Newspapers on iPad examples by Joe Bustillos

So when we last left our hero, I was looking for the best way to consume my daily news via my iPad… I had discovered that the Amazon kindle edition of the Los Angeles Times was much improved from earlier versions. My guess is that earlier versions, because of limitations of the kindle itself, were black and white images only and attempted to mimic the look of the print edition in a single column fashion, which led to some navigation difficulties. I really don’t know because by the time I decided to subscribe to the LA Times they had switched to an Onswipe-like layout with side-scrolling and section navigation on the left. See A) Los Angeles Times – Amazon Kindle edition on the right.

Imagine my surprise when I checked out the free LA Times iPad app and it looked pretty like the Amazon Kindle version that I was paying $9.99 each for. In fact, the free version was a little more advanced in it’s usage of screen real-estate, giving the reader a bit more information and options on each single screen. See B) Los Angeles Times – iPad App Edition (free) to the right.

The free version had the better screen usage because the section menu was drop-down, so it was out of the way when not needed. See C) Los Angeles Times – iPad Edition – Sections Menu to the right. And the free version was not lite on content by any stretch of the imagination. Granted, the last time I saw the paper version of the daily I was shocked at how small the newspaper was. It was hardly a shadow of it’s former self. So my guess is that the free iPad version has all of the same content as the paper version.

Finally, one thing that was very frustrating with the Kindle version of the Los Angeles Times was that if I found an article that I wanted to share or clip there was no way to do that in the Kindle version. I couldn’t select the article to copy it or even select any text that I might want to share. Now that might have been a limitation of the iOS interface but it really made the Kindle version feel like it was just for reading and not for sharing or research. The free version had social-networking built-in. Yeah. I cancelled my Kindle-edition. See D) Los Angeles Times iPad Edition Social Networking Menu to the right.

As I continued to explore the free Los Angeles Times iPad app I couldn’t find anyway to “subscribe” or become a subscriber in the traditional sense. I’m guessing that the free iPad version is being supported by the few ads along the bottom of some of the screens. As much as I love getting the whole LA Times for free, I’m concerned about the sustainability of the free model. That said, I’m not happy at the confusing subscription model being promoted by the New York Times that favors paper-subscribers over iPad/online subscribers when there’s so much less waste in the iPad/online model. Note that when you look at the iPad version of the New York Times all of the sections are locked for non-subscribers – see E) New York Times – iPad Edition – PAID Sections.

So, do I enjoy a free-copy of the LA Times every morning on my iPad with my Wheaties? Not so much. It’s tough to settle into the sit-and-read-the-paper-with-breakfast model that I’ve aspired to. Also, I’ve gotten used to skimming dozens of news sources at a time via my iPad RSS reader of choice, NewsRack. There are dozens of more visual newsreaders that mimic the slider model, but my purpose is to skim and select what to read and if I have to wade through tons of images it’ll slow down the process. I guess I’ve chosen a method of going through dozens and dozens of news sources instead of trusting a couple, or as in my dad’s case, one source.

Actually, now that I think about it, part of my problem is that I’m used to skimming and get a lot of my research links via my Twitter-stream. I tend to skim my Twitter resources before skimming my RSS articles. So, there’s a definite disconnect from the traditional news/magazine publication cycle and how I consume my information. As beautiful as some of these news apps are (like the ABC News and BBC apps) I don’t want to go to dozens of iPad apps or virtual magazines. It’s the web2 model: I don’t want to have to go to the apps, I want the news to seamlessly come to me. Man, this is much more difficult than I expected. This is going to require more thought… to be continued…

Sources:
image: Man Reading Newspaper at Beach – Microsoft Office Clipart, http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/results.aspx?qu=newspapers&ctt=1#ai:MP900401660|mt:2| retrieved 1/14/2012.
image: Newspapers on iPad examples by Joe Bustillos, http://josephbustillos.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/newspapers-on-ipad.jpg retrieved 1/14/2012.

