Hyperlinks in Print IV

[cityofsound] Porter notes that they're dealing with "readers who get most of their news from television and the internet now" and without the hours to spend reading the paper that people used to have. He can't assume that people are going to read the whole thing - so there are navigational cues, layout guides, and other devices to alert the reader to other articles of interest within the paper (and presumably online) - almost, "if you like this article, you'll also like this one on page 14".

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 Hyperlinks in Print III

This third chapter of our investigation into the use of hyperlinking metaphores in print design takes us to a page of the April 2005 issue of The Atlantic Monthly magazine: David Foster Wallace's cover story about talk radio. The layout of the article has been altered to facilitate interaction between the main text and the footnotes (not unlike the work done in I.D. magazine in early 2004).

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 Epic 2014

In the year2014, The New York Times has gone offline.
The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned.
What happened to the news?
And what is Epic?

 Listen To The People

[csmonitor.com] In Chile, instant Web feedback creates the next day's paper. This revolution has occurred, says the paper's publisher Augustine Edwards, thanks to his decision to listen to "the people." Three years ago, under Mr. Edwards's guidance, LUN installed a system whereby all clicks onto its website (www.lun.com) were recorded for all in the newsroom to see. Those clicks - and the changing tastes and desires they represent - drive the entire print content of LUN. If a certain story gets a lot of clicks, for example, that is a signal to Edwards and his team that the story should be followed up, and similar ones should be sought for the next day. If a story gets only a few clicks, it is killed. The system offers a direct barometer of public opinion, much like the TV rating system - but unique to print media.

 Hyperlinks in Print II

Let's start this series with one of the best attemps I've seen to use hyperlinks in books. For 2 years (2001 and 2002), the designers of the Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design Directory book overlayed each page of the book with a subtle and exciting second layer of information.

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 Twin Media: Hypertext Structure Under Pressure

On August 13th finished the 15th Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia held in the University of California, Santa Cruz. Several awards were presented during the conference: the Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Award went to David Kolb for his Twin Media : Hypertext Structure Under Pressure.

This essay explores issues that arise in composing a long argumentative hypertext that is connected with a book on the same subject.
It concerns not the old navigation problem for the lost reader, but the construction problem for the uncertain author who worries about readers.
It reports on a practical experiment, and deals with issues in hypertext rhetoric and link structure that arise in the construction of a hypertext under pressure from a book version.
Although the situation of the hypertext being discussed is somewhat unique, in fact hypertext structure is always under pressure from print habits of reading and writing, especially in scholarly writing, so the issues discussed here are widely relevant.

 TextArc

[TextArc.org] A TextArc is a visual representation of a text—the entire text (twice!) on a single page. A funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary; it uses the viewer's eye to help uncover meaning. Here are more detailed overviews of the interactive work and the prints.
TextArc is a tool designed to help people discover patterns and concepts in any text by leveraging a powerful, underused resource: human visual processing.
TextArc exposes the nature and style of a document's content, not by algorithmic winnowing but by arranging and showing every word. It taps into our pre-attentive ability to scan for brighter (here, more frequent) words, compare them, and let the eye read those words in a balancing act between them . The eye and mind scan for ideas, then follow the ideas down to where and how they appear in the text.

 More QR codes

More photos of QR-codes found on everyday items in Japan.
Starting with 2 magazine adverts for mobile phones featuring barcodes linking to the mobile site of the maker; a graphics-softwares tutorial book that has a barcode on its cover including all the details about the book so you can come back later and ask for it precisely for example; a mini-guide to Tokyo areas and streets featuring a different barcode on each spread that if scanned takes you to a mobile site page giving you more precise information on Gourmet or Lodging informations for that very area delimited by the spread's contour; and finally an ink-stamp made by Sachihata with a barcode that could include all your contact details to then be printable on some of your belongings, letters, business cards.
I think that it is safe to say that more than 60% of all new mobile camera phones sold in Japan now have a QR barcode reader included in their system. I will get back to you as soon as I can get more precise numbers for the 3 main makers AU, DoCoMo and Vodafone.

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 Fujitsu's Invisible Cameraphone Hyperlinks

[NEAsiaOnline] Fujitsu has developed a method for invisibly embedding information into printed images as small as one centimeter square. By printing a series of imperceptible yellow dots into an image, up to 12 digits of numeric information can be hidden, allowing a company to embed a phone number or encoded URL. Then, by taking a picture of the image with a cameraphone or PDA, special software can decode the numbers and call the company's phone number or look up their webpage. [via]

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 The Responsive Octopus

[aether architecture] A virtual structure designed through physical modelling, by informing the virtual with qualities of a physical model. The structure is responsive, it is aware of the visitors presence and redefines its geometry dependent on the visitors position. This structure functions as a navigation system for the website Allende Arquitectos in Madrid.

