Two regional titles in Germany, Berliner Morgenpost and Hamburger Abendblatt, have put up pay walls around premium content. But two big national titles, Bild and Die Welt (owned by publishing company Axel Springer), are keeping their websites free while selling iPhone-app subscriptions for $2 to $5 a month. And when The Guardian, Britain’s most-visited newspaper website, launched a $3.73 iPhone app — despite outspoken rejection of the pay-wall model — it sold 70,000 in the first month.
Ad Age (link)
Category: quote
Premium content
Le Monde in France, for example, has been charging for premium content since 2002, and has racked up 100,000 subscribers steadily paying $8 a month — even though its traditional newspaper circulation is barely more than 300,000.
Ad Age (link)
“Facebook Friends”
I remain suspicious, however, of anyone who argues that online social networks, like Facebook, will revolutionize human interactions. Whenever I encounter some utopian celebration of Facebook, I always go back and read some Jane Goodall, or Robert Sapolsky, and remind myself that our social lives haven’t changed that much since we were hairy apes patrolling the African forest. In fact, the most obvious parallel for just about every primate troop remains high school. It’s not that Facebook doesn’t matter – it’s just that our social lives are stubborn things, and tend to revolve around the same constants regardless of the technology.
Jonah Lehrer, “Facebook Friends,” The Frontal Cortex (via somethingchanged)
Sometimes we have a conversation like this one
Verona De Tessant: Burt, are we f***-ups?
Burt Farlander: No! What do you mean?
Verona De Tessant: I mean, we’re 34…
Burt Farlander: I’m 33.
Verona De Tessant: …and we don’t even have this basic stuff figured out.
Burt Farlander: Basic, like how?
Verona De Tessant: Basic, like how to live.
Burt Farlander: We’re not f***-ups.
Verona De Tessant: We have a cardboard window.
Burt Farlander: [Looks at window] We’re not f***-ups.
Verona De Tessant: [Whispers] I think we might be f***-ups.
Burt Farlander: [Whispers back] We’re not f***-ups.— from the film Away We Go
decaffeinated coffee table
I bought a decaffeinated coffee table, you can’t even see a difference.
Author Unknown (via coffeechat)
Wie trinkst du deinen Kaffee?
Wie trinkst du deinen Kaffee? How do you like your coffee?
– schwarz (black)
– mit Milch (with milk)
– mit Zucker (with sugar)
– mit Süßstoff (with sweetener)
Ich trinke meinen Kaffee gerne schwarz mit Süßstoff und manchmal auch mit Milch. Mmmh. Lecker.
(I like to drink my coffee black with sweetener and sometimes with milk, too. Mmmh. Yummy.)
Clients
Clients are the difference between art and design.
Michael Bierut (via soulellis)
Blogging is an art form
ireadintothings: Blogging is the art form of the 21st century. When you’re blogging, you’re doing art. Quote me on this one.
Upstart Publishing l Seth Godin
Consider this quote from a high-ranking book publisher who should know better, “We must do everything in our power to uphold the value of our content against the downward pressures exerted by the marketplace and the perception that ‘digital’ means ‘cheap.’ …”
Hello?
You don’t have the power. Maybe if every person who has ever published a book or is ever considering publishing a book got together and made a pact, then they’d have enough power to fight the market. But solo? Exhort all you want, it’s not going to do anything but make you hoarse.
Movie execs thought they had the power to fight TV. Record execs thought they had the power to fight iTunes. Magazine execs thought they had the power to fight the web. Newspaper execs thought they had the power to fight Craigslist.
Here’s a way to think about it, inspired by Merlin Mann: Imagine that next year your company is going to make 10 million dollars instead of a hundred million dollars in profit. What would you do knowing that your profits were going to be far less than they are today? Because that’s exactly what the upstart with nothing to lose is going to do. Ten million in profit is a lot to someone starting with zero and trying to gain share. They don’t care that you made a hundred million last year from the old model.
If I’m an upstart publisher or a little-known author, you can bet I’m happy to sell my work at $5 and earn seventy cents a copy if I can sell a million.
