Silicon Valley has a race problem.

You don’t need a Twitter fight to tell you that. And, while it’s great that CNN has made waves with previews of its upcoming show on the subject, you don’t need cable TV to tell you that, either. (For two smart views on the controversy, read Hank Williams and Angela on BlackWeb.)

Just look around. Anyone who works in the Valley for any length of time will have noticed the alarmingly large number of white guys occupying positions of power. There are a few women, and there are sizable contingents of Asian entrepreneurs among the entrepreneurial and venture capital classes. But there are not many women and there are almost no black or Hispanic entrepreneurs.

The White House photo of Barack Obama having dinner with a table full of Silicon Valley titans in February is the perfect illustration of this. Look at the table: It’s almost all white guys. There are two women, one of whom (I think) is the wife of the host, and the other of whom is Carol Bartz, then the CEO of Yahoo, who is known — and criticized — for being loudmouthed and aggressive. And there’s just one black guy: the President of the United States.

This picture is probably 100% representative of dinners among Silicon Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs and investors, except that the black guy isn’t usually there.

If you’re black, Hispanic or female, I can’t tell you anything about racism that you don’t already know. You’re going to need an extra dose of moxie, persistence and determination to make it here. You may want to consider, as Vivek Wadhwa did, hiring a white man to be the public face of your company. (Wadhwa also points up the importance of building your own networks.) These decisions will have to be up to you and whatever friends and allies you can recruit to your side.

But I can tell you what I’m doing about Silicon Valley’s race problem. And if you’re one of the white guys who run things around here, you should consider that you have a responsibility to do the same things.

I’ve hesitated about writing this post. But I decided I couldn’t keep silent about this, because one of my career goals, for the past 10 years, has been to make Silicon Valley more accessible to people like my daughter, who is both black and female. I hope this post helps advance that agenda.

So, here are my tips for white guys on how to fight racism and sexism.

First, educate yourself. You don’t know squat about racism or sexism. Period. End of sentence. So read. Watch movies. But most of all, talk to people. Find people who are trained in anti-racist education and invite them to educate you.

In my case, I have spent many, many hours in anti-racism seminars, educational programs about race and culture, and dinner table discussions with my family, extended family and friends. It’s a topic that is never far from my mind.

Second, make an effort to connect with people who are different from you. Make friends with people. Extend your social circle.

And really make friends. A friend once told me, early in my education, that the diversity of your circle of friends is best measured by who comes to dinner at your house. You may work with people who aren’t like you, but if you’re not having them over to dinner, you’re not really getting to know them.

In my case, work is now the least diverse part of my life. My family is multiracial, my kids go to a school where there are people from diverse racial and economic backgrounds, my neighborhood is all over the map, and I live in one of the most diverse areas in the country. It’s only when I start talking to PR people and Silicon Valley executives that the diversity level drops. But it’s taken me a decade of conscious decisions to get to this point.

Third, when you’re recruiting, widen the circle of candidates. Make decisions about who to hire (or invest in) based on merit. But make sure the pool is diverse, so you can at least make fair choices.

I try to follow this principle whenever I hire people. I’ve reach out to professional associations like the National Association of Black Journalists. I ask people I know to recommend talented women they know. I ask for help from my existing networks wherever I can get it.

Once I get that pool of candidates, I evaluate everyone on their merits. I’ve never given a job to anyone because I wanted to increase the diversity of my team. But I have gone to lengths to make sure that the pool of candidates is diverse.

This is, I think, the most important thing that white people in positions of power can do.

There’s a real benefit to this diversity, too, beyond some abstract notion of fairness. A diverse workforce is going to better at producing products that appeal to a broad range of customers.

And diversity breeds creativity. People who come from different backgrounds are more likely to have different approaches to problems, or different ideas. Bring them together and yes, there can be conflict and misunderstandings. But out of that conflict can often come much better ideas than you’d get from a roomful of people who have the same backgrounds.

Finally, be willing to talk about race. Realize that you are going to sound like a clueless idiot much of the time. But also know that for people of color, race and racism are constant topics of discussion. Race is an incredible taboo only for white, middle-class people. We are embarrassed to talk about it, or even to acknowledge it. But until we do, we can’t really learn.And yes, I am sure it sucks when someone holds you up as an example of white-guy cluelessness.

But when you refuse to talk about racism and race, whether from fear of embarrassment or out of ignorance, you can’t learn. If you pretend that it’s just a meritocracy, or that the problem is too mysterious to be addressed, or that you yourself are not racist, you can’t learn.

More importantly, you can’t do anything good about it.

I don’t expect that most white guys in power will follow these steps. It’s too uncomfortable and too difficult to do, unless you’re motivated by someone you love. But I can say that it’s something very much worth doing.

I bought a Nook Simple Touch a couple weeks ago, just in time for a vacation reading binge.

I can’t improve much on John Abell’s review for Wired, The Nook Nails It, as I agree with everything he says there.

This is the best reading machine I’ve come across so far: It’s light, easy to read, compact, and elegant. There’s no ugly keyboard reminding you that you should probably be writing something instead of just kicking back with a book, or a magazine: It’s just a reading device, plain and simple.

