Three great examples of the educational potential of new media:

1. This visual dictionary of 53,463 nouns in the English language on one page

2. This incredible video that gives a visual representation of the Civil War in four minutes (please Google it if you have trouble with this version)

3. This animation of the Bayeux Tapestry

Notice the effect in each case of the use of multimedia to compress time and space, relate the visual and the semantic, and give a big-picture perspective.

In the case of the Civil War, for instance, we’re given an instinctive sense of the relative length of its major stages that would be hard to get from a written narrative, as well as an animated representation of wins and losses as control of territory: the time between Lincoln’s inauguration, Southern secession, and the beginning of hostilities; the seeming border stalemate through the middle of the country that begins early on and lasts for most of the war; the significance of certain battles for the control of territory; the seemingly glacial pace of the North’s acquisition of territory, as it moves like an amoeba across the map, until Lincoln’s second inauguration, after which the rate seems to increase exponentially. Meanwhile we get a running tally over time of the war’s cost in human life.

The dictionary is the most obvious case of the relationship between visual and semantic meanings, since it both matches images to words and orders words by the relatedness of their meanings. So you might learn that “Jell-O” and (oddly) “substance” are semantically close and then go on to explore visual similarities or differences.

Finally, there are some good reasons to animate a representation of the Bayeux tapestry: for those of us who haven’t gone to France to see it, it’s nice to get something of the experience by video. But then we need some compensation for the loss of the power of actually being in the presence of a 260-foot-long 12th century work of art—especially one that is also a historical narrative of a central event in English history. Since in this case the new medium—video—is a barrier between the audience and its subject; it needs to overcome that distance by drawing on its strengths. One of these strengths is movement: but what’s needed is more than a long (and potentially boring) pan of the tapestry. The new medium must tell the story in a compressed space that the old medium unfolded along 260 feet. So it’s helpful to have both a long pan of the tapestry and an animation of its content.

In 2000, someone at a party told me that very soon books would be obsolete. The Rocket eBook had been around for less than a year, billed itself as the “first usable, mass-marketed electronic book,” and could hold a whopping 10 novels. Other competitors were also generating a lot of press—these included the Gemstar, the Everybook, the SoftBook, and the confidently named Librius Millenium Reader (I can’t help hearing here the theme to Conan O’Brien’s “In the Year 2000″ skits). The “death-of-the-book” meme—as old as the computer—had once again been revived.

Today we know that reports of the death of books had—yet again—been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the e-book bubble quickly burst, and the digital text utopia did not arrive. People were buying neither e-books nor e-book readers. While the analog book had been evolved to gratify human sensibilities over millenia, e-book readers still had significant problems to overcome in the area of user interface. A 1999 article in the New York Times on whether such devices meant “the end of the story for books” offered some good reasons for skepticism—or at least cautious optimism:

Robert Darnton, a professor of history at Princeton University who has championed electronic publishing for scholarly dissertations, said, ”I think it’s only a matter of time before we can have mechanical devices that will make possible a satisfactory but new experience of reading.”

But he conceded: ”One thing that seems to be missing is paper, the feel of a book when you hold it, its grain, its texture, its elasticity, its whiteness. The sensation of paper is bound up in the experience of reading. We have a long-term kinetic memory of paper. How will we substitute a new medium for it or improve on it?”

Designers of e-book readers were well aware of the need for them to be book-like. The Rocket eBook was the size of a paperback. Other devices were weighted to the heft of an actual book. One device, by Everybook, tried to get closer to the feel of traditional books by using facing LCD screens. But these were not innovations that readers wanted to curl up with. The problem seemed to be the screen itself.

User reticence about digital reading was already a well-known fact. Electronic texts weren’t themselves new: The Gutenberg Project had been digitizing texts since 1971. Yet computer-based reading hadn’t taken off, even on the Palm Pilot, which had been around since 1996. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen was prescient at least in part:

“It’s a pure matter of technology: The screen resolution is too bad. We know from human-factor studies that reading speed is 25 percent lower on the screen than on the printed page.”

Nielsen thought that 300-dpi screens might solve the problem by providing the same clarity as that of print.

