If you read one thing today …

We’re going to try something new at Meanland. (Actually, it’s something shamelessly ‘borrowed’ from Meanjin’s Fat Cactus. In fact, all the cool blogs across the interwebs seem to be doing it.) This ‘something new’ is to post 5 links and a bonus video once a week. Links that we likely tweeted, but who has time to follow all those labyrinthine data trails across the internet?

So let us begin.

If you read one thing today … make sure it’s one of these:

1. Awe and the machine

By the twentieth century, some cynicism had crept into descriptions of the newest machines. Writing about the impact of radio on his rural Maine community, E. B. White observed, “One of the chief pretenders to the throne of God is radio itself, which has acquired a sort of omniscience.” In the lives of the people in his town, the radio exerted a “pervading and somewhat godlike presence.” But it was also something to which they turned daily for advice and instruction. As White wryly noted, “The church merely holds out the remote promise of salvation: the radio tells you if it’s going to rain tomorrow.” 



Today, we no longer approach our many machines with awe …

2. On transparency, tracking data, and the new journalism: How The Guardian is pioneering data journalism with free tools

The technology involved is surprisingly simple, and mostly free. The Guardian uses public, read-only Google Spreadsheets to share the data they’ve collected, which require no special tools for viewing and can be downloaded in just about any desired format. Visualizations are mostly via Many Eyes and Timetric, both free.

Data Blog posts are often related to or supporting of news stories, but not always. Rogers sees the publishing of interesting data as a journalistic act that stands alone, and is clear on where the newsroom adds value:

I think you have to apply journalistic treatment to data. You have to choose the data in a selective, editorial fashion. And I think you have to process it in a way that makes it easy for people to use, and useful to people.

3. On writing, publishing and money: The glamorous life? (Notes from the indie trenches) part one

Still, everyone in publishing knows what book tours are really for, and it’s not money. As indie-publishing-god Richard Nash put it, when I asked him if book tours are worth it: “I wouldn’t separate out the book tour and ask is it worth it. We shouldn’t be doing anything to market books if it isn’t providing a decent return. But we have to look more holistically at the return. For a debut writer who tends write 20 books in a lifetime, to spend $500 cultivating a relationship with a few influential book people in a given town—a blogger, a critic, a local producer and two bookstore staff persons, could provide a superb ROI even if you only sell 8 books that day. But to land in a town, meet no one, sell 35 books at the local B&N, and move onto the next, that might not be worth it at all. It is all about making connections between people …”

(Booksquare’s post on Wylie’s Odyssey editions well worth reading, also: Today in publishing: a skirmish)

4. On small presses, technology and digital publishing: Byte-Sized Books

Of course, online readers can be fickle and attracting them is by no means automatic. Structures in place for selling books—wandering into bookstores, perusing covers, seeing what people are buying, talking to clerks—don’t exist online, which means that publishers, even small ones, can’t do business the same way. “A 12-, 24- or 34-year-old stumbles into things differently than a 12-, 24- or 34-year-old 20 years ago,” said Electric Literature co-founder Scott Lindenbaum, who, with co-founder Andy Hunter,* worked every day of the week for six months to ensure that the business would exist one year after they sold 3,600 iPhone apps of their literary magazine in July 2009. Embodying the little-guy economy maxim that marketing and product are becoming the same thing, they spend 70 percent of their time creating digital content and promotional material to tacitly remind trollers of YouTube, blogs, and other virtual spaces of their existence.

5. On drinking and endless ebook speculation: E-books article drinking game

Bonus footage:

On creepy music videos and stock footage: A very creepy music video made entirely of stock footage from Getty Images Archives