A couple more thoughts that came to mind since I wrote this post for Shareable about The Daily, and how it completely misses the point of the iPad and social media.

The question you've got to ask with any new technology is, what problem does it solve? The problem the iPad solves is 1) most of our reading is now done on a screen and 2) reading large bodies of text while sitting at a computer fucking sucks. Computers still suffer from the vestigial design limitations of the unwieldy terminals that spawned them--they're devices to enter commands and data into, not read on. Sure, they've evolved to do other things (poorly), but they're still only a stopgap solution for consuming text/audio/video online. The iPad, with its tactile interface and slim, magazine-like form factor is an imperfect but improved device for reading text on the Internet.

So what problem does The Daily and Conde Nast's apps-as-glorified-PDF's solve for the user? They offer less functionality than comparable news websites, which already look great in Mobile Safari. Instapaper already offers the definitive offline reading solution (as far s I can tell, The Daily doesn't even have an offline mode, rendering it particularly pointless.) The problems they theoretically solve exist entirely on the publishers' side: it's easy to repurpose content, control its use, and cling to the old media business models. But in what way are any of these things advantageous to the user? They're not, yet the publishers are charging a premium for a substandard product that is easily bested by free web content through Mobile Safari and cheap or free archiving or aggregation apps like Flipboard, Instapaper and Reeder.

Aside from Murdoch's octogenarian peers who bring iPads to Davos but don't know how to use them, for whom is The Daily compelling or useful?

There's fiction by Brigid J. Barry, Deb R. Lewis, Thomas Mundt, Megan Stielstra and Matt Wood, art by Carrie Sieh, and nonfiction essays by Jeff Severns Guntzel, Mike Zapata and yours truly.

If you enjoy what we've been doing at Is Greater Than, please consider giving it a try and spreading the word. Proceeds will go back into the site and help fund future editions. And as always, thanks for reading!

Buy it here: http://isgreaterthan.net/is-greater-than-digital-omnibus-2010/

I bought an ipad this weekend, and I adore it. This usually-reflexive-cynic is blown away. It makes reading digitally--be the source the Internet, an eBook, or Instapaper--a totally tactile, pleasant, satisfying reading experience. Unlike reading on a browser at a desktop, which I've always found vaguely dissatisfying and frustrating.

Totally pumped, I began work on an ebook anthology of work from Is Greater Than. This is a preview of the first Is Greater Than Digital Omnibus, an eBook designed for the iPad and other ePub-compatible eReaders. This is a very rough draft of what I hope to have submitted to the iBooks store and other eBook outlets by the end of the week. It will include features, art, comics, creative nonfiction, humor writing and fiction by myself, Brigid J. Barry, Jeff Severns Guntzel, Deb R. Lewis, Thomas Mundt, Carrie Sieh, Megan Stielstra and more.

I didn't know a single thing about authoring epub ebooks before this weekend; it is ridiculously simple. Here's a post I just wrote for Shareable.net about how you can make your own epub books (which, for the record Cory Doctorow et al, are as easy to drag and drop into iTunes and sync with the iPad, DRM-free, as mp3's have been with every iteration of the iPod and iPhone since version one.) Read it here.

The new zinemaking is how I see it. Fuck yeah.

This post written on my iPad.

Just got back from a group workshop meeting for 2nd Story. If you’re not familiar, 2nd Story is a theater collective I’ve been working with that produces readings at wine bars around Chicago. The process is what sets it apart from other reading series: 2nd Story pull actors and directors from the theater world to workshop pieces of short narrative nonfiction with writers, to craft the stories and their performances into something that people at a wine bar will actually want to engage with while imbibing.

It’s challenging for me: frustrating, rewarding. All of my prior performance experience comes from playing in bands, where the only verbal interaction with the audience was short quips in-between songs. While performing the songs, the guitar served as a crutch separating myself from the audience, and I was performing practiced, relatively polished songs with a group of other people. We were delivering loud, complete products with clearly delineated beginnings and ends, barreling over chatter and indifference with unnecessarily loud amps.