With it, I’m reading far more than I was before, and I look forward to continuing that trend when vacation ends, by reading on the train and in the evenings at home. I even got a clip-on book light for reading in bed or in the tent: Works great.

The Nook’s touchscreen works very well. It’s easy to highlight passages, somewhat less easy to make annotations, and page-turning is a breeze with left or right hand buttons, or swipes or taps on the touchscreen. Like John, I wish there were some kind of “back” function, as it’s occasionally easy to get lost among the endnotes, but that’s a minor quibble.

In all, an excellent e-reader.

There are a couple of more serious drawbacks that keep the Nook Simple Touch from perfection:

Very limited wireless delivery. The Nook has Wi-Fi, which you can use to purchase books and magazines and newspapers. (And you can read the full text of any e-books in B&N stores, a nice touch.) Periodicals are delivered to you automatically. But to get anything else onto your Nook, like PDFs, you need to plug it into a computer via USB and sync. There’s no wireless sync, and there’s no way — as there is with the Kindle — to e-mail documents to your reader. That’s a big drawback for one of my main uses for the Nook, which is reading articles I’ve saved to Instapaper. I use Calibre to fetch those stories, which works very well (although I feel compelled to add that Calibre is the ugliest piece of software I’ve come across in a long time). But I have to remember to dock and sync the Nook whenever I want to get the latest Instapapered stories. Bummer.

Text rendering is a little buggy. For instance, superscripts (like footnotes) add a bit of extra leading to the line spacing above them, which is distracting and sloppy-looking. Occasionally hyphens just disappear, so instead of “twenty-four” it displays “twentyfour.” (This happens with both PDFs and with e-books purchased from Barnes & Noble, so I think it’s some kind of intermittent rendering bug.) Text resizing doesn’t work all that well on some PDFs, with a huge jump from “pretty small letters” to “gigantic headline type” and nothing in between.

Both of these should be straightforward to fix through a firmware update and, in the case of e-mailing to your Nook, the addition of some kind of back-end support. If not, I’m hoping that someone will soon hack the Simple Touch’s Android-based OS and figure out how to make it happen.

He started with a good gut understanding of what works online, and built a federation of blogs that exploit a similar model (low overhead, smart and fast writers, efficient tech and ad sales) to great effect. Gizmodo, Gawker, IO9, Lifehacker are all category-leading blogs, or close to it; some of them (like Gizmodo) are starting to compete with traditional media as well.

But what is more significant, his operation is devoted to objective, metric analysis in a way that no one else is. Gawker’s metrics are public — and the metrics for every writer are public too. It’s at the core of the organization. And carefully watching the data, I think, has shaped his strategy more than anything. It’s also led him to be way ahead of the curve in many cases (I’m thinking of the way he started planning for a 40% decline in ad spending, in 2008, long before the rest of the media were willing to face up to what was coming).

It’s somewhat amazing, then, that he’s willing to share the results of his insights. Lifehacker today hosted his thoughts on where Gawker Media is going in 2011.

Now, this could be a classic head-fake, and perhaps Denton is only publishing this plan to throw the rest of us off. But I don’t think so. I think the advice in here is solid, and he’s publishing it because the odds of his slow-moving competitors actually being able to capitalize on this information are slim to none. Meanwhile, Denton raises his cred among smaller publishers, editors and writers, some of whom may be eager to work for him at some point.

Be that as it may, there are some good pointers in Denton’s roadmap.

Here’s the Cliff’s Notes version:

1. The news drives traffic — and more importantly, brings in new readers/viewers. Or, as Nick puts it, “aggressive news-mongering trumps satirical blogging.”

2. Aggregation is important for filling in the gaps between a few breakout stories each day. The solution? First, two types of edit staff: editors/curators, and reporters/producers/scoopmongers. Second, relegate the reverse-chron “blog flow” to a sidebar, and make the stories, not the blog, the center of attention.

3. Having a variety of content is important — even more so as your audience grows and becomes more diverse.

4. Photos, videos, and strong visual presentations work really well now.

5. You can sell video ads in banner ad spaces.

6. Gawker is being programmed more like a TV network, with time slots for stories and ad campaigns, and less like a newspaper or magazine.

7. Gawker is going after brand advertising, the traditional stronghold of magazine companies like Hearst and Conde Nast — and the TV networks. To do that, they’re going to be moving upmarket this year. Sponsorships and time-slot campaigns are the key to moving out of the doldrums of low-value, high-inventory web advertising.

Big media, watch out. Denton’s done with blogging; his next target is finding an even more profitable form of new media that blends aspects of blogging, magazine journalism, and TV.

This story subsequently edited and much improved by Ryan Singel, after which it appeared on Wired.com: Gawker Gives Up on Blogging (And That’s a Good Thing!)

It’s about 35 minutes long. Dave’s post also includes links to some of my favorite haiku and other micropoems published on tinywords.

Link: Woodrat Podcast 21: Dylan Tweney.

