Reasons why Jeff Bezos is your friend:

• Price of Kindle is without contract. He could have followed the cell carrier model and subsidized the device by having you sign a two year contract which would ultimately cost more. But they did not do this. I think this points a way forward for print and magazines, a way to get money for content. Eventually all the limitations of the screen resolution and lack of colour will be resolved, or people will complain less about the backlight. As on a laptop. Imagine colour, every magazine in print, back issues, books, out of print, back catalog, you name it. In 60 seconds. Searchable. Cross referenced. Links to the web.

That is what I had intended to write. Instead;

Today we saw the release of Kindle for iPhone and at least the app is free! Immediately I downloaded the app, and went to the Amazon web page on my computer to get snacking! Because that is what we are supposed to be doing on the iPhone, short form reading, correct?

Lets subscribe to a magazine, they need help! Who’s in trouble? Newsweek looks pretty thin lately, let’s give ‘em a buck forty nine a month huh? So you login, you click the One Click and……….you get redirected to this:

Not registered you say-but what is that device listed in your Manage your Kindle page-my ‘frickn iPhone that’s what!

Two unresponded emails to Amazon customer service go by, and eventually through googling “kindle for iPhone does not work” gets me to this on iPhone lounge where they have figured out that indeed, only books are available for the iPhone, and those colourful glossies called magazines, which should be ripe for “short form” reading and browsing, are not available.

A bigger question is why should I pay 1.49 for content that is available online for free?

Nobody likes paywalls but I think we are going to have to differentiate based on time perhaps, who gets what when. Subscribers get immediate web updates of magazines and newpapers, as it is now. Everyone else can read it for free a day or week later. We already see that with Hulu, episodes of current shows (ok…you got me…Battlestar Galactica…) are delayed a week from air. I am completely fine with waiting a week to see this online and save myself the cable subscriber fees. I still see the advertising.

If I want my New York Times or New Yorker before anyone else, I should pay. Otherwise wait a day or a week. Blogs can still create links, they just can’t do it within seconds of an article appearing online. Perhaps bloggers could pay (hey-there’s a idea!) to scrape. And get paid to be scraped. It would at least create a marketplace for content and support the people who create it.

We talk about mental transaction overhead-why people don’t want to pay for these things. At some point you have to live in the real world of food and rent, don’t you?

Print is ready to go. Don’t want to hear no guff about the ancient TV, the Steely Dan album or the turntable. Check out the show details here.

Here are a few different concepts for ebook readers, mine on the lower left, essentially a larger iPhone, Classicapp, available now for the iPhone, Greg Raiz’s concept for a resdesign of Kindle (via daringfireball.net) with less clutter, and Plastic logic, currently vapourwear but who knows.

It is interesting to read the comments on Greg’s redesign and what is argued over, colour vs. not colour, keyboard vs. not keyboard. etc. We are all very concerned with how the object is the make or break aspect of reading books and magazines on an electronic device. My last post also focused on the importance of the feel of the object, how Apple gets form factor right. (sometimes)

The more I look in to this however, (being a blog I have spent, oh, probably 10 minutes but who is counting?) the more I see a glaring issue that is probably the single biggest obstacle-format wars. Consider how many different formats and ways we have of representing text and images on screen, html, pdf, text, Word, ePub, eReader format, whatever form of DRM Amazon is using, etc. We haven’t even begun to develop the marketplace for electronic reading and already it is balkanized. 

You thought it was hard for Apple to get some sort of consensus from the music labels for the iTunes music store, this is more of the same. Amazon perhaps has the headstart now with two versions of the Kindle and their massive catalogue behind them. But don’t be fooled by the device. The device is critical, but the format is where the real money is. 

You will probably see the entire magazine and newspaper publishing industry go down in flames before you will see a consensus on how to deliver the product to a handheld device. A magazine publisher would do well to throw in with someone soon, although there is no real competition (Apple, where are you?-SJ famously said he was not interested in the market because no one reads anymore. I hope he was being disingenuous). 

You could envision a bundle where the reader is subsidized by the publisher, buy a Kindle and get to select from a few magazine subscriptions to get you started. Here is Popular Mechanics and oh, by the way, the entire archive going back to 1945 is there too. Vogue back to 1935. I think the obstacles are probably not what we think they are. All of this eInk technology hubbub is a tempest in a teapot. We already read more from LCD’s than paper. I believe the eInk thing is a canard. “Market Research” said that people don’t like reading online but the question is more about typography, presentation, and screen resolution. We now have small hi resolution devices that are more than adequate for reading. It will get better. This is not the issue. Bandwidth, there is a real issue, 3G is the bare minimum and laughable that North America is still stumbling along with this. Blame your phone, cable and internet provider. Detect a pattern here from my last post?

