Yellow Cucumbers Edible
2 years ago
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Publishers to Get More Revenue Share From Amazon’s Kindle
Amazon.com said Monday that it would give magazine and newspaper publishers more of the revenue that it collects from the periodicals sold via the Kindle Store.
Amazon will increase the royalties to 70 percent beginning Dec. 1. Publishers previously received about 30 percent, though royalties varied by publisher.
By making the royalty rate more attractive to publishers, Amazon is trying to encourage them to sell digital versions of their periodicals in the Kindle Store, perhaps at prices that are more attractive to readers.
From The New York Times
Amazon will increase the royalties to 70 percent beginning Dec. 1. Publishers previously received about 30 percent, though royalties varied by publisher.
By making the royalty rate more attractive to publishers, Amazon is trying to encourage them to sell digital versions of their periodicals in the Kindle Store, perhaps at prices that are more attractive to readers.
From The New York Times
Monday, November 1, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Thursday, October 21, 2010
The Toxic Side of Being, Literally, Green
Kermit was correct, being green really is tough, so tough that the color itself fails dismally. The cruel truth is that most forms of the color green, the most powerful symbol of sustainable design, aren’t ecologically responsible, and can be damaging to the environment.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” said Michael Braungart, the German chemist who co-wrote “Cradle to Cradle,” the best-selling sustainable design book, and co-founded the U.S. design consultancy McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. “The color green can never be green, because of the way it is made. It’s impossible to dye plastic green or to print green ink on paper without contaminating them.”
This means that green-colored plastic and paper cannot be recycled or composted safely, because they could contaminate everything else. The crux of the problem is that green is such a difficult color to manufacture that toxic substances are often used to stabilize it.
Take Pigment Green 7, the commonest shade of green used in plastics and paper. It is an organic pigment but contains chlorine, some forms of which can cause cancer and birth defects. Another popular shade, Pigment Green 36, includes potentially hazardous bromide atoms as well as chlorine; while inorganic Pigment Green 50 is a noxious cocktail of cobalt, titanium, nickel and zinc oxide.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/arts/05iht-design5.html?ref=color&pagewanted=all
“Ironic, isn’t it?” said Michael Braungart, the German chemist who co-wrote “Cradle to Cradle,” the best-selling sustainable design book, and co-founded the U.S. design consultancy McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. “The color green can never be green, because of the way it is made. It’s impossible to dye plastic green or to print green ink on paper without contaminating them.”
This means that green-colored plastic and paper cannot be recycled or composted safely, because they could contaminate everything else. The crux of the problem is that green is such a difficult color to manufacture that toxic substances are often used to stabilize it.
Take Pigment Green 7, the commonest shade of green used in plastics and paper. It is an organic pigment but contains chlorine, some forms of which can cause cancer and birth defects. Another popular shade, Pigment Green 36, includes potentially hazardous bromide atoms as well as chlorine; while inorganic Pigment Green 50 is a noxious cocktail of cobalt, titanium, nickel and zinc oxide.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/arts/05iht-design5.html?ref=color&pagewanted=all
Sunday, October 17, 2010
News Corp Bans Cablevision Customers From Watching Hulu
When the clock struck midnight on Saturday, Cablevision customers could no longer watch FOX on their TV. That's because News Corp. (which owns FOX) and Cablevision couldn't come to an agreement on the fees that Cablevision should pay News Corp. It's something that's happened before with other networks and other cable providers but the new twist is that News Corp. is using their stake in Hulu to ban Cablevision Internet users from accessing FOX content on Hulu as well.
The problem this raises is that if programmers are using a ban of accessing Hulu (an internet website, after all) as leverage against a cable provider for TV fees, it's only going to kill the hope and promise of net neutrality. If cable providers and programmers continue to have their way, the web could turn into the big fucking mess that cable is.
