jameswharris

Blogging and the Hive Mind

I’ve always meant to write a “Why I Blog” post and now that I’m listening to The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen this seems like a great time to do it. I googled Keen and many of the reviewers I read just dismissed him out of hand. Keen is essentially calling all us bloggers monkeys with typewriters. He’s not kind to amateur writing and talks as if the Internet is one giant slush pile that is assaulting the true quality writing that comes from traditional publishing.

Keen does make some good points. One point he champions over and over is culture is better served by the expression of the elite few rather than hearing from the democratic roar of everyone. Keen also suggests the idea that television would produce better shows if there were fewer channels and he also believes the emergence of YouTube dilutes what the average viewer watches down to crapola.

Now I don’t disagree with him. If all the video we watched came from twelve networks then I’d say the average quality of TV would be pretty damn great. In fact, for TV viewing I’d prefer having only twelve networks. I actually miss the days when there were only CBS, NBC and ABC. During those years I felt I had a stronger bond with my friends and family because we all watched the same shows. Three is too few but five hundred is too many. The same math does not apply to the Internet.

Keen believes the time people waste on reading blogs could be better spent on reading professional edited magazines and books. He also believes that the web undermines the economy of traditional publishing. I think in both cases this is true. However, he misses the point on the real value of blogging.

Blogs and blogging actually have many purposes. Few bloggers see themselves competing with Time, Harper’s or Scientific American. Most blogging is social and their posts would be competition with casual conversation rather than paid writers. Some bloggers are just writing public diaries and many others are just following the herd hoping to meet other like-minded creatures.

I do believe there is a small percentage of bloggers who would like to be real writers and use blogging as a form of practice. However, I can’t imagine them wanting to kill off commercial writing because they all secretly hoped to get published and paid too. Many bloggers dream they can make money blogging but Andrew Keen shoots down this idea by interviewing owners of high traffic sites. I also talked about these get-rich-quick bloggers in my post “Has Google Become King of the Spammers?” I don’t equate blogging with these people.

All of this doesn’t discredit Keen’s attack that the web is hurting professional publishing by distracting readers from buying books and magazines. The world of money centers around attracting eyeballs and minds. There is always competition for people’s attention. Even before the Internet parents and educators wanted to recapture the attention of their children and complained the choice kids faced was between quality and drivel. Back then the pundits worried that television was empty calories and books were primo brain food for kiddies. Now Keen is protecting TV from the Internet.

Is Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur just a descendent of Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham? Both men could be right in their campaign to defend culture but they could also be wrong in that they missed the qualities of a new art form. What does blogging bring to our world that didn’t exist before?

Instead of being passive individuals that consume predigested information produced by the elite, people on the net embrace being active through self-expression. The Internet represents a do-it-yourself revolution. Sure, by the yardstick Keen measures blogging does not measure up – yet. The value is not in what’s being expressed but in the effort people make to express themselves. Blogging represent amateur essayists. I remember back in school when the teacher assigned writing a 500 word essay it would bring about groans. Now millions want to write such essays every day. Is that a bad thing?

Personal computing has always represented a strange kind of revolution and transformation. I helped hundreds of people learn to use a PC back in the 1980s and I always felt sorry for them. Suddenly jobs for secretaries and professors required that they learn all kinds of new skills that was never part of their jobs before. The average worker now has to learn skills once left to specialists like typesetters, graphic layout artists and computer operators. Now the net is expecting little Jacob and Emily to write and edit, and for some to be sound engineers and video production technicians. Is that so bad? Most of the people producing the content for the web are rank amateurs and Keen doesn’t like that. To Keen everyone is practicing the piano and it’s painful to hear.

Personally I think Keen is worrying too much over nothing. He screams the sky is falling by predicting there will be five hundred million blogs by 2010. It’s my theory that blogging will fall out of favor before 1/12 of the human race takes to the blogosphere. There’s a good chance that socializing on the net might be a fad. I say this because I see an awful lot of dead and neglected sites. It takes a lot of work to maintain and grow a site. Blogging isn’t for the lazy. Nor does it have wide appeal.

