I just real­ized that I’m halfway through the sixth week of the spring Semes­ter at Cor­nell! And over at RIT, they are in winter finals — which means that spring quar­ter is around the corner. And with spring comes the count­down to the Imag­ine RIT inno­va­tion fes­ti­val. The next few months of my life will be beyond busy. Which really isn’t any sort of shift.

As to what I’ve been spend­ing my time on (beyond school work) — the answer is video edit­ing. I brought a Kodak Zi6 HD Dig­i­tal Video Camera with me to the O’Reilly Tools of Change con­fer­ence to exper­i­ment with its capa­bil­i­ties (aside: I’m plan­ning to use it (or some­thing like it) for my own research. And, for a ~$150 invest­ment, I’ve been really impressed. I plan on review­ing it as a tool for qual­i­ta­tive research some­time in the near future.). So while at TOC I shot video of var­i­ous demo prod­ucts and also got a few inter­views with people there. So I’ve also I had to dust off my (lim­ited) Adobe Pre­miere skills to get them ready for shar­ing on the web. All of this has been a great, if slightly time con­sum­ing, expe­ri­ence. It’s solid­i­fied the fact that I will def­i­nitely have a media com­po­nent to my PhD research.

You can check out the videos on the OPL’s news page and on our Vimeo page. The one that will most likely cause the most stir will be Tim O’Reilly talk­ing about Open Pub­lish­ing:

Tim O’Reilly makes the argu­ment for Open Pub­lish­ing @ TOC 2009 from Open Pub­lish­ing Lab @ RIT on Vimeo.

Pre­sen­ters and atten­dees at this year’s O’Reilly Tools of Change for Pub­lish­ing con­fer­ence spent a  dis­cussing the topics of social read­ing and com­mu­nity. One con­stant ques­tion was are these spaces that Amazon or Google will own? A week after the fact, and draw­ing on my expe­ri­ences with online com­mu­nity at kodak.com, I’ve come up with the fol­low­ing assessment:

In this area, Amazon’s fur­ther ahead than Google, but I’m not sure that either is really in the right place (or could be the right ser­vice) for this to work. The rea­sons for this is that they’re fun­da­men­tally in the same business:

Con­nect­ing people with content

The sus­tain­able com­mu­nity model is:

Con­nect­ing people through content

Amazon is arguably fur­ther along because they’ve fore fronted the approach of “Connecting people with con­tent through other people.” Amazon makes you aware of other people asyn­chro­nously brows­ing the
con­tent (with things like reviews and other people like you have bought). But there’s no con­certed effort to con­nect you with those people. For exam­ple, you can submit reviews, but you’re not nec­es­sar­ily encour­aged to engage in a dis­cus­sion of reviews (though a threaded system of some sort). Like­wise you can create lists, but not com­ment on lists. And while Amazon has dis­cus­sion boards, they’re buried well below the fold line of the page (and beneath all the rel­e­vant content).

In Google’s case, those other people and what they do are a hidden aspect of the algo­rithm. Using Google is cur­rently (gmail, gtalk, and lat­i­tude excluded) a soli­tary expe­ri­ence. While every­one is using it, you are not made aware of them (this con­cel­ment of the ever­p­re­sent other is per­haps why Google can get away with more pri­vacy things than Facebook).

Now all that said, as we learned at Kodak.com, its far easier to get people to dis­cuss a given topic a a site orga­nized around that topic than it is to get them to talk about a topic at a site orga­nized around the medium that enables that topic. In plain lan­guage, people are far more likely to talk about photos of their baby at babies.com rather than in a “babies” forum/community at kodak.com.

Just as the photo was just a medium for the con­tent (the baby) that con­nected, so to is the book another medium for the con­tent that con­nects people. This is def­i­nitely an area where pub­lisher and genre sites have an imme­di­ate advan­tage (pro­vided they have to tools to do it).

None of this is to sug­gest that google or Amazon couldn’t over­come this. But it would take a lot more work than is imme­di­ately appar­ent (and take them out­side of their cur­rent busi­ness models).

Tools of Change has been amaz­ing for both my RIT side and my Cor­nell side. Our pre­sen­ta­tion went really well. And our stu­dents have made a great impres­sion on the folks — and for a teacher, there’s noth­ing better than that. I’ve also made a number of excel­lent con­tacts for my Jour­nal­ism research.

I also got a draft copy of Cory Doctorow’s new book! Woot!

I’m blog­ging details of the con­fer­ence at the OPL site. Lots of stuff will go up tonight, but if you’re inter­ested, check out: <a href=”http://opl.rit.edu” />http://opl.rit.edu</a>