On June 9, 2011 I did something I didn’t expect to do a few years earlier: I officially graduated from the University of Washington with a Master of Communication in Digital Media (MCDM) degree. The reason I didn’t expect to do it is because of how I thought of myself and what I thought I was capable of, up to that point in time.

Off the top, though, I have a huge number of people to thank for “holding me up” when I was ready to fall and for joining me on the journey.  The two primary people I want to thank are my spouse and partner, Carol, and Hanson Hosein, director of the MCDM program (pictured here handing me my diploma). My journey would have been impossible without them. Read more…

Amazon made an announcement last week about the Kindle e-reader and changes to their royalty scheme for authors that may have caught your eye. I will do a quick recap:

Amazon announced it is providing authors and publishers with a “70% royalty option” for books sold on the Kindle. The new royalty regimen seems to be squarely aimed at keeping Amazon as the’ top of mind’ publisher for e-books, especially in light of the enormous number of new readers that were unveiled at the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and the breathlessly awaited arrival of an Apple tablet device. The new percentage of 70%, from the current royalty of 35% per title, comes with a number of restrictions. These include:

• The actual price of the book must fall between $2.99 and $9.99 and be at least 20% below the lowest price of a physical edition of the same book.
• It has to sell for the same price, or less, as it does with competing booksellers.
• It has to be available everywhere the author or publisher has intellectual property rights.

According to Amazon’s announcement, “the 70 percent royalty option is for in-copyright works and is unavailable for works published before 1923 (a.k.a. public domain books). At launch, the 70 percent royalty option will only be available for books sold in the United States.” To see the entire announcement, go here.

My take: The royalties question is very important to authors, obviously, as that’s how they eat.  Amazon’s announcement has a sobering effect on competitors and publishing houses, as many authors may opt to move their works to direct publishing by Amazon, foregoing the services (and fees) associated with working with a publishing house.

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First, I want to be clear: I have not installed, used or been invited to use Google Wave.  That’s my disclaimer, and I’m sticking to it, for now.

The Google Wave team sent out invitations to an additional 100,000+ test users starting September 29, 2009 (the original preview was for developers only and the number of developers involved has not been broadcast).  This set of users consists of three main subgroups: public users who signed up early, developers, and a select group of Google Apps users.  So what are they getting?

Google Wave has been highlighted in many ways: as a real-time communication platform, as a reinvention of e-mail for the 21^st century and as an online collaboration game-changer.  There are an enormous number of articles and posts on Google Wave available and I’m not going to try to be comprehensive about this (I will provide links at the end of this post if you wish to do some more reading on your own).  What I am going to do is point out a few things that I think are truly interesting and compelling about what Google is trying to accomplish with Wave, and a few open questions I have about how it might work or be adopted. Read more…

I received my Kindle 2 on Wednesday, February 25.  First, this was a brilliant marketing and customer satisfaction tactic on Amazon’s part.  I originally ordered the Kindle late last year and knew, from the product page, that it would be weeks before my order was delivered (the original proposed delivery date was in mid-March).  It was to be a late Christmas present.

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In a blog post today on CNET, Caroline McCarthy reports on the effect of the economic downturn on social media consultancy.  She makes some interesting points, not the least of which is that the real experts will remain once the smoke clears.

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In an article on the Editor & Publisher site about publishers losing money on pirated online content, the research company Attributor said that media companies could “capitalize on the trend if they could figure out a way to get a piece of advertising revenue from the traffic flocking to their pirated stories.”

There are a number of interesting aspects to this story, some of which are the result of the research that Attributor did to arrive at its recommendations.

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There has been an incredible amount of huffing about President-elect Obama’s use of social media tools during the campaign.  Much of the change that has taken place to date has been around how the country has connected around his campaign and how this will (A) be taken forward into the presidency, and (B) change the face of politics and public discourse. 

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Whether you are a fan of Wal-mart’s “always low prices” shelves, or vilify them for their labor practices and effects on small-town America, Josh Bernoff’s blog post on Wal-Mart’s embrace of social applications will lead you to see them in a different light than you might normally.

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