Performing a ten-minute short story, alone on a stage with a spotlight on you, there’s none of that contract that separates band from audience; instead, you’re having an intimate experience with an audience that demands you respect the give and take of the room. You need to be agile and comfortable enough with to riff off the audience and the unexpected, to feel the ebbs and flows of the room in the moment. A band has to consider this, but is far less agile: once you’re locked into a song, you’re committed to finishing that song, and there’s little course-correction to be made.

If they’re not going your way, you steamroll your way through it. In a reading, it’s a much more delicate give and take with the audience. This is terrifying. From the writing standpoint, it’s also challenging: I’m still finding my voice for narrative nonfiction, a far different form from feature articles or half-baked culture punditry or satirical riffs or fantastic/satirical short fiction, all forms I’m a lot more familiar and comfortable with. Certain skills can be transposed, but there are a whole load of new ones to develop. Particularly, writing for a live audience, not readers.

It’s tough and scary and frustrating, but worthwhile. I also suspect that a lot of what I’m getting from this can be used to inform my other writing. Seems like in the current new media/publishing climate, honing your writing so it can hold the attention of a groups of drunks in bars, well, that’s a skill that would serve me well to consider when writing for the web audience.

Anyway, this is already TL;DR, but a few notes from today’s meeting about writing with performing in mind, that I found particularly useful:

Have an hypothetical, ideal audience member in your mind that you are specifically speaking to—I know this is a writing trick—to have a hypothetical reader you’re writing for. It’s one that I’ve deployed in the past. I hadn’t thought about doing something similar when performing for an audience.

Not every response to an unexpected audience action needs to be a witty zinger. A genuine response is just as valid and effective.

Live in the scene - create eye contact with the character you’re speaking to, when speaking those lines - have first scene and last scene memorized - memorize first sentence of each paragraph

Trust your instinctual reaction to the stimuli around you. Unless of course, your immediate instinctual reaction is, as it is for me: “FLEE!”

Crossposted from my Tumblr, Eventual Ghost

I’m often amused, tickled, etc about things I come across while walking around Chicago, IL. This is a collection of pics I’ve too-long kept hidden on the private Facebook.

This could work in a few cases—tween-pop stars such as Miley Cyrus that command singular devotion from their fans—but not for mature music listeners with a large collection of artists in their library. What the new band app craze reminds me of more than anything is the failed enhanced CD initiatives of yore, in which labels were going to add value to physical CD’s by forcing anyone who played music on their computers to interface with it inside of a clunky, frustrating Flash or Quicktime file that offered the exact same content you’d find on the artist’s website.

The headline zooming around the blogs right now is correct on one thing: the album is dying*. But the statement should be more along these lines: the album is dead, long live the playlist. Or long live Random Shuffle. Or iTunes Genius. Trying to create a new product that locks users into one app, particularly given the iPhone’s unscalable app interface and Apple’s insistence on not allowing third-party apps to run in the background, is just another in a long line of failed attempts by the music industry to create a new bundled product that only a handful of obsessives would want.

* And yes, I realize that such a statement sounds contradictory coming a few days after I announced that I’m working on a new album, and to that I say: the album isn’t quite dead yet. The writing’s on the wall, but as long as there are olds who still have some emotional connection to the concept of the album, there will remain a continually shrinking market for it. In addition, the infrastructure just isn’t there to sell and promote single songs or short EP’s for an independent, unsigned artist--to get your music on iTunes, Amazon mp3, CDBaby, etc, it still has to be delivered in album form. This will no doubt change in the next few years, as the emotional attachment to the album continues to fade (I can’t remember the last time I had the desire to listen to a full album, and I’m 33, not 19,), but it’s certainly not going to change in six months or a year.

Take the music industry. You come closer to spelling out where it’s going to go.

