Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Reading as a Participation Sport

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A few things have been pushing my thinking even more about reading and writing in digital environments, and I thought I’d throw some kind of random thoughts together here mostly to capture them but also to see where writing about them takes me. So apologies in advance for the thin threads and varied directions this may go in.

First, let me say I love my iPad…as a reading tool. I’ve been telling people that when the new OS comes out here in the next couple of weeks, my “grade” for it will go from a B- to a B+ just for the mere ability to multitask through many open programs, which is the major frustration I find with the device right now. I hate having to close one app down in order to open another up because it’s just so different from the usually six or eight programs and 30+ tabs I have running at any given moment on my MBP. But having said that, I absolutely love reading on the iPad. It’s light, it’s thin, it glows. Yeah…I’m having a moment…

To that end, I seriously don’t know if there’s a more useful app than Instapaper. Now, when I’m working on my laptop and my network floats up some interesting piece to read, I just “read-later” it in my browser and the article, stripped of all the ads and extraneous junk on the page, syncs right into my iPad for later, leisurely, comfortable consumption. And…for somewhat comfortable creation. (Btw, here is the RSS feed for my Instapaper saves if you want it.) With a little work, I can share out those pieces to Twitter, capture chunks on Evernote, save them to my Delicious account, all of which will get oh so much easier when the OS updates. But there is no question that  reading no longer just means consuming. It’s all about pulling out the most salient, relevant pieces and doing something with them that potentially makes other people more knowledgeable as well.

Second, there has been a great series of posts on my new favorite blog at the Neiman Journalism Lab (Harvard) regarding the use of links:

Why does the BBC want to send its readers away? The value of linking
Why link out? Four journalistic purposes of the noble hyperlink
Making connections: How major news organizations talk about links

Now I know most of these have a journalistic bent, but I think they have relevance for any of us who write in this linked world, whether it’s blogs or Twitter or whatever. In fact, I might argue that conversations such as these should be happening in fourth and fifth grade as we begin to help our students understand the value of public writing. I mean it might just be me, but I would love my kids to have an understanding of the value of links in writing in terms of how they can be used in storytelling, in keeping the audience informed, in enabling transparency and their value as a “currency of collaboration.” Isn’t that an inherent part of the online writing interaction that we should be teaching?

Third, back to the iPad for a sec. I love the fact that this morning, Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus landed in my Kindle app, ready for me to read. I just finished Switch (highly recommended) and now I have two abridged, annotated, digitally marked up versions of recent books in Evernote that are fully searchable and remixable and sharable (within limits, of course.) I’m becoming more convinced that I’ll never buy another paper book again if it has a Kindle version.

And finally, I bought the Wired Magazine app for the iPad on Monday ($4.99) and it’s, um, pretty darn cool. It’s also another small step in the way we read; embedded videos and audio, amazing graphics, interactive buttons to push. I found it much more engaging to read…that participation thing again. Not that it’s the reinvention of print, but I would have loved to been in some of the brainstorming and idea sessions when they created the interface. It is beautiful and functional. And soon, according to the developers, it’s going to get more social as well, more opportunities to do “connective reading.” Not saying I’m going to subscribe to Wired this way, but when textbooks are made for the iPad in this format…could be very interesting.

I know most people shudder when I say this, but I’m more than ok with letting go of the paper reading world at this point. I’m much more interested in exploring these digital spaces, their opportunities and their drawbacks (as Nicholas Carr has been espousing of late) than watching my paper books grow dust on the bookshelves.

You?

More Deliciouser and Readerable

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Ever since last month when delicious FINALLY did an upgrade, I’ve been digging into it pretty heavily and really liking the result. That’s not to say that there is anything especially new here; there isn’t aside from the 1000 character description upgrade which, to me anyway, is a big deal. But for some reason it’s been working better for me on a number of levels.

In fact, all that new space has made me change some of my delicious habits on both ends of the spectrum. It’s made me sure to add a good deal of annotation to most of the bookmarks I save, and it’s made me start to expect others to do the same. Kudos to Alan Levine, Howard Rheingold and others, who fill up my daily morning newspaper with enough link detail to let me make faster decisions about what they are sharing. Here’s hoping more folks in my network will follow suit. It really has become the place that I start my reading, and I’m finding that it’s making me think even harder about my own organizational structure and how all of this flow of information works best for me. And by the way, the new Google Reader preview extension for Firefox that I just added has really made all of this much easier for me as well. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like for anyone interested; the fact that I can comment directly from Reader is chaning that part of my practice as well…more comments.

I’m finding as I experiment with my delicious network that as I tweak it and try to hone it, I’m getting more good information than I used to. More relevant. More thought-provoking, than simply reading through my blogroll of usual suspects. It’s expanding my sources of information, and it’s making even more clear the potentials of user-generated connections. But I’m also finding the process of identifying those who make up my network interesting. I’ve been spending a great deal of time looking at the networks of those in my network, finding others who I might want to add based on the tags that they use (like do they have an “education” tag, or do they have some uniquely formed ones like “mediagoesaway“), the frequency with which they save things (30 a day = not good as does 30 a year), the amount of annotation, and who they might be networked in with.

I still struggle with the organization of all of this, but I’ve pretty much now decided to forego the tagging and sharing features in Reader for attempting to make it all work in just one place in delicious. Not sure why I haven’t caught the Diigo bug as others have, but on some level, it just feels too overwhelming in terms of the amount of stuff you can do, although from a collaborative standpoint, there is no question Diigo has some compelling advantages. delicious just feels more manageable for me at this point.

Anyway, just an update on the evolution of my info management process for anyone that’s interested. Would love to hear others to deconstruct their own processes in similar ways.

A Delicious Digital Footprint

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I hadn’t planned on getting my writing life in order today, but then I somehow happened on this post by Michele Martin on using Delicious to create an online portfolio. Since I have a couple of articles due out this fall (and a couple of new books in the works), I decided a good place to start getting my brain around the idea was with all of the off-blog writing I’ve done the past few years, and so, there went a couple of hours. After wading through it all, it turns out I was able to locate online 35 of the 40 or so pieces of published writing I’ve done (at least the ones I can remember.) Anyway, I gave them all a tag, and now when you pull up the associated page in Delicious, you can see them all in one quick swoop.

A couple of observations here: First, while I know there are parents who are choosing their kids names based on whether or not the domains are available, (which is ridiculuous, btw) I’m thinking it may be good to choose a tag early on. I’ve started using tessorichardson and tuckerarichardson for the stuff I post about my own kids, and I’m thinking they might continue to use that tag as they begin creating and posting their own stuff as well. Second, what I like about this is that because of the RSS feed, people who might be interested can track my work and I can repurpose it elsewhere, say on a Pageflakes page (which could also serve as a portfolio, btw.) Third, as Michele says, the easy to update part of this is really intruiging. For instance, I might want to do this whenever I read generous reviews of my book, (forget the bad ones…(0:) or when excerpts of my presentations end up online. Just create a bit of a different tag, like “willrichardsonbookreviews” or “willrichardsonpresentationclips” etc. And then, I could use the bundles function to bring them all together (or, of course, I could just add a catchall tag like “willrichardsonportfolio”.)

Dunno if this has any earth shattering significance, and I’m sure many folks are already playing with variations on this theme, but I think the ease of doing this once you have it set up makes it worth a second or third thought.

(Photo “Footprints” by andy 5322.)