Starting Points: web

Showing posts with label web. Show all posts

Jun 19, 2010

Closing the Digital Frontier

The era of the Web browser’s dominance is coming to a close. And the Internet’s founding ideology—that information wants to be free, and that attempts to constrain it are not only hopeless but immoral— suddenly seems naive and stale in the new age of apps, smart phones, and pricing plans. What will this mean for the future of the media—and of the Web itself?

By Michael Hirschorn

Image credit: Jason Schneider

As Chris Anderson pointed out in a moment of non-hyperbole in his book Free, the phrase Information wants to be free was never meant to be the rallying cry it turned into. It was first uttered by Stewart Brand at a hacker conference in 1984, and it came with a significant disclaimer: that information also wants to be expensive, because it can be so important (see “Information Wants to Be Paid For,” in this issue). With the long tail of Brand’s dictum chopped off, the phrase Information wants to be free—dissected, debated, reconstituted as a global democratic rallying cry against monsters of the political, business, and media elites—became perhaps the most powerful meme of the past quarter century; so powerful, in fact, that multibillion-dollar corporations destroyed their own businesses at its altar.

It’s a bit of a Schrödinger’s-cat situation when you try to determine what would have happened if we had not bought into the IWTBF mantra, but by the time digital culture exploded into the mainstream with the introduction first of the Mosaic browser and then of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, in the mid-’90s, free was already an idea only the very old or very obtuse dared to contradict. As far back as the mid-’80s, digital freedom was a cause célèbre on the Northern California–based Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (known as the WELL), the wildly influential bulletin-board service that brought together mostly West Coast cyberspace pioneers to discuss matters of the day.

It gives you a feel for the WELL’s gestalt to know that Brand, who founded the WELL, was also behind the Long Now Foundation, which promotes the idea of a consciousness-expanding 10,000-year clock. Thrilling, intense, uncompromising, at times borderline self-parodically Talmudic, the WELL had roots in the same peculiar convergence of hippiedom and techno-savantism that created Silicon Valley, but it also called out, consciously and un-, to a neo-Jeffersonian idea of the digital pioneer as a kind of virtual sodbuster. The WELL-ite Howard Rheingold, in his 1993 digital manifesto, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, described himself as being “colonized” (in a good way) by his virtual community. The libertarian activist John Perry Barlow, an early member of the WELL’s board of directors, was a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital version of the ACLU.

At the WELL, the core gospel of an open Web was upheld with such rigor that when one of its more prolific members, Time magazine’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt, published a scare-the-old-folks cover story on cyber porn in 1995, which carried the implication that some measure of online censorship might not be a bad thing, he and his apostasy were torn to pieces by his fellow WELL-ites with breathtaking relentlessness. At the time, the episode was notable for being one of the first examples of the Web’s ability to fact-check, and keep in check, the mainstream media—it turned out that the study on which Time’s exclusive report was based was inaccurate, and its results were wildly overstated. In retrospect, what seems notable is the fervor with which digital correctness—the idea that the unencumbered flow of everything, including porn, must be defended—was being enforced. In the WELL’s hierarchy of values, pure freedom was an immutable principle, even if the underlying truth (that porn of all kinds was and would be increasingly ubiquitous on the Web, with actual real-life consequences) was ugly and incontestable.

Digital freedom, of the monetary and First Amendment varieties, may in retrospect have become our era’s version of Manifest Destiny, our Turner thesis. Embracing digital freedom was an exaltation, a kind of noble calling. In a smart essay in the journal Fast Capitalism in 2005, Jack Shuler shows how similar the rhetoric of the 1990s digital frontier was to that of the 19th-century frontier era. It’s a short jump from John L. O’Sullivan in 1839—“The far-reaching, the boundless will be the era of American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles”—to Kevin Kelly, the pioneering conceptualizer of the “hive mind” and a founding editor of Wired, writing in Harper’s in 1994, “A recurring vision swirls in the shared mind of the Net, a vision that nearly every member glimpses, if only momentarily: of wiring human and artificial minds into one planetary soul.” Two years later Barlow, a self- described advocate for “online colonists,” got down on bended knee, doublet unbraced, to beseech us mere analog mortals: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone … You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

I take you on this quick tour not to make fun of futurism past (I have only slightly less-purple skeletons in my closet), but to point out how an idea that we have largely taken for granted is in fact the product of a very specific ideology. Despite its Department of Defense origins, the matrixed, hyperlinked Internet was both cause and effect of the libertarian ethos of Silicon Valley. The open-source mentality, in theory if not always in practice, proved useful for the tech and Internet worlds. Facebook and Twitter achieved massive scale quickly by creating an open system accessible to outside developers, though that openness is at times more about branding than anything else—as Twitter’s fellow travelers are now finding out. Mainframe behemoths like IBM wave the bloody shirt of Linux, the nonprofit open-source competitor of Microsoft Windows, any time they need to prove their bona fides to the tech community. Ironically, only the “old” entertainment and media industries, it seems, took open and free literally, striving to prove that they were fit for the digital era’s freewheeling information/entertainment bazaar by making their most expensively produced products available for free on the Internet. As a result, they undermined in little more than a decade a value proposition they had spent more than a century building up.