A: Music’s already there. We don’t have to guess about what the future of music is; we can already see it. It’s interesting as an analogy. We wrongly correlated, or equated, the music industry with the record labels. It now turns out in fact that the labels are now the least important part. If you look at the rest of the industry now, from the bands to the fans from Apple to tour promoters, everyone’s doing OK, except for the labels. So there’s really nothing wrong with the music industry; we’re just redefining what it is. And I wonder whether we’re going to see a similar fragmentation and reformation of media. Right now, media is defined as those who own the presses – the presses meaning either the physical presses or broadcast towers or whatever. We’re beginning to see a new class of professional media which operate on internet economics. They’re still small, and they don’t make anything like the money.

Really? Everyone’s doing OK other than the labels? Anderson is making a common mistake here (like most people who have opinions on the future of the music business, but know absolutely nothing about it.) First off, the claim that everyone is doing “OK” no doubt extrapolates from the cases of artists like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Dave Matthews Band etc, who, of course, are doing OK. They’ve got money in the bank, they’ve got a healthy number of fans (and cross-promotional marketing opportunities) to ensure that they will continue to do “OK”. Like many a tech evangelist before him, Anderson is assuming that these rare instances represent the bulk of the music industry, ignoring the huge majority of bands out there that are operating on a working-class income level. To generalize how these bands are doing—again, the majority of working bands—by using Radiohead as a model is like trying to extrapolate how independent books stores are doing by looking at Amazon’s sales figures. The difference in scale is immense.

To determine how most of these working bands are doing would be very difficult. Collecting metrics on this would demand getting actually profit/loss sheets from working professional bands, a difficult proposition since 1) many of them don’t track that shit very well and 2) the ones that do are loath to talk about the economics of being in a band and guard their bands’ financial information with a Steve Jobs-esque level of secrecy. This is complicated all the more because it’s always been difficult for working bands. As record sales decline, gas prices rise and ticket sales soften due to the economy, are these bands really doing “OK”? It’s hard to say conclusively. Many of them would probably say that it’s always been hard to be a professional musician, and it’s getting continually tougher with each year. Unless Anderson wants to pull out some actual numbers demonstrating how the economic situation has improved in the past decade for 90% of the working bands out there on the road, he might want to think twice about using the music industry as a model for his free new world.

via the Daily Swarm

Reporting needs to get paid for. But denying everything that has been learned in the past decade as to how people use and interact with content on the web is absolute unmitigated insanity. It's almost as if the people in the business who are making these arguments want to commit career suicide.

You know the basic argument; it's made by your Reason Magazine-subscribing acquaintance whenever there's a large public outpouring of grief over an event deemed unimportant by said bastion of reason and logic. And of course, it's a bit ridiculous for your average person to experience sadness about a person-as-abstract-concept, a faraway figure of wealth and decadence. That doesn't make the sorrow any less valid, however. And these responses don't make a reasonable argument; instead, they're merely the outbursts of trolls expressing their narcissism of minor differences.
Skeptics can tut-tut all they want, and (rightly) wonder why more people are choked up about the death of a pop star, than, say, yesterday's reports of the increasing death toll in Iraq. Fair enough. But to express confusion at why so many people are affected by this death in particular, and suggest that this sadness is merely a ridiculous response to a minor event, is disingenuous at best.

For people between the ages of, oh, 25-45, Michael Jackson is a vector of childhood nostalgia. He's the last of an era of bigger-than-god pop stars, the sort of figures that people feel a personal identification with, no matter how much (in this case) that figure was troubled/disturbed/potentially criminal. There won't be another figure like MJ, and his passing, I think, represents to people the passing of a certain era with which a distinct generational span feels a real, personal identification with. People aren't necessarily mourning Michael Jackson--an abstract public figure who's been the subject of primarily public scorn for the past 15-20 years--but the passing of something more personal and intangible. And yes, that may be somewhat maudlin and nostalgic, but it's a valid emotional response to a news event this size. It may be, to some degree, misplaced, but it's far from silly or ridiculous.