Once again, We Media is designing new space.

There’s the physical space of weSpace, the co-working hub we’re launching for entrepreneurs and digital creatives. There’s the social space where we connect innovators through technology, collaboration and creativity. And there’s the space between the ears where we consider our place in a shape-shifting world.

Space matters. It can inspire people to do great things. To engage one-another. To think more deeply. To innovate and make a difference. Space inspires us.

But like great expectation, great space just doesn’t happen. It unfolds in time. “The future enters us slowly, as if to transform us, long before it happens,” the poet Ranier Marie Ilke counseled.

Space must be designed. Carefully, bit by bit. Steve Jobs put it this way: Design isn’t how it looks, it’s how it works.

We Media emerged a decade ago with a prescient and somewhat ominous (at least for some) design: Networked technology would enable everyone to set the agenda for what we know, how we work and how we live. In the world we designed in 2002, control shifted from traditional institutions to everyday people. Media was democratized; power flowed to citizens.

Many people see this as the Internet revolution. It is, but not the way they think. While the “digital everything” was the first law of We Media back in 2002, it was also a foreshadowing of a social revolution to come. The age of access that we saw coming a decade ago is patently obvious today as people everywhere design or redesign their place in a connected society. The implications for just about everything are profound.

Design sits atop our agenda for the visible future. It is the way we interact with the world. It’s how and what we see, how we organize thought, how we translate concepts to others, how we create, how we express ourselves. Design brings us closer to communion with the ineffable in a period of enlightened anxiety.

Watch this space.

Jeff Gomez (@Jeff_Gomez), a multimedia producer and CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment, makes the case for art in a crazy, scary world.

Among other things, Mr. Gomez is a leading practitioner of what media scholar Henry Jenkins calls transmedia – that’s fiction and entertainment spread across many different platforms.

Professional credentials and bona fides aren’t the point here. Jeff’s personal story, told at TedxTransmedia in 2010, is about the power of story itself. The price of admission is 22 minutes of your time.

We have to provide an architecture that allows for people to lift themselves from darkness and mundanity.

Denial and isolation. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. The five stages of grief are a healing process for those who suffer serious loss. Now come signs that journalists are easing their pain through the fifth stage, acceptance.

One signal comes from Brave News Worlds, a new report from the International Press Institute and the Poynter Institute. A collection of essays from digital innovators and advocates, Brave News Worlds provides “effective solutions and lessons learned” in the transition to digital media. What resonates, though, is its point of view. Loss lingers and continues, but the publishers offer an agenda of hope. “Is the future really so bleak?” asks IPI’s Lauren Dolezal.

The question captures the irony of the report’s title, a tortured reference to Aldous Huxley’s disturbing, distopian vision of the future in his 1931 novel Brave New World. The metaphor transported me to a 2007 seminar at Poynter where a faculty member warned that technology and empowered citizens would undermine the capabilities of newspapers to organize communities, and thus hurtle society toward distopia. The scenario spooked participants so thoroughly that they were asked to exorcise their demons by revealing what worried them most. Their answers produced a flip chart of fears, mostly about job insecurity and the inevitable demise of newspapers. They were right to worry.

Bill Mitchell, the report’s editor, makes no such mistake. Mr. Mitchell is quick to get past the woe-is-us feeling so prevalent among journalists these days. He acknowledges an epiphany, then does his best to deliver one. He reassures journalists instead of scaring them — smart for someone who heads Poynter’s entrepreneurial and international programs. Practitioners such as Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, validate journalistic enhancements in the digital age. Pop-prophets of media change — the likes of Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirkey and Dan Gillmor — spin now-familiar commentary about the expansion of journalism to most everyone. What emerges is validation for journalists to move on.

But moving on presents another irony. In what could have been a powerful demonstration of the capabilities of digital media — interactivity, linking, social networking, multi-media storytelling and design — the report is instead delivered on the platform for journalism that is being replaced: print, 152-pages of it. You can download a bulky PDF from the IPI and Poynter sites, but the print-bomb undermines the publishers’ credibility for espousing the opportunities of digital delivery. It does, however, validate their contention that journalism’s transition won’t be smooth.

I admire IPI and Poynter for the reckoning. The moment is not about the collapse of journalism, but of its reframing. Call it entrepreneurship, innovation or creativity, you must first accept the possibility of a media renaissance. The hard part is letting go.

