer.  I would not call it a bad thing — perhaps these are the types of creative copyright norms we want to create in our culture. It’s OK to quote (even extensively)!

Google’s investment in the future of journalism

The Atlantic :: Magazine :: How to Save the News.

Esteemed journalist James Fallows pens an article about how Google is trying to create conditions that will help pay-for-journalism survive in the free, online news world. He clearly lays out the problems of sticking with print and convincing advertisers of the value of an online ad.  The real interesting part is the last third: how we might start to find and pay for good content. From the perspective of Google, this makes sense–more reliable searches with better content.

My blog has been quiet for awhile because I’ve been “too busy to read.” I’m working on that problem, because reading and writing are too central to how we think.  It’s like I’ve been holding my breath for a month.

iPad review, part deux

After having a chance to give the iPad the “reading in bed” and (my daily) “reading the newspaper on the bus” tests, I think I have a better feeling for how this thing works as a reading device.

First and foremost, everyone else is right about the weight–it’s heeeeeavy! It’s possible to hold it up for an extended time, but not comfortable. Best to find something to lean it on (your chest, a bag, etc).

Second, the glossy screen is truly a problem for reading anywhere out in the open. The reflection from overhead lights and the mirror effect were very distracting to me.

Again, the programming was the part I found most interesting.  Books are made to look like books. When you consider that the form of a book (pulp pages between a cover, with margins on the side and spaces between words) evolved over a long period, it seems a bit unnatural to attempt to impose this form on a new device. I’m sure some will want it to work like a book, but this might not be the best fit for the medium.

Perhaps a bit closer to home are news apps like the NY Times Editor’s choice. This app acts as a sort of a hybrid between their iPhone app and the desktop reader.  It uses the space to display a variety of articles in an a manner that isn’t too far off from a traditional newspaper, integrates ads in a tasteful way, and yet is different enough from the print version to seem at home on this screen. The editors also take advantage of the larger screen to include the graphics that were in the print edition.

This app causes me to think further about how well this thing might work as a learning device–be it as a textbook replacement or a more interactive learning tool.  While heavy, it’s lighter than a stack of textbooks, and does a good job of integrating graphics and multimedia on the page. I see digital textbooks as having the potential to keep a book’s linearity while still allowing for more interaction and following links for more information when something doesn’t make sense. I think a text on the iPad could allow a good “textbook author” to do just that.

My ultimate conclusion is that I’m not dropping my netbook for an iPad anytime in the near future, but I’m starting to see how it really might be something new and different for digital publishing. I’ll never admit Steve is right about it, though.

iPad Review

I had a chance to play with an iPad for a whole day–why not add my own thoughts to the throng of reviews 🙂

First off the typing.  While not as bad as I thought it might be, it could also be a whole lot better. I consistently have problems with the auto-correct on my iPhone, and naturally have the same problem on the iPad.  What’s more, the keys are placed like a regular keyboard.  For most this isn’t a problem, but those of us who have grown accustom to the iPhone will frequently hit shift instead of delete. What’s weird to me is, without a physical keyboard, Apple could get super creative with the interface–yet, for some reason they can’t even program in a caps lock.

The reading experience is similarly “just okay.” I did not use it enough to experience any kind of eye strain, but was almost blinded by the glare from the sun while reading on the bus. The mirror effect from the glossy screen is similarly kind of annoying. I’ll withhold my final judgment until we get a good app for reading and annotating pdfs, as well as a good manga reader.

The iPhone apps that were brought in seemed awkwardly small in 1x mode, and unacceptably pixelated in 2x mode. I couldn’t find any small-screen apps that I could tolerate using. Native iPad apps, however, were a different story. Many are scaled-up versions of their smaller cousins, and thus struggling a bit to use all of the screen real estate. Yet, the feel of interacting with these larger apps is kind of nice.  It’s more natural that using a mouse, and for this reason I could even see my parents could operating this thing.

In the end, I’m about where I thought I would be.  For those that don’t know how to use/update/configure a computer, the device is a winner (once we get our Google printing, that is). The rest of us are going to have to wait for the “killer app” that makes this form factor really make sense. Unfortunately, the platform won’t allow anyone to fix these interface complaints, like the keyboard layout. In Apple’s mind, if you don’t like it you must not be of sound mind.