But now, it seems, things are changing all over again. The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway, signals a radical shift from openness to a degree of closed-ness that would have been remarkable even before 1995. In the U.S., there are only three major cell-phone networks, a handful of smart-phone makers, and just one Apple, a company that has spent the entire Internet era fighting the idea of open (as anyone who has tried to move legally purchased digital downloads among devices can attest). As far back as the ’80s, when Apple launched the desktop-publishing revolution, the company has always made the case that the bourgeois comforts of an artfully constructed end-to-end solution, despite its limits, were superior to the freedom and danger of the digital badlands.

Apple, for once, is swimming with the tide. After 15 years of fruitless experimentation, media companies are realizing that an advertising-supported model is not the way to succeed on the Web and they are, at last, seeking to get consumers to pay for their content. They are operating on the largely correct assumption that people will be more likely to pay for consumer-friendly apps via the iPad, and a multitude of competing devices due out this year, than they are to subscribe to the same old kludgy Web site they have been using freely for years. As a result, media companies will soon be pushing their best and most timely content through their apps instead of their Web sites. Meanwhile, video-content services are finding that they don’t even need to bother with the Web and the browser. Netflix, for one, is well on its way to sending movies and TV shows directly to TV sets, making their customers’ experience virtually indistinguishable from ordering up on-demand shows by remote control. It’s far from a given that this shift will generate the kinds of revenue media companies are used to: for under-30s whelped on free content, the prospect of paying hundreds or thousands of dollars yearly for print, audio, and video (on expensive new devices that require paying AT&T $30 a month) is not going to be an easy sell.

Yet lack of uptake by young people will hardly stop the rush to apps. There’s too much potential upside. And with Apple in the driver’s seat, the rhetoric of “free” is becoming notably more muted. In rolling out the iPad, Steve Jobs has been aggressive and, to date, unapologetic about policing apps deemed unacceptable for the iPad store (or apps whose creators hold opinions that are anathema to Apple’s corporate interests or sense of universal order). And Apple has so far refused to enable Flash, the Adobe technology that runs 75 percent of all videos seen on the Web, and is launching its own ad-sales platform, presumably to control and monetize traffic on its devices.

On a more conceptual level, the move from the browser model to the app model (where content is more likely to be accessed via smartly curated “stores” like iTunes, Amazon, or Netflix) signals the first real taming of the Wild Digital West. Apple’s version of the West has nice white picket fences, clapboard houses, morals police, and lots of clean, well-organized places to spend money. (The Internet, it seems, is finally safe for Rupert Murdoch.) These shifts are seemingly subtle, but they may prove profound. Google, which built its once monopolistic position by harnessing the chaos of Web search, has been forced to move aggressively to preserve its business model against this new competition: it has teamed up with the Apple-scorned Flash; is making conciliatory gestures to the content owners it once patronized; has reached a deal to purchase a mobile ad-sales platform; and is promoting its own vision of the future based on cloud computing. Phones using its open-source smart-phone operating system, Android, are outselling the iPhone. Even so, Google still needs for the Web, however it’s accessed, to remain central—because without contextual search advertising, Google ceases to matter. Smart phones in general, and the iPad more pointedly, are not driven by search.

All of this suggests that the era of browser dominance is coming to a close. Twitter, like other recent-vintage social networks, is barely bothering with its Web site; its smart-phone app is more fully featured. The independent TweetDeck, which collates feeds across multiple social networks, is not browser-based. As app-based usage climbs at the expense of the browser and as more content creators put their text, audio, and video behind pay walls, it will be interesting to see what happens to the Twitterverse and blogosphere, which piggyback on, and draw creative juice from, their ability to link to free Web content. If they don’t end up licensing original content, networks such as Twitter and Facebook will become purely communication vehicles. At first glance, Web sites like The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post will have a hard time once they lose their ability to hypertext their digests; on second glance, they will have an opportunity to sop up some of the traffic that once went to their now-paid rivals. Google, meanwhile, is hoping to find ways to link through pay walls and across platforms, but this model will clearly not be the delightfully free-form open plain of the early Web. Years from now, we may look back at these past 15 years as a discrete (and thrillingly indiscreet) chapter in the history of digital media, not the beginning of a new and enlightened dispensation. The Web will be here forever; that is not in question. But as Don Henley sang in “The Last Resort,” the Eagles’ brilliant, haunting song about the resortification of the West, “You call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye.”

