Start of two waves?

The first wave is a wave of posts. I've arrived at the TOC conference, and gave my tutorial yesterday. I expect that the conference will give me ideas for several blog posts over the course of the conference. I've also got some stored up ideas that came from preparing the tutorial that should come out in a while...

I have hope that the second wave will be a wave of action. I was gratified to hear that Digitizing Your Backfile was the tutorial with the highest registration. I'm sure there's selection bias at a conference like this, but it said to me that perhaps people are getting ready to act on projects. I hope that the good tutorial attendance means people are ready to act, not just test the waters. The water is great, and it's time to swim!

I do have the sense that after a pause for a deep preparatory breath, online publishing is now heating up rapidly, and this time it's heading for action, not just interest. As people act, I'd like to be sure that they act carefully, and think about all the options (including ours, of course).

I sometimes worry that our no-development self-managed model is confusingly different to people who have been conditioned by years in which expensive custom builds were the only way to get stuff online without being bundled into someone else's aggregated product.

Comments

Stanford's HighWire Press Picks Tizra

We're thrilled to announce a new partnership with Stanford University's HighWire Press. It's exciting not only as an opportunity to work side-by-side with a longtime leader in online publishing, but also as validation of the robustness and flexibility we have worked so hard to build into Tizra. HighWire has been serving up some of the most prestigious online journals in the world since 1995, and they are extremely selective about the technology they offer their customers. But the real proof of the collaboration's value is the response from the marketplace, with organizations including Project MUSE (Johns Hopkins University Press), Duke University Press , and GeoScienceWorld already signed on in advance of the product's launch. Clearly, the increased discoverability, ease of use and agility resulting from the collaboration are what publishers—and readers—are looking for. Further details on the partnership are in the news release below. A PDF version is ...

Leave Web Enough Alone!

Jeremy Zawodny is rightly torqued about the needless complication of tools that purport to help with information sharing. The web's always had that pretty well covered, thanks to the simple magic of the URL. Anything you find, you can bookmark, email, or with a tinyurl , disseminate on a cocktail napkin. If my dear grandfather had been born later, he probably would never have picked up the habit of mailing articles lovingly clipped with a pen knife, and instead would have referred me to his del.icio.us feed. Zawodny points to a bizarre assortment of pop-ups, forms, and other unwelcome surprises that result from the "helpful" new sharing features, and notes... they seem to be placed on the sites under the assumption that I'm too stupid to send email (to the people I presumably email frequently already) with a URL in it... Thanks for the confidence boost. At Tizra, we're more inclined to say thanks to for the opportunity to do better. Our AgilePDF™ , for exampl...

Context is King!

John Blossom's post on traditional portal strategies resonated with my recent thinking about aggregation sites ( Shorelines: portals Passe ). I made his post into a silly slogan for my subject line, but he is making a good case that even in the "piling things up" business, there are potential problems with actually piling them up. Reading it, for a minute, I had a pang about Tizra. You might be able to read it as saying that it's not worth building your own content collection at all, but I don't think that is the practical point for publishers. I think that the notion of stressing context and tuning product offerings to user groups is exactly what we enable with our product and content management tools. You need to have a branded presentation of your content to all your different audiences, and make every audience an offer that they want to buy. That takes a lot of flexibility, which is what we've concentrated on. That flexibility should be on tap, not the en...

Tizra Blog

Search This Blog