I do not have any friends my own age that blog. In fact, I have a very hard time getting my friends to even read my posts. Even when I tell my wife that I’m writing about my girlfriends she can’t find motivation to read my writing because the world of blogs isn’t real to her. Now blogging might be an age related activity, or it might be a person-type activity. Most people I know define socializing as meeting other people face-to-face. Blogging is a kind of hive mind socializing that allows certain kinds of people to enjoy communicating in a non-face-to-face mode, and I think that greatly limits the audience.

Which brings me back to why I blog. I always wanted to be a writer because I loved to read. I’ve taken a number of fiction writing courses, including many hours in a MFA program. I also attended the Clarion West writer’s workshop in 2002. It’s a semi-serious hobby that I’ve tried to work at more since I turned 50. Blogging is writing and publishing without an editor. I consider it practice writing. Forcing myself to write 3-4 essays a week is a kind of discipline. And it’s very educational.

Blogging has taught me that I have to entertain readers and that’s very hard to do. When you’re young and want to be a writer you assume you’ll hammer out a novel and people will want to read it. Well, they don’t. I use blogging stats as a tool to measure successful stories, and so far I have not been very successful at all. My best day was hitting 149 readers. And even that number is deceptive because most people come to this site by accident. WordPress shows me the search terms used and it’s obvious in most cases what people want isn’t what I’m offering them.

My two most successful essays “DRM and iTunes and Rhapsody Music” and “Did AAPR Rip Off My Old Mother?” were flukes dealing with topics outside my normal range of interests. That’s actually a great lesson of journalism – write about what people want to know and not what I want to naval gaze. Of course then I’d always be writing about Brittany Spears or how to create web sites that brings hordes to Adsense links. I have a lot of room to learn and practice. There are zillions of great essays to study and my hope is to find many models to work from. Eventually I’ll write posts that succeed in the way I want.

I also blog to make friends. My wife had to take a job out of town and I spend a lot of time in my house alone. This has forced me to socialize more with face-to-face friends, but I also find blogging to generate good company. I love the passion that my fellow bloggers show for their subject matter. I admire many for their skills and I study them hoping to improve myself. I see blogging as a self-improvement hobby.

I have also discovered a by-product of blogging that is very beneficial to me. In recent years my memory has gotten more sieve like. Since I’ve started blogging I’ve slowly changed and I’m now retrieving words better. I worried I was on the road to Alzheimer-land. Blogging is good for my mind and helps me learn discipline. Keen is right – I don’t write as well as a professional writer. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to improve. Blogging challenges me to improve every day. I read other blogs and admire what they have done and that pushes me to do better. I read professional magazines and study their quality and that makes me want to write better too. Keen missed this whole angle that deals with self-improvement.

Finally, blogging makes the world smaller. There is a hive mind quality about the Internet. I think of the Internet as a sixth sense and it disturbs me that my friends only live in the world of five senses. This is both metaphorical and real. I think Andrew Keen devalues this new kind of neural network of bits and bytes in which we’re all a synapse. Keen really hates Wikipedia and fails to credit the hive mind for creating something both useful and wonderful.

I think Keen has some valid criticisms in The Cult of the Amateur and I’m going to return to them time and again. I think blogging, YouTube, Wikipedia and all the other products of the net can be improved. Many magnitudes of evolution will happen on the net in the next ten years. Reading Andrew Keen won’t save the old ways of things, but his criticisms will help us to grow stronger. Keen fails to see the competition of the fittest angle is this brouhaha. I think traditional publishing will survive and thrive and the net will only get more powerful too.

Jim

What is Your Personal Science Fiction Fantasy?

What is your personal science fiction fantasy? Let’s say you die and wake up in front of a superior being and he/she/it tells you to pick your next life, what would it be? You can pick anything from reality, your own imagination or from any fictional world you’ve encountered. It’s a big multiverse out there – where would you’d like to go?

Would you want to time travel to the epic past to be another Solomon with a harem of hundreds? How about just taking a chance by asking to be born a thousand years in the future. Military SF is popular so would you volunteer to join up and serve in an interstellar military brigade? Does being a pioneering colonist on Mars inspire your dream time? I know, ask to be a rock star in England in 1965.

