Going bookshops in Exeter, London Communication making more sense

This post has some of the same ideas as in previous ones. But there could be a clearcut event sometime soon or by taking a few months as one section of time.

Another way to look at it is through decisions that turn out to be sound even though they were queried at the time. The London College of Printing has been in some confusion I think since the name was changed to Communication. I rarely meet anyone working there who is delighted with the changes. But I notice there is strong mention of games in the promotion for the 2012 Futures conference. This is easier as part of Communication. Of course the London School of Economics changed the scope without changing the name. But the Futures conference this year may indicate a scope for communication that has a more confident direction.

In Exeter the rebuilding of the university central forum managed to demolish the bookshop without leaving enough space for a new one. There is a temp Blackwells for about six weeks with enough stock for the courses set texts. Then there will be a desk in the supermarket to support the website. Meanwhile in Exeter Waterstones will soon stock Kindle and a new John Lewis will offer the new Nook from Barnes and Noble. I don't yet understand how Waterstones will promote their own website rather than Amazon. But the nature of sites selling books is changing. WH Smith displays Kobo and has another Costa.

It may turn out over the book selling time till the new year that there has been a shift to digital. But if a university has no need of a bookshop, what is the case for a library?

So far I have been interested in digital developments while thinking that print and hard copy books can continue as well. But compact discs seem to be vanishing now from retail shops. The student newspaper in Exeter has dropped any protest at the lack of a bookshop longterm. It will be interesting to see if there is some reporting in week seven.

#mtw3 online again at the end of this month, Linda Shelton finds out more about Google docs

Linda Shelton has announced another online event at the end of October. Details in the #mtw3 blog.

She is having trouble with fitting a Google doc into Blogger but has now made it public and there is a direct link

So you can add comments or links or suggest new topics.

I hope to make some connections with the Futures conference at the London College of Communication and look back and forward to Cross Media Live. Already the Acrobat aspect is out of date as Adobe said nothing about the new version. That's just one example. More later.

I also hope to fit in a bit more about quality and ask a few questions if the chance crops up. What happened to UMIST? Long ago there was work there about quality but only the critique aspect seems to be remembered. And how do the quality certificates for business schools actually work. There seem to be several quality marks. How to compare with the comments around ISO 9000?

Copyright, creative industry and barbarians as in radio and academic publishing #mtw3

This post is intended to interest people following #mtw3 in looking on YouTube for clips from the Wild Show on Phonic FM. You can listen live 10 - 12 on a Thursday morning but it is mostly a music show so for this sort of copyright etc. topic the edits on YouTube would be a better place to start.

We have a long term project to be video DJs, including design science. I say we, but my colleague JD still needs to be convinced. He thinks that being a DJ is a skill. He is not wrong but a show could be designed as well, I think. Recently we had a guest talking about Any High Street and how images have particular qualities in a gallery. We then spoke about live appearances by DJs and how this might be different to radio. Here are the links-

(YouTube should show parts 2-4)

We now have to go back to the clips about barbarians and copyright so we can try to fit things together better.

Acrobat 11 announced, still questions re buzz and pricing

Html-a11

There is an announcement about a new Acrobat, and a blog by Kevin Lynch

but I still think there is not much investment in promoting PDF. I continue to post on the Cross Media Live group on LinkedIn. The actual event was only a few weeks ago but there was nothing there about the new release of Acrobat or new features. There may be an expectation that corporate sites will upgrade anyway. Kevin Lynch is doing a lot more for HTML5 which may have a larger future. 

Kevin Lynch recently spoke about HTML5 and there is support for developers.

The MARS project appears to be discontinued so there is no development for the PDF format. Perhaps the routes to and from XML are good enough so far.

The graphic is from Topsy and may explain a lot. I will try the same query over the next few months. So far Acrobat 11 is making no impression at all on HTML5 buzz.

It sometimes happens that software gets cheaper as it matures. The price for Acrobat 11 seems to be much the same. Meanwhile the Creative Suite is on a cloud subscription. Photoshop and Premiere are both available in Elements guise at consumer level prices. Acrobat continues as a desktop product that can only be afforded by corporate budgets. Several new features are aimed at ease of support for IT departments. There are cloud services but they seem to be quite limited, I will look at this in more detail later.

There is now support for touch screens on tablets but I am not sure PDF will be used in that context. So far it seems that most of the new features are slight improvements.

At least the presentation is based on what PDF offers. Previously with Acrobat 9 there was an emphasis on video conferencing as a good use for Flash. Acrobat 10 featured Portfolios as a Flash menu level. I don't think Portfolios are widely used. It appears that with 11 you can combine PDF and have a PDF opening page so you don't have to use Flash if your design is from a PDF world.

There is some interesting research on offer as background for Acrobat 11

But there are loads of questions around this. If Acrobat continues at current price PDF will continue as a niche format. The content will also be available in formats designed for mobile devices and cloud services. The situations IDC describes will use a mix of Acrobat and other software. So this blog will try to look at choices.

Dionne Warwick could be a remix but linking allowed, Anybody Out There?

Heard this on Steve Wright, not sure if this is the same mix. Dionne Warwick has a new CD out soon but there is nothing on YouTube. On Soundcloud there are two tracks loaded by Charmfactory, a legit PR operation. On the website they mention SlyFly and show a screenshot from Soundcloud. So maybe it is only this mix that can be linked to. You will also find "Always something There to Remind Me".

This is interesting as a track and also as an example of copyright. On the Wild Show ( Phonic FM Thursday mornings) we have an OFCOM and PRS arrangement so we can play anything but no agreement or budget yet for "play it again". Works ok for speech extracts on YouTube but linking to music can be complicated.

