Web 2.0 and Vanity Presses

Commercial book publishers have been criticized for fearing the paradigm shift of the Internet, and for being slow to integrate new technologies into their websites and their marketing strategies. Because I do freelance reviewing, I spend a lot of time wading through the websites of the larger presses, and I can attest that they're a real drag to search and navigate—fifteen different imprints of the same title to scroll past, genres with too much content to browse, etc. However, companies that offer self-publishing have apparently not been so lethargic. In fact, one of the prizes in the Books category of the 2007 Web 2.0 awards was given to www. lulu.com, a company that offers self-publishing services.

If you want to play around, you can log in as InteractivePublishing, with the password intpub. The site is definitely very Web 2.0—a web-based platform (with upselling of additional special services—marketing, translation, packaging, etc.), wherein they offer the technology, and you control your own content and design. Not only that, but you can sell your book right on the site and buy books from other self-publishers. You can join groups for children's authors, horror writers, etc., or you can create your own community. There's a blog, live chat, multimedia and so on.

Most importantly, there's a rating system. Usually vanity presses are disparaged because of the lack of quality control—scholarly and commercial reviews can't get involved with their lists because there'd be so much schlock to wade through. But although Lulu will facilitate the publication of anything and everything, there is a pre-screening process powered by its users, so it might actually have a shot at competing with commercial presses in terms of getting press and selling copies.

Project Gutenburg has nothing to do with vanity presses, but it is kind of Web. 2.0. They offer totally free access to online books that are no longer under copyright. It's accomplished almost entirely by volunteers. I used to be a volunteer proofreader with them, using their all-Web interface. There are cross-platform capabilities, and although there isn't actually voting, the site does track and publicize the top downloads. Moreover, the site is extremely vocal and committed about the freedom to download, share, distribute information, which seems almost as much Web 2.0 as RSS feeds.

Book Publishing and Web 2.0

Chronicle Books, an innovative trade publisher based in San Francisco, has translated its quirky print products (e.g., gift items and clever kits) into an online bonanza. They feature podcasts, a blog, ePostcards, and videos, and they continually come up with ever more creative ways to make the Web a place to feature, display, and market their titles.

"21 Surefire tips" link fixed

Link fixed in 21 Surefire Tips Article and Sermo article below.

Apologies to those who were trying to follow the link before.

Pfizer and Sermo

Sermo is the largest online physician community devoted to sharing clinical information and trends in healthcare. Any member physician can pose questions, and get volunteer responses from other physicians. Pfizer and Sermo have just announced their commitment to a strategic collaboration in which Pfizer will share its knowledge base with the Sermo community. The expectation is faster and more focused communications that respond to specific clinical problems in real time.

Ad support as a complete business model for consumer mags

Since last week we talked about the viability of sponsorship as a sustainable business model for PLoS, I thought it would be interesting this week to look for a few consumer magazines that depend basically entirely on advertising, eschewing subscriptions altogether. I have to say that this was much harder than I'd thought.

Obviously, it's much easier for an online periodical than a print periodical to go totally over to advertising, asking for nothing from readers, but even the e-zines I looked at had small exceptions to the advertising-only rule. The Onion is an almost completely free publication that has had notable success both in print and digitally. Still, The Onion also makes some revenues from merchandise, though I can't imagine it's much; and people who live outside the free distribution range have to subscribe. Wired is a technology mag that sells the print version, but has completely free online content. It both recycles some features from the print mag and adds new stuff. The New Yorker has the same business model: it has completely free online access, which includes some but not all the print features, plus extras. Salon is an online-only magazine, without a print component. It upsells users, offering a huge amount of stuff for free (with the option, every now and then, to watch or to skip an advertisement), but it also suggests that you subscribe to Salon Premium.

Tangentially, here's an article (from last year) on how magazines are doing utilizing Web 2.0 constructively. It's kind of what you'd expect, but it's a nice summary.

Consumer Magazines

I looked at some of Rodale's magazines - Prevention, Women's Health, Runner's World, etc. They all have some Web 2.0 features (blogs, RSS feeds, videos, most popular ratings, etc.). I looked at these sites because previously I saw a video of an NYU conference last year on "Who's in Charge? Old Media, New Media... or the Consumer?" When I watched it, I thought it was interesting that Steve Murphy from Rodale talked about how the websites were deliberately decentralized and each magazine had an independent site. My company has gone back and forth about whether to focus online on the individual product brands or have everyone under a strong company brand.