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
— Rudyard Kipling, the Gods of the Copybook Headings

A lot of people will have a go at TBD.com for its defining joke: the promise of Washington’s highly touted news-and-culture site is to be determined. With its launch today, TBD lives up to its mushy ambition.

Those expecting “God’s work” — a reference that editor Erik Wemple spins in his opening post — will long for divine inspiration. The Lord works in mysterious ways. TBD is, to be kind (TBK), a work in progress. For now, TBD’s founders are content to celebrate getting the sucker up. The celebration goes something like this: “We’re TBD, a site whose development is always uncertain, forever under construction.”

TBD is not your typical, uncertain startup. If you live and work in or around Washington, D.C., as I do, you’ve heard for a year that Robert Albritton, the Washington media magnate, and Jim Brady, a friend who is the former executive editor of washingtonpost,com, planned to revolutionize local news. Everyone wants a piece of The Washington Post, which is under assault on all fronts. With TBD, Albritton and Brady have the beast in their sights.

In its debut TBD shows off an updated version of convergence — that mind-numbing, inward-looking, mid-90s strategy from control freaks who thought they could combine media assets and control a local market. TBD merges Albritton’s two area TV station sites, WJLA-ABC News 7 and News8.net, with an online staff of 50.

Bringing the project into the decade, it adds a network of community blogs and websites. Social media tools — today’s requisite, must-have connections such as Twitter, Facebook, RSS and mobile apps– complete an otherwise familiar formula for news display and access. More shrewd than informative, TBD’s social media are networks for promotion and distribution rather than platforms for compelling news produced by the most talented experts who blog in and around Washington.

Can TBD provide the elusive model for local news in the digital age by competing with The Post’s failed, hyperlocal strategy?

“TBD has all the parts,” Steve Klein, who runs the electronic journalism program at George Mason University, told me at our meetup this weekend with the Online News Association. As such, TBD will likely be the darling of the online news set, the Mainstream Media survivors who are trying to keep outmoded institutions afloat.

But parts is parts, says the huckster who sells chicken pieces. TBD presumes to revolutionize without innovating. There’s nothing that changes your experience, your point of view, your relationship with local news, or the metaphor for storytelling. It doesn’t engage digital audiences in a fresh way or enable them to fully participate in the diverse, exciting flow of content in the nation’s capital.

The revolution is still coming, yet to be determined.

One way or the other, Flipboard will make you flip. The new Pad app is either the personalized, social magazine you’ve been waiting for. Or it’s just another slick, content thief that fails to deliver on a fresh promise.

At first flip, Flipboard is stunning (you have to download the app; the website is a brochure). The free app renders links from top tech and social media sites into a well-designed, magazine-style layout. Flip through content with a flick of the finger. The content-at-your-fingertips interface is intuitive, functional and fun — yet another incremental advance in haptic, information design based on human gestures. Touch screens, the iPad and trackpads move us closer to Minority Report.

But Flipboard is off to a shaky start. The app exhausted capacity within a few hours of launch. Flipboard’s big idea — creating sections for the news that my networks and friends are sharing — fizzled at the start.

I couldn’t add either my Twitter and Facebook accounts. Rather, I was instructed to email Flipboard for an invitation to add content. The shortcomings of the launch made me and other customers cynical.

Without personalized feeds, Flipboard is just an elegant aggregator: a leap forward from Internet sites that look as if they’ve been assembled by computer, which they are, or shoveled by news organizations into a new ditch. Flipboard feeds display-content into images and extended briefs that link to original content. It leaves the impression that content gets love, that it is curated, redesigned or re-edited with care.

Incumbents are staking out traditional ground. After its impulsive tech writer praised the Pulse News Reader, a visual browsing app, The New York Times forced Apple last month to remove Pulse from the App Stores for infringing on its rights. The app, a $4 download, was reinstated after Times feeds were removed.

The impressive part about Flipboard, as well as Pulse, is that it applies a beautiful, interactive metaphor to news access, an alternative to the old syndication standby, RSS. RSS pulls original content and formatting from simple, authorized feeds. Traditional providers embrace RSS because they believe it extends distribution of content prepared for another medium by sending users to their destination sites — which happens only some of the time. Flipboard is just one of a new breed of “feed readers” that ditch the visible plumbing of RSS for their own content scrapers. Those scrapers translate content into visual nuggets that fill the nutritional needs of most news consumers on the Internet. The issue is whether they’re fair.