Now think hard. Use your imagination. You don’t want to be Dudley Moore in Bedazzled.

All of us spend a lot of time reading science fiction escaping our mundane life in exciting stories of the future and other worlds, but I’m reminded of a title of a Philip K. Dick book: What if Our World is Their Heaven? How do you know that the life you are living right now isn’t the one you picked the last time you died?

If you think about this for awhile you’ll see you will want to be reborn into a life of opportunity and not restrictions. The reason we all aren’t still living some Old Testament fantasy is because its so limiting. If you look at the history of mankind on Earth you will see the evolution of diversity of being. Imagine if reincarnation is true – but instead of us all trying to get off the wheel of life and death we all anxiously die desiring to come back for more and more and more. The Hindu believe we return to this life because of the sin of desire. Obviously we’ve embraced desire over returning to Oneness.

The philosophical purpose of reincarnation is to provide a mechanism by which we improve our souls. So should our science fiction fantasies follow this concept? Do I love Have Space Suit – Will Travel because it’s a blueprint for improving my being? Or do we merely choose our stories seeking to diversify our desires?

Growing up my number one science fiction fantasy was to live on Mars. If I died and met that superior being now that wouldn’t be my wish. No, my current wish is very different. I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating my naval while listening to pounding hard rock music that stirs my emotions and vibrates my neurons into a higher state of consciousness and I know what I would tell that very superior being.

I’d tell ole SB to put me back in my own life starting in 1963 so I could live my life over and try again. I’d want it to be the ultimate “if I knew then what I know now” experience. I don’t know if the laws of reincarnation allow for reincarnating into oneself but that’s what I would want.

Now this isn’t because I thought my life was so great and I’m unnaturally attached to it. First off, I hope I would do everything different. Sure being a colonist on Mars would be damn exciting but to be honest, I don’t have the Right Stuff. I think those Hindus were right, the idea is to improve and not just party hardy. I think a do-over would teach me a lot. Maybe it would take several repeats of this life before I do have the Right Stuff to go on.

Now this isn’t avoiding making a choice in front of that superior being. This is a very active science fiction fantasy. Log some iPod time and fantasize this out for yourself. Imagine your own do-over and think about all those decisions you made where you could have followed the other path.

With every novel we read we step out of our own life into another world. With every movie we watch we reject this reality for fictional moments in another. What does this tell us beyond showing us we have a desire to escape? Has reality has just gotten too slow and boring for us and we need imagination to make it more exciting? This reality is pretty far out. As far as we know Earth is the most happening place in all the dimensions we know about.

Reality has always been vastly more complex than any fiction. Remember that when you’re making your wish in front of that superior being. No one has ever imagined a Heaven better than Earth. Think about that. Think about those poor Muslim bastards who kill themselves for seventy-two virgins. Does fresh quim really define paradise or is it just an unimaginative wish? Why do so many on this planet want to believe this world is shit and the next one Heaven?

I don’t believe in superior beings or lives after this one. Every day I am reborn into the same exact reality as yesterday. Every moment is a then where I know what I know now. I am facing the same decisions I made in 1963. Mars is always there if I take the time to invent a way to go.

Are our science fiction fantasies escapism or planning time? What is your science fiction fantasy? What does it tell you?

Jim

The energy for this essay was fueled by:

“The Weight of the World” by Neil Young
“(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult
“Thank You Friends” by Big Star

Inventions Wanted 006 – The Data Bank

I’ve worked with computers for decades and backing up has always been a hassle – both at work and at home. I used to have a tape system for home but it became impractical years ago when hard drive space far outpaced the expense of tape drive technology. In recent times I’ve been using external USB drives, but they’re not backup paradise either.

Unless your backups are frequently taken off site there is always the problem of your house burning down, blown away by tornados, submerged in a flood, or invaded by thieves. In the early days of personal computers valuable home data was limited to word processing files, spreadsheets and financial records. Most of that stuff could be saved to floppies. Now I need 63 gigabytes of space to preserve my digital valuables.

Since our parents died, my wife and I have became the librarians of family photos. We have boxes and boxes of photos that we’re scanning to digital files. I’ve also converted dozens of old cassette and CD audio books to MP3 files. And I converted LPs and CDs to MP3s. Now I have an every growing expanse of valuable binary data.