And even worse, what happens when a cable provider and progammer, like for example Comcast—which owns NBC and thus has a stake in Hulu—one day decides that in order to access NBC content on Hulu, you need to have Comcast and other cable providers get locked out? It's a messy situation that's bound to get messier with the new and different avenues of content we can access now.
from Gizmondo
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Debate on Twitter
Can Twitter Lead People to the Streets?
Introduction
Alexandra Zsigmond
"Social networks are effective at increasing participation — by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires," he writes. And the "weak ties" created by these platforms, he adds, cannot promote the discipline and strategy that true political activism requires.
Can social media tools like Twitter nurture political action? What are their limitations and how might that change as social media mature?
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/09/29/can-twitter-lead-people-to-the-streets?ex=1301457600&en=6a8f91b2b47adcc6&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=OP-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M169-ROS-1010-HDR&WT.mc_ev=click
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
"In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.
In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory."
from an article by Guy Deutscher in The New York Times
In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory."
from an article by Guy Deutscher in The New York Times
Monday, September 27, 2010
This is a news website article about a scientific paper
In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?
In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of "scare quotes" to ensure that it's clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.
In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research "challenges".
If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims.
This paragraph elaborates on the claim, adding weasel-words like "the scientists say" to shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist.
[...]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/24/1
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Blogging Is Alive and Well, Says Report
By FREDERIC LARDINOIS of ReadWriteWeb
Published: September 24, 2010
While blogging was still a major topic of discussion just a few years ago, things have been rather quiet around it in recent times. Even in the so-called blogosphere, we don't talk a lot about the actual activity of blogging anymore these days. According to a new report from research firm eMarketer, however, blogging is still alive and well. Today, half of all Internet users read blogs and and while blogging itself remains somewhat of a niche activity, about 12% of U.S. Internet users update a blog at least once per month.
http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2010/09/24/24readwriteweb-blogging-is-alive-and-well-says-report-17921.html?ref=technology
Published: September 24, 2010
While blogging was still a major topic of discussion just a few years ago, things have been rather quiet around it in recent times. Even in the so-called blogosphere, we don't talk a lot about the actual activity of blogging anymore these days. According to a new report from research firm eMarketer, however, blogging is still alive and well. Today, half of all Internet users read blogs and and while blogging itself remains somewhat of a niche activity, about 12% of U.S. Internet users update a blog at least once per month.
http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2010/09/24/24readwriteweb-blogging-is-alive-and-well-says-report-17921.html?ref=technology
Get a Clue: What Do People Remember About Your Site?
September 24, 2010
By FREDERIC LARDINOIS of ReadWriteWeb
You've invested good money in your web design, but do you know what your customers actually remember about your site? Clue, a new tool from Bay Area interaction design and design strategy firm ZURB, lets you create a 5-second interactive memory test that you can use to test what people remember about your product. The tool is available for free and you don't even have to log in to use it.
In a 5-second test, you get to see a website for 5 seconds and then you have to enter up to five things you remember about the screenshot you just saw. These tests are pretty common in usability studies and ZURB isn't the first company to offer a web-based version of this. FiveSecondTest.com, for example, offers more features than Clue, but it's also a paid service.
With Clue, ZURB focused on making the creating of these test as easy to use as possible. To get started, you just have to enter the URL of the site you want to test. Clue will take a screenshot of the site and return a link that you can then give to your test subjects. As ZURB's lead marketer Dimitry Dragilev told us, the tool is mainly aimed at small businesses and mom and pop stores, as well as designers who want to quickly test and idea. Given that you can't password-protect your test results, though, you probably don't want to use it for confidential tests.
Once you know what your visitors remember about your site, you can then work on tweaking your site to match what you actually want them to remember about you and your product.
