Molecularist

I was a writer long before I joined Nokia. So, I have a particular fondness for anything to do with publishing – online or print. Indeed, publishing is a good industry to look at, since it is both old and mature, and is constantly ‘suffering’ attacks from digitization, democratization of distribution and publication, and online stuff in general.

As I mentioned earlier, a mature industry is not a dead industry (heh, not even mobile phones). One way to continue extracting value from a business is to look for the value elsewhere.

Browsing about, I ended up in Slashdot, reading a great post by Neal Stephenson, responding to some reader questions. Neal is an amazing writer, his Snow Crash book is considered one of the conceptual forebearer of the Web, along with other cyberpunk novels of the time (go read it!). He makes an interesting comment between Dante writers and Beowulf writers – writers with and without patrons. As a writer who has always had a patron, I enviously look over to the Beowulfian writers. 🙂

He also makes a final comment on the fate of publishing (see below), and he’s so right. I’ve heard so many stories about how publishers (of sheet music, music, books, music, movies) have shuddered when the game rules changed, only to regroup and redefine the game – in their favour.

I’ve been thinking a lot about publishing books. I published two of my books (someday publicly) via Lulu just to understand the process. Even though Lulu makes it dead simple to sell, ship, and print a book, there is so much more to publishing than that, as Neal says below. And that’s why publishers will stay in the game.

Link [via anti-mega]: Slashdot | Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor.

Likewise, if you think of a publisher as a machine that makes copies of bits and sells them, then you’re going to predict the elimination of publishers. But that’s only the smallest part of what publishers actually do. This is not to say that electronic distribution via CC is just a fad, any more than online bookstores are a fad. They will keep on going in parallel, and all of this will get sorted out in time.

Plazes is a cool location service that cleverly is building a database of locations users go to, leveraging that info to make connections, and then some.

They started with a PC app for sniffing MAC addresses of routers.

Then they added a s60 app for smartphones to sniff cellIDs (I had a tiny role in that).

Now they are adding SMS (see note below).

I like the way they are doing things for at least 2 reasons:
1) They didn’t try to do everything possible in the first go. They started with the low-hanging fruit, go the service rolling, and are now adding new channels.

I call this ‘first go deep, then go wide’. We had a discussion about this at work, worried that ‘going wide’ – integrating and broadening the offering – would detract from ‘going deep’ – laser focus on making one thing the best damn thing. It’s a tough balance.

2) They are testing all sorts of channels. They started with an easy one, that wouldn’t disrupt one’s behaviour too much – a PC client, easy to work with. Then they upped it a bit – the mobile client needed to be put on the phone, there’s some behavioural change on the phone (really, how many times do you do something when changing cell towers?). Now they are asking the user to actively think about where they are, making them do the work (or at least that’s what I think the SMS channel will require).

I’ve asked to check it out. I haven’t been able to use the mobile version since I got my N93 (and now N73). This SMS version should work with any phone. I’d be interested in knowing what the usability will be like.

From the Plazes newsletter:

Good news for all Plazes users that like to use our service on the go,
but do not own a series 60 smartphone: The Plazes SMS gateway reached
alpha state! It enables the creation of Plazes, checkin / checkout to
Plazes and keeping track of your friends – all via SMS!