But as resolution improved, it became clear that it wasn’t the only problem. The fact that electronic screens are back-lit makes it both un-book-like and unpleasant for long-term reading. What was required was “digital ink” on a screen (or even paper-like medium) that reflected light in the same way as a real book. Xerox and MIT had been diligently working on this problem while the first wave of e-book reader hype came and went.

Eight years later, the fruits of work on “digital ink” (and “electronic paper”) are only just making themselves known. Today we have the iLiad (2006), the Sony Reader (2007), the soon-to-be iRiver eBook Reader, and the just-released Amazon Kindle.

With the Kindle, Amazon has one-upped other available readers by offering a wireless connection (via Sprint’s EV-DO network) that allows access to Web content and does away with the problem of synchronization to a computer. Unfortunately, the device costs $399, books at least $10 apiece, newspapers $15 a month, and blog subscriptions $2 a month. A $399 price point for the device is a problem, and history has not been kind to paid subscription models when it comes to Web content. And as Jay points out, we can’t yet be confident that we can get the books we want in electronic format. Further, PDFs will need to be converted to the Kindle’s proprietary format to be read on the device. So despite digital ink and wireless access, there are still some significant barriers to entry for users interested in e-books.

But beyond cost, content, and format, there is still the question of user interface. Do we yet have a device that gives readers enough of the full experience of reading a regular book to be a real breakthrough (as Robert Darnton puts it, “the feel of a book when you hold it, its grain, its texture, its elasticity, its whiteness”)? Perhaps we’ll need something that is much more book-like in look and feel—including multiple (digitally inked) pages that bend—before reading on an electronic device doesn’t seem, at a primal level, sterile and less gratifying than the real thing.

Asus recently began selling a $399 Linux Laptop, the EeePC (on sale here), with a $299 version to be launched soon. That’s a very low price for a 2 lb., 7″ display machine—usually ultra-portables belong to a high-end and expensive category. The Toshiba Portege R500, for example, retails for $2000 or more.

The EeePC is getting great reviews and apparently has been selling one every two seconds in Taiwan. It isn’t the only affordable Linux machine making mainstream inroads—Dell has been selling Linux Unbuntu systems, and Everex just started selling a sub-$200 Unbuntu machine at Wal-Mart. But the EeePC is the first cheap ultra-portable to be marketed to a new niche—not business travelers with money to spend, but average computer users who want an affordable way to take the Internet with them. (The only affordable laptops with a similar form-factor, and perhaps Asus’ inspiration, are those in production for the One Laptop per Child project).

Asus is achieving success in a traditionally perilous niche. UMPCs, for instance, failed to catch on: they were too expensive. And while devices like the Pepperpad are less expensive, they are not cheap enough to capture the market. Tapping this niche isn’t just about creating the right Internet device; it’s also about breaking a certain price barrier. Asus is breaking that barrier both by offering Linux instead of Windows and by eliminating a regular hard drive in favor of 4GB of Flash storage.

Flash storage certainly helps reduce price, but why so few gigabytes? The idea is that customers are doing more of their work and storing more of their data online. With this fact in mind, the EeePC includes links to Google Docs and other online applications (although it also includes the free Microsoft Office-compatible OpenOffice.org suite). Here’s a user review that I think captures the essence of the need that the EeePC satisfies: “Good form factor. Basic apps are all I need. Browser very fast. Boot in a little less than 15 seconds.”

There are a few industry lessons here. The first is that hardware devices are becoming commoditized because of the predominance of Web applications. More and more, such devices are not the endpoint for users, but merely (preferably lightweight and fast) tools to reach the place they really want to be—online.

Here’s the take of Tom Krazit of Cnet:

“End users desire the ability to take the full Internet with them, the experience they have on their PC, in a nomadic or mobile fashion,” said Gary Willihnganz, director of marketing in Intel’s mobile group. That’s language straight from the playbooks of Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt, both of whom this year have emphasized their commitment to delivering a PC-like Internet experience on a handheld device.

Tim O’Reilly also puts it well:

We are starting to see the real blurring of handhelds, cell phones, cameras, and other consumer devices. Everything is becoming connected, and computing truly is becoming pervasive…. As people get seamlessly connected, wherever they are, devices become less important, even throwaway, and the continuity of the user’s data becomes most important.

