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Yesterday Linda Hollier (@lindahollier) put me on to “a new concept: a metro flaneur!” A what?!?! Of course, she had me at flaneur (What is a flaneur?), so I headed on over to Shoba Naraya’s post,”Solution to urban isolation: become a Metro flaneur“. The article, looking inside of the much anticipated opening of Dubai‘s Metro Gren Line, pits enthusiasts against indifferent Dubaians. She’s sympathetic to the former, helpful to the latter. Her wonderful waterfall of flaneurial advice flows from her friend Ria’s question: “And what would I do on the Metro?”

It was the French poet Charles Baudelaire who came up with the word “flaneur” to describe the attitude that he thought we should adopt while walking the streets… sauntering… eying the women walking by and enjoying the drama of the streets… [taking the time] to observe, imagine and gossip… Great cities of the world engender people’s hopes and aspirations. To plunge into Piccadilly, Fifth Avenue, Boulevard Saint-Germain, or Paradeplatz is to feel part of a great and variegated group of beings who are both similar to us and intensely different. Being in a public place is an exercise in subsuming the ego for the pleasures of being a part of the great tide of humanity. Sitting together on a subway allows people of different classes to mix and even decompress together. Soon, commuters will start talking, sharing stories and chores.(The National)

Intoxicating idea. Addictive occupation. I believe that many feel the flaneurial tug, but most have trained themselves to resist the siren-call in the name of focus, discipline and productivity. Fair enough. No doubt these ambitious souls are accomplishing and producing more than I. But at what cost? And not just to themselves. Is the race to the swift? Sometimes. But not always. And even when it is, is the race worth winning if you’ve missed the swish-swish-swish of the tedder raking the freshly cut hay into labyrinthine mounds for the hay bailer? If you’ve missed the smell of freshly drawn sap being boiled into maple syrup? If you’ve missed the feel of cool water against your skin while skinny dipping in Lake Champlain, swimming in the shimmering moonbeam? If you’ve missed the sight of three pheasants chicks breaking out of their shells in a corner of the back meadow?

In addition to Naraya’s article Hollier shared a blog post that she’d written a year ago to commemorate the passing of a date which intrigued her. There is much to ponder this fellow flaneur’s thoughtful post, but it’s her train reflection which offers the most apt and eloquent denouement for this morning’s rumination on the metro flaneur.

09.09.09 is a special day in Dubai’s history. It sees the opening of the Dubai metro which has taken 49 months, 30,000 workers and Dh28 billion to achieve. It will be the world’s longest automated driverless rail system and this new system… will no doubt have far-reaching effects on the lives of all who live here…  As I think about the metro, I think too of my late father whose love for trains and railways finds itself somehow continued within me. As Dubai’s first Metro train rolls out of the station today, another page of history will be turned. I am one passenger on the train of life.  Today is one station along the way.  Today is my birthday.  I feel privileged to be on this train. (Integral Life)

Why should you take the metro? What would you do on the metro? Be a flaneur. At least once in a while.
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• The Loquacious Flaneur
• Flaneur as Detective
• A raconteur in every flâneur
• Urban Flaneur Guidebook
• Fête du Flâneur
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• Johannesburg Flaneur
• Friday Flaneur: Munching music
• The Flâneur & The City: Historic Core
• Staring Flâneur
• Flâneur videos all around the world
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• Autoportrait à République
• Flanerie: Banal into Art
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“There’s a revolution going on right now in the way that people consume journalism. We’re at a point where technology is going to enable us to view and consume media in an entirely different way… One thing that we’ve been great at doing is telling stories… This is just adding one more avenue of communicating and connecting with the brand of Wired… We really would like to offer more choices to our readers and to our advertisers and move beyond just the static notion of ink on a piece of paper.” ~ Scott Dadich (Creative Director, WIRED)

Tippingpoint Labs founder Andrew Davis dives into the publishing bruhaha in a provocative post, “Seth Godin and the Flower Clock“. Flower clock?!?! Yep, and a clever connection made. Here’s the skinny.

The Aalsmeer Flower Auction located in Holland is the world’s largest flower auction. Cool, right? Bet you didn’t thought about the back story for those iris you planted last spring, did you. Now you will. And you’ll think about flowers a little differently. And maybe the future of publishing too…

What’s amazing about Aalsmeer isn’t its sheer size, or the volume of flowers they ship. It’s not the high-tech, precision supply chain management process they employ. It’s the financial model they use to set the price of one flower… This is what’s known as a “Dutch Auction,” and it’s been taking place since 1860. (Tippingpoint Labs)

Overstock.com and RedEnvelope.com, decided to cut out the middle man (the investment banks). They looked to the Aalsmeer Flower Auction as a model for going public. This new approach set the stage for one of the most innovative and successful IPOs in market history: Google. In August of 2004, Google went public with lower fees and a more diverse investor base. It demonstrated the power of democratic finance at its finest. Google proved that an innovative approach to raising money (more than $20 billion) existed outside the widely accepted and traditional approaches to investment banking.(Tippingpoint Labs)