21 Surefire Tips for a Successful Blog Launch

A really useful article on how to best promote your blog.
"The 21 points included in this checklist will cover the basics of what you need to do during those all-important first two weeks of your blog’s life. While there are no guarantees in the blogosphere, if you follow these launching tips closely, your chances of success are greatly improved."
See avivadirectory.

FYI. I stumbled on this using "StumbleUpon". It is also highly rated via Digg.

Some of you may want to use these tips for your own blogs.

Enjoy.

No Boundaries

Consumers have been enjoying National Geographic magazine since 1888. Now there's a TV channel (international and U.S.), as well as a web site and various other media associated with it, e.g., an Education site, Adventure magazine, National Geographic Explorer Classroom magazine, National Geographic Kids magazine, Traveler magazine, books, CDs, DVDs, maps, retail store, film projects and screenings, concerts, lectures, and exhibitions at the National Geographic Museum.

Their mission: Founded in 1888 to "increase and diffuse geographic knowledge," the Society works to inspire people to care about the planet.

Banks do Web 2.0

If a bank can do it, so can I. Techneophyte's first homework exercise: present a 2.0 site. Royal Bank's blog  meets several criteria. The student bloggers on it involve (1) people talking to machines, while voting on preferred bloggers is (2) "bottom up" and involves a (3) publish-and-subscribe mode vs. simple searching. Links to facebook and other social networking sites further make this site (4) relationship vs. transaction oriented. Users can link from there to a separate, student banking site on which Royal Bank offers (5) micro-aggregation -- pie charts, etc., representing that individual user's finances. Formerly, one would have to have a trust fund to merit such reporting. Now, in keeping with Web 2.0, it's power to the people!

STM Open Access Journals

The Public Library of Science offers an open-access collection of journals for the scientific community. The site hosts journals for Biology, Medicine, Computational Biology, Genetics, Pathogens, PLoS ONE (general science and medicine research), and Neglected Tropical Diseases.

The site is a model for how non-profit organizations (like the American Institute of Physics) could offer open-source access to their journals. PLoS charges the authors a fee to publish on their site to cover the cost of peer-reviewing among other costs.

For an idea of what open-source really means, this is from the site's FAQ:

Open access means everything published in PLoS journals is immediately available online for free. Read it, host it, print it, copy it, distribute it—all use is fair use, so long as the original authors and source are credited.

-B. Miller

Canada's GPHIN

The Global Public Health Intelligence Network uses machine-to-machine communication to search and filter Internet reports in various languages for information that may relate to public health threats—viral outbreaks, contaminated water supplies, famine, etc. It then passes the results on as HITs to be analyzed by officials at Canada's Public Health Agency.

Any organization may pay a fee to subscribe. While the subscription service is perhaps intended primarily for government or philanthropic health organizations, medical publishers could no doubt benefit from this service as well (as could anyone running a conspiracy theory website).

It's so effective that in February of 2006, Larry Brilliant, head of Google's philanthropic division, committed a $100,000 grant from the Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference to a project that will use GPHIN as the basis for an International System for Total Early Disease Detection.

I didn't find any info on how that's progressing so far—it may be one of those projects for which a 2–4 month time-to-launch does not apply.

iOpenAccess

Taylor & Francis, a leading publisher in scholarly sciences, announces that its "iOpenAccess" option has been extended to cover 31 journals in environmental and agricultural sciences, behavioral sciences, and development studies. This is in addition to the 175 journals from T&F's Chemistry, Mathematics, and Physics portfolios, 7 behavioral science journals from Psychology Press, and medical and bioscience journals from Informa Healthcare.

All authors whose manuscripts are accepted for publication in one of these iOpenAccess journals will have the option to make their articles available to all via the Journal's website, and to post to repositories, for a one-off fee.

