Articles, Blogs and Podcasts
For most of our history, we've reported on important issues in media, technology, business and society in books, magazine columns, trade journal articles and newsletters. While we still contribute articles for publication, most of our work this century has been posted through blogs and, lately, though podcasting. The printed word is still important, but it doesn't compete all that well with interactive media.
IN3 WEB LOGS
HealthcareNBIC.org
DISRUPTIVE INNOVATIONS IN HEALTHCARE
Read about the important developments, hot technologies, interesting business models and intriguing people that are applying new science and emerging technology to transform medicine around the world. NBIC stands for the historic convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science. Visit HealthcareNBIC.
Pervasive.TV
THE FUTURE OF THE MOVING IMAGE
Learn how video is breaking free of the TV sets in our living rooms and finding new forms on our office PCs, in mobile phones, pocket computers, car dashboards, advertising billboards and retail store signs. Visit the Pervasive.TV microsite and browse the Pervasive.TV blog.
IN3 Network
MEDIA, TECHNOLOGY, BUSINESS & SOCIETY
The regular blog of IN3.ORG with notes on technology, updates to courseware and workshops and news about current work.
Visit the IN3 Network blog.
IN3.ORG Multimedia
iTUNES VIDEO PODCASTING
Our channel for audio and video programming developed in our research, education and consulting projects. Connect via iTunes.
Graphics Teachers Blog
A FORUM FOR TEACHERS OF GRAPHIC DESIGN, PUBLISHING, PRINTING IMAGING< MULTIMEDIA AND VIDEO
We administer this pro bono blog for NY's Graphic Arts Educational Advisory Commission.
Visit the GTBlog.
Some of these articles are a little out-of-date, but most hold up well even with 20/20 hindsight.
Copyright, Piracy and Personal Ethics
In a seminar for a parents' group on Internet Safety, I talked about a parent's responsibility to teach good online citizenship in addition to e-street smarts. Afterwards, a conferee wrote to ask "Is it wrong to download MP3 files off the net?" Here's a personal answer. By Jack Powers
The Interactive Future of Signs
"Why do billboards, bus cards, and store signs all have to carry the same static information all of the time? If you think about it long and hard, there’s no reason that the "pages" we see on signage shouldn’t be as animated and as interactive as the rest of new media..."
Making the Most of the Internet for Graphic Arts Firms
"...since the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1994, more than 320 million pages of type and art have been published online – without film, without plates, without stripping. Every single day, the top five Web sites distribute more than 500 million pages around the world, most of them customized, to more than 100 million readers – without ink, without paper, without postage..."
A Bandwidth Perspective on Design
"...All communications media development is leading us toward broader and broader publication bandwidths...The lowliest administrative assistants in the bowels of the hugest government bureaucracies now have high resolution laser printers on their desks...with typography that was the monopoly of graphic arts experts (like me) just a generation ago."
Why the Internet is Bad for the Graphic Arts Business
"...Hardware, software, digital design, electronic commerce, multimedia, publishing, entertainment, manufacturing, finance-- there’s no industry that isn’t being changed in some way by digital technologies. It’s not just the Internet, it’s the whole texture of the wired world making communications faster, easier, cheaper and more automatic. That can be very bad for the graphic arts business."
In the Land of the Blind...
"...There are too many blind visionaries talking too much trash to too many uninformed customers about too many things they don’t fully understand...Each new invention is touted as the killer application that makes all of human history up until this very moment obsolete..."
The Human Cost of High Tech
"...the great sickness that has come over American industry in the last five years is not simply a desire to make things better, it’s a fanatical zeal to “re- engineer” business so that it can get by without human beings, without continuity, without fun..."
Ideas Drive Interactive Marketing
"...New media--especially the web--closes the gap between creator and audience, between seller and buyer, moving communication 'from brain to mouse to screen,' the closest we can get (so far) to the ultimate communications link--'from brain to mouse to brain'...."