Traditional publishers are in a frenzy. Book publicists, agents, and the publishers themselves are challenged with disruptive technologies that are “destroying” their traditional business models. It looks a lot like Wall Street after the dot-com bust. There’s confusion and frustration in the marketplace… With each and every second that passes by, traditional publishers are watching their market erode. The first publisher willing to stand up and bid on a new publishing model will set the standard for the future. (Tippingpoint Labs)

Related articles

• Sarah Kay: Seth Godin’s Last Domino (virtualdavis.com)

“Peace is most likely to happen when we are able to drop our notions of defending our own, separate ‘selves’ and can release into trusting the interconnected nature of life.” (Integral Buddha)

Letting go. Laying aside our egos and self interests and defences. Trusting is of course the most difficult part for many of us. Fear. Experience. Caution. Stand in the way. But going deeper, a memory of the connectedness, of the shared humanity. Part of all that. A different sort of trust. But the wariness still tickles my sensitive underbelly…

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I had the good fortune of spending several weeks in Costa Rica in February 2010. The first ten days on Peninsula Papagayo revolved around family time, catching up with my nephews and lots of windsurfing.

In the middle of week two my in-laws headed back home and my wife and I headed down to Tamarindo where we met up with friends who write, create beautiful art.. and surf! This goofy little vignette was my first dabble with iMovie. A bit of surfside fluff for your amusement.

Pura Vida!

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For years I’ve been talking about stories and storytelling. For years people have rolled their eyes and reminded me that storytelling is for kids. Okay, that’s not quite true. I’ve managed to win over a few along the way who’re willing to admit that stories and storytelling are among the most vital building blocks of community, of education, of entertainment, of marketing, of sales… Especially in the last few years. Finally folks seem interested in storytelling. Storytelling is cool! This makes cocktail parties a little more exciting for me, and it encourages me to explore further, question more, dream bigger.

This morning I woke up thinking about the intersection of storytelling and technology. My mind was racing. My rumination included various dissimilar but related ingredients including:

• Intersect – a site where people can share stories and chart them by time and place to see where their paths might cross.
• Storify – a next-generation storytelling platform that lets you build stories from social media.
• Hacks/Hackers – “a network of people interested in Web/digital application development and technology innovation supporting the mission and goals of journalism.”
• Paper.li – a newspaper-style interface for curating and accessing Twitter content.
• Apture – a tool enabling readers to search and explore rich content and media from the web without even leaving the page
• Mrs. Farnsworth – A.R. Gurney’s comedy in which I’ve been playing the part of Gordon Bell.

On the one hand, last night I performed in Mrs. Farnthsworth at the Old Mill Studio in Elizabethtown. Community theater. Amateur. Fun. Short run. We started out at BlueSeed in Saranac Lake and we head up to SUNY Plattsburgh later this week. The show dishes up plenty of political snarkiness and the audience is the final judge of what is true and what is fabrication. This Thursday and Friday you can judge Mrs. Farnsworth for yourself.

I haven’t acted in a few years, and my first inclination was to decline when I was approached last winter. But then I read the play. And I reconsidered. Not because of the politics. Not even because of the uncanny coincidence that my character was also a creative writing teacher. Two stronger reasons compelled me, a longstanding fascination with acting as a form of storytelling and the notion that remembering how a play is produced (as seen from the inside out) might serve to make me a better president of the Depot Theatre board. I’ll weigh in again on this once we conclude our run.

Last night was our fourth performance of six. Not out best. That was Friday. We really aced it on Friday. Actors were at the top of their game, and the packed audience didn’t miss a beat. Such fun. Virtual reality in the oldest sense! It’s a quirky play, especially fun for me to play Gordon since I’m both a teacher and a writer. Reminded me of moments in the classroom when a lesson was really humming along, students were totally in the zone and ideas were popping. An amazing experience. Addictive. Just ask a teacher. It also reminded me that my first moment in a classroom was storytelling… But that tale for another day.

On the other hand, I spent yesterday experimenting with Intersect’s story sharing platform, and urging Storify to let me “alpha preview” their storytelling platform. Both services offer so much promise! I really enjoy the stripped down simplicity of Intersect, but I’m fascinated with the curatorial potential of Storify. Both platforms are still mere glimmers of what they might become, not exactly prenatal, but early, early in their development. That said, these two technologies offer two of the essentail ingredients for the future of journalism: intersection and curating. I don’t just mean sharing content easily and across multiple platforms. I don’t just mean offering a clumsy threaded link list to interested story followers. I mean that convergence of these two platforms could literally reinvent journalism, collaborative, real time reporting and storytelling.

