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RT @gov2events: "Data.gov.uk versus Data.gov – Which wins?" http://bit.ly/9xsUyg #gov20 #opendata /via @dominiccampbell (About 17 hours ago by @badosa)
Badosa.com has been my main field of experimentation, a website in the Web 1.0 era that kept some editorial control but was made of user-generated content. Soon it offered e-books in the “standard” of those early non-standardized years (RocketeBook). Or dedicated e-books for MS Reader (e-books generated on the fly with a customized dedication). I always thought immersive reading was a handheld matter; that’s why Badosa.com was made available for some mobile devices (pocket.badosa.com).
In 1998 I played with random literature (“human-computer interaction” you might say) in the Poetic Browser, completely remodeled 10 years later with widgets and an API. Widgets weren’t new at Badosa.com. I tried them many years before in what I called our Content Server (this page is still online but it’s not linked and it’s not considered “active”). 2005 was the Ajax year: to try the technology I build Excerpta, a service that was introduced to the public in 2006. And because it’s always fun to play with APIs, in Map of fictions I couldn’t avoid putting my hands in the Google Maps API. Finally, December 2008 was the time to play with the Flickr API and machine tags (“tripletags”) to let people associate photos to texts.
Back in the 90’s I was full of energy. I thought some sort of literary directory was necessary and I build Inlibris.com. I think Inlibris was the first to offer random results. Or results from other user’s queries. Or the possibility to get a copy of the search results in an e-mail (this feature is gone; back then it seemed interesting considering there was no DSL). When Amazon.com introduced its Associates Web Service I couldn’t wait to build my own store. Inlibris Bookstore was made “à la 90’s”, and I haven’t updated since (sorry!). The store was designed PDA-friendly and tried to make sense of the Welcome tab by putting features instead of sections in the tab area (and failed). In the first quarter of 2009, I couldn’t fight the irresistible urge to put my hands on the New York Times API: I used it to add links to reviews of books in the bestseller’s list.
(Besides the aforementioned APIs, as you may have noticed, in the site you are viewing now I’m using the Twitter, Delicious and BackType’ APIs.)
Galeradas.com (galleys, in Spanish) was a platform for digital conversion services. But the e-book market wasn’t ready. I should be remodeling this site soon.
With Critipedia.com I learned how the Wikipedia works. It was meant to be a place for reviewing books and other content powered by MediaWiki. But it never took off (it wasn’t the right tool, actually, and once there was nothing else to learn I lost interest). I developed some tools to convert ISBNs, get related ISBN, find ISBNs... I should try to do something with those... Anyone with an interesting idea for this domain?
Widgets have a bright future, in my humble opinion. And that’s why I acquired the domain Widgetia.com. It sounds like the name of a directory of widgets. But I’m not planning on using this domain in the short term.
I’m the proud owner of more domains: accedo.org (on accessibility?), leelia.com (on the reading universe?), dotepub.com (on e-books in the standard .epub format?). I should try to find time to build something on them.
In no particular order:
The Future of Books: Digital Literature & Market: I prepared (but didn’t use) this presentation for a round table given at a writers’ meeting on digital literature organized by Octubre CCC on October 2009 in Valencia. About e-books, e-readers and digital literature.
Statitistical Dissemination 2.0?: I prepared this presentation for a speech given at a course organized by Eurostat on Statistical Dissemination and the Internet in Madrid. The actual presentation was enriched with some web demos and had fewer slides: in this version, I have unhidden some slides that were not needed for the core of my speech and I have added some text to help following the line of argumentation.
Analyzing widgets and APIs build by an organization as a part of its online strategy (as a means of branding, sales promotion...). Measuring widgets and APIs success: engagement, clicks-thrus, views, installations, conversion...
Widget and APIs analytics
A disponer. Felicidades por lo del Eustat.
Y aquí la presentación con la queen otras ocasiones he defendido estas palabras http://www.slideshare.net/badosa/statistical-dissemination-20
Y antes David G. Robinson, Harlan Yu, William P. Zeller y Edward W. Felten http://ssrn.com/abstract=1138083 (véase http://www.slideshare.net/badosa/la-difusin-estadstica-en-el-contexto-de-la-web-20-presentation)
Un artículo que abunda en la idea de que los lectores de RSS son un producto para un nicho, por mucho que nos esforcemos en evangelizar
http://regulargeek.com/2009/12/21/rss-readers-are-fine-but-they-are-niche-products/
Y por qué la concepción de la mayoría de lectores de RSS es quizás inadecuada (incluido Google Reader) (cosa que también enlaza con la contraposición rss-twitter de más abajo):
http://realtimerss.org/post/293254708/google-reader-is-wrong
I agree with you: “dedicated” is an euphemism for “limited”, as I have argued here:
http://www.slideshare.net/badosa/the-future-of-...
E-book readers may work for older bookish generations but they will probably not succeed in the current and future generations used to the new web ecosystem.
Completamente de acuerdo. Los lectores de RSS han languidecido al mismo tiempo que Twitter explotaba y es posible que ambos hechos no estén del todo desconectados. Aunque se trate de soluciones completamente diferentes con características muy distintas es posible que muchas usuarias hayan encontrado en Twitter (simple) lo que de otro modo hubieran tenido que resolver con un lector de RSS (complicado).
La aproximación a la distribución de información agregada de Twitter es la inversa a la de RSS:
En Twitter la información está centralizada, pero se puede acceder a ella descentralizadamente gracias a su API. La información en RSS, en cambio, está descentralizada y para centralizarla es obligatorio que la usuaria eche mano de un agregador de RSS.
The book was (is!) a means of distribution and a means of consumption. POD tries to keep the old way of consumption (paper) while profiting the new means of digital distribution, converting digital (dynamic, semantic, interactive...) text back to frozen text. It seems to me like a train pulled by a horse: a mixed solution between two times.
