There’ve been a few updates on Planned Obsolescence in the last couple of days, most notably that the text is now running in CommentPress 3.1, just released by the Institute for the Future of the Book.

The basic functions of CommentPress 3.1 are much the same as in the early-release version in which Planned Obsolescence was originally posted: readers can comment paragraph-by-paragraph, or page-by-page, discussing a lengthy text in some detail with one another. The site also provides a community blog on which registered users of the site can post and discuss in a more free-form fashion. But the 3.1 software release adds a number of nifty features:

– All readers, registered or unregistered, can now also leave comments on the text in its entirety, via the “general comments” page.
– Comments can now be explored in themselves, not only as comments-by-page, but also as comments-by-author, and each comment read this way links back to the comment in its context within the original text.
– The toolbar has also been significantly streamlined, and it now provides drop-down table-of-contents access at any point in the text.

CommentPress 3.1 is a WordPress plugin that can be used with your own WordPress theme, or with the included CommentPress theme.

So far, my experiments with CommentPress as a review tool have been quite positive; though many of the folks I’d like to get feedback on Planned Obsolescence from have been (I assume) too busy this fall to get to it, those readers who have commented have left me great advice that will be extremely helpful in my upcoming revisions.

But I’m still seeking more feedback, of course. And I’m looking forward to some upcoming new MediaCommons Press publications.

I just want to note that not one of the 46 students I’m teaching this semester pointed out that the percentages I listed on my syllabi, detailing the amount that each assignment would count toward their final grades, don’t add up to 100. In one class, they added up to 105, and in the other, 120. Did no one notice, or did someone deviously think they’d use my bad calculation to their advantage?

I’m not sure where October went, much less the first two-thirds of November. Actually, I do know where it went: to three conferences in five weeks, with an added surprise family trip in the mix as well.

There’s lots of stuff going on, perhaps needless to say, and I’m hoping to write about it in the coming few days. Let this serve as a placeholder and a reminder that I’m still here. (If only a reminder to myself.)

I will begrudgingly admit that I’m intrigued by the Nook, Barnes & Noble’s new device, previewed today, which seeks to be an Unnamed Other E-Reader Killer (follow that link and scroll down; apparently the K-word was banned from today’s announcement). There are three things about it that have me most intrigued:

First, that it’ll be running Android. The open source platform means it’s arguably hackable and developable-for.

Second, that it’ll have some as-yet incompletely understood lending capability. How it sounds like it’ll work is this: I have a book, I share it with some friend who can read it on their Nook for fourteen days, and during that time I don’t have access to the book. After fourteen days, I assume it returns to me — which is more than I can say for a lot of books I’ve lent out.

And finally, and most interestingly, that it’ll apparently provide some kind of interface between the e-book store and the physical bookstore:

Both 3G and Wifi will be free in the store, meaning consumers can do digitally what they’ve alway been able to do: “flip through the entire book, in their favorite book store.”

Bob Stein was thinking about this not too long ago, attempting to imagine the “place for books” as we move further into digital textuality. The ability to browse and buy in the physical store is one of the things I liked best about the future imagined by the French publishing group, Editis, in their video, “Possible ou Probable?”

The Nook doesn’t as yet look as cool as those little leather folios, but it’s a fair step in that direction, I think, recognizing the multiple ways that readers want to interact with books. And its basis in Android suggests that it may be at least a small step in the direction of a device that interacts more flexibly with the internet as a whole.

I’m going to embed my slides from today’s talk here, but you’re probably better off actually looking at them on SlideShare, as you can see the notes that way…

Among other things this weekend, I’m re-reading Fanon for Monday’s class. Fascinating to see today’s five years ago post pop up.

I’m in Milwaukee this week at the tenth meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers. The good news is that the wireless is strong, ubiquitous, and free. The bad news is that we seem to have broken Twitter.

I’ll hope to post from here over the course of the conference. If you’re here too, be sure to say hi.

Um, yeah. I’m sure that’ll work.

[11.08 am, edited to add: Ed Champion has published a very interesting interview with the FTC's Richard Cleland on these new regulations, and particularly how they might affect book review blogs.]

I’ve noticed over the last couple of months that several of my favorite websites were becoming, well, wide. It’s become increasingly common, in fact, for me to find myself scrolling sideways as well as up-and-down when out there browsing, and frankly, it was getting to be a bit annoying.

But with my entry (yes, at last!) into the ranks of those who are getting to play with the Google Wave preview, it hit me: the fundamental orientation of the web is changing. And Wave may well cement that change.

Here’s the thing. Early web pages were composed vertically, in portrait layout, partially because of the limitations of screen width and partially because of the rear-view mirrorism that caused us to think about these new digital forms as “pages.” That concept has proven surprisingly sticky: web “pages” scroll vertically to this day, and very few sites have played with the horizontal axis.

Enter Google Wave, however (and possibly, as its necessary precursor, Google Chrome, though being a Mac user I can’t really speak to that at all).

Its three-column orientation demands horizontality — if the columns are too narrow, you lose a lot of the toolbar options, and everything just feels out of proportion.

So this makes me wonder, if Wave gets the kind of buy-in that the hype suggests, whether we’re seeing the fundamental orientation of the web switching from portrait to landscape — not that we won’t still be scrolling vertically rather than horizontally, but that the basic screen unit will be wider than it is tall.

This has deep implications for contemporary web design, I think, and not least for me; the other Planned Obsolescence works quite well in a wide window: you can stretch the main text and comments columns to be as wide as you would like. But it doesn’t work well here at all, as I’ve been using a fixed-width theme, and that ugly gray background block at right just gets bigger and bigger.

I’ll be curious to see whether this shift becomes — no pun intended — broader. Is the basic assumption of web layout becoming landscape? How do we organize a wider window?

You know what they say about it.

Google Wave went into a wider preview release yesterday, as the first of what was supposed to be 100,000 invites were sent out to folks who’d agreed to beta-test for the developers. And everyone, myself included, has been waiting with bated breath.

Well, not exactly bated breath. More like breath that’s being used to whine and wheedle, hoping for an invite to come sooner.

The developers, however, are (a) in Australia, and so not operating on my time zone!, and (b) apparently pushing out these invites by hand. One. At. A. Time.

So I have no idea whether I made the 100,000 cut or not. I do know, however, that a friend who did passed an invite my way last night, and that invite hasn’t yet been processed, so I’m still locked out.

It’s not like I don’t have other things I need to do (like respond to some of the awesome comments that have been left on [the other] Planned Obsolescence), but I’m still checking my Gmail account every three seconds just in case.