Ian P. Hines great interview with Pat Dryburgh.

The Hayek vs Keynes Rap. Very well done, and it stuffs quite a lot of information in. If you want a quite good overview of the Keynes and Hayek debate (perhaps the most relevant debate in the 20th and now the 21st century) in a wonderfully-silly format, watch it.

Thread & Water. Great t-shirts, for a great cause. All proceeds go to supporting clean water in Haiti.

It’s by a bunch of great people, including Phil Coffman and Joshua Blankenship. The shirts (and the web site) look fantastic.

Justin Williams on Indie+Relief:

For an idea to go from a single tweet to a massive, worldwide charity drive in the span of six days is impressive and possibly insane. That said, I’d do it again in a heartbeat (though I hope that won’t be necessary).

I just now learned of Justin Williams and Garrett Murray’s Indie+Relief, and what an incredibly great idea it is. They raised over $140,000 to donate to Haiti relief.

This is the Mac community at its finest.

Evan Williams in 2005:

It’s always good to have options. One of the best ways to do that is to have income. While it’s true that traffic is now again actually worth something, the give-everything-away-and-make-it-up-on-volume strategy stamps an expiration date on your company’s ass.

Good advice, but…

(Via Chris Thomson.)

Pat Dryburgh joined the Fusion network. Can’t think of a better guy to be a member.

What Neven Mrgan would like to see:

An easy way for people who write, draw, play, and combine all of these, to publish their work to a simple, popular, digital store serving a device ideal for reading; a publishing equivalent of the App Store.

That’s precisely what I’m hoping for, too: a dead-simple way for individual writers, filmmakers or other creatives to publish their work online for people to purchase.

Imagine a store that can, if not support, provide some income to people like Garrett Murray for their films, or stories, or comics. One that lets them focus on making things, rather than setting up a complicated and altogether unsatisfying web platform to sell it.

Apple’s apparently impending tablet has grabbed me, for one reason: I love to read. Reading the newspaper over breakfast is a kind of meditation for me, a slow morning routine that prepares me for the rest of the day.

After that ritual, which I look forward to every morning, I go and read through my feeds on my computer, and the differences between the two are jarring. One is relaxed, considered and focused; the other frantic.

So I am interested in the tablet not because it will be a new toy to play with, but because it could be a suitable replacement for print — with all the advantages of a web-connected device — that a computer will never be.

I am interested in it, because I can see myself sitting down with a tablet in the morning, next to my bowl of cereal and tea, and reading the newspaper and a select few feeds for an hour.

But video and other multimedia content isn’t particularly appealing to me, like Time Inc.’s mockup. An excellent reading experience, just as engrossing as print, is.

I’ve done two mockups of what I would like to see for a newspaper. The first is the “first page”:

(Click to enlarge and reveal the rest of the page)

Rather than adopt the typical newspaper layout to the tablet screen, which would likely require zooming in on each article to read it, each article is perfectly readable without zooming. The central advantage of a newspaper’s first page is the large number of articles that it has, and thus the breadth of content it shows. I kept that feature, but did so in a way that is readable without zooming.

A newspaper works in a simple way — you either flip through it to get to the section you want, or pull that section out and read it first. I want the application to be just as simple for jumping to a new section, so you can move to one easily from anywhere in the application. Rather than make a navigation screen, it has a permanent bar at the top which gives you immediate access to any section.

When you want to read one of the articles, you just tap on it, and it opens it in the article view:

The article view has the same bar at the top, so you can jump to any section.

There is little UI, or any other visual distractions — just the text and relevant image. To change pages, you slide your finger from the right edge toward the left edge, just like other ebook applications on the iPhone.

While reading, I like to highlight and take notes for articles I might use in later work. To do this, you tap and hold with two fingers on the text, and then run your finger along the text to highlight it. You can add a note as well, which is then attached to the highlighted portion (this is signified by the dog-eared edge of the highlighted text).

As I discussed in an earlier article on the tablet, I want these noted sections to be compiled for you and synced back to your Mac with the citation, so it is ready to be inserted into whatever you are writing.

The UI elements at the bottom do what you expect — the plus button, when pressed, allows you to share it via Twitter or email, while the star allows you to save it for later. I wasn’t (and am still not) sure what the best way to do these things is. I want as little UI clutter on the screen as possible, so I initially wanted the UI elements only to pop up when you tapped on the screen (like several iPhone applications do), but this is too clunky. They pop up when you accidentally tap the screen, and end up being a distraction.

I also thought about using gestures, but I couldn’t think of a gesture that is conceptually associated with sharing, and would be discoverable by users. I then thought about a little tab at the bottom, which you could pull up to reveal the UI elements. I rejected this because it introduces complexity and more steps into something that should be dead simple.

Instead, I tried to make them as unobtrusive as possible. Rather than look like a bar overlaid on the screen, I wanted them to look more like they are a part of the page, just as the text is. As a result, the reader shouldn’t think about them at all — they are not covering any part of the page, but are on the page itself, and so they shouldn’t be a factor until they need to use them.

Pogue reviews the Barnes & Noble nook, and concludes that it’s junk:

Those missing features are symptoms of B&N’s bad case of Ship-at-All-Costs-itis. But the biggest one of all is the Nook’s half-baked software.

To use the technical term, it’s slower than an anesthetized slug in winter.