These past fifteen years or so, keeping up with tech trends has been my business, and back in the beginning the newspaper would have been of no use (except for the computer store ads in the Saturday Sports section). Local user groups (NOCCC was strong back then) were the first sources of news and computer magazines like Byte and PC World were essential links to information. Eventually TV shows like C/NET TV and the Computer Chronicles and eventually ZD-TV/TechTV filled in the gap as user groups began to fade and virtual communities began to grow through the Internet. TV shows were then replaced by audio and the video podcasts mostly done by full-time podcasters. But I still hadn’t found a consistent “news gathering” process.

When I got my first iPad I was hoping that I would find a much more Eco-friendly way to consume daily news and tech news. I was really looking forward to reading newspapers and magazines on my iPad. One of the first publications to make it’s debut, The Daily, was buggy and I wasn’t really impressed with the quality of the writing style, so I never subscribed beyond the one-month free trial. At the time there were newspaper apps but they were geared for the small iPhone screen and were hardly better than a crippled webpage. This was not the experience I was looking for. In fact the best magazine/newspaper translation to iPad that I’ve found has been the Zinio version of National Geographic. Zinio is an app or wrapper that previously appeared as a Mac and Windows desktop app, but in it’s iPad incarnation not only does it preserve the feel and layout of the magazine but it all offers photo galleries and videos not possible in the paper version of the magazine. The only draw-back is that I have to remember to launch the Zinio app to get to my magazine library, but everything else is pretty seamless. Now that Apple has it’s own “newsstand” version I wonder what the difference might be. Also NG has it’s own stand-alone version. As far as look and feel and multimedia options Zinio works.

Newspaper-wise, in the beginning there was nothing, except for the iPhone versions. Being from the West Coast I was hoping to get the LA Times, but the Times was a Flash-only subscription that wouldn’t work on my iPad. Amazon had a kindle version of several newspapers, but reviews were critical of the offering, mostly related to poor editing and poor image support. But then some time late in the summer I discovered that Amazon had improved their newspaper subscription service and signed up for the Los Angeles Times via Kindle. Ten bucks a month for the daily paper with all of the sections from the original in a semi-blog/onswipe kind of layout. Not too bad. Well, except for when I happened to find almost the exact same version available apparently directly from the LA Times (via an LA Times app), FOR FREE! Doh! To be continued…

Sources:

• image: Newspaper forest green by NS Newsflash/Jon S, http://www.flickr.com/photos/62693815@N03/6277389273/in/photostream/ retrieved 01-10-2012
• video: 2011-02-19 The Daily Before & After by Joe Bustillos, http://www.flickr.com/photos/joebustillos/5463229493/ retrieved 01-10-2012

I just had a chat with Karl Peterson, current month 12 student, he called to share that he’d met a professor, Jim Groom, at the University of Mary Washington who’s doing a course on Digital Storytelling as an open university course. According to Peterson, Groom has no formal ed tech training but is mirroring a lot of what we’re doing in emdt. You can visit his course at http://ds106.us. Awesome.

Then when I was on the ds106 site I noticed a Internet Radio player and on the player at that particular moment was someone I’d met through twitter @DrGarcia, the Gypsy Rogue Scholar. Woe, I know that she’s mentioned doing an internet radio show, but that’s way too “we’re all connected” for me. And as I’m writing this, they’re playing a mash-up on copyright, my area of concentration. The universe is scaring me.

You can get more info on radio-ds106 at http://ds106.us/ds106-radio/ and http://bit.ly/radio4life. Yeah, there are more of us experimenting and creating new media in education (mostly ’cause the old system is dead).

Sources:
YouTube Video: Homeless Man With Golden Voice Reunited With Mom by AssociatedPress, retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LVU0sbdSyY&feature=related on 01/14/2011

YouTube Video: Homeless man with golden voice ‘thankful to be here’ by Today Show, retrieved from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/40943737#40943737 on 01/14/2011

YouTube Video: CNN: Homeless man, Ted Williams with golden voice hits jackpot by CNN, retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrBkxcztA_o&feature=related on 01/14/2011

It’s something that the computer geeks don’t get. It’s part of why Microsoft’s efforts to promote Tablet PCs for the past ten years has completely failed. It’s not about the hardware or the feature list. It’s about the books, magazines, newspapers, and movies I can connect to and my access to my stuff stored on the cloud. In typical Apple fashion they are at least a good five to ten years ahead of the curve and this is resulting in more than a few disconnects. The geeks are thinking GBs storage, USB ports and processor speeds and old media are thinking pay-walls and DRM. And both of them are so dead wrong, it’s embarrassing.

