Interview with Shirky on social reading, which point to the how people use what they read. A few side remarks on publishing:"Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done."

Brief column on making that MIT move to open sourcing content. Plan. Use your own server. Use your own CMS (wiki). Promote to admin.

A BOOK CROWDSOURCED IN ONE WEEK MAY 21-28, 2010. A little thin. More like an academic magazine than a multigraph.

Be visible, be findable: "But in their cost-benefit calculus they often forget to factor in the hidden costs of publishing in a closed way. The largest hidden cost is the invisibility of what you publish. When you publish somewhere that is behind gates, or in paper only, you are resigning all of that hard work to invisibility in the age of the open web. You may reach a few peers in your field, but you miss out on the broader dissemination of your work, including to potential other fans."

TechCrunch meets Fortune and sparcs fly off the paper. The whole snafu is caused by an intern, that's clear. But it does dramatize the clash of currencies.

Superb primer on designing text for devices - with links. Read it

"The order of things in broadcast is "filter, then publish." The order in communities is "publish, then filter." If you go to a dinner party, you don't submit your potential comments to the hosts, so that they can tell you which ones are good enough to air before the group, but this is how broadcast works every day. Writers submit their stories in advance, to be edited or rejected before the public ever sees them. Participants in a community, by contrast, say what they have to say, and the good is sorted from the mediocre after the fact."

a response to Ted Genoways "The Death of Fiction?""We could buy books directly from authors whenever possible so that they're getting a more just cut. We need to re-conceptualize how we think about exchange and consumption. "

Kathleen Fitzpatrick. Book is being written with CommentPress

Proboscis in action.

The FLOSS Manuals Project wants to change all by bringing open source concepts to publishing. They are engaged in building a platform and community designed to get interesting books published and do it on faster cycles. I recently had a chance to participate in a FLOSS Manual Book Sprint as they worked on a Firefox Manual

A few anecdotes about publishers malingering in the pre-digital age. Inky hubris. Makes the alternative of print on demand look good. "Publisher friends, I tell you this because I am your friend; I value your contribution and I like you. I want to work with you. But this is an intervention. You need to look at writers and illustrators as partners and collaborators and treat them as such. It’s time to step up in a spirit of partnership, "

Fun stuff, with a Wired editor arguing for causation, an academic author arguing a fluke, and commentators arguing both ways. The article is written so that all can have their say, which by my book, is the New Journalism.

Utilities and toys for printing and mashups.

Weblogs and Wiki: Pay Matt's site a visit.

The following is a set of notes, written over several months, in an attempt to weave together a number of ideas that have emerged in the course of the institute's work. I'm hoping for a lot of feedback. If there's enough interest, we'll put this into CommentPress so that the discussion can be more extensive than the blog's comment field.

Article by K Fitzpatrick published in CommentPress.

The New York Times has certainly embraced blogging, but it was striking to see in this post from The Lede just how much they’ve embraced link journalism: