Links of Interest

Publish books with WordPress, Cheap and lazy in abundance, new stats on how we use mobile

Kat Meyer
August 6, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including--in this release--PDF, ePUB, TEI.

If you haven't already done so, you should first read the many excellent reports from those who participated in One Week | One Tool (and watched it from afar). One Week | One Tool was an intense institute sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities that strove to convey the Center for History and New Media's knowledge about building useful scholarly software. As the name suggests, the participants had to conceive, build, and disseminate their own tool in just one week. To the participants' tired voices I add a few thoughts from the aftermath.

Surveying the Digital Future
At the New York Times Bits Blog, Claire Cain Miller reports on the latest findings from the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School's "Surveying the Digital Future" report. Turns out most people are cheap and lazy. Find more accurate quotes below:

Internet users overwhelmingly do not want to pay for access to Web sites that they already view free, yet half said they never clicked on Web ads and 70 percent called Internet advertising annoying. Still, just over half said they would rather see ads than pay to see Web sites.

• Internet impact on traditional retail declines -- 61 percent of Internet users said that online purchasing has reduced their buying in traditional retail stores -- down from 69 percent in 2008.
• Top 10 online purchases -- 59 percent of Internet users said they purchase books or clothes online, followed by gifts (55 percent), travel (53 percent), electronics/appliances (47 percent), videos (46 percent), computers or peripherals (41 percent), software or games (40 percent), CDs (40 percent), and products for hobbies (38 percent).
  

• Taken together, 59% of American adults now go online wirelessly using either a laptop or cell phone, an increase over the 51% of Americans who did so at a similar point in 2009
• The use of mobile data applications has grown dramatically over the last year, even as overall cell phone ownership has remained steady
• Although young adults have the highest levels of mobile data application use among all age groups, utilization of these services is growing fast among 30-49 year olds. Compared with a similar point in 2009, cell owners ages 30-49 are significantly more likely to use a range of mobile data applications on a handheld device.