On the media end I should be able able to click on any book and get an electronic or audio version for less than the price of going to my local Borders for a dead tree version. But the publishers have got their heads so far up their asses that they want to charge me a hard cover price or more for a version that doesn’t cost them one physical cent to produce or ship. They would rather sell 1,000 copies for $25 than 1,000,000 copies for $5. Or worse, there’s no e-version available because they can’t figure out how to make a digital version (though I remember a Harry Potter fan copying a 500 page book in less time than it took for the dead tree version to make it to his country).

Here’s the deal, we want to pay for the story, movie, song. The career of Jonathan Coulton should be proof of this. What should also be clear is that we’re not interested in paying for all of the middle managers and flunkies who don’t add one wit to the product. Yes it’s a business, and there are lots of important folks who make it happen But we’re not going to pay $25 for a book when we know that the pricing structure was built around creating a physical book that isn’t getting created. And the scarcity model, where only so many books/song/videos can be made every year, isn’t going to work in the era of almost infinite artists freely sharing their works on the Internet (remember Jonathan Coulton?).

Free Background Old newspaper by ShironekoEuro

So, getting back to the iPad, I was really hoping on the first day to subscribe to my local papers and national voices from the first day and buy any book like Michener’s The Source from the 1970s or even older tomes like The Idea of the Holy. Over the past month the only books I’ve bought were from the amazon app because the ones I wanted weren’t available on the Apple iBook app and I haven’t found a single newspaper to subscribe to that was any better than what I can get on an RSS reader. Fail. But in the last couple of days I’ve been encouraged by the iPad version of National Geographic (offered by Zinio) that not only mimics the magazine format but also offers unpublished photos and videos not available in the dead tree version.

My thing is that technology is so expensive, so, except for the geeks, it’s got to deliver something more than what can be had without the device. And that extra stuff has got to be the music, books, magazines, newspapers, media that is cheap, instantly available and brings something “more” than the analog versions. The Achilles heel is whether the media companies can wrap their heads around the game changing nature of this new model. If Apple loses the tablet war it’ll be because the public lost interest while the media companies fiddle with their business model and fail to deliver. jbb

Boxee Beta from boxee on Vimeo.

One of the things that I’ve learned so far is that even though I’m using fast wireless “N” and or a fast “power” Ethernet connection between the first and second floors, ripped DVDs stored on hard drives in their original Mpeg2 format won’t play across the network without lots of buffering or dropped frames. Unacceptable. I was anticipating using my PS3 as the movie/media player downstairs (still working on that), so I had previous converted some movies to mp4 and those videos seemed to play nicely across the network. So, even though I’m a firm believer in having access to all of the “extra features” that I look for with my DVDs (and how convenient they are to access using the DVD menu system), I’ll need to rip and convert my media to a more network friendly format, like mp4 (which makes each extra feature into it’s own separate video file). Grrr.

image by Joe Bustillos

I have a huge DVD and music collection and get most of my more daily news and entertainment via video and audio podcasts, so I need some kind of box attached to my TVs so that I can get my Internet/network media. I was hoping to use my PS3 as the player in my living room, but it has a crappy web-browser and doesn’t do RSS, so it can’t natively do podcasts. More work needed here. At the moment my mac mini is doing living room media duties. I love the Front Row interface, but it seems a bit confused that my episodes of StarTrek (classic and Next Gen) are not movies and won’t let me organize things. So maybe the updated Boxee interface will do the job.

