Well, not exactly the hotseat. More like a backyard chaise lounge. Whatever the metaphor, Kevin — who originated the Virtual Book Tour over a year ago — is the editor of a new book, Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times. It’s a collection of articles about how young writers approach their craft.

For more about Kevin’s virtual and real-world book tours, see his website. The book will be in stores nationwide June 1.

I read the book during my trip back East last week and found it rewarding and passionate, particularly in the writers’ zeal for the writing life. Especially strong were Kevin’s introduction and the opening chapters, including “Look the Part” by Pamela Ribon and “Border Lines” by Stephanie Elizondo Griest — two ruminations on race and coming of age — and Howard Hunt’s “The Invisible Narrator,” a must-read for anyone entering profile-based magazine journalism.

Here’s the email Q&A I conducted with Kevin about his new book:

Where did the idea for “Bookmark Now” come from?

I wanted to do a book length assertion that members of my generation still read and read actively. But I didn’t want to write it all myself because I felt it would either sound overly academic or pedantic and droning. An anthology, a discordant collection of voices, seemed like the perfect solution.

How long was it in the making? Is there a backstory here? Trials, tribulations, near-slashing of wrists?

A little under two years. For the 25 contributors we got, I probably asked 75 writers. There were days when I was ready to chuck the whole project, along with myself, in the nearest river, but it helped once I realize that editing an anthology is a slow, stuttering process. Your daily progress depends so much on others. It’s akin to planning a wedding. Or going to war.

Pull back the curtain for us a bit and describe the process involved in assembling this collection. It couldn’t have been easy.

I began with writers I not only knew but whom I had worked with in the past. Then came the long-shot, hail mary, try-again-in-five-years kid list, then writers I just liked and would work with on just about anything and finally those I hadn’t heard of but were referred to me by those already on the project. I had an idea of what I wanted each of them to write and most of them ignored me. I think we have a much better book for it.

Do any of the stories in the book speak to you on a deeper level? Which have a special resonance?

No more one than the other. Sometimes I think I’m more attached to the essays that came in earlier or that got precisely when I was feeling lowest about the project. But if I look hard at the whole book, each one is crucial to the structure of “Bookmark Now.” Favoring one over the other feels like adding an extra wheel to a truck.

How are writers and bloggers different — and alike? We’ve all heard of the solitary writer holed up in his room, while bloggers seem to thrive amid a sea of like-minded individuals. Are we moving toward a new kind of online writer, one more plugged into a community Zeitgeist?

I certainly hope so. I don’t think we are ever going to see writers as a species become as gregarious as say, stand-up comedians, but I do believe there is a class of writers who thrive on interaction and community with their readers on other writers and that exchange is as important to them as their alone time with their muse. I think it’s also a hallmark of creative people of this generation who are coming of age creatively with audiences who talk back and with comrades easily accessible by email.

Would you recommend the writing life for those of us who actually enjoy making a living wage?

Certainly not. But I would recommend parlaying the expertise that comes from writing into a living wage. I consult with other writers, publishers and arts organizations on how to use technology and social media because it was the ass-backwards way I got into publishing. That knowledge is worth something and eases the burden of living on a writers salary. Easier for non-fiction writers, I know, but not impossible for novelists with an entrepreneurial spirit.

Continue reading »

They really know how to sucker you in to sign up for all the extras in our 6-year-old’s T-ball league. Here’s the latest: a batch of Bobby baseball cards, with Bobby giving his serious hitter’s look.

In addition to yesterday’s brouhaha over the New York Times’ decision to include its op-ed columnists in a premium service starting in September, there are other interesting things happening here at IDG’s Syndicate conference that are worth highlighting:

BlogPulse

A lot of talk in the hallways about BlogPulse, which joins Technorari and Feedster and PubSub as part of the blog tracking toolset.

Atom

I had breakfast with Tim Bray (erstwhile Sun Microsystems blogger) and Jon Udell (Infoworld blogger/journalist) this morning just before our panel about harnessing the voice of the individual. Tim finished the spec for Atom last night. We may see an Atom-RSS battle in a few months when Google is expected to embrace it and place it on all Blogger blogs.

I’m sitting now at a lunch session with Robert Scoble, Charlene Li of Forrester, Udell and others, and Mr. Scoble was asked if he’d begin using Atom. He answered:

“Is it demonstrably better? If so, we’ll embrace it. Will I switch? I need to hear the benefits my readers will get from a new feed format. My mother wants only one feed, not a choice of five formats.”

