Tech IT Easy

So Penelope Trunk wrote a book. I previously wrote about her here. A commentator on one of blog-posts asks:

Penelope,
I read your blog regularly. Is there anything in your new book that I wouldn’t have already gotten from your blog?
Either way, I’ll probably buy it… but I was just curious.
Posted by Kelly

Penelope responds:

Kelly, 
I think the difference between a book and a blog is how big the idea is. So a blog is a pile of many small ideas. A book is one, big idea. So the book does not have small ideas that you don’t know, but the book is sort of curated to add up to a big idea. 
Organizing my thoughts into grand ideas that come at the end up a buildup is harder for me than writing posts. This is how I know that a book is different than the posts even if there are no new posts. 
I hope this is a good answer. And thank you for buying the book

Penelope

I’m also reading one of Seth Godin’s books, Linchpin, which I understand is like many of his books, collecting a number of blog posts together. Penelope calls this curation, I’m sure Seth has a name for it too.

One thing that I feel has changed in the landscape of media consumption is consuming in smaller chunks. Whether it’s buying single tracks from iTunes or watching TV-shows, our consumption time gets smaller and smaller. I don’t know much about purchasing single tracks from iTunes, I prefer buying a whole album because you get more for your buck. But my listening behaviour is based around playlists, often using iTunes smart playlist feature, called Genius, which works similar to Pandora’s algorithms and is the way Spotify is supposed to work. I rarely put on an album and listen to the whole thing in sequence. Does that change my behaviour in terms of consumption? I guess that I appreciate the “curation” that albums, often soundtracks or compilations, provide. Purchasing playlists compiled by “experts” is a killer product, if that already exits, and I really miss the online mixtape movement that was hot a few years ago, but got sued off the table.

TV-shows is something I happen to know a lot about, because I love watching whole seasons of shows. Starting with “Star Trek: The Next Generation” as a kid, “Babylon 5” (yes, I’m a scifi nerd), “Friends,” “the Sopranos,” “Veronica Mars,” and more recently “The Shield” and “The Wire.” TV has always been a threat to movies, as a technology, but now it is a threat on a much larger scale. You cannot tell the story of The Wire in a 2 hour movie. It’s 5 seasons of 24 episodes and the depth through which you get to know the characters is impossible to match.

Now, David Simon, creator of The Wire, is a genius. So is Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek. Seth Godin is arguably a master of his craft, and so is Penelope Trunk. So the analogue between TV-shows vs. Movies and Blogs vs. Books only works if the creators are professionals and their individual chunks of content represent that quality. Could any blog be turned into a book? I’d love to see a book comprising of curated AVC.com content (written by Fred Wilson) and even a coffee-table book by Jason Kottke (Kottke.org). I of course do not want to produce one for Tech IT Easy, and there are many blogs that I do not need to see in book form.

The evolution of the Internet has created a similar scenario for Book publishers and Newspapers that TV has caused for Movies. But the latter have had to adapt, moving to the small screen or hyping up 3D (not a fan anymore) to draw people back into cinemas. We’ll see whether the same adaption will occur for book publishers that newspapers are making towards e.g. the iTunes model. It’s definitely interesting to see some movement into the opposite direction, blogs turning into blogs.

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