Painting of Basho meeting two travelers, from the Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008660384/

Savvy journalists have adapted (or have been forced to adapt) to a new, more collaborative publishing model online. Here are my notes from a keynote presentation I delivered on this topic at the OCLC Collaboration Forum, held at the Smithsonian, on September 21.

Matsuo Kinsaku was born around 1644 in Japan. As a young man, he became a master of a form of collaborative poetry.

It was a kind of party game: A poetry master would kick things off with a pithy short verse, and then other people in the group would collaborate (and compete) to come up with subsequent verses, each one subtly or cleverly linked to the one before.

He was very successful and popular, but around 1682 Matsuo became dissatisfied and started traveling around Japan.

As he went, he wrote compressed travelogues interspersed with very short poems. They were kind of like those kick-off verses, except they stood on their own.

Over time, his new approach gained popularity, power and subtlety. He took on the poetic name of Basho, and his artform is known today as haiku.

Since the 17th century it’s been primarily an individual activity, like other poetry.

But in my work over the past decade publishing an online journal of haiku, tinywords, I’ve seen haiku come full circle. On tinywords.com, haiku are published as poems, like on any other literary journal. But like many websites, we also allow readers to post comments, or as I like to call them, “responses.”

In some cases, those responses are simply comments like “great work” or “beautiful imagery.” But sometimes, people post their own haiku in response. On occasion, that’s sparked a whole chain of linked verses, each one responding to the one that came before.

Sound familiar?

A similar thing, I think, is happening in journalism.

In the 18th century, American journalism emerged as a boisterous supplement to the mail. Postmasters were the earliest publishers, because their jobs put them at the center of the community, where they’d hear rumors and news from locals as well as far-off lands.

Publishing a newspaper was both a way of taking advantage of the postal infrastructure, and a way of drawing together a community’s conversation.

Not surprisingly, early newspapers were argumentative, opinionated, political, and sometimes even slanderous. They reflected the political and social conversations of their time and place.

Skipping forward to the 20th century, as newspapers became big businesses, journalists adopted a loftier, more impartial, “objective” tone.

That’s partly because they wanted to reach bigger, more diverse audiences. But it also had to do with the need to not piss off advertisers.

Whatever the result, the act of creating journalism became a more isolated activity, and less conversational.

With the advent of the internet, journalism is again become more conversational, more collaborative.

I think that’s a wonderful and exciting thing, much like the return of spontaneous, collaborative linked verses on tinywords.

But it does have its moments of terror, anxiety and frustration.

I’d like to give you some stories, by way of example, to show how that process is happening, and some of the things we’ve learned about what works and what doesn’t.

Now, what’s going on in journalism is also reflected in other fields of communication. Music, television, movies are all undergoing similar upheavals. Even product design and product marketing are being forced into more collaborative models.

Case in point: Old Spice guy. This phenomenally successful advertising campaign drew all kinds of attention this summer when, for several days, the advertising company behind it recorded a series of spots in response to public comments on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and more.

Not everything I’m going to talk about will be transferable to those fields, or to the fields of libraries, museums and archives. But I hope there will be some lessons in what follows — or failing that, at least some comfort. You’re not alone.

Before I get to some illustrative stories, let me just outline that we’re seeing increased collaboration on several levels:

• with other journalists (content swaps, for instance)
• with sources (who increasingly have their own voices)
• with readers (who are also empowered via comments, Twitter, etc)

Social Media

Social media is increasingly important to journalists as a research and promotion tool.

Example: We increasingly rely on Twitter to find, research and promote stories
Why? Because that’s where our readers are — and in many cases our sources.
(The growing importance of interlinked networks of humans and content)

Sometimes stories are driven by the use of social media: e.g. How I used Twitter to live-blog the opera

Comments

We’re publishing — and revising — in public. That means we’re subject to far greater scrutiny than journalists used to be accustomed to. (Or, as some would say, what people are saying about us hasn’t changed — it’s just that we can hear it now)

Case study: Why the Japanese hate the iPhone
We made some sourcing errors, and when we corrected these, we were insufficiently transparent about that. Combined with the article’s provocative headline, that meant we came in for even more grief (viewed as a coverup). In the end we had to publish an explanation that was as long as the original article.
LESSON: Transparency matters.

Gawker Media’s comment system: infinitely promotable commenters
Carefully tiered system allows anyone to comment, but only “starred” commenters are readily visible. Star system lets editors delegate moderation to the most trusted commenters. Each commenter also has an identity. Result: comments are often highly entertaining — as much if not more so than original article.
Example: See this hugely entertaining comment thread
LESSON: Moderation/community mgmt tools can make a huge difference.

I’ve seen this on tinywords, too: It took many iterations to find a comment system that encouraged the right kind of interaction, not just long-winded debates.

With the right comment system and a smart, engaged community, journalists are not the last word — they are conversation starters.

Wired’s global iPhone network study
Recruited more than 2,600 respondents to help measure, and map, AT&T’s 3G network coverage.
LESSON: You can accomplish a lot with free tools (eg ZeeMaps). Cleaning up data is going to take a lot of work. Have a backup plan in case of server overload (eg static image).

