Here’s the latest buzzy idea for saving journalsm: Be Obama.

Crowdfunding, as described here is essentially allowing (hopefully) large numbers of people to contribute small amounts of money to fund journalistic endeavors. Spot.us, for example, posts lists of potential stories, lets freelancers sign up (or contribute their own ideas), and then lets people donate money toward funding of the story. Once the story tops up with cash, it gets reported and written.

So, yeah, worked great for Obama, right? Crowdfunded his way right to the White House. Except it seems to me that journalism maybe has tried more or less this before. I think maybe it was called subscriptions, back in the day when people got newspapers thrown at their windows by bleary-eyed sixth-graders. Or, if you prefer the broadcast metaphor, maybe we can think about pledge drives.

In fact this model does work reasonably well if the crowd is forced to fund, as is the case with BBC or German TV here. Of course that’s not a market-friendly strategy, but that whole market-knows-best thing is looking pretty threadbare these days anyway.

Not that I’m arguing that all journalism should be supported by a mandated fee of some kind. But it sure seems that if old journalistic values are going to be maintained at any level, it might be a good way of doing things.

From an NYT blog, a Steve Jobs quote bashing Amazon’s (no longer new) e-book reader:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

So, fellow writers, fellow readers, throw up your hands in defeat, the iPod generation has triumphed. Burning books is so twentieth century, we will simply declare reading to be a waste of time, a marketplace irrelevance, and move on.

What a prick.

(via Appalachian Geek, who has much smarter things than I to say about it)

The Guardian wrote this weekend about Picador’s plan to stop publishing most literary fiction initially in hardback form. That means even stellar writers like Delillo, Naipaul, Banville and Cormack McCarthy will be going straight to paperback.

I read this with an initial twinge of irritation and sadness. I love hardback books, what reader or writer doesn’t? They’re beautiful, solid, lasting, and look good on a shelf. Sometimes they even have resale value.

And yet. About ten seconds later, I realized this could be some of the best news to hit the publishing industry in some time.  Here’s why, nicely wrapped up in one rival publisher’s comment:

Rival publishers described it as “a seismic change”. “Hardback then paperback has been the model for 60 years,” said Dan Franklin, the veteran publisher at Jonathan Cape.

What kind of business model doesn’t change for 60 years? I’m as book-y as they come; and yet I scour used bookstores for paperbacks, the same way everyone I know does. Hardback books aren’t serving the mass market, and they aren’t serving the writers who produce them.

When my co-author and I did our first (and as yet only, but wait…) book, it was hardback only. We were shocked at the discounts, shocked at the haphazard marketing dollars spent, shocked that our publishers had no interest in moving it to paperback, despite the fact that our core audience was mostly unlikely to shell out for hardback. We’re still trying to get the rights back so we can publish an updated version ourselves.

Publishers simply haven’t adapted to a market that has changed very, very radically in 60 years, and probably most in the last five. This is a step in the right direction, even if it’s a little sad. So be it. If my next book (fingers crossed) comes out only in paperback and digital form, I won’t shed any tears.

The iPhone is here. I already feel myself to be a better, more fulfilled person. I’ve heard that the problems in the Mideast are under control now, as a result, and the bombs they found in London today were really what you’d call celebratory, not aggressive per se.

Simply by repeating the mantra, or should I perhaps call it sutra, The iPhone is here, I find I have become more beautiful, more intelligent, taller, perhaps younger in a biochemical sense; I can tell that any genetic flaws I might have had — left-handedness, male-pattern baldness, a weak heart, predisposition to diabetes or blasphemy — all these have been wiped away as by a cool, cleansing cloth. My spelling is better, and brother, you should see my handwriting now.

I don’t personally have one yet, but of course I will, because it makes no difference whether I sell a kidney or not; my iPhone will help me grow a new one if I require it. Just knowing it exists has soothed my career anxieties, enabled me to switch to low-fat milk in my coffee, convinced me to start jogging in the morning and cut back on my consumption of beer and other intoxicating beverages in the evening. My penis has grown several inches, which I assume will have a correspondingly radical effect on the amount of spam mail I receive.

Already, I can only credit the iPhone for the startling improvement in my fashion sense, which led Kate Moss herself to call me on Skype just a few minutes ago and ask whether I would advise her on a few modeling dos and don’ts next season. Being above such frivolous activities since the release of this Olympian devise, I of course declined, but — on the sly — did give her a few diet and media-handling tips.

The iPhone has revealed to me, and I think to the world at large, the glories of veganism, of communal living, the futility of war, and of conflict, one man or woman against the other. I think that by tomorrow we will see corrupt politicians and corporate leaders across the world throw themselves on the mercy of mankind, confess their sins, and hand the reins of power to a cadre of benevolent turtleneck-wearing sages. It will be a better world, I can feel it.

I thank you, iPhone. I cannot thank you enough.

One reason I’m very glad I’m not covering daily technology news at this particular moment: I don’t have to be a bit excited about Apple’s iPhone. I’ve seen a lot of hype in my time, but this product pretty much wins the gold medal. Fully years of speculation. So much breathless writing since Apple’s pre-announcement that it’s a wonder whole generations of tech journalists haven’t expired in some kind of mass phonoerotic asphyxiation. And Apple, as always, feeding little bits to the hyperventilating masses, like chum to starved, brainwashed sharks: It will have good battery life. OOH! It will get Youtube. OOH!

It’s a phone, peoples. It’s just another step forward in the Internet-in-your-pants scenario. Look at it, use it if it’s useful, and try not to have to wipe yourself off afterwards.

