Detroit as the next great American artists colony.

Detroit has taken a beating— it’s essentially dead. With median home prices hanging around used car territory much of the city’s real estate sits empty and decaying. Jobs are few and far between. When looked at through the prism of any traditional economic marker the situation is bleak.

This is despair.
This is [...]

Why I don’t like Wired’s “iPad” demo.

Aside from the usual problems I have with publishers getting all obsessed with output format something else about this beautiful demo really irks me: the fact that this thing will NOT run on an iPad. It’s an AIR/Flash/Adobe creation and I’m sure nobody needs reminding on the current status of the Apple/Adobe relationship. So, given [...]

Why ideas are core to Enterprise 2.0 – via @bhc3

The following clip from Hutch Carpenter drips with insight on how ideas can operate as social objects in the enterprise. One of the things I wrestle with on a daily basis is how to use social tools and technology to organically stimulate innovation and collaboration across the organization. It’s a tragic mistake to [...]

Thought Update: As much as Toyota was emblematic of efficient…

As much as Toyota was emblematic of efficient 20th Century manufacturing process they are symptomatic of the how the opaque communications culture of 20th Century organizations play in a 21st Century firmly fixed on transparency.

Thought Update: It’s strange that Apple – being so obsessive…

It’s strange that Apple – being so obsessive about controlling the end to end user experience of their products – ships iPod and iPhone with such lousy ear buds.

Print media as offline lust object… redux

The following clip from Mental Floss features Wired Editor Chris Anderson giving his take on where magazines and print might head in a tablet driven digital world. Be sure to click through to the post and listen to the quick audio clip – in it he mirrors something I wrote two years ago: http://mturro.com/2008/01/22/print-media-as-offline-lust-object/Clipped from [...]

@neilperkin on paywalls in publishing and how the right way might look.

This clip from Neil Perkin really underscores a point I was recently trying to make regarding the need for publishers to change more than just the output technology of their offerings. Simply taking your current publishing process and putting a “digital” face on it is a dead end. The entire system needs to be [...]

Looking into the future through a rearview mirror.

I love everything about this video – aesthetically it hits for me on almost every count: music, process, letterpress, booze, promotion – it’s really perfect. Beyond all that I find a special satisfaction in that it celebrates a way of working that predates the digital – a time when a font was something you held [...]

Ridiculous Condé Nast contest shows just how out of it the publisher is.

The problem with this approach is that it’s highly unlikely that there will be one singular idea that does anything to help old growth media dig itself out of the swamp it’s mired in.

Outfits like Conde Nast need to stop looking for magic bullets and savior tablets and start doing the hard work it’s [...]

Why Michael Pollan is the most subversive writer alive.

While most food and diet books focus on you – on how to make you look better, make you feel better, make you a more happy and loved person, make you look good on the beach, get you more dates – Michael Pollan focuses on us. It’s that simple little shift of focus (from [...]