Technologicology: Looking Outside Tierney’s 4×3 Box
After the jump, Technologicology takes a long, hard look at Brian Tierney’s paperless paper of the future without paper!
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Aside from the daily guilt trip of a doorstep subscription to the Inquirer, I’d always been a consumer of online news. I can’t even fold a newspaper without it looking like a pile of dog diapers, something that my obsessive-compulsive side appreciates as much as the fringed edge of a torn ringed-notebook page. My delivery person has never once delivered a paper that has been in any order or included every section, which has had a devastating impact on the relationship between my neighbors and I — it took weeks to figure out that they weren’t stealing my Section A.
Instead, I’ve always relied on the Internet to meet my news needs. Sure, the presentation sucks, navigation is horrific, and typos are everywhere. But not reading online news is like turning down free bologna samples at the grocery store: That shit is salty, but that shit is free.
I really appreciated the redesign of Philly.com. They did everything we were expecting — branded Inky and DN as separate entities, cleaned up the front page and navigation, and tried their damnedest to keep up with the impacts of the blogging world on news media.
What I was most excited about was the changes they made to their RSS feeds. For the newbie: RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a form of content delivery that is very slowly changing the way we receive information. Instead of searching out the most recently updated websites while you’re killing time at work, RSS enables you to have those updates come directly to you as soon as they are posted on the net. Problem is, the average user doesn’t know what the hell RSS is or how to use it.
Basically, you click about 90 of those little orange buttons on Philly.com’s RSS feed page, pictured in that monolith of an image on the right, and everything you never wanted to hear from Stu Bykofsky and 89 of his other schizophrenic coworkers comes straight to your inbox, reader or aggregator as soon as it’s online.
Despite this obviously obsessive and ridiculous embrace of new technologies like RSS, Brian Tierney is still a proud citizen of the Land Of Confusion:
I think that the printed product will be around 10 years from now. It may be that instead of being 50 cents a day, it’ll be $2.50 a day because I think the price of the product is very low. We may have fewer people reading it, but you know, I really don’t care if people get it on a little reader or PDA. The thought of someone holding a device with a 4-inch by 3-inch screen and reading a long editorial in The New York Times — I don’t see that happening, to be honest with you. I certainly don’t see this mass of people who are over 35 years or 40 years of age doing it because it’s just cumbersome to read it like that.
Cumbersome? I’d like you to take a look at the Sony Reader PRS-505:
The PRS-505 is a second-generation E-Ink electronic reader. E-Ink is the sexiest new display to come around since Hi-Def. Its goal is to emulate ink quality as closely as possible, and it does a pretty good job of it. You know how annoying it is when you’re staring at your cell-phone in the sunlight trying to make sure it isn’t your landlord calling? E-Ink looks better in the sunlight. Weighing in at nine ounces and only .3-inches thick, this little baby accepts external memory cards and can probably hold the entire Inquirer archive in a fanny pack. Stack those papers, Tierney.
Coupled with auto-updating RSS feeds, an electronic reader can sit docked next to your computer and when you leave for work in morning, you’ve got all the Inky you can handle and your zone-of-irregularly-shaped-paper won’t take up three subway seats. You’ll even be able to bring a copy of Ulysses without rearranging your schedule around chiropractor appointments.
The point isn’t to lambaste anyone for their ignorance of my obviously fanboy-ish geekdom. What’s important is that we remember one thing: The newspaper industry ain’t doin so well, and there are great things happening in the tech field that can help out. Be the RSS feed. Be the E-Ink. But whatever you do, we’d prefer that you don’t Bee anything.
Brian James Kirk is a writer living in Fishtown, USA. His affinity for RSS feeds is equally as strong as his affinity for ladies- a subject he often covers in a sex column he writes for the Temple News.
Previously: Technologicology: Takin’ It To The Street View