There is a great opportunity here that is going a begging and we are  not arguing over the right issues. Format, DRM, Service.

Publishers, get on board while you still have staff left to publish…

“The easy Internet ad dollars of the late 1990s enticed newspapers and magazines to put all of their content, plus a whole lot of blogs and whistles, onto their websites for free. But the bulk of the ad dollars has ended up flowing to groups that did not actually create much content but instead piggybacked on it: search engines, portals and some aggregators.

…

But things have changed. “With newspapers entering bankruptcy even as their audience grows, the threat is not just to the companies that own them, but also to the news itself,” wrote the savvy New York Times columnist David Carr last month in a column endorsing the idea of paid content. This creates a necessity that ought to be the mother of invention. In addition, our two most creative digital innovators have shown that a pay-per-drink model can work when it’s made easy enough: Steve Jobs got music consumers (of all people) comfortable with the concept of paying 99 cents for a tune instead of Napsterizing an entire industry, and Jeff Bezos with his Kindle showed that consumers would buy electronic versions of books, magazines and newspapers if purchases could be done simply.”

Walter Isascson, Time Magazine

Lincoln, Darwin, and the Penny

February is the cruelest month. It is also the month of my birthday, and other brilliant people like me, Lincoln and Darwin to name two. I’m sure there are plenty of other stupid people too. 

Recently Walter Isaacson, now there is a segue, wrote a piece in Time magazine about saving newspapers. Good thing he wrote it too, Time magazine was all of 56 pages, I guess getting a ringer in can keep the team in the game.

He traces the development of media online, from the early days as magazines and newspapers tried to figure out how this was going to work. All of them ran up against what I have called the TV mentality, or the idea that what is on the screen should be free, or monetized by advertising.  I think there has been a confusion between the ideals of the internet, that information should flow freely and be universally accessible, and how it has turned out, the conflation of the TV mentality with the idealism of the internet. We are stuck at the point where now the information itself is free, because the TV model of advertising supported content has failed online. You can thank Google for that failure as Isaacson observes, by making ads ubiquitous and essentially meaningless the value of those ads is driven down, as is the available pool of advertising dollars.

Notice the distinction I am making, the internet is not, I believe, about making ideas “free” from an intellectual property standpoint. It is about making access universal. The internet was invented by scientists for communication. The ideas that were being shared were paid for by colleges and universities in grants and endowments. What appears to be a Star Trek universe without money and everyone doing what they are supposed to be doing for “The Enterprise” is nothing but. (see what I did there?) The only way that research gets done is that people who are free to work where they want to work are paid in money which is the tool that makes it possible. Even pure research eventually gets monetized, thank goodness for my space pen that writes upside down!

So we have a confusing set of behaviours. We want to encourage freedom of access to information, as in a library. We are going in with the freedom of browsing as associated with the television. The internet is like a Library turned into television. There was never more confusion in school than when the Library was involved. No one understood the arcane language of attribution and citation, the latin shortforms cf, ibid, etc, and the fact that you couldn’t just copy whole cloth out of the encyclopedia for your term report. But you could go borrow a book for free. So you can see there the tension between the Star Trek world of pure ideas and altruistic behaviour and the capitalist world of citation and plagiarism. Just how are we supposed to behave?

The internet takes intention and makes attention-a shopping mall takes attention and makes intention-

You can browse a library, a mall, and the internet. But they are not the same.

The mall and the internet are strikingly similar, both are highly organized around the pleasure of looking, and not being looked at, at least that we are aware of. The mall takes the concept of the market square, the commons, and tweaks it ever so slightly from a public place of exchange for ideas, politics, art, and commerce, into a private space of commerce only. It is not the site of political discourse or free speech. The browsing function is enhanced so that the citizen becomes dissociated from the citizenry so to speak, they become passive buyers. The mall stimulates (or overwhelms, in the case of children’s breakfast cereals) your senses, feeds you, controls the climate, and allows you to sample (touch, hold, fondle) a variety of goods without feeling obliged to buy; big open doors, wide aisles, open merchandise. Hopefully the seduction entices you to buy. Attention is converted to a buying action. 

 The internet, conversely, is more like TV, it takes intention, the intent to do something, to go somewhere, (Microsoft, Where do you want to go today?) and changes it to simple attention, random browsing. The architecture of links is what does this. Before you know it, you are reading about Yak herding in Bhutan. It is more like the library in this case. Or Strand Books. Go in looking for one thing and come out with something different.

