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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
Praise for Daily Blah:
"It is fun to watch the author's navel-gazing joy." - Sunday Times (UK)
"It's really funny and informative." - Dave Eggers, author
"The Blah is becoming a daily destination for me." - Richard Marsh, Playwright
"I like it, and I don't." - Fiona Hogg, Teacher
"Better than Xanax." - Lessley Andersen, journalist
"Dude, lay off the crack pipe." - Souris Hong-Porretta, gamesmith
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Daily Blah for... Saturday, November 15, 2003
Smart Library
Yes, it's another Amazon story. This one ran as a sidebar to the iTunes piece:
Smart Library
Amazon's new search service takes readers inside their books
The trouble with books is that they're too low-tech. Like all wood-pulp devices, they have no built-in search engine. Sure, you can look up stuff in the index. But who has the time? Certainly not the generation that is growing up with Google. According to a 2001 Pew Research Center study, 71% of online teens rely "mostly on the Internet" for their homework. As the pace of life grows faster, the tendency is to shun any information that isn't delivered fresh and piping hot to our computer screens within seconds. And that means books lose out. At least it did until Jeff Bezos intervened. On Oct. 23, the Amazon.com CEO (and TIME's 1999 Person of the Year) unveiled a new feature called Search Inside the Book. Amazon had spent the spring and summer digitally scanning 33 million pages—that is, every page from more than 120,000 in-print titles—and putting them in a vast searchable computer archive. Before on Amazon you could look only for names of books; now, to the chagrin of some authors, you can pinpoint a text reference on the very page where it appears and call it up in a jiffy. At a stroke, the world of wood pulp and the world of wired information just merged.
Of course, Bezos is not running the archive as some kind of nonprofit virtual library. He's improving our access to books because he wants to sell us more of them. Only registered Amazon customers may use the service (registration is free but a credit-card number is required). Even the most determined searchers will not be allowed to see more than 20% of any single book. The idea is to turn us all into bibliophiles by showing just how many authors have written about whatever topic we desperately need to know more about. The first few pages are free. Once you're hooked, you'll have to charge it at the checkout. Still, the Search Inside the Book archive is a stunning achievement. Those 120,000 titles are about as many as you would find at your local Barnes & Noble store. Even with the best cataloging system and the most helpful staff, tracking down every instance of a subject by browsing the stacks could take years. Like Steve Jobs with his iTunes Music Store, Bezos had to negotiate a maze of copyright issues and publishing-house egos to get his digital archive off the ground. Some writers in the cooking and travel genres fear a whole new kind of literary Napster situation. They say readers will too easily crib a recipe or city description without buying the book. They may have a point. Then again, how hard is it to scribble down a recipe while standing in the cooking aisle at Barnes & Noble?
To offer us the inside of every book, Amazon has a long way to go: the Library of Congress holds 19 million tomes, and about 3 million are in print. But Bezos is off to a blazing start. To go the distance, he's appealing to authors' dreams of immortality. Let us digitize your work of genius, he tells them, and the reading public will have access to it forever.
Soon Amazon hopes to start its own publishing service, serving up fresh copies of any title the moment you ask for it. The phrase out of print could soon lose its meaning. And the Google generation might get a lot more interested in wood pulp.
—By Chris Taylor
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