“Fair Use” — the principal that guides usage and linking to original content — remains the force majeure of the Internet. Aggregators and indexers such as Yahoo! and Google have stretched the limits of fair use on one of the fronts of the unholy war with content providers. It’s a war they’re winning. The weakened providers have settled for a truce that grants them pageviews from links and RSS feeds. But where traditional news providers have largely capitulated in the interests of survival, the new breed of Internet-only news providers are beginning to take exception. One of them, the technology weblog Gizmodo, even questions whether Flipboard is legal: “Flipboard … has a problem: it scrapes websites directly rather than using public RSS feeds, opening it to claims of copyright infringement.”

You can read that sentence in the digital version of Wired, which licenses content from Gizmodo, which supplies content to Flipboard. Presumably, you’ll soon be able to add feeds from your Twitter and Facebook friends linking to the Gizmodo story that appeared in Wired that was picked up by The New York Times and distributed through its RSS feed.

Flip to the next page.

Top ten things to do in Washington on a hot August afternoon:

1. Freeze flip-flops, walk the Mall until feet thaw.

2. Frozen ritas in the Metro Center ESPN Zone.

3. Turn the AC app on your iPad all the way up.

4. Duck boat tour with crash in the Potomac.

5. Movie at Iceplex 16: Cold Souls.

6. Speed Segway races down Capitol Hill.

7. Edit Flickr photos of February snowstorm.

8. Alaska cruise with Sarah Palin. Cold, very cold.

9. Hurl water balloons from top of Washington monument.

10. Cold showers with Michaela and Taraq Salahi.

Or you could chill with us from 3:30 to 6 pm on Saturday, August 7 at our Lake Anne meetup in Reston with the DC Area Online News Association Meetup Group: paddle-boat rides, WeSpace open house and picnic, Dale’s Pale Ale, and a salon on creativity at Cafe Montemartre.

Sound nice? Click for directions and to RSVP

Today we’re pleased to announce the launch of WeSpace, a collaboration hub for tech startups, creative professionals, telecommuters and solo entrepreneurs.

Sure, there’s a web site, online signup and all that. But when we say hub we’re talking about a real place – a co-working office space we’ve designed for creative people who care about how and where they work.

WeSpace is located at We Media HQ, next door to the Lake Anne Coffee House in the historic Lake Anne Village Center of Reston, Virginia. It’s a unique, funky, human-scaled neighborhood in the heart of Northern Virginia’s technology corridor. It’s a visionary notion of the ‘burbs – a walkable community ideal for work and play.

WeSpace is a low-cost alternative to working at home and to virtual offices, cubicle farms and other bland workplaces. You bring your laptop and cell phone, we provide the wifi and workspace in an inspiring environment for work, collaboration and creation. You also get to hang out and share ideas with the We Media crew – and an insider’s look at what we’re working on and how we work.

Co-working is simpler than traditional office rentals, less expensive and designed to offer a creative and collaborative work environment for individuals and small teams that may work at home, in coffee shops or where ever their work takes them.

In our own work we’ve seen first-hand that the nature of work and business itself is changing. For many professions, technology makes work anywhere possible. That might mean you work at home some days, in an airport others, or where ever your business takes you. Co-working provides an inspiring “place” and a community for independent professionals who find they work better together than they do alone. You can read more about co-working and find other co-working spaces here.

If you’re a Northern Virginia entrepreneur, web or app developer, designer, writer, consultant, telecommuter, Starbucks denizen or any kind of mobile, digital creative, we hope you’ll work with us at WeSpace. Memberships, which include wifi, power, kitchen and access to shared meetings spaces and whiteboards, start at $300/month, or $30/day.

Learn more, see photos and sign up for membership at: www.wespace.biz.

Attendees at TRDC can disrupt conventional thinking and stimulate innovation by using Disruptathon’s mobile application platform at the event.

Ask questions, raise issues, arrange meet-ups, provide feedback, or note key findings for innovation from the conference. Just bring your iPad and download the Disruptathon app. Or use an iTouch that Disruptathon founder Pete Erickson will provide you at the conference.

TRDC is all about creativity, connections and the latest technology. It’s about participation, too. The Disruptathon platform is just one way we’ll capture ideas and examples from everyone, including TR’s group of Digital da Vincis.

