How sharing disrupts media | Felix Salmon
There are lots of ways of publishing content onto the web, and if you look at the relative popularity of, say, WordPress vs Tumblr vs Twitter, then it’s easy to come to the conclusion that the easier you make it to publish, the more popular you’re going to be. But at Tumblr, at least, there’s something else very interesting going on: according to Karp, there are 9 curators for every creator on his site.
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Journalists, I find, tend to come quite late to sites like Tumblr and Pinterest. For one thing, those sites are overwhelmingly visual: images nearly always do much better than words. And more generally, journalists are much better at writing than they are at reading — which means that they’re really bad at seeing the value added by curating and reblogging.
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But in future, the most viral stories are going to have a life of their own, being shared across many different platforms and being read by people who will never visit the original site on which they were published.
Will Apple launch a sort of GarageBand for e-books? “That’s what we believe you’re about to see,” MacInnis told Ars (and our other sources agree). “Publishing something to ePub is very similar to publishing web content. Remember iWeb? That iWeb code didn’t just get flushed down the toilet—I think you’ll see some of [that code] repurposed.
Ars Technica on Apple’s textbook event this week.
My hopes for this announcement, if it is a “GarageBand for eBooks”:
- It’s free
- It’s not just for text books
- It is able to tie into a boilerplate Newsstand app, allowing publishers to more easily layout periodical content in a standard way (the divergence between Newsstand apps is unnecessary and frustrating)
- Textbooks are published into a textbook ecosystem, with unified notes, book collections for courses managed by instructors, and interactive quizzes built into books allowing students to take short exams and instructors to grade easily from an iPad.
I think 2 will eventually pan out, but 3 is wishful thinking. 4 would be a game changer, but would require massive commitments from major universities to catch on. Teachers I know would like such an ecosystem (I would have liked it as a student), but it may be a hinderance to adoption and is probably best saved for later.
(via dbreunig)(via dbreunig)