O’Reilly’s conclusions are borne out by the PC market decline in Japan in favor of smaller devices. They are also borne out by the recent entry of Apple and Google into the mobile phone market. In fact, Google Android could drastically change the phone market by leading the market toward open source, unlocked phones that allow developers to bring wireless devices to the next level by giving users more choices when it comes to applications. It’s a move similar to the opening up of the Facebook API (with new competitor OpenSocial in pursuit) to allow a greater level of connectedness over the Web—not just via links, but via data exchange and functionality. The point is to bring state of mobile phone technology up to speed with the latest developments in Web applications, and that means especially making them more compatible with social networking and video-sharing applications.

So here’s how I trace these connections:

Social Networking–>Web applications predominance over client software–>Open APIs/Open Source–>Hardware lightening and commoditization in favor of social network access

That’s how I think cheap and lightweight hardware like the EeePC, the “cannibalization” of proprietary software by open source, recent developments in social networking, and Google Android are related.

Wikipedia’s recent edits page is long overdue for this mashup, which allows you to watch in real time as recent anonymous editors are located on a world map. Enjoy watching someone in the United Kingdom edit American Old West while a North Carolinian tinkers with Social Darwinism.

Reminiscent of Twittervision‘s enhancement of Twitter, WikipediaVision can be surprisingly addictive. And it’s another great example of simple online applications that combine publicly available information to great effect (in this case, using the Google Maps API, hostip.info, and GoNew’s IP to country service).

Check out Swamble for a fun and innovative social network (sign up for the “private beta”).

Swamble makes it easy to bet on anything: without cash. Online betting is currently illegal in the United States, but as TechCrunch notes in its Swamble review, that could change soon. On the other hand, non-cash betting can force you to get pretty creative—as in one user promising to shave his head if Notre Dame wins seven games this year. Miller beer and “bragging rights” are also very popular.

See also the Swamble’s recently added pro football facebook app.

In a recent survey by ChangeWave, the iPhone is receiving a customer satisfaction rating of 92 percent. (By comparison, Blackberries receive the second-highest rating, at 50 percent.) At the risk of sounding like another Apple cheerleader, I have to admit that I’m one of these customers.

But I hadn’t expected to be.

I haven’t had good experiences with PDAs and smartphones. The Treo 650, for instance, was a nightmare when it came to bulk, reception, and sound quality. And gradually the idea of hunkering down over a tiny glowing screen with a stylus seemed less and less cool. A friend reminded me, “You work in an office—you should want to spend less time at the computer, not more.” So I bought the simplest clamshell I could, resisted the temptations of the Crackberry, and felt liberated from my gadget obsession.

Then the iPhone ad campaign began. I admitted to myself I was curious, but I reminded myself how much I hated smartphones and tiny screens. I had trouble believing that any touch screen could be genuinely comfortable. I’ll go see a floor model, I thought, and that will be that.

Of course, that’s like an alcoholic walking into a bar to look at a “floor model” of the latest brand of vodka. Once a gadget freak, always a gadget freak. I went to my local AT&T/Cingular store after work—after the lines had died down and the mobs had left it looking like the remnants of a party: dirty floors, disorder, and a significant number of stragglers snapping up the final stock. I asked myself if I wanted to be one of these people. One guy received his new iPhone over the counter with a classic air of paranoid covetousness—like Gollum possessive over his precious (and it should go without saying that there is significant overlap between tech early adopters and Lord of the Rings devotees). The staff had long since run out of the decorative gift bags.

“You bought into the hype, man, you got sucked in.” These are the things that reformed early adopters say to each other. My friend wouldn’t even look at my iPhone he was so disgusted. “I swear,” I said, “I went in to look at a floor model.” And that’s what I had done. And the next day I found an Apple store that hadn’t sold out, and walked out self-consciously transporting, through a crowded mall, the black decorative gift bag that is a mark of pride or shame, depending on your state of mind.

What sucked me in?

First, the iPhone is aesthetically pleasing. Second, it’s a pleasure to use. And that’s about it.

