Amazon.com Widgets
via theatlantic.com
quickmeme.com
ap via nbc news
While I’ve been busy doing whatever (looking for a new home, etc.), I missed a few big birthdays here in online-land.
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Tim Berners-Lee opened the first public World Wide Web site on 4/30/93 at the CERN particle-physics lab in Switzerland. For the occasion, that site has been put back up at its original URL.
Berners-Lee was, and still is, an idealist. In the original CERN site’s documents, he described the WWW as something that could open up information to the masses.
Instead of “walled garden” online networks such as CompuServe, Prodigy, and the original AOL, the Web would be open to all comers and contributors. Anybody could put anything on, or receive anything from, it.
This ultimate “disruptive technology,” creator of LOLcat memes and destroyer of newspapers, record labels, and middle-class livelihoods, got its start with the most noble of intentions.
(Just like many a mad-scientist-movie experiment.)
By pure coincidence, the first issue of Wired magazine was out that same month.
From the start, it was intended to be a lot more important than a mere buying guide to PC gear. It was to chronicle tech as the biggest economic, societal, and even ideological movement of our time.
It posited loudmouth, alpha-male San Franciscan Libertarians as the Voice of the Future. It sneered at governments, residents of “Tired” locales (France, Manhattan, Seattle), and people who dared to think about the well-being of others as backward-thinking parasites.
In the world according to the early Wired, CEOs were the new rock stars, even the new royalty. No social or environmental issue could be discussed in its pages, unless there was a potential solution that would also enrich (or at least never inconvenience) big business.
In the end, the bosses and bosses’ lackeys Wired worshipped got most of their way.
And as cyber-critic Jason Lanier notes, the 99 Percent are still trying to pick up the pieces.
That same week 10 years later, Apple launched the first version of the iTunes Store.
The iTunes application had been around since 2001, when Apple bought and revamped a third-party program called SoundJam MP.
Steve Jobs had identified music (and eventually general media) playback as a technology in which Apple had to lead, for the sake of the company’s survival. Otherwise, Windows-only applications and file formats (remember WinAmp?) would shut out Mac users, threatening Apple’s presence in home environments. By making iTunes, and making a Windows version of it, Jobs and co. stayed in the home-computer game.
Two years later, Windows Media-only file protection schemes were threatening to put a lock on “legal” (commercial) music downloads. Again, the Mac and its users would be shut out. Apple’s response not only had to be Windows-compatible, it had to dominate the market on both platforms.
The iTunes Store did that, and more.
Its stand-alone hardware adjuct, the iPod, quickly dominated the new market of portable digital music machines.
And along the way, iTunes allegedly “killed the old music industry.”
(Of course, many of us felt the old music industry had deserved to die, but that’s not the point here.)
But now, the notion of music downloads seems as archaic as the notion of buying music on little compact discs.
The big hype these days is for streaming music subscriptions, a field which Apple has yet to enter.
Yet through all these industry changes, one thing remains constant.
Most recording artists themselves still get the fiscal shaft.
wu ming, via daily kos
via cartoonbrew.com
'every driver every time it ever rains ever'
slate
wikipedia via king5.com
factmag.com
via wikipedia
Pay close attention to the above image.
It indirectly has to do with a topic that’s been going around here of late, including on this site.
The premise: Seattle has become the new nexus of the book industry.
Amazon now firmly pulls the strings of both print and e-book sales, at least in the realm of “trade books.”
Costco and Starbucks also hold huge influence over what the nation reads.
Nancy Pearl’s NPR book recommendations hold huge sway.
And we buy lots of books for local consumption, giving Seattle readers an outsized role in making bestsellers and cult classics.
See anything missing in the above?
How about actual “publishing” and “editing”?
Now to explain our little graphic.
Cincinnati companies once had an outsize influence in the TV production business.
Procter & Gamble owned six daytime soaps, which in turn owned weekday afternoons on the old “big three” networks.
Taft (later Great American) Broadcasting owned Hanna-Barbera, which in turn owned Saturday mornings on the networks.
But if you think of TV content actually shot in Cincinnati, you’ll probably remember only the credits to the L.A.-made WKRP In Cincinnati.
And maybe a similar title sequence on P&G’s N.Y.-made The Edge of Night.
We’re talking about one of America’s great “crossroads” places. A town literally on the border between the Rust Belt and the South, in a Presidential-election “swing state,” often overshadowed by cross-state rival Cleveland. A place with innumerable potential stories to tell.