Chris Bowler’s interview with Garrett Murray.

Murray’s film Forever’s Not So Long is absolutely fantastic, and quite inspirational. It doesn’t take a big budget to make a great film.

Square is a new service which allows you to charge credit cards with your iPhone. Birdfeed creator Buzz Andersen is involved, and that tells you all you need to know about it.

I absolutely love the website, too. There’s nothing particularly amazing about it — and that’s why it’s so good. There’s nothing on it that isn’t necessary, it tells you precisely what Square does, and is quite beautiful.

John Battelle explains why he won’t read books he cares about on his Kindle.

And that’s when it hit me, in a very visceral and almost reactionary sense: I never, ever, EVER, want to read a book on this device, at least as the device is currently set up. Perhaps that’s a bit too sweeping: Put another way, I don’t ever want to read a book that I would ever want to share or keep – one that I’d want to put on my shelf in my library at home.

He makes a compelling point. Sharing can be solved rather easily, but the social aspect of books — seeing what someone is reading in public, and what one’s read in their library — can’t be.

Reading in public is especially interesting. When you see someone reading a book in public, the focus isn’t on the medium, but on what book it is. When reading on a device (whether it’s a Kindle, Nook, or iPhone), the focus is entirely on the device. That seems to be an important shift.

James Shelley thinks the medium not only changes how we read, but alters how our brains function:

So here is our trajectory: more text, faster, in smaller chunks. If we use technology that forces us to think in 140 character bites, that is exactly how the brain will adapt. If we use technology that forces us to skim-read tomes of information, that is exactly how the brain will adapt. If we use technology that wires our consciousness to a global network during ever waking moment, that is exactly how our brains will adapt.

(Via Pat Dryburgh.)

Cormac McCarthy doesn’t think people will read lengthy works anymore:

But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you’re going to write something like “The Brothers Karamazov” or “Moby-Dick,” go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don’t care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

I fear he’s right — we have so many different sources of media vying for our attention that the quiet, commitment-requiring book can’t even begin to compete — but I don’t think he is. Not many people read Moby Dick from cover to cover to begin with.¹ It’s always been a small subset of the public that seriously reads literature, so I’m not sure if anything is really changing for lengthy writing.

But lengthy works can only exist in a medium that allows it. Books allow long works because books demand a singular focus from their readers: you can’t read a book and check your email and Twitter at the same time. Digital mediums, like the computer and to a slightly lesser extent smart phones, don’t demand this focus. While reading an article, I’m looking at one layer that’s on top of several others, a background, and a dock with icons in it. I’m not focused on that essay as much as I could be, because I can look at anything else on the web in a split second. Computers aren’t for reading, because your focus is perpetually split. That’s the downside to multi-tasking.

Mobile devices like the iPhone are better in this regard, but not completely. Because applications take the entire screen, while reading on the iPhone you can focus only on the text — but you are still only two taps away from browsing the web or making a call.

Content within this medium must compete for the user’s attention. This encourages short, punchy pieces; to the point and dramatic. It is no wonder that content on the web tends to be short and of the “10 ways to supercharge your blog” variety.

So I am not sure that it is the culture that’s influencing the kind of content, so much as it is the medium. What we need, then, are digital devices that demand the same focus as books, and can wrap a reader up in them. Hence the Kindle. These devices must come close to the book’s intuitive feel — there should be nothing on the screen but text (the Kindle’s menu bar at the top is a terrible offender), and interaction with the device must be natural. While reading it, you forget you’re holding it; when you “flip” a page, it doesn’t break the story’s spell.

The Kindle is an advancement toward this, but it doesn’t reach it. The most attractive thing about the Kindle is that content is its absolute focus. But, unfortunately, the screen is a dark gray, a constant reminder it isn’t paper; pages take a while to re-draw; its chin, and keyboard, are visually distracting.

A tablet would eliminate some of these issues; there would be nothing to distract visually as it would be just a screen, and pages would change immediately. But the tablet would be a convergence device, as this is what people demand — it would browse the web, email and watch media. Distraction comes back into the picture. In this sense, the tablet seems ideal not for literature, but for news and magazine content. Long-form content by web standards, but short enough to be read quickly. No commitment necessary.

So that’s the issue. Dedicated reading devices promise the singular focus of books, but the technology isn’t quite there yet (and the companies making them haven’t shown they can design a device with the necessary natural feel in its hardware and software), while the technology absolutely is here for the tablet.² These two devices represent two competing mediums — and more than culture, I think this is what will decide what kind of content we read in the future.

1. I read most of Moby Dick in high school, but sat it down after Melville’s exhausting classification of different kinds of whales. That broke my will. ↩
2. It’s unfortunate that dedicated devices aren’t quite developed enough yet, because combining them with an iPhone is powerful. The dedicated device for reading long-form content when all you want to do is read, and the iPhone for reading magazine-like content and small parts of long-form content while mobile. ↩

Merlin Mann on what Instapaper means for good, long-form content on the web:

I no longer cringe with guilt when I come across a 1000+ word anything that I know I want to read — but which I also know I have no time to read right now. So, I hit a button, and I forget about it. Now — especially combined with Marco and Nostrich’s not-missable Give Me Something to Read — I have no excuse not to lose myself in longer pieces of non-fiction whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Are you getting this? I hit one button, and magical and interesting things just…happen.