LongForm.org

Slate led me to my favourite website of the week, Longform.org. Longform was started by Max Linsky and Aaron Lammer to share their favourite pieces of journalism.

I think every writer and aspiring writer keeps a folder of favourite articles (e- and hard copy versions) they've read. This is the website I've always wanted: a place to dig into the archives and find gems you've never heard of but other long-form J fans have loved.

The articles date back as far as 1966 (Esquire, of course) and others can be found on newsstands currently. Writers represented in the latest Longform.org lineup are the usual suspects—Susan Orlean, Mark Leibovich, Mark Bowen, James Fallows, Simon Winchester, David Grann, Michael Lewis, Jeanne Marie Laskas, John Sack, Jeffrey Goldberg.

Bonus: LongForm works closely with Instapaper (possibly the best app out there) so that you can save and read these great pieces on the go.

Nope, I wouldn't buy it

The comments section on author blogs and on Amazon.com already permit readers to air their views, question an author’s premise or add their own knowledge to the content of a book.

Now, in an experiment developed by SharedBook, a company that designs customized books and allows readers to annotate documents online, the publisher of “Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children,” a book about parenting by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman that went on sale last week, is inviting readers to make notes on three chapters of the book.

Starting Sept. 14, chapters concerning praise for children (and why too much is not a good idea), the importance of an extra hour of sleep and the prevalence of lying among children, will be posted on PoBronson.com, Nurtureshock.com and Twelvebooks.com, the Web site of the book’s publisher, the imprint that released the book. Readers will be able to highlight a word, a sentence or a paragraph and add notes that will be integrated as footnotes on the text.

“We thought this would be a great way to go deep into the text and literally argue with it sentence by sentence, collectively,” said Jonathan Karp, publisher and editor in chief of Twelve, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group.

SharedBook will collect footnotes and incorporate them with the three chapters into a PDF that readers can buy for $2.95.

--"A Book that Lets Readers Handle the Footnotes," New York Times

I love you, I hate you Arianna

Today Syracuse's School of Public Communication, which trains journalists, honours Arianna Huffington with a Fred Dressler Lifetime Achievement Award... for making money on the backs of unpaid writers?

More commentary at Advertising Age

Twitter: Officially over capacity

All I'm getting from Twitter in the past few days is the fail whale. There's been a huge surge of new this week due to the AplusK vs. CNN showdown and new members Oprah and Gayle King.

Here's a rundown of the events at Maria Write Now

And the illustrated version

Waxin' and Milkin'

So long as I have fingers, I will keep scrolling Waxin' & Milkin', a "visual mixtape" (the most ingenious and successful idea I have seen in a while).

*Now with never ending pages! Keep scrolling until infinity!

Chinese Calligraphy, meet the 21st century

Here's a stunning site where you create your own music video for Spanish singer Labuat. It's all in Spanish but you'll understand what to do.

NB: Depending on your connection speed, it might take a while to load

http://soytuaire.labuat.com/

via Fubiz and FWA

It's amazingly satisfying to pretend you're Daft Punk

I wish christmas could be sooner

Oooh baby, that's a detachable touch tablet screen on a laptop computer with two batteries so that it lasts 10-15 hours, and weighs only 2 lbs. AND it operates on your choice of O/S. I'm drooling.


Introducing the TOUCH BOOK by Always Innovating (www.alwaysinnovating.com)

via GIZMODO

Thanks, Internet

If I never surface from my room again, it's because I'm on Polyvore, a scrapbooking, styling, fashion watching, DIY, social networking, creative expression extravaganza. You can see what I've done with my day so far in the carousel below.



Find me on Polyvore

In reality, it's weird

This is a very weird blog feature that Style.com has launched for this season's fashion weeks called "Virtual Front Row". They have correspondents in Milan, Paris, New York phone in a blog-style post and Style.com animates the avatars in these little "live" videos below. It's a very bizarre little idea, not in the fact that the technology is very exciting but because it looks a bit creepy.

I wonder if people are enjoying these. Either way, they are fascinating to me. Here's (from top to bottom), Erin Wasson, Tim Blanks (yay!), and Vera Wang. Other contributors include Michael Kors, Haley Freedman, Averyl Oates, Jefferson Hack, and Oliver Zahm. All "virtual front row" videos so far can be found here. And in this meta-moment , Jefferson Hack (current editorial director of Dazed and Confused) plays around with the idea of avatar mash-ups.

Megan Lau: Owns Home Computer

via BoingBoing

Clash of the Titans: Google vs. Amazon & Apple

Today, Amazon announced that it will sell e-books for the iPod Touch and iPhone:

Starting Wednesday, owners of these Apple devices can download a free application, Kindle for iPhone and iPod Touch, from Apple’s App Store. The software will give them full access to the 240,000 e-books for sale on Amazon.com, which include a majority of best sellers.

