Magazines Go Digital, Almost Unusable
August 5, 2009
At lunch today, one of the goslings mentioned a Lifehacker post about MagMe.com. We fired up the Dell Mini 9, our lunch companion and took a look. On the Dell Mini’s screen, there was not much that was legible. The wireless connection provided by the restaurant bogged down with job seekers surfing Craigslist.com for a lead made the interface slow, very slow. You can try the service once you register. A couple of the fields on the registration screen did not work too well; for example, the city field popped the cursor to the last name field. Magazines are in a world of hurt because their business model seems out of sync with what is happening online. MagMe.com may be one way to save a once vital information sector. You can check out a competitor called Magazines.net. Slightly different approach but clunky. At least Magazines.net has a search engine. Judging from the line up of magazines on these two services, you have an eclectic range of titles to browse. Not for me and my Dell Mini 9.
Stephen Arnold, August 5, 2009
Wall Street Journal Spamming Again
August 4, 2009
The Wall Street Journal stopped spamming me for a couple of weeks. Now the Viagra-marketing-influenced newspaper is doing it again. I am now receiving two different spam messages. The first wants me to subscribe. After the WSJ stopped spamming, I resumed my subscription.
The second spam is fresh. The WSJ wants me to become a subscriber to the electronic edition of the newspaper. Here’s the latest, highly professional, quite compelling missive:
What’s interesting is that this spam does not render. Seems to me that the WSJ may want to hire a different spam marketer. The present outfit can’t code and has insufficient bandwidth to display the Viagra-marketing-influenced junk pushed at a ** paying customer **. How far newspapers have fallen? Judge for yourself.
Stephen Arnold, August 3, 2009
Perfect Search
August 4, 2009
The Mail & Guardian is not aware of an interesting search company called “Perfect Search”. You can read about the company at http://www.perfectsearchcorp.com and get an inside peek at the firm’s high-speed system in my interview with Ken Ebert, on of Perfect Search’s technologists in the ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speak series.
The UK newspaper’s use of “perfect search” has a different spin because the newspaper seems to unaware that there is a company with the phrase used in the story’s headline “Rivals Strive to Topple Google in Quest for the ‘Perfect Search’”. In addition, there is not too much information about rivals. Google right now doesn’t have too many in my opinion. There are “to be” rivals or “hoped for” rivals aplenty. I think that articles like this Guardian effort ehlps increases confusion about search.
The Guardian article trots out the painful reminder to publishers that Google has “enormous power”. The article points out that Google will run “more than one trillion searches”. Then comes the passage that I found interesting:
But it is also possible that the concept of search may be moving forward so fast that it will outstrip search engines themselves. The explosive growth of social networking services, such as Twitter and Facebook, is taking the concept of search into unknown areas. Both began as ways for friends and acquaintances to share information and news about themselves but then they developed a critical mass. Suddenly Facebook and Twitter became tools that could be searched by their millions of users. Search on Google for a recipe and you will get a relatively random selection. Ask Facebook or Twitter for a recipe and you will get a choice often aimed specifically at you. Nor is it just for trivia. In the recent political turmoil in Iran, Twitter became a vital tool for organising and releasing information about the violent post-election crackdown. If you wanted the latest news from Iran, it was Twitter that you turned to as well. Twitter had showed itself perfectly able to channel people’s most profound desires: in this case, political freedom of expression. You can plan a revolution with Twitter.
In my opinion, this passage makes clear that Google in particular and online change in general is why newspapers, magazines, and books in hard copy form are clueless. Instead of adapting, as this Guardian article makes clear, the reporter explains a change. Yet muddles what has happened, why the change has taken place, and what the wave of changed has washed up on the digital beach as deadwood.
The article concludes with a question: Perhaps not even Google knows exactly what the world will look like. Yet.”
No kidding. Google is an example of adaptive intelligence, exactly the type of business behavior that traditional media does not understand and, therefore, describes in confusing, often misleading ways. Google surfs digital trends and even makes some waves itself. Traditional newspapers, like this article, describe the snow falling around the grass eating dinosaurs as the Ice Age approaches.
