ReadSocial

ReadSocial is an API that helps content owners add paragraph-level comments (and groups) into their text. Think: discussions at the source. This blog covers what the RS team has to say.

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Larry Page's thesis idea: a tool to annotate webpages. He wound up just building Google instead. #socialannotationsarehardbutcool

Wired, Feb 2013.

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The best way to combat piracy isn’t legislatively or criminally but by giving good options.

Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos - who claims that every time Netflix enters a new territory, its numbers go up while Torrent numbers go down.  More here. (via directingfilm)

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ReadSocial Powers Open Access Publishing with QScience

ReadSocial is excited to announce a new partner, QScience! QScience is working to make open access, peer reviewed content richer and more interactive, using ReadSocial as the basis for contextual discussion.  

QScience.com launched in September 2011 (so they've got some cutting edge ideas). It's technically a peer-reviewed online publishing platform that offers a collaborative research environment for scientists. The platform publishes a range of peer reviewed, high quality, open access journals, databases and repositories which adhere to international publishing standards.

As for ReadSocial, we now have paragraph-level commenting and groups working in a number of different environments (web, iPad, inside EPUBs). Since groups are created using hashtags, it's possible to create very specific, subject-based discussions on top of articles as well. QScience was looking for something that offered powerful discussion features and was easy to implement (and scale), and thus the partnership was born. 

With ReadSocial, QScience readers can add commentary to any paragraph of any research article on the site (much more valuable than adding it at the end, where the context of a comment is often lost).  This means that when other researchers come to the article they’ll see comments made by others adjacent to the relevant paragraph, and they can respond with a comment, link or image. QScience is the first academic publisher to deploy this technology.  

In the official announcement, Paul Coyne, Technical Systems Director at QScience, said, “ReadSocial fits perfectly into the QScience vision that research should be open, transparent, shareable and social. We are very excited about this new development and believe that it will demonstrate to our authors our commitment to making their works highly visible, read and cited.”  

See an example of it being used on QScience here.

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It Is Easy For People To Miss Disruptive Trends

A colleague sent this over to me today. It's from an essay called "It Is Easy For People To Miss Disruptive Trends," posted today on TechDirt. 

"People are notoriously bad at recognizing important trends in innovation. It's most commonly seen in people dismissing some new technology or service as being unimportant. Over and over again, people seem to think that the world is static and thus, people "won't need" certain technologies in the future...."

And he continues:

"...I'd say that if people aren't missing the trend, then it's not disruptive. What makes disruptive innovation so disruptive is often the very fact that so many people dismiss it and insist that nothing will come of it. It's that dismissiveness that often helps the innovation become so powerful, because it gets better and better while people are so busy writing it off. And then, suddenly, it's ready and the world wants it. And the incumbent players, who dismissed it, all feel taken by surprise. "

Last week I was watching the Twitter feed for a European conference (I wasn't attending), and people were debating the value of social reading, discussing how they didn't think anyone wanted conversations in their books. That was weird. After all, I can't imagine pitching them on Twitter a decade ago, "it's a backchannel that lets you have a conversation with other people in the room while a presentation is going on." Right. Explained like that, most people would have agreed they don't want a digital way to talk about a presentation while the presentation is, well, being presented, especially with people sitting in the same room. But it is now a conference requirement.

It's a bit hard to tell how things will work out. So often it's about how a technology is integrated that matters.

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Andreessen on 1993 Social Features for Mosaic

Back in 1993, when Eric Bina and I were first building Mosaic, it seemed obvious to us that users would want to annotate all text on the web – our idea was that each web page would be a launchpad for insight and debate about its own contents.

So we built a feature called "group annotations" right into the browser – and it worked great – all users could comment on any page and discussions quickly ensued. Unfortunately, our implementation at that time required a server to host all the annotations, and we didn't have the time to properly build that server, which would obviously have had to scale to enormous size. And so we dropped the entire feature.

Yep. Unless it's your core feature, you probably don't want to build it. The devil is in the details...kinda the raison d'être for ReadSocial.

Source here.