Stories, by their very nature are rhizomic. Instead of simply converting traditional print journalism and storytelling to digital (most of what the large media outlets have undertaken so far), the future isn’t flat. Nor is it linear. Nor is it ever in final format. The future is fluid. Information is viral, mutable, shareable. Collaboration is critical. Content affinity is critical. Similar and/or complementary content must connect. And as the massive proliferation of content overwhelms us, curating and aggregating and reviewing/commenting and fact checking become essential. Information strata and intertextuality and multimodal media must interlink, be sortable, trackable. Trying to flatten this future model of journalism, of storytelling into one dimensional print interface will not only be more and more challenging, it will also be less and less necessary, less and less desirable.

Although it’s a somewhat restricted example of the sort of story aggregation and curatorship that could be possible with next generation tools, Tim Carmody’s (@tcarmody on Twitter) “Lobbying for Followers on Twitter: A Love Story” offers an amusing and powerful example of where we’re headed. Add video, audio, slide shows, comments, forums, etc. to the equation, and it’s staggering what you wind up with. How will we navigate, sort, verify, absorb, enjoy this new content interface? Verdict’s still out, but I can’t wait to begin experimenting.

Which takes me back to the video and to Tristan Harris, the CEO of Apture, who waxes enthusiastic but befuddled about the need for a convergence in technology and storytelling:

“You need people from a computational background and from a storytelling background to be able to satisfy the interest of say a publisher who is trying to tell stories and the people who consume information while also satisfying the… and leveraging, I guess, the technology of the medium itself that let’s us do innovative things that we couldn’t do before.”

Yes, we need those people. And we need them to imagine and build and support the next generation of storytelling tools. In the mean time, I’m going to keep exploring their efforts while telling my own stories. And I’m going to continue enjoying the fact that folks finally know (and care) what I’m talking about at cocktail parties!

“Create buzzz for your book” with AuthorHive

Generate Some Serious Book BZZZ : With help from the marketing experts at AuthorHive, your book can be the talk of the town. No matter what your marketing experience or budget, our marketing consultants can help you create an integrated campaign to tell your story. (viaAuthorHive)

Yet another sign of the times, shifting services toward writers, empowering the author to step increasingly into the shoes of the publisher. Have you had any experience with AuthorHive or a similar book marketing service? Is it the wave of the future?

Amazon predicts that it will sell more e-books than paperbacks by the end of next year, and that they will eclipse both paperback and hardcover sales combined shortly thereafter. “I predict we will surpass paperback sales sometime in the next nine to 12 months. Sometime after that, we’ll surpass the combination of paperback and hardcover,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told USA Today… [So] paperbacks and hardcovers may soon become a minority in the world of books. (Mashable.com)

Is Bezos bluffing in order to help drive the market? Or is he spot on? One day soon we’ll know, and in the mean time we’ll keep worrying, celebrating, laughing, panicking, arguing…

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As on Facebook, Intersect users create a personal page, [but] the big differentiator with Intersect is that stories get matched to a specific time and place, with visitors able to locate a person’s story on a map or scroll through an online timeline of a person’s life.

“Basically, it gives people the ability to tell stories collaboratively and in a way which we think is going to be really interesting and fun,” said Monica Harrington, who joined Intersect earlier this year as chief marketing and business development officer. “It is really about bringing storytelling to the Web.”

“Stories are how we communicate values, essentially how we connect with one another,” Harrington continued… “There’s no way to tell our stories in a way where we can be connected together,” she said. (techflash.com)

Perhaps claiming to bring storytelling to the web is a little bold, since there have been all sorts of web-based digital storytelling options for a decade or so. But it does sound like the first user-friendly community open to the public for sharing storytelling. And for searching out stories. An open archive for storytelling. Open source storytelling!

I’ve offered to participate in their beta launch, and I’ll post updates if/when I get the chance to play around with the prototype. Throw another log on the fire and let the stories flow… I’m contemplating a narrative meander around Crown Point fort. What story would you tell?

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Ever wish you could sit down with a couple of bestselling authors and ask them what they think about the whole digital/traditional publishing debate? Here’s your chance. Sort of…

Tim Ferriss (Image: Scott Beale)

Tim Ferriss (@TFERRISS) and Ramit Sethi (@ramit), both New York Time’s bestselling authors, dish up raw, unfiltered and honest impressions of today’s book publishing world. They discuss both the benefits and the drawbacks of traditional publishing and self-publishing, and — though this video only offers one-way info flow — you could always shoot them follow-up questions via Twitter.

Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweekclimbed to the coveted top slot on The New York Times, Business Week, and The Wall Street Journal bestseller lists, and Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich popularity continues to drive more than a quarter million readers to his blog iwillteachyoutoberich.com every month.

If you’re wading into this brave new world of digital publishing, it might make sense to listen to these guys!

Publishing Updates for Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss publishes The 4-Hour Body.

Tim Ferriss publishes The 4-Hour Chef.

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