Stephen Arnold, August 4, 2009
Journalist Explains Away Information Phase Change
August 4, 2009
I enjoy finding articles that find a way to explain that what young people are doing is not important. Even more delightful is the notion that the kids with parents who are clinging to traditional media for their livelihood fuel the phase change as the parents remain clueless.
An interesting example of this type of write up is “It’s Easy to Forget that Most people Don’t Twitter, Use RSS Feeds or Read 20 Blogs a Day.” I am an old geezer, writing for my personal enjoyment as the addled goose. But I am sufficiently aware of my digital surroundings to recognize that the information environment is quite different from that of my childhood or the mid 1990s when Chris Kitze, my son, and myself created The Point (Top 5% of the Internet).
Etaoin Shrdlu pointed to a post that said:
“Publishers aren’t exactly fools to not throw everything into online. Print is where the eyeballs are; it’s where their best customers are.”
The post attracted some interesting comments as well. One jumped out:
First, you’re using the top five newspapers as the premise for all papers. Secondly, you’re comparing two different products but only using The standards of one. While the Los Angeles Times may be worth thirty minutes of my time, the Sierra Vista Herald or the Reno Gazette-Journal is not. In fact, many if not most of those small newspapers are boring once you get past the front page. This, of course, is completely subjective. Prove me otherwise and I’ll buy you a beer. Blue Moon, too. he other issue with your data is that you ignore the entire utility of the Internet. A newspaper by its physical nature, limits you to only read what was published. The Internet is all about linking, metadata tagging and search engines. People’s reading habits online are vastly different than reading a printed product. Haven’t we known that for years now?
My question is, “If I were going to start a money making information service today, would I include a print component?” I would not for these reasons:
- Too slow
- Too difficult to control costs such as printing and distribution
- The topics which interest me do not lend themselves to big, fat printed documents
- Online marketing can generate consulting work, so the “report” is mostly an advertisement.
The better question is, “What will those who depend on selling hard copies do to generate revenue in a post print world?”
Stephen Arnold, August 4, 2009
Generational Data Conflicts Loom
August 3, 2009
Governments are making data available. A good example is Data.gov. Not perfect, but interesting. On the other side are the commercial database publishers. Examples include the dinosaur-like Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, and Cambridge Scientific. Each of these commercial enterprises charge money for data. The fees are high because each of these companies tries to deliver Google-type services without Google’s advertising business model. This means that the person wanting the data has to pay a great deal even to learn if the commercial database has information of use to the customer. Libraries, once the cash cow for some commercial database publishers, have fallen on hard times.
Where’s the conflict?
In my opinion, the Digital Beat story “Open Data Is the Future of Web Discovery” makes the potential problem easy to grasp. The story contains this interesting passage:
For now, we need one of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to make toolbar data available to see if there’d be massive advances by third-party developers. The first company to do this will open a new market, so who will be the first, and why? These big companies could find a way – like Facebook has – to build a vibrant developer community using their data and distribution. Perhaps the data provider can participate in the value created by charging for accessing and using the data. Or maybe Facebook, Twitter (or Twitter developers) will be the first to share click and other usage data. No longer would you have to build a multi billion dollar company to get access to data that could be used to make significant advances for users. All these companies would need to feel comfortable that users’ privacy is protected. Googlers tell me it’s highly unlikely Google would release toolbar data because the data is too valuable, privacy concerns and users might be surprised to see how much Google knows about them. Maybe the data is too important to Google so the company must hold it close to maintain its competitive advantage, but perhaps Yahoo and Microsoft would be willing to share data with select partners while tightly protecting user privacy for a chance to increase their competitiveness with Google. Or maybe these companies will try to build discovery services themselves. In the meantime, those potential advances in search, discovery and more are being stifled. Developers using Twitter, Yahoo and Microsoft search APIs could make better services for users with more data from those companies as well as Google, Facebook, Mozilla and others like data analytics companies. The chance these companies will share more data with developers aside, it’s worth figuring what would be possible if they did.
The warring factions will be:
- Governments who make data available for all and permit commercial entities to repurpose government crated information into commercial products
- Social and real time system that offer free data and make it possible for commercial entities to create new products and services so that monetization models emerge
- Commercial database companies who want to preserve their proprietary content and create new, high value products using traditional business models
- Individuals who write Web log posts that become fodder for aggregation and often play the role of “information farmers” raising wheat that food companies process into high value products.