Now you could argue that the internet enables some buying activity, but in the case of music, it was a painful transition. The iPhone App store has been a breakout success. Subscribing to media however, has not taken hold. All we really want is to be held in attention. Don’t ask us for money. We can’t fondle the goods. We can only scroll and click. It is primitive. (Scrolls?) Speaking of fondling, you might locate the success of the App store in the pleasure of the iPhone itself, the Steely Dan of Trojan horses (I can’t believe I actually wrote that) as far as online buying goes. This is something Apple gets right in all of its products, the seduction of form. Apple turns attention into intention in all of it’s products. 

Understand the behaviour, define the Marketplace

So the basic unit of the internet, the click, has a value that we have not yet figured out. It is a new behaviour. It is a kind of decision but it is the forestalling of decision. Channel surfing, web surfing. This is the problem. You can’t create a marketplace if you can’t monetize the behaviour. For now we have adopted the TV model wholly and simply- sell eyeballs and clicks back to advertisers. Apple seems to be on to something because they have transformed the “click” into the “Touch”-meaning they get how browsing is pleasure, and pleasure can be converted into purchasing action. But Apple is the aberration in the marketplace.

And the marketplace has been hijacked by the telcos as Isaacson writes:

“Another group that benefits from free journalism is Internet service providers. They get to charge customers $20 to $30 a month for access to the Web’s trove of free content and services. As a result, it is not in their interest to facilitate easy ways for media creators to charge for their content. Thus we have a world in which phone companies have accustomed kids to paying up to 20 cents when they send a text message but it seems technologically and psychologically impossible to get people to pay 10 cents for a magazine, newspaper or newscast.”

(Aside- Text messaging is the cell company’s dirty little secret. There is no physical reason why text messaging should cost anything. Text messages are routed within communications that the cell phone makes to identify itself to the network. It is part of the overhead, unused bits that pass regardless of the users intervention. That is why they have a maximum length, the size of the space available. There is no incremental increase in network load no matter how many text messages are sent. It is the opposite of actual voice and data traffic. Yet we pay for it. It is like monetizing your breath. There is no doubt that the telco’s are going to have to bear a share of the burden of change.)

Until we redefine our behaviour online, it will be difficult to establish a true marketplace. In that it looks like a traditional marketplace, it has failed. Meaning brand retailers and consumers. The real growth, the new behaviour, has occurred with what has been interestingly defined as “user generated content”, which reinforces the distinction between “us” the consumer, and “them”, the corporation. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. I should be able to hang out a shingle and sell my content online. But in the absence of a true marketplace, this is difficult. 

“Snark” media has managed to carve a very lucrative toehold in the dying carcass of mainstream-media. You can’t just grab a photograph from the NY Times online or Getty, write a funny comment and post that as “content” somehow hiding behind fair use. NYT paid for the wire photograph, so why should Gawker get to run essentially the same picture under the guise of criticism or commentary when really they are creating an whole other category, David Denby calls it “Snark” or at the very least, a funny diversion. If Jon Stewart does a piece lampooning an issue, you can bet they get clearance and pay for whatever they use. It is unclear what Gawker pays for and what it simply credits back without paying for. This is an example of how the TV mindset of selling eyeballs back to advertisers is failing online. The only way that the Gawker model works is if the content is free. They get to sell the attention back to the advertiser. Profit. One you have to pay for that content then you really are no different from a mainstream source, creating your own unique content with the associated “burden” of paying creators. Less profit. 

In a true marketplace the online behaviour of browsing clicks and links would have value on some level other than as pure attention. As in a real marketplace, eventually you have to buy. It is a measure of how desperately we cling to the infantile pleasure of looking that we are so frustrated by online links that go behind paywalls! Just look at that angry face! Baby wants his toys! Why does mommy take them away! Grrr! Whaaa! Seriously, perhaps this is a function of a normal maturation process-we have been calling it web 1.0, web 2.0, so grownup! Really we have Web-Two-Year-Old. That is where we are. The web as playpen. Part of this is enormously creative, the play aspect. But eventually you teach the kids how to set up a lemonade stand at the end of the driveway. Ok so its not Darwin, but it is an evolution. (I was stretching for a title)

We find ways of paying for things all the time. Call it redistribution of income. Ouch! It comes in the form of tax law that gives breaks to small business, write offs for business purchases like subscriptions, and luxury taxes. There is also a vast pool of money contained in the simple rounding of our purchases to the next dollar. Banks are now starting to toy with working with schemes that capture that. The Lincoln Penny is powerful. Redirecting that money online for clicks is not unimaginable.