Clue joins ZURB's constantly expanding range of tools like Bounce (our review), Notable and Verify.
http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2010/09/24/24readwriteweb-get-a-clue-what-do-people-remember-about-you-3556.html?ref=technology
By FREDERIC LARDINOIS of ReadWriteWeb
You've invested good money in your web design, but do you know what your customers actually remember about your site? Clue, a new tool from Bay Area interaction design and design strategy firm ZURB, lets you create a 5-second interactive memory test that you can use to test what people remember about your product. The tool is available for free and you don't even have to log in to use it.
In a 5-second test, you get to see a website for 5 seconds and then you have to enter up to five things you remember about the screenshot you just saw. These tests are pretty common in usability studies and ZURB isn't the first company to offer a web-based version of this. FiveSecondTest.com, for example, offers more features than Clue, but it's also a paid service.
With Clue, ZURB focused on making the creating of these test as easy to use as possible. To get started, you just have to enter the URL of the site you want to test. Clue will take a screenshot of the site and return a link that you can then give to your test subjects. As ZURB's lead marketer Dimitry Dragilev told us, the tool is mainly aimed at small businesses and mom and pop stores, as well as designers who want to quickly test and idea. Given that you can't password-protect your test results, though, you probably don't want to use it for confidential tests.
Once you know what your visitors remember about your site, you can then work on tweaking your site to match what you actually want them to remember about you and your product.
Clue joins ZURB's constantly expanding range of tools like Bounce (our review), Notable and Verify.
http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2010/09/24/24readwriteweb-get-a-clue-what-do-people-remember-about-you-3556.html?ref=technology
Friday, September 24, 2010
The Future of the Book.
The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.
"Meet Nelson, Coupland, and Alice — the faces of tomorrow’s book. Watch global design and innovation consultancy IDEO’s vision for the future of the book. What new experiences might be created by linking diverse discussions, what additional value could be created by connected readers to one another, and what innovative ways we might use to tell our favorite stories and build community around books?"
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
3 Scholars Take On the Business of Book Publishing
Like West Virginia's, the press at Texas Christian University is a small operation. It aims to publish about 20 books a year and has a staff of three people, including Mr. Williams, who handles acquisitions and oversees all operations.
He has been given a three-year window to develop the press, which he says already breaks more or less even. "My main task is to keep the press healthy, try to reduce costs to the university, and look toward the future," he said.
High on Mr. Williams's agenda is making the press more visible to the rest of the university community. "There's not a lot of students and faculty who really know a lot about TCU Press," he said. So he's holding meetings around campus to talk about possible publishing partnerships, student internships, and other ways in which the press can strengthen its home ties.
Then there's the awesome challenge of the digital age to navigate. "We really need to be cognizant of this tremendous revolution that's going on right now, not only in the publishing industry but in the entire concept of literacy," Mr. Williams said.
He will push ahead to convert the press's backlist into e-books and "basically try to do what a number of the healthy academic presses in the country are already doing," he said.
Having studied earlier cycles of publishing upheaval and transformation, Mr. Williams sounds intellectually well positioned to lead a press through the current one. "There are a number of really interesting parallels that can be drawn to the revolution in print culture that occurred in the 18th and early 19th centuries and the kind of revolutions going on today," he said. Print culture—presses, newspapers, readership—exploded in the 19th century. "Similar kinds of explosions are taking place today with the revolution in technology," he said. "I think it's fascinating."
http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Take-On-the-Business/124520/
He has been given a three-year window to develop the press, which he says already breaks more or less even. "My main task is to keep the press healthy, try to reduce costs to the university, and look toward the future," he said.
High on Mr. Williams's agenda is making the press more visible to the rest of the university community. "There's not a lot of students and faculty who really know a lot about TCU Press," he said. So he's holding meetings around campus to talk about possible publishing partnerships, student internships, and other ways in which the press can strengthen its home ties.
Then there's the awesome challenge of the digital age to navigate. "We really need to be cognizant of this tremendous revolution that's going on right now, not only in the publishing industry but in the entire concept of literacy," Mr. Williams said.
He will push ahead to convert the press's backlist into e-books and "basically try to do what a number of the healthy academic presses in the country are already doing," he said.