My thought is that these forces may split along generational lines and engage in quite interesting interactions.
Stephen Arnold, August 2, 2009
Magazines on Slippery Slope
August 3, 2009
I fielded a question about magazine publishing on Monday, July 27, 2009. A small publisher with a handful of titles wanted me to offer some new ideas for generating revenue. Magazine publishing has been a challenging business since the implosion of Life Magazine. I have seen interesting business school case studies about the impact of shifting consumer preferences for news and information upon the weekly that provided many Americans with news and visual information. You can now explore in a clunky and limited way some of the Life Magaazine pictures on Google. The service is free, which baffles me, but I am an addled goose and not able to keep pace with the really swift and smart bicoastals who make decisoins about high-value informatoin.
Like newspapers, magazines have some brutal economics with which to wrestle. Paper, ink, distribution, and other must have lubricants for the business are expensive. Forget what the White House says about inflation. The costs for these traditional publishing essentials continue to climb. Printing is a money pit as well. Digital technology helps by eliminating the centuries old multi-step plate process. But direct-to-press requires expensive hardware and software. Printing remains expensive. Finally, there is the cost for human brain power, even if those brains are contractors and 22 year olds from fancy universities. Try as publishers might, it is tough to create a newspaper or a magazine without people to write stories, make ad deals, and place the phone calls to suppliers.
Long a niche business, magazines find themselves on the wrong end of a pointy stick from Web sites such as Alltop.com. I can create a magazine with a few clicks. If Alltop does not suit you, try Congoo. There are quite a few choices created by people who don’t have the same fondness for flipping through Mechanix Illustrated or the Saturday Evening Post that I had when young.
$17 dollars worth of hard copy magazines from big gun publishers.
In short, magazines on paper are finding their corner of the publishing world under the same pressure as people who make wooden shoes or spin wool by hand. Even niche magazines for fanatics of a particular activity such as crafts or kit airplanes are going to have to come up with some new ideas.
In my conversation, I had to say, “Let me think about some ideas.” This blog post is my preliminary thinking about what is likely to be the next zero point in publishing. Let me run down the thoughts that I am pushing around.
The Traditional Product
I went to Barnes & Noble, a recently remodeled store. The magazines are still upfront but the selection has been culled. The new layout not far from my goose pond pushes book lights, book ends, and Moleskine products. The books are pushed to the rear of the store, and the computer book section has been eliminated. The free WiFi was not working but Barnes and Noble is a bricks and mortar business which is now jumping into electronic books. That will be interesting to track.
The magazines occupy four wooden bays. Crafts and kit airplane titles were not to be found. I could not locate the specialist magazines for those interested in archaeology. I noticed that the magazines devoted to watches and luxury goods were few and far between as well. When I did find a specialist magazine like Hemmings Motor News, there were three copies on the shelf. Maybe Hemmings is a big seller at this Barnes and Noble?
I bought two magazines with the idea that I would look at the hard copies and review my subscription copy of the recent New Yorker Magazine. The total cover price for the three magazines discussed below was about $17, excluding tax. Three magazines for about $20. Hmmm. I remember the commutes between New York and San Francisco when I bought four of five magazines on every flight. Not any more. I have info on my iTouch.
Car and Driver
My recollection is that Bill Ziff was into car magazines before he hopped on the computer magazine trend. Automobile fanatics are ideal for niches. I don’t pay much attention to automobiles or automobile magazines. I live in truck and gun-rack country. Car and Driver reviews vehicles that work well in Palm Springs but don’t have much to offer to a person who drives on dirt roads. I flipped through the magazine with the cover date September 2009 and in tiny, tiny type the $4.99 price. (I wonder if the small type communicates modest value?) The feature in this issue was new cars. I may have missed something but three points hit my knee like the weird door design on my 1973 Pontiac Grandville convertible:
First, where were the Hondas? I like Hondas. These are vehicles I can buy over the Internet, sight unseen. I drive them 100,000 miles and then get another. Odd omission in 140 page magazine. Honda is one of the top selling vehicles in the US. I wondered if the news hole was too small to slug in some Honda information or if the Honda vehicles were no longer interesting to Car and Driver readers. Ah, well, editorial decision. Honda information is available online.