Which brings us back to manifest destinies, physical and digital. As Patricia Limerick has argued in her reconsideration of frontier ideology, the moonstruck rhetoric of Manifest Destiny in the 1800s, though it may have been sincere, neatly papered over a host of less enlightened agendas. The surge west was a critical driver of economic growth, allowing the growing republic to harness vast amounts of natural resources and create new markets. The high-flown ideology of Manifest Destiny was, in short, a cover for a massive land grab (not to mention the slaughter of the Indians). The same is happening online. Now, instead of farmers versus ranchers, we have Apple versus Google. In retrospect, for all the talk of an unencumbered sphere, of a unified planetary soul, the colonization and exploitation of the Web was a foregone conclusion. The only question now is who will own it.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/closing-the-digital-frontier/8131/

Apr 17, 2010

Web Coupons Tell Stores More Than You Realize - NYTimes.com

Image by The Lightworks via Flickr

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

For decades, shoppers have taken advantage of coupons. Now, the coupons are taking advantage of the shoppers.

A new breed of coupon, printed from the Internet or sent to mobile phones, is packed with information about the customer who uses it. While the coupons look standard, their bar codes can be loaded with a startling amount of data, including identification about the customer, Internet address, Facebook page information and even the search terms the customer used to find the coupon in the first place.

And all that information follows that customer into the mall. For example, if a man walks into a Filene’s Basement to buy a suit for his wedding and shows a coupon he retrieved online, the company’s marketing agency can figure out whether he used the search terms “Hugo Boss suit” or “discount wedding clothes” to research his purchase (just don’t tell his fiancée).

Coupons from the Internet are the fastest-growing part of the coupon world — their redemption increased 263 percent to about 50 million coupons in 2009, according to the coupon-processing company Inmar. Using coupons to link Internet behavior with in-store shopping lets retailers figure out which ad slogans or online product promotions work best, how long someone waits between searching and shopping, even what offers a shopper will respond to or ignore.

The coupons can, in some cases, be tracked not just to an anonymous shopper but to an identifiable person: a retailer could know that Amy Smith printed a 15 percent-off coupon after searching for appliance discounts at Ebates.com on Friday at 1:30 p.m. and redeemed it later that afternoon at the store.

“You can really key into who they are,” said Don Batsford Jr., who works on online advertising for the tax preparation company Jackson Hewitt, whose coupons include search information. “It’s almost like being able to read their mind, because they’re confessing to the search engine what they’re looking for.”

Image by Bramus! via Flickr

While companies once had a slim dossier on each consumer, they now have databases packed with information. And every time a person goes shopping, visits a Web site or buys something, the database gets another entry.

“There is a feeling that anonymity in this space is kind of dead,” said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology’s information privacy programs.

None of the tracking is visible to consumers. The coupons, for companies as diverse as Ruby Tuesday and Lord & Taylor, are handled by a company called RevTrax, which displays them on the retailers’ sites or on coupon Web sites, not its own site.

Even if consumers could figure out that RevTrax was creating the coupons, it does not have a privacy policy on its site — RevTrax says that is because it handles data for the retailers and does not directly interact with consumers. RevTrax can also include retailers’ own client identification numbers (Amy Smith might be client No. 2458230), then the retailer can connect that with the actual person if it wants to, for example, to send a follow-up offer or a thank-you note.

Using coupons also lets the retailers get around Google hurdles. Google allows its search advertisers to see reports on which keywords are working well as a whole but not on how each person is responding to each slogan.

“We’ve built privacy protections into all Google services and report Web site trends only in aggregate, without identifying individual users,” Sandra Heikkinen, a spokeswoman for Google, said in an e-mail message.

The retailers, however, can get to an individual level by sending different keyword searches to different Web addresses. The distinct Web addresses are invisible to the consumer, who usually sees just a Web page with a simple address at the top of it.

So clicking on an ad for Jackson Hewitt after searching for “new 2010 deductions” would send someone to a different behind-the-scenes URL than after searching for “Jackson Hewitt 2010,” though the Web pages and addresses might look identical. This data could be coded onto a coupon.

RevTrax works as closely with image-rich display ads, with coupons also signaling what ad a person saw and on what site.

“Wherever we provide a link, whether it’s on search or banner, that thing you click can include actual keywords,” said Rob O’Neil, director of online marketing at Tag New Media, which works with Filene’s. “There’s some trickery.”

The companies argue that the coupon strategy gives them direct feedback on how well their marketing is working.

