The viral meme in the cloud

Memes are nothing new. The thought of them was invented in 1976 by the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins. To him memes were replicators like nucleic acid, leaping from brain to brain by what he called a process of imitation, and they compete for attention.

When I first heard about memes I thought, oh I know what this is, it's just another word for fad. I became aware of fads as a preteen, observing full skirts and saddle shoes. Oops, I'm dating myself for all to see. Fads have that characteristic. But it also demonstrates a difference from meme. A fad can be about physical objects whereas memes are ideas, like the idea social media, perhaps?

Certainly when memes are creatures of the internet, they are entropic. This means their energy has been spent before they reach you. They share this with "information" in general, as defined by Claude Shannon who devised the formula by which information goes across the wire (or though the ether or whatever channel.) Shannon's information is entropic by definition. So the meme is actually entropic before it goes on the wire, not just afterwards.

When you receive cloud memes or pass them on, if they do contain a new thought, it is limited as part of the shallow, lack-of context that is the abstract machine-driven world. Even if a meme is new, it just becomes another cog in the internet thought-ecosystem because it doesn't contain enough energy to change an agenda.

No wonder memes become viral from the cloud. As information is flying in and out across the networks, button-push by button-push, the meme is sufficiently simple to be instantly grasped before it jumps on like a grasshopper.

Is there a problem with the internet?

After two years of exploring the question "Is there a problem with the internet?" Nigel Scott reaches a climax of sorts with his turn-of-the-year posts over at Excapite. They deserve some amplification from this corner. 

There is not a problem with the internet according to the social media pundits. Since things go viral with social media there is a potential gold mine available for the taking. All you have to do is get plugged in. As Nigel neatly summarizes it:

"....what was important about Rebecca Black wasn't the video but the response to the idea that "you too can have a music video that can go viral thanks to the So.Me". This inspired thousands of wanna be video stars and video makers to try their luck... just like we witnessed before with Bloggers, the App Store and Android Developers and the Social Media Game developers."

Truth be told, there is a downward spiral going on in internet economics. First we saw it with music. We pay a fraction of what we used to pay for music. Now we've come to expect all online content for free or for pennies on the dollar. The whole publishing industry is struggling to monetize itself, newspapers, magazines, books, blogs, all of it. Apparently the reward goes to those who disrupt the old guard, namely iTunes and Amazon. However, as Nigel Scott again explains to us, the software industry could be next since it shares many of the media's vulnerabilities. And he asks what is after that? Finance? Inventory management?

The Old Guard, in this case Hollywood, wants to solve the problem with copyright protection, new SOPA legislation in Congress. Can they outlaw a function of the computer machine, copy, that is actually inherent to it? According to Cory Doctorow this is just the first skirmish in what will be The Coming War on General Purpose Computation. The stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race. General purpose computers have replaced most of the devices in our world. We don't have cars or radios, we have computers that serve as cars and radios. The vested interests who make these products will want to "secure" them, which will undermine the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society. 

There is a problem going on here. No doubt this problem has many facets which will be difficult to identify, much less solve. Then we are faced with the difficulty of reimagining this system.

The new publishing paradigm

We know that there is a new publishing paradigm, we are just not certain what it is. The salient points for 2011 have been summarized by Jenn Webb over at O'Reilly Radar.

We have ePrint to replace print, but does it? Authors don't need publishers anymore, so how do we find our audience midst the information flood? The idea has become a meme (See Nigel Scott, Reflections, Observations and Forecasts [Part 2]) but what else qualifies as an idea? How can anything else be heard?

The new media is Facebook and Twitter and the audience is reached by nanocasting. The mass media still exists as TV, radio... but the attention of the audience is fragmenting into social media. In social media you don't broadcast to the mass, you "nanocast" to the individual. Are there constraints on what to say to this individual? If so it is not a constraint of content, it is a constraint of what travels across the pipes to actually strike a chord on the other side. The same-old same-old text doesn't necessarily do the job in this context. 

It is a new world and when you step into it, you might not recognize what is taking place. I need a map that tells me upfront what each of these new "places" is about. Thank you webdesignerdepot.com: Friendster, Hi5, Mulitply, Orkut, Kontain, Ning. Authonomy, Photobucket, Flickr, Revver, Delicious, Digg, Reddit,Posterous, Tumblr, Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, FriendFeed, Lifestream, Profilactic.com. I realize some of these names are iconic. The problem remains: how is this list penetrated with meaningful nanocasting?