Crowdsourcing Stories

Assignment Zero
Joint effort between Wired.com and NewAssignment.net, led by Jeff Howe and Jay Rosen. Aimed to report and produce a series of stories about crowdsourcing.
Result: mostly failure. Volunteers came on board before there was anyone to manage them. Articles were long and poorly edited.
LESSONS: Engage editors/managers early. Crowdsourcing works best with well-bounded, clearly-explained problem sets. Professionals can help clean up / bring amateur work to a higher level.

Haiti Rewired
Launched in February 2010. Community built around technology & technical needs in rebuilding Haiti. Goal: to be a long-term, persistent community hub.
Success story: Translated construction manual
LESSONS: Defined problem set, good tools make a big difference. Also, hire a good, committed community manager.

Reinventing Publications

Some publications are going beyond just crowdsourcing individual stories, and are basing their entire existence on a more collaborative foundation. Two recent examples:

Everywhere — crowdsourced travel magazine edited by Todd Lappin
Crowdsourced enthusiast magazine. Readers are natural contributors because they’re enthusiastic about the subject.
LESSONS: “structuring the test so people can pass.” Lappin’s term for making the assignment achievable (eg short, 400-600 word articles, not long-form narrative). And rigorous editing.

Longshot Magazine (formerly known as 48 HR magazine)

Wrap-up

Roger Ebert has pointed out that there are more movie critics than ever now, and in many ways, they’re better than ever.

Clive Thompson’s argument that it’s a golden age of writing:
Cites Andrea Lunsford, a professor of rhetoric at Stanford. Studied 14,000 student writing samples from 2001 – 2006.
“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says.

I find that really encouraging. It is true that the economic environment for journalism can be very threatening, and there are many unanswered questions about who will fill the vital role of newsgathering if no one can make a good business out of it.

But the fact that there is so much conversation embedded within journalism now has to be a good thing. And the rise of more and better writing, by far more people, is contributing to that.

People who used to just read the news are now reading it more critically, responding to it, posting comments or writing commentaries and news stories of their own.

Collaboration may be forced upon us. But it is creating a virtuous circle of interactivity that will serve both journalists and the public better in the long run.

tinywords is set up a bit differently than almost every other literary journal. Poets submit their work using a web form, which puts each poem into a review queue where the editors — myself and several others — can read and rate them. Every poem is read several times by several different editors. In this queue, all poems are presented anonymously or “blind”: we don’t see the name of the author.

In my experience, switching to anonymously reviewing haiku has made a huge difference. Each poem has to stand on its own, without the benefit or hindrance of an author’s reputation. Previous appearances in prestigious journals don’t help, since that information is also hidden.

This system means that widely-published poets have no more advantage than rank beginners. Nobody can rest on their laurels. Nobody gets less consideration because they lack a reputation.

It also makes it easier to give each poem fair consideration. Sometimes a poet will submit an excellent poem in the middle of a handful of mediocre work — or a stinker hidden in the middle of otherwise excellent poems. In the past, when I reviewed incoming haiku via email, it was easier to issue a blanket acceptance or rejection. The anomalies were carried along with, and shared the fate of, the poems that surrounded them. Now, each poem stands or falls on its own merits.

An unfortunate side effect is that poets get an individual rejection or acceptance e-mail for each poem they’ve submitted. Unfortunately these are almost all form letters (there’s no way I could practically write 800 individual responses in the course of a week or two). That can seem hurtful or insensitive to some. But I think the benefit of individual, anonymous consideration of each poem outweighs this downside.

My objective with tinywords is to publish excellent poetry, and the publishing system is set up to serve that goal.

one petal
from the princess tree
clings to the windshield—
I drive away
looking in the mirror

un pétale
de l’arbre impérial
s’accroche au pare-brise
je démarre
en regardant dans le rétroviseur

via 25 Canadian Tanka Poets in French and English : Atlas Poetica.

The iPad has touched a nerve in the geek community.

Judging by comments on Wired.com and elsewhere, many people are outraged that Apple would try to foist a less-capable, dumbed-down device on an unsuspecting public. Thanks to clever marketing, these people point out, Apple has persuaded us to spend $500 and more for something that’s less capable and more restrictive than a netbook computer costing half as much.

Those critics are right. But their rage is misplaced.

The iPad is the ultimate media consumption device: It’s just a screen. It is a more beautiful and immersive screen than photos suggest, though. You really do have to hold one in your hand to appreciate how tangible it makes the digital world. Thanks to the in-plane switching LCD and the fast processor under the hood, photos, videos and web pages all come to life, in rich, vivid colors and with a presence that I’ve never seen on any laptop.

Apart from that, there isn’t that much that’s innovative about the iPad, technologically speaking. The rest of Apple’s innovations have to do with packaging, marketing, and a retail experience that’s almost frightening in its attention to detail.

But then, good customer experience, clever marketing, and a fast, bright screen that you can take with you may be just what Hollywood needs.

Because that’s who the iPad is made for: Hollywood. And Madison Avenue, Nashville, Fleet Street, Burbank and all the other places where mass media is produced. (Why do you think Stephen Colbert was one of the first to get an iPad? And why do you think the iPad ad debuted during the Oscars?)

