Author Archives: OBS

John Ashbery: In Memoriam

Poet John Ashbery died this past Sunday, stilling a genius voice whose insight and humor truly broke through to the other side. My husband introduced me to him in the 1970s. We read Houseboat Days aloud and laughed together at “The Serious Doll.”  We were delighted when Ashbery accepted our invitation to come and give →

Free Speech Matters

During these challenging times, some may find it tempting to try and purge the online environment of propaganda and hate speech — but we must not succumb to the siren song of censorship, whose blade, given time, cuts equally right, left, or center. Danger signs manifest themselves today — some gatekeepers of our internet infrastructure →

Standing up for Net Neutrality

Since we saw the first posts on USENET in Spring 1989, describing the protests in Tiananmen Square, and the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, OBS has built a publishing services business based on a free and open internet. Censorship (in the form of suppression and distortion of free speech) is raising its ugly head once →

IDPF/W3C Merger Seen as Threat to Industry

An Open Letter from Fran Toolan about the IDPF/W3C merger Friends, I am writing to you today to update you on an important issue that has the potential to undermine the success of the eBook industry. As many of you already know, the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) is finalizing its plans to “merge” with →

Wisdom to our Electors, From the Source

What’s New today, and critical for us to understand before the Electoral College votes next month, is a document from 1788: The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton designed the Electoral College to ensure that “… the election of the President is pretty well guarded.” The College’s 538 Electors come from outside of Federal Government, →

Happy 25th, WWW!

Tim Berners-Lee launched the world’s first web site two and a half decades ago, and suddenly, incrementally, bit by bit,  we all became… something else! It’s been quite a ride, as we have externalized and collectivized our thinking and living processes, converging online, becoming the hive mind. Grateful to TB-L for starting the blaze — →

We at OBS saw the XML spider approaching twenty years ago, and talked about it at the Summer Publishing Institute at the University of Virginia in 1997. Today, Enterprise Content Management systems are a multi-billion-dollar industry that’s growing at 15% per year.

XML-spider

Figure: “The XML Spider”: With a database of content tagged in XML, a publisher can code once and use many times, opening up new revenue streams through re-purposing their content. Please note: this is an archival document showing XML-centric workflow that was created by Laura Fillmore in 1997 as part of her presentations at the University of Virginia Summer Publishing Institute. It’s in need of updating!

A major instance of just such an update came recently with the Copyright Clearance Center’s acquisition of Ixxus, a publishing solutions provider. Together, the CCC and Ixxus are creating a revolutionary content management system that enables publishers to create a live hive of inter-operable content, chunked to the least common denominator. This “single source of truth” serves to centralize and standardize the publishing process, from file management to workflows to distribution and beyond. Pedagogical interface (PI), here we come!

 

 

 

 

LOL RE: Kids, Cursive, and the Future of Communication

Public elementary schools appear to be eliminating the teaching of cursive writing. Early introduction to block letters today apparently only readies youngsters to recognize letters on a keyboard and begin typing ASAP, thumbing in texts and tweets on screens, rather than serving as a precursor to learning cursive writing as a primary means of documentation →