Use of multimedia is beginning to take storytelling in radical new directions The simple truth about the book in the 21st century is that this is a golden age of reading and writing. As Umberto Eco puts it in his latest publication, _This is Not the End of the Book_ (Secker Harvill), "the computer returns us to Gutenberg's galaxy; from now on, everyone has to read". The figures support this. Despite a dire economy, there's a boom in progress. In 2009, in the US, during the worst recession for 100 years, American readers bought more than 800m new books. Here in the UK, the number of published new titles per annum has risen from 65,000 in 1990 to a staggering 177,000 in 2010, far greater – pro rata – than France, or Germany. Our literary microclimate is flourishing, too. Book festivals up and down the country are heaving with record attendances. Book clubs and reading groups have become middle England's bingo. Every publisher has a reader's group website to promote new books. Then there are the prizes: Smarties, Orange, Whitbread, Aventis, Booker, Samuel Johnson, Duff Cooper, and this week, the Encore prize. The buzz of ... Labour's lost its voice, the Lib Dems are denying their past and the Tories revel in living by Victorian orthodoxies In a strict sense, the government's economic policies are not a gamble – a gamble has some probability of success. These had only the remotest chance of succeeding, unless you accept the risible story that the alternative 12 months ago was national bankruptcy. Or if you accept that any price is worth paying to avoid credit agencies pronouncing a downgrade of the creditworthiness of British public debt. Instead, it is now obvious that we are living through one of the great economic misjudgments of modern times. The UK recovery is incredibly weak – whether measured against our past or against the experience of other countries. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research's current economic forecasts make very sober reading. It will not be until 2013 that output in Britain will return to the levels of 2008. The US and most of Europe will have completed their recoveries well before then. This is even lengthier than in the early 1930s. But at least compensation for that came in strong economic growth from the mid-1930s onward, buoyed ... L.A. Times: > About an hour south of Washington, D.C., deep beneath rolling hills near the verdant Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, lies a storehouse filled with bounty. > > At one time, during the Cold War, that treasure was cash — about $3-billion worth — that the Federal Reserve had socked away inside cinderblock bunkers built to keep an accessible, safe stash of funds in case of nuclear attack. > > Now what's buried here, however, is cultural rather than financial: The bunkers are a repository containing nearly 100 miles of shelves stacked with some 6 million items: reels of film; kinescopes; videotape and screenplays; magnetic audiotape; wax cylinders; shellac, metal and vinyl discs; wire recordings; paper piano rolls; photographs; manuscripts; and other materials. In short, a century's worth of the nation's musical and cinematic legacy. > > This is the Library of Congress' $250-million Packard Campus for Audio- Visual Conservation, a 45-acre vault and state-of-the-art preservation and restoration facility on Virginia's Mt. Pony. It's here that a recent donation from Universal Music Group, nearly a quarter-million master recordings by musicians including Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Bing Crosby, is now permanently housed. Some staff members busy themselves daily cleaning ... The U.S. government Saturday released five home videos of slain terrorist leader Osama bin Laden taken from his Pakistan compound. This video shows the terrorist leader reading a statement. Video from the U.S. government via NewsCore. The C.I.A. is releasing videos seized from Osama bin Laden's compound showing him watching himself on TV and another in which is reading from a script. If yout want to learn more about gardening from reading glossy magazines, both the photos and the articles matter. A few months ago [Jason] got his hands on a free Coby DP700WD digital picture frame and thought it would be fun to hack. After realizing that the frame did not run any sort of Linux-based OS he figured his options were pretty limited, but he gave it a shot anyways. The frame came with [...] (Scott) In a biting column he titles "The first-person presidency," Victor Davis Hanson conveniently summarizes the national security positions asserted by then Senator Obama, with relevant quotations, and contrasts them with the positions he has taken as president. He then provides this convenient summary: > Senator Obama opposed tribunals, renditions, Guantanamo, preventive