Having studied earlier cycles of publishing upheaval and transformation, Mr. Williams sounds intellectually well positioned to lead a press through the current one. "There are a number of really interesting parallels that can be drawn to the revolution in print culture that occurred in the 18th and early 19th centuries and the kind of revolutions going on today," he said. Print culture—presses, newspapers, readership—exploded in the 19th century. "Similar kinds of explosions are taking place today with the revolution in technology," he said. "I think it's fascinating."
http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Take-On-the-Business/124520/
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff your CPU can already do
Hold onto your hyperthreaded horses, because this is liable to whip up an angry mob -- Intel's asking customers to pay extra if they want the full power of their store-bought silicon. An eagle-eyed Engadget reader was surfing the Best Buy shelves when he noticed this $50 card -- and sure enough, Intel websites confirm -- that lets you download software to unlock extra threads and cache on the new Pentium G6951 processor. Hardware.info got their hands on an early sample of the chip and discovered it's actually a full 1MB of L3 cache that's enabled plus HyperThreading support, which translates to a modest but noticeable upgrade. This isn't exactly an unprecedented move, as chip companies routinely sell hardware-locked chips all the time in a process known as binning, but there they have a simpler excuse -- binned chips are typically sold with cores or cache locked because that part of their silicon turned out defective after printing. This new idea is more akin to video games that let you "download" extra weapons and features, when those features were on the disc all along. Still, it's an intriguing business model, and before you unleash your rage in comments, you should know that Intel's just testing it out on this low-end processor in a few select markets for now.
from: Engadget
from: Engadget
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Ebook market exploding, says new iDPF survey
By Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords
What you see from my chart is that ebook sales grew nicely between 2002 and 2007, but were really too small to register on the radar screens of most industry watchers. Starting in 2008, however, the growth rate started to accelerate, and then this acceleration continued throughout 2009 and into the first month of 2010.
According to the AAP, in 2009 ebooks accounted for 3.31% of all trade book sales, up from only 1.19% in 2008. Even if sales stay flat from January onward in 2010, we’re looking at ebooks accounting for 6-8% of U.S. book sales in 2010. If sales accelerate further, a 10% monthly run rate is certainly likely by the end of this year. These numbers are dramatically higher than most reasonably-minded industry watchers predicted even a few months ago.
http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/ebook-market-exploding-says-new-idpf-survey/
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Of Two Minds About Books
By the end of this year, 10.3 million people are expected to own e-readers in the United States, buying about 100 million e-books, the market research company Forrester predicts. This is up from 3.7 million e-readers and 30 million e-books sold last year.
The trend is wreaking havoc inside the publishing industry, but inside homes, the plot takes a personal twist as couples find themselves torn over the “right way” to read. At bedtime, a couple might sit side-by-side, one turning pages by lamplight and the other reading Caecilia font in E Ink on a Kindle or backlighted by the illuminated LCD screen of an iPad, each quietly judgmental.
Although there are no statistics on how widespread the battles are, the publishing industry is paying close attention, trying to figure out how to market books to households that read in different ways.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/technology/02couples.html?src=me&ref=technology
The trend is wreaking havoc inside the publishing industry, but inside homes, the plot takes a personal twist as couples find themselves torn over the “right way” to read. At bedtime, a couple might sit side-by-side, one turning pages by lamplight and the other reading Caecilia font in E Ink on a Kindle or backlighted by the illuminated LCD screen of an iPad, each quietly judgmental.Although there are no statistics on how widespread the battles are, the publishing industry is paying close attention, trying to figure out how to market books to households that read in different ways.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/technology/02couples.html?src=me&ref=technology
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."
