| The Atavist: How Multimedia Should Be Done in Digital Magazines As media consumption devices evolve, so too does the form content takes on those devices. A great example is a new iPad and iPhone app called The Atavist, which is changing the way nonfiction stories are created and sold. Co-founder Evan Ratliff told the audience at the AdAge Creativity and Technology conference yesterday that The Atavist was created to fill a hole in the publishing market. The Atavist sells multimedia enhanced nonfiction stories. In length they're about halfway between an extended magazine article and a book. It's similar to the content in Kindle Singles, where simplified versions of stories from The Atavist are also made available. In The Atavist iPad and iPhone apps, each story (there are 5 available currently) is packaged into a rich, immersive experience. As well as text, there are photos, videos, audio, links which pop up contextual information, sharing options, and more.
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Making Cash an Option for Digital & Mobile Payments, Dwolla Launches "Grid" Online and mobile cash-based payment service Dwolla has launched its first API (application programming interface), which the company calls "Grid." This tool allows for the integration of Dwolla's cash-based payments service within other platforms and applications. The operation works somewhat like a Facebook Connect for payments - instead of merchants holding your personal data on their servers, that sensitive information is stored within Dwolla. How much of your data they can access is up to you, the consumer. The benefit here is that with less access to this data, there's less risk of fraud.
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Iceland Pursues a User-Generated Constitution In 2009, Iceland passed a privacy and free speech law to make itself into a haven for new media. Since then it has seen the eruptions of the Eyjafjallajökull and Grímsvötn volcanoes and one of the worst banking meltdowns of all time. But despite the dark times, Iceland has not lost its faith in the power of the social web. The country is now crowdsourcing the writing of its new constitution.
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NYT Crowdsources the Review of 24,000 Palin Emails Tomorrow, the State of Alaska is set to release over 24,000 of Sarah Palin's emails, "covering much of her tenure as governor of Alaska." The New York Times is hoping that its readers will pitch in and help them filter this vast cache of new data on the former governor and erstwhile vice presidential candidate. Derek Willis announced the project on the Times's Caucus blog. "We're asking readers to help us identify interesting and newsworthy e-mails, people and events that we may want to highlight. Interested users can fill out a simple form to describe the nature of the e-mail, and provide a name and e-mail address so we'll know who should get the credit. Join us here on Friday afternoon and into the weekend to participate."
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Google Says Yes, You Can Doodle In Our E-Books I realize its anathema to some, but one of the things I miss most about the transition from print to digital books is the ability to write on the pages. Oh sure, I can justify my notes and marginalia as being full of intelligent insights. But I think it all stems back from a love of coloring books and from adding my own creative and colorful commentary to printed pages. There's also a lot of pleasure in that sort of mark-up: coloring in pictures, doodling in the margins, scribbling on pages. And now, Google's gone and done it. With a select group of its e-books, you'll find you can turn on Doodle Mode. This lets you take a "virtual crayon" to the virtual pages. You can color, draw, connect the dots, underline.
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Supreme Court Upholds $290 Million Patent Infringement Award Against Microsoft The U.S. Supreme Court (PDF)has ruled that Microsoft is liable for $290 million damages for patent infringement for technology used in building its Word software. The decision upholds a 2009 ruling in which Microsoft was found guilty of infringement on the patents of the Toronto-based i4i. Microsoft had appealed the verdict, but the Supreme Court agreed with the lower courts' decision, with an unanimous ruling announced today. i4i holds a patent for building a method of processing custom XML, a method i4i claimed - and the courts haveagreed - that Microsoft violated with its 2003 and subsequent versions of Word.
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YouTube Now Lets You Remove its Logo From Video Player - For Better or For Worse In a small but significant move this afternoon, Google's YouTube announced two new features that will make it all the more attractive to serious video publishers: HD preview images and the ability to remove the YouTube logo from the player. Online video is growing fast and business publishers have a lot of choices for places to host their video. YouTube has scale like no one else - but it's not been quite as classy as some other options. The ability to remove the YouTube logo by simply adding ?modestbranding=1 after the URL in a player embed code is both generous and wise. All for free!
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The Slow Hunch: How Innovation is Created Through Group Intelligence Chance favors the connected mind. That is what author Steven B. Johnson says to those looking for the next big idea. Johnson is the author of "Where Ideas Come From" a book that looks at the macro trends on how innovation evolves. Ideas are rarely created through a "eureka" moment. It may seem like Doc Brown fell off his toilet and invented the flux capacitor, but really the idea for time travel and how to do it were converging in his brain for quite some time before the blow tothe head. Instead of an "aha!" moment, Johnson believes that ideas are born of a "slow hunch" that are made possible through periods of technological innovation and evolution. If you are creating a startup, where do you get your ideas from?
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After 20 Years, Is The Website About to Become Extinct? One of the highlights of Internet Week New York, the annual Internet festival in NYC, has been the Digital Archaeology exhibit. It charts the evolution of websites and web design over the past 20 years: from the first ever website in 1991, the CERN site by the Web's inventor Tim Berners-Lee, to the highly interactive 2010 HTML5 music video for Arcade Fire by Google. Each of the 28 websites in the exhibition was displayed on a computer and software of its time, which brought back a lot of memories for this old 1990s webmaster! I spoke with the exhibition's curator, Jim Boulton, and Abbie Grotke, the Web Archiving Team Lead from the Library of Congress. We discussed how web design trends have evolved over the years, along with the difficulties of archiving increasingly interactive and social content on modern websites. Indeed, we touched on the possible extinction of websites within the next few years!
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Iranian Blogger Loses Appeal on 20 Year Term: This Week in Online Tyranny Hoder goes down for 20. Hossein Derakhshan, the Canadian-Iranian blogger known as "Hoder," has lost his appeal in Iranian court. He was originally sentenced to 19 and a half years last September, following his arrest when he returned to Iran. Now, that sentence has been confirmed, making him the blogger serving the longest prison sentence ever. Hoder was well-known for publishing instructions on how to use blogging software for the Persian language, earning him the nickname of "the Blogfather." Outspoken, he first visited Israel, interviewing, among others, Iranian Jews who had immigrated there. Later, he made an about-face and became a vocal supporter of the Iranian regime, returning to the country of his birth. There he was arrested, his conversion to the cause of the Islamic Republic apparently not enough to wash away his sin of independent thought.
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