Gutenberg: The OG of bloggers

Every time someone purchases a new tablet computer or e-reader, another tiny fraction of the world's newspapers, books and magazines sublimate into the digital ether. In an era of great transition, when even advertising models are up in the air -- for example the precipitous drop in the price of banner ads, the ultimate analog for outdated print advertising models -- it's helpful to remember that we've been here before, and the solutions were no less strange than the ones publishers will eventually be forced to settle on as they fully transition to digital.

NPR's truly excellent Planet Money podcast recently took economist Tim Harford on a tour of all the places in New York City that are emblematic of failure -- and its necessity for innovation. Their first stop was the Gutenberg Bible in the New York Public Library.

You'd think that the inventor of the printing press, which revolutionized all media after it, forever, would have reaped great riches from his invention, but that wasn't the case. It turned out that everything else that went into creating a book -- the paper, binding, transportation to book sellers, etc. -- was so expensive that you might as well copy them by hand.

Gutenberg had solved the wrong problem.

What kept the early publishing industry afloat was something quite unexpected, from a modern perspective: the printing of Papal indulgences. That's right: the birth of movable type was sheets of paper telling sinners they were absolved of their transgressions.

Eventually, of course, the printing press allowed for the explosion of an industry to a degree that none of its progenitors could have imagined. And maybe there were even a few visionaries back then who saw it coming. But in the meantime, those who made it work found the one thing that fit the economics of their nascent technology -- sort of like how so many outlets have come to rely on blogging to bring in the pageviews at a cost considerably below that of original reporting.

We all know that eventually, something like the print media most of us grew up with will find a way to sustain itself solely in a digital form. But what many have yet to realize is that the route to that eventuality could be strange and circuitous, indeed.

Developers found the "app starved" Android market unexpectedly grateful for their port of Battleheart

Mika Mobile makes a compelling game, Battleheart, that has been a big hit on both the iOS and now Android platforms. Having watched their app succeed on both platforms in succession, the team behind it has learned a few things about the level of competition on the Android platform.

As one of the Mika Mobile team members noted in a recent blog post: "I'd go as far as to say that a polished, high quality product is more likely to be embraced on Android than on iOS because the quality bar on the android market is so pathetically low."

Evidence to that effect comes from the fact that a) Battleheart is rated even more highly on the Android app store than on iTunes, despite being exactly the same game on both platforms, and b) Battleheart earned that rating despite what the team estimates is a failure-to-install rate on Android of between 1-3 percent, leading many customers to demand their $3 back.

Overall, the Mika Mobile design team has found that the paucity of quality games on Android means they are earning on Android fully 80 percent of the revenue they're currently earning on the iTunes app store, and all of that solely through word of mouth.

That said, there are two big problems with Android, say the team: First, iTunes handles payments so developers don't have to, but on Android, all developers are vendors on Google Checkout, which means they get to resolve payment disputes on their own.

Second, a significant proportion of apps simply fail to install correctly on Android devices, through no fault of the developer. "Third party mods, or the device's download cache, a corrupted temp file on the SD card, or the cached data of other apps interfering with normal download behavior is the root cause of 99% of the correspondence I get, and it's fairly tiresome."

As if we needed it, here is yet more evidence that the Android app store is in its early days, and that Google isn't paying attention to the care and feeding of its developers the way Apple is. It appears that every day it's more lucrative to deal with these headaches, however, and since developers generally follow the money, it seems inevitable that the Android app ecosystem will continue to close in on parity with the iOS app ecosystem.

Whether or not that game of catch-up will ever end in Android surpassing the quality and scope of apps on iOS -- that's anyone's guess.

One of the "lost" images from American Graffiti, as featured in a piece from the latest issue of WIRED

Magnum Photos, possibly the most famous and valuable photographer-owned collection on the planet, knew it had "lost" images from the set of American Graffiti, George Lucas's first film. It also knew that the way to find them was to get humans to start tagging every image in their archive. Problem is, they couldn't trust the Amazon Mechanical Turkers to whom they were crowdsourcing the tagging of their archives to be able to recognize images from the set of that movie.

That's where a machine with a pre-programmed (by humans) "semantic graph" comes in, says Panos Ipeirotis, a professor at NYU. Much like IBM's Jeopardy-winning software Watson, this system had a map of the relationships between different phrases. It's a bit like the game six degrees of Kevin Bacon, in which players try to leap from one actor to Kevin Bacon by tracing the links between them in the form of movies in which actors have both appeared.

At the intersection of the tags for the actors that appeared in the photographs being processed by crowdsourced human labor was American Graffiti. It was the only movie in which all of these actors had appeared, so it sat at the center of the semantic map connecting them.

In other words, humans plus machines accomplished something that neither could have accomplished on their own for a reasonable cost.

Many, many media companies have large volumes of material which is inadequately tagged with metadata, if it's even tagged at all. The solution that Tagasauris applied to the Magnum photo archive could probably help unlock treasures in the archives of any company with a sufficiently deep archive.