Once the shopper prints an online coupon or sends it to his cellphone and then goes to a store, the clerk scans it. The bar code information is sent to RevTrax, which, with the ad agency, analyzes it.

“We break people up into teeny little cross sections of who we think they are, and we test that out against how they respond,” said Mr. Batsford, who is a partner at 31 Media, an online marketing company.

RevTrax can identify online shoppers when they are signed in to a coupon site like Ebates or FatWallet or the retailer’s own site. It says it avoids connecting that number with real people to steer clear of privacy issues, but clients can make that match.

The retailer can also make that connection when it is offering coupons to its Facebook fans, like Filene’s Basement is doing.

“When someone joins a fan club, the user’s Facebook ID becomes visible to the merchandiser,” Jonathan Treiber, RevTrax’s co-founder, said. “We take that and embed it in a bar code or promotion code.”

“When the consumer redeems the offer in store, we can track it back, in this case, not to the Google search term but to the actual Facebook user ID that was signing up,” he said. Although Facebook does not signal that Amy Smith responded to a given ad, Filene’s could look up the user ID connected to the coupon and “do some more manual-type research — you could easily see your sex, your location and what you’re interested in,” Mr. Treiber said. (Mr. O’Neil said Filene’s did not do this at the moment.)

The coupon efforts are nascent, but coupon companies say that when they get more data about how people are responding, they can make different offers to different consumers.

“Over time,” Mr. Treiber said, “we’ll be able to do much better profiling around certain I.P. addresses, to say, hey, this I.P. address is showing a proclivity for printing clothing apparel coupons and is really only responding to coupons greater than 20 percent off.”

That alarms some privacy advocates.

Companies can “offer you, perhaps, less desirable products than they offer me, or offer you the same product as they offer me but at a higher price,” said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director for the United States Public Interest Research Group, which has asked the Federal Trade Commission for tighter rules on online advertising. “There really have been no rules set up for this ecosystem.”

Nov 5, 2009

BBC - China to ban beating web addicts

Image by dcmaster via Flickr

China's ministry of health has moved to ban the use of physical punishment to treat teenagers addicted to the web, according to draft guidelines.

There are dozens of treatment centres offering to wean youths, mostly boys, from spending hours on the web.

Many of them are military-style boot camps that rely on tough programmes of physical exercise and counselling.

Two boys were beaten at separate camps earlier this year, one died and the other was severely injured.

"When intervening to prevent improper use of the internet we should... strictly prohibit restriction of personal freedom and physical punishments," the ministry said in a draft guideline quoted by Reuters news agency.

In July, the ministry of health formally banned the use of electroshock therapy as a treatment option.

There was a public outcry after 15-year-old Deng Senshan died in August less than 24 hours after arrival at the Qihang Salvation Training Camp in Guangxi province.

Days later, 14-year-old Pu Liang was put in a Sichuan hospital in a series condition after allegedly being beaten by his boot camp's principal and other students.

Some estimates suggest up to 10% of the country's 100 million web users under the age of 20 could be addicted, and a growing number of rehabilitation services have sprung up to deal with the problem.

Some define an internet addict as anyone who is online for at least six hours a day and has little interest in school.

"The goal of intervention is... to urge the target people to use the internet in a healthy way," the ministry of health statement said.

"It's not to stop them from using the internet."

Oct 12, 2009

Making the Most of Customers' Online Reviews - WSJ.com

Image via Wikipedia

Companies are learning to make the most out of customers' online reviews of their products

By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER

Online, everyone has an opinion. For e-commerce businesses, the hard part is making the most of them.

Amazon.com Inc. began posting customer ratings and reviews of its products online in 1995, with an anonymous five-star write-up of Dr. Seuss's "The Butter Battle Book." Since then, most online businesses have found that allowing customers to post reviews—including negative ones—can boost sales and help merchants quickly identify problems with their products.

Now, makers of review software are adding features that allow businesses to get more out of consumers' input online. They have found ways to boost the number of reviews on a site and lend them more credibility, so shoppers are more likely to feel comfortable making purchases. And merchants can now reap the benefits of input from consumers before a sale is made, by posting questions from people thinking about buying a product and the answers, including comments from other consumers.

Building Trust

The review software developed in-house by Drugstore.com Inc. relied on customers to motivate themselves to submit reviews of the products they bought. But after outsourcing its reviews in June of 2008 to San Francisco-based Power Reviews Inc., Drugstore.com launched a system that automatically emails customers about three weeks after they've made a purchase, encouraging them to post a review.

Getting those email requests "makes you feel important and also increased our brand's connection to you," says David Lonczak, chief marketing officer of Drugstore.com, which is based in Bellevue, Wash.

