Love it or hate it - the Kindle is acting a bit like a bow wave on the e-book front. This post from Crave lays out some of the specs of a new
reader from Netronix. Why is it that I think that as Jeff Bezos continues to apologize for Kindles being sold out, that these other companies are looking at this demand and reacting? The iPhone changed the discussion and I think the Kindle is doing the same.
Want one? Sure you do. Maybe Will Richardson already nailed it with "The iPod of Reading," that's pretty good. EVDO. Long battery life. Great display. Ability to annotate and create notes. Not a bad feature list.
The question is...how bad does this crack at the traditional publishers' idea of what it is they do? You know I could also give a whit about the number of NY Times bestsellers available for purchase on the Kindle, as a father of an 8-year old and a recovering grad student, I want to know what textbook publishers are lined up for the Fall next year. Who will publish PSYCH 101 in a Kindle-friendly format? Then the real question is who will have the guts to make the 2nd edition of PSYCH 101 - which only changes a chapter or two - available as a lower cost add-on to the original?
Want to go green? Then lead the charge in your office or company to buy every new employee a Kindle and stop printing employee manuals. And annual reports. Oh, and conference guides - please save the trees from conference guides.
Geez, the popular novel is the least of my concerns when this kind of technology comes onto the scene.
What if instead of building a better mousetrap, you built a universal mousetrap? That seems to be what Netvibes has done in building its Universal Widget API (check out UWA widgets here). According to Webware, UWA-developed widgets will now run on iGoogle, Apple Dashboard, Opera, Vista and Windows Live and support for Yahoo!'s widget engine is on the way. I know that some purists may rebel at having what appears to be a developing de facto standard 
built by a company but it was clearly needed and there doesn't seem to be a lot of push back on this, in fact people seem most upset that it doesn't go far enough yet. In fact I love the quote in the Webware article about standards mitigating risk and enabling creativity. WIRED had a great story on that as well.
My little post about Gliffy got so much attention that when I stumbled onto this list from Vitaly Friedman, I just had to include it.
Vitaly includes downloaded apps and Web-based, free and commercial and the Comments section is a whole other gold mine of people writing in to add items to the list.
If you haven't check out Blurb yet, you should. (NY TImes article) Blurb is one of the latest in a growing colelction of print-on-demand piblishing services. Included in this group are are others like Lulu, XLibris, and iUniverse. I've actually downloaded Blurb's software for organizing your book and it is rich in functionality and well-designed (meaning I could figure out how to use it).
They all offer slightly different services and pricing levels (e.g. Blurb's lowest is $30 but Lulu prices mainly on a per page basis). Just think though, if you tack on $30 (plus S&H) to your class tuition, then that ugly 3-ring binder could become a very cool artifact from your class - or at the least you could create the book and then offer the choice to your learners about buying it.
(Link)
"Two services run by two people in Australia are giving people new ways to access and use video content from sites like YouTube and Google Video, and copyright holders may well find themselves up in arms about it."
This is a great story about I heard Ellen Wagner mentioned in a speech at SRI - it focuses on the 'consumer effect' - the fact that people at home may well be involved with more advanced technology (at least in parts) than they are at work.
One of my favorite paragraphs: "Here's some advice for IT departments: Get over it. Sure, consumer technology's momentum has reached a dizzying speed, but fighting it is futile and ignoring it means being left behind. A wiser approach is to focus on the opportunity consumer tech presents, both inside the company and out among customers. The first step is accepting that there's a power shift under way, with consumer tech setting the agenda."
The impact of consumer technology within corporations is undeniable and fighting it, as the article states, is just a waste of energy. Why not form focus and study groups of your own internal early adopters and make them part of finding the solution?
Here is the deal...put these MyVu Personal Media Viewers on and hook them to your video iPod and you will see a 320 x 240 display which will appear to float in front of you about a meter away. This resolution and distance get you about a 14 x 17 screen (at least according to the tech spec sheet). The MyVu also incorporates noise-canceling, stereo ear buds and goes for about $269. Not bad specs and not a bad price but I'm not running out to get one for myself just yet.
I am thinking though about how easy it is to create video podcasts (1, 2, 3) and how easy it is to even use online video editing tools (1, 2) . Then you load them up onto the new guy's company-provided iPod and as he walks around the store, the floor or the office campus he can watch orientation videos (you can see thru and around the image as you watch it). Or the tech can load up video tutorials of how to fix the equipment he happens to be looking right at. The tech is here, what we need to do is think about the users and how we could create an experience that improved their workday by using this stuff.
I'm just going to go ahead and assume you're all using Firefox. Maybe not for everything, maybe you haven't made that leap yet, but at least you've downloaded it and are exploring with it right? OK good.
One of the greatest things about an open platform is the genius of the development community that springs up around it. One way that the Firefox community manifests it's passion is by creating extensions. Extensions are add-ons to Firefox that increase existing functionalities or adds new ones. Imagine that, the ability to actually add new functionality to a platform without having to a vendor and pay more money for it or wait 18 months for them to get around to it.
All that is a long way of saying that here (and here) are two great articles which lay out a bunch of the best, most useful extensions available for Firefox. Want to block ads? Discover new sites? Maybe have greater control over tabbed browsing? These are great starters but the real kicker is that with a little research (really just reading through the list of extensions) you can really customize Firefox to be your own personalized browsing experience. I wonder if we could do that with learning applications....