I’ve played with Boxee previously, but couldn’t break away from my iTunes addiction. With the software upgrade and set-top box, I’m thinking that this might be the solution to my Internet TV/podcast thing, either the software or the set-top box. Depending on my success using the PS3 as a media player, I still might need another set-top box for the bedroom TV. I’m also thinking that I need to plug into the NetFlix thing (streaming and disc) so that I don’t find myself buying every movie I want to see. So whatever box I get needs to do Netflix, access my music and DVDs across the network and either grab podcasts off the net or the ones stored on my other computers. Having invested in the PS3, I’m aware of the problems of getting a box that isn’t as expandable to handle all of the twists and turns that tends to happen in the media market.

Sources:
* Boxee Demo. http://www.boxee.tv/box retrieved on 1/23/2010
* FrontRow image by Joe Bustillos
* Tekzilla » Episode 124: “Should I buy a Boxee Box or a Roku or Stick With My xbox?” http://revision3.com/tekzilla/veronicapc/should-i-buy-a-boxee-box-or-a-roku-or-stick-with-my-xbox-360- retrieved on 1/23/2010
* Tekzilla » Episode 121: Boxee Box. http://revision3.com/tekzilla/2010newyear/boxee-box retrieved on 1/23/2010

I’ve been watching Leo since the early ZD-TV days. It feels like it was early Internet, but it really wasn’t. Here was a guy and a show that was part of this tech world that I was a part of, that no one else understood. So for their last podcast for 2009, TWiT 228, they got a bit nostalgic (and funny). Good times. This was not the case several weeks ago when Leo and John C. Dvorak made fun of the NASA Tweet-up and totally forgot about what Twitter really means. Basically they took the low road and made jokes about what the hell are you going to say in 140 characters except, “I just peed in my diaper.” Twitter isn’t about the 140 characters or what one has for lunch. It’s about the community and connections that happen over time. So, sometime Leo gets it, and other times he goes for the cheap shot. Surprise, he’s human.

It is a bit strange to feel a connection with an Internet personality (who was a Cable-TV personality from a small network before that) and then discover that there’s a whole community of weirdos like me who work in tech. Following is a short documentary featuring Leo talking about the moment we’re at right now where it’s possible for a small media company can compete with giant corporations and get their message out without all the filters imposed in the past. It’s about the individual and the community and the message. It’s not about 140-characters.

Bonus video: Here’s a video circa 1996 during which Leo Laporte predicts the future. Given next week’s Apple announcement, Leo’s talk about the power of the Newton in 1996 might be all the more interesting:

Sources:
* YouTube video: TWiT 228: The TWiT Of The Decade posted by TWiT. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaq_FoA8jmo retrieved on 1/19/2010
* The Spark Series, Part 3: OPEN by Michael Sean Wright and Marc Ostrick. http://www.eguiders.com/exclusive/the-spark-series-part-3-open retrieved on 1/19/2010
* Of Mouse and Man. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzIV8BxlaQs retrieved on 1/19/2010

I previously posted a blog entry about the ThruYou project after a friend sent me a link to the project on the same day that the Buzz Out Loud podcast crew commented on Jonathan Coulton’s blog post about the project. Like Coulton, my first impulse is to go on and on about the tour de force that this project represents and how it reveals how ridiculously broke copyright is. One track from the project, Wait For Me, has almost 140,000 views. After listening to the project I bought his commercially available CD, Escape Route, from Amazon (in DRM-free downloadable MP3 form). That’s one sale of a record that wouldn’t have happened had this artist posted his creation for free on YouTube. As Larry Lessig said in his TED presentation, this is not about taking someone else’s work and passing it off as ones own (piracy), but taking what has gone before and making something completely new: remix culture.

An excellent website has been created listing the Thru-YOU videos and all of the contributing videos: http://thru-you.org

Sources:

* My Top 5 Albums of 2009 – Tortoise, Muse, P.O.S., Mute Math, & Kutiman by Nathan Chase, http://nathanchase.com/2009/12/my-top-5-albums-of-2009-tortoise-muse-p-o-s-mute-math-kutiman/ retrieved 12/31/2009.

* YouTube video: Kutiman-Thru-you – 06 – Wait For Me by Kutiman, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i88CKr6Shn4 retrieved 12/31/2009.

* TED Talks: Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity by Larry Lessig, http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity.html retrieved on 12/31/2009