Blogging at the New York Times

Since I work for a newspaper (Die Welt) I'm very interested in what the "traditional" media is doing on the internet. Our online site offers RSS feeds on many different topics, just like the NY Times does. However, it seems unattractive to download any of these feeds as each one (as I understand it) only focuses on one topic. What the reader needs is an indiviudalised RSS feed that knows his / her interests. Is anyone doing that yet / what would it take? -I also have another question relating to housingmaps.com, which I wrote about last week. I mentioned that people put mashed up maps on their websites, and that google lets them use googleearth etc. for it. I was wondering when "mash ups" are legal? Are they usually done by users - or does something like Facebook qualify as a giant mash up? Still trying to figure out what exactly the term entails...

Acclaim's DANCE Online (Possible "Mashups"?)

LUIS MORENO - I'm having a little trouble finding an appropriate example of either a "Really Simple Syndication" , "Mashups", "Social Bookmarking"or a "AJAX" because I am still getting myself familiar with the terms. Maybe I can better understand their meanings by the next class. I can across a website that may or may not fall under the "Mashups" descriptions... but I do know it's definitely WEB 2.0.

Acclaim's DANCE Online is a a free-to-play multiplayer online dancing game. It is considered to be a Massively multiplayer online game (also called MMO) meaning a computer game which is capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously.

DANCE Online enables players to cooperate and compete with each other on a grand scale, and at times interact with people around the world over an INSTANT MESSAGING feature that is also a "built-in" part of the game. (People usually talk to each other before and after dance battles)

These type of games started out in ASIA, however what makes DANCE! Online original is the fact that it features top talent and master recordings from Warner Music Group Corp , making it the first free multiplayer online dance game to feature major label content and artists.

During the launch of the game ....Atlantic Records recording artist Cupid, with his hit single “Cupid Shuffle,” made a personal virtual appearance in the game. The idea is to have more recording artists create their own avatar and play the game live online and chat with fans.

HOW TO PLAY & DETAILS: Players of DANCE! Online can create their own avatar (create a character) and use either the keyboard or most PC compatible dance pads to match the beat of the song and to make their character perform choreographed dance steps.

Within DANCE Online , there is virtual currency where the player can earn and accumulate money. Players are able to purchase optional items from the game shop to customize their virtual characters with clothing and various accessories. Players can also purchase “song packs” to dance to even more songs from WMG’s catalog. The game is free and will be supported by in-game advertising provided by IGA Worldwide.

VIDEO: THE GAME IN ACTION



COUPLE BATTLES:

Collections of RSS Feeds

I have to admit that I have never signed up for RSS feeds, so I was looking around to find some that I found interesting. I found a few sites that list multiple RSS feeds for various types of information. One is Chordata which lists thousands of different feeds from areas of sports, business, health, etc. Registered users can also rate the feeds. You can also recommend other feeds to the site.

RSS Benefits

I kept this article for my file on "things we should be doing but aren't doing." It's written by a law librarian and discusses how it would be helpful to her if more publishers used RSS feeds to inform her about new titles instead of using direct mail, email alerts, etc. For example, the article mentions that John Wiley has a RSS feed for new titles by subject. What I'm interested in finding out is how hard this is to get started.

Get Any Content from the Web

Dapper.net aims to make it easy and possible for anyone to extract and reuse content from any website. By doing so, the hope is to allow others to realize their creativity and implement new and exciting services and applications.

This provides new means for people to access content (e.g., RSS) from an individual site. Dapper can be used to create feeds, widgets, and APIs with the content and links.

Interesting Sites

http://www.mla.org/map_single An interactive mashup of US census data on languages with maps via a proprietary software (GIS). You can get a tour of the varous features at http://www.mla.org/map_tour106.

http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=9TSZK4G35XEZJZG21T60 This seems like Web 2.0. but what do you call it? This particular example enables users to volunteer to examine satellite photos of the Nevada landscape to help find the missing flier Steve Fossett; one more way of using the web to harness the collective energy of a large number of people (and their computers). The whole framework is a confusing Amazon beta site called "Mechanical Turk" that lets you use their APIs to build applications to do this sort of thing; you can even pay people to take on these tasks, called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks). The site already has 66,179 projects that you can work on.

