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:

1. the cover image as a marketing tool becomes benign, and
2. books on a shelf in someone’s home serves as personal testimonials to the value of the book.

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.

With smartphones and tablet readers, the cover can become like a movie or video-game trailer that entices your imagination using moving visual and audio cues.  Albeit from magazines, here are two very different examples of how animated cover art can draw the consumer in.

A recent New Yorker cover by Jorge Colombo illustrated entirely on the iPhone app Brushes:

And an even more dynamic experience is this opening sequence for an iPad publication:

A movie poster never sells a film as much as the movie trailer or review does. So why should a book cover or poster have to? No longer will you be able to judge a book by its cover…

Exhibitionism drives the digital landscape.

Social media and networks thrive on the fact that people like to share about themselves, as well as share things that they find interesting. Publishers should be making these two factors work in their favor.

First, virtual applications like Visual Bookshelf (by Living Social) in Facebook, have a much greater reach than any guests that will walk through my study at home. Someone with 200 friends can easily share tips about the 100 books on their shelves much more quickly and passively, than they can with 10 friends at a dinner party.

Hannah is a Facebook friend whose bookshelf I've never seen. In fact, we've never met in person, but know each other thru a mutual friend. Nonetheless, I've grown to trust her and her taste in books, and have recently begun reading "The Elegance of the Hedgehog".

In fact, Visual Bookshelf expands one’s community beyond their immediate social network friends to the 52,000+ fans of the app on Facebook, or 1.3 million fans [2008 data] on its site.  And virtual social applications become more intimate as friends discover what books I may have on my nightstand… not just my bookshelves.

The integration of Visual Bookshelf and Amazon.com is a key example of how publishers can transform consumer behaviour by encouraging instant one-click (print or electronic) book purchases.  The one-click sell rate for a cheaper e-book will inevitably surpass the sales of higher-priced print books as consumers become increasingly accustomed to instant, hassle-free purchases.

Readers know what sells best.

After all, they did buy your book.  So let them share their favorite experts, whether it’s 140 characters  at a time or in 40 word snippets.  One day soon, e-books will allow people to share any section (of limited length) from a book directly to Buzz, Twitter or Facebook, for example.

A snippet that rang true to one reader could be the bit that sells the book to someone else.  Or if a reader is curious about a book and wants to find out who in their network has read it, linked data will one day be able to give you customized feedback.

Amazon sort of does this already with the “People who bought this also bought…” feature.  Netflix does this very well with movies, but has thus far lacked at building an active engagement on existing social networks outside the Netflix platform.

Then imagine tying in a New York Times book review to this social media chatter. The possibilities for truly integrated and digital marketing only keep growing.

Besides, how many of those books on your actual bookshelves, have you actually read?

Together, the e-book and social Web lets you prove your “smarts” through your ratings and reviews… to the billions who have access to the Web.  Nevermind the dozen friends who will walk through your house this year.

If any organization should be worried and recreating their business strategy as a result of e-books, it would probably be public libraries.  How will they deal with brick-and-mortar operations if the “information” they’ve traditionally collected becomes completely available for loan online?

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):

1. Click on the “New Link” button.
2. Drag the link box to the portion of your sidebar that you’d like hyper-linked.
3. Resize to fit the area to be hyper-linked.
4. Enter the email or Web site information, and choose the highlight color.
5. Save settings.

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.

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.

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

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.

So what is Aardvark?

It’s an IM client from which you can ask a specific question like “What’s a good easy bike path in Irvine, CA for a beginning cyclist?”  And it’ll send the query to others who claim to be experts in cycling nearby.

Unlike Twitter, your question is broadcast to those mostly likely able to answer your question.  Likewise, you’ll get sent questions that you’re most likely knowledgeable about based upon your Aardvark profile.  You can control how many questions are sent to you and how often, so you only participate as much or as little as you want to.

Since it’s still in private beta, there isn’t a critical mass yet to get quick enough responses.  (It took about 20 minutes to get an answer to the question above.)  And I have a wishlist of features including:

• The ability to add users other than those that I invite to be “friends”
• An option to receive any questions (and answers) regardless of topics from those I mark as friends
• Receive instant answers from a repository of previous answers to similar questions.

According to Read Write Web (@rww), Aardvark was developed by The Mechanical Zoo, a San Francisco-based company that raised $5.25 million from August Capital and Baseline Ventures last October.

