Launching Digital

Two different music recordings have been in the news. The new Nine Inch Nails (NIN) "Ghosts" project and (with a little less buzz) Melody Gardot. They're both interesting examples of success online, yet I believe their strategies have important differences.

Both have a low price point which is important, but NIN had popularized the album by using pirate music sites and offering exclusives at high price points. Also, I think a key difference is fan base. NIN is electronic music with a fan base interested in electronic media. (One promotional stunt they did was to leave USB drives with content on them in the bathrooms at their shows and the previous album was all tied up in a dystopian electronic surveillance theme.)

I think Gardot has used a much simpler model and grown in a much more impressive way than NIN. It is similar but I think there are important differences. Radiohead is a more similar comparison to NIN since they are both old groups with an established fan base.

An established band has the capital to set up a website and conduct online sales (the NIN interface is impressive). An emerging artist must rely on iTunes. The same is true in the book industry.

Dan Brown, for example, could set up a server, release an eBook and sell print copies via LuLu and give the publishing industry a wake up call. An emerging author would have to use iTunes something that many have not taken advantage of yet (despite Make Magazine presenting the concept at TOC this year). It may just be a matter of time before we see the same thing occur in books that we have seen in music. One could attribute this not happening yet to the slow speed of publishing or maybe it's just something that authors are not interested in. The parallel might hold true that established artists would have to pave the way with independent experiments and then the new comers might move along via iTunes (or some equivalent).

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Size Matters

Video conferencing doesn't work. Phone conferences and webex are all second rate to being in the room with one person. Of course when you need to connect 20 people, these technologies help, but the underlying issue is size.

The issue with video conferencing is that even on a large screen TV, the people you are viewing are a percentage of their actual size. There was a fellow we used to video conference with who would be the only one in the room, so he'd zoom the camera in on his face. He joked around that he was doing the anchorman thing, but beyond the humor he was connecting with us better. At that size he was almost life size. You could see hesitation in his gestures or subtle recognition in his face while you spoke. Of course he was disconnected from us because there were a dozen two inch people on his screen.

We are aware of nonverbal communication, yet it seems we don't realize that size matters in nonverbal communication. Sure we have video, but at the normal video conference sizes it is like monotone speech. People are used to communicating with others of roughly the same size. We are probably attuned to the subtlties of nonverbal communication on that scale. While having people larger than life on the screen would be a mistake (it would seem strange to our eyes), we should strive for near life size.

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Create it new?

Imagine you have two companies. The first is only a couple years old. It was started by a few established employees with experience and some ambitious and hard working but inexperienced new comers. The second has been around for years is firmly established and has seasoned insiders. What makes the first company a threat to the second? Size, maneuverability, and momentum might be a few advantages of the first company. Consider the second company. If you are making a list, somewhere down the way on it you might mention their legacy data. The fact that they have data going back 10 or 20 years though is that a huge advantage? You might get some great longitudinal studies out of it, but would you actually think of it as a competitive advantage -- especially when weighed against the first company? Would you compare what the systems could do or how much data had in them? Sure apples to apples you would say both matter, but consider that the better system without the data grows.

I have been thinking about system design and legacy data and the weight that is put on maintaining how things used to be. The irony is that often technology is used as leverage to change how things are. Often there is a work flow or politics that is causing inefficiency amongst employees. A new system or technology is proposed because talking to people or reorganizing has resulted only in people returning to old habits. So you use technology to being about change in people. You start there, but then you stop thinking about that and get to the task at hand. Now you are thinking about current system requirements and examining the old system. A requirement of the system will be to import the old data or interface with the old systems. Suddenly what started with "bring about change" is being tempered with "work with the old".

The challenge of working with the old is not there in the first company that we first imagined. That company is free to just bring about change. It can work faster and nimbler because it is paving a new trail and not repaving the old road. Of course things are not that simple. There is a lot of benefit to having an old system to use as a model. Most likely it had things about it that worked well and features you would not have realized are important. Some things need to grow organically and hopefully an existing system has been tweaked to do so. Also there is much benefit in having something familiar to people because in the end it doesn't matter how good your system is if they do not embrace it.

Bearing that in mind though why not have tandem systems? Why not build it new and keep the old? Migrate data from the old system to the new one after you put the new system out there and get it working. Surely you will loose some data that simply doesn't fit the new model, but that's growth. Over the years you hopefully have learned something about streamlining a process down to its essentials. Simple and elegant data is something hard to come by, but hopefully experience is leading you closer to it and not further away.

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Blogged with Flock

Notes from the Monday keynotes at O'Reilly TOC

Here are my notes on the keynotes from Monday. I kept wondering why the emphasis was on nonfiction and not fiction. I think there's something to be considered in the ease that nonfiction fits into the web and that fiction may not. Is the digital age merely the death of the reference book? Sure the encyclopedia and increasingly the travel guide have major online threats. But what about fiction? Even Fray.com prints now and again...

Stephan Abram

The novel is an invention from the 1800s

Context is king - not content

The half life of a fact is 8 years

Younger audiences scan a website with a circle and then zero in on the middle. No more of the traditional F scan.

Bill Burger

As O'Reilly points out, the threat is not piracy, it's obscurity.

Copying used to be more valuable than the content before the printing press. But Guttenberg and especially the industrial revolution changed the ratio. Now the tools of the web are valued more than the content. [Will we see the same cycle of content vs. tool once again? What happens when the tools are free and ubiquitous?]

Douglas Rushkoff

Contact is king

Mass media connects people to products not people to people

Advertising works best on lone individuals, not well on social groups

Interpersonal media allows the interaction between people

In the online world, there is social currency and real life motivation from your reputation. In the work world you are anonymous in a company with little emphasis to be passionate or to try hard.