It may take the death of printed media to force a normalized online buying behaviour with respect to Newspapers and magazines. Or it might just take a simple tactile device like the iPhone to drive purchases. The Kindle does not seem to be there yet. I think the maturation is in colour, bandwidth, and form factor. And interactivity, although that has been poorly defined up until now. People seem to think that this “problem” is too hard, which I think is to ignore that the problem is simple, but our behaviour is immature. We have been caught up in a bubble of growth that was not sustainable. Time to pay.

The internet may also become partly a utility. We are already heading towards a world of utilities. Consumer banks will probably become like utilities, says Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.” (interview with Charlie Rose). The chaos created by bank failures would be too great to allow the possibility of say, one day, not being able to get cash out of a cash machine.  So we are moving towards a form of bank nationalisation. Add this to the other functions of a modern society that we have come to expect, healthcare (ok now?) law and order, and banking is obviously an essential service. The internet may be another. 

Have I solved all the problems yet? I guess I’m saying there is no problem. Or no problems that a little upheaval can’t solve.

The Boom is Over. Long Live Art!

Some real gems:

Every year art schools across the country spit out thousands of groomed-for-success graduates, whose job it is to supply galleries and auction houses with desirable retail. They are backed up by cadres of public relations specialists — otherwise known as critics, curators, editors, publishers and career theorists — who provide timely updates on what desirable means.

Many of those specialists are, directly or indirectly, on the industry payroll, which is controlled by another set of personnel: the dealers, brokers, advisers, financiers, lawyers and — crucial in the era of art fairs — event planners who represent the industry’s marketing and sales division. They are the people who scan school rosters, pick off fresh talent, direct careers and, by some inscrutable calculus, determine what will sell for what.

…

And where is art in all of this? Proliferating but languishing. “Quality,” primarily defined as formal skill, is back in vogue, part and parcel of a conservative, some would say retrogressive, painting and drawing revival. And it has given us a flood of well-schooled pictures, ingenious sculptures, fastidious photographs and carefully staged spectacles, each based on the same basic elements: a single idea, embedded in the work and expounded in an artist’s statement, and a look or style geared to be as catchy as the hook in a rock song.

Just read the whole thing.

Everyone has been asking (well, no one, but you get the idea) what kind of tools I used to create the new website. Part one is and has been for a while, SlideShowPro. There are different versions, they have a standalone that creates web galleries from Lightroom, plus a standalone app if you don’t have Flash.

I used the Flash version to build a swf. You can customize nearly all aspects of the component, and it can show video and play sound as well. What I am using is a pretty stripped version paring down to the essentials. As far as complexity goes if you follow the instructions you can do it. Big-However, you have to be willing to stumble around and solve your own problems, hunt, google, etc. But the information is there.

The thumbgrid is a new addition also from the folks at Slideshowpro, and this adds the zooming thumbnails and also the mouseover navigation and tooltips. A nice touch is that no matter how you size the stage, the maximum number of thumbnails are calculated and fit for you. You have control over scaling of the zoom, scroll speed, spacing, etc. 

None of this would be all that helpful if you couldn’t update the site yourself with new images. That is where Director comes in, and is the backend to SSP.

This is a screenshot of a webpage showing me logged into my Director page. I am hosting this on my own server, along with the images. You can also buy a Director package that includes image hosting, and possibly more importantly, includes maintenance upgrades and new features as they become available. You then tell Director to “serve” images to your website where the swf resides, and they are displayed. But Director will do more than this, it can serve images to any website or blog where your SSP swf or other javascript/Ajax generic slide show is running. This is how I am able to serve images to the page on my blog, iPhone, where a non-flash type slide show is visible and visible on iPhone. Essentially a parallel site.

What you see above is an Album view, and I can drag and drop images to reorder them. You can upload images, add captions, rotate and delete images also. Albums can be included in Galleries, and Galleries are what you are seeing as my top level, Work and Assignment. You can include and remove Albums from Galleries all from the web interface. 

Finally there is Lightroom, and a plugin called Lightroom to SlideShowPro, which exports images from Lr to any Album directly using Lr’s FTP functionality.

This is the last link in the chain, and makes keeping the site up to date very easy. If you enter caption information in the metadata it can be included with the image in the upload and Director can display that also. About the only thing I can’t do is combine two images two-up like you can in LiveBooks. But there may be a way eventually. For now a sidetrip into Photoshop. (yes I have tried print to jpeg and the results are crap for some reason).

Could you get all this in a turn-key solution-yes-LB and aphotofolio will do pretty much all of this. But you have to like their designs and you have to like their pricing, which may or may not be for you. Freeway Pro was the wysiwyg web authoring program I used to design the site, it is not like Dreamweaver, it is more a layout program that generates code behind the scenes. It is easy to use. This code may or may not be editable by other programs like Dw. But that is not an issue for me.