Panels and Powerpoints are for the Digital Dinosaurs. Join us for creative conversation, striking show-and-tell and cool connections on Monday, June 14 at Gannett-USA TODAY headquarters from 1 to 4:30 pm. Check out the latest on the program and watch the video.

Register today.

We all have moments of inspiration. Tabula Rasa DC is one of them — a few hours of inspired thinking about moving through a creative moment. Now there’s an app for that.

Oh!magination, a new app from our friends at KvJ & Company, let’s people capture, share, discover and delight in ideas. You can get a free download by attending TRDC at Gannett-USA TODAY headquarters from 1 to 4:30 pm on Monday, June 14.

Oh!magination joins us as the official app for ideation at TRDC. A playful, interactive application for ideas, you’ll get a chance to use it as you’re inspired. Rich Brandisi, the COO of KvJ & Company will be on hand to talk about opportunities for innovation in mobile-social computing, as well as show off Oh! during the app throwdown at TRDC.

Check out the program, watch the video, and by all means register today.

Today we’re announcing Tabula Rasa DC, our second event in just a few weeks at a moment of change for personal computing and communications.

Tabula Rasa

What’s your app?

We’ll help you answer that question. Check out the program. Read our agenda.

We’ve been waiting for this moment since we bought our first Mac II back in the Dark Ages.

A scant four weeks after iApple introduced the iPad, we played in NYC’s Digital Sandbox by staging the first throwdown on tablet computing. First-movers showed a stunning array of mobile applications for connected citizens and consumers. A talented group of innovators, developers, entrepreneurs and visionaries helped us flash-forward to a new marketplace for mobile engagement.

Beyond exuberance, one million iPads have been sold in a month. This is just the beginning, not just for the iPad but for personal computing on a stunning array of high-concept, high-touch devices heading our way.

Advantage goes to those who move first. As with other moments missed, slackers and laggards are left to compete for scraps, then complain.

Suddenly, everyone has an iPad or e-reader conference to show struggling vintners how to pour old wine into new bottles. Which may be fine for winemakers whose vineyards have gone fallow. Learn how to squeeze more juice out of fermented grapes, then charge more for the stuff. Even if it leaves a bad aftertaste.

We’re vintners of another kind. Plant anew. Cultivate. The terroir is rich, bold and complex. Join connoisseurs of creativity for a tasting from 1-4:30 pm on June 14. The vintage may be inexpensive, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption. Drink up.

Online registration here.

At Tabula Rasa NYC we asked a stunning group of innovators, developers and visionaries to consider five questions at a pivotal moment for media and the people who create it:
How does moment of opportunity look?
What has been created in just a few weeks?
What should be created?
What are the challenges?
What problems can we solve?

We saw awe-inspiring work, a renewal of the creative passion that helped launch the Internet and its period of technical, entrepreneurial and societal achievement. Old-school publishers such as Popular Science, Zagat and Thomson Reuters rediscovered their game with sharp-shooting apps aimed at connected audiences. NPR and ESPN enhanced experiences that were already compelling online. There were untethered virtuosos, too, such as Electric Literature, the Ghost in the Machine (under development) collaboration, and soloist Rob Kelley’s BeatPad. We’ll revisit and follow the development of their apps in subsequent posts, examining the qualities that make them successful.

More critically, we saw, heard and felt a renewal of the creative passion that helped launch the Internet, the Web and its culture-bending technical, entrepreneurial and societal achievements. In just four weeks since the launch of Apple’s iPad, a flurry of applications has been released to expand engagement, enhance understanding and extend meaning and utility.

Design-driven innovation from a fresh, creative class of developers has delivered a whole new mind for experiencing a world gone digital — high concept, high touch connections that enable us to cope with our unrelenting craving for transcendence.

Finally, we have devices and a number of very good starts that deliver abundance with an aesthetic imperative, as well as a new and better way of organizing things: the new order or order.

Yet, initial responses to our questions were cautious and meek: It is early. We don’t really know. Where’s the money?

Where’s the money?
As a way out of ingenuity, the last response is the first one cited. “Where’s the money?” is the mantra of the unimaginative. A circular question, it is an excuse for inertia, a business plan for standing still. Again. The question is almost as pathetic as its cousin — the position that we won’t invest in an online or mobile strategy until we are certain it works. Good luck with that one.