In short, it’s a consumption device, not a production device. Sure, you can make short comments using the on-screen keyboard, but if this were your only device for writing and publishing blog posts, you’d want to fling it out a window.

In other words, the iPad is not ideal for the kind of interactive, distributed storytelling that the web has spawned: in a word, blogging. It’s not likely to do well as a photo or video editing tool or programming device either, though I haven’t tested that hypothesis.

The very thing that makes the iPad so good as a lean-back media device — its lack of a keyboard — is exactly the thing that makes it poorly suited to banging out thoughtful essays, outraged screeds or pointed corrections.

But you know what? That might be OK.

The iPad’s not taking away my keyboard, after all; it’s just another device. Sometimes the kind of passive entertainment it affords is exactly what I want after a long day at my keyboard. While its onscreen keyboard is no great shakes, I can type out a comment or a tweet on it if I feel the need to, and I can always walk over to my laptop if I decide I need to compose a full blog post to rebut some idiot.

As an entertainment device, it’s the next best thing to television. Actually, it’s kind of like television 2.0.

After a day with the iPad, I kind of like that. It’s no more, and no less, than Apple promised. For what it is, it’s a brilliant device: fun, dopamine-releasing, immersive, and easy on the eyes.

If I were to choose between a television and an iPad, I’m pretty sure I’d pick the iPad.

Thanks to by Brian X. Chen for the photo above, and some help sorting out my thoughts in this piece.

Check out this video, where I give a 3-minute first look at the iPad’s high and low points:

I spent way too much of last Sunday figuring out how to import over 300 articles from my database of published articles into WordPress, to make it easier to find and manage all that work. Those articles are now visible in the published work category here in my blog.

I also switched this site to the impressively flexible and powerful Suffusion theme by sayontan, who provides excellent support for the theme on a public Suffusion support forum.

The old writing database was something I built a few years ago from scratch, using PHP with a MySQL database on the back end. It was a great learning experience and worked well for keeping track of, and showing off, work that I’d done as a freelancer. What I learned while building that database also helped me build the custom CMS that ran on tinywords from about 2004 until last year.

There’s something really satisfying about building one’s own content management system, no matter how simple or bare-bones. But in the end, managing content in a custom CMS gets to be a pain in the ass, and you look more and more enviously at the features that WordPress users keep getting, without any effort on their part. I was already using WordPress for this blog, so it made sense to consolidate it with my older database.

Fortunately WordPress has the ability to import RSS files, so Sunday’s work was mostly a matter of getting the RSS feed into the right format, making sure it included all the articles, and eliminating stray, non-ASCII characters. In other words, a lot of work tweaking PHP.

The WordPress RSS import tool doesn’t give you much feedback — it just works or it doesn’t — and there are no particular options, so it was mostly a matter of trial and error.

Again: a learning experience.

But I can’t believe that Steve Jobs is going to stop there.

Brian X. Chen and I predicted on Tuesday evening that Apple’s big announcement would go beyond the iPad, and include the announcement of a major, multi-platform content store centered on iTunes.

We were wrong. Wednesday’s announcement was all about the iPad, and nothing else.

But the door is still open for Apple to make a broader content play, and here’s why it makes sense — and why it may be inevitable.

Apple already sells apps, music, video and podcasts through iTunes. Already, iTunes includes fairly robust support for sharing the content you download with other computers on your home network, and of course you can play music, video and podcast on your iPhone or iPod touch as well as your computer. In other words, iTunes is a pretty good media delivery system. In many ways, it’s broken, and it needs to be fixed, but it works.

Apple will shortly begin selling e-books. They’re in the EPUB format, which is fairly rudimentary and doesn’t include much support for formatting or layout, but it’s a start. Also, it’s unclear whether those books will be readable on anything except the iPad. Let’s assume that even if they are iPad-only to start, Apple quickly comes up with some way of reading those books via iTunes on your computer and on your iPhone, because it needs to do that to remain competitive with Amazon’s Kindle.

Apart from those formats — AAC/MP3, Quicktime video, EPUB books and iPhone/iPad apps — iTunes doesn’t offer much support to content producers.

But there’s an end-run around iTunes, for app developers who are frustrated with Apple’s slow and arbitrary-seeming approval process. It’s call web development, and it’s why Apple will soon have to expand the iTunes menu.

Ambitious web developers are discovering that they can create web-centric apps using HTML5 and JavaScript that have surprising speed and interactivity. Check out the Google Voice web app for a clear illustration of this principle. It looks and feels more like a native app than anything I’ve seen recently.

The more developers start going this route, the more money Apple is going to be leaving on the table, because those web apps won’t be sold through iTunes. They’ll be given away or sold through a variety of other payment mechanisms, none of which give a cut to Apple.

Eventually, Apple’s going to offer a way for web app developers to sell subscriptions or one-off access to their web apps via iTunes.

It won’t be mandatory, because there’s no way for Apple to close off the independent web developers completely without messing with the web standards they seem clearly to be supporting. But there will be a powerful incentive for developers, which is that they can take advantage of a built-in micropayment system and the installed base of 125 million iTunes users.

