This is what you sign up to as an Apple Apps developer (or how to become an IT freemason in one simple step)

Do the words devil, sell and soul come to mind here?  The full text of the agreement can be found at the Electronic Frontier Foundation's website - but since one condition of being an Apps developer is that you don't reveal the terms and conditions pursuant to being an Apps developer, a Freedom of Information Act request was needed to obtain the gory details.  As I have mentioned on other blogs of mine, Microsoft seems a paragon of virtue compared to the current control freakery of the (once) beautiful Apple.  We can argue about whether we prefer open source to proprietary software, of course.  Even as a self-confessed addict of open source ways of doing things, I can see examples of when - at least as business people - we would prefer the latter to the former.  But proprietary terms and conditions?  Where you cannot reveal the context in which you are working to anyone who is not a member of your select club?  This is more like freemasonry for the digital world than a relationship between 21st century creators.

Definitely a bad day for electronic publishing, the day Apple got its grubby fingers in the pie.

More background here from John Naughton.

How Apps can provide that immersive reading experience (and save the hyperlinked intelligences we covet so much)

Magazines which earn income from adverts really need you to want to sit inside their covers and stay there for a while.  The Internet has broken down the reading experience into a disjointed butterfly-like flitting from one promiscuous hyperlink to another.  That is really why traditional publishing and the Internet don't go together.  A carefully bound publication creates its narrative across lush publicity.  Your (now) standard Internet surfer creates his or her own utility-focussed story of information, in many cases excising the irrelevance of marketing from the often crowdsourced and amateur-based editorial filters.

Traditional publishing is, however, still a powerful medium.  Here I mean powerful in the sense of appealing and not in the sense of overwhelmingly controlling.  There is, therefore, surely a place for both a paywall-less Internet of hyperlinked intelligences and a supremely structured set of top-notch editorial environments.  Recent attempts by people like Rupert Murdoch on the one hand and apparently successful Internet players such as the New York Times on the other to deconstruct the Internet of hyperlinked intelligences and block the flow of discourse and comment have threatened a whole eco-system; indeed a whole way of life.  Mistakenly, in my view, instead of trying - with all their resources - to reinvent a different distribution system altogether, they've wanted to bend quite out of shape a lovely medium which is currently on a wonderful intellectual high.

So is there any way out?  Perhaps it's time I revised my initial unhappiness with the Apple iPad.  If Apple, with its locked-down consumer software, can take out of the Internet equation the high-class publishers who want upfront income and an immersive reading experience instead of banner advertising and promiscuous thought crickets, perhaps at the same time it can remove the risk of disintegration that such publishers currently pose to the creative commons of millions of souls that is our dearly beloved worldwide web.

I do hope so.

More here - from John Naughton today.

My Epson printer seems to be monitoring my wallet instead of my ink

Not happy.  My Epson printer, an admirable consumer durable in almost every other respect, no longer seems to be monitoring my ink as it should.  It would, in fact, seem to be monitoring my wallet rather than its cartridges.  In fact, rather than usefully tell me it's time to change cartridges when it's actually time to change cartridges, it forces me to change cartridges whilst there still appears to be a ream of paper's worth of printing swilling around their insides.  Even though I've disabled the ink monitoring, it won't disable what the ink monitoring prevents you from doing - which is simply print until all the ink runs out.

It's truly amazing how these big companies make money out of us without us really realising it.  Truly amazing.  Adding value for shareholders was never so dishonest a pursuit.  (Unless, of course, I'm missing something here and there's a simple button simply buried deep inside the software, designed simply to save legal-type faces from legal-type challenges that consumers like myself would be only too pleased to have an opportunity to mount.)

Ikea's new online magazine (II) (thekitchen.ikea.co.uk)

More from the interactive side of Ikea here as they launch a new online kitchen design site here.  For full public consumption from the 24th February onwards.

A good example of how to publish constructively - and interactively - on the web.  This takes advantage of the public appetite and dynamic for crowdsourcing - as indeed did places like Ikea even before the web took hold.  Outsourcing the building of furniture to customers satisfied the growing need for more democratic prices as well as - in a sense - empowering these selfsame customers and making them more important.

Flatpack is the real world equivalent of Facebook, I suppose.
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Update to this post: free kitchen planner software from Ikea available for PC here.  So the lines between real world and virtual blur evermore fiercely.  We even begin to outsource the designer side of things - the real added value stuff.  As with teaching and the trade of optician, as with self-medication, little by little the bastions of all these professional black arts fall to the tide of self-education that is the modern information gatherer's natural habitat.

So will there ever come a time when something as literal as plumbing becomes a simple matter of calling up the ether and sticking a virtual thumb in the leak?