After launching the program, Drugstore.com witnessed a more than 300% increase in new reviews, lending a lot more credibility to its products—especially those with a large number of positive reviews.

There was also a side benefit. Customers who responded to the emails could be confirmed as buyers of those products—unlike some people who post reviews on products they haven't actually purchased. These "verified buyers" are given a badge next to their reviews, adding authenticity to what they report.

"Three or four years ago, you were just happy if you found a review on something. But now you wonder if I can trust the reviews that I am reading to make a decision," says Andy Chen, Power Reviews' chief executive.

Feeling Connected

Skepticism about whether the reviewer actually bought the product isn't the only reason a shopper might not give a review much weight in deciding on a purchase. Sites like baby-products retailer Diapers.com are increasingly deciding that customers are more likely to trust a review from someone they feel connected to in some way.

In the market for baby products, "the most important recommender is going to be people who are in a very similar situation to yourself," says Josh Himwich, director of e-commerce solutions at Diapers.com, which is based in Montclair, N.J. "It is the closest thing you can get to a recommendation from a sister or friend."

Sometimes a review will include personal information about the author that might establish a connection with a shopper. But that's not true of many reviews, and even when such information is included it isn't prominently displayed.

So two years ago Diapers.com started using a feature offered by Power Reviews that helps shoppers distinguish one reviewer from another. Now when customers contribute a review, they have to check one or more boxes to identify themselves in terms such as "first-time parent" or "grandparent." Reviews show up on Diapers.com categorized under those headings.

The site plans to expand on that service next year by allowing users to search through the jumble of reviews on any given product based on those identifying categories—choosing to see, for example, only reviews written by the parents of twins. Mr. Himwich expects that feature to give his site a leg up on others that only sort reviews based on ratings or on comments that have been voted the most useful.

In the coming weeks, Bazaarvoice, a software firm based in Austin, Texas, will expand a system that takes the idea of drawing connections among shoppers a step further, by linking reviewers' write-ups with their Facebook profiles. That will make it easy for reviewers to share write-ups with their friends, and for other shoppers to see a lot more information about who has left a review. "Everybody knows you will trust somebody you know more than somebody you don't," says Bazaarvoice Chief Executive Brett Hurt.

Any Questions?

Another service from Bazaarvoice is helping merchants mine input from consumers who are still considering a purchase. The Whitney Automotive Group, which runs auto-parts supply site JCWhitney.com, watched sales jump after it hired Bazaarvoice to add customer reviews to its site three years ago. But the comments alone couldn't help with another problem: shoppers inadvertently buying the wrong product.

So two years ago, the company asked Bazaarvoice to add the capability for shoppers to pose questions about products before they buy, instead of just leaving comments after the fact. The service allows customers to "let us know what information isn't out there," says Tom West, JC Whitney's chief executive.

It also sparks discussions among shoppers about the company's products. Normally, online shoppers ask questions about products by sending an email to the store, or phoning a call center. The answers a shopper is given only benefit that one person—other shoppers don't get to listen in. Now, when a JC Whitney customer posts a question on the site, other customers or JC Whitney employees or suppliers can post answers that all shoppers can see. The software keeps track of which questions have and haven't been answered, and directs new questions to employees who are experts on the subject.

The feature hasn't increased sales much, says Mr. West, but it did cause the company's product return rate to drop 23% in the first year after the system was put in place, compared with the previous year, for those products that had received a critical mass of queries.

"It turns out that if it was a question for one person, it was a question for even more," says Mr. West. "While we may lose a sale, we also prevent a return."

Bazaarvoice has been extending the service to suppliers who want to answer the questions asked about their products on retailers' sites. For example, Samsung Electronics uses the service to answer questions on BestBuy.com and other sites about its television sets, signing its answers "Mr. Samsung."

Oct 6, 2009

A New Web Tool to Take Control of Your Health - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By STEVE LOHR

The national health care debate right now is all about giving more people affordable access to doctors and hospitals. Yet the vast majority of health care decisions — 80 percent or more, experts say — are really made by individuals, instead of medical professionals, whether choices are about diet and exercise or ways of managing chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease.

The long-term answer to improving the health of the nation’s population and curbing costs, experts agree, is to help people make smarter decisions day in and day out about their own health. And the most powerful potential tool in the march toward intelligent consumerism in health care may be the Web.

That is why on Tuesday, a start-up company led by Adam Bosworth, former head of the Google Health team, plans to become the newest entrant to the online consumer health business.

Already, surveys show that a majority of adults in America routinely scour the Internet for health information. Doctors joke that the standard second opinion of diagnosis and treatment has become a patient’s Google search, with the results printed out and brought to the doctor’s office.