When that happens, it will be a subtle but powerful shift in the economics of the web. App producers will then have the option of creating iPad/iPhone native apps in Objective C, or of producing web apps using HTML5, JavaScript and H.264.

If they go the latter route, they’ll have the option of deploying content on the public web, and collecting money however they can.

Or they will be able to deploy HTML content and web apps via iTunes, letting Apple take care of billing and settlement in return for a 30% cut.

There will be cries that Apple is creating a walled garden, or splitting the web into pieces. And they’ll be right, to a point. But the fact is, there’s no reason that all web content has to be delivered via HTTP from a public, free web server. It could be delivered, page by page and web app by web app, via iTunes.

If I were a web developer or a content producer, I’d be looking at ways of creating rich, immersive experiences using web technologies. Because even if my prediction is wrong and you can’t at some point sell those through iTunes, the iPad is going to make experiences like that compelling enough that you will be able to sell them, through one channel or another.

This article also subsequently appeared on wired.com.

In fact, the amount people read tripled from 1980 to 2008. That’s amazing considering it had previously been undergoing decades of steady decline. Suddenly people stopped watching so much television, and started reading again.

They’re just reading on the screen instead of on paper.

Two of the tools that I’ve found most helpful for reading are Instapaper and Readability. Both of them reformat web pages, stripping out everything except the core text, making them far easier to read.

Arc90′s Readability offers instant gratification — it transforms the page immediately, right in your browser — and you can choose from several different formatting options.

Marco Arment’s Instapaper saves the reformatted pages for later, so you can read them at your leisure, either on the Instapaper web site or (my preference) in the Instapaper iPhone app.

Both tools are free, though Arment offers a premium version of the Instapaper app for $5 that adds some nice features, like automatic updates and tilt-scrolling.

Both tools tell me a couple of things about the web:

One, modern web design is way too complicated and cluttered. Ads, banners, navigation bars, sidebars, and a million other things make most web pages an aesthetic and usability disaster. Readability and Instapaper fix this, giving the content back to the readers. Some forward-thinking web designers, like Laura Brunow Miner’s Pictory Magazine, have followed this trend, by creating stripped-down, content-centric web designs that let the reader focus on what really matters. I’ve tried to follow this trend by simplifying the design of this site as well as the haiku and micropoetry site I edit, and I know others who have done the same.

Two, web standards work. The reason Readability and Instapaper work is because most web pages are structured in fairly predictable ways, with a well-accepted markup language that is widely and (usually) consistently deployed. This gives readers the flexibility to enjoy published content in the way the reader chooses: On its original web page, in an RSS reader, on an iPhone, or through the filter of a reformatting tool. Readers can also easily reblog content on their own sites, which contributes to conversation and community formation, and makes it easier for other people to find the content.

When publishers consider nonstandard web publishing platforms, they should keep this in mind. Something that’s published as a PDF, Zinio mag, Adobe app, Flash file or iPhone app is by default outside the circle of web standards. Unless the designers of those platforms include tools for reformatting, reblogging and sharing content, they’ll risk taking themselves out of the broader collective conversation altogether.

That goes for the exciting new e-magazine apps under development by my employer and other publishers, too.

From my own experience, and the experience of friends who had spent months to years to a lifetime devoted to little magazines and small presses, I knew in my bones that tinywords had become overwhelming. This stuff eats you alive. But I also knew, it’s damn hard to let go once you made your mark. There’s that little voice that keeps calling you back.

From a long interview about tinywords, between me and poet and publisher Norbert Blei.

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a discussion about press embargoes, with Tom Foremski, Damon Darlin and Mark Glaser, skillfully moderated by Sam Whitmore. Also in the audience, and contributing worthy comments, were Rafe Needleman, Paul Boutin, and other members of the press and PR corps.

I kicked things off (and got a cheap laugh) with the comment that I thought the word “embargo” derived from a Latin phrase meaning “Fuck you.” It was a joke, but I meant it, in a way: I don’t like embargoes, and when I agree to one it’s because I realize the value of the news to my readers outweighs the value of the independence I would retain by saying no. In other words, the PR person has me over a barrel, and she knows it. If I want the news, I have to agree to the terms — terms which include tying my hands.

What’s more annoying, I’ve had several cases recently at Wired.com where we were put at a serious disadvantage by embargoes that we’d agreed to, in good faith. Either through machinations by the PR firm, cluelessness on the part of their clients, or ruthlessness on the part of other journalists, the news got leaked — early — by other news outlets, leaving Wired high and dry. This has happened more in the past year than in the whole previous decade, leading me to think that yes, there is something of a crisis here.

It’s this awkwardness, bad faith, and outright attempt to control the press that makes many journalists, including Glaser, feel that we should just refuse to accept embargoes. Indeed, some news outlets, if they have enough clout, can get away with this as a general policy: the Wall Street Journal is the shining example.

But most news outlets aren’t in that position, and most journalists aren’t likely to be able to refuse embargoes long for a simple reason: In product-driven journalism and indeed in much business journalism, PR people hold most of the cards, during the news announcement cycle anyway. (Product reviews, analyses and more scoopy stories are a different matter.) If you want the news, there’s only one source: The company that’s making it.