Tim, talking of "an eloquent and elegant summation", Sara Lloyd was actually quoting Seth Godin when she said:
"The new thing is never as good as the old thing, at least right now. Soon, the new thing will be better than the old will be. But if you wait until then itâs going to be too late."
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/music-lessons.html
As Clay Shirky would put it:
"Most of the defenders of current culture don't even try to explain why it was OK that the printing press destroyed scribal production, but not OK that the internet threatens newsprint, or why a proliferation of new creators and experimentation with new forms was good in 1508 but bad in 2008. It is simply assumed that revolutions in the past were good but those in the future are bad (and of course all of this is painted on the broadest possible social canvas, to hide the "Life was better when I was younger" flavor of the argument.)"
I think we should avoid the word "ebook" as it suggests it would be business as usual (but electronically). Instead of exploring "the new world of ebooks", as you put it, we should encourage the exploration of the new world of "digital text".
(BTW, the link to *Notre Dame de Paris* is broken.)
@Mike, Tara Hunt's slides are at http://www.slideshare.net/missrogue/government-20-architecting-for-collaboration
Fantastic Plastic, of course, because everyone attributes fantastic powers to a device no one has seen (except in picture).
I agree with #3. But not with #2: we shouldn’t be so obsessed with what we can or can’t do in the physical world: these are false analogies. Products (ownership) have become services in the digital world. And what was impractical in the physical world is not in the digital world. Let’s embrace the new world with all its possibilities instead of remembering what we could or couldn’t do in the physical world.
That said, the Terms of Service agreement should state that clearly (you are renting a service that sooner or later could become obsolete) and, accordingly, the price should be lower than that of a physical book (ownership, resellability, etc.). And of course Amazon should never delete the annotations of a reader (as it has happened in this case).
But wait a minute, @Sami... "locale: 'ar'" for Argentina? Is the value of "locale" a country? Or a language (for example, "locale: 'es-ar'")?
@Sami: thank you very much for the (apparently undocumented) tip!
The wizzard and the generated code should be updated to support the locale parameter.
Friend Connect now supports languages at site-level. But some sites are multilingual. Language shouldn't be an attribute of the site: it should an attribute of the gadget.
Tim, thanks for the transcription!
"Reading is an important enough activity that it deserves a purpose-built device..."
Bezos has said this before. I guess he means "IMMERSIVE reading". After all, we've been hyper-reading the web using non-dedicated devices all these years... and new products like tablet netbooks
will help us doing that sort of active reading in the future.
If current electronic ink technology wasn't limiting in terms of color and refresh rate, I'm not sure Bezos would be saying that. Fortunately e-ink with LCD hybrid screens (Pixel Qi)
are around the corner.
WWW para editores (y más allá) (1): WWW for publishers (1). Introduction. Hypertext. Books, CD-ROMs and the WWW. User experience. Usability. Accessibility. This is part I of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.
WWW para editores (y más allá) (2): WWW for publishers (2). Hypertext and software. Information arquitecture. Interaction design. Navigation design. Interface design. Categorization, nomenclature, structure. Orientation tools: sitemaps, indexes. Search engine. Conceptual model, metaphors. This is part II of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.
WWW para editores (y más allá) (3): WWW for publishers (3). Addresses: URL (URI). Domains. HTML. XML. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search Engine Marketing (SEM). This is part III of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.
WWW para editores (y más allá) (4): WWW for publishers (4). Text. Writing for the web. Typographical resources for the web. This is part IV of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.
WWW para editores (y más allá) (5): WWW for publishers (5). Web 2.0. This is part V of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.
WWW para editores (y más allá) (6): WWW for publishers (6). Web 2.0. Digitization. XML. RSS/Atom, ONIX, BookDROP, papiNet, XBITS, TEI, ePub, DocBook, DAISY. API. Widgets. Webservices. Mashups. This is part VI of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.
WWW para editores (y más allá) (7): WWW for publishers (7). Creative Commons. This is part VII of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.
WWW para editores (y más allá) (y 8): WWW for publishers (and 8). E-books. This is the last part of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.
La difusión estadística en el contexto de la web 2.0: This presentation was the original starting point for my speech at a round table concerning Web 2.0 in a Spanish regional statistical offices’ meeting. Due to time restrictions, the actual presentation I gave was shorter: I was forced to hide many slides. In this version all those slides are visible again.
Proyecto E-book 2001: My 2001 e-book project. Interesting for historical reasons. We might learn something from the past.
TOPLAX, the right approach to Ajax: This presentation was really a test, or a joke, or a neologasm (the pleasurable feeling from having coined a new word). There are more neologisms than ideas these days. I was trying to prove that a new word in the Ajax semantic field even with no promo whatsoever could get a significant number of views.
I have studied Economics and Philosophy. A result of those studies is for example my very old article La metrización y las ciencias sociales: introducción a la teoría de la metrización para investigadores sociales. Not that it matters. For many years I have been teaching online publishing in Masters Courses by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and EdiTrain. I have worked in the software sector (SAS Institute), but that was short: I have been working on statistics for the government for many years. Fruit of those years is for example the old article Estimation of sampling variance of the Spanish Labour Force Survey (with Montserrat Guillén Estany). Currently, I am the manager of Statistical Institute of Catalonia website.
On the net, I’m known as Xavier Badosa. Other possible variants: Xavier M. Badosa, Xavier Martín Badosa, Xavier Badosa Martín.
You may contact me by sending an e-mail to my first name (Xavier) at my main domain (that happens to be my family name, too). If you are human, I guess you understood. If you didn't, use the form at Badosa.com.
