Art:

• If you are looking for any confirmation that people are searching for handcrafted simplicity, and they’re willing to pay $125 for it, check out Paper Jam Press’ handcrafted letterpress posters.
• Ward Shelley creates hand painted elaborate timelines as paintings, placing real events in subjective contexts with stunning results. (hat tip to kottke.org)

Books:

• Bookforum’s review of “Death Becomes Him” (free log-in required) was intriguing enough to get the book put on my Amazon Wish List. I have a need to learn more about necronautica!

  [...] what is left of a man when his memories and movements have been chiseled away? But it also suggests a type of purgatory, a halfway house or a waiting room.

Data:

• Edward Tufte asks his readers about life tracking and self-awareness tools. How many times will you check back to track for follow-up?

  What kinds of effective displays are used by people in planning, recording, and assessing their daily activities? Since so much information is compiled, it is important to identify what kinds of data are relevant to understanding and changing one’s activities, to go beyond score-keeping. So we’re looking for data that would help see what we’re doing, how much is habit, and how one can be more effectively self-aware. The issues are less about display methods and more about choosing the key data worth looking at.

• Speaking of life tracking and self-awareness, Nicholas Felton has taken it to a new extreme and published an annual report of his life each year since 2005 replete with beautiful charts and new insights into how he spent his time. Felton is also the founder of a website called Daytum that can help you track all of this information for yourself and share it with others.

iPad (just because I need to know):

• I was dubious about an article claiming that the iPad needs multiple user switching and multitasking but this post on MacUser brings up very specific things that will feel broken in the experience if these two features don’t make it soon. Either that, or I’ll be buying myself an iPad and a special separate one for Jan!

Hi everyone! I’m back from holiday and looking forward to another great year with The Puget News. For now, a quick video with some compelling storytelling. It’s one Vimeo’s top videos of 2009. Enjoy.

[Hat tip to the ever excellent kottke.org]

E.C. Segar's 115th Birthday on Google Homepage

I must say, I really like how Google and Bing both work a bit of serendipity into their search engines these days. It helps to go to the site and see a dash of playfulness and personality and adds a human touch, a feeling that there is some editor working on pleasantly surprising the users every day.

Not to mention the fact that I think it works to get more users checking back in day to day. It could just be my heightened awareness to it but I could swear Google is accelerating the number of these special site treatments. While not as cryptic as the infamous Valentine’s Day “Googe” incident, the most viewed post ever on this blog, today’s treatment is a fun trip down memory lane.

The E.C. Segar treatment pays honor to what would have been the 115th birthday of the famous cartoonist who learned to cartoon via a correspondence course while working as a film projectionist. Bravo sir!

Yeah, you heard me right, that’s not a typo – it’s “Vook“. Strange name for a great overall concept and product that’s a harbinger of what’s to come. All you stodgy warthogs who think that it’s only about the printed page need a reality check. Most authors care about delivering their message and the printed word has been an amazing vehicle for that message for centuries. Going forward, however, new digital tools will enable much more direct communication between author and audience and Vooks are a really interesting first stab at the commercialization of that digital connection. While there will always be room for well-written and thought-provoking literary content, a significant percentage of that content, especially factual content, will be expressed and absorbed via multimedia and social engagement channels. This is undeniable and already happening. Vook is leading the charge.

So what’s a “Vook?”

A Vook is an online/digital book supplemented with additional material. In the case of “Crush It,” you get the full text of the book, a professionally produced video for each chapter of the book, and a “Connections” page hooking you into social media sharing channels and providing you supplementary links to follow should you desire to do so.

How does it all work?

Basically, you just navigate your way over to Vook.com, find a Vook title you want to buy, and decide on whether or not to buy the web version or the iphone version. In the case of “Crush It,” each version of the Vook is currently $11.99. (This is the most expensive Vook on the site. The other featured Vooks go for $4.99 on the iPhone version and $6.99 on the web version.)

So far, I’ve only utilized the web web version of Vook, and I’ll tell you straight up that it is WELL WORTH $11.99. Gary Vaynerchuk, the author of “Crush It,” was in Seattle promoting his book a couple weeks back and I spent $20 buying hardcover copy and getting it signed. Now don’t get me wrong, having the signed copy is pretty cool, I mean Gary V. had the chance to tell me personally to “Crush It.” Awesome. But if I had the opportunity to do it all over again, I’d much rather have bought the Vook. I would have received all the same base content plus a whole passel of vintage Gary video to go along with it. I would have gotten more for less.

And really, “Crush It” is ideally suited for the Vook medium. “Crush It” describes how Gary worked himself silly creating and then monetizing his personal brand and it has tons of simple tactical things you can do to follow the same path. It’s not a long book, but it’s well written and inspirational. It oozes Gary’s positivity from every pore and while that may not be for everybody, he had me at “How badly do you want to crush it?”

Strengths of the “Crush It” Vook

• Strong overall value proposition: The book retails for $19.99 and is currently being sold on Amazon for $11.47. Any way you slice it, $11.99 for the book and all that dynamic content is well worth it.
• The video content is well made and allows you to get that personal Gary V. vibe. If you haven’t been able to see Gary V. on tour, this is the next best thing.

Quibbles

• Why make me pay for two separate versions of the Vook if I want to access the same content in both places? That’s just outdated and silly. I can read my Kindle titles on both my Kindle and my iPhone (and soon on PC-based reader) at no additional charge. I paid $11.99 for the web version. I should have access to that optimized for my iPhone.
• The Vook video content had some minor audio clipping issues on my Mac.
• The “Connections” content is a bit weak. It’s mostly static links to sharing on Twitter, Facebook , etc. I’d love to see this area made into a real social gathering spot for the book. Why not host live uStreams with the author or feature ongoing forums for people that are into the book? This can and should be taken further than what’s there.

And now my questions for you guys out there are these:

What do you think of the Vook concept? What types of books will make the best Vooks? What’s keeping you from trying one out?

Today’s xkcd is brilliant. Edward Tufte eat your heart out.

Movie Character Interactions

I always think it’s a bit *ahem* manufactured when the Top 100 books of 2009 are announced with 16.66% of the year still left to go, but I guess that’s how you help drum up holiday sales. Anyways, Amazon announced its top 100 Books of the Year today.

The full list is here.

Here are the top 10:

1. “Let the Great World Spin” by Colum McCann
2. “Strength in What Remains” by Tracy Kidder
3. “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel
4. “Brooklyn” by Colm Toibin
5. “Beautiful Creatures” by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
6. “Crazy for the Storm” by Norman Ollestad
7. “The Girl Who Played with Fire” by Steig Larsson
8. “The City & The City” by China Meiville
9. “Stitches” by David Small
10. “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” by William Kamkwamba

As usual, most of those book are totally unknown to me. The only one I’ve read is “The City & The City” by China Mieville and I’d highly recommend that as a very novel melding of speculative fiction and mystery. In the top 100, the only other book I’ve read (I’m actually about 2/3 of the way into) is “Inherent Vice,” by Thomas Pynchon – but you’d probably expect that of me seeing as how I will buy every Pynchon novel the minute it comes out and swallow the thing down like a python and a small child.

Take a look at the list of Amazon’s Top 100 Books of 2009: Editor Picks
and tell me what I need to read next. What am I missing out on?

On Tuesday afternoon, I went over to Elliott Bay Books to check out Gary Vaynerchuk while he stopped by to talk about his new book, “Crush It.” As usual, his enthusiasm and positive energy was infectious. In fact, the first thing I did when I got home was read the entire book cover to cover and here’s what I learned: if you squeezed Gary until he became an oozing liquid, and then you sopped up his essence with a bunch blank pages, you’d end up with this book (and it would taste nice with a glass of Petit Verdot).