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 Barcodes linking to online content V (and last)

[Computers and Internet] Tokyo’s Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s leading newspaper, has been printing on the corner of a page a series of black dots, which are not Japenese characters. These black dots are in a tight, uneven pattern. From a distance it looks like a woven fabric, and closely it looks like a snowy TV screen. When this page is fed through a scanner, the true nature of the image is revealed: it’s software. In this way, the newspaper is sending music files, video games software, etc., to its 10 million customers.

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 Newsmap launches My friend Marcos Weskamp has finally released his Newsmap application, an amazing information visualising tool. Here is how he presents it:

Newsmap is an application that visualizes the totality of the GoogleNews aggregator. The GoogleNews aggregator is an amazing piece of software, not only aggregates almost every single online newspaper, but it also combines news stories into clusters so that when the same story is repeated among several news sites, it files and displays only one to you - no mater how different the actual text that makes the article is. Even the same story, told from completely different points of view, get's filed as one single entry.

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 Barcodes linking to online content IV In May 2000, The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., USA started delivering newspapers that had tiny barcodes on articles, allowing readers to use a pen-like wand to scan and pull up related information on the Web. The barcodes were called GoCodes and had an advantage: they could fit on a line of text and therefore didn't need a dedicated space in the layout of the page.
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 From Web to Print for TV2 Nettavisen

[E-Media Tidbits] In a one-time marketing ploy, the online newspaper TV2 Nettavisen in Norway published 20,000 copies of a print version of the website on Friday (19/04/2004), with a resounding success: all media in Norway and many media outlets around the world have been talking about it. The paper was printed in tabloid format and distributed to commuters in Bergen and Oslo. "A very smart move, and a perfect way to visualize the broad content of a news site," a high-profile Norway media executive told me.

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 Tape and thread

[Anil Dash] Compulsion to Blog: the compulsion to quote and link is too strong.... Being stuck in an airport last night without connectivity, I found myself ripping the pages out of a print magazine so that I could refer to them later and quote from them. Soon I'll resort to creating links with scotch tape and thread.

Nice quote, definitely relevant. I wonder what this could lead to if I were still an art student (as in- if I had 3 weeks off work to only think about that). Maybe Paulus could propose that as a project to his student at the LCP?

 The print audience pushes back

[E-Media Tidbits] A couple of trends in newspapering seem obvious and inevitable to me: [1] Local newspapers will play local news more strongly on their front pages, relegating national/international news to inside sections. (With so many better online sources of non-local news, what's the point of putting day-old national/international news on the front page? Readers have already seen it online or on TV.) [2] More previously-printed content will be published only online, and print editions will promote more content that's exclusively online -- with printed references to web addresses for this content.

 Hyperlinks in Print I The January/February 2004 issue of International Design Magazine (I.D. Mag) sports a complete redesign. On its last page, a new section called /flashback makes use of footnotes in an interesting way: numbered transparent yellow tapes are added to the text in lieu of the traditional footnote numbers.
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 Barcodes linking to online content III In Japan, more than 68 million people can access internet from their mobile phones; book trains, airplanes, cinema, you name it, you can probably do it from your keitai (mobile in Japanese). However, some web URLs can be quite tedious to enter on the limited keyboard of a mobile phone. Enters the QR-code.
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 Books24x7 announces book nominations

[PR Newswire] Books24x7, a subsidiary of SkillSoft PLC and the developer of online Referenceware(TM) for IT and business professionals, today announced the nominations of its third annual Referenceware Excellence Awards. The awards will recognize the most widely used computer technology and business books available through Books24x7, which offers subscription clients detailed online searches to more than 5,000 unabridged IT and business books.

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 Barcodes linking to online content II In late 2000, the US company Digital:Convergence released a bar code scanner profiled like a cat and appropriately called the Cue:Cat. Their dream was to link the physical world to the digital world by enabling us to scan bar codes on newspapers articles or any objects and be automatically taken to a corresponding website.
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 Barcodes linking to online content I

[WAN] While the "Metro" phenomenon of successful free newspapers is well known, News.nl adds a new twist. Stories and advertisements carry a barcode, which commuters who want more information can scan with a purpose-built pen which they insert in their computers when they return home. The pen, which can hold up to 150 web addresses, will automatically direct the web browser to a specified page. "Traffic on the News.nl site doubled because of this system. There was really a lot of interest from readers who want more information," said Mr Volmer. (12 October 2000)

I will try to collect as many references to this as possible. I have a few more lined up, coming really soon.

If you know of other examples, or have pictures of those barcodes, please send them our way using the Contact Us link at the top left of this site. Thank you.