A Rain of Frogs

Yesterday I read a post by Greg Storey of Airbag fame called Bipolar. It was a response to a feature by the Society of Publication Designers celebrating an Art Director in the St. Louis area named Tom Carlson.

Carlson is, as both the society and Greg state, doing ‘a lot of smart, cool work.’ Apparently he is able to do this because:

“As free papers, these weeklies are removed from the restrictions of newsstand sales and subscription renewals. With improved printing and reproduction capabilities (although their art directors would probably disagree about the quality), these papers have been able to get much more sophisticated in their cover designs, now oftentimes rivaling and surpassing other, slicker publications in their regions.”

It was this attention to design that prompted Greg’s response.

“At a place that obviously celebrates really great design their website must glow like a thousand angels! And with Tom at the helm maybe a newspaper has finally awoken from their Adobe GoLive ’99 slumber.’”

Then, not a paragraph later, Greg admonishes:

“Oh look, as it turns out the Riverfront Times is just another newspaper that is living in the past and waiting for that Internet thing to go away and to stop bothering them. Pity.”

While Greg has done a good job of pointing out how traditional media – specifically the newsprint industry – has a long way to go when it comes to digital media, he has, in my opinion drawn the wrong conclusion.

I think we both agree that the newspaper industry has not embraced the digital shift as quickly as it could have and most certainly there is a long way to go, but to infer that the poorly designed website of a design-sensitive newspaper is an indication that the industry is ‘living in the past’ is perhaps wrong.

I work for one of the largest media companies in Canada. My development team is responsible for, among other things, the web efforts of six urban daily newspapers in Canada. While I agree with Greg that we’re barely scratching the surface on the potential of the web, I know that the digital side of our company is responsible for less than a tenth of the revenue of the print side, if even that. I suspect the figure is more likely one twentieth.

That figure is in flux, leaning more and more toward the digital side every day. Given adequate business models, digital revenue not just in our media company, but all of them across Canada, will eventually (perhaps even soon) exceed print revenue, but we’re not there yet.

Like most players in the newspaper industry, we are investing in the digital side, investing in the future. And we’re probably investing more than the ten percent the current revenue model would indicate. The fact is that right now the lion’s share of our revenue comes from our traditional paper business. Money must be invested there as well.

Companies like the Riverfront Times are probably engaging in similar behaviour. They’re probably investing in infrastructure right now, something that is invisible to the public, but is both expensive and essential. In the meantime, the larger revenue generating part of the business – more mature but becoming less relevant – has a solid infrastructure in place which allows for a great deal of design flexibility, permitting the Riverfront Times to spend a relatively larger amount of money on design and presentation in their traditional publications than they do in digital products. I suspect we’ll see Carlson’s excellent aesthetic sense transition over to the digital side as the company’s digital infrastructure matures.

It’s not simply that the industry is wearing blinders, though that is certainly arguable. It is largely a function of revenue. People like Greg or myself, who have been involved in digital media for a long time are accustomed to change and experienced with entirely different revenue models than those of the newspaper industry. These businesses are finally overcoming decades – and sometimes centuries – of doing business one way and learning to embrace the fast pace of change that we take for granted. Accusing them of ‘living in the past’ because of the current state of their website is both unfair and unfounded.

My new year sure started off well, with fresh baked baguettes baked by Sarah.

Our kitchen – Toronto

It all started with Y2K. Would the lights stay on?

The tech bubble burst. Planes slammed into buildings. Videotapes of terrorists, anthrax in the mail. War in Afghanistan, then Iraq. Bombs in London and Madrid. Tsunami in the Indian Ocean, Katrina in New Orleans. SARS in Toronto. Vanishing ice caps, polar bears mating with grizzly bears, global warming, climate change, hacked emails. The Great Recession. And finally, H1N1.

Goodbye 2000s. We won’t miss you at all.

I really thought it would be gimmicky. I really wanted it to be gimmicky, but it wasn’t. True to my nature, I didn’t much want to like the 3D effects in Avatar, but I did.

They were remarkably well done. So well done, in fact, that I forgot all about it within the first five minutes of the movie and got down to the business of enjoying the movie. This has to be the highest praise that any special effects could achieve – the effects were so good that I totally didn’t even register their existence.

And it wasn’t just the 3D effects, it was the actual visuals. The blue characters were so lifelike that I didn’t notice they were motion-captured CG. The flora and fauna of Pandora were just as lifelike. The overall effect was so good that I really truly didn’t register it, and instead found myself drawn into the story.

And the story was pretty good, though not what I would call amazing. It started off with all sorts of promise, all sorts of potential for deep, meaningful character and relationship development, some of which was visible in the relationship between Jake Sully (why are marines always named like this in movies?), a crippled former marine, and Dr. Augustine. Character and relationship development potential skyrocketed when Jake, in Avatar form, meets Neytiri, the princess of the Na’vi.