detention, Predator-drone attacks, the Iraq War, wiretaps, and intercepts -- before President Obama either continued or expanded nearly all of them, in addition to embracing targeted assassinations, new body scanning and patdowns at airports, and a third preemptive war against an oil-exporting Arab Muslim nation -- this one including NATO efforts to kill the Qaddafi family. The only thing more surreal than Barack Obama's radical transformation is the sudden approval of it by the once hysterical Left. In _Animal Farm_ and _1984_ fashion, the world we knew in 2006 has simply been airbrushed away. Coincidentally, Jim Geraghty has received this "motivational poster" from a reader. It applies the teaching of Hanson's column to the successful operation against bin Laden. The words at the bottom read: "VINDICATION: When the loudest critic of your policies achieves his greatest success because of them." Geraghty supports the point with another handy ... During my time in the States, the average shopper I encountered in Walmart was not your tech savvy geek. For those who have never had the honour of stepping foot in a Walmart, it is like the love child of The Warehouse, Mitre 10, Countdown and The $2 shop. Anything your heart desires is available in Walmart, for ridiculously low prices. I'm a massive fan of the Amazon Kindle, having bought one for my partner at Christmas. I see the success of this Walmart-Amazon deal being with how stupidly simple the Kindle is. The Kindle is small, light and does one thing and does it very well - its e-paper allows you to read books. No flashy graphics, no backlit screen, no having to charge it every night (supposedly the Kindle has a month's battery life) - it really is the perfect device for a book worm. So Amazon has started with a great product the closely emulates a physical book (eg no eye strain), without having the bulkiness of a thick novel. Good start. Their next trick is delivery of books to the device. I opted for the ... Primary schools could be given a government approved reading list, under new plans considered by the national curriculum review. It may not be well known to the rest of the world, but in the adoption community - today, the Saturday before Mother's Day is Birthmother's Day. Here is a link to some awesome poetry and other writings by birth/first mom's. Most adoptions are a happy time for the adoptive family. Adoption is seemingly all about the adoptive parents and the child and what they have gained. Little thought may be given to the losses created by adoption. By reading the words of these birth mothers I hope that we can begin to see and appreciate their feelings. Take some time this weekend to think about these women who have made us adoptive mothers mothers and what we or our children can do to honor and remember them. Suggested Reading: * Adoption Poems About Birth Mothers * Once You've Decided That Adoption Is Right for Your Baby * How to Open a Closed Adoption * Preparing Your Child for an Open Adoption Today Is BirthMother's Day originally appeared on About.com Adoption / Foster Care on Saturday, May 7th, 2011 at 08:56:17. Permalink | Comment | Email this As mentioned in the previous post we set out to design our wakesurfer rib and spine templates and having decided on compound curves for the ribs, we started measuring and making a tool to produce the ribs. We want to minimize the weight we add, while also making the deck of the wakesurf boards as … Continue reading » DOWNLOAD: Jessica 6 - Prisoner of Love (w/ Antony) (MP3) Download "Prisoner of Love" from the forthcoming Jessica 6 album above (Antony and Nomi Ruiz together again). "See The Light" will be released by Peacefrog on 6/6. Jessica 6, who... Justin Bieber can't get enough of the NBA, he was the MVP of this years celebrity game and now he's talking up one of the games young stars. HERALD SUN reports that Bieber player three hours of pick up basketball … Continue reading -> Manchester United vs Chelsea 8 May 2011- Old Trafford, Manchester- 16.10 local kick off. The destination of this season's Premier League title could be decided this weekend when Manchester United host Chelsea at Old Trafford on Sunday evening. Bet on Man Utd vs Chelsea at PaddyPower after reading this preview at Sportsbookie.com. United's title hopes [...] Related Posts Stoke vs Arsenal Britannia Stadium, Stoke - 8 May 2011- 14.05 kick off Arsenal will look to keep themselves mathematically involved in the hunt for the title by beating Stoke City this weekend in Staffordshire. Bet on Stoke vs Arsenal with our betting partner Bet365 after reading our betting preview at Sportsbookie.com Arsenal provided a [...] Related Posts Arse... Capitalist Lion Tamer was the first of a few of you to point out the rather interesting analysis by Oliver Reichenstein about the idea of