So, kids, there used to be a day when you could go to the store, pick up a television, bring it home and actually watch TV. No, hear me out, I know it sounds like some kind of crazy fantasy, but it’s true. Once, in those wild college days, we even scoured back alleys for old wood-paneled television sets, brought them home and they actually worked.

This weekend we finally decided to make our big investment, and buy a television. We’ve been watching Battlestar Galactica and various DVDs on our laptops, which is fine, but we need to hear some German television. Is the idea. For learning purposes. So off to Saturn we toddle, and invest in an extremely inexpensive hotel-style set. Ready to go.

Naturally, being the extraordinary but generally counter-productive cheapskate that I am, I argue against getting a DVD player, even a cheap one. My laptop has an SVideo out, and sure, the TV doesn’t have one, but there are converters, I see. Surely I can hack something together.

So we get it home (or technically, the delivery guys get it up the stairs). We plug it in. Blue screen. Kein signal. We plug the long antennae cable into the wall. Nothing. No signal. A little research tells us, belatedly, that there’s no such thing as analog TV in Berlin anymore, everything’s digital, which means that we need digital receiver box to get even the basic channels. Grump.

I plug in the computer. After some fiddling, I get a black and white picture. Not really what I’ve been looking for. I shake the antennae. Because, kids, in the stone age, that’s what you did when the color wasn’t there. No good. I find an SVideo help page and follow some software tweaking instructions. No good. I give up, and then H4X0R 4imee finds a few sites explaining that SVideo’s no good with the proprietary plugs they use over here, there’s some color vs. light transmission issue that strands us in the B&W era, unless we open up the connectors and actually solder a couple of pins together.

So there’s where we are. TV, no signal. No DVD-watching. I guess we’re gonna get really geeky on this one, break something, and then have to go buy a DVD player and a digital tuner like we’re supposed to. Did I mention that I love television?

I’m in Vienna for a few days, covering the extraordinary evolution of cocktail robotics. Roboexotica is an art show and technologist’s playpen, where towers of tubes and slides can make a decent mojito, a little blowtorch attached to a bottle can make what is by reports a truly awful (but fiery!) Spanish Coffee, and the debate over what really constitutes a robot goes on fueled by flowing booze. As all debates should be.

I wrote about the event for Wired News here, with pictures here.

Vienna reminds me how much Berlin has lost. It is a city on a grand scale, spared from destruction. Baroque architecture everywhere, streets and facades that demand horse-drawn carriages (which, tourists fear not, are in ample supply), palaces and statuary and gardens and all the accoutrements of empire. I had a coffee in the Central Cafe today, a room that should be in a palace somewhere, and perhaps once was: arching ceilings, marble pillars, full-length portraits of the emperor and his wife. Some emperor. Some wife.

Berlin has none of this grandeur. What was there once was smashed, thanks to P.F. Hitler’s insistency on staying the course. But it was never a city like Vienna, or Paris, or Rome; Germany’s rulers generally despised it as too free-thinking, not military enough. They preferred nearby Potsdam. What Berlin has is spirit, then and now, and that comes out today in the ubiquitous graffiti and vacant-lot Biergartens, rather than monumental architecture. I like that; but I like wandering baroque streets, too. We’ll have to return here.

OK, a quick word of explanation. Last week I flew to Geneva to visit the Large Hadron Collider that CERN is building there, which will be the most powerful particle accelerator in the world by a factor of about 10 when it turns on next year. Amazing, inspiring stuff, which I’ll write about for Wired News in a few days.

But a story that won’t make it in: When they were excavating one of the caverns for these massive five or seven story detectors, they hit an underground river. Water started flowing in, clearly a bad sign. Since they were at a collider facility, they naturally turned to supercooled liquid helium to freeze the water and get rid of it, before fixing the leak. The resulting ambient temperature drop was so extreme that even the surface of the roads, 100 meters up, were iced over on that warm mid-August day.

Naturally, when I looked at the elevator buttons going down into the pit, and see the bottom one labeled “Hell,” it set me thinking…

Here’s a confession: I’ve never made it through the Illuminatus trilogy, despite trying several times, despite it being a canonical text (or maybe symptom) of the conspiracy prone, paranoid culture that led also to Gravity’s Rainbow and, say, Dick Cheney. Now its co-author, cult hero Robert Anton Wilson, is apparently sick and poor, and close to being evicted.

That’s really not what you ever want to hear when you’re a writer. But here’s where the Internet comes in. A plea for funds, rent money and then some, is going around the Net, led by uberblog Boing Boing. A day later, it looks like he’s in better shape. Go Internet. This is where the community flexes its muscles for good, instead of just hype.

And so at last, writers, journalists, reporters, call us what you will, we’re being replaced by computers just like everyone else. The Thomson financial media group is using software programs to automatically generate earnings stories, within .3 of a second of the release of a company’s earnings statement. No chance of a John Henry moment there; it takes my computer longer than that just to load the page, much less for me to read and digest the information.

Reuters, too, is apparently using automatically generated pieces. Bloomberg says they’re not, but the conditions they have in their offices, and their stylebook, make the distinction a bit academic.

And so here we are. There’s propagation of information, and there’s storytelling. Newspapers and other media outlets are supported by people for whom information is a necessity. For them, the computer can do the job. Style doesn’t matter. Style and storytelling is a luxury, for people with time, like organic vegetables or free-range chickens. We shouldn’t kid ourselves about that.