But few of these potential stories have made either the small or big screens.
The last series set in Cincinnati was the short-lived Kathy Bates drama Harry’s Law.
The only TV fare made in Cincinnati has been a couple of obscure reality shows.
The lesson of the above: prominence in the business side of media content isn’t the same as prominence in the making of media content.
What of the latter, bookwise, is in Seattle?
Fantagraphics has tremendous market share and creative leadership in graphic novels and in comic-strip compilation volumes.
Amazon’s own nascent publishing ventures have, so far, aroused more media attention than sales.
Becker & Mayer packages and edits coffee-table tomes for other publishers, and now also provides books and “other paper-based entertainment… direct to retailers.”
The relative upstart Jaded Ibis Productions combines literature, art, and music in multimedia products for the digital era.
We’ve also got our share of university presses, “regional” presses, and mom-n’-pop presses.
Still, the UW’s English Department site admits that…
Seattle is not exactly a publishing hub… so job openings are very limited and most local presses are small and specialized.… In any location, those seeking jobs in editing and publishing far exceed the number of jobs available; competition is very vigorous.
And these are the sorts of jobs people relocate to get, or even to try to get.
Of course, Seattle also has many writers and cartoonists of greater and lesser renown. But that’s a topic for another day.
neil hubbard via cousearem.wordpress.com
tom banse via kplu
networkawesome.com
seattle dept. of transportation
…historically the stingiest, most fiscally conservative, most technologically resistant and investment-averse people ever, with the highest percentage of luddites per capita.
seatacmedia.org
Earlier this year, KUOW and MOHAI came up with a list of 25 “objects that tell Seattle’s story.”
They range from the obvious (a Boeing B-17, a poster announcing the Japanese-American internment, a Starbucks coffee cup) to the more obscure (an ancient, giant ground sloth).
A little more recently, SeattlePI.com ran a list of “25 things we miss in Seattle.”
These also ranged from the truly famous (the Lusty Lady sign, Frederick & Nelson’s window displays) to the lesser known (the Woodland Park Zoo’s nocturnal-creatures exhibit).
I’ve got my own list of Seattle pop culture icons. All of them are things I’ve personally seen or owned.
And yes, there are 25 of them. (Why break a routine that works?)
In no particular order, they are:
via jerry beck at indiewire.com
latimes.com
So much has been written already about the beloved film critic, TV host, author, Russ Meyer screenwriter, champion of obscure good films, vilifier of stinkeroos, and stoic survivor of one of the worst cancers anybody ever had.
I can only repeat what’s already been said—that Ebert was admirably both a film-lore geek and a populist, a man of aesthetic standards who wasn’t above enjoying (and helping make) down-n’-dirty exploitation, and a great wit.
Here are two pieces of his that have been rediscovered of late.
In the first piece from 2010, he looks back at his post-adolescence, in an era when college administrations still actively attempted to prevent students from having sex.
Then in his 2011 memoir Life Itself, he discusses his completely grody cancer and says, “I do not fear death.” And he explains his political stance:
“Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world.
Here are reminiscences of Ebert by two Seattleite members of his longtime blogging team, Jeff Shannon and my ol’ UW Daily staffmate Jim Emerson.
8tracks.com
As I’ve written here before (see category tag “books”), the book industry is not, repeat NOT, dying.
(That’s the newspaper industry, the music industry, and the non-cable TV industry.)
Book sales have held their own in this one-two punch era of economic blecch and Internet “disruption” better than most any other “old media” business, with the possible exception of movie theaters.
And the percentage of book sales held by indie bookstores has also held about even. Online and e-book sales ate disproportionately into the revenues of big chain bookstores, leading directly to Borders’ collapse.
For a more thorough look at the book biz—past, present, and future—check out “What Is the Business of Literature?,” an essay by Richard Nash for the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Nash believes, as do I, that the literary biz has been a hidebound, inefficient beast, and that the sooner it gets dragged kicken’-n’-screamin’ into the modern age, the better:
Book culture is in far less peril than many choose to assume, for the notion of an imperiled book culture assumes that book culture is a beast far more refined, rarified, and fragile than it actually is. By defining books as against technology, we deny our true selves, we deny the power of the book. Let’s restore to publishing its true reputation—not as a hedge against the future, not as a bulwark against radical change, not as a citadel amidst the barbarians, but rather as the future at hand, as the radical agent of change, as the barbarian. The business of literature is blowing shit up.
