Hugh McGuire

Moby Dick every week

Hugh McGuire says:
Roger Bohn of UC San Diego, estimates that the average American consumes about 36,000 words of text per day, during leisure hours. That number includes print, email, the web, and text messaging. That’s a lot of text. At that rate the average American could read Moby Dick every week.

Figuring out computer issues

Hugh McGuire is always worth reading... but this flowchart stopped me cold. I need to send this to my dad, my sis-in-law, my brother-in-law and everyone else who calls me for computer tech support!

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We used to call this technique "poking around at it" when I worked in a doc team. After the half hour was up and I would go ask, the first question would be "Did you poke around at it?" Of course, advanced poking around included "what did you install last, and when did you install it?" and other such questions.

But this flowchart was in an article about the iPad, and how it may change computing. Because it would stop this kind of trouble. You use an app that does what it does, and if you are trying to get that done, well, then it is done. No more poking around.

What is technology going to do?

From the Book Oven (Hugh McGuire), and from a much longer post:

Here are some of the things that are coming, I think, from the inevitable drive of technology to order nature, and our human desire to have efficient sorting systems:

We’ll continue to cataloging everything (from books to people to places) online, and find better ways to sort all that information, using objective authority (eg authoritative incoming links, aka google juice), personal network authority (links/preferences from your chosen network) as relevance indicators.
We will map this network on the web, and increasingly apply it to physical space (starting with google maps, and becoming more customized and personalized)
Mobile technology will mean both that our access to cataloged information becomes ubiquitous, and our efforts to catalog things will be unconstrained
RFID, or something like it, will mean that this sorting of physical objects will move from its current general state (eg. tracking & finding something like “any copy of a certain book”), to specific (eg. tracking & finding something like “a particular copy of a certain book”), and will touch people too
We’ll get all the media we want, when we want it
We’ll get most of the data we want, when we want it
Our mobile devices will increasingly interact with our physical surroundings (point at an object, get info on it; buy it; sell it), and will become our bank, and keys, our thermostat, and more, as well as everything else it already is (telephone, email, library, map etc).

All data on the web will become structured, and mostly available
More data sets (eg government-owned) will arrive on the web, and more people will participate in using that data to understand the world, and make decisions, to order nature
Data about people will become structured, and mostly available [For a well-networked human in my circle, this has already happened: I can track their interests, on a daily basis (del.icio.us, google reader shared items, digg etc.), their movements (dopplr), their public thoughts (blogs, twitter), books they like (librarything, gutenberg bookshelf), things they buy, etc etc.]
Lots of money will be made (if all goes well, some of it by friends of mine) finding new and different ways to do all this, and more and more. In essence, we’ll continue to use the web (and increasingly, mobile devices) to better order nature. And we’ll become better ordered at the same time.

Looking at this very brief list of what’s going to happen, I can’t help but think: “so what?” Is any of this going to make people’s lives richer or more meaningful?

My suspicion is “no.” I say this as a digital native, if a relatively recent, adoptive native (starting in 2004). For myself, I have found that the price of the benefits of the web has been heavy: while the web has allowed me to do all sorts of things, to build things and relationships, and projects, I find the quality of my time on the web so often unsatisfying. In a comparison of value to me between a random “leisure” hour on the web and a random hour doing something else in the real world, the real world trumps the web almost every time. Yet the web still usually wins the battle for my time (this says as much about me as it does about the web, of course).

Publishers need to think about readers, not book stores

Hugh McGuire attended the O'Reilly Tools of Change for publishing conference, and has written a nice piece on what he doesn't see happening: a concern amongst publishers for their readers. Concern for bookbuyers is all well and good, but as media changes its frame, the buyers are the ones they should be courting:

The question every publisher should be asking themselves every day is: how can I provide more value to my readers? I suspect the ones that start each day with that question will find the right answers, and will navigate the next few years with success.

And a few more snippets:

So, books are just one part of the picture. They are, I believe, at the base of O’Reilly’s success, the foundation upon which the company is built, but not necessarily it’s financial driver. O’Reilly is successful because they understand the value of books not as “things we can sell” but rather as “things that are of value to our customers: the readers.” O’Reilly provides readers with something of value, and gives them many many different opportunities and different routes to give money in exchange.

So: If you are in the publishing business, who is your VP of Reader Relations? Does your exec committee meet regularly to discuss: How can we sell more books and cut costs?

Or are your meetings titled: How can we deliver more value to the people who want the content we have to give them? How can we give people more opportunities to give us money for the valuable service we provide?


Do read Hugh McGuire here.