But then you throw in the obligatory marine colenol, a heartless corporate exec hell bent on obtaining unobtanium, the aforementioned crippled ex-marine starting to go native complete with love story, and a cast of hundreds of alien natives that are almost stereotypical not just in their belief structure, but ceremonies and even speech, and the story starts to feel like a bit of a retread.

When the Na’vi people go to war with the technologically superior ‘sky people’, things go from the sublime to the ridiculous, and I started thinking about the Ewoks in the Return of the Jedi.

Don’t get me wrong, despite the somewhat tired story, I really enjoyed my Avatar experience. It made me aware of what can be done with 3D technology in the hands of a master, though I shudder to think of how badly that could go wrong in the hands of someone else. The story wasn’t bad, it was just a bit tired. And the imagery more than made up for it.

The story was troubling for me, though. Not in and of itself, cos it’s a pretty good story, no matter how many times it’s been told. In the words of my father, there are only seven stories, anyway. The real problem for me was that I had just finished reading this exact same story a few months ago. Except that time it was called The Soldier’s Son Trilogy by Robin Hobb.

Let me include the description from the book’s pubisher:

Nevare Burville has spent some time as a cavalry officer on the kingdom of Gernia’s frontier, engaged in expanding it against the wild nomads of the plains. He has been successful as a soldier, he is happily engaged, and he is the scion of one of the new noble families. Unfortunately, now he has to complete his military education at the King’s Cavalry Academy, which is dominated by scions of the old nobility, who have no use for upstarts like Nevare. Also, it appears that Nevare has been too long within range of the powerful magic of the shamans of the western tribes, and their influence has converted him into a sort of sorcerous Typhoid Mary—and he may not be the only one. The consequences for Nevare personally are grim, and for Gernia potentially grimmer, if a way to fight the “barbarian” magic isn’t extracted from civilized knowledge.

Hmm.

Sounds suspiciously like the movie I just saw, except instead of Nevare it’s ‘Jakesully’, instead of the plains it’s the forest mood of Pandora, and instead of Gernia it’s an evil corporation. The barbarian magic’s still there though.

Regardless, I would recommend you see the movie, but I think it’s probably only watchable in the 3D version. I can’t see it being as immersive and enjoyable on the normal screen, and I doubt much it will translate well to the small screen. And at $615 million worldwide after two weeks in theatres, I doubt anyone else cares.

Today is the shortest day of the year, the longest night, and marks the changeover from becoming increasingly seasonally depressed to becoming increasingly seasonally happy. Add to this the fact that we’re about to celebrate the changing of decades from the largely depressing 2000s to the 2010s, a decade about which I am feeling extremely optimistic, and this is a season of great change.

It is in honour of this season of change that I wish to make some predictions.

The first is about computing. I foresee the end of computing as we know it in the next few years. I think the Apple iPhone was a game changer in ways people are only starting to grasp at this point. The iPhone got people used to carrying a computer with them wherever they went, and it is this that is at the heart of a paradigm shift in computing.

Rumour has it that Apple is going to release a tablet-based computer next year. Until recently, I wasn’t very gripped by this rumour, mostly because I couldn’t see how a device with a 10.1” screen could possibly fit in my pocket – I couldn’t carry it around with me, and that seems a step back from the successes of the iPhone.

But I think it’s going to be more useful than I have given it credit for. It could fit in a purse or backpack. It’s actually pretty tiny, if you think about it. A device with a 10.1” screen could be as small as 6 × 9 inches – the size of a paperback book. And given the dimensions of the iPhone, could be as thin as half an inch, or maybe even thinner. That’s imminently portable, especially given how much such a device could do. Battery life remains a question mark, but if it gets similar life to an iPhone, it’ll probably be enough to start with.

The tablet would probably have a similar touch interface to the iPhone, and given the scaling technology Apple already has built in to the iPhone for photographs, iPhone apps could run in full-screen mode scaled up. Alternatively, they could run in some sort of windowed mode, allowing the device to multi-task like a normal computer. And given the Mac DNA present in the iPhone OS, it’s possible that some Mac apps could run on the tablet too. That would solve the largest problem facing any new device – that of not having enough software to justify owning the device.

I am excited by this in a way I couldn’t have imagined not so long ago, and look forward to more information on the Apple tablet as it becomes available.

My second prediction is about the future of books, and is partially related to my feeling about the Apple tablet.

I love books, I really do, but the idea that books won’t be affected by technology is foolish. Books will always be around – people like the feel of them in their hand, just like audiophiles love the feel of playing vinyl records. But I suspect the lions share of book purchasing and reading will be done on electronic devices.

But I don’t think it’ll be done on the Kindle, or any eInk device.

Let me be clear. I’ve used a Kindle, and I enjoyed it. I also kept trying to scroll by touching the screen, and felt that the physical buttons felt archaic. the eInk was cool, but it was also pretty low contrast, and as my eyes age, I am finding I need more contrast. Couple that with the Kindle’s connection to Amazon-format books and it’s inability to do anything other than be an eReader, and I think it’s days are numbered, especially when multi-function devices like Apple’s tablet hit the market.

So there you have it, two predictions for the next decade made on the last Solstice of the old.