Nicholas Carr, From _The Atlantic_
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
No Lie! Your Facebook Profile Is the Real You
No dustjackets required
from The Guardian UK
What is the point of dustjackets? The clue can't be in the name: on the shelf, the most dust-prone part of a book is the top, which a jacket doesn't cover (these days, anyway). Decoratively, too, they are a recipe for disappointment. Bring home your expensive new hardback, lift up its gorgeous plumage, and underneath – in the UK at least – you're liable to find rough-textured and drably covered board, with the only graphic element a cruder reproduction of the lettering on the spine of the jacket. In America, land of the deckle edge, your chances of a pleasant surprise are greater; but the jacket remains an unnecessary and vulnerable encumbrance. That, at least, is how it has always seemed to me – and some in the book trade appear to be reaching the same conclusion.
Jacketless hardbacks with cover art printed on them (the technical term is "casewrapped") were once a format reserved for rough environments. It was the style for set texts to be handed down across generations of schoolchildren, and workshop manuals to be kept within reach of greasy fingers. Now, however, it seems to be becoming an increasingly popular option for literary fiction.
What is the point of dustjackets? The clue can't be in the name: on the shelf, the most dust-prone part of a book is the top, which a jacket doesn't cover (these days, anyway). Decoratively, too, they are a recipe for disappointment. Bring home your expensive new hardback, lift up its gorgeous plumage, and underneath – in the UK at least – you're liable to find rough-textured and drably covered board, with the only graphic element a cruder reproduction of the lettering on the spine of the jacket. In America, land of the deckle edge, your chances of a pleasant surprise are greater; but the jacket remains an unnecessary and vulnerable encumbrance. That, at least, is how it has always seemed to me – and some in the book trade appear to be reaching the same conclusion.
Jacketless hardbacks with cover art printed on them (the technical term is "casewrapped") were once a format reserved for rough environments. It was the style for set texts to be handed down across generations of schoolchildren, and workshop manuals to be kept within reach of greasy fingers. Now, however, it seems to be becoming an increasingly popular option for literary fiction.
Digital Disappearance
from Miller-McCune
Once upon a time, news stories were entombed in newspaper “morgues” and rarely saw the dusty light of day.
Now the news never dies. Millions of people can search the archives online — an amazing benefit unless, perhaps, you’re someone who was actually in the news.
In a recent survey of 110 news organizations, the Toronto Star found that increasingly, publishers are fielding regular requests from anxious and embarrassed readers to “unpublish” information, sometimes months or years after it first appeared online.
Once upon a time, news stories were entombed in newspaper “morgues” and rarely saw the dusty light of day.
Now the news never dies. Millions of people can search the archives online — an amazing benefit unless, perhaps, you’re someone who was actually in the news.
In a recent survey of 110 news organizations, the Toronto Star found that increasingly, publishers are fielding regular requests from anxious and embarrassed readers to “unpublish” information, sometimes months or years after it first appeared online.
Publishing: The Revolutionary Future
From The New York Review of Books
The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler's unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don't recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg's German city of Mainz six centuries ago.
Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And no one today can foresee except in broad and sketchy outline the far greater impact that digitization will have on our own future. With the earth trembling beneath them, it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitization offers them to restore, expand, and promote their backlists to a decentralized, worldwide marketplace. New technologies, however, do not await permission. They are, to use Schumpeter's overused term, disruptive, as nonnegotiable as earthquakes.
The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler's unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don't recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg's German city of Mainz six centuries ago.
Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And no one today can foresee except in broad and sketchy outline the far greater impact that digitization will have on our own future. With the earth trembling beneath them, it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitization offers them to restore, expand, and promote their backlists to a decentralized, worldwide marketplace. New technologies, however, do not await permission. They are, to use Schumpeter's overused term, disruptive, as nonnegotiable as earthquakes.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Survey: Paying for online content a tough sell
from SFGate.com
With big media companies grappling with ways to increase online revenues, a new survey released Tuesday showed 85 percent of Internet users believed that online content that is currently free should remain free.
Yet the extensive survey by the Nielsen Co. research firm found online consumers may be more willing to pay for certain categories, such as movies, games, TV shows and music, and less likely to pay for news, blogs and user-created videos.