Multimedia Databases
"...Who needs everything on-line? What’s the real value of digitizing all of your text and graphics for instant retrieval at the touch of a button?...It occurs to me that, for most publishers, putting everything on line is more trouble than it’s worth..."
Teaching Skills That Kids Can Use
"... take a person from 1895 and put him in a 1995 office and he’d be utterly lost. Bring him to a modern supermarket or shopping mall and his head would start to spin. Put him in the middle of a high school classroom and he’d be completely at home ..
Continuous Publishing Replaces the Deadline
"...writers, editors and art directors organize their work for the convenience of the pressman, batching up collections of copy and art with deadlines for the pouch that goes to the printer once a week...Interactive media eliminates the holy deadline...
New Media Is Cheap As Dirt
"...Yes it’s also faster, it’s interactive, it’s customized and it’s searchable. But more than anything else, it’s cheap as dirt. It costs less than a buck to press a CD-ROM and just pennies to publish a page on the World Wide Web...."
Participative Video: Virtual Reality Illustration
"...Video is the opposite of interactive media. The pleasure of the new interactive texts is that they are participatory...every customer gets to drive through the content at his own pace...With video, all you can do is watch, the passive couch-potato recipient of somebody else’s fixed content..."
Writing for the Web, Part I
"...Everybody knows that writing a script for a TV commercial is different from writing an article for a magazine. So why should we think that text on the World Wide Web can just be "re-purposed" print material squirted out through an HTML word processor?..."
Writing for the Web, Part II
"...On the web, before you can compel your reader's attention you have to deal with his robot first. Robotic search programs like Lycos and Alta Vista constantly scan new pages on the web and build public directories of searchable key words. Personal search robots and algorithmic information agents do the same thing for companies and individuals..."
On-Line All The Time, Everywhere
"...Being wired means never having a minute to yourself, never being out of touch, never off-duty. The global telecommunications network links the whole world in real time at ridiculously low costs, abolishing distance, accelerating the pace of change, and bringing the world together in interesting new ways..."
Developing Web Developers
"...Sometimes things can be too cheap. On the World Wide Web, any maniac with a Macintosh and a modem can become a web developer....I don't know which pages are worse, the college sophomore's self-indulgent kaka or the corporate shovelware served up by MIS directors and PR flacks..."
Tempting the Click
"...interactive advertising is perfectly zappable and perfectly measurable. The interactive viewer doesn’t get a commercial unless he asks for it...and every time he views an ad, a computer knows..."
Technopeasants and the Info Aristocracy
"...The technopeasant is at the mercy of a growing Info Aristocracy of computer experts, media consultants, equipment vendors, software developers and ten-year-old kids who know how to surf the net. They are be-fogged by clichés, terrified by the future and easily stampeded into bonehead technologies by sharpies and charlatans..."
The Content Cliché
"...In the first place, "purpose" is not a verb, and "re-purpose" is even less of a verb. More important, successful publishing is a lot more than just content, a lot more than merely words and pictures..."
Where's the Money for Printers in New Media?
"...In a tough graphic arts economy, prepress and printing firms are looking to escape increasing competition and narrowing margins by expanding into emerging interactive publishing technologies like multimedia, CD-ROMs, on-line services and demand printing..."
What I Learned from the Internet Boom
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!" Jack Powers reflects on life in the dot.com bubble.
Interactive publishing refers to all the new media formats that use the tools of computing, communications and imaging to tune themselves uniquely to the needs of each reader. Here are some basic maxims about the development of interactive content and their place in the media landscape.
"...One of the mobile phone’s initial purposes was to provide the ability to send out an SOS or emergency call, but now, messages with a social intent -- or messages with no intent at all -- are the norm..." By Nina S. Young
Is it ethical to withhold one's identity on the Internet? IN3 contributing editor Lawrence Greenberg describes some of the key discussions from our popular CyberRights & Wrongs roundtables.
A founding member of the Telecommunications and Computer Networking Group (TeNeT) at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India reports on innovative technologies developed for a commercial spin-off to bring telephony and Internet connectivity to rural India. By Dr. Bhaskar Ramamurthi