Tag: publishing

Music Is At The Heart Of This Novel



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m listening to a lot of soundtracks of serious, dark thrillers these days, hoping that some of it will rub off of me as I develop this novel. I simply don’t take myself all that seriously, so I need to get into that vibe as I develop the novel.

At the center of this story (two novels, one story) is music. I’ve come up with a rather unique way to use music in this novel. I only use titles of songs because, well, the medium is the message and all that. But I’m hoping people like me who like the type of music I like will dig it, as they say.

One of the layers of this novel is me reminiscing about those few, brief — but extremely exciting — months in Seoul in late 2006, early 2007. I simply can not tell what really happened in a way that anyone would want to read because it’s a tragedy with a forgone conclusion.

But I can, essentially, hide that story inside another story.

As such, I’ve spent a lot — A LOT — of time figuring out how to re-create the dynamic in my personal life during late 2006, early 2007 when I was publishing a magazine and DJing at a expat bar. Pretty much the entire novel, by accident, is simply an excuse for me to remember how cool I briefly was a long time ago.

I’m going to try to work music into every aspect of the novel. This, of course, hopefully, will make it easier to adapt into a movie should somehow I manage to sell this thing after all is said and done.

We’ll see.

My life in Seoul, 2006-2007.

V-Log: A Deep Dive Into Saving Time Magazine By Turning It Into A ‘Twitter Killer’ App #Disrupt

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

No one listens to me, but this is a really compelling concept. The idea of turning the legacy brand Time Magazine into an app that would compete — and ultimately kill — Twitter is really cool. And on the face of it, it’s pretty obvious. What you do is, you use the existing content creation backend infrastructure of the magazine to start the app.

There’s just so much to talk about. I talk about all of it pretty extensively in this video. But, like I said, no one listens to me and I’m just pissing in the wind. But it is fun to talk about. I just wish someone with some power at Time Magazine might at least listen to me.

V-Log: Re-Imagining Time Magazine As A ‘Twitter Killer’ App #Disrupt

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I guess why I keep writing about this concept is it’s so obvious to me. I’m something of a “power user” of Twitter and I kind of hate it. It sucks. The reason it sucks is, really, only about 10% of its user base is worth anything. So given that Time Magazine has been bought by a technology company, it seems pretty obvious to me that if you’re going to “save” it, you turn it into a social media platform designed to fell Twitter.

There’s just so much you can do with this concept. For me, the crux of it all is if you base the service on the old Usenet platform’s concepts, it make a lot of sense. Now, Reddit is a lot like Usenet, but it’s such a poorly designed implementation of Usenet as to be useless, at least in my opinion.

But here are the basics of my re-imagined Time Magazine.

Groups
Existing writers and editors of Time Magazine, instead of putting a magazine out every week, would be paid, in essence, to contribute content into the service in Groups they would be responsible for. Given that they would be paid to use the service, they would have a reason to be willing to take the time and effort to manage these Groups as systadmins. They would — at least at first — have the exclusive ability to create new Groups. Later, as a Point system kicked in, other people might be able to bubble up to the surface of the system and also be able to serve as systadims. But that would take time.

Posts
This is one cool feature — instead of being limited to 280 characters people using the Time App would have an entire full-page, multimedia Post to write content into. These Posts would have a robust threading quality to them, as well as the ability for users to in-line edit them once they had proven that they weren’t completely insane. (How they might prove this is up to discussion. I think at first it would be simply the amount of time you had used the service or whatever. Something intuitive.)

Video Conferencing
Another cool feature would be the ability to have recorded 4-way video conferencing. If you limited this feature, at least at first, to Time App staff, then you wouldn’t have to worry about abuse.

Anyway, there is so much more I could talk about, but no one listens to me. But, like I said, this is so obvious to me. It just makes so much sense. The user base of Twitter is in near open revolt and if you gave them a better mouse trap, I think they would flock to it in droves. I know a lot of celebrities and thought leaders hate Twitter with a passion. If you gave them something like my proposed “Time App” I think they would love it from the get-go.

Use Case: Bringing Back Usenet Concepts & Saving The Publishing Business

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I have talked at great length about this subject, but it’s fun to daydream about it. No one is paying me any attention and I’m kind of cooling my heels intellectually until I get a new camera and pursue that life. Having said that, I think a service based on the concepts of Usenet could do wonders for the publishing business.

I say this because instead of sending people a link to a site like you have to do with Twitter, with this proposed service, you could come to some agreement whereby a link detailing breaking news could be shot directly into the service in such a way that not only would people be able to inline edit it as part of the discussion, but the original ads associated with the article would be preserved.

This is important because people will be engaging with the content in a really proactive manner and the ads associated with the content would be viewed heavily. This might, just might, help with interaction of ads in such a way that it could boost the bottom line of online journalism.

This doesn’t even begin to address the issue of how you would know a lot more about users than otherwise because they would come to a newsgroup, or “Group” as I call them, for a very specific reason. They would not only come to a newsgroup for a specific topic, but the “patron” of the Group, a verified account holder, would be directly connected to the group because they created it.

This brings up all kinds of interesting advertising scenarios. Imagine a full page ad for this or that widget as a post in a group that was hotly debating the merits of the widget. Or something. Something like that. I would be interesting. I really like this concept. I think it has a huge potential upside monetarily.

But as I keep saying, no one is listening to me. No one cares about what I have to say, so this is more about me relaxing on a cold winter evening than anything else. Here are some more thoughts below.