Media RSS (mRSS)

Bradley Horowitz, director of media search for Yahoo!, gave a fascinating presentation about the just-announced Media RSS format (not quite a standard). He began by contrasting mass media and micro media.

Mass media:
Appeals to large audiences
Controlled and manicured distribution
Expensive to produce
Studio model, high-stakes economics

Micro media:
May have limited audience
Uncontrolled, unmoderated distribution
Cheap to produce
Different, developing economic model

“At Yahoo, we think people will consume media from both the head and the [long] tail. It’s about My Media,” Horowitz said. Inside the company, they call it FUSE for enabling people to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge. People usually stop at the first bullet point, but Yahoo takes the ability to use and share media seriously.

He showed off the Flickr flash widget, a piece of javascript code you can drop into your blog to home in on the feed you want, displaying a small boxed set of photos on your blog. I think it’s similar to the Daily Zeitgeist.

Media RSS — which Ourmedia.org announced support for yesterday (here’s the short post Marc and I crafted for the Yahoo search blog) — is a simple extension to RSS and podcasting. It dresses up enclosures and gives it a little bit of metadata so it can be found by the search engines. It’s designed to support grassroots publishing, enabling audiences to access content previously unavailable through traditional channels.

1,366

The number of blog feeds that Robert Scoble now checks daily. (This is one!)

Memeorandum

Memeorandum came up today. It takes feeds from the NY Times and Washington Post and adds comments right beneath them.

Del.icio.us

I was excited to meet Joshua Schachter, founder of the social media/tagging site Del.icio.us. They have something over 100,000 users, with 40,000 active users who tag an average of 4 to 5 items per day. I joined a few weeks ago. Revealing quote from Joshua: “I don’t use RSS readers all that much.”

About those RSS numbers

David Sifry, CEO of Technorati, warned, “People mistakenly think their RSS readership is huge. You need to divide that number by about 10 because the RSS companies poll your RSS feed about once an hour on average,” and there’s no guarantee the content is even being read — just delivered.

Legal issues

Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge chaired an interesting session on legal issues and fair use in the digital age, with Neeru Pahlia of Creative Commons and Rafat Ali of PaidContent as well. I made the point that as a publisher, it shouldn’t really be up to me to decide which media items ought to be kicked off Ourmedia.org for copyright infringement, but the panelists agreed that fair use in cyberspace is a grey zone right now and we’re stuck with the status quo of laws not designed to take Remix Culture into account.

Meeting Adam

I was happy last night to meet Adam Fields in person at the blogger dinner at Gallagher’s Steak House in mid-town NYC that 40 folks attended. Adam has been a star moderator/content creator/server specialist for Ourmedia.org.

Markos Moulitsas

Martin Nisenholtz

I was shocked when I learned this morning (I was flying yesterday) about Monday’s announcement that the New York Times is placing all of its op-ed columnists behind a $50-a-year pay firewall starting in September. Shocked probably isn’t too strong a term.

Conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan castigated the Times for withdrawing from the blogosphere.

Liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos — whom I finally had a chance to meet in person today — derided the decision on his blog and in a conversation with me following his talk at IDG Syndicate today.

Markos wrote that come September, he’ll stop linking to the Times Op-Ed pages. “I think this is the best way they can become irrelevant. If my readers can’t read it, why would I link to it? The key to blogging is that readers can look at the source material and make up their own minds.”

Markos told me, “The Times has it exactly backward. Opinion is the one thing that is not in short supply in the blogosphere. David Brooks’s ability to influence the public discourse will be incredibly diminished. The Times is taking itself out of the conversation.”

Count me with Sullivan and Moulitsas. This seems like a wrongheaded decision, perhaps not from an immediate business POV but certainly from a long-term strategic one. It will marginalize the Times’ editorial voice in profound ways.

Ironically, minutes after Markos spoke, Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations for the New York Times Co. (and an affable, familiar figure at media conferences), took the stage.

It wasn’t exactly the lion’s den, but Nisenholtz fielded a barrage of questions about the policy decision, including two from me. Highlights:

- He said the decision generated “very robust discussion inside the company,” with some people arguing for keeping the op-ed columns open on the Web and others arguing for closing off more of the content.