But the Web is still mainly a vast trove of generalized health information. The ideal, health experts say, would be to combine personal data with health information to deliver tailored health plans for individuals. That is what Mr. Bosworth and his San Francisco-based company, Keas (pronounced KEE-ahs) Inc., mean to do.

Using the Keas system, for example, a person with Type 2 diabetes might receive reminders, advice on diet and exercise, questions and prompts presented on the Web site or delivered by e-mail or text messages — all personalized for the person’s age, gender, weight and other health conditions.

Although success is far from certain, Keas has some big partners, including Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault.

Health technology experts say Keas is at the forefront of the effort to combine advanced Web and database technologies so it can personalize health education. The promise, they say, is a big step forward for online health tools, and could help accelerate their adoption — much as the spreadsheet program helped kick-start the personal computer industry back in the early 1980s.

“This is the next generation of applications for online health care,” said Dr. David C. Kibbe, a health technology expert and senior adviser to the American Academy of Family Physicians, who is also a member of the Keas advisory board.

The Obama administration has drafted its guidelines for producing electronic health records — patient records held by doctors and hospitals — with applications like Keas in mind. To qualify for government subsidies, the electronic records must be able to generate patient education materials that help guide care, and eventually share information with personally controlled health records of the sort offered by Google Health and Microsoft Health Vault.

“The goal is not just health care information, but knowledge about what that means and what action to take,” said Dr. John D. Halamka, chief information officer at the Harvard Medical School, and a member of a federal advisory group on electronic health records. “And that is what Keas, and others in different ways, are really starting to think through.”

Other initial partners of Keas are impressed with its technology. Healthwise, a nonprofit supplier of online health information, has created 15 care plans for Keas so far, including ones on high blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, weight management and stress management.

Healthwise provides health content to major managed care companies, insurers and Web portals, including Kaiser Permanente, Aetna, WebMD, Revolution Health, Yahoo, MSN and AOL.

But Keas, said Jim Giuffre, president of Healthwise, has a feature that is distinct from other health services online. “They have developed the technology to make decisions from personalized data,” Mr. Giuffre said. “We think it’s going to help consumers make better health care choices.”

Dr. Alan R. Greene, a clinical professor of pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, has two children’s care plans on Keas, for ear infections and asthma, and is working on others. Dr. Greene has done projects with WebMD and Yahoo in the past. “But this little start-up has an extremely powerful tool, both personalized and interactive,” he said.

For medical experts, Keas is currently helping them with technical assistance. But the company intends to keep simplifying the tools so that individual physicians or health experts can build their own care plans.

The technical game plan at Keas bears the imprint of Mr. Bosworth’s career. As a senior engineer at Microsoft in the 1990s, he led the design team that created Access, a personal computer database program, introduced in 1992, which enabled nonprogrammers to build databases. Later, Mr. Bosworth focused on Internet software, working on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser and then XML, an open technology for tagging text documents on the Web and data sharing between programs.

Database expertise, easy-to-use tools for nonexperts and automated data sharing among Web documents are all essential ingredients in the personalized care plans.

At Google, which he joined in 2004, Mr. Bosworth worked on Gmail, Blogger, online spreadsheets and other products. But the company’s leaders knew he was interested in using Internet technology to improve health care. Having studied history at Harvard, Mr. Bosworth is a voracious and eclectic reader and a globe-trotting traveler. (The name “kea” refers to a species of alpine parrot, which he spotted on the South Island of New Zealand).

“I spent 25 years of my life building Lego blocks for computing,” said Mr. Bosworth, 54, adding that the time had come to pursue wider horizons.

His years at Google, Mr. Bosworth said, were good ones, and the work the health team was doing with personal health records was important. Moving people’s data online, where individuals can control it, he said, would be vital to using Internet technology to improve health care — and only big companies like Google and Microsoft can do that.

“But I decided my focus should be on the other side of the equation — what to do with the data,” he said.

So Mr. Bosworth left Google, founded Keas and started hiring people in March 2008. The company has 24 employees, and last December it received venture capital backing from Atlas Ventures and Ignition Partners.

The Keas site requires a user to sign in and fill out a questionnaire. Personal health records from Google Health and Microsoft Health Vault can be automatically fed into the Keas care plans.

Another early partner is Quest Diagnostics, the nation’s largest clinical laboratory company, and, with permission, an individual’s lab data can influence the Keas plans. Users can put in as much or as little personal information as they want. Because Keas works with care providers, like doctors, it is required by law to adhere to all federal rules under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, for encrypting and handling information to safeguard the privacy of personal information, Mr. Bosworth said.

The care plans present personalized status reports, as individualized dashboards, showing a person to be in the red, yellow or green bands. Green is good, and care plans make recommendations on how to get there.