We weren’t surprised that some who participated in Tabula Rasa, and some who covered it, could not or would not get their minds around the theme of the event: innovation in the emerging Conceptual Age. Mea culpa, we invited discussion at a where’s-the-money session called Good Apple, Bad Apple / Good Business, Bad Business. Given both the dissension over “paid models” and the noisy discourse surrounding it, the topic is a requirement on the conference circuit. Not even a fresh take could take us out of the weeds.

We thought our friend Merrill Brown, the former Editor-In-Chief of MSNBC who’s been dealing with the issue for a coupla decades and currently promotes a freemium model for publishers (some content free, some paid), summed it up rather well: “Putting up a pay wall does not solve your business problem,” said Brown. “Publishers who think they can put their magazine on an iPad and make a lot of money are making a significant mistake.”

We love surprises … almost as much as provocation. Jeff Jarvis didn’t disappoint. We showed the stunning TIME magazine app — high concept, high touch, and only $4.99 issue. The Buzzmachine turned buzz killer:

“I think the TIME Magazine app is the most sinful piece of shit ever,” said a skeptical Jarvis., “The ego of it was unabashedly awful.” On his blog he writes: “It’s worse than the web: we can’t comment; we can’t remix; we can’t click out; we can’t link in, and they think this is worth $4.99 a week. But the pictures are pretty.”

Josh Quittner, TIME’s editor-at-large and one of the creative forces behind its iPad app, gave it back to Jarvis in a blog post called “And the horse you rode in on.”

“Jarvis, a former Time Inc.-er, can be forgiven for the disgruntled, I-hate-my-ex-wife tone that creeps into his rhetoric, whenever he discusses his former employer. It’s tiresome, dude, and intellectually dishonest given that you’re still stumping for your Google book.” 

Turns out the dispute was not about the money, but a little about the distribution of media bundles, a little about concerns that Apple and its partners are attempting to control the “open” web and kill the link econony (Google), and more than a little about Jarvis and Quittner.

Can we turn the page, please?

The Meaning Model
Enough cautious and meek. We need some bold. Why not look at economic issues with the same creativity and integrity as we do conceptual ones? The current “where’s the money” debate is framed by rules developed for the economies and societies, factories and mass production, of the Industrial Age. Forward-thinking enterprises adapted to the atomization and proliferation of content in the Information Age. Now we enter the Conceptual Age with a universe of creators. The new currency is meaning. Off the top, how many business plans can you conceive for a meaning model? Maybe a hundred for, say, anyone?

From Tabula Rasa, we put that first word on the blank slate: meaning. As we reconsider what it means to be human, we’re discovering new metaphors for storytelling, creating new ways to engage, connecting with a world of friends and information, and designing innovations that will guide our lives and shape our universe on almost any device.

Where’s the money?

We’ll answer the question with a better one: Where’s the love, y’all? We put that one to music (Black-Eyed Peas with Justin Timberlake) and video when we started we this crusade back in ought-three. If you don’t know the answer to “Where’s the Love?” by now, you’ll never get the one that asks “where’s the money.”

This is one of those moments – an important shift in digital culture that will be old news, obvious to everyone, a few years from now. There’s an electrifying crackle in the air as digital creatives, businesses, investors and visionaries collide in a mad dash to define the future around the next big thing. Not even the old masters of the universe can stop it. Their hands are slipping off the controls.

There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I may lead them.

Sorry. Your people are leading the way in this universe.

Journey to the Conceptual Age
It’s not just the iPad, it’s the promise of a more personal, more creative, more fulfilling, more inspiring and more beautiful digital experience. It’s the promise of something more human, more wonderful. It’s bigger than Facebook or Twitter or Apple. It’s the next PC, the next smartphone, the next printing press. It’s all of that – in a simple, mobile shiny-new-thing powered by something entirely new to media: human touch. Gigs and hard drives fade into the cloud, replaced by pictures and words and shapes and sounds we can mold like clay. That’s magic. The result isn’t merely something hard and shiny that resembles a notepad. It’s something old, deep and rare: pure joy.

Over the next weeks we’ll continue our journey to the Conceptual Age. We’ll stop at the guideposts along the way, showcasing innovative examples of work defining the creative moment. We’ll conduct activities that show where the moment is leading. And we’ll identify the qualities of design-driven innovation that will determine who flourishes and who flounders.

To get started, we have five questions ….

I am excited to announce the launch of a new project that we are calling WeThink.

What is it? WeThink is a conversation about innovation and the future — an effort to explore new ideas and promote solutions to the challenges that our society is facing.

