The magazine industry might want to consult the following video the next time they're fighting for consumers' hearts and minds.
Be sure to watch the whole thing. It's not what it initially appears to be. And you might want to gird yourself for the inevitable torrent of copycats to come.
It's rare when you see such a clear example of the Internet's disruption: OK Go, the band best known for its clever music videos, has severed ties with its record label, EMI. The reason? The label is caught in old-think and wants to disable the embed function on the group's web-based videos.
OK Go ... God bless 'em ... told EMI to politely bugger off. The band knows embedding is an absolute must-have if you want to harness the web's power.
Speaking of which, here's the group's latest masterpiece:
Books lock content into a container by default. There's no easy way to excerpt or share or disseminate. But digital sets that content free, and that means hardware that delivers digital content needs to facilitate that freedom. False obstacles that seek to duplicate the limitations of print are ridiculous. Hear that, Amazon?
Thankfully -- seriously, thank God for this -- it looks like magazine publishers are getting the message. From the New York Times:
Sports Illustrated's demonstration version -- developed with the Wonderfactory, a design firm -- lets readers organize the magazine by subjects like baseball or football. They can circle photographs or articles and use a toolbar to e-mail an article, print it, view comments, view related items, see relevant Twitter posts or save the article to a favorites file. They can rearrange the order of the issue, see dozens of photos that don't make it into print and pull live scores from all the teams they follow. [Link and emphasis added.]
One last thing. I try to include a source link with all of my tweets and excerpts; just a little something that allows people to go deeper if they're so inclined. That's why tablet editions need a link-to feature. It could take the form of a web-based version of the article (with advertising and marketing all around it, of course). Perhaps it's some sort of intermediate, email-to-a-friend edition. Maybe it's an iTunes-esque redirect. I really don't care what the links look like. They just need to be there.
Michael Levenson's first-person account of Boston's schizophrenic Downtown Crossing is an interesting story, but there's a gaping hole in the coverage:
Where are the pictures?
The story text has no photos and the home page features only one small picture.
Downtown Crossing is a bizarre part of the city that's ripe for a photo essay. This was a perfect opportunity to combine Globe editorial coverage with Boston.com's jaw-dropping Big Picture blog.
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