The move comes a week after Amazon started shipping the updated version of its Kindle reading device. It signals that the company may be more interested in becoming the pre-eminent retailer of e-books than in being the top manufacturer of reading devices.

Remember when I thought that the whoever would be the first to sell books through apple would will the digital-book game? It might not be true anymore. Recently, Googlebooks launched a $7-million spending campaign to seek out authors world-wide via print ads in newspapers.

The almost comically sweeping attempt to reach the world’s entire literate population is a reflection of the ambitions of the Google Book Search project, in which the company hopes to digitize every book — famous or not, in any language, published anywhere on earth — found in the world’s libraries.

...But as it turns out, authors and publishers are hard to track down. More than members of most settlement classes, said Kathy Kinsella of Kinsella Media in Washington, which is directing the ad campaign, these are a particularly diffuse group.

“We looked at how many books were published in various areas,” she said, “and we knew from the plaintiffs and Google that 30 percent were published in the U.S., 30 percent in industrialized countries. The rest of the world is the rest.”

So, using United Nations data, her company created a list of countries and territories. Some nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran, were excluded because they do not agree to international copyright terms. In others, like Cuba, North Korea and Myanmar, her company is prohibited from buying ads because of United States trade embargos, Ms. Kinsella said.

Google is willing to make an arrangement with the authors to allow their books to be read online for a fee; Google will take a cut and so will the copyright holder. This is a game changing move, considering the scope of the Googlebooks project. Googlebooks might be simply more accessible since it works on any platform, not just Kindles or iPhones. Their strategy probably has Amazon and Apple shaking in their boots.

via NYTimes, "Amazon to Sell E-Books for Apple Devices" and "A Google Search of a Distinctly Retro Kind"

love it.

Marc Andreessen on everything in Silicon Valley

I mentioned this on twitter last night before the video was available... here's the full show for your viewing pleasure: this is Marc Andreessen in conversation with Charlie Rose about all things Internet-related and why the next iPhone will probably have a kindle-sized screen. Andreessen is completely ready for us to be more wired and is optimistic about what technological innovation can bring to society and the economy. It is refreshing to hear that the end is not nigh because we have a dependency on technology.

Walking towards an incredible farmers' market in San Francisco, I found this in a newspaper box: The Printed Blog, a cool, printed aggregate of pictures, lists, articles and jokes from around the world in the past few months, and published in Chicago.

I was doing my homework, I swear

While researching on Google Books, I discovered that they now have back issues of Popular Science, Ebony, and New York, among other magazines available for your perusal. Happy reading (and procrastinating).

Note to self: Learn how to use Twitter now

... or get left in the dust.

According a blog on Wired.com people are getting their household plants, appliances, etc. to twitter them. That is so cool.

Businesses are starting to be built around it. Botanicalls, for example, sells a Twitter-enabled hardware kit that lets your neglected house plants alert you when they're thirsty.

The company has developed a tiny moisture sensor attached to a circuit board with an Ethernet port. You stick it in your plant's soil, and when the moisture levels drop below a certain level, your plant sends you a tweet begging to be watered.

Wired.com, "Twitter Fast Growing Beyond Its Messaging Roots"

e-books by an expert

The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age

"Take all of your arguments against the inevitability of e-books and substitute the word "horse" for "book" and the word "car" for "e-book." Here are a few examples to whet your appetite for the (really) inevitable debate in the discussion section at the end of this article.

"Books will never go away." True! Horses have not gone away either.

"Books have advantages over e-books that will never be overcome." True! Horses can travel over rough terrain that no car can navigate. Paved roads don't go everywhere, nor should they.

"Books provide sensory/sentimental/sensual experiences that e-books can't match." True! Cars just can't match the experience of caring for and riding a horse: the smells, the textures, the sensations, the companionship with another living being.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Did you ride a horse to work today? I didn't. I'm sure plenty of people swore they would never ride in or operate a "horseless carriage"—and they never did! And then they died."

More Love for the New York Times

Could I possibly go without posting something from the New York Times every week? I tried and for that reason, I've been saving this one for a while. But I've decided to give in because it's beautiful so you should have a listen and a look... maybe it's gimmicky but that crisp, romantic black and white photography steals my heart.

One in 8 Million is a series of slice-of-life stories from New York City:

"New York is a city of characters. On the subway and in its streets, from the intensity of Midtown to the intimacy of neighbourhood blocks, is a 305-square-mile parade of people with something to say. This is a collection of a few of their passions and problems, relationships and routines, vocations and obsessions."

ONE in 8 Million