Smart businesspeople focus on the things they have the power to change, not whining about the things they don’t.
Existing publishers have the power to change the form of what they do, increase the value, increase the speed, segment the audience, create communities, lead tribes, generate breakthroughs that make us gasp. They don’t have the power to demand that we pay more for the same stuff that others will sell for much less.
And if you think this is a post about the publishing business, I hope you’ll re-read it and think about how digital will change your industry too.
Competition and the market are like water. They go where they want.
Via Seth Godin
2 Moral Lessons
Moral #1: “If you work hard, stay focused, and never give up, you will eventually get what you want in life.”
Moral #2: Sometimes the things we want most in life are the things that will kill us.
Downtime
I am something of a recluse by nature. I am that cordless screwdriver that has to charge for twenty hours to earn ten minutes use. I need that much downtime.
a dying part of the graphic arts
so, i work at a company that makes videos. that means lots of props. since it’s much easier to just make something like a giant fake ticket with custom text than edit/composite it in later, there’s lots of fun stuff to be made.
in the world of digital art/graphic-making, this is totally dying. why make something to photograph when you can just composite the image from assets on the screen?
because it never. looks. as. good. (seriously!)
examples that will always fail: why hand draw type when you can just pick a handwriting font? why write on a box when i can just draw on the box with my tablet? why take a certain photograph when i can just digitally change his/her hair color and possibly move that arm over somewhere else…
answers: because the handwritten effect is lost when every duplicate letter looks exactly the same. because it will always look like you just drew on a box with your tablet and skewed it (and no layer blending property can achieve the correct texture). because the photo will always be just slightly off.
so, if you want to make some text out of yarn or whatever. don’t go looking for a photoshop brush, just friggin’ do it. on your desk, on a big white piece of paper. your results will thank you.
Cool or fool
Cool
- Taking party photos and printing them for your friends instead of blogging them.
- Reading cookbooks like novels and not necessarily cooking the recipes.
- Introducing two real life friends you know will love each other.
- If you see a solo tourist trying to take their own photo in front of a landmark, stopping and taking it for them.
Fool
- Flashmobs put on by commercial enterprises or organisations.
- Stories about Twitter in newspapers.
- People who say “I’m sorry I haven’t posted on Twitter/my blog for so long I’ve been soooo busy.”
- Marketing and online strategy blogs that are completely removed from the real people who make up the internet.
Digital Isolation
On-demand services can rarely satisfy our old-fashioned desire to sometimes be surprised. We’ve read too many reviews and PR quips about the show before clicking to download it – we know exactly what to expect. What’s lost in this process is the joy of stumbling upon something new and exciting—the accidental discovery. Lost, too, is the thrill of the chase for that elusive something that, in ancient history, led members of our species to many a dusty shelf or bin in an old fashioned brick and mortar store.
On-demand media exerts conflicting pressures on us. It draws us away from our co-workers and neighbors while simultaneously connecting us to a global community thousands strong. It dilutes the dwindling pool of cultural touchstones we share, but in doing so, exposes each of us to a vast ocean of possibility. It gives us virtually anything we could ever want at our fingertips, but threatens to overwhelm us with such abundance.
We Are United in Our Digital Isolation, PopMatters (via somethingchanged)
“Good ideas rarely come in bunches”
Theoretically, a great number of ideas assures a great number of choices, but such choices are essentially quantitative. This practice is as bewildering as it is wasteful. It discourages spontaneity, encourages indifference, and more often than not produces results which are neither distinguished, interesting, nor effective. In short, good ideas rarely come in bunches.
There is no such thing as a free book
beattitude: i currently have 44 books checked out and 20 on hold. guilt, check. anticipation, check. time to read these books? um. theconceptlibrarian: magicmolly:
Engaging with the New York Public Library taps into all sorts of unexpected economic anxieties and pleasures.
Ordering books online to be delivered to your local branch brings a feeling of great wealth. For example, figuring out how to nab brand-new books with minimal wait time is akin to having an endless credit line at Barnes & Noble, while picking up a stack of freshly-delivered oversized art books and rare scholarship is like winning access to an antiquarian’s private collection.
