lee crane

This could probably steal a few souls quite nicely (and at $5,000 empty a few wallets). . .

The EOS 1D Mark IV arrives in a body-only kit at the very end of the year, in late December, and should cost $5,000. A companion add-on, the WFT-E2 II A, will give the Mark IV 802.11g Wi-Fi and Ethernet support to share photos over local networks and the Internet, including remote shooting with a live preview; Bluetooth is onboard to add geotagging with a wireless GPS receiver.

[Link: electronista]

In a letter to his readers, URB magazine’s founder and publisher Raymond Roker announced that the magazine is taking a break from the print media world. Roker, who has kept URB independent through out its history, explained his reasons for the change than most:

To simply blame the prevailing conditions on the financial markets is only partially accurate. We’re experiencing an incredible and sweeping shift in consumption and media habits worldwide, especially in the magazine market. It’s affecting giant publishers like Condé Nast as well as niche publishers like us. . . For these are other reasons (read on), effective after Issue 158 (Summer 2009), we have decided to take a hiatus from the print edition of URB so that we can evaluate the landscape, relaunch URB.COM and decide where we fit in the new, new legacy media ecosystem.

I think this is something we’re going to be hearing a lot more in the near future. And it makes sense. Media is digital, print is analog.

[Link: Urb.com]

But it’s going to be well worth it.

[Link: Gizmodo]

Julius Shulman, amazing mid-century photographer and example for a working life lived right, died on July 15, 2009. He was 98 and still taking pictures.

Shulman produced images of buildings — by pioneering architects like Richard Neutra, John Lautner and Pierre Koenig — that defined the postwar architecture of Southern California, among other places. The gregarious and seemingly tireless photographer continued to work until shortly before his death.

Makes me wish I would have gotten that book signed when I had the chance. . .

[Link: NY Times]

Don’t know if I could make it back through, or if this is the way I’d like to spend my summer, but the crew at InfiniteSummer.org is doing a group read of David Foster Wallace’s mammoth, best novel ever written, Infinite Jest this summer starting on June 21, 2009.

Join endurance bibliophiles from around the world in reading Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat.

[Link: InfiniteSummer.org]

On Thursday night June 4, 2009 I participated in a panel discussion on Social Media and the Social Web presented by Nemo Design and Group Y at the Nemo offices in Portland, Oregon.

The panel was titled Who Killed Social Media? Reputation, Community Management, and the Future of Branding and included four other industry professionals:

• Dave Allen, the bass player of Gang Of Four, founder of Shreikback, and now Nemo Design’s community manager, director of insights, and Pamplemoose.com blogger;
• Matt Savarino, Lead Information Architect at K2 Sports and creator of Ridertech;
• James Todd – Software Engineer for Twine at Radar Networks;
• Tony “Frosty” Welch – Web, Community and Social Media Strategy Personal Systems Group at HP, Community Manager for theNextBench.com; and me.
• Marshall Kirkpatrick, Vice President of Content Development and Lead Writer at ReadWriteWeb was the moderator.

I was going to write it up but luckily for me (and the rest of the panel), Portland-based Cyborg Anthropologist and social media consultant Amber Case got it all down for Hazelnut Tech Talk. If I had someone as talented as Amber cleaning up all my panel comments I’d likely be invited back more often.

If you’re up for reliving the night listen to the entire panel on uStream or check out all the photos on Trevor Graves’ flickr
or on ahockley’s flickr.

Special thanks to the following people for making my trip to Portland so smooth and delicious: Nemo’s Trevor Graves, Mark Lewman, Dave Allen, and Becky Ratner-Singh, Group Y’s Liz Randall and Mark Sperling, Yobeat.com’s Brooke Geery and Jared Souney, Billy Miller, and Cec, Katie, and Teal. Portland is not only green, it is apparently packed with good people.

[Links: Hazelnut Tech Talk, #whokilledSM, Nemo Flickr, ahockley Flickr, uStream, Frostyland]

After watching the highlights of The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher’s interview with Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone (at The Four Seasons in Carlsbad, CA) it would almost seem that the guys behind one of the fastest growing information distribution networks in the world simply stumbled into this and are still trying to figure it all out.

They kept saying they “need to do more work,” but the way they said it made it seem like their success so far has been a complete fluke. Their vagueness, however, may be exactly what is allowing them to be wildly successful. Click the link to see what I mean.

[Link: D7 | All Things D]

Yesterday I killed off more than 100 old books and transported their analog corpses in a stolen suitcase to a lonely loading dock behind the library and dumped them. Now, thinking back, I can’t help but feel badly about it. To me books always hold more than the stories in them. They hold my memories of reading them and that is why I have such a rough time getting rid of them.

For instance, I bought that Dickens A Tale of Two Cities in high school. It was probably the first “great book” that made me realize that they were called “great books” for a reason. Philip Roth kept me company at the top shack on Chair 6 at June Mountain and may be why I got yelled at for having so many hangers. I don’t remember much about A Yellow Raft In Blue water except that I was glad to have read it before Michael Dorris killed himself (writers. . . ). Never finished John Gardner’s Grendal because I’d never made it all the way through Beuwulf and apparently that would have helped. I read Already Dead, but I still don’t understand all the hype surrounding Denis Johnson. And there is nothing Jonathan Franzen will ever write that I won’t read. The only reason The Corrections ended up on the pile is that after reading it, I bought it in hardback.

But they are gone. And now, we have more room on our shelves. Which is good, I suppose.

Got this tweet today from Circe Wallace at @CirceSnow. It appears that she is not exactly happy with something someone else tweeted for her suggesting she was exhausted after snowboarding at Jackson Hole with T-Rice.

I don’t know who was tweeting for Circe if those weren’t her “own words,” but it is something to think about when considering outsourcing your Twittering.