Also we discuss graphics, text in print, other media as copyright examples. Rates of change vary for different formats and situation. For response to web technology sound seems most advanced.

There could be a theory of public relations that includes how to identify content for free distribution as promotion and versions at various price levels. Later there could be a look at graphics through tablets etc. Book publishing has found a viable model so far but there may be more disruption to come.

Web, TV, interesting stats re location and tech spread over time. #EX1to4

This is from Media Post
 
A just-released study from consumer research firm GfK reports that consumers in Western countries and emerging markets are more likely to consider price, screen size and display technology when buying a new set rather than Internet connectivity. But in emerging markets, the interest is much higher in the Web. About 61% of consumers in India and 64% in China said they look for Internet capabilities in new TVs, compared to 26% in the UK and 29% in the U.S., GfK said.

Usage of connected TV features is also much higher in emerging markets. GfK found that three-quarters of smart TV owners in China have used the connected TV features on their TV sets in the past month, compared to half or less in the Western markets.

 
 
So local TV through search terms could start out in "emergikng markets". Any locality, real or imagined, can be sustained through agreed search methods. I am still thinking about EX1to4 as an areafor local video but it may take time to scale. There may be a case for a benchmark on somewhere else.
 

Any High Street interview from Wild Show now on YouTube

This leads to three more when you view on YouTube.

More later. Towards the end of part four we talk about digital media and "aura". There will be further discussion on the Wild Show this Thursday morning 10 -12. I will start the show till about 10.30 but chris Norton may allow some of this theme to continue. He has to fit in some music, I do realise.

Mark Garrett announces new Acrobat, not much interest from analysts

This post is another bit of draft really. I can't find the detail needed for a proper report. But there will be other versions later.

The Adobe meeting for analysts about the recent third quarter included this statement from Mark Garrett, Executive Vice President and CFO-

We achieved Document Services revenue in Q3 of $185.5 million, driven by continued Acrobat adoption in the enterprise, as well as strong growth in EchoSign and related Acrobat cloud services. Looking to Q4, we are excited about the next major release of Acrobat which will ship late in the quarter.

But as far as I can tell so far this was the only mention of Acrobat, nothing from Shantanu Narayan I can find. So Acrobat seems to have become one of those products that is assumed to just tick over. From a financial point of view it can be assumed that if there is an upgrade then millions of corporate desktops will more or less automatically be budgeted for a few more hundreds of dollars or local equivalent. There was no guidance on any PDF technology development, as with HTML 5 or analytics.

I listened to the Q&A and did not hear any questions about this. Blogsearch so far finds this from Tim Anderson

What impresses me about Adobe is how well the company has survived the decline of Flash and the relative failure of its efforts in enterprise applications (the digital enterprise segment is now subsumed in the figures into “Digital Marketing”). The segment breakdown for the third quarter looks like this:
$millions
  • Digital Media (Creative Cloud) 769.1 (71%)
  • Digital Marketing (analytics etc) 257.1 (24%)
  • Print and Publishing 54.4 (5%)
 Although "Print and Publishing" is small and not growing there is a danger in ignoring flat pages. During the time of Flash anyone looking at the Adobe web site might have got confused if interested in corporate communication. There could have been more explanation on the potential of the PDF structure.

Looking at Acrobat Users find no news or info on a new Acrobat

to be continued when some new info turns up.

As previously mentioned, if Adobe are not developing or promoting Acrobat then there is a case for lower price levels and a look at alternatives.

Trying out Cross Media as an event in slow motion

Zpdspace

Sorry for delay in writing up Cross Media Live. Various things are taking up time. I think this was a major event but I can't get a grasp on the time context. It may be part of a fairly long process as part of another one. The legitimate British printing industry was definitely part of it. some of the ideas have been presented in other places and times but the idea of hard copy as part of communication is something to develop. The reports so far suggest there were more people there from marketing than from print, with a considerable number from publishing.

I have started to play with the idea of a Zone of Proximal Development somewhere between Cross Media and IPEX. So in space it follows the canal from Islington to the River Lee then down the river to ExCel. In time it will be October 2013 to March 2014. The learning theory is that "scaffolding" helps people move through a developmental stage. But this assumes that some scaffolding exists. I am still not sure what was concluded at Cross Media 2012. Whatever it was may be rewritten.

So I am looking forward to the London College of Communication Futures Conference  on 7th November. The change of name from London College of Print was followed by using the words "design" and "media" instead of print and publishing. Maybe there is some sense in this that will be clear eventually. The layout of the Cross Media theatres used some of the new words.

I am also thinking about  another online test phase for #mtw3. Concluding with innovation and academic publishing seemed to work ok and would relate to the LCC topics as I remember. Things don't change that much. So the week before could suit. 31 oct, 1 and 2 Nov includes a Thursday so could link to radio show in Exeter.

Thing is with the ZPD it can work both ways. Early next year BETT will be at ExCel and probably the technology thought suitable for schools will not be far behind that bought for games etc over the holidays. The new possibilities will work back to King's Cross - the Guardian, British Library etc. There is still the rest of the year to work out some convincing scaffolding for Cross Media 2013. 

Isca Wheelchair Dancers ready for Remix, creative commons but no sound...

Still waiting on Spotlight this evening around 6.30 I guess. Could it be possible that their version turns up on YouTube?

Meanwhile the Remix button is shown as there is no sound.

(As expected the YouTube robots have decided that Aled Jones has a case for the rights and advertising income. They have also decided to place an advert for his tour next year that includes Exeter in May.