creating a "Business Class" freemium operation for news. The basis of the post was a discussion Oliver had with a media exec about paywalls, in which Oliver came out against them and explained his reasoning (which we agree with) and the exec countered with the "business class" analogy, leading Oliver to rethink his position a bit: > _ He asked me what I think about pay walls. I told him what I always say: The main currency of news sites is attention and not dollars and that I believe that it is his job, as a publisher, to turn that attention into money to keep the attention machine running. He nodded and made the following, astonishing statement: > >> I can't see pay walls working out either. But we need to do something before we lose all of our current subscribers. Sure. It's a tough business environment, but… But the flight industry is a tough environment too, and they found ways. So tell me: Why do people fly Business Class? In ... This week's links: Digital, Mobile and Social Media in India: A presentation. The future of advertising will be integrated: by Mark Suster WSJ Tech Report: includes the Tech 25, and many other articles. Using your sales force to jump- start growth: from McKinsey Quarterly. "Here are four innovative ways companies can use their sales reps to drive growth." First Time [...] Years ago, I read a bit of advice in The Whole Earth Catalog, which said a great way to get up to speed on a subject you are interested in is to read a children's book about it. It's excellent advice, and I've made use of it many times over the years. My second grade daughter recently wrote a report on Frederick Douglass. I knew very little about Douglass, but she had a Scholastic book about him, so I read it in 20 minutes. I now feel like I know almost everything I will ever need to know about him, and I have a great deal of admiration for this American hero. If I had purchased an adult-level biography of Frederick Douglass, I don't know if I would have ever opened the book. The best children's books are the ones that were published before 1970. After that, the illustrations started to get crappy, and the writing took a nosedive, too. There are exceptions, but I found it to be the rule. Here's a winner from 1964: Why Satellites Stay in Orbit, by Sune Engelbrekston and illustrated by Lee Ames. It's a very short ...
Key Words: reading
References:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/08/deep-media-fiction-web-mccrum
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/08/will-hutton-economic-policy-wrong
http://www.thedailyswarm.com/headlines/us-governments-vast-music-archives-go-public-sorta/
http://online.wsj.com/video/us-footage---bin-laden-reads-statement/929FE8C2-D0FA-4AA0-86A9-A3FC11003038.html
http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=61a0f117fcb4ad335ceb17a1eaf6221a
http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/theculture/~3/QnD27rlH8Vs/How-not-to-read-a-gardening-magazine
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/hackaday/LgoM/~3/hz8ib8cv64s/
http://feeds.powerlineblog.com/~r/powerlineblog/livefeed/~3/oaJ6gdEzJA8/028993.php
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/geekzone/~3/j8LyGd3k6a4/7628
http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/education-13320661
http://adoption.about.com/b/2011/05/07/birthmothers-day.htm
http://rd.sportsblogs.org/viewEntry.php?id=3036759&src=rss
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BrooklynVeganFeed/~3/6yvQwzaf66k/antony_on_a_new.html
http://benmaller.com/2011/05/justin-bieber-talks-up-thunder-star/
http://rd.sportsblogs.org/viewEntry.php?id=3036578&src=rss
http://rd.sportsblogs.org/viewEntry.php?id=3036524&src=rss
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110504/17110014149/why-every-news-site-should-focus-being-first-class-all-time.shtml
http://emergic.org/2011/05/07/weekend-reading-131/
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/zFd4rt9cjGc/why-satellites-stay.html
http://pixelhat.net/
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Robert McCrum how the web allows stories to be spun in new ways The country needs an economic vision but who will provide it | Will Hutton U.S. Government's Vast Music Archives To Go Public Sorta... Footage Bin Laden Reads Statement Lede Briefing on Documents How not read a gardening magazine Digital picture frame reverse engineering Vindication Amazon’s Kindle sold through Walmart Primary pupil booklist considered Today Is BirthMother's Day FlyBoy Wakesurf Boards wakesurfing Wakesurfer rib tooling Antony Jessica 6 track Justin Bieber talks up Thunder star Sports Betting Blog Manchester United vs Chelsea betting preview 8 May 2011 Stoke Arsenal Why Every News Site Should Focus On Being First Class All Time Weekend Reading Satellites Stay Orbit Cool 1964 kids' science book