While there were no clear-cut categories of content that will successfully sell online, there was a "definite maybe," Nic Covey, Nielsen's director of cross platform insights, wrote in a blog post about the report, "Changing Models: A Global Perspective on Paying for Content Online.
"When asked to focus on specific types of content, survey participants are more willing to at least consider paying for particular categories, especially if they have done so before," Covey wrote.
Previous studies have shown a long-standing online culture preferring free content still runs deep. For example, a Forrester Research report in November found that 80 percent of U.S. consumers would not bother to access online newspaper or magazine sites if they were no longer free.
But the Nielsen report was broader in scope, surveying 27,000 consumers in 52 countries in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East about various forms of content.
In four categories - theatrical movies, music, games and professionally produced videos - 50 percent or more said they would consider paying or have already paid for online content.
At the other end, less than 30 percent said they would consider paying for social networks, podcasts, news-talk radio, consumer-generated video and blogs.
In the middle were magazines, newspapers and Internet-only news sites. But 78 percent said they should be able to access newspaper, magazine, radio or television service free online if they have already paid for a subscription.
Meanwhile, 79 percent said they would no longer use a Web site that began charging for access, "presuming they can find the same information at no cost," the report said. That sentiment was highest - 85 percent - in North America.
With big media companies grappling with ways to increase online revenues, a new survey released Tuesday showed 85 percent of Internet users believed that online content that is currently free should remain free.
Yet the extensive survey by the Nielsen Co. research firm found online consumers may be more willing to pay for certain categories, such as movies, games, TV shows and music, and less likely to pay for news, blogs and user-created videos.
While there were no clear-cut categories of content that will successfully sell online, there was a "definite maybe," Nic Covey, Nielsen's director of cross platform insights, wrote in a blog post about the report, "Changing Models: A Global Perspective on Paying for Content Online.
"When asked to focus on specific types of content, survey participants are more willing to at least consider paying for particular categories, especially if they have done so before," Covey wrote.
Previous studies have shown a long-standing online culture preferring free content still runs deep. For example, a Forrester Research report in November found that 80 percent of U.S. consumers would not bother to access online newspaper or magazine sites if they were no longer free.
But the Nielsen report was broader in scope, surveying 27,000 consumers in 52 countries in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East about various forms of content.
In four categories - theatrical movies, music, games and professionally produced videos - 50 percent or more said they would consider paying or have already paid for online content.
At the other end, less than 30 percent said they would consider paying for social networks, podcasts, news-talk radio, consumer-generated video and blogs.
In the middle were magazines, newspapers and Internet-only news sites. But 78 percent said they should be able to access newspaper, magazine, radio or television service free online if they have already paid for a subscription.
Meanwhile, 79 percent said they would no longer use a Web site that began charging for access, "presuming they can find the same information at no cost," the report said. That sentiment was highest - 85 percent - in North America.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome
from The New York Times
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.
The results are surprising — well, to me, anyway. I would have hypothesized that there are two basic strategies for making the most-e-mailed list. One, which I’ve happily employed, is to write anything about sex. The other, which I’m still working on, is to write an article headlined: “How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault.”
But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.
Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.” (I swear, the science staff did nothing to instigate this study, but we definitely don’t mind publicizing the results.)
“Science kept doing better than we expected,” said Dr. Berger, a social psychologist and a professor of marketing at Penn’s Wharton School. “We anticipated that people would share articles with practical information about health or gadgets, and they did, but they also sent articles about paleontology and cosmology. You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.
The results are surprising — well, to me, anyway. I would have hypothesized that there are two basic strategies for making the most-e-mailed list. One, which I’ve happily employed, is to write anything about sex. The other, which I’m still working on, is to write an article headlined: “How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault.”
But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.
Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.” (I swear, the science staff did nothing to instigate this study, but we definitely don’t mind publicizing the results.)