What’s the big deal? If you follow our work here at all, you’ll know that We Media is a movement – a concept – that helps explain how we know what we know, who we trust, and how we learn. It’s about power of the community. We Media is part of the infinite quest to harness the power of media, communication and human ingenuity for common good. And, well, We Media changes everything.  We Media changes the way we innovate.  We Media changes how we create, sustain, and grow successful ventures. We Media enhances the structures, models and economies that support human communication, interaction and achievement.  And through that, We Media challenges us to review our existing ways of operating, break apart our established structures, and re-build our approach to the future.  These changes impact all of us, and they are forcing each of us to find new ways of thinking about… well, everything.

What are you talking about? I have this crazy idea that we need to re-think the way we create, support, and sustain ventures.  We need to re-think how we innovate.  What we are doing isn’t working anymore – not as well as it should – and we need to try something different.  That means re-considering what kinds of companies and organizations are needed today, in response to the massive changes we are seeing in our society as a result of the influence that technology and the internet are having on our culture.  That means re-structuring how ventures, both for-profit and social in nature, are funded and managed.  That means re-assessing what success looks like for new companies and organizations, as well as re-considering how we measure progress of existing organizations against our needs in society.  And that means re-building the whole infrastructure of innovation… from how we teach it, promote it, cover it in the media, what skills we value, who gets to serve as gatekeepers, and more.

How will it work? Over the next year we will collect and share new ideas, highlight different approaches, ask tough questions, and propose solutions. We will lead a new and different kind of discussion about innovation. Everywhere we go we will be looking for new issues to discuss and new ideas to consider.  Everyone we talk to or encounter is invited to contribute their experience or perspective to help power this effort.  And all those ideas and suggestions, approaches and solutions will be shared.  They’ll be posted online.  They’ll be open to feedback.  They’ll be mashed up with other thoughts.  At the end of a year, our plan is to pull together a ‘solutions book’ that helps to support, and sustain, a vibrant and game-changing discussion going forward.  The rest we will figure out as we go.

The first few ideas and questions will be posted in the next several days.  So, stay tuned — the fun is just beginning.

The biggest surprise from yesterday’s unveiling of Apple’s iPad was that print publishers and journos weren’t terribly excited. “Waiting to be surprised. That hasn’t happened yet,” said Jim Roberts, the only New York Times wonk who didn’t confuse Steve Jobs with Moses. Valleywag has a good take on Print Media’s Big Tablet Letdown.

Our enthusiasm for the tablet comes from both sides of the brain, the creative as well as the practical (we’re talking about business). The Creative Class sees the possibilities: read Nick Carr, Pentagram, Joe Zeff and my post yesterday on experiential news design.

Our take is that smart publishers can reap rewards by investing in new channels for storytelling, advertising and, dare we say, content you can charge for. But few have expressed either understanding, leadership or the required commitment to fill the blank slate of content that the expanding flood of tablets and other mobile devices afford. The creative class is apt to beat them to the future.

New technology spawns new ways to tell stories. That’s the exciting part of Apple’s new tablet, an old idea whose time has apparently come.

Now comes the hard part: creating the content and designing the experience for the next wave of consumer devices that deliver our stories. We’re about to discover whether incumbent publishers and broadcasters can lead us into that world or whether a new, creative class of media designers and developers will replace them.

What to put on the screens that we’ll hold in our hands, stuff in our pockets, and pack in our briefcases and backpacks? A page from a book? A story from a newspaper? An index from a web site? Search results from Google and Bing? Icons from the iPhone? Short-message streams from social networks? Video games? Celebrity porn? Or something more?

The New York Times has spent the past three weeks developing an app for the iPad hat allows readers to save stories, view photos and play video. “We want to create the best of print and best of digital, all rolled into one,” said Times VP Martin Nisenholtz at today’s iPad unveiling. “We think we captured the essence of reading a newspaper,” added his colleague Jennifer Brook.

Three whole weeks developing an app. Essence of reading of a newspaper. Be still my heart.

“Salvation (for Newspapers) Is At Hand,” writes Robert Wright, the Times’ new egg-head Opinionator for exclusive online commentary on culture, politics and world affairs. He suggests The Times will harvest additional revenue from people like him who’ll pay for news on online devices the way riders pay for trips in a taxi — on the meter.

