Not sure how I missed this the first a couple days ago, but luckily @psychemedia called my attention to it today. Scott Leslie has a great post on using Twitter with Google Reader and the implications of that.

Money graf is here:

I’m not sure how many people actually realize that GReader allows you to search across all the feeds your subscribe to (or even a specific feed). Why is this important? Because – if it’s in my feed reader it has already reached a certain level of ‘trust’ as a source for me. I’m not saying I “believe” everything in my feed reader, but the vast majority come from people who are curating their own identities/output, whose context overlaps mine to some extent (otherwise I wouldn’t be subscribing to them). Being able to see who else in my network wrote or linked to something I find is of great use for me, increases my ability to assess information 10 fold.

I’ve been doing this in a slightly different configuration (I use gtweet), but I can vouch it works as advertised. Like Scott, I started doing this several months ago; for me the reason was I wanted to get out of the Skinner-box behavior that Twitter can elicit from me (I get to constantly checking for pellets) – a great way to do that is put twitter in a feed and read a whole days tweets at once.

But as my reader filled with tweets, I quickly discovered the search benefit. When searching my feeds for something like collaboration, I can see tweets referencing material on collaboration as well (of course, I make sure I use the twit-iom “collab”).  Perhaps an even more common use is to see if someone has been covering an issue that I want to write on. If someone in my network has been talking about, say, the realtionship of independent bookstores to state colleges recently I want to make sure I add to that discussion rather than start an unrelated discussion that doesn’t build on what’s already been said.

The most fascinating thing about this to me, as a person that has just come out of writing draft new media fluency standards for the college, is how natural this activity is for all of us (that so many people have discovered it independently), yet how hard it is to explain to people that it is this sort of tuning of your PLN that represents true fluency.

Anyone who thinks that the internet will change the fundamental building-basedness of primary education should ask their friends with children about the joys of parent-teacher conference day.

Further interesting trends in bookstores in my neverending attempt to find a bricks-and-mortar business model that can withstand broadband.

(And if you don’t understand why that’s important to education, well, I don’t have enough time to help you.)

OK, you saw below the recent slump that the chains have hit, compared to Amazon.

Well, here’s a neat fact – Amazon, e-books, and a lousy economy are apparently beating the hell of of the Barnes & Nobles of the world, but according to the Boston Globe independent booksellers have been barely touched:

Nationwide, sales in bookstores of all types fare better than in many businesses. The Census Bureau reports that bookstore sales in January 2009 were virtually unchanged from January 2008, compared with an 8 percent decline in total retail and food service sales. The big chains did not share that good news. Barnes & Noble’s store sales dropped 5 percent last quarter compared with 2007, capping a year that CEO Steve Riggio called “the most challenging year that the company and the industry have ever experienced.” Fourth-quarter sales in Borders superstores plunged 15 percent, and the chain closed 112 of its Waldenbooks locations in 2008.

Interesting, right?

I’d been looking for an example of an industry that had successfully altered its business model, and defied the onslaught of BEE (Broadband Eats Everything). Stories about the newspapers and the record industries wake people up, but people need positive models to function and get inspired, one can’t run entirely on anti-patterns.

The other day, after reading Clay Shirky’s Social Hubs piece,  I thought I’d come across one – bookstores. True, the e-book and Wal-mart threats to book sales are relatively new. But Amazon.com was one of the first commercial web sensations, widely proclaimed as the death of brick and mortar stores.

Yet the stores are still here, right?

Well, kind of:

(via www.fornerbooks.com)

I don’t know enough about the industry to say much worthwhile, but those curves up there start to look a little like other industries, ones that muddle along thinking they have dodged the bullet, that the “internet thing” was all just hype, a passing fad – and then boom – the decline begins.

On the other hand, this looks a much softer landing than the newspaper industry — you don’t see a 68% reduction over 8 years here.  The initial effects seem to be muted by the fact people are reading (and watching and listening) more than ever. It’s not quite the zero-sum game a daily newspaper tended to represent.

Clay Shirky, from a recent post on his blog about bookstores:

The local bookstore creates all kinds of value for its community, whether its providing community bulletin boards, putting rocking chairs in the kids section, hosting book readings, or putting benches out in front of the store. Local writers, harried parents, couples on dates, all get value from a store’s existence as a inviting physical location, value separate from its existence as a transactional warehouse for books.

The store doesn’t get paid for this value. It gets paid for selling books. That ecosystem works — when it works — as long as the people sitting in those rocking chairs buy enough books, on average, to cover the added cost of having the chairs in the first place. The blows to that model have been coming for some time, from big box retailers stocking best sellers to online sales (especially second-hand sales) to the spread of ebooks to, now, price wars.

A while ago I asked a question on twitter that got no responses. Basically, the question was this: We always talk about the industries crashing in the digital economy. But where are the models of survival?

In other words, it’s great to tell college administrators they shouldn’t be like the record companies or the newspapers. But where are the inspiring stories of industries that changed? Because frankly if we’re all going down anyway, why not just double down on failure and cross your fingers?

It occurs to me that bookstores are a great example of an industry that survived through evolution. As Shirky points out in his post (emphasis mine):

Online bookselling improves on many of the core functions of a bookstore, not just price and breadth of available books, but ways of searching for books, and of getting recommendations and context. On the other hand, the functions least readily replicated on the internet — providing real space in a physical location occupied by living, breathing people — have always been treated as side effects, value created by the stores and captured by the community, but not priced directly into the transactions.

…

All of this makes it clear what those bookstores will have to do if the profits or revenues of the core transaction fall too far: collect revenue for the side-effects.

The most famous version of this is bookstore-as-coffeeshop, where the revenues from coffee subsidize the lingering over books and vice-versa, but other ways of generating revenue are possible. Reservable space for book clubs, writers rooms, or study carrels; membership with buy-back options for a second-hand book market run out of the same space; certain shopping hours reserved for members or donors; use of volunteer labor, like a food coop; sponsorships from the people or businesses in the neighborhood most interested in the social value of the store and most interested in being known as local machers.

Local bookstores have survived much longer than I would have predicted. And in the world where Amazon’s name recognition is pretty much ubiquitous, the mega-chains have actually grown.

But unlike local record shops, which have largely disappeared outside of major metropolitan areas, and chain record shops (of the Strawberries and Coconuts variety) that where still extant seem to have that slight eau-de-Radio-Shack, bookstores have survived. And they did so primarily by embracing and emphasizing their function as a social hub — increasing the readings, providing other means of subsidizing the activities of the store (coffee shops, etc).  In fact, bookstores did this so well and record stores so poorly that in country where book sales generate a fraction of the revenue music does, the average consumer is probably more likely to buy a CD in a bookstore at this point than a record store.

There’s problems with this analysis, sure.  But I wonder if it provides at least a partially positive model for campus-based education in general, if only because I’m drawing a blank on any other significant broadband survivors….