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Founder Travis Alber's video for the Women 2.0 PITCH NYC event. #ReadSocialInANutshell

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Envisioning ReadSocial.

ReadSocial is an API. Technically that means it's a bunch of code, running complex interactions on a server. It lives in the cloud. In the case of ReadSocial, the code tracks paragraphs and selections, comments, who makes them, who replies, etc., and serves up those conversations on whatever device that text appears. But at its core it is just lines and lines of code that the average user can't see. That can make it hard to imagine. 

For programmers that's alright. Once they get the core concept they can often begin to think about how to use it. But for the sake of discussion (and speed), we also offer a few pieces of ReadSocial for the front-end. Pieces you can see. User interfaces that you can look at and understand. They give us a basis to talk about how it might work inside your content. These code libraries also let you get up and running immediately - if you like them you can use them right out of the box. One is for web-based content. The other is for iPad apps. The clients are open-source, so you can update them with your logo. Or change the look-and-feel. You can build completely new clients from what we've given you, to make it fully customizable. Just tie them to our backend and you're good to go. You get the idea.

I've added a few screenshots of our web and iPad clients to this post. The functionality is the same for both, they just look a little different, because one is on the web and the other is, well, on the iPad. But they both do the same thing - enable conversations inside a piece of text, and move those conversations across systems, to wherever that text lives.

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Melville House interviews ReadSocial

A perspective on the future of the book

Travis Alber and Aaron Miller both have undergraduate degrees in English, and Aaron also has a MFA in creative writing from Irvine. One might expect them to have typical literary professions, perhaps in traditional publishing or journalism. In fact, for the last 15 years they’ve had careers in technology. Having always been interested in the ways that literature and technology intersect, they’re two brilliant minds on the forefront of the ways that web and ebook technology are converging. And they think it’s an exciting place to be. Travis was able to answer a few questions about the future of publishing from Argentina....Read More

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Commenting On The Web Is Broken

ReadSocial Founder Travis Alber recently contributed Commenting On The Web Is Broken to the Women 2.0 network; it's an article that discusses the need for innovation in how we communicate around what we read. 

Commenting is broken. I don’t want to sound too harsh, realizing there are comments at the end of this article and that it’s technically possible to use them. The paradigm for commenting on the web hasn’t changed in 15 years, but how we communicate online has. We communicate in the moment. We share our thoughts. Talk about it.

But just like we’ve done for more than a decade, we talk about it somewhere else. We scroll 30 paragraphs down the article and type in a little box at the end. Or open a separate tab. Sometimes we comment on a separate social network with just a link to send people back to what we’re talking about.

Although we live in a world where we want to discuss things in the moment, it is somehow nearly impossible to discuss it in context. In a world where we have more ways to get information and more ways to share it, why don’t we have the ability to talk about it in context, where that information lives?

Read the rest on Women 2.0.

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The Straw that Stirs the Drink

I can tell a ReadSocial meeting is on track when the person I’m speaking to gets a little uncomfortable and says “Well, I have to tell you, we talk a lot about adding social to our books. We’re thinking about building this.” Most people expect me to get defensive, but my reaction is usually:

That’s great! Of course you are!

If you've put much thought into it, you realize that it's more complex than just highlighting a few words. I'd imagine you're realizing you're going to have to hire the right team, commit those resources for the next 3-6 months, set up and manage the servers, create or customize a content management system, figure out what social paradigm you're going to use, design and build out the feature set, have a vision for the product roadmap, and get buy-in for a budget to handle all that long-term.

That’s why we built the ReadSocial API, because everyone is thinking about this.

All I can really say is: you can use this right now. Today. All those tasks above? We already did all that. Moreover, you still own the content and the users, we're just the straw that stirs the drink. We're ready to help you launch it today, you know? Just sayin'

-Travis

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BetaBeat Digs Vannevar Bush and So Do We

Betabeat, the tech blog for the New York Observer, called us very nerdy, which, to the uninitiated, kinda translates as "cool." So we're feeling pretty good about that!

