Thanks, Google

I'm getting ready to send my novel out, with the trusty help of Google...

Politics of Friending

An interesting piece on teachers' reactions to a law banning internet contact between instructors and students. I have a number of friends who are high school teachers who have wrestled with this issue in recent years, including whether it was appropriate to be friends with graduated (presumably now adult) students. One, female, is friends with many of her students (all female -- she's a dance and cheer coach). Another, male, has an absolute no-Fb contact rule.

HTML5 and the Future of Paid Content

The Nieman Lab has an excellent piece on the future of HTML5 and how it will be used to create an app-like experience in your web browser. The details probably won't interest non-techies, but anyone who reads free content on the web -- in other words, everyone -- should take note of this point:

Publishers have to wonder: Is it the romance with discrete, ownable apps that consumers are willing to pay for, or is it the wider experience? We can see, in the makings of Apple’s evolving publisher subscription policies, an understanding of this dilemma. That may be why Apple is forcing news publishers to restrict browser access to news if they want to retain their direct customer relationships with readers — and continue to offer enabling apps through iTunes.

So far, apps have managed to buck the free content trend, as the article points out, largely because they are seen as "ownable" -- a file you put on your phone, much like a song or TV show, that is yours to keep forever. Of course, unlike songs and TV shows, apps aren't static -- most require software updates, access to information on servers that refresh content, etc. In that sense, they have both more value (because they're dynamic) and less value (because they fall into that "content is free" category of web news to which people are now accustomed).

So the questions really are: will people pay for an app-like experience in an HTML5 web world? Or will HTML5 kill the app marketplace with commensurate free content?

"Gone Gone Gone So Long"

In these troubled times, we can all agree: Rick Moranis is awesome.

Your Face Tomorrow

After a couple months of on and off reading, I finally finished Javier Marias's "Your Face Tomorrow" trilogy. It requires a lot of initial patience (and readers in search of action, look elsewhere), but it's probably the most satisfying reading experience I've had since reading Philip Roth's Zuckerman novels in succession.

After I finished, I sorted through some of the critical re-hash from the last few years and found this remarkable profile from 2005. Particularly of interest is the revelation that Marias, in Spain, serves as the kind of broadly focused public intellectual that has virtually disappeared from America:

Every week for more than a decade, he has addressed a readership of millions, on politics or art or whatever else might have caught his eye. Although such a prominent byline may help explain the success of his fiction in Spain, it doesn’t account for the five million books of his that are in print in some forty countries around the world. To an unusual degree, Marías manages to inhabit not only the popular but also the literary sphere, counting J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, and the late W. G. Sebald among his admirers.

Marias's activities as a columnist are particularly surprising considering the verbose, serpentine sentences that he unravels in his fiction. The term "Proustian" is becoming almost as ubiquitously meaningless as Kafka-esque, but still: here it applies. It's not the kind of sound-bit friendly writing that is in favor in opinion pages here, but it does reward its pursuers.

It's Still Winter

In case you were wondering.

"What am I sitting on?"