The weight of all these digital files is becoming a burden. Last year I bought Second Copy and two USB 250gb drives. I made a copy of my files to one drive and took it to work. I then connected the other drive and let Second Copy replicate my hard drive activity to it in real time. My plan was to switch drives every week so I’d always have a fresh backup off site. I never developed the discipline to follow this plan more than a few switch outs.

So this week I subscribed to Mozy.com, an online backup service for $55 a year. My plan was to create a Mozy backup and then restore it to a drive at work to test it out. When I purchased Mozy I knew it was going to be slow but I had no idea how slow. The first backup I set up with 63gb of data was predicted to take 5 weeks. I have the third fastest DSL from AT&T. High speed internet access is built around downloading speeds not uploading speeds which are a fraction of downloading speeds.

I called AT&T and asked about getting their fastest DSL service but they told me it wasn’t available in my neighborhood. I even considered switching to Comcast high speed cable internet but I’m living with slow uploads for the time being.

The next thing I did was stop the current backup and cut it down to 7 gigabytes of essentials. I was able to upload this data set in a couple of days. At work today I ran the restore to test things out. Mozy.com offers different ways to restore your data. The fast way for large backups is to have them burn DVDs and express mail them to you, but this costs extra. I used the free web restore method. You log into Mozy, request a restore and wait for them to email you when the files are ready for downloading. It took about an hour to be notified.

Mozy makes one or more compressed .exe files for you to download. I assume they divide your backup into the same DVD size chunks as they do for when they actually burn DVDs. I got two 3gb files that I downloaded in less than an hour. Download speeds were 1.1 – 2.2 megabits per second at work.

I discovered that my backup had no .mp3 files in it. I then read Mozy’s manual and discovered you can configure your backups with all kinds of filters. The basic data set of My Documents files were set up to filter out .mp3 files because I had unchecked the Music backup set. But I was expecting to get my audio books, which are also in .mp3 format.

In other words you will have to play around with the settings to get exactly what you want. If you don’t have much to backup I’d just backup everything at once. Mozy is light on documentation so I’m guessing at some of their methods. I emailed Mozy several times and got answers, but for other things I just speculated about how to do things. It’s easy to use, but you have to second guess them at times.

One problem with online backups is how and when to copy files. My Second Copy program patiently waits and every ten minutes copies any newly created files to the USB drive. That’s great as long as I don’t mind an ever growing backup because it never deletes files on the backup drive. That’s great if you want to fetch a file you’ve accidentally deleted last week, but bad because your backup contains all those files you thought were deleted.

Mozy works by creating backup sets. Each set is a snapshot of the moment. If you make a backup with Mozy one week, clean up your hard drive and reorganize your files and make another backup the next week and that backup will reflect your new system. That doesn’t work with my USB system. Working with the Second Copy method I’d have to wipe the folder on my USB drive and start Second Copy running fresh.

What I would like is an online backup that copies files as I make them but waits one week after I’ve deleted a file on my hard drive and then delete it off the online backup. In other words I want backing up to be totally automatic and without backup sets. Mozy doesn’t work that way, but the way it works is best for the technology we now have.

All this begs me to put on my wishing cap and imagine a perfect service. What I would like is a Data Bank that protects my digital wealth the same way a normal Bank protects my money. I want to feel totally confident that my data is always protected, maybe even with government regulations. I’ve read horror stories about online backup companies going out of business. Online backups is a fantastic concept. It would be nice to know that Mozy or companies like it replicate their stores to multiple cities and I’m 99.999999999 percent sure I’ll be able to restore my files in case of a catastrophe.

I’d also like my Data Bank to work with a standardize filing structure so I can easily find my files. Mozy copies Windows My Documents’ structure and appears to use Vista’s new structure with my Vista machine. Mozy is starting to support Macs and I hope they follow on with Linux. It’s a shame that all the OSes don’t use a similar filing structure so people could learn data organizing principles. I think it’s great that Microsoft started segregating music and photo files. I wish the OS could tell the difference between music and audio books.