Initially, the care plans will be free, but eventually Keas will include subscriptions for plans, probably at a few dollars a month. Keas will take a slice, and pass the rest on to the plan creator — the model used by the Apple’s iPhone applications store.

“We’re still learning, so we’re in no rush to charge,” Mr. Bosworth said. “But the idea is that people will get paid for doing things that are really engaging and useful.”

In the long term, Mr. Bosworth hopes Keas will evolve into a marketplace, where health experts are the sellers, and consumers who want the best personalized advice are the buyers. “I think that’s a pretty big idea,” he said. “If it works, it helps drive consumerism into health care.”

Sep 24, 2009

Novice Authors Must Promote Themselves, Since Publishers Won't - washingtonpost.com

With Promotion Money Tight, Authors Take to Online Sites To Toot Their Own Horns

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 24, 2009

Poor Kelly Corrigan, first-time author, didn't get invited to this weekend's National Book Festival on the Mall to plug her 2008 memoir, "The Middle Place." She won't be rubbing shoulders with heavyweight authors such as Sue Monk Kidd, John Grisham or Pulitzer winner Junot Diaz. No major newspaper bothered to review the California mom's tale about cancer and family and recovery when it was released. Her publisher didn't send her on tour. All the old-school staples of book promotion -- the book festival, the tour, the glowing newspaper review -- Corrigan got none of them.

What was a newbie author to do?

She cobbled together a trailer for her book on her home computer, using iMovie software, downloading a free tune off the Web for background music, and stuck it on her Web site. Her agent helped get her on one network television morning show. About 20 friends hosted book parties, which she hit on a self-funded three-week blitz, selling books out of the trunk of her car. A guy shot video of her reading an essay at one of these parties, and she posted it on YouTube when the paperback came out.

A year later, the book has sold about 80,000 copies in hardcover and another 260,000 in paperback, according to Nielsen BookScan data. It sat on the New York Times bestseller list for 20 weeks, peaking at No. 2. That homemade trailer has been viewed more than 100,000 times. The video of her reading has drawn 4.5 million hits. She's in Washington on Thursday, speaking at the Congressional Families Cancer Prevention Award luncheon. Then she will plow into more than a dozen paid speaking gigs across the country in the next six weeks.

"I hand-sold at least 2,000 to 3,000 copies," the 42-year-old said in an interview this week from her home in Oakland. "And while the hardcover was doing well, everything changed with that video from the reading."

Corrigan, spending $3,700 for the Web site and her tour, figured out a path through the weird new-media maze of authors overseeing their own marketing and promotion, using the Internet and networks of friends to get their little-known works off the ground.

Book publishers actively market and promote authors, of course, particularly the big names, but for thousands of writers it's a figure-it-out-yourself world of creating book trailers, Web sites and blogs, social networking and crashing on friends' couches during a tour you arrange.

"Being an author has become much more of an ongoing relationship with your audience through the Web, rather than just writing a book and disappearing while you write the next one," says Liate Stehlik, publisher of William Morrow and Avon Books. "You have to be out there in the online world, talking and participating."

Authors are expected to behave like mini-entrepreneurs, says Kamy Wicoff, founder and CEO of She Writes, a Web site devoted to helping women writers promote their books. She started the site in June. More than 4,000 writers have joined.

"The landscape has altered so fundamentally and irrevocably that almost no one is immune from finding ways to participate in the promotion of their books," Wicoff says. "Writers with small advances and limited resources are expected to treat their book as a new company, with marketing and promotion and PR."

This trend is driven by the availability and ease of Internet marketing, the expense (and diminishing use) of author tours and the need to keep up with the competition. More than 560,000 books were published in the United States last year, a $25 billion pie of which everyone wants a slice.

"The fragmentation of the market is staggering," says Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, a book audience research firm in New York. "Authors walk into bookstores and think they're cluttered, and wonder how browsers could find their book in there. The problem is, the Web is giga-cluttered by comparison."

For some established icons such as E.L. Doctorow, John Irving or Toni Morrison, the established round of reviews and readings at major festivals is promotion enough. For pop-culture mainstays like Grisham, Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, fans are primed and waiting for their next efforts.

Many other authors -- the media personalities, the pundits, the politicians, the self-help gurus -- "are actually selling their book long before they sell the book," says Richard Pine, a literary agent for three decades and co-founder of InkWell Management. These people, he says, are establishing who they are and what they have to say and are building an audience years before they actually have a book on the shelves.

This reader familiarity is the biggest factor in sales, according to repeated studies carried out by Hildick-Smith's firm. About 60 percent of respondents in surveys say the decisive factor in their decision to purchase a book is that they are already fans of the author.