Content is a medium. It is an excuse for interacting.

In the first renaissances, hearers became readers
In the second renaissance (the internet), readers became writers

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Best Practices in Cross Media Publishing - notes

Steve Paxhia gave a presentation at the O'Reilly TOC and I took a few notes.

The Discovery Paradox
- Professionally selected content is not generally findable online
- "Good enough" free alternatives work better


Search Engine Optimization
- Has limited impact
- Gives diminishing returns
- (Phillip Torrone of MakeZine.com said he leaves it to Google to figure out)

Search & Discovery Rights
- Sell your the right to index your site (don't give it away)

Attributor is offering the ability to search for pirates. They take a hash value of your content and then look for that hash value on the net.

Publishing Collaboration
SAP Netweaver Forum has 1 million users (how are you going to sell a book on this subject with this competition?)
Near Time - O'Reilly
Libre Digital MashUps

Consumer Reports entered the digital age by first changing their process and then their technology. (Technology can force people into a new model, but the best bet is to have people change their model willingly and then back it up with the technology.)

Product Plans - 'nuff said

Give readers a choice: paper or digital (paper or plastic?)
Functionality should fit media
New products for new readers

MashUp geographic data - track and predict your clicks

The most important degree for the technology revolution in publishing is... an MLS degree (it's needed for good metadata - think about it, so much of this has organization and categorization as a key value - it is time for the great categorizer Aristotle once again)

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Online Identity as Resume

One of the ideas floating around the O'Reilly TOC was that an online identity is better than a resume. I think this makes some sense. The days of wanting people who would perfectly conform themselves (their lives) to a rote template are passing. When you need creative thinkers and problem solvers, you might find those people best when you give them the space to be themselves. However one thing worries me: resume honesty. I've had the luxury of only really needing a resume once in my life (I worked for myself for a long time and have then been with the same publisher for a long time). I didn't need the job, so I was very frank on the resume. But you hear stories about resume dishonesty all the time. Online identities are surely fraught with inaccuracy or bravado at times, but how much worse so if the online identity is viewed as a resume? But on the other hand maybe we are all best served by knowing our next employer will look us up online. It might gives us pause before clicking "send" and maybe we'll have a little less noise on the net.

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what data when

I spoke with Derek Powazek the founder and CEO of pixish (pixel + publish) about voting before a product is made. It is an essential part of Pixish which would otherwise merely be a call for submission posting board, it is instead something greater. Traditionally you collect data after the fact. You log the point of sale of a product and then mine from that data and related demographics based on a customer rewards card or credit card. But what does it mean to get that data early? People who are motivated to vote on the cover are not only saying which cover they like best, but presumably they are thinking about which cover is the right fit. This means people are engaged with the product in not only the sense of "do I want this or not" but instead they are thinking "what is this" on a deeper level than usual. This might lead to a much deeper connection/identification with a product than you would otherwise have. Not only does voting yield early marketing enthusiasm but also deeper connections to the product.

BTW, speaking of Derek, you should check our Fray (can you believe he got fray.com? He just asked nicely and got it. This guy's got karma.) I just started reading the print edition of Busted and I'm impressed. The commitment to honest but entertaining story telling is paradoxically perfect.

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eBooks in iTunes

I learned today from Phillip Torrone at the O'Reilly TOC that eBooks are supported by iTunes. I feel silly since I've received PDFs from iTunes when I purchased albums that included them, but I also was told by some in the print publishing world that it just wasn't so. Apparently Make knew about it in 2005 and latter speculated on them being added to the iPod, which I think is the future. EBook readers are only going to be around until phones have comparable abilities (like maybe fold out screens or maybe simple iPhone support). I was convinced of this after hearing on NPR about Kurzweil's phone that reads for the blind (knfbREADER). Vision impaired people said this device they would buy because it meant not carrying around an extra device. Here are people who need such a device and yet they wouldn't buy it unless it was in a phone. I'm sure Kindle will help get things started, but the log that will be lit is going to be a hand held device that handles voice and can be made compact.

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Hiatus Explanation

So it's been a couple years since my last post. Way back before that I was using LiveJournal. I don't remember what I posted as, put I think I had an icon of a typewriter and tended to get side tracked in my posts and talk about unimportant details like icons for blogs I don't post to anymore.

Anyway, I signed up on blogger just to squat on the name ollav and also so I could comment on friends blogs. I called myself the "blogless blogger" now and then when commenting. While I was squatting on the url ollav.blogspot.com I did work on a little blog about Judaism, but it was not written to be read. It was just a place to collect personal notes. I did have one post worth reading, but it was actually just a reprint of something I wrote for my synagogue's newsletter.

I'm writing now because of the O'Reilly TOC conference that I just attended. I'll speak more about what the inspiration was in a latter post, though it has a lot to do with my work in IT at a publishing house. It seems not only publishing is pushing into the social networking buzzy word thing though. I know of people from the music world, video games, and social sector non-profits who have this same unspoken work pressure. I find it interesting that some people of my generation (actually all within a year of my age) are getting into the social networking thing because of their jobs. We're just on the cusp of being generationally motivated to join. Others at the same age were getting in on this from the start, so based on the good science of a sample group of a dozen who are 1/3 into it, 1/3 pushed into it by work, and 1/3 not interested or ambivalent, I say my generation is the cusp generation for social networking.

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define your terms

The word Ollav is Gaelic in origin and comes from pre-Christian times in Ireland when the leaders were also great scholars. According to Ulyssees Annotated "the ollaves were pre-Christian Irish masters of learning and poetry."

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