“Science kept doing better than we expected,” said Dr. Berger, a social psychologist and a professor of marketing at Penn’s Wharton School. “We anticipated that people would share articles with practical information about health or gadgets, and they did, but they also sent articles about paleontology and cosmology. You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
As Data Flows In, the Dollars Flow Out
from The New York Times
It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or more for cellphone service and the average family is spending as much on entertainment over devices as they are on dining out or buying gasoline.
And those government figures do not take into account movies, music and television shows bought through iTunes, or the data plans that are increasingly mandatory for more sophisticated smartphones.
It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or more for cellphone service and the average family is spending as much on entertainment over devices as they are on dining out or buying gasoline.
And those government figures do not take into account movies, music and television shows bought through iTunes, or the data plans that are increasingly mandatory for more sophisticated smartphones.
Publishers Win a Bout in E-Book Price Fight
from The New York Times
Could book publishers suddenly be in the position of telling Google what to do?
With the impending arrival of digital books on the Apple iPad and feverish negotiations with Amazon.com over e-book prices, publishers have managed to take some control — at least temporarily — of how much consumers pay for their content.
[...]
How e-books are sold — and for how much — has been a crucial topic of debate among publishers and retailers for the last two years, as digital books have taken off. Led by Amazon.com’s Kindle electronic reading device, the e-book market is growing at a fast clip, fueled partly by cheap digital editions. Amazon and several other retailers now offer new releases and best sellers for $9.99, far less than the typical $26 cover price on hardcovers.
Publishers have been fretting that such pricing has devalued books in the minds of consumers and have been looking for ways to regain control of what readers pay. When Apple unveiled its iPad, it said it had agreements with five of the country’s six largest publishers. Under those agreements, publishers would set e-book prices — within limits — so that new releases of most general fiction and nonfiction would sell for $12.99 to $14.99. Apple will act as an agent of the publishers — a set-up known in the publishing world as the agency model — and take a 30 percent cut of each sale, leaving the rest for publishers to split with authors.
In early negotiations, the 63 percent Google had been offering publishers was based on a wholesale model, but executives briefed on the discussions said that Google was now open to talking about an agency model and was also prepared to discuss paying publishers 70 percent of each sale.
Even Amazon has been forced to back off its $9.99 pricing in an agreement with Macmillan, one of the country’s six largest publishers. In a recent dust-up after Macmillan told Amazon it was moving to the 30 percent agency model with higher consumer pricing, Amazon removed direct access to Macmillan’s physical and electronic books from its site for a week. Amazon later surrendered to the publisher’s terms.
Could book publishers suddenly be in the position of telling Google what to do?
With the impending arrival of digital books on the Apple iPad and feverish negotiations with Amazon.com over e-book prices, publishers have managed to take some control — at least temporarily — of how much consumers pay for their content.
[...]
How e-books are sold — and for how much — has been a crucial topic of debate among publishers and retailers for the last two years, as digital books have taken off. Led by Amazon.com’s Kindle electronic reading device, the e-book market is growing at a fast clip, fueled partly by cheap digital editions. Amazon and several other retailers now offer new releases and best sellers for $9.99, far less than the typical $26 cover price on hardcovers.
Publishers have been fretting that such pricing has devalued books in the minds of consumers and have been looking for ways to regain control of what readers pay. When Apple unveiled its iPad, it said it had agreements with five of the country’s six largest publishers. Under those agreements, publishers would set e-book prices — within limits — so that new releases of most general fiction and nonfiction would sell for $12.99 to $14.99. Apple will act as an agent of the publishers — a set-up known in the publishing world as the agency model — and take a 30 percent cut of each sale, leaving the rest for publishers to split with authors.
In early negotiations, the 63 percent Google had been offering publishers was based on a wholesale model, but executives briefed on the discussions said that Google was now open to talking about an agency model and was also prepared to discuss paying publishers 70 percent of each sale.