Because we can’t trust online backup companies yet, its important that you restore you files to a computer not in your house. I did mine at work, but if that’s not possible you might want to find some backup buddies to trust. It would be wonderful, that in the future, Data Banks do become a reality and they are guaranteed 100% trustworthy.

What I also want from the dream invention is perfect access from any computer I’m working on. Just as I can log into my money bank from my work machine I want to be able to log into my Data Bank and have easy access to my home files. For instance, as I rip my CD collection I’d like to copy it to my work computer to play songs there. Or if I start a project at home on the weekend I’d like to get it out of the Data Bank on Monday. Mozy isn’t set up like that.

I’d love to log into my Data Bank and see two folders at the root level:

/data

/library

Data would be where I go for any files I created and Library would be media files like music, photos, audio books, video, ebooks, Acrobat files, etc. It would be very cool if the Data Bank worked like a network drive and I could just play my media files from that location. However, I don’t know if that’s practical. If a Data Bank had six hundred thousand customers could they handle such a load? Maybe in the far future where everyone has fiber optics and gigabit bandwidth. But for the near future I think causal access for backing up and retrieving should be practical now.

Even that is beyond Mozy at the moment. Mozy is designed to backup your files and then in an emergency restore them. I think I’m pushing their system when I plan to backup my home system and then restore it on my work computer a couple times a year. Since Mozy could go out of business I don’t trust them yet to hold my files without having them on a second computer. I’m mainly using Mozy to eliminate messing with the USB drives. That’s another source of saving electricity for those wanting greener computing, but I’m also getting tired of hearing my USB drive grind away. Mozy should make my life simpler, and that’s good. It will take a year or so of living with Mozy to really decide how they do.

Jim

Has Google Become King of the Spammers?

Every time I use Google, especially when I’m trying to find a product review, I’m overwhelmed with sites that are trying to sell me something. Any word in my search term can set off a signal to bombard me with results from vendors. I don’t mind the Adsense listings in the right column, but the paid rankings is getting out of hand.

Google seems to be invading my life even more with sales pitches when I visit blogs and web sites. Everyone is seeing a gold rush with Adsense. But I’ve got to wonder just how many bloggers make money using it? It makes their pages look ugly and uninviting. It’s one thing if you’re making a living off your site, but it’s another thing just to junk up your layout because you have get rich quick fantasies.

Spam is the word for unwanted email, but I’m now wanting to broaden its definition to include all ads. Some web sites are looking like the hoods of race cars. Magazines are so filled with ads that publishers practically give subscriptions away as sales catalogs. I go to the movies and have to sit through an ever growing review of ads before the previews as well as having to overlook numerous ad placements being forced into the show. Trucks and buses are becoming roving billboards. I quit listening to radio years ago because of the obnoxious ads. If I didn’t have a DVR I wouldn’t be able to watch many of my favorite shows. Computers now come with crapware which is only a new form of advertising.

Spam is overwhelming our lives.

Microsoft seems to be going nuts trying to find a way to compete with Google. When is the ad boom going bust? What we need is the HBO of search engines – but would people pay for better search results? I’d pay $19.95 a year for a great search engine that found me what I wanted to know instead of sales pitches.

The trouble is a great non-ad search engine will be defeated if it only takes me to web pages full of ads. How often do you end up at web pages or blogs that are honey pots that tricked you into seeing a page full of ads?

If the free Internet is going to be ad-powered I’m not sure we don’t need a new Internet. I find most of my answers now at Wikipedia, which still uses the PBS model of financing. Strangely enough I’ve paid for the online Encyclopedia Britannica which uses the HBO model but I prefer the results from Wikipedia. Open source enterprises combined with subscriptions and donations could the way to go.