What does Google Books offer?

Does Google Books have something to offer publishers that other services do not? This is the question I posed to myself after reading Edward Nawotka's piece  at PublishingPerspectives. His article follows the news of Google's new partnership between ActualLitté and Google Books. The plan of editor/founder Nicolas Gary is for the ActualLitté magazine to present a selection of older books, i.e. classics, from Google's library with themes relevant to current news topics.

Since this is my first look at this subject, please share your own experience if you have one. This could be an important consideration for internet publishers. 

Google's service  includes: 

1. the latest index of the world's books

2. a Bookstore that also connects to independent internet booksellers   

3. library lending (do you need references?)

4. a book preview that shows more than Amazon or Apple

If your book is in Google's library will that help sales? In the days of print and print-book libraries, it was understood that library circulation of a book generated sales. We shall see if the same is true for electronic circulation. Any circulation should stimulate news of a book by word-of-mouth. 

A decline in interest in Google Books due to the Google settlement might cause  Google to lose interest in its books, particularly here in the USA. Does your website have a link to the presentation of your book in Google Books?

Possibilities for live

I went to a free live Webinar in the "lobby" of O'Reilly Publishers on HTML5 for publishers last week. What interested me about Webinar was not so much the content but the experience, my first Webinar.

It was located in the window of the browser. Basically it was a slide show with  a live sound feed. I'm guessing the moderator was at O'Reilly here in California, but the presenter was in Massachusetts. Down in the corner of the browser was a live chat feed where the 20 or so participants from all around the country could talk to each other.

Have you ever been in a classroom where all the people were chattering as the presentation was going on? Since the chat was written instead of audio, and since the presentation wasn't too dense, it was manageable. The conversation ranged from the quality of the audio (passable from where I was at but not top notch, less than passable for some of the others) to questions about HTML from people who varying skill levels so the more knowledgable helped the less knowledgable. The skill part was nice. I took notes on the audience contributions.

An interesting point about "live" in the content. With HTML5 Geolocation it is possible to embed a live feed of a particular place into a document, as part of a story line for instance. The possibilities are developing.

Information Roll-a-Coaster

As three posts demonstrate, one of the implications of technology for publishing is that the use of templates creates vanilla pudding. The blog template and its culture put you on the Information Roll-a-Coaster. Pick up the content off the search engine, crank it out with the widgets that push it here, there, and everywhere, and then keep to your schedule or you will lose the traction of sliding with your audience into the next shallow curve.

It's a set up. How crazy are we? What master do we serve? (See Nigel Scott's Children of the fauxion.) It's a big mechanical "information" roll-a-coaster. You can't even take the buttons off the template if you want to. They are cemented in.

Drowning in the Flood of Information

As I said yesterday when I updated the statistics, there were millions of print books published last year, 2010, over three million actually.

If our reading public used to consume 50,000 books a year, where are we going to find readers for 3 million? In his book Information James Gleick quotes Bertolt Brecht from the first days of radio:

"A man who has something to say and finds no listeners is bad off. Even worse off are listeners who can't find anyone with something to say to them."

What is amiss when the veritable technology company Xerox posts this video of concern about the information overload of its employees, indeed about the information overload of business employees in general?

Purpose

It is time to begin to express the work that I have been doing in a blog to give it a broader context.

I begin as a frustrated independent publisher. I have advice from two reliable businessmen that publishing on the internet is a marginal game. Publishing was my retirement plan for the last 25 years, so needless to say, I am not happy about this news.

My ambitions were modest, one author only D.K.Toteras, whose work has been entrusted to me posthumously for publication. We established Nine Muses Press aka 9muses.com in 1996 with the publication one book, but circumstances prevented us from pursuing that project fully.

According to Bowker of Books in Print, in 2010 there were 316,480 industry-published books, and 2,776,260 print-on-demand books, over three million total. That is just print books, not including ebooks. Not so long ago the amount of industry-published books was a relatively stable 50,000 titles per year, and vanity/self-/independent publishing was relatively little. So it takes considerably more work for less return than previously, and the question becomes, is it a good investment? For me the answer is no at the present time, because I have no confidence of enough return that I can even cover the expenses of producing a book.

So I have taken up the investigation of the problem of publishing on the internet, which turns out to be a problem of the internet in general. My initial purpose with this blog is to share what I have learned and explore it further.

My thanks to Nigel Scott of Excapite and David Cole of Bay Tree Publishing for forcing me to reckon with my fate.