It’s not because I need to check email away from the computer. It’s not because Web surfing is absolutely essential wherever and whenever. It’s not because I get to listen to music while talking on the phone and chatting and emailing and surfing the Web and looking at photos and using Google maps and popping off a beer cap with the built-in bottle iOpener. And after all, the iPhone’s greatest innovation is that it does less than any other smartphone!

Really, it comes down to intriguing innovation in user interface that is hard to resist. The touch interface makes it enjoyable to surf the Web—the only small device I’ve used for which this is the case. And when I say “enjoyable,” I don’t mean merely “functional” or “tolerable,” and I’m not saying that what it does is more useful than other phones; it’s just fun—justifiably unnecessary.

The best way to describe why this is so is to say that the iPhone decreases the distance between you and the tasks you’re trying to perform. That’s an immediacy that technology usually takes away via mouse, keyboard, and stylus interfaces. Getting to use your fingers, on the other hand, is satisfyingly basic—even primal. Hence the iPhone may also be the anti-gadgeteer’s gadget in the same way that the Wii is the non-gamer’s video game. And both I see as an extension of recent trends in social networking, which have become successful by lowering the barrier of entry for users and applying principles of simplicity and immediacy that Google and Apple have adhered to for some time.

The only question left, of course: will it blend? [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dr5zAOc7-0]

I walked into a 7-11 looking to indulge my health food habit, and was sidetracked by a bag of Doritos sparsely decorated with white lettering against a white background: X-13D. The potential eater is invited to taste test, figure out the flavor, and enter a product naming contest online.

A brilliant marketing ploy that I couldn’t resist. After the first chip I felt like the proverbial Violet Beauregarde: is that mustard I taste? Ketchup? Onion? Yes — and pickle, beef, and bun. A cheeseburger!

An interesting experience — not exactly pleasant, but interesting. And the contest website, like the product branding is intriguing, and a great example of the power of participatory marketing. Users can generate clues, advertisements, and enter the contest. Is “Cheeseburger Paradise” too obvious?

Movable Type is going back to open source in its next version, succumbing to pressure from WordPress. According to Technosailor, the damage has already been done, Lord of the Rings style.

The stakes can get very high:

The company, Purdue Pharma, agreed to pay $600 million in fines and other payments to resolve the criminal charge of “misbranding” the product

Caveat brandor!

If you’d like to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of “Web 2.0″ sites, see this collection. It will be interesting to see which of those sites fail and which succeed. Does the volume of competition and the proliferation of niches imply a bubble? If so, the typically American manic optimism that fuels it is an economic plus, according to Slate columnist Daniel Gross.

And it’s driven by technological innovation:

…the excitement of a new technology interacts with some of the more unstable components of America’s character—boundless optimism, a tendency toward entrepreneurship, a tolerance of creative destruction, and greed—to produce a kind of mania. So, every time a hot new technology comes along (whether it’s the telegraph or the Internet), Americans collectively lose their minds—and then lose their shirts.

Looking back through the last 150 years, a familiar pattern emerges. A wonderful new technology or economic idea arrives. A few good years of solid growth help engender a sense that things are different and that new rules apply. Hype and rosy projections—from Irving Fisher’s 1929 prediction of a “permanently high plateau” to Dow 36,000­—justify investing at stratospheric levels. The trend, previously confined to the business community, crosses over into popular culture. Everyone’s buying stock, investing venture capital, refinancing a mortgage, installing compact fluorescent light bulbs. And then, pop! The bubble bursts, heroes become goats, and bankruptcies spread. As corruption and venality are exposed, self-loathing and recriminations rule the day. (See: subprime lending, spring 2007.) And that’s when all the moralizing narratives about the tragedy of bubbles get written.

But that excitement leaves behind something permanent and useful, according to Gross: infrastructure. And in fact Web 2.0 may be the offspring of the last decline:

The Internet pop has left us with Web 2.0—Facebook and Skype, MySpace and YouTube, and, most of all, Google. Each of these companies either was started or gained critical mass after the Internet bubble burst. Each gained tremendous scale overnight thanks to all the cheap excess capacity built during the 1990s bubble.