They caught our presentation at Book Expo America last week, where did a series of short demos of the paragraph-level conversations created with ReadSocial. Here's what they say:

We were immediately partial to Read Social due to the choice of demo text: "As We May Think," Vannevar Bush's seminal essay anticipating the Internet. Very nerdy, guys. (We like.) The service makes it possible for content creators to add a social layer to their text, making it possible for readers to annotate with comments and conversations. All we could think was: Finally, something to replace those dumb forum discussions we were subjected to in college.

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ReadSocial presented at the Book Industry Study Group's Digital Show and Tell last week, part of the Book Expo Amercia conference in NYC. BEA is the largest publishing conference in America, and one of the largest in the world. Basically, it was big.

In January 2011, ReadSocial, in its early development stage, won this competition at an event in midtown Manhattan. So we came back with a launched product to try it again. We didn't bring home the prize this time, which is alright with us. We met a number of good people, and the whole event was amazing. We're always up for hanging out with BISG!

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Oprah's Book Club 2.0: The Glass is Half Full...or Empty

I was excited to see the video about the relaunch of Oprah’s book club. She’s calling it Book Club 2.0; she's embracing ebooks wherever her bookclub readers read them. A publisher even dropped Oprah’s notes inside the latest book selection. At the paragraph level! That’s right up our alley here at ReadSocial. Oprah’s personality drives the book club - she picks the books, she shares points of discussion - so leaving notes for her readers makes sense. So why is the glass half full (or half empty - it’s the half that’s important here)? While Oprah offers some good commentary, she doesn’t close the social loop. She says “Read my annotations at the end of a paragraph, and then we can discuss them on Twitter or Facebook.” It’s like taking the long way home. Like walking around the block instead of just crossing the street. People should be able to answer when Oprah’s comments are made. People should respond to Oprah in the moment. The conversations should happen inside the book, next to the content, while you’re reading, and conversations go both ways. That’s the idea underlying ReadSocial, and most of the work Aaron Miller and I (Travis Alber, to those of you I haven’t met) have been focusing on for the last 5 years. However, as Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 works now, everyone needs to leave the book and go to Facebook. Or Twitter. And maybe come back later. Or not. That is a clunky way to discuss something. ReadSocial’s capabilities allow people to respond to notes right in the book, without leaving. Right there at the paragraph level. To be fair, the toughest stuff to get working at ReadSocial is what you don’t see: keeping track of where the notes appear, who responds, what they say, who replied, how to handle content updates, etc. The most elegant parts of ReadSocial are what’s behind the scenes, behind that little icon next to the paragraph. We built that stuff because we knew most other systems wouldn’t. So while I’m still excited about Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, I wish it could be better. We’re doing some really exciting experiments with ReadSocial - embedding conversations in many different types of reading systems and files. Contact us if Oprah’s plans inspire you.

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Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 Blog on Social Reading

The skeptics tell me “reading is a solitary activity” and “my reading will never be social.” That’s fine. When social features are fully built into our e-reading devices and apps I’m sure they’ll include a disable option for unsocial readers. The rest of us, however, will enjoy a level of engagement and discoverability that was never possible in the print world.

Don’t confuse today’s lame highlights-sharing functionality with tomorrow’s fully social feature set...

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At Digital Show & Tell, developed by BISG with support from the Ebooks, EReaders, Digital Books LinkedIn Group and sponsored by BookExpo America, participants "Speed Date" up and coming projects in the e-book, e-reader, and digital content space. HOW IT WORKS: Over the course of three hours -- punctuated with coffee breaks, of course! -- eighteen demonstrators will elevator pitch their innovative digital projects to a small group of participants for 5 minutes, strictly timed. Once time is up, the participants will rotate to a new demonstrator.

Check it here >

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A good innovator will design products to where the market will be and not where it is now. Even if it means that the overall selling market is limited (as that will only be the case for a short period of time).

Nick Ruffilo, CTO at Aerbook

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Hashtags determine what groups you're part of. This functionality gives ReadSocial the flexibility not found in other platforms. It also allows you to be part of just one or many different groups reading the same book. The emphasis here is on common interests rather than a friend status within Facebook, for example.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/05/readsocial-travis-alber-toc-podcast.html