- The decision to include the op-ed columnists behind the firewall, Nisenholtz said, was one based on the idea that they wanted something “powerful enough to attract people and make them want to subscribe but to keep the big front door open” at the same time. One goal of the move, he said, was that “so ultimately we can pay the journalists” on the Website, although I suggested that David Brooks, Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman really write for the print publication and thus shouldn’t be counted against the online operation.

- When someone asked if the Times was concerned about being shut out of the conversation, Nisenholtz said, “Yes, there is a fear of that. What I’m hoping is that won’t happen, although there’s the possibility that can happen. I hope over the next several months we will see the hidden paid Web [become more prominent]. It strikes me as odd that you can do a Google search and never find the Wall Street Journal. We think that’s OK. (Laughter.) From a social perspective, that does seem odd to me.”

And yet the Times is now embarking down the same road.

- Nisenholtz: “I don’t know how the search engines accommodate themselves to this. But I have a feeling that as more and more folks struggle with the issue of free and paid that they will have to accommodate themselves because I don’t think it’s necessarily right that the only information that gets exposed is free.”

- I asked Nisenholtz, “I can’t believe that your columnists are happy about this.” He nimbly answered that he wouldn’t presume to speak for the Times’ columnists, but that the columnists have “responded well” so far.

- More Nisenholtz: “For 10 years you’ve been asking for seamless access to the archive, and now we’ve given that to you. The quid pro quo is you got what you asked for and now we’ve got to ask for something in return.”

- What about bloggers who cut and paste from op-ed columns — even entire columns? “I don’t really want to comment too much other than that we will continue to do whatever is necessary to protect our intellectual property,” Nisenholtz said. “We recognize there will be some of that, because of the nature of the blogosphere.”

Let me be clear: No one begrudges the Times’ right to make money from its online operation, but the New York Times Digital is already profitable, and this seems like a move that will hurt the paper’s voice — and, yes, its credibility — in the long run.

Media will change more in the next five years than it has in the past 50 years. We stand at a historic moment when we’re witnessing the transition to a fundamentally new kind of mediasphere.

My two-years-in-the-making book, “Darknet,” has just been released. It’s not another book about the excesses of copyright law — not really. “Darknet” takes a look at the future of future of movies, television, computing, music, games, art and more — and the choice we face as a society.

In the next two months, I’ll be publishing stories and analysis from the book in regular weekly installments. Look for them every Monday on Darknet.com.

We think this is the first time this kind of “mini-book” — containing both installments from the book and new material — has been done on the Web. That’s appropriate, given that “Darknet” was the first mainstream book written with the help of readers on a wiki (in addition to those who helped out on the Darknet blog and in private forums).

Today I’ve published the first two installments of the mini-book: the book’s Introduction and a story about three teenage filmmakers.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading these accounts, regardless of whether you buy the book or not.

More importantly, I hope that the blogosphere helps stir a public debate about these critical issues, which have long languished in the recesses of academia and the political establishment rather than in the public townsquare, where these conversations belong.

Highlights and takeaways from the citizens media summit in San Francisco on May 15, 2005:

Pithiest quote: Joan Walsh, editor of Salon.com: “We don’t want to become old media at [age] 10. We still view ourselves too much as a print magazine on the Web.”

Most exciting new tool that works: participatoryculture.org‘s open-source video platform for grassroots culture.

Most interesting new citizens media site: The just-announced (but not yet live) Newstrust.org, Fabrice Florin’s effort to “help people find news they can trust.”

Most interesting schism that developed: Not so much a schism, really, as a point of emphasis. Several folks, led by Fabrice Florin of NewsTrust, David Bank of Emerging Agenda, Jonathan Weber of New West, Howard Rheingold, Dan Gillmor and others, emphasized training, editing, standards and creating media for a social purpose (the advancement of democracy, etc.). A second group, led mostly by me, Michael Tippett of NowPublic, Susan DeFife of Backfence and Denise Atchley of the Digital Storytelling Festival, sought to emphasize empowering users to create media as an end in itself, as a means of fostering creative expression. The two approaches have much in common, but the differences in emphasis are important to consider.

Most out-of-the-box thinking: By Brewster Kahle, natch, who dusted off two ideas ready for resurrection: a video browser and the library exemption for loaning broadcast news video. (See the meeting summary for more details.)

Most positive development: Action items by Mary Hodder, Michael Tippett, Amanda Michel, Fabrice Florin and others to form teams to tackle a university conference and a learning clearinghouse for training and for legal education.

You can see a full summary of Saturday’s session at the citizensmediasummit.com site.