What I want when I go to the search engine is usually something specific. Not only is the information I want specific, but I also have a exact idea in mind for how I want my answer formatted. I want to buy a new HVAC, so I turned to the Internet for help. I want How-Tos, Tutorials, Product Reviews, Consumer Reports type articles, etc. What I would like in my dream search engine is a box for my query and a checkbox list of formats for how I want to receive the information. For example:

Bibliography
Essay
Blog
Newspaper story
Encyclopedia entry
Definition
Photograph
Video
Audio
Travelogue
Lesson
Tutorial
Book
Journal
Magazine article
Peer-reviewed academic journal
Product Review
Comparison shopping grid
Sale offers

And so on. Sure, sometimes I do want to find a place to shop. Most of the time I don’t. Using Google now is like visiting a poor country and stepping off the plane to be mobbed by hundreds of hucksters and beggars. And as long as Google is free this is how it’s going to be. They have to make money to pay their overhead. Can’t blame them on that. But, I’m sick of ad-generated enterprises.

I’m not expecting a free lunch, but that’s what people have come to expect from the Internet. I think the businesses and advertising firms of the world need to think of ways to market their wares other than buckshot spamming. I know the current system is working for them and I tend to think most people accept things the way they are, so change is unlikely. I believe we have a whole generation of people used to being walking billboards with their clothing, and they have lived and breathed advertising their whole life and can’t think of anything different.

I’m not against shopping. I’m not against technology helping me find things to buy. I am tired of spamming, and I believe the world of advertising has become spammers. Google has succeeded magnificently in this method, so everyone is following them.

Recently I started researching social networking and found tons of sites about how to increase ranking or visitors. Everyone wants to manipulate Digg.com to increase their traffic and thus their ad revenues. In fact, some of the sites with the largest traffic are those that teach people how to generate large traffic – in other words, the Internet is becoming a giant pyramid scheme. Hordes flock to the Internet to make their fortunes only to learn that to make money requires getting other people to flock to their sites.

Google has unwittingly become the tool of this madness. Digg.com offers one method to overcome Google’s Achilles heel but only if you’re looking for what’s popular on the net at the moment. Ad driven sites are now trying to find ways to manipulate Digg.com.

During the early years of the World Wide Web it was promoted as a super Library. Mixed in with all those billions of current pages are ones that offer genuine information, the kind of data you go to a library to find. Wikipedia has become the shining light that draws people seeking knowledge. What we need is other information enterprises that are like Wikipedia and Digg.com that circumvent the ad generated gold rush.

One idea would be to create a Digg.com for long term ratings of web pages. Google does that by measuring how many links point to particular pages, but I assume this feature is overridden by paid rankings. Google could offer a non-ad version for a fee if they wanted and even combine Digg.com voting. The early form of Yahoo was based around a subject tree index of human reviewed web sites. That worked when the Internet was smaller. It might work again to make the Internet seem smaller and manageable by filtering out the noise.

I tend to think all gold rushes, like this ad generated one, eventually go bust. Pages will start disappearing when ad revenues don’t grow. Super sites will consolidate services. I think blogs will evolve and like personal web pages before the blogging era, will lose their appeal to most people. Blogging will succeed as a form of personal communication but I don’t think many people will ever make money at it.

Jim

Going Paperless

When my Time magazine renewal came in recently I decided not to renew. I had been paying about $29 a year and now it was $49, and I thought that too much. Then on Saturday I saw the new issue at my favorite bookstore and wanted to read it, but I passed on it thinking I’d need to learn to do without. Later that evening I had a V-8 moment where I imagined hitting my head. Hell, I have a Kindle and I can get Time from the Kindle store, I thought. It turns out subscribing to the Kindle version of Time is only $1.49 a month or about $18 a year.

Flipping on my Kindle I zoomed over to their store and subscribed and instantly saw a download completed message. A couple clicks later I was reading the article I saw at the bookstore about George Clooney being the last Hollywood star.

Then it occurred to me that I should check Time’s web site, and I’ll be damn if the whole article wasn’t there for free. Not only was the read for free it also included a video segment of George Clooney going into the writer’s crawl space looking for source of an alarm that had gone off unexpectedly. Seeing the video of a fancy movie star at the writer’s modest house for dinner doing ordinary things really did accent the piece. I could have had all of this for free.

The trouble is reading Time online isn’t exactly pleasurable, and reading the Kindle is, so I’m happy to pay for my Kindle copy. However, this experience reminded me of an article in the latest issue of Wired (hard copy $12 a year) called “Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business” – which I now link so you can read for free. Once again I wished I had this article on my Kindle. The Kindle is actually as near perfect for my eyes as I can imagine anything formatted for reading. Among all the little buttons at the bottom of online reading material I now wish there was a “Send to Kindle” button. It would be worth the dime Amazon charges for receiving such stuff.

