It is the duty of every man to endeavour that something may be added by his industry to the hereditary aggregate of knowledge and happiness. To add much can indeed be the lot of few, but to add something, however little, every one may hope. Rambler #129 (June 11, 1751)
Which 2-3 have the most to do with you and where you are right now?
Which one seems like JUST the advice YOU need right now?
Which of these do you DO as a regular part of your life?
MAKE an mp3 recording, reading and commenting on one of the above questions
SAVE it to /eas190/
go to http://bloggery.wlu.edu/mt.cgi and login
UPLOAD that file to the class blog
Some new stuff:
What's up with Amazon and Google?
...aftermarket reselling of books is decreasing the time window in which publishers and content creators can make money. A book retailing initially at $20 can sell used for 25 cents or less within a year or less (to the detriment of the author's royalties.) The biggest beneficiary of the "aftermarket" is none other than Amazon.com, with its ever-increasing transaction fees...Curiously, in an age of widespread literacy and access to all kinds of books, people are reading fewer books and when they do, it is the same old crap everybody else is reading . People have offered explanations: competing entertainment choices, the decline of independent bookstores, the abundance of books tied in with other media properties... Litblogging has gone a long way to counteract this narrowing of tastes by exposing people to a wider variety of writers (the same has been happening in the world of MP3 Bloggers) . But mainstream success is still defined by the public as coverage in Big Media, which is increasingly focused on its own media properties.
...content creators need a way to sell and distribute content with less restrictive licenses (i.e., Creative Commons or Founder's Copyright). People are using more liberal licenses not just to be "nice" but to make it easier to publicize and promote their works. Audience building lies at the heart of the problem. As publisher Tim O'Reilly once wrote, "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy."
By acquiring a Print-on-Demand (POD) company and an ebook software company, Amazon.com is retooling itself to offer a complete publishing solution to authors disenchanted with the current state of publishing. We may soon live in a world where authors can upload content into Amazon's content management system, which then can sell it on demand as a physical object or digital ebook.
...This past year marked two watershed moments in the ebook world: a grayscale ebook reader (Ebookwise 1150) began selling near the $100 range, and a high-end reader (Cybook ) capable of reading most ebook formats began selling near the $400 range. Both devices allow importing of .txt, .rtf and .html files.
Remix Your Web (O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, mid-March 2005)
Remix 1 3 minutes: "...an extraordinarily important freedom that our culture guarantees... a freedom to remix..."
remix 2 2 minutes: "the potential of this technology is new, and the restrictions are new..."
remix 3 another 2 minutes: "the world of freedom that text people enjoy was not written for the world that multimedia is..."