The feeling warps when you go home and log into your NYPL account to tally up the damage. This is when you see that you have 13 books checked out, and several are due within the week, and two of these cannot be renewed because someone else has ordered them. With this discovery comes a troubling sense of indebtedness.
There are two ways to respond: ignore the debt (while fighting back a tide of guilt) or quickly pile up all half-read or non-essential books and run back to the library to return them. Dumping an armload of books lightens the psychic load and provides a measure of relief when you check your account to see that this time you owe only 9 books, and these all have a solid two weeks before they begin to accrue fines.
Oddly enough, the logical extension of this method (returning all of your books at once and immediately) does not bring about feelings of relief, but rather feelings of poverty. With no books checked out, it becomes clear that you have nothing to lose but also nothing to gain.
A good balance is to have six books out and at least twelve books on hold, so that a sense of satiety (the six books) is matched with a sense of anticipation (the twelve books on hold) which combines to overshadow the lingering sense of debt embodied in your six homebound library books.
Q.E.D., I think.
We treat our spiritual lives like the round of golf
‘Church isn’t boring because we’re not showing enough film clips, or because we play an organ instead of guitar. It’s boring because we neuter it of its importance. Too often we treat our spiritual lives like the round of golf used to open George Barna’s Revolution. At the end of my life, I want my friends and family to remember me as someone who battled for the Gospel, who tried to mortify sin in my life, who found hard for life, and who contended earnestly for the faith. Not just a nice guy who occasionally noticed the splendor of the mountains God created, while otherwise just trying to enjoy myself, manage my schedule, and work on my short game.
-Ted Kluck, from Why We Love The Church: In Praise of Institutions And Organized Religion
HT: Pyromaniacs: I Lose, You Win (via nickbogardus) (via papertowngirl)
Readers Change Publishing Game
After suffering declining revenues, layoffs and widespread closures, magazines and newspapers need to do something to reinvent the future of publishing.
Could New E-Readers Change Publishing Game? – PC World
Has anyone mentioned the fact that an e-reader could just be replaced by an iphone or black berry?
(via fluffynotes)
You will become literature
ireadintothings: You will become literature, and you’re already a poem in my head.
We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.
We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering -these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love -these are what we stay alive for.
Dead Poets Society (via ireadintothings)
How to post work safe content
another reason to deep-six my tumblr account… often i unfollow new followers due to nsfw content. i’m not being prudish & i appreciate you following this tumble log, but i can’t view your content at work (due to #2 & #3 on subcreation’s list) or at home (due to #4)…
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Is it free of nudity and gore?
- Would I want this on my screen when my boss dropped by my office?
- Would I want a prospective employer or client to associate me with this?
- Would I show this to a 5 year old? (your site is public, so you actually might be showing it to a 5 year old)
If you can answer yes to all of these questions, go ahead and post it.
If you answer ”no” to #1 and “yes” to #4 and still intend to post it, spend a moment rethinking your life as you (please, at a minimum) go into the “Customize” page and mark your site as “Not safe for work (NSFW)” under “Advanced”.
Thanks
Magazines won’t die
Speaking from personal experience, I’ve noticed something lately. The more I use technology (and I am on this damn computer a lot…too much), the more I want to read a magazine. But I want different things than I wanted five years ago. Frankly, I want a break. I want to be surprised and delighted …
The Internet is a technology that enables people to go out in SEARCH of things. I’m all for that and love it to pieces. But sometimes, I just want things to FIND me. Sometimes, I am just tired of looking and typing and seeking, and I just want to sit on my comfortable couch and be surprised when I turn the page.
That’s why I believe magazines won’t die.
Writers mistakes
I exist in real life
ireadintothings: I find it really hard to grasp that I exist in real life, and that I am not just a character from my own autobiography for people to read about. But that’s all that I will be, eventually. I guess as a writer, that’s your aspiration.
Coffeehouse Junkie 