Sree Sreenivasan and Vadim Lavrasik write about future journalism, or rather the journalist of the future at Mashable. The traditional skills and values of journalism--story-telling, research, and the like-- will be important in the future. However, the future journalist will have to supplement these with an emerging digital skill set.

The lone wolf journalist will be replaced by the collaborative journalist--the future journalist will work with any number of colleagues, including "citizen journalists" (i.e., bloggers), and segments of the audience. Traditional narrative skills will be crucial, but narratives will be produced and show on many different platforms. Curating and linkblogging are two buzz words in the tech blogosphere. The future journalist will not just produce original content, but will collect, edit and filter content created by others. The future journalist will need business savvy, an entrepreneurial attitude and an aptitude for metrics and measurement.

In short the future journalist will have to develop the social media skills of the blogger and the digital preservation skills of the librarian/information scientist. Vadim Lavrasik makes many of the same point in another Mashable piece. Both Lavrasik and Sreenivasan have blogs and Twitter feeds. Contact information is available on the linked posts.

Mars rising over Haleakala Crater Moonbow. via. According to Wikipedia:

A moonbow (also known as a lunar rainbow, lunar bow or white rainbow) is a rainbow produced by light reflected off the surface of the moon rather than from direct sunlight. Moonbows are relatively faint, due to the smaller amount of light reflected from the surface of the Moon. They are always in the opposite part of the sky from the moon.

Doesn't run on steam, but actually shoots rubber balls really really hard. via

David Radcliffe, "Less is more: The modernity of the early modern essay", Eighteenth Century Life, 33: Winter 2009 Scott Black, Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006 Radcliffe thoroughly reviews Black's book on the origin of the essay form in Britain circa 1600-1750. Black believes that the essay as practiced here was less influenced by the great works of Montaigne and Bacon than by the ordinary commonplace book. These books, as you know, are collections of quotations, facts, poems, notes, and anything else that appealed to the compiler's fancy. In part, commonplacing's goal was to compile a compact and portable reference library personalized for the reader. Since Erasmus it had been considered a component of any liberal education and many literate English men and women took it up as a lifelong practice. The key to the commonplace book was the interaction between reader and text. Books were read with an eye to finding the useful. Indeed, early modern reading habits didn't always involve reading a text straight through; the reader skimmed and skipped and jumped from text to text. The commonplace as a record of the reading was perhaps the only continuous text that the compiler ever encountered. Reading was not so much watching an author on display as it was building a bank of skills. Both the commonplace and the essay were records of the compiler/essayists reading. Black says, "digesting an essay was tantamount to composing an essay". Black makes much of the digestion metaphor. Later he writes:

one reads in order to get material to work. One must digest what one reads, making it his own. One writes in order to aid the process of digestion.

Reading is simply an occasion for writing, which is the final stage of digesting what one has read. Early modern essays were an elaborate form of commonplacing more than closely argued polemics or explorations of the inner self. Scott Black's book is in print and should be available from wherever you obtain books. The Radcliffe essay is available on JSTOR.

Gnome Press was a US small press running from 1948 to 1962. Edited by Martin Greenberg (an "outright crook" according to Asimov), Gnome published early hardcovers of many pulp era authors, like Howard, Heinlein, Asimov (who never saw a dime for the Gnome edition of the Foundation Trilogy), Van Vogt, and so on. Several notable fen and pros worked for Gnome: Andre Norton, L. Sprague deCamp (Gnome was where he got his start on rewriting the Conan opus), and David Kyle, who was best known, perhaps, for doing the Conan maps.

Earl Kemp's eI47 has a brief history of Gnome, along with a check list of the 86 titles and ephemera, as well as scans. It's the last chapter in Earl's Anthem series of articles on early SF small presses.

As an aside, Martin Greenberg is not to be confused with Martin Henry Greenberg, who had a long and fruitful professional relationship with Asimov. The latter wrote a humorous bit about his confusing the two.

I've read enough about the iPad over the last week to form an opinion. You have too, so I'll spare you the links and the summaries and the quoted text. My opinion can be summarized by the answers to two yes-or-no questions: Would I buy an iPad instead of a MacBook? No. Would I buy an iPad instead of a Kindle? Yes.

James Ball at Not Easy to Forget discusses the creative ways people take pen-and-paper notes at social media conferences he's attended. Everyone, it seems,is bringing along pens, pads and Moleskines. The reason is simple:

Time-tested and true, the studious practice of writing things down is still one of the best ways to utilize the different parts of your brain, and this to help retain important information. It’s just that simple, looking, listening, speaking, and writing all draw from different physical faculties and neurological processes. The more of these that you make use of, the better you’re taking it all in.

For inspiration, he links to Mike Rohde's Flickr scans of an extensive set of notes taken at a Word of Mouth Marketing Crash Course in fall 2008. The notes have lots of doodles and illustrations and a generally fun approach to a job many of us regard as drudgery.

No wonder James refers to Mike as "a man who is well known and sought after for his note taking skills".

Jonathan Dee wrote a good piece on right-wing blogger Charles Johnson (of the warblog LGF) in last Sunday's NYT Magazine. Read the whole thing for a capsule history of the recent conservative flame war. I'm most interested in the following quote:

Whatever you think of him, Johnson is a smart man, a gifted synthesizer of information gathered by other people. But just as for anyone in his position, there is an inevitable limit to what he can learn about places, people, political organizations, etc., without actually encountering them. Instead of causes and effects, motivations and consequences, observation and behavior, his means of intellectual synthesis is, instead, the link: the indiscriminate connection established via search engine.

This is the blog author's way of looking at the world. Bloggers are great summarizers of what others have learned and  written about online. But it seems as if a thing cannot be the case without a link some where or and entry in a search engine. Once that link is established, however, the thing is the case forever. The piece is worth reading and saving, both for what it says about conservative politics and about online writing in general.

Zeldman frets about the preservation of personal web material, which usually disappears once the hosting bill goes unpaid. He has an idea:

A suggestion for a business. Sooner or later, some hosting company is going to figure out that it can provide a service and make a killing (as it were) by offering ten-, twenty-, and hundred-year packets of posthumous hosting.

A hundred years is not eternity, but you are not Shakespeare, and it’s a start.

From Technabob: