Category: Books

Storyful’s Art and Science of Real-Time Discovery – Feedly

Storyful’s Art and Science of Real-Time Discovery – Feedly

“We discover and verify the content from social media using our own technology and open source technology [editor’s note: including feedly!], monitoring the social web in real time,” explained Derek Bowler, Storyful senior journalist and special projects lead, who also helps lead the company’s internal work flows, processes, and tools.

Storyful’s ability to work together across timezones and continents is central to the value that they create. They have global offices in Ireland, Hong Kong, Australia, and New York, and each team works together in real time. “Collaboration is at the core of Storyful,” says Bowler.

Organize what you are monitoring into feedly Collection.

Storyful creates a feedly Collection for every story they monitor like 2016 Decision, funny videos, cat videos, ISIS, and more. It’s an easy way for them to follow multiple sources on the same topic in one place. And when they seem a Collection updating with many new articles, it often means that a new story might be breaking.

Create a diverse mix of sources with your Collections

When Storyful creates a topic to monitor, they carefully hand pick sources that include as many known YouTube accounts from that particular location, Facebook feeds from active posters, key Twitter accounts, and any relevant sub-reddits. They ensure that they have at least one feed from each channel, often many more.

“That’s a one-stop shop because a lot of things we see happening in social media are encompassed in those channels,” says Bowler. “We knew a year ago that if we were monitoring those four major social platforms effectively, we were not able to monitor the topic effectively. The best thing about feedly is that it allows you to bring it all to one place.”

When Storyful editors start to see some feeds updating with increasing velocity, they know that something big is breaking.

Create an archive

One way Storyful uses feedly is a bit unconventional: They use it as a YouTube archive that is easy for them to search through. They have over a thousand YouTube videos that they monitor. By connecting the YouTube feed to their feedly, it becomes easy for them see what is breaking, but also use search terms to find a relevant video.

In particular, Storyful likes to use:

  • FB-RSS – This tool creates feeds from Facebook pages.
  • IFTTT + Slack – Storyful relies on Slack for their team communication. So, they create Google Alerts that they import into feedly. And from feedly, they use IFTTT to push breaking articles into their Slack.

What do you use to monitor every day news?
Are their tools, tips, or tricks that you or your organization use to be the first to know something?

‘The Book of Lost Books,’ by Stuart Kelly – New York Times

‘The Book of Lost Books,’ by Stuart Kelly – New York Times

“The Book of Lost Books” concerns itself with two main subjects: books that have disappeared, either through negligence, deliberate destruction or the vicissitudes of history; and books that never got written in the first place. Ranging over authors as famous as Homer, Hemingway, Austen and Aristophanes, it also contains chapters devoted to non-marquee names like Widsith the Wide-Traveled, Fulgentius, Ahmad ad-Daqiqi and Faltonia Betitia Proba.

Each chapter contains abundant biographical information about the author in question, then proceeds to explain how one or more of his or her books was lost, stolen, mutilated, bowdlerized, incinerated or abandoned.

Kelly seems to grudgingly accept that we are lucky so much great literature has survived, but would be a whole lot luckier if cultural pyromaniacs had refrained from burning down the library at Alexandria once and for all nearly a millennium and a half ago, where the only complete copy of Aeschylus’ 80 plays had been housed for a thousand years.

…

Occasionally Kelly gets lost inside his sentences; it’s anyone’s guess what he’s ranting about early in the book when he repeats the accusation by Lasus of Hermione that Onomacritus might have been guilty of misattribution, nay forgery, in his edition of Musaeus. In other places, he can turn pedantic; discussing the language of the “Iliad,” he writes: “Predominantly in the Ionic dialect, it contains traces of the Aeolic, hints of Arcado-Cypriot.” Mr. Kelly: behave!

But these occasional lapses quickly give way to delightful vignettes like the one about a critic thrown off a cliff by “irate Athenians who objected to his carping criticism of the divine Homer.” Today, if anyone got thrown off a cliff, it would be for complaining about Oprah.

The Seattle Review of Books – The publishers’ dilemma

The Seattle Review of Books – The publishers’ dilemma

The publisher as distinct, unique entity is the foundation of Roberto Calasso’s The Art of the Publisher, a small collection of connected essays and transcribed talks about Adelphi Edizioni (the Italian publisher Calasso has worked for or run in some capacity since 1962) and about publishing in general. Calasso immediately complicates the idea of the publisher, pushing it past purveyor of art and into art itself: “What is a publisher,” he asks, “but a long snakelike progression of pages?”

A publisher, then, is a sort of super-book that contains hundreds, maybe thousands of distinct but “mutually congenial” individual books. Each publisher is a multimedia, multidisciplinary project (including everything from editorial to publicity) whose essential concerns are whether and how a book gets published.

Things, then, haven’t really changed in 500 years. Whether and how have always been the primary concerns of the publisher. The former is a complicated question. It’s a bit like asking, “What makes a good book?” The answer might be beautiful or moving, but it’s just as likely to be subjective, overly reliant on current trends, biased, or myopic.

Calasso pokes fun at the question of what makes a good publisher even as he fails to adequately answer it: “A good publishing house [is] one that… so far as possible, publishes only good books.” Elsewhere he invokes publisher-as-book: “publishing the wrong book would be like putting the wrong character in a novel.”

#142: Rebound

#142: Rebound

I’ve mentioned before that my laser printer is one of my best friends during the editing process, but another best friend, especially for quick reads, is my Kindle. With relatively little headache I can export my Word document as an epub, pop it on my Kindle, and have, effectively, a prototype of a typeset book; book-like thing.

I say it’s great for quick reads because on the Kindle I tend to read with more of a reader’s frame of mind than a writer’s (or editor’s, for that matter, as it’s just tedious enough to make annotations on e-ink to discourage me from making too many).