“Crush It” is like having Gary sit down and tell you that it’s time for you live what you love – that there is an unprecedented opportunity to establish your own personal brand and to make a good living at it. The book itself is a practical guide to the current state of content (video, audio and print) on the web, how to see whether you’ve chosen the right niche (do you have 50 posts you can do on it?), and then how to build your influence and audience as you scale out to be a known figure in your chosen space. While some of the tactical information near the end will probably seem very outdated within the next few years, most of the advice in the book is timeless. Gary talks about the importance of having an opinion and telling great stories but focuses even more on how you can build an audience by listening, caring and engaging with people. His life is a living example of each of these precepts and he uses all of the new social media tools at his disposal to find his audience wherever they happen to be.

The following is a recording of Gary’s talk at Elliott Bay Books from October 20th, 2009. It’s worth a listen if you’d like to get a sense of what makes this guy tick and you want some “No BS opinions” on where the internet is heading next. By the way, if you like this, please let me know by leaving some feedback in the comments. I’d be happy to post more author talks whenever I can get to them.

An interesting look behind the red velvet curtain known as Netflix. You get a bit of the CEO profile (which is worth reading if you’re an internet entrepreneur) and a healthy does of their stealthy, healthy business model.

Rather than design its own product, it would embed its streaming-video service into existing devices: TVs, DVD players, game consoles, laptops, even smartphones. Netflix wouldn’t be a hardware company; it would be a services firm. The crowd was stunned. In half an hour, Hastings had completely reinvented Netflix’s strategy.

The New York Times has Jeff Bezos giving up some new details on the Kindle ebook and ereader businesses in a short technology piece. The fact that they are independent businesses is probably the largest tidbit, and I think will silence a lot of critics who have been flogging Amazon for pushing a highly proprietary device (to date) on the market.

“The device team has the job of making the most remarkable purpose-built reading device in the world,” Mr. Bezos said. “We are going to give the device team competition. We will make Kindle books, at the same $9.99 price points, available on the iPhone, and other mobile devices and other computing devices.”

This is also the first time I’ve heard confirmation of “other computing devices,” which I hope is just plain old code for, “you’ll be able to read all your books on Whispersync between your computer, phone and reader.”

Woohoo!

Wired Magazine has a list of “Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Fiction” which is worth a perusal. The ones that resonate the most with me right now are these:

• 5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.
• 8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.
• 17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.

#5 resonates with me since I just moved form a large house to a tiny condo and had to move my book collection – again. I have hundreds of pounds of books stored in many bookshelves, even after trimming the collection by about 50% in a recent moving sale. I read the other day that Sherman Alexie considers the Kindle to be an “elitist” device – because Kindle is expensive and only driven by one company. While I understand where he’s coming from and agree that it is currently elitist, I also think it neglects the fact that people with large libraries of physical books are also “elitist” but also “environmentally non-friendly.” I love books, but I also think that books are a luxury that should not be afforded by people who read a lot and can afford to get a device that doesn’t perpetuate the shipping of dead trees and the expansion of personal space to maintain a collection of knowledge.

#8 is just plain interesting. As a literature student, I love the ability to locate nearly any reading material via Amazon.com. The fact that the long-tail is now available to researchers and academics is a boon to society and literary study. Unfortunately, it is also true that the availability of the long-tail has indeed “balkanized” more casual readers. It’s important for cultural reading experiences to exist, for mass market works that matter to be read by large percentages of a population as it further discourse and allows for common language to be achieved. I am particularly interested in group readings of major works. In fact, this is one reason I’ve been so active in reading groups throughout the years and am partaking in Infinite Summer. (We’ve got a small reading group that will most likely be meeting a couple times a week on Wednesday evenings in Seattle. If you want to join us, feel free to leave your comment so I can get in touch with you. You’ll be doing your part to combat excess balkanization.)

#17. That just the result of non-face-to-face discourse in the internet age. A small percentage of vocal self-serving twits can exert undue influence over debate. It’s a core problem that needs to be addressed. I don’t know what to do about it.

The entire list is thought-provoking and worth a read. Which one resonates most with you and why?