http://essay.blogs.nytimes.com/ An interesting blog based on a NYTimes essay, "What's the Matter With College," published in July + the responding essays solicited from college students + a growing file of reader comments on the winning essays + "popular tags" of the essays (weighted by frequency?) + audio files of the original essay and the first-prize winner + a search function to search all 600 submitted essays (by word, state, institution, and year of graduation) + (and let's not forget this) interactive and ever-changing advertising. Using the web as a platform--kind of a digital soap box where millions of people can comment on six people commenting on an essay commenting on millions of people. This resource becomes richer the more it is used, but at some point it becomes pretty unwieldy--already there are hundreds of posted comments with no organizational principle other than chronology.

http://www.nform.ca/publications/social-software-building-block A helpful description of how "social software" works, not technically, but in terms of what it allows people to do.

Personalized Start Pages

Traditionally, to subscribe to an RSS feed, you first had to install a news or feed reader on your computer (or you could use most browsers' favorites/bookmarks menu functions). Personalized start pages will also manage the RSS feeds for you though, as well as providing a place to put all your downloaded widgets. I like igoogle best because I can see my gmail inside it, and because you can consolidate all your feeds into google reader so you don't have quite so many boxes floating around. But pages like Netvibes and Pageflakes are also quite popular (for some more background, see Mashable's review of Pageflakes).

As you can see, although these start pages are infinitely customizable, they generally come with some RSS feeds pre-loaded, from big publishers like the New York Times or Flickr, as well as with some of the most popular widgets pre-installed, like the Wikipedia or amazon search bars. I was wondering how the developers of these start pages determine which feeds and widgets to put on the default template for all new users - whether it's just based on popularity and dependability, or whether the publishers actually pay for that placement. I wasn't able to find out much (anything), but it did start me thinking about what would be involved for a publisher that wanted to offer its own version of a personalized start page. I don't know how involved an endeavour that is or whether there is or will be Open Source technology to facilitate it, but it struck me as something that could substantially benefit companies that have existing websites and an existence beyond the start page.

For example, the company I work for full-time is a membership organization that provides educational and career services to the financial industry. If we offered a personalized start page to members and non-members, it could not only include a feed about our upcoming events and member benefits, but could pull feeds from online industry publications like Crain's, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and so on. Constant updates for various exchanges could run in our space, and members who were logged in to their accounts could also have special free access to subscription feeds from Reuters, Bloomberg, Capital IQ, and so forth. Special widgets to calculate stock values, exchange rates, etc., could be pre-installed. Convincing industry professionals to set NYSSA as their home page and to use us as the portal through which a whole realm of online tools and information is accessed would be a substantial benefit in terms of general visibility, in terms of ease of publicizing upcoming events and other special offers, and in terms of promoting (paid) membership in our organization to current non-members in the financial community.

On the other hand, the small literary journal where I'm an editor could benefit from the same scheme in quite a different way. If we set up a personalized start page, it could include a feed for our weekly web-exclusive publications of poetry, prose, and interviews; feeds for updates to the blogs and home sites of our contributors and editors; and feeds for updates to comparable journals and small-press publishers. If we made it interesting and effective enough, people who had never heard of or read our journal might come to it simply as a personalized start page, and might then be drawn to become part of our audience or even a print subscriber.

So it struck me that, as feeds and widgets and stuff like that grows increasingly popular, actually creating and managing personalized start pages holds a lot more marketing and revenue potential for companies than simply putting their info out there in a feed. On the other hand, there are doubtless drawbacks -- technological? expenditure related? -- that I haven't considered.

Vox.com blogsite

Sixapart.com hosts a blog site very similar to blogger called Vox.com. The biggest difference is that you can make blog posts and include your own information that you've already uploaded to flickr.com, photobucket.com, youtube, amazon and several more. You can even use public image sites like imagehost.com to insert their available images into your posts.

The site also combines the blogs together into a social networking site like myspace or facebook. The site takes advantage of metadata by tagging words in your profile, as well as any books, videos, images, etc. that you post.

Check out the page I set up.

The site tour may also be of interest.

-B.Miller

Online Word Processor

This software-as-a-service (SaaS) application will work online or offline, in a browser or on a desktop, on Windows, Macintosh or Linux, and provide the exact same experience regardless of platform or connection status. Adobe is promising that Buzzword will be the next generation in online, collaborative document creation and management.