b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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From Germany, With Love
Blog-Novelist Gets Contract
Self-publishing as Minor Leagues
OPML Outlining for Palm OS
For the New Year
RIAA Copy Protection Strategy is Windows Media Player
Looking at the World Through a Different Lens
Friday, January 3, 2003
Virtual Management Consulting
We'll see more consultancies focused on virtual organization and collaborative computing over the next year, as the growing number of free agents combines with easier, more affordable technology. Recent discussions with several fellow free agents have underscored the difficulty of manning the ship alone. Some few, rare individuals are equipped -- mentally and emotionally -- to go it alone for extended periods. Most of us need some supporting and complementary partners.The first round of weblog conferences will spur some of this. It will be interesting to see how 2003 shapes up.
Virtuelle Projekte.. Take a look at vrtprj: virtual project, a consulting practice for management and technology of virtual organizations. Needed now more than ever. In English, in German, their weblog, Groove spaces. They help with the use of many tools. I suspect this is a growing specialty. Cool that they are starting in Germany, where the need to work across national and cultural boundaries will create new methods and challenge the existing tools. [a klog apart]
From Germany, With Love
Blog-Novelist Gets Contract
Yet another alternative path to getting published, the blog-novel, pays off for a sci-fi writer. The writer, John Scalzi, is a professional writer, but primarily in non-fiction. Still this is one of the first cases of a blog-based effort being picked up by a major house.Over at American Invisible, Inc. Hugh Madison is pushing along with his own blog-based novellas featuring a range of 1950s and 60s comic book-style detectives. Check it out for a sense of how weblog-based serialization works.
Blog-novel to become paper-novel. Patrick Nielsen Hayden -- blogger, senior editor for Tor Books -- announces on his blog this morning that,
...I really did make a publication offer, on behalf of Tor Books, to a writer named John Scalzi for a science fiction novel he had serialized on his web journal. And he very graciously accepted.[Boing Boing Blog]
Self-publishing as Minor Leagues
Once the domain of pathetic wannabes, self-publishing is growing as a viable path to publishing success. My former employer iUniverse recently signed a deal with Kensington to act as a "farm club" for writing talent in the categories Kensington serves.But self-publishing is not for the feint, as this article points out. It's hard work, and it's not just about the writing. Writers -- now like everyone else who wants to succeed -- have to be capable business and sales people, and have the fortitude to keep pushing in the face of adversity.
Self-promoting self-published teen author gets half-mil deal. A 19-year-old author of a self-published epic fantasy novel has successfully promoted his book into a worldwide publishing deal reportedly worth $500k.
This young author became one of the latest graduates of the difficult world of self-publishing to climb into the major publisher big leagues. World rights to Paolini's "Eragon" and its two unwritten sequels were sold recently to the youth division of one of the country's most prestigious houses, Alfred A. Knopf, in a deal reportedly worth more than $500,000...The young author, who recently turned 19, has now learned far more than just to sound like a big-time author. He has learned about the draining grind of book promotion, with more than 70 appearances around the country during 2002, from elementary schools to bookstores. And he has also learned the power of persistence, to keep slogging away through good times and bad.
(Thanks, Vera!) [Boing Boing Blog]
Friday, December 27, 2002
OPML Outlining for Palm OS
Thorough and useful notes from Rick Klau on connecting via Palm OS and OPML.
Editing Radio Outlines on Your Palm.Thanks to my new Treo, info on my PDA is always close by. I'm increasingly reliant on outlines as a way to organize info, collect thoughts, etc. But one limitation was that I couldn't edit the outlines on my Palm. When the Treo arrived, I put a little effort into trying to fix that.
You can read the results here.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
For the New Year
"Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude and perseverance." -- Samuel AdamsRIAA Copy Protection Strategy is Windows Media Player
Here's the next big idea for copy protection -- only allow RIPping to Windoze™ Media Player files. Surely <strike>these morons</strike> they don't really think this will work.Jacobs at SunnComm said his company's latest technology fits the bill, and it's being tested by three of the five major record companies. Sexton of Macrovision, which bought Midbar in early November, said his company will have a similar offering early next year.The goal, Sexton said, is to enable all the personal uses consumers expect from an ordinary CD, just in a more limited fashion. In particular, the dual-session discs being developed by SunnComm and Macrovision don't allow consumers to convert songs to MP3 files, the most popular format for music on computers and portable digital players.
Instead, when consumers copy one of the new discs onto their computers, they end up with a set of scrambled song files in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media Audio format. Those files can be transferred only to portable devices that support Windows Media.
So the geniuses at the copy protection factories have decided to disable the entire galaxy of portable, personal, auto, and home MP3 players. This is a strategy? This is allowing all the same uses, just in a more limited fashion?
Even if the tech guys can sucker Valenti and friends into paying them a few hundred million for this brain-dead idea, it has about as much chance of succeeding in the US market as I have of winning the PowerBall. If this is the best they can come up with, the game is already over.
Star Tribune Record labels grapple with CD protection. "For three straight holiday seasons, record executives say, Internet piracy has been the Grinch of the music business, undercutting album sales and labels' year-end profits." "Music and technology executives vow that this will be the last holiday season without widespread use of technology that prevents songs from being transferred from CDs to the Internet. Of course, they've made that prediction before." [snowdeal.org | conflux]
Monday, December 23, 2002
Looking at the World Through a Different Lens
Recently a long-time friend said to me, "Your view of the world is just a bit different." We were discussing how the convergence of new technologies is fundamentally remaking my old industry and none of them seem to get it. She's right. But the evidence is growing daily that I am, too. I've been watching the printing and publishing industries too long not to understand some of the basic, and fatal, flaws that engross both industries. Now if Gary Hamel is right, then at some point my different view will pay off in the right innovation at the right time. That time is getting closer.
Innovation Now!by Gary Hamel from FC issue 65, page 115
[...] My colleagues and I have studied hundreds of examples of business innovation during the past couple of decades. Again and again, we have asked ourselves, "Why is it that some people see opportunities and others don't? How do the radical innovators look at the world?" The answers that we have found can be summed up by Alan Kay's famous aphorism that perspective is worth 80 IQ points. An innovative insight is not the product of an individual's brilliance. It's not as if innovators' heads are wired in different ways. Innovation typically comes from looking at the world through a slightly different lens. [...] When most people think about the future, they typically take 98% of the industry orthodoxy as a given. That means that before they start, they've already limited their potential for innovation to about 2% of the available "space." To innovate, you need to spot the absurdities that no one else has spotted, to ask the stupid question that no one else has asked, to take some existing performance parameter and push it so far that suddenly you have illuminated a new possibility. [...][FastCompany]
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