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‘Social’ Media: The Oddness of Meeting IRL

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agent, author, books, digital, ebooks, Jane Friedman, Porter Anderson, publisher, publishing, Writing on the Ether, Books in Browsers, Internet Archive, StoryWorld, Writer's Digest Conference, Tools of Change
Each of these terra cotta figures bears the likeness of an actual employee of San Francisco’s Internet Archive. The “Little People” were directly addressed by several speakers this week at the Books in Browsers conference there. None of the sculptures responded. They’re “seated,” quietly, in the sanctuary of the former Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist, now home of the Archive. Look in the upper right of this image — those blue lights are on the servers that maintain some of the mighty Archive’s 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data (that’s correct — ten petabytes, one quadrillion bytes) in arched alcoves of the imposing sanctuary. That’s 170+ billion web pages. Which is my excuse for this huge caption, of course.

 

 

 

Ania Wieckowski, Harvard Business Review’s Managing Editor, is nothing if not a poised tweeter.

She sweetly tweeted this — or tweetly sweeted it — at this week’s continually provocative Books in Browsers (#BiB12) publishing conference in San Francisco.

This is one of the lesser known confabs in publishing, invitational and demanding, keenly focused on the future of the book and our relation to it.

agent, author, books, digital, ebooks, Jane Friedman, Porter Anderson, publisher, publishing, Writing on the Ether, Books in Browsers, Internet Archive, StoryWorld, Writer's Digest Conference, Tools
Organist Don Knuth rehearsed his Thursday evening concert for a celebration of the Internet Archive’s achievement of 10 petabytes of data. A power failure, ironically, pulled the plug on the concert.

The conference was co-produced by the Internet Archive in San Francisco (thank you, Peter Brantley) and O’Reilly Media (thank you, Kat Meyer and Joe Wikert).

BiB embraced the Archive’s latest milestone, 10 petabytes of data, in a celebration led by founder Brewster Kahle.

Meanwhile, Wieckowski and I have been in touch on Twitter for a year or more. Guy Gonzalez introduced us online, artful bringer-together that he is. But we’d never met in person.

Wieckowski sought me out during one of the conference’s 15-minute breaks.

After a hug and a grin, we chatted beside my live-tweeting command center at the door of the sanctuary, dodging our passing-jostling colleagues as if we were the kind of joggers who trot around each other a few times in order to exchange morning pleasantries.

This pattern would repeat itself throughout the two long days of great material at Books in Browsers. Although I had met some of my favorite Twitter correspondents who were there in person, others — like Wieckowski — were still virtual-only to me. [Read more…]

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