Even Amazon has been forced to back off its $9.99 pricing in an agreement with Macmillan, one of the country’s six largest publishers. In a recent dust-up after Macmillan told Amazon it was moving to the 30 percent agency model with higher consumer pricing, Amazon removed direct access to Macmillan’s physical and electronic books from its site for a week. Amazon later surrendered to the publisher’s terms.
To Deliver, iPad Needs Media Deals
from The New York Times
This is a device for consuming media, not creating it. So are the media providers ready to deliver?
Yes and, sadly, no. The iPad’s glories as a media consumption device open up a whole new frontier for developers and publishers. But they also raise large questions about the business models that will drive that content to the screen.
[...]
But there’s a sticking point here, too. The consumer side of both newspapers and magazines is in the database business, trying to expand their base of credit cards and information about consumers. In a world of applications, a share of the revenue will go to publishers, but the information about customers mostly belongs to Apple. The big question for publishers is, will Apple allow them to develop their own relationship with the consumer?
This is a device for consuming media, not creating it. So are the media providers ready to deliver?
Yes and, sadly, no. The iPad’s glories as a media consumption device open up a whole new frontier for developers and publishers. But they also raise large questions about the business models that will drive that content to the screen.
[...]
But there’s a sticking point here, too. The consumer side of both newspapers and magazines is in the database business, trying to expand their base of credit cards and information about consumers. In a world of applications, a share of the revenue will go to publishers, but the information about customers mostly belongs to Apple. The big question for publishers is, will Apple allow them to develop their own relationship with the consumer?
In the World of Facebook
From The New York Review of Books
What is "social networking"? For all the vagueness of the term, which now seems to encompass everything we do with other people online, it is usually associated with three basic activities: the creation of a personal Web page, or "profile," that will serve as a surrogate home for the self; a trip to a kind of virtual agora, where, along with amusedly studying passersby, you can take a stroll through the ghost town of acquaintanceships past, looking up every person who's crossed your path and whose name you can remember; and finally, a chance to remove the digital barrier and reveal yourself to the unsuspecting subjects of your gaze by, as we have learned to put it with the Internet's peculiar eagerness for deforming our language, "friending" them, i.e., requesting that you be connected online in some way.
[...]
If Facebook Connect spreads through the rest of the Internet, it will begin to produce even more radical effects. Google, the dominant force on the Web for the past decade, explicitly stated its goal at the company's founding: "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible." But there are some things that many would rather not make universally accessible—and not just books under copyright. Facebook, with the private information of over 350 million members, now constitutes what Wired magazine has called a "second Internet." By encouraging members to bring their Facebook settings with them onto the rest of the Web, Zuckerberg hopes to take this new Internet, with its pretensions to privacy, and place it at the foundation of the old one.
What is "social networking"? For all the vagueness of the term, which now seems to encompass everything we do with other people online, it is usually associated with three basic activities: the creation of a personal Web page, or "profile," that will serve as a surrogate home for the self; a trip to a kind of virtual agora, where, along with amusedly studying passersby, you can take a stroll through the ghost town of acquaintanceships past, looking up every person who's crossed your path and whose name you can remember; and finally, a chance to remove the digital barrier and reveal yourself to the unsuspecting subjects of your gaze by, as we have learned to put it with the Internet's peculiar eagerness for deforming our language, "friending" them, i.e., requesting that you be connected online in some way.
[...]
If Facebook Connect spreads through the rest of the Internet, it will begin to produce even more radical effects. Google, the dominant force on the Web for the past decade, explicitly stated its goal at the company's founding: "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible." But there are some things that many would rather not make universally accessible—and not just books under copyright. Facebook, with the private information of over 350 million members, now constitutes what Wired magazine has called a "second Internet." By encouraging members to bring their Facebook settings with them onto the rest of the Web, Zuckerberg hopes to take this new Internet, with its pretensions to privacy, and place it at the foundation of the old one.
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