I’d seen the original Kindle here and there, and actually got a personal tour of the Kindle 2 this past weekend (courtesy @AdamAinbinder).  Whenever I have a new toy in hand, it’s like being a kid in a candy store.  The Kindle is no different.

Since I wasn’t completely convinced of the Kindle 2 yet, it was a pleasant surprise to read today that Amazon had released Kindle for the iPhone.  Why?  Because 1) no need to spend $359, and 2) wi-fi access!

Like any gadget geek, I downloaded the free installation from the App Store immediately (or as quick as the App Store would allow me since other brilliant minds had the same thought.)  This is where my excitement stopped, and this blog post began:

Peeve #1 – I went to download a couple sample chapters to test it out, and to my chagrin, I can’t download or purchase books directly from the Kindle App.

Peeve #2 – The app reroutes me to the Kindle Store on Amazon’s Web site and suggests I can do so on the iPhone Safari App.  But there is no mobile version of the Kindle Store, meaning there is no easy way to navigate it from the iPhone.

Peeve #3 – The Kindle Store is not integrating my Amazon Wishlist which has both books and periodicals.  Instead it’s suggesting, I might be interested in Danielle Steele.  (Uh, no thanks!)

Getting past these issues, I do like the fact that in the Kindle Store, I’m able to purchase – or better yet, preview – chapters of a book directly to my iPhone.  Which, then lead me to the next issues with the Kindle App (and I stand to be corrected on these points since I’ve only tried sample chapters of a book):

Peeve #4 – I can’t search terms, phrases in Wikipedia like you can on the Kindle 2.

Peeve #5 – I can’t search definitions for words in a built-in dictionary like you can on the Kindle 2.

Obviously the screen is much smaller on an iPhone and the readability of the screen is not akin to the Kindle’s screen.  But the idea that I don’t have to carry one more electronic gadget on my travels is nice. (I already can’t leave home without my AmEx, laptop, SLR, Coolpix, and iPhone!)

Put another way, my ideal e-book reader would:

1. Be a part of my phone, with a screen that is easy on the eyes;
2. Have wifi capability;
3. Scroll pages with the swipe of a finger;
4. Have all the functionalities of the Kindle 2 (screen, dictionary, wikipedia, highlighting, etc.);
5. Use open DRM so as not to be locked into the Kindle or other e-book reader only;
6. Allow upload or purchase of independent/self-published books or any PDF content;
7. Share CC-licensed books across machines; and
8. Issue five licenses so that I may load books on my computer, phone, e-reader and maybe one day my interactive kitchen for the e-cookbooks.  The last license would be so that when I’m done reading the ebook, I could pass one license on to a family member or friend – much like I can a hard copy book.

I’m living in an ideal world.  But if just the other day I’d wished for a Kindle App for the iPhone and it’s come true… I’m guessing the list above isn’t too far away from reality or fruition.

From a business perspective, I’m glad Amazon has released their e-books to the iPhone.  It’s a huge opportunity and marketshare that Amazon can access easily.  It also – maybe – provides Apple an incentive to beef-up their next version of the iPhone so that readablity is improved!

I did my obligatory post on the randomness of me:

1. It did not say that I would have bad luck for seven years if I didn’t do it.
2. The first person that tagged me is someone I don’t know too well, and I felt like I got to look into his soul. So I wanted to share back.
3. Whatever I wrote on this list, I would be remembered for at my memorial service – not the 25 skeletons in my closet, which are reserved for those who I’ve shared those experiences with.
4. And because as much as I’d like to say I’m a trailblazer… I am a conformer.

OK – I’ll end there.  25 Random Things is the only fad I’ll succumb to… Until the next one from a friend – who I may or may not be friends with in real life – tags me in Facebook and inspires me all over again.