It’s probably a holdover from my design days, this wanting to see a prototype on the native device. Once you’ve built the whole widget yourself, it can be hard to work in one stage of the process while knowing how much your decisions in later stages can affect the overall experience. Book jacket designer Chip Kidd famously wrote his first novel THE CHEESE MONKEYS in the page layout software Quark 3.2, which is kind of like trying to carve a turkey with lasers. (But I understand, Chip!)

This is also why I admire the quality in screenwriters that allows them to entrust a director with a movie script, to give that baby away and see someone else raise it. Or to be more precise: the Quality is a trusting non-attachment, an awareness of being a part of a larger ecosystem/community/world. I’ve been trying to cultivate this quality, both personally and professionally—I’ll be working much more with others to publish this book than I did with the previous one.

The Anatomy of Type by Stephen Coles – An online companion to the book — The Anatomy of Type: A Graphic Guide to 100…

The Anatomy of Type by Stephen Coles – An online companion to the book — The Anatomy of Type: A Graphic Guide to 100…

The Anatomy of Type: A Graphic Guide to 100 TypefacesAKA The Geometry of Type: The Anatomy of 100 Essential Typefaces Students and professionals in any creative field can benefit from a good typographic eye. The Anatomy of Type (published in the UK as The Geometry of Type) is all about looking more closely at letters. Through visual diagrams and practical descriptions, you’ll learn how to distinguish between related typefaces and see how the attributes of letterforms (such as contrast, detail, and proportion) affect the mood, readability, and use of each typeface. Nutritional value aside, the spreads full of big type make tasty eye candy, too. The typefaces featured in the book are hand-picked by the author for their functionality and stylistic relevance in today’s design landscape. Along with several familiar faces (such as Garamond, Bodoni, Gill Sans, and Helvetica), you’ll also discover contemporary fonts that are less common — and often more useful — than the overused classics. This website will be updated with news and resources related to the book’s content. Subscribe to the RSS feed or follow on Tumblr for updates.

The Anatomy of Type: A Graphic Guide to 100 Typefaces
AKA The Geometry of Type: The Anatomy of 100 Essential Typefaces

Students and professionals in any creative field can benefit from a good typographic eye. The Anatomy of Type (published in the UK as The Geometry of Type) is all about looking more closely at letters. Through visual diagrams and practical descriptions, you’ll learn how to distinguish between related typefaces and see how the attributes of letterforms (such as contrast, detail, and proportion) affect the mood, readability, and use of each typeface. Nutritional value aside, the spreads full of big type make tasty eye candy, too.

The typefaces featured in the book are hand-picked by the author for their functionality and stylistic relevance in today’s design landscape. Along with several familiar faces (such as Garamond, Bodoni,Gill Sans, and Helvetica), you’ll also discover contemporary fonts that are less common — and often more useful — than the overused classics.

Note: This is one book. There are two covers and titles (due to regional publisher requirements) but the content is the same.

Buy the book:
Indiebound (Support your local shop)
AbeBooks (Support an indie shop)
Alibris (Support an indie shop)
Amazon

This book was written and designed specifically for the printed format. The author does not recommend the Kindle version.

The Curse of Storage

The Curse of Storage

Our ever-growing collections of information and objects can lead to thoroughly modern crises that echo the past. Commentary by Momus.

I’ve been thinking about the parallel between object storage and information storage — apartments and computers — ever since visiting an interesting exhibition at London’s Barbican last month.

Future City looks at experiment and utopia in architecture over the last 50 years. I was particularly impressed by a quote from Japanese metabolist architect Kiyonori Kikutake. “A Japanese room is determined by information,” Kikutake was quoted as saying, “whereas a Western room relies on objects.”

I thought immediately of Kyoichi Tsuzuki’s photographs of Tokyo apartments. These tiny places (I lived in one myself for a year) tend to consist of an empty living space — typically a tatami-covered floor — surrounded by densely packed information-storage systems.

The information “saved” to these spaces might be clothes, records, knickknacks, magazines, toys — the obsessively collected, meticulously arranged, somewhat pointless “hard copy” of countless shopping trips. The tatami-and-futon floor space, meanwhile, is where processing happens.

There, the room’s occupant does his living, eating, loving, sleeping, thinking. This is the room’s RAM, its processor, where the present moment is all. Here the timeline of human attention scans through a book, a manga, a magazine or website, one page at a time.

Never one to pass up an opportunity to think of my lifestyle as Japanese rather than Western, I decided there and then to create a “Japanese” apartment in Berlin, a place devoted to information and the storage of information. My new apartment, after all, was on the small side. I’d have to resort to Japanese tricks and a Japanese sensibility to make it work. I had in mind not just Tsuzuki’s photographs of stashed Tokyo pads, but also a lovely book I have (it’s in a box somewhere) of photographs of Japanese writers’ rooms.
Continue reading “The Curse of Storage”

This Means This, This Means That: A User’s Guide to Semiotics: Sean Hall

This Means This, This Means That: A User’s Guide to Semiotics: Sean Hall: 9781856697354: Books – Amazon.ca

Semiotics is the theory of signs, and reading signs is a part of everyday life: from road signs that point to a destination, to smoke that warns of fire, to the symbols buried within art and literature. Semiotic theory can, however, appear mysterious and impenetrable. This introductory book decodes that mystery using visual examples instead of abstract theory.

This new edition features an expanded introduction that carefully and clearly presents the world of semiotics before leading into the book’s 76 sections of key semiotic concepts. Each short section begins with a single image or sign, accompanied by a question inviting us to interpret what we are seeing. Turning the page, we can compare our response with the theory behind the sign, and in this way, actively engage in creative thinking.

A fascinating read, this book provides practical examples of how meaning is made in contemporary culture.