Besides, as I asked that night, what journalist would ever refuse an exclusive? What about an exclusive offered only to you, the New York Times, and the WSJ? What about an exclusive offered to you and just 25 other news outlets? In the last case, it’s not totally exclusive, but the news is still worth something — and it’s something that hundreds of other journalists and bloggers don’t have. So in other words, the embargo is on a continuum with exclusives, making it unavoidable.

This even though embargoed stories are almost never our biggest ones. The big stories — those that garner huge pageviews — are almost always the ones where we’ve done original reporting, broken a new story on our own, provided unique analysis, or delivered perspectives you couldn’t get elsewhere. But the embargoed stories are the ones the readers (and the boss) would miss, if you didn’t cover them, so you have to cover them, even if you know they’re not likely to be hits.

That said, I recognize that embargoes are a fact of life in my field and I take a pragmatic, and I hope honorable, approach to them. My rules are simple:

• If I agree to an embargo, it has to have a specific expiration date and time (with the time zone specified).
• Once I agree to an embargo, I will honor its terms.
• If a few details are leaked by other sources, I will report on those leaks without recourse to the embargoed information I may hold.
• But if the whole story breaks early somewhere else, it’s fair game: The embargo is off.
• And if the PR person values their relationship with me and with Wired, they will call me as soon as possible to let me know that the news has broken and that I’m free of the embargo.

Also, and this bears repeating: It comes down to trust. I think the reason that embargoes have gotten such a bad rap in the past year or two is that both journalists and PR people are struggling with massive upheavals in the way news is published and distributed. There’s a lot of turnover. Everyone is overworked. As a result, there are fewer of the personal, human-to-human connections between flacks and hacks that used to make the embargo system (and indeed, the whole PR-press relationship) work. So mistakes get made, either by naive or unprincipled journalists, or by new and untrained PR people, or by either one, when someone figures that the value of the news opportunity exceeds the value of the (nonexistent) relationship.

So really, I’m much more likely to agree to an embargo if I know you and have worked with you before and I trust you. And likewise, you’re much more likely to offer me an embargo if you know and trust me.

More coverage of the embargo panel (the stories I could find, anyway):

Internetnews.com: Tech Reporters Talk Tough (David Needle)

Bay Newser: Hacks and Flacks Talks Embargoes (E.B. Boyd of MediaBistro)

To Embargo or Not to Embargo (Bobbie Peyton, Burson-Marsteller)

Persuasive Marketing: Is It Time to Place an Embargo on PR Embargoes? (Robert Mullins)

The Future of the Embargo (Brian Solis)

The Death of the Embargo: We Won’t Care (Stowe Boyd)

And it looks like Waggener-Edstrom, which hosted the event, has posted video of the Embargo 2010 discussion. It’s about an hour long.

Also, see my earlier post: Journalism and PR in the new media age.

The collective intelligence poured into inventing new portable games over the past several centuries is equivalent, scientists estimate, to the outpouring of genius from a whole year’s worth of Nobel prize winners. Except instead of curing cancer, we’re making toys for kids who have trouble paying attention in school!

Read more: Pocket Players: 13 Great Portable Games (Wired.com)

Columbia Journalism School dean Nicholas Lemann has said: “I’ve never met a single person in 35 years who went into journalism out of pure economic reason.”

He never met me. While my motivation wasn’t purely financial, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t the primary reason I chose journalism instead of, say, trying to make my way as, say, a poet or a professor of religious studies.

I had just graduated from college with an interesting but totally impractical major in what amounted to postmodern philosophy. I needed a paycheck, and the ice cream shop that hired me for twelve hours a week wasn’t cutting it. I liked writing and had enjoyed working on some college publications, so journalism seemed like a good way to earn some money and have fun while I was doing it. And who knows? Maybe I would grow up to be a famous writer.

But to be honest, my literary aspirations were secondary to the need to make my monthly rent and my lack of obvious qualifications. So when, after a long, hot, nearly-jobless Boston summer, Chris Shipley offered me a job as an editorial assistant at PC Computing, I jumped.

I was lucky. I got into tech magazine publishing by accident (there was a recession on, and neither Mother Jones nor the local newspapers were interested in hiring), but it turned out to be a really good time to be covering technology. Over the next decade and a half I worked for InfoWorld, Business 2.0, Wired, a mobile tech startup called Mobile PC, and a bunch of others. I got to witness — and help cover — the second half of the PC revolution, the rise of client-server computing, the earliest days of online services, the dawn of the commercial internet, and the onset of the mobile era. Those booms fueled a lot of advertising, too. Through the 1990s and the early 2000s, tech publications were awash in cash, so we enjoyed plenty of perks, like offices with killer views, lavish Christmas parties and generous travel budgets. Okay, so I wasn’t making a lot of money, but I was doing fine. My wife and I bought a house. We built an addition to the house. We started a family.

So yes, Dean Lemann, I’m willing to stand up and be counted as someone who went into journalism for the money. The bet even paid off.

Along the way, I learned that I love the work: I love the tech and the science stories I cover, I love talking to people to learn how they do what they do, I love telling stories and watching as people read and respond to them in real time.

I’m lucky in a different way, too, which is that I get to be a journalist at a time when the profession is being reinvented and turned inside out.

If going into journalism for the money seems ridiculous now it’s a sign of how attenuated the opportunities are becoming for traditional journalists. Needless to say, the perks dried up long ago. The four years I spent as a freelancer, from 1999 to 2003, were a steady downward arc of income, corresponding to the beginning of the end for the news business. There’s a good chance that I’m making as much money now as I will ever make — without changing careers — and that’s a sobering thought. Every morning when I go to work I think about how lucky I am to be working at all — let alone working in one of the most progressive and open-minded newsrooms in the world. I’m grateful for the opportunity for as long as it lasts.

What’s happening right now is the aggressive reinvention of journalism. Many of the most innovative journalists working today didn’t go to J-school, and some don’t even consider themselves journalists at all. They’re bloggers and writers first of all, and don’t necessarily pledge allegiance to the same motivations or values that inspire traditional journalists. The skills that make them stand out can be learned on the job, or through networks of like-minded writers, not through expensive graduate programs.

But the job remains the same: to tell true stories that inform and entertain.

I’m not convinced that journalism as a profession will even survive the next ten years. The economic conditions that enabled newspapers to support huge numbers of reporters have dried up, and I don’t see any credible way for internet advertising or subscriptions or micropayments to make up the difference. Somebody may invent a really lucrative business model that works, and I hope they do. But I’m not holding my breath.

The writers who are successful at telling true stories will still be around, and may still choose to call themselves journalists. Or they may adopt some newer moniker, or none at all.

In the meantime, though, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing for as long as I can. I’m excited about the new tools that we have for telling stories, and I’m glad to be in a place where my job is to figure out how to use tech to find and deliver the news better. I still get excited about the possibilities of technology, and I like writing about it. So I’m not going anywhere just yet.

I may have come to journalism for the money, but I’m staying for the stories.

Brian X. Chen wrote a moving story about how three professional photographers are continuing to pursue their art even though they’re almost totally blind. One of them went blind after he’d become a photographer, but has found a way to continue working using a Nokia N82 and an iPhone 3GS. This piece shows the potential for technology — gadgets, even — to extend human potential and enable people to overcome limitations that, in the past, would have been crippling or crushing.

The photos are beautiful, too.

Blind Photographers Use Gadgets to Realize Artistic Vision

That’s a great hed, by the way: It’s direct and to the point. What more do you need?

But few people believed TMZ because the story didn’t say what the sources were, or at least not very clearly. And despite its excellent track record of shoe-leather reporting, TMZ doesn’t have enough of a reputation in most people’s eyes to be considered a reliable source on its own. That may change, since getting “the scoop of the decade” has done a lot to augment TMZ’s reputation.

But yesterday afternoon, it was only after an LA Times blog confirmed the death, citing “city and law enforcement officials,” that the story was credible.

Lesson #1: Your sources matter. And readers will pay attention to who those sources are. If TMZ had stated its sources more clearly in the story, more readers would have believed them.

Lesson #2: Reporting counts for a lot. TMZ has worked really hard, doing serious, old-fashioned, shoe leather reporting, to get this and other scoops, as the Guardian describes. There’s no substitute for developing and maintaining sources, knowing your beat, figuring out how to get ahead of the news, and laying the groundwork so that you’ll be ready when the big story breaks.

Michael Jackson: how celebrity gossip site TMZ got scoop of the decade [UK Guardian]

Twitter, circa 1935

It may come as a surprise to you to find out that Wired publishes about 10 different blogs, accounting for a total of 50-100 articles per day, with a staff of about 25.

By contrast, Wired magazine publishes about 85-100 pages of stories per month with an editorial staff of 40 — and that’s not even counting the people who write most of the stories (who are freelancers) or the half-dozen interns.

As a medium, blogging is both faster-paced and less meticulous than magazine publishing. We have nowhere near the staff resources of our companion magazine, so we are unable to do many successive edits on each item we publish, as they do. And that’s not necessarily even desirable: In blogs, it’s important to be fast and to speak with a natural, individual voice, both of which would be lost with many-layered, magazine-style editing.

That said, I find typos and grammatical errors appalling, and I strive to eliminate as many of them as I can either before posts are published or shortly thereafter. Still, some get through. I’m grateful when commenters point those out, and I correct them when I hear about them.

Arnulfo Quimare and Scott Jurek, two of the greatest ultra-long distance runners right now.

“Got it!” Luis said, dropping back to show me the image in his digital camera. He’d sprinted ahead and wheeled around just in time to capture everything I’d come to understand about running over the past two years. It wasn’t Arnulfo’s and Scott’s matching form so much as their matching smiles; they were both grinning with sheer muscular pleasure, like dolphins rocketing through the waves.

“This one is going to make me cry when I get back home,” Luis (Escobar, the photographer) said. “It’s like getting Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle in the same shot.”

Text: Christopher McDougall, Born to Run, p. 252

Photo: Luis Escobar.