Entries tagged with “curation” from Tools of Change for Publishing
Excerpting Best Practices Hinge on Intent
Mac Slocum
March 2, 2009
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A piece in the New York Times reignites the fair use debate by asking: How much excerpting does fair use cover?
It's a reasonable question, particularly since Google News, the Huffington Post and countless other sites rely on excerpt aggregation to drive traffic and sell ads. But the rules of excerpting are also -- to steal a line from Steve Jobs -- "a bag of hurt."
Fair use is a doctrine, and as much as editors, bloggers and others with an excerpting bent wish for structure (word count, percentage used, image size, etc.), it's not going to happen. Fair use is contextual and case-by-case. That's why Henry Blodget, co-founder of Silicon Alley Insider, has the right perspective:
"To excerpt others the way we want to be excerpted ourselves."
Intent is the key to proper excerpting. If your intent is to single out someone else's work, and drive attention and its associated benefits and detriments to the creator of that work, then excerpts will be short and filled with outbound links. But if your intent is to fool Google, boost your traffic, and use someone else's material to further your own efforts, then excerpts will be long and link-free -- or they'll contain links to your material.
Excerpting is an extension of white-hat vs. black-hat search engine optimization. The white hats understand that search engines are the essential utility on the Web. Gaming them for personal gain erodes value and reduces opportunities for everyone. Black hats care only about short-term efforts, so they do anything they can to turn attention into quick advertising revenue. What black hats don't realize -- or care about -- is the impact their actions have on the structure of the Internet. They're jackhammering the foundation they're standing on.
Sites that push the boundaries of excerpting are engaged in the same self-destructive behavior. They may see short-term traffic and revenue spikes, but the source sites will eventually cry foul and enact their own Draconian countermeasures. Long-term, this doesn't benefit anyone. Sites that rely on excerpted information will lose access, and originating sources will lose attention. To be effective, excerpting needs to be a mutually beneficial relationship that provides value to everyone involved. The only "rule" is intent.
Tagging the Real World through Barcode Apps
Mac Slocum
November 14, 2008
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Earlier this week, Peter Brantley noted an interesting barcode application for Android phones that connects the ISBN data on a physical book with Google Book Search listings. This merging of the physical and digital worlds isn't novel -- other companies offer similar applications -- but the discussion surrounding these apps tends to focus on retail threats and opportunities rather than broader uses.
Speaking as an unabashed content geek, I find the information curation possibilities from this digital-physical merge particularly interesting. The Web has provided an assortment of organization tools -- RSS feeds, readers, tags, categories, etc. -- that help me find and synthesize a vast amount of information. But the same can't be said for the real world. If something pops onto my radar while I'm sitting in front of the TV or shopping at a store, I need to open a browser (assuming I have a computer or phone), punch in the information and save it for later retrieval. This isn't an arduous task, but it lacks the elegance of scanning and tagging Web-based data.
My online efficiency increased exponentially a few years ago when I incorporated RSS feeds and readers into my daily routine. Instead of tediously visiting particular sites or running open-ended search queries, I could now gather useful sources in one application and sort that data into segments geared toward my own needs. Not to get too syrupy here, but it was an eye-opening experience that revealed a new depth to the Web. These barcode apps offer similar possibilities for seamlessly accessing the physical world's stored information. Armed with a cell phone and a data plan, those of us who are curation minded can expand the boundaries of discoverability into an untapped region.
What Cookbook Publishers Can Learn from the Music Industry
Mac Slocum
November 4, 2008
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The similarities between the music and book industries tend to diverge when you examine the smallest possible component of each format: unlike songs, book chapters aren't usually self contained.
But recipes are a different matter. A recent story in the New York Times looks at the upcoming Web site, Cookstr, which aims to catalog recipes from top chefs:
Cookstr, which will be supported by advertising revenues, will aggregate recipes from published cookbooks. All of the authors will have their own pages, with biographies, links to recipes and books, and in the case of restaurant chefs, links to their locations on Google maps.
Cookstr isn't blazing new trails here: All Recipes, Epicurious, Big Oven, FoodNetwork.com and other Web outlets have built their sites around aggregation of individual recipes. But there's still a silo-based mentality in play because recipes are only free to roam within the boundaries of each site. This is equivalent to a record company only making songs available through its own proprietary service. As we've seen with the success of iTunes, YouTube and most recently through Hulu, users flock to platforms that replace traditional boundaries with massive catalogues of material. Shoehorning content and users into a specific channel rarely works on the Web (iTunes is the exception), so the record labels eventually moved toward wide distribution across multiple platforms.
There are key differences between songs and recipes -- paid downloads vs. free text content most notable among them -- but a variation on the song model might work for recipes: sell advertising against publisher-owned recipe pages; allow standalone recipes to disperse with attached branding and pull-back opportunities; and use increased attention from wider distribution to deliver related products with built-in scarcity, such as traditional cookbooks, custom books, curated collections, cooking classes and events.
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