william couch

Welcome to 2006. I understand I haven’t been doing much here; I’ve been incredibly busy in the past few weeks and I don’t foresee that ending anytime soon. As such, I have been unable to update the design of this site. For now though, come here for the content, as I do plan to post weekly.

Since my introductory entry, much has changed. Not just the new year, but my viewpoints on much of the new media that has arisen. Events such as CES in Las Vegas last week, to having heated talks about culture, media, technology and the social and technological impacts the three are generating, with professional journalists, bloggers and friends alike have enlivened my thoughts, and will subsequently enliven this site. I’ll be keeping this post brief, but in light of these events, I would like to propose two trends that 2006 will see and will once again transform our media landscape and concepts of content delivery.

Photocasting - This is not strictly due to Apple’s introduction of photocasting support in iPhoto bundled in iLife ‘06, as announced at Macworld on Tuesday, but it plays a role. As an avid photographer, this means of content delivery for photos is wonderful utilization of technology. The ability to have an ongoing photo album of your favorite photographer’s photos will be a powerful and useful tool to publicize one’s work, and to share photos in an easier manner than the burdened form of bulk emails, or .ZIP files via YouSendIt. Moreover, like podcasting, this trend will be realized by more than subscriber’s of del.icio.us popular and Slashdot techies due to Apple’s support and seamless integration. Applications with photocasting support in Windows and support by Flickr and feed aggregators will develop this year and ease the introduction and use to an even greater extent.

The Publishing Industry Meets the Internet - This semester, I am taking a class about The Future of Daily Newspapers, which is being taught by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Mark McDonald and where the students must subscribe to the print edition of the New York Times to investigate the matter hands-on. I’m taking another on Computer-Mediated Communication, where parallels have been drawn between the failure of the recording industry to recognize the Internet as a new content delivery platform, and how newspapers may too fall into a simliar trap. In all, interesting discussions have begun to challenge the very ideology of the publishing industry. And it’s not just these classes that have gotten me thinking. Andy Rutledge, the Creative Director of NetSuccess in Dallas, has written about the site design of online newspapers and how, in order to maintain readership online and in print, must translate their site’s design to mirror their print’s or at the very least present an experience as aesthetically pleasing as newsprint in order to stay in competition with other newspapers. A local friend of mine, Eston Bond, managing online editor of The Michigan Daily, the University of Michigan’s student run newspaper (currently undergoing reconstruction in light of this topic), and I have had numerous discussions on the topic, one resulting in a 2 hour debate and an entry on his site, hyalineskies. Slate Magazine had a feature on the topic and Slashdot too saw an entry on the debate. And perhaps the biggest factor that will play a role is New York Times’ hiring of Khoi Vin, of Subtraction and advocate of the grid in web design, to head Online Design. This move could very well be the start of an initiative to reevalute how publishers and newspapers present and deliver their content online. All of this activity will surely spur interesting change and discussion in the publishing industry, from challenging what defines journalistic credibility to considering the very aesthetics of reading the news in print. I’ll post my 2 cents in a later entry, but be on the lookout for these two.