It turns out the average is 20 cents. The closer your food is to what farmers actually produce, the more they make. The further away — think cereal or even beer — the less. A lot less. Here’s the story.

You know you are in the right place at the right time when a little profile of your work that appeared in your university’s alumni magazine gets picked up by the state’s Department of Agriculture’s main publication. Sweetness!

Wired has the story of a bit of very famous text added to the robots.txt file maintained by Last.FM. I won’t spoil your delight by writing any more.

The New York Times has a nice review of Clay Shirky’s book _Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Here’s an excerpt:

The time we might free up by ditching TV is Shirky’s “cognitive surplus” — an ocean of hours that society could contribute to endeavors far more useful and fun than television. With the help of a researcher at I.B.M., Shirky calculated the total amount of time that people have spent creating one such project, Wikipedia. The collectively edited online encyclopedia is the product of about 100 million hours of human thought, Shirky found. In other words, in the time we spend watching TV, we could create 2,000 Wikipedia-size projects — and that’s just in America, and in just one year.

Anthologize is a tool for content creators to turn their website, and other materials they have syndicated I believe, into a book. It was produced by the Center for History and New Media’s “One Week, One Tool” project. They used a number of extant ideas and projects as their starting points:

• Matt Cutt’s Blog to Book
• Hugh McGuire’s “An Open, Webby, Book-Publishing Platform”
• O’Reilly’s Tools of Change

UPDATE: Further along in the traditional publishing workflow comes editing and I just came across a website that allows for a kind of crowdsourcing of editing: it’s called BiteSizeEdits. Fascinating.

UPDATE 2: There’s a commercial site doing this: http://leanpub.com/.

ReadWriteWeb has a post that relays news from the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe: Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt explained that the end of anonymity on the web is coming because governments will demand it in order to avoid its misuse for criminal or anti-social behaviors:

The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity. In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it.

Schmidt also had good news: users are creating a lot of data. Oh, the bad news: all that data makes it possible not only to track you but to predict where you are going:

If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use Artificial Intelligence, we can predict where you are going to go.

As for the Techonomy conference itself, I can’t quite tell what to make of it. It’s either a nicely idealistic counter-balance to the Wall Street set who seem like modern day Vikings raping and pillaging every landscape they encounter when you read their philosophy:

Techonomy draws its inspiration from the ‘creative capitalism’ of Bill Gates, the ‘eco-pragmatism’ of Stewart Brand, the ‘big history’ of David Christian, and Bill Joy’s recent work on the economics of large-scale innovation. Each thinker in his own way points to a new humanism founded on the old notion that invention is what we do as a species. It is human nature to combine technology and economy to solve problems – to do so is both an opportunity and a responsibility. It’s who we are, and the only way we’re going to get to any solutions.

But sometimes the site feels a bit like certain strains of Puritanism, wherein you knew who the saints were because they were rich. You know, God wants you to be rich and the fact that you’re rich reveals that have been chosen by God. There’s a little bit of “we are the chosen” here.

Of course, it doesn’t help that the neo-logism Techonomy is just so awful. It practically screams “well-intentioned silliness.” I remember someone wanting to use informances at some point.

Everybody’s talking about disintermediation, but, as Don Linn points out:

Disintermediation is nothing new. It happens when businesses change so get used to it. Sears, Roebuck disintermediated the local dry goods store when it mailed its first catalog and it continues unabated in every sector…not just publishing and bookselling.. As Mike Cane has pointed out, there’s a sad irony in watching independent booksellers ranting about being disintermediated by Amazon as they listen to music they downloaded to their iPods from uber-disntermediator, Apple iTunes.

In the weirdly wonderful category comes news that the Library of Congress offers a virtual tour of its facilities via an iPhone/iPod Touch app. Here’s the link to the web version of the iTunes Store: link.

Using the Arduino board, a Dutch group has built themselves a cardboard track, a remote-controlled car — with a video camera, and used an old arcade game as a controller to recreate the PlayStation game “Wipeout” in the real world. At one point during the interview, one of the creators remarks that a lot of people have a hard time connecting what they see on the controller monitor and what is happening on the track. Are we so used to thing happening on television having no connection to reality? It would be an interesting thought experiment for a humanities class.

Here’s the link to the project’s Vimeo page, which should work for non-Flash devices. (I believe Vimeo offers HTML5 support.) And here’s the embedded player version:

In Tolkien’s grand narrative, the “one true ring” turned out to be a really bad idea, and it took a three-book sequence to destroy the thing. In the humanities in particular and the academy in general, we continue to be vexed by a file format that allows for productive interchange that is also open — both in the beer and speech senses. Microsoft’s Word files, DOC and DOCX, are clearly not it, though they are now so ingrained in everyone’s workflows, if only thanks to the application being omnipresent on most Windows computers, that many of us assume they are the basis for any interchange.

But anyone who has had to trade a complex document back and forth a few times with more than a few basic style options has learned, things get lost in transit.

Until recently, however, few applications did a decent job of reading and writing Word’s DOC file format. It was getting better — which may be one of the reasons why Microsoft changed to the DOCX format, who knows? — but it was still not reliable.

What are the alternatives?

• OpenOffice’s ODF has never quite caught on.
• RTF is fairly reliable, but it isn’t capable of much.
• HTML seems so “webby” and hasn’t, at least until CSS3, been at all friendly to printed matter.

Which leaves PDF.

Adobe wisely side-stepped competing directly with Microsoft in producing its “portable document format,” but unfortunately for Adobe, but perhaps fortunately for those of us for whom openness matters, PDF seems to have really hit its stride exactly in that moment where the rise of mobile computing devices call it most into question. After all, who here hasn’t muttered in frustration when accessing some simple text content on your phone or tablet and discovered it is in a PDF formatted for an 8 x 11 piece of paper. Oof!

And yet just as we in the humanities have leaned too much upon Word — I now traffic in tracking changes in Word documents in articles for journals and books (Ugh!) — we are starting to lean too much on PDF. A recent exchange in the Digital Humanities On-line mailing turned up the follow comment from Stephen Woodruff:

There are many ways of creating and encoding a PDF file, and not all result in text which can be copied and pasted if the text includes more than standard Ascii characters. Normal word processors hold a internationally accepted numerical representation of each letter plus a note of its font, size, colour and so on. So you can search for an “a” without caring whether its in Arial or Times, red or italic, and you can copy that numerical representation to another application, even if it doesn’t understand colour or have the same fonts.

PDF doesn’t always work like that. Some encodings are analogous to what a typical word processor would use, some are not: they store glyphs, effectively pictures of the individual letters, and have a table to convert back between those and the character codes needed by a copy-paste operation. Its that conversion back that can go wrong: you can read the PDF files and print them because all your eyes and the printer need are the shapes, but if they have been created badly you can not reliably extract the text. (I’m trying hard not to start complaining about the use of PDF, which is a PAGE description language not a TEXT description language, in the academic world.)

Stephen also points to a terrific post by Adobe’s James King which clarifies PDF’s purpose. King’s post ends with the following:

The PDF design is very tailored to the creator being able to quite directly and without ambiguity, specify the exact output desired. That is a strong virtue for PDF and the price of more difficult text extraction is a price worth paying for that design.

And so there you have it: PDF is really about presentation. Whether you can get text (data) back out of it is not this particular vessel’s problem nor its concern. That seems problematic to me for those of us who wish our content to be as portable and re-usable as possible. I think PDF is terrific as one possible output, one possible product, but it’s not the interchange format of which everyone dreams. Quite the opposite.