The New York Observer’s MondoWeiss: How the Internet Is Replacing the Book

Self-publishing on the web, whether through blogs or by posting articles in web-journals, is rapidly eclipsing traditional academic venues in its ability to serve the public and popularize knowledge. For example, I have an impact on policy making in Washington and capitals across the globe through my blog, which has close to 2,000
readers a day. Many of my readers are from a blue-chip list of policy wonks who have email tags from the leading think tanks and government agencies. Moreover scores of journalists are reading my site every day. I speak to at least 10 journalists a week, who use me and my site for story ideas, background information, and contacts. I was quoted in over 1,000 articles last year while living in Damascus. If my relatively modest, country-specific site is having an impact, Juan Cole’s is many times larger. He was getting a quarter million readers a month at the height of the Iraq war. Web-publishing and blogging is reconnecting academics to main-stream intellectual discourse.

In the middle of Alex Barnett’s blog entry on “Statcrunching” is the mention of Netvibes

Anything that grows at the rate that Alex has captured is worth looking at.
In terms of easily getting an overview of where my life is at I use ….

iCal on the Mac for calendar
Technorati for Bookmarks
Apple’s Dashboard for widgets etc
My Yahoo for RSS feeds
etc
etc

However with Netvibes I can integrate most of this in the one desk top.
Already, even after an hour I have …

1) Reorganised all my Bookmarks and have a nice bookmarks “cloud”
2) Have my eBay sales status ain a little box
3) Same page have both my Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts with unread mail
4) Also have del.i.cious bookmarks in a box as they are a lot of extra ones I have
5) Have set up four tabs for RSS feeds to cover blogging, publishing, technology and others
6) Have my calendar there also

and the good thing is if I go to another computer when I’m travelling or whatever the same screens will be there. What a time saver and a brilliant leading edge solution.

Once you have added a new “box” to the page you can specify how many entries you want shown and also move the box around so that if you want your mail on the left and search and eBay on the right it is easily achieved.

It’s a true drag and drop format.

It’s a bit strange when you first go to the home page of Netvibes because there are no instructions you just have to get started.

This is an excellent tool with lots of enhancements in the pipeline.
Here is a snapshot of some of my first page to give you an idea.

The Blog page is even better because what used to take several screens in MyYahoo RSS reader now takes one!

Alex Barnett blog : More FeedBurner statcrunching

What a great article Chris Anderson wrote for Times On Line.

Just shows that with blogging, you can grow in a niche, publish a book and it never needs to go near a book store

With a third of Amazon’s book sales coming from titles outside of the top 100,000, and growing, it sets you thinking about where we all will get our own particular pieces of information from in the future!

When you think on this …

“Most of the top 50 bestselling albums of all time were recorded in the Seventies and Eighties (the Eagles, Michael Jackson), and none of them was made in the past five years. Hollywood box-office revenue was down by more than 6 per cent in 2005, reflecting the reality that the cinema-going audience is falling even as the population grows.”

and this …

“No 1 is still No 1, but the sales that go with that are not what they once were.”

and this …

“although we still obsess over hits, they are not quite the economic force they once were. Where are those fickle consumers going instead? No single place. They are scattered to the winds as markets fragment into countless niches.”

Read Chris’s excellent article here … and support him … buy his book!

Brave new world of a million niches beats the blockbusters – Business – Times Online

Enjoyed Eoin Purcell’s post “Is the future bright? Books, Digitisation and Evil!

I believe iTunes will eventually meld with MySpace.

Or the future derivatives of them. Just as individuals can load podcasts up to iTunes the day will come when it will not only be the large record companies domain.

I remember getting my first Mac and laser printer in 1984. Suddenly all those one page brochures and leaflets that were printed by printers via advertising agencies became the domain of people with a Mac. That impact has lasted through to now where a large majority of people in the graphic industry use Macs. This changed a paragdigm. Jobs did it again with iTunes. Back then nobody bitched about postscript being an enabling language, they just used the machines.

Yes its a different world now but someone had to provide a solution that worked seemlessly for the user. Like the Mac and the laser printer. There are many lasr printers now and lots of programs to use them. MacDraw and MacPaint are no more. Pagemaker is hanging on. iTunes will not be the only format forever but without the paradign shift would I be driving to work listening to a podcast from London about publishing here in Australia?

While iTunes is talked about being a virtual monopoly MySpace should be seen as more of a threat to publishers. Given that companies like Lulu and Booksurge can produce physical books they can be marketed directly to the world by the author and delived as an eBook or as hard copy. At least publishers are in the game with iTunes but maybe not for long. Most minor bands and artists in the world have MySpace accounts and sell their tracks from there. No record companies involved. Their community of fans visit their MySpace every day to check if anything is new. A whole new paradigm. The next step may be linking MySpace and iTunes so that there is a commercial market for even the one man band!

So … yes there are two ways to go but I believe the trend will be that most of the publishing market will go direct from the artist to the consumer with “bestsellers” being picked up by traditional companies who have the bookshops and record stores. Just wonder though who will visit them.

Cheers
Paul Niederer pubbys.com

<a xhref=”http://www.pubbys.com” mce_href=”http://www.pubbys.com”>pubbys.com</a>

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Not sure if you are like me.

Besides subscribing to around 40 blogs I get my news now through RSS feeds I want to get. Just the topics I’m interested in withh one general news feed to make sure I dont miss out on something that is current.

This means that the daily newspaper is no longer delivered. That leads on to something spotted on Hypergene. Buffett says “Newspapers are a business in permanent decline”

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A while a go a good blogger Ed Dale posted a great article on the dot.com boom happening again.  Business week now have an article that looks at what is happening in Silicon Vallley. Well worth reading!

If you are building your own on-line business through Blogging or whatever it pays to reflect a bit on if you have an exit strategy or not.

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