We are really very close to having a paperless society that pundits have talked about every since I can remember. People always exclaim they hate reading off the computer screen even though they spend hours a day doing so. Now the Kindle offers a better way to read, even better than paper, and that starts to suggest going paperless is possible.

By the way, I kid you not when I say I prefer to read the Kindle over paper. If my paper material was formatted like the Kindle, paper would be fine, but modern layout artists format magazines for people with 20-15 vision. The typeface on the Kindle is sharp, large and the scan line is just a few inches across – very easy on the eyes.

I subscribe to a lot of magazines, most of which I only read a tiny fraction of each issue. All those trees cut down and processed with tons of water, power and dangerous chemicals so I can just flip through and read a few tidbits here and there. Now that’s wasteful. I’ve been feeling guilty for years, but with global warming I really feel terrible about such waste. I’ve decided it’s time to go paperless. Besides that I’m tired of carrying so much paper out to the curb for recycling.

I canceled the paper over the protest of my wife – we finally compromised and get just the Sunday edition, but I’m aiming to eliminate that too eventually. I hate to see newspapers lose business and carriers lose jobs, but we recycle pounds of newspaper after only reading ounces of pages. That’s just too wasteful. Now I’m on to finding new ways to read my magazines.

Most magazines do not have Kindle editions, but they usually have a web edition. However, many of those do not have full text online. I got the latest Scientific American today and checking online I find two articles available as full-text, including the cover story “The End of Cosmology,” the one I wanted to read the most. The others articles are available for money online and SciAm also offers a digital subscription for $39.95 a year that includes 12 new issues and access to 180 old issues. That seems steep because my paper copies cost just $24.95, and that includes shipping and the slaughter of the pulp trees. Seems like bits of electrons would cost less.

What I’d really like is a service like Netflix that for a single fee provided me with full access to a range of magazines and their back issues. I still don’t believe Wired hippie pie in the sky about everything being free. And if everything free is going to be plastered with ads like a race car then I don’t want free.

Going paperless will be tough. I don’t think the online Popular Photography will be as nice to read online as flipping through the paper version. They do a pretty good job and sometimes the photos look better online. And it’s much easier to maintain back issue information online. It would be great if they truly showcased every photo with a 1920 x 1200 pixel version. Now that would be worth subscribing too. This would be especially great if I could add them to my Desktop Art Gallery.

I currently subscribe to two paper editions of science fiction magazines, Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Recently I bought an issue of Analog which had the #2 part of a serial so I zipped over the Fictionwise and bought the past issue and as it turned out the third issue was already on sale too. Fictionwise then sends me my magazines to my Kindle for reading. So I read a Kindle issue, then read a paper issue and then finished up with a Kindle issue. That really convinced me I preferred reading SF by Kindle.

The SF mags are slowly losing subscribers so I’m wondering if e-book subscribers are helping or hurting their business. It costs the same to sub with either edition and once again I feel like I’m getting more for my money with paper but I actually read more stories when I get the Kindle edition.

It will take a year or two for all my paper subscriptions to lapse. During the time maybe more magazines will come out on Kindle, or I’ll just start reading them online. I hope the Kindle does become a success and the “Send to Kindle” button starts appearing on web pages.

Going paperless is a lot like going CD-less. I assume DVDs will be next. Can magazines and newspapers survive and thrive off of online and e-book editions? That’s the real question. If Wired is right then they can, but I don’t know. So far the tide is against online subscriptions – people expect everything on the web for free and I don’t know if that’s possible in a paperless world. Right now publishers make the bulk of their income off of paper editions. Can they even survive in a paperless world without charging? I don’t know. I do know I gave up reading my local paper years ago when I discovered I could read the NY Times for free online.

Maybe they could combine free web versions but have a fee based button for sending to the Kindle. I’d gladly pay 10-25 cents an article for such a fee.

With global warming, oil and water shortages, paper is an expensive luxury if you have a digital world.

Going Paperless 2

Jim