Tag - wired

Is This Really The Future of Magazines?

May 28, 2010
John Koetsier
news

Why, why, why, Wired? 400 MBs of images in your 500 MB iPad app. Extremely uncool.

From the story on Interface Lab:

With the Wired app weighing in at a whopping 500 megabytes – just 100 shy of a full CD-ROM – how do they intend to maintain new editions of the magazine?  500 MB is too large for a 3G download (no help from AT&T’s less than spectacular network performance) and for those with iPad’s with the smaller storage, each issue will take a significant chunk of space on the device.  With no apparent means for managing which issues you keep on your device, this will become huge issue for a lot of people.  Obviously they will fix this with updates to the application, but I’m still wondering what they were thinking to begin with.  I’m hoping there were voices of dissent that pointed out the end product was not worth it’s weight in megabytes.  A PDF version would have been a tenth of the size, though without the interactivity.  But is the interactivity worth the 500MB price?  I personally don’t think so.

Why is the magazine so large?  Being the intrepid hacker that I am (*wink*) I mounted my jail broken iPad via AppleTalk and quickly tore into the app itself to see how it was constructed.  Similar to the PopSci+ magazine application, each Wired issue is actually a bunch of XML files that lay out a bunch of images.  And by “a bunch of images” I mean 4,109 images weighing in at 397MB.

via Is This Really The Future of Magazines or Why Didn’t They Just Use HTML 5?.

Geo-location: very mashable

January 21, 2009
John Koetsier
news

Great post on Wired on the mobile geo-available lifestyle.

Letting everyone know where you are whenever you are there, however, might have a few hazards. Everything, after all, is now mashable:

And location info gets around. The first time I saw my home address on Facebook, I jumped—because I never posted it there. Then I realized it was because I had signed up for Whrrl. Like many other geosocial applications, Whrrl lets you cross-post to the microblogging platform Twitter. Twitter, in turn, gets piped to all sorts of other places. So when I updated my location in Whrrl, the message leaped first to Twitter and then to Facebook and FriendFeed before landing on my blog, where Google indexed it. By updating one small app on my iPhone, I had left a giant geotagged footprint across the Web.

Funny – and concerning.

Better than free?

February 2, 2008
John Koetsier
news

Kevin Kelly, former Wired editor, is writing a book online – the Technium.

One thing he wonders about is in a world with a giant copier machine (the internet) and in which therefore everything is essentially free, how do you generate value? In a recent article, he talks about “generatives” that make something better than free:

  1. Immediacy
  2. Personalization
  3. Interpretation
  4. Authenticity
  5. Accessibility
  6. Embodiment
  7. Patronage
  8. Findability

As I commented on his blog …

Great article.

It’s very interesting to take the 8 “generatives” as a model and put existing business through it … do they fit? do they still work? is there still profit to be made?

One thing:

I think we need to differentiate between truly free and virtually free. The “copy machine” operates because people like me buy internet access, people like you buy server space, companies like NetNation, my host, buy and offer rackspace, and companies like the telcos provision and rent lines.

Incremental cost of using them is nil or almost nil, but you and I support this invisible giant copy machine in a very real way.

Seth Godin has also picked up on this meme …