Wright is so wrong: most consumers of news and information online aren’t like him. If we wanted a newspaper we’d buy one. The metaphor for storytelling is a good one for the stories produced by print journalists. Just don’t given us stories online that are produced for print and expect us to pay for them. Don’t give us talking heads on a video when we can make a more compelling one with a $100 Flip camcorder. Don’t assume that we can’t get other quality stories from a world of sources in a variety of formats and share them instantly with friends.

I’ve spent a good part of the past two decades evangelizing the need to design new storytelling metaphors and formats for the digital age. Now would be a good time to give it a go. As old formats decline before our eyes, publishers can barely restrain their enthusiasm for the iPad, the eReader or the next eSomething — more things on which to distribute their stories, more opportunities to charge.

This shapes up as another transformational moment for media. Unless content creators can develop differentiated, high value formats for their stories, I’m afraid the anticipated rewards from a new era of paying for discreet morsels of news will disappoint. Worse, enterprises that fail to adapt content to formats designed for interaction and social engagement will not only decline further, they will likely fail.

The race is on to design the news experience for the digital now as well as the digital future. It is an experience coming to the everywhere screens of daily life. Two decades of moving stories from one medium to the next hasn’t worked. It’s time to reinvent the news package, make it immersive and dynamic, provide social context, and include new layers and metaphors of knowledge, context and meaning. This will not only take time and investment, but creativity and imagination. A devotion to compelling storytelling is at the heart of it.

We have the tools to make stories soar across media. Journalists, developers and designers could lead a renaissance for experiencing news in the connected society rather than participating in the decline of news formats that are becoming irrelevant.

Stay tuned. I’ll talk about experiential design at this year’s We Media conference. Meantime, I’ll post stories from the front and showcase breakthrough examples that might be applied to a news experience for tablets and other devices. Please send me examples that you recommend.

For starters, a few creative examples follow. Click and through for the full experience. See:

Jonathan Harris is an artist/designer/technologist who is pioneering new metaphors for storytelling that are original, immersive and multi-sensory.

We Feel Fine is an in-depth exploration of human feelings, http://www.wefeelfine.org/

Sputnik Observatory documents contemporary culture through video interviews. It is based on the premise that that everything is connected to everything else.

The Whale Hunt is an experiment in human storytelling that enables readers to participate and see through multiple perspectives, concepts, context and cadence.

Journey to Zero is a collaborate journey on the future of mobility guided by Richard Saul Wurman.

For a more familiar metaphor developed for the tablet, see the wonderfactory’s prototype for Sports Illustrated. www.thewonderfactory.com It’s best experienced through the video on their site.

Also Flyp magazine, which uses an innovative palette of online tools and Web 2.0 user functionality to provide an engaging and enriching multimedia experience.

Before we’re swept away (oops, but that seems to have happened already) by the unveiling of Apple’s tablet we ought to pay homage to technologies before the iPad and visionaries before Steve Jobs.

The original messiah machine: the Mac Plus. Introduced in 1986, this little beauty brought a revolution in publication design. It came standard with 1 MB of  RAM in an all-in-one, beige case wrapped around a 9-inch monochrome display. It was the first Mac to come with a built in SCSI port for an external Hard Drive.

The Plus was the computer that brought desktop publishing within reach of almost everyone. The revolutionary WYSIWYG interface enabled fast, professional management of text and images, as well as the creation of simple charts and graphs. Costing about $2700, most design and graphics departments could afford just one. But they came with the signatures of Jobs, Woz and the rest of the Apple design team on the inside of the plastic shell. Iterations of The Plus brought the capacity to design and publish entirely on the computer.

The Plus was also the computer where designers and journalists discovered online networking. Before the Net exploded as open and global platform, communicators connected their Pluses to to PressLink. The database and computer bulletin board service, a subsidiary of Knight Ridder, enabled access, transmissions and downloads of small files of news text, photos, images and graphics. PressLink also served as proprietary network for collaboration and communication.

Now for visionaries. You can’t marvel at the tablets, eReaders and mobile screens that will dazzle the future of communications without nodding to Roger Fidler. A seminal figure in digital publishing, he developed a prophetic prototype for a news tablet in 1994. Roger was among the few to understand the convergence of technology, communications, design and mobility. He developed devices for moving news beyond print in the early 1990s. Now some publishers think those devices are the salvation for newspapers.

Matt Mansfield has written a splendid profile of Roger on the Society for News Design site.

Time to look forward again. It’s noon and the Apple unveiling is five hours away.