Should I have been spending the time doing other thing, promoting, shooting new work, etc.-well, yes, but there are always things you should be doing. I got a lot of satisfaction (and a fair amount of aggravation) from doing it myself. 

When my first website went up in 2001, there were few packaged solutions for professional photographers. So I had to do it myself.  Now there are several, and some competition in price. Starting out now, as I said, I probably would not go the self-designed route, the choices are too easy you could say. But there is something about a custom designed site that communicates more about the photographer I hope, an approach, or approachability. That is what I am aiming for.

It had to happen. Once you go serif you are stuck.

And a gratuitous change in title, no doubt my google ranking will slip. Yeah, right. Eventually I will get around to crossdomaining the writing/wrighting issue. I know you don’t know what I am talking about. Neither do I.

Also, an iPhone compatible version of my site served by SlideShowPro Director onto a page on the blog:

No more flash cul-de-sac.

You don’t know how much work it takes to get to this point. My advice to new photographers is don’t do your own websites…for example, Flash 10 now behaves differently with respect to security. What this really means is that everything needs to get updated just to work, I’m talking Wordpress, which publishes this blog, the Slideshowpro components I am using on the website, which include Director, and the new Thumbgrid. Oh, and while you are actually updating your site, you better update the site! Which was the point right?

I like it much better, and I hope you do too.

What you might notice; I have separated out “Work” which includes work produced on assignment and personal work, from “Assignment” which is published and unpublished editorial, and soon, Corporate and Interior images.

The idea here was steal from the best. Nadav Kander has things organized this way. The first thing you see is “Work”. This is what I do, and will (perversely) keep doing regardless of who is the client. There is no differentiation between Editorial and Advertising and Corporate clients. A picture is a picture. I hope this will allow me to focus what I do as “what I do” and be category neutral. It includes what I used to call Project work. I am not going to call them projects any more. To me it seems tentative and grasping. I just make work. You can figure out where it belongs. That doesn’t mean there aren’t titles to the work. Here I stole from Adam Bartos, who simply has a list of Projects as his portfolio. The whole site design borrows heavily from Raymond Meier, who’s site I think is really one of the best out there. 

A first for me is serif! Adobe Caslon for the name and text. Not since the beginning days of NY where it was all Clarendon for me have I had a serif font anywhere near my branding. Helvetica Neue, Gill Sans of course, CityOf, which is a variation on Futura, and lastly an outline version of Interstate. Here are some old sites:

Please don’t say you liked the old ones better… » Read the rest of this entry «

I submitted this under editorial, a story for New York Times on single dads who have elected to have children but not through marriage. Steve Harris conceived Ben with a surrogate mother and donor egg. The playpen in the office allows Ben to visit his dad at the Law office, however I am pretty sure the Nanny is always nearby.

I picked this mainly because it is funny and attention grabbing, it is not however the image that ran. What can you say, it’s a crapshoot…

Under personal unpublished I submitted this excerpt from the series “Flyover States.”

This was the description:

“I would like to go back to a time when a solitary aircraft flying overhead was an object of wonder and beauty instead of suspicion and dread. The aircraft are purposely rendered small and visible only in high magnifications, dissolving into grain,  passing or intersecting a boundary between existence and disappearance from sight.”

I played with the idea of having dyptics where I would actually enlarge the section in question to show how the image dissolves into grain, or in this case, noise. Unfortunately digital images as pixels do not enlarge the way that film images break up into grain. Very quickly you get square pixels. Someone needs to invent a stochastic image sensor.

It is very hard to look at these pictures and not feel something awful might happen. The military has used silhouettes as enemy aircraft identification training since the dawn of flight. Yet the silhouette of a bird carries no such connotation.

Yes I know I don’t have a hope in hell of winning PDN. YMMV. » Read the rest of this entry «

This was one of those assignments where you are sent in blind except for the headline. I knew the story was about the psychology of the workplace, which for most self employed photographers is something they know absolutely nothing about. Well, except that my ID and SuperEgo don’t throw away their leftovers in the home office lunchroom refrigerator…

Immediately upon arrival and setting up I find out that the individual portrait idea I had was not going to fly: the crew was a team and needed to stay together. No individual portraits. 

I would like to say I came up with this solution all on my own but we all know where it is cribbed from. Sometimes it is helpful to be able to invoke the deity of “Avedon” to support your harebrained schemes. 

I think it splits the difference, individuals in a group. Thanks to TAG creative for letting me in the door.

Full story here. BTW don’t be shocked by the color in the article. I get paid just the same. » Read the rest of this entry «