A recent post at BusinessInsider reads “One huge bummer about e-books: No one can see how smart you are“, citing that publishers find the transition to e-books the beginning of the end for them, as well as retail bookstores. The reasons cited in the article appear to be two-fold:
The real bummer here is that book publishers are not seizing the opportunity to transition a reader’s behaviour to “show-off” from their intimate living rooms to “sharing” on the vast Social Web. The two reasons above are simply excuses that will likely fail at buying traditional publishers time.
Book publishers and sellers alike could instead be spending their efforts addressing the demise of the printed book (glass half empty)… or rather, the rise of the e-book (glass half full).
Cover art is dead?
Far from it, in fact. Cover art is now more important than ever. With e-book readers like the Kindle and iPad, publishers have the opportunity take a single image, and create a dynamic cover that gives a potential readers more than a singular visual impression.
Read more
Twitter backgrounds can now be interactive… [Correction: Works on any browser! See comment from ShiftComm below.]
Installing and activating your page with Clickable Now is good practice. Your followers, customers, and constituents may be using either browser, and this is just one more step that will help ease the process for people who want to interact with you on the Social Web.
Install the add-on or script into your browser from here, then give Clickable Now access to your Twitter account. Once you do, it’s pretty simple (See the screen shots below):
That’s it! Although this only works on Firefox browsers, and for those who have installed the add-on, it’s a big step forward. We’ve been wanting the Twitter backgrounds to be interactive for a long time.
You can see below what we’ve hyper-linked @INCULINK or on my personal page @SherryMain. We’ve added live links to our logo and URL, personal blogs, personal Twitter accounts, and to our Facebook fan page.
Perhaps one day, HTML will go the way of Photoshop layers and allow us to upload custom HTML backgrounds behind the Twitter feeds. But until then, this will do…
Hat-tip to Todd Defren (@tdefren) of ShiftComm.com.
Read more
12seconds.tv is to video, what twitter’s 140 characters is to the written note.
Today, 12seconds.tv reveals its newest feature – the 12omercial – a 12-second video feature that can be linked to Web sites or contact information such as your Twitter or Facebook accounts. This in itself isn’t too unique. One can already tweet their 12seconds video, and people already send links to each other. In addition, now all 12seconds.tv videos track viewing statistics.
What’s unique with this morning’s new release is the partnership that 12seconds.tv has made with LG and its Versa phone. LG has a branded page from which they invite the 12seconds community to create short bits about their new mobile phone.
For LG, it’s free advertising, the opportunity to scout talent and even come up with creative marketing campaigns on a minimal budget. LG can repurpose the videos for a full-blown or viral ad campaign. Through this partnership, LG is also exciting and engaging its product owners.
YouTube and Seesmic both offer the ability to record your own video, but no company has invited the public to submit their own content, and add it to a live feed that can also be 
syndicated to blogs, Facebook, Twitter and beyond.
The real challenge to LG and other brands who participate in this live stream conversation will be how companies respond to complaints and other negative or inappropriate content. Will a company respond to a complaint with it’s own 12second clip, attempt to censor the content, or lead the conversation offline? Will a customer service representative respond to you? Will busy execs sometimes be expected to respond on camera themselves?
These are just a few things to consider when entering the next social media territory. The advantages of being a first-mover company is undoubtedly strong, but only when done with careful strategy. The consequences of failed public relations via this new medium, however, have the potential to be exponentially damaging.
We’ll keep a close observation on the LG and 12omerical campaign.
12seconds.tv itself has great potential. The creators of Tweetdeck must also think so since 12seconds.tv has been a feature there for a little while now. It’ll be interesting to see how the likes of Seesmic (which is integrated with Twhirl) and YouTube compete in this crowd-sourced marketing arena.
The next step for 12seconds.tv… First to come out of beta, and then perhaps a 12seconds iPhone app on a future model with video capability? Let’s hope so!
Our overview of different video/multimedia sharing options and its uses in social media applications are coming up in the next week, but I wanted to take a diversion today to review 12omercial as it debuted.
I don’t know why I’ve recently had such fascinations with subway maps. It’d be cool to be known for illustrating one…
information Architects has released their fourth Web Trend map, modeled after the Tokyo Metro Subway System
The Web Trend Map is a yearly publication by iA Inc. It maps the 333 most influential Web domains and the 111 most influential Internet people onto the Tokyo Metro map.
Domains are carefully selected by the iA research team through dialogue with map enthusiasts. Each domain is evaluated based on traffic, revenue, age and the company that owns it. The iA design team assigns these selected domains to individual stations on the Tokyo Metro map in ways that complement the characters of each. For example, Twitter is located in Shibuya this year, as Shibuya is the spot with the biggest buzz.
Why Tokyo Metro? Because the complex metro lines are the best analogy to the Internet we have found for a trend map. To serve our purposes, however, the Tokyo Metro map has been modified slightly from its original version.
iA is soliciting final feedback on this Final Beta version before sending it to the printer.
I’ve referenced their last two maps extensively in new media/digital strategy maps. Here are links to those:
Creative Commons has announced CC0 – pronounced CC “Zero”. CC0 benefits those creators who aren’t concerned about copyright protections, or who later want to waive those rights altogether.
According to the Creative Commons, the law makes it virtually impossible to waive the copyright automatically bestowed on creators. CC0 is a universal waiver that may be used by anyone wishing to permanently surrender the copyright and database rights they may have in a work.
Personal Genome Project, is one of the first adopters of CCo. Read more about CC0 at the CC blogpost “Expanding the Public Domain: Part Zero“.
So, that begs the question – what are the terms of any Creative Commons license? Is it life + 75 years like copyright?
UPDATE from @plagiarismtoday: CC Licenses, if they aren’t changed, last as long as copyright as it is a copyright license, not a change to copyright law.
Read more