“ iTunes is dead. But it’s still the big play. Microsoft became trapped in the Windows legacy and now, it appears, that Apple is becoming trapped into the iTunes legacy.”
Circa Blog: The Right Package for the Right Information
There are some smart folks over at Circa:
The language change is minimal - from “content” to “information,” but the subtle shift alters how we think about a product and how users can engage with it.
Creating “content” implies a certain packaging. We are producing “video” content or “text” content. Even “multimedia” content denotes a packaging with a pretty bow for the consumers to appreciate. If information, as they say, wants to be free - then it can be packaged in unique ways that content cannot.
As I read it, Borthwick is suggesting that information has an inherent value. While content, as we traditionally think of it, is chock filled with information its value isn’t inherent but manufactured and mediated for the audience.
There will be much to discover at Circa but at the heart of it I believe Circa will value information over content.
I couldn’t agree more.
“ We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable. That leave you with the sense that that’s the only possible solution that makes sense.”
Make Your Own Magazine
The Verge reports:
Arc90, the team behind Readability, is today introducing Readlists, a new website / web app that lets you create your own ebooks from your favorite articles online… The concept is simple: click “create Readlist,” paste in whichever URLs you’d like in your book, add a title and custom descriptions, and share.
You can export your book in either the near-universal ePub format, or send it directly to your Kindle. The option to send to iPhone/iPad does exactly the same thing as “Email e-book,” and seems to be there just to push Apple users in the right direction.
While I’ve been enjoying Instapaper’s similar feature for some time now, I worry about such an official, explicit, marketed product. It’s hard for the publishing industry, the people paying most of the writers whose pieces you include in your custom magazines, to view this as anything but a threat.
Watch: with a few editoral successes, sites will start attempting to lock down their content.
“ Opinion polls show over 75 percent of Greeks want to stay in the euro, but two thirds oppose an international bailout, a lifeline which came with harsh salary, pension and job cuts.”
“ ABC 4 confirmed through another independent source that the Apple deal is pretty sweet. Not only is Apple coming to City Creek [Salt Lake City], but Carlson’s sources tell him City Creek is giving Apple 5 years free rent.”
“”In one tenderness test, researchers cooked muscles to medium, punched out half-inch plugs of meat and set them in a machine that measures the force it takes to shear them in half. Promising cuts were given names like the Sierra, the Western Griller and the Petite Tender.
“If we can dig out a muscle and use it in a new way that hasn’t been done before, it seems to me we are obligated to give that muscle an identity so someone can understand what it is,” said Dr. Calkins, the Nebraska professor.
This will never end up on a How It’s Made.