I do wonder.

iPad haiku

Here's my entry for an iPad haiku competition that may still be open for entries (never was able to work out time differences):

Big money beckons:
"Save books" is the cry - but why
take tablets? Read more!

More on why newspapers simply aren't getting the Net

From John Naughton's Memex today, a lovely piece which explains far better than I ever could the reasons behind all the above.

More online newspapers to go down the pay route (though in this case without the accompanying Google-bashing)

Now it would appear that the New York Times will follow the Murdochs of this world - though with certain differences of opinion. No gratuitous Google-bashing going on in this case, for example. More on this subject here.

It seems that minds are being made up with a rather unseemly haste as economic crisis puts a brake on advertising revenues. How this will affect the web is unclear. I suppose that in some way it may drive even more people away from "professional" websites and into the expanding embrace of family- and friend-sourced communication and content. We may find that newspaper publishing becomes even less relevant to our daily habits as Facebook, Twitter and traditional blogging all tie up our time in essentially Web 2.0 focussed activity.

The truth of the matter is that it was our love affair with mobile phones that really started the rot. More than any other technology before or since, they have captured our hard-earned incomes with both pay-as-you-go and more traditional contracts. In doing so, they have allowed us to publish our thoughts on a one-to-one basis via voice, text, photo and - more recently - video in such a way that an industry can be built on the back of a viable economic model at the same time as satisfying the ever-increasing need of 21st century citizens to express themselves rather than be the captive object of makers of received opinion.

Now this one-to-one relationship has become multiple and globalised, we simply can't shrug of this intruding desire to both communicate actively and incessantly register in a plastic sense - somewhere - our thoughts and musings.

Newspapers which don't get this interaction or change in behaviours won't get the 21st century. It's as simple as that.

(The above link via StKonrath's Twitter feed.)

Lessons from the past - the telegraph, the Internet, newspapers and news

Not the Telegraph. The telegraph. How newspapers may fall but news will continue to march on as before.

FLIPS books for Nintendo DS and DSi (or the future for e-books everywhere)

Lovely idea, this.



I do wonder if this won't be the future for e-books. Rather than simply converting printed copy into e-ink, the porting process will be rather more involved. After all, websites are e-books by another name. A case of convergent evolution.

It's really not true that children do not read any more. They read far more than I ever read as a child - and I was a prolific reader. What they don't read is traditional books. What they do read is hyperlinked text - and very proficiently.

The FLIPS series is far more than a worthy attempt to reach out to a new audience on its own terms. The FLIPS series is a blueprint for e-books everywhere.

How truly bad (some) newspaper editors are at making money (or how this is the century of the amateur communicator)

A brilliant exposition of how bad some newspaper publishers are at making money out of all that free traffic Google and company provide them with. If you still believe that the British Digital Economy bill is worth the e-paper it's burned into, please read this article first. The future is not Murdochian, not if the future is to include any of the oldco business models. For Murdoch and Mandelson's way will probably - quite contradictorily - end up achieving the final destruction of the old institutional newspaper publishing models: quite the opposite of what they were actually aiming for.

It may, in fact, end up leading to greater opportunities for end-user/producers as they happily allow search engines to find them.

In the Internet, visibility is everything. Web domains mean little these days. Search engines are how we find things. Search engines are the equivalent of the environmental knowledge we used to keep in our heads when our environment was our town. Now our environment is the planet, there is absolutely no way we will be able to do without search engines.

Microsoft's Bing is sizing up to be the Google for the oldco content providers and their 20th century publishing models. Bing believes in walls, in payments upfront, in monetising above all, in old-fashioned unidirectional relationships between passive consumers and directing producers. Bing and all those intellectual property merchants who will follow Murdoch's lead make up the last desperate throw of the dice of the oldco cash-cow-owning content providers who've suddenly discovered their cash cows aren't quite so attractive as they used to be. It's not piracy that - long-term - is going to do them in. It's simple boredom from consumers who are no longer captive. Organisations who collaboratively created quite magnificently in the 20th century are being outdone by millions of telephone texts, billions of downloads of home-made videos on YouTube, trillions of words published on Twitter, Facebook and blogs and an infinite number of social and personal exchanges between ordinary people who far prefer to spend their free time these days communicating with other ordinary people.

This is the century of amateur communicators. Partly because education has meant we're not so amateur any more. But mainly because - suddenly, for the price of a broadband connection - very simply we can. That's our essence as human beings. We are innate communicators. That's what we do. And we are beginning to get the hang of doing it without filters or intermediaries. We're beginning to want more of each other - and less of the professionals who once made a living out of publishing.

We're all now editors, authors, publishers and journalists. Doesn't mean we're good at it. Just means we're good enough.