But most authors are much more like Corrigan. Or, say, Monica Holloway.

The Los Angeles-based mom got good reviews for her first book, a 2007 memoir called "Driving With Dead People." Her second, "Cowboy and Wills," about her autistic son and his dog, is coming out this month. She's hired a consultant to help with Internet publicity. She's got her own Web site (which she pays for), hired a company to put together a trailer for the book, and commissioned someone to write background music for it. She's worked hard to make sure the red on the Web site matches the red on the book cover, ensuring a professional appearance. She's started blogging on the Web site of her publisher, Simon and Schuster, and is networking to set up book club appearances.

"It's all Internet, Internet, Internet," she says of the promotional process. "It's crazy, you emerge from this place of solitude in writing and then switch into the hot glare of 'market yourself now!' It's very uncomfortable, and you try to get past it with some sort of sophistication."

Book trailers are one of the newest promotional outlets. Everybody's got them, little video commercials for their books, something like movie trailers. Grisham's are 20 seconds; Corrigan's is about two minutes.

John McQueeny, chief operating officer at TurnHere Inc., a media production company based in San Francisco, has seen his company make "hundreds and hundreds" of these videos since it got into the business in 2006. He's hired mostly by publishing companies, he says, but a bargain-basement video for a writer working solo would cost about $2,000.

"We're not shooting talking heads in studios," he says. "We're capturing a story about the author, often on a location relevant to the content of the book. It's a way to convey the meaning of the book in moving images and sound . . . and relative to the cost of a tour, it's extremely inexpensive."

So all these shiny things that go fast are really fun to produce, and some are even fun to watch. But do they move units any better than the old-fashioned author signings in a local bookstore? Do they help a book sell more copies, or merely keep pace with others in the marketplace?

Nobody really knows, a range of publishers and industry watchers say. There is not a clear-cut means of connecting Web site traffic, say, to results in sales, and some experts warn new authors not to go overboard.

"There's so much you can do for free in Web promotion that it's just crazy," says Christopher Jackson, executive editor at Spiegel and Grau. "There's been a lot of money wasted in publishing on slickly produced author Web sites that, in the end, really didn't lead anywhere."

Annik LaFarge, a prominent Web site designer based in New York, works with high-profile authors such as Mitch "Tuesdays With Morrie" Albom to help them stay in touch with their fans.

"I get calls several times a week from writers asking me to help them with their projects, but I encourage a lot of them not to do that much," she says. "Unless you have the time and money to invest in it and do new things with the site and keep filing new content, it may not be worth it. . . . The main problem is the cacophony of the Internet. It's difficult to make any sort of impression at all."

Pine, the literary agent, says his best advice to authors is still "write the best book you possibly can." After that, he says, put your name and face out there, no matter the odds. He names Stephen King as "the king of taking a chance on things digital," and salutes Corrigan's seat-of-the-pants success story.

"If you don't try it, you don't know if it will work," he says. "Her videos could have not worked just as easily as it turned out they did. But she got out there, threw herself in the game and look what happened."

Aug 27, 2009

Groundbreaking Australian book gets to the heart of the YouTube phenomenon

13/08/2009

Australia's most successful YouTuber, Natalie Tran, is not a stripper, a file sharing pirate or a cy

ber bully as popular wisdom about the nature of YouTube might have you think.

YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green analyses the most successful videos with some surprising results. This analysis of the most popular, most viewed, and most discussed YouTube clips found that it’s not just videos about cyber-bullying or bizarre accidents that top the charts.

In the case of Natalie Tran, she is a highly successful performer who is also deeply embedded in the social network of YouTube, treating it as a virtual community where she is on equal terms with her audience. Tran’s regularly produced YouTube act (which goes under the name Community Channel) is based around the idea of a ‘bedroom vlog’.

“The Vlog, or videoblog, where the performer speaks straight-to-camera from an everyday setting like a bedroom, is probably the video form that is most representative of YouTube’s community and culture”, explains Dr Jean Burgess, the Australian co-author of the first comprehensive book on the YouTube phenomenon. “Many of YouTube’s most subscribed channels are home-grown examples of this form, not "big media" productions”

Rather than simply trading in negative and harmful images, the book demonstrates YouTube is a place where people share jokes, ideas and intimate details of their lives. It also found that when it comes to traditional media, the site is one where people go to understand history and current affairs through the sharing of news footage and political speeches.

So while most of us use YouTube to catch up on the latest viral sensation or to find our favourite music videos, for a small but significant number of users it’s also an online community where, as Burgess says, "Thousands of active YouTubers like Tran share ideas, entertain us and each other, and form an active network of lead users with high levels of digital literacy."

Also see Jean Burgess' blog for more details