From my Facebook post…

What the heck:

1. I used to work with maximum security inmates @ San Quentin. They were the nicest men. This experience definitely shaped my views about the death penalty.
2. I have bad luck with valets. Twice in a row the same car was crashed. The second time it was totaled. Neither time was I in or near my car.
3. I can’t leave the house or go on any extended trip without a Nikon – an SLR usually, but a pocket one will do.
4. I dream of being the Barefoot Contessa, and Paul is my Jeffrey.
5. I want to attempt the Crystal Cove sprint marathon this year.
6. I was voted “most technologically advanced” in high school. Really, that was a category.
7. I want to skipper a sailboat through the Panama Canal.
8. The first conversation I ever had with Paul lasted over 7 hours… I don’t think we realized we could have the rest of our lives together yet then. (Of course now, we don’t even live together… but somehow it works!)
9. I much prefer Northern California to Southern California.
10. I kept my maiden name and added Main just to see if my name would extend to three lines on the driver’s license (Sherry Lynn Kokoro Hashimoto Main). It didn’t.
11. I don’t *hate* many things, but I do hate it when people don’t like me or are not pleased with me.
12. I am a snob. I know it. I need to fix that.
13. Someone once told me I was intimidating. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. That’s not the vibe I give out, is it?
14. I used to compete in abacus competitions. I am bad ass at adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. I rock at mental math.
15. I have dreams that I am running really fast and all of a sudden I take off and am soaring, and everyone looks up at me perturbed. I want it to really happen one day.
16. If I could have dinner with five influential people dead or alive, they would be: Leonardo Da Vinci, Barack Obama, Lawrence Lessig, Robin Williams, and Madeleine Albright.
17. I named my goldfishes Cat and Dog. So I wasn’t lying when I said I had a Cat and Dog growing up.
18. I wrote an essay in 1996 about My Role Model and it won me some scholarship money. It’s still true.
19. I play the piano, clarinet, contra-bass clarinet, percussion (quads, bass drum, marimba, etc.), and Rock Band guitar. I dream of being in a symphony. Something about being one of many to make something beautiful.
20. I have a blog about all things social media, food, policy and photography.
21. I’m addicted to Twitter and wish they would just hire me already. Follow me @sherrymain.
22. If I had to brand myself with tattoos, these would be included: Apple, Marc Jacobs, All-Clad.
23. I’m so detail oriented, I forget to see the big picture. Even when I make a note to remember to take a step back.
24. I don’t tell family and friends “thank you” enough. So THANK YOU.
25. I’m glad this list isn’t a game of truth or dare… Boy would I lose all your respect then!

I just read this fun op-ed from the Washington Post by Jeanne McManus.

It comedically devalues life in a Twitter world:

Which comes first? The Twitter or life itself? Are we writing about what we’re doing or are we writing about what we’re going to do or are we doing it because we need something to write about?

I enjoyed her short musing.  But now, I can’t find a link to follow her tweets anywhere on the entire op-ed page!  Nor have i been able to locate her through Twitter’s “Find People” tool. I’m bummed, as she sounds really interesting, whether these are her real tweets or not:

Jeanne has measured out her life with coffee spoons. Huh?

So I write my own public request to Ms. McManus… and to any other editor, writer, reporter who covers new and social media seriously or comically – on TV, in print or online: please share how we can follow you or become a fan on these new tools which you write about.

NPR’s Science Friday does a great job of this.  While driving from Annapolis to D.C. several weeks ago, @Padrepablo and I listened to Ira Flatow (@scifri) interviewing Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly).  Ira repeatedly mentioned how we could follow them.  And caller Jeff Levy (@levyj413) – the EPA’s web manager – who talked about government and social media also shared how listeners could follow him. I’ve since learned a lot from following Mr. Levy.  I’d like to easily do the same from others.

Of course, privacy is a concern, so I understand if you don’t easily share your Twitter name with your article… but then could you consider separate public and private personas? When used correctly, I can only see sharing Twitter accounts as a great learning and conversation tool.

Taking my own advice, you can follow me @sherrymain.

Here’s a snapshot of Twitter Chat During the Super Bowl from the New York Times today. Click on the image to see the interactive map, and navigate the different categories in the left menu as you play the Game Timeline up top:

The Washington Post has done mash-ups of tweets, videos and photos on Google Maps, which is really, really easy to do. Here is the official Washington Post announcement that describes what they did for the 2008 Presidential Elections.

Perhaps there’s an advertisement opportunity here for papers to highlight particular buzz in unique colors for products (or brands) that are willing to pay the papers. (Of course, the anti-conglomerate, free-press side of me hopes this won’t ever happen. But the business degree side of me tells me it’s probably already in the works.)

On the flip side, another opportunity here is for market researchers to take a tweet-grid such as these and geo-locate where their products/brands are most or least popular. We’re definitely at the dawn of a new era of reporting and micro-marketing…