Second, some vehicles rated data tables and others did not. I wondered why there was no Web link to the Car and Driver Web site for additional information about each automobile. I solved the problem with a quick visit to The Auto Channel. That outfit has data about the new cars.
Third, the writing was not crunchy. This means that if Bing.com or Google.com indexes an article, false drops are likely to pepper the search results. Let me give you one example. Writing about the Jaguar, Car and Driver used this phrase “evinced a strong whiff of femininity”. I hope Car and Driver has a great search engine optimization program because this type of writing will get the article in a list of results about women’s fashion. Maybe that’s the Car and Driver audience?
Google on the Future of Digital Books
August 1, 2009
Media Bistro ran a fascinating article that is classic Google. I heard Dan Clancy speak earlier this year. I I read the BayNewser’s “Google Engineering Director Spells Out Vision for the Future of Digital Books.” Mr. Clancy is an engaging speaker. He is gentle in appearance, manner and rhetoric.
The point of the write up, in my opinion, was well expressed in this passage:
Google will partner with all interested retailers, so you’ll be able to buy books wherever you like—at an online site or your neighborhood bookstore. The books themselves will be stored “in the cloud,” meaning out on some Google server, rather than on your computer hard drive or in a device you own. And you’ll be able to read them on any device you want—e-reader, phone, computer, or netbook.
BayNewser points out that this vision is different from the pending deal with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. How different? Mr. Clancy is presaging the future. The “pending deal” is about the past. Navigate to BayNewser and read the extensive quotes yourself.
When I read the article, I asked myself, “Is revisionism an increasingly important tool in Google’s public relations arsenal?” And, “Will Google knit together its various publishing initiatives so an author can create, store, and sell books via Google?” Publishers seem to be a litigious, easily disintermediated group when I look to the future.
Stephen Arnold, August 1, 2009
New York Times: Two Indexing Methods
July 31, 2009
Teragram, a unit of SAS SAP, provides software that automatically indexes content for the New York Times’s Web site. I saw a tweet on my Overflight service that pointed out that the newspaper uses humans to create the New York Times Index, a more traditional index. You can find the tweet here. If true, why won’t the Teragram system do both jobs? When financial corsets get yanked tighter, something has to give. My thought is that if the tweet is accurate, is redundancy cost effective? An indication that neither works particularly well? There is a political logic, not a financial logic, at work?
Stephen Arnold, July 31, 2009
Newspaper Woes in Harrods Creek
July 30, 2009
I subscribe to four hard copy newspapers. I don’t think too much about the delivery of the newspaper because I am not too far from a large, confused supermarket. This outfit gets four or five copies of the newspapers so my copies turn up. Yesterday, I did not receive a USA Today. This is a Gannett publication known in Harrods Creek as McPaper. Today I got the USA Today but it was soaked. That’s better than the New York Times’s dead tree offering. The New York Times paper did not arrive. A tip of the hat to the floundering Courier Journal (where I used to work) and the zippy new Wall Street Journal. Both arrived. I resubscribed once the WSJ stopped sending me spam to become a subscriber. Net net of this is that when you have an old geezer who pays for hard copies, maybe the newspaper folks should deliver the paper and get it there in a readable form. Must be really tough in today’s financial climate. No wonder there is some reluctance on the part of busy people to go with old news that arrives wet or not at all.
Stephen Arnold, July 29, 2009
Books Do Not Have Lift
July 30, 2009
Mike Hendrickson posted his mid-2009 State of the Computer post on O’Reilly Radar at http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/state-of-the-computer-book-mar-25.html. He’s tracking sales of computer industry books, and sales are going down, down, down in a possible reflection of the economy. On the other hand, if you’re looking for technical information and how-to’s for systems like Windows Vista, Mac Programming, or SharePoint, wouldn’t you start on the Internet? We would. There’s so much good real-time data out there to crunch (if you’re willing to put in a little extra work ). That combined with the exponential growth of the Internet is going to put more nails into traditional media’s coffin. Book readers are mostly oldsters and the younger folks seem to relate to fresher media.
Jessica Bratcher, July 30, 2009
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