TeleMice, K-12 e-books vs. locker squeeze, 'Death to User-Generated Content,' Google's e-book possibilities, OLPC laptop costs, and reusable paper

The war against the TeleMice is at the Afghanistan stage, with the foe no longer quite in charge but still hiding in the caves—er, behind bookshelves and the like.

Carly and I keep baiting two black Victor electronic traps—on the kitchen floor—with Jif peanutbutter. We’re also relying on a mix of old-fashioned spring traps and glue traps elsewhere, not to mention countertop cleanings and the rest. And, yes, we’ll welcome further advice from fellow mouse-hunters. Body count so far is 10+ as the war goes on against second-gen enemies.

With bin Laden-relentless rodents and other distractions stealing blog time, it’s good to see posts from Jon (on XHTML/CSS e-books) and Chris (on Erics Flint’s DRM and biz-model thoughts). Keep it up, guys, and I’ll welcome others pitching in.

Sunday’s TeleLinks

Captured and processed in line with international standards for humaneness, just like the e-Victors’ instant zapping of the mice, here are some Sunday links.

—Students Say Locker Size Is Cramping Their Style (Washington Post)—one of the many arguments for e-book in K-12. My favorite tidbit: “William Schmidt, a professor at Michigan State University, blames textbooks. He is an expert on the size and weight of American school texts. ‘Worldwide, we have the biggest textbooks that exist in mathematics and science,’ he said. Middle school books often top 700 pages, he said, because publishers attempt to include all the material taught in several of the largest states. ‘We are so far off the scale, in terms of what we expect our kids to lug around.'” Time for the ASPCA to expand its mission to protect school kids from overgrown p-books?

—-Death to User-Generated Content, a posting last year in Derek Powazek’s blog—spotted by Lisa Williams, a contributor to the Online News List, who wrote an essay on placeblogs that I’ll reproduce later in this TelePost. “Calling the beautiful, amazing, brilliant things people create online ‘user-generated content,'” says Powazek, “is like sliding up to your lady, putting your arm around her and whispering, ‘Hey baby, let’s have intercourse’… Writers produce stories or articles. Authors write fiction or memoirs. These are words infused with meaning and romance. Can you imagine a writer saying, ‘I am a content provider,’ when asked what they do?”

In a somewhat related vein, also see Gift economy or honeymoon? from if:book‘s Ben Vershbow. And speaking of if:book, check out Mashups made easy, written by Eddie Tejeda.

—From Gutenberg to Google: Book retailers look forward to embracing Google, in the Register and on ElectricNews.Net. Should the Do No Evil Duo and colleagues place pay attention to the article? Quote:

“One method Google could use to make money from its online book repository is to do an iTunes on it. That is, allow people to download digital texts, called eBooks, directly onto a dedicated e-text display medium, such as Sony’s Reader—a tablet-like device designed specifically for reading eBooks. What makes books different, and potentially more lucrative than downloading movies or music, is that Google only has to close deals with a relatively small number of global publishing powerhouses.”

Well, that’s an oversimplification with all the Long Tailers out there, and we need to think beyond just dedicated devices, especially DRM-infested ones, but Maxim Kelly’s piece is useful just the same.

—Wayan Vota‘s further thoughts on the genuine costs of the OLPC laptops—in response to our post. Hey, Nicholas Negroponte should be paying Wayan for some first-class Devil’s Advocacy.

—Slashdot item on reusable paper, which, in the very long term, could have some interesting e-book possibilities if people can deal with the many negatives.

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Back to the issue of essays, photos, etc., from users. Here’s more from Lisa Williams—thoughts reproduced with her permission from the Online-News list:

Forgive me if some of you have heard me say this in other contexts. I run a placeblog for Watertown, MA, called H2otown.info. It’s open to input from the public—comments, photos, blog posts, etc. I also run a site that’s a directory of local blogs. Anyone could look at even the best of these sites for 15 seconds and say, “Wow, what a crappy newspaper!”—and hit the back button. And in doing so, miss the entire point of why these sites are successful.

Placeblogs reflect the lived experience of a place, from the relative quality of the crust on the pies at the local pizza joints to elections. Newspapers concentrate on the tiny fraction of that lived experience that is news. Placeblogs can and do contain information about subjects that people working at the local newspaper consider news and write stories about. But they’re not driven by news: they’re driven by content about what life is like when you walk out your front door; and most Americans are very fortunate in that their experience when they open the front door is not news. (People sometimes ask me, but what do you write about? Is there any news in Watertown? My answer: Hell no, if there was a lot of news in Watertown, I’d move!) Doesn’t mean they don’t want to talk about non-news, though. Much of this content looks really dumb when translated into newspaper dialect: “Stymied By Soggy Crust, East Side Man Switches Pizza Alliance.” But if you take those items out of a placeblog, you’ll kill it dead.

(Now, don’t get too comfortable—-placeblogs often beat the local paper with actual news like election results, not because they know first, but because they hit ENTER first; inflexible web systems, or a desire not to put anything online before the print edition hits the street, still hamstrings many newsrooms.)

Some newspapers (and other news organizations) look at placeblogs and wonder whether they would benefit from wrapping this kind of online community around their traditional product. Maybe they can. A lot of the ones I’ve seen—with a very few exceptions—are terrible. Terrible placeblogs, that is. Tumbleweeds blow by between flame wars between two curmudgeons. There are dozens of independents run out of someone’s back porch do a better job at generating and maintaining a community site that’s fun and interesting to visit and participate in than some run by news organizations who spent actual money on developing the community platform.

My guess is that at this point there are more successful community sites aimed at geographical communities run by people who aren’t part of a news organization than there are successful community sites run by news organization. Running an interesting and thriving online community requires different skills—and different values—than the ones that are operating in the newsroom. It’s up to those news organizations to decide whether adding online communities to their sites is something they want to do or not, and if they want to, whether or not they’re in it to win it. They have big advantages—but will they use them?

Here’s Lisa in a note to me, on pay vs. nonpay:

I think opening sites to free-will contributions is okay, but some of the gleeful hand-rubbing about how much money will be made by people other than the creators—and referring to them as “consumers” or “users” is pretty loathsome. It would be nice to be able to kick back even a tiny part to the creators or, say, to a charity voted on by the community.

But that presupposes that the site is actually cashflow positive—a big hurdle by itself.

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So go Lisa’s thoughts on Authentic Media. I hope to discuss AM later with the still-delayed essay. Time is short, the reason I’ve consolidated so many topics. I may not be able to post as frequently this week as last week

Meanwhile, at least it comes to the present post, the topic police are on vacation. Feel free to comment away on any of the above and add your own twists, as long as you’re not selling v+i@!g0r-a or something.

Photo credit: Hortensia via FlickerR–CC-licensed.