I have said less than nothing here over the last few months. The main reason, as anyone who has spoken to me for more than five minutes in the last six months knows, is that I’ve been putting pretty much all my non-work, non-family effort into my book, which will be called Creative Disruption and all being well (ie assuming I finish it) come out early next year.
In an ideal world, of course, I would have been crowdsourcing the whole thing, and probably set it up as a wiki. But frankly, I’ve been locking myself away whenever I can in a very non-collaborative way. Anyway, partly to keep the pressure up on myself, I’ve started a blog about the book – CreativeDisruption.net
I’m going through a bit of a Wordle phase at the moment. And just putting together a presentation to take round the business. This is my ‘Agenda’ wordle slide…anything missing?
Blogging has been a bit light recently – having spent a lot of time travelling round, and a couple of genuinely interesting days at Zeitgeist. To my surprise, I found the Salman Rushdie session the most inspiring. You can find a full set of videos from there on, surprise surprise, YouTube.
For some reason, talk of e-ink and flexible screens tends to bring me out in a rash of luddite grumps.
I don’t quite now why – but I suspect it’s because I’m generally cautious about any technology which is always ‘two or three years away’ and is supposed to change our world.
It maybe because I see all as the DeLorean car of publishing technology. Just too futuristic for its own good.
It maybe because all the great leaps tend to be truly disruptive and painful, and this feels strangely comfortable (it’s like a paper without the paper! keep your layout! turn the pages! add video!).
Anyway, this all came flooding back to me last night as I was catching up on some of the coverage of FirstPaper which has been backed by Hearst, and is apparently two years away from launching.
They are planning to test-market a wireless online newspaper within the next two years, using E-Ink technology. But unlike Kindle’s small, hardback reader, Hearst plans to employ the technology on a flexible screen almost as big as a tabloid paper. The e-paper can be updated by simply touching the screen. So kind of like a big mousepad that works like a screen in the size of Rolling Stone magazine. Touch screen functions and customizable column are what I predicted. This is an interesting one to watch. Who wants to read from your IPhone if you can have a digital tabloid?
Anyway, at this stage – unless you happen to be in the hardware game it’s a purely hypothetical debate. I spoke recently with someone at one of the big publishers who said that actually e-books were turning into a surprisingly healthy business for them – but it’s still a niche.
Which do you think will have more active users in three years time: e-readers or whatever twitter turns into?
Anyway, if I can stop being curmudgeonly for a second, I do have a dream here, but it is not an e-ink newspaper facsimile. It’s one of these devices, flexible and indestructible with a super smart rich media news reader/aggregator at the front end. So, I get just the stuff I want, always on, with pics and video – effortlessly and wirelessly aggregated.
Comments(0) 
