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Table of Contents
On the Internet, the objectives of writers and those of publishers may well differ. Writer benefit from notoriety -- being widely known; while publishers often focus on selling their product -- the content in print or electronic form. Publishers measure success based on immediate revenue, while writers may take a longer view and invest effort to build their reputation, knowing that their marketability as authors and also as speakers and consultants and teachers depends on their reputation. For writers, audience is key. For the short-term, they may not care whether that audience pays for the work or not. They want to reach enthusiastic readers who will talk and write about their work, raising their visibility and long-term value.
A hundred years ago, book publishers tended to take a long-term view and would invest in publishing and publicizing the early work of novelists who they believed had potential. They would take a loss on those early works, considering that an investment that could be paid back many times over from the success of later works, which they could count on having the rights to.
Today, publishers buy content based on already established reputations and capitalize on immediate market opportunities, rather than striving to make beginners visible. Today, building reputation is the concern of writers and their agents.
As it turns out, the Internet is an excellent medium for building individual reputation. People with lots of content can make it available for free and can make it findable via text-based search engines (like AltaVista) to reach a wide audience. And they can invest their time in contributing to on-line discussions (newsgroups, mailing lists, forums, and chats), generating further interest in their printed work and in their abilities as speakers, consultants, and teachers, while at the same time getting the creative stimulation that comes from frequent interaction with an audience.
At the same time, the Internet is still a relatively unknown and risky realm for publishers. Most have not yet figured out an effective, predictable way of generating revenue for content. Yes, they can use the Internet as a marketing tool, to promote sales of printed products. But it is difficult to come up with ways to be paid directly for content on the Internet -- by subscription, or by individual reader transaction. And publishers tend to fear that customers will duplicate and distribute electronic content on a wide scale, eroding potential revenue. So while authors might want the full-text of their work made available to the widest possible audience for free, publishers frequently will do no more than provide sample chapters and excerpts, as a marketing ploy.
It would be good for publishers and authors to better understand their own best interests on the Internet and to negotiate with one another from a position of mutual respect. The author needs visibility and the publisher needs revenue, and the Internet tactics to be used to accomplish those differing goals should be an integral part of contract negotiation.
(This was a topic of discussion at our weekly chat session on Business on the Worldwide Web. Check http://www.samizdat.com/#chat for the edited transcripts.)
I have often suggested that writers would probably do better making their content available over the Web for free and charging for face-to-face and on-line interaction, such as related speeches and courses. To test this concept, I recently proposed several course outlines to a university, which may choose to include one or more of them in its regular business curriculum or as part of their continuing education program. I could also present one or more of these in a distance education format (using chat and forum). Those courses are:
In Advanced Search, in the "boolean" query box enter
link:amazon.com AND NOT host:amazon.com
and check "count documents matching the boolean express."
That will give you a close estimate of how many Web pages that are not at the Amazon.com site have hyperlinks to Amazon.com pages. When I tried that I got 140,937. For comparison, I tried the same for CDNow (73,159), Submit-It (22,923), and Reel.com (6,020). If I wanted to see the list of the pages themselves (instead of focusing on the count), I wouldn't check "count..." Then I could keep clicking on "Next" at the bottom of the results pages to see more. Or I could harvest the information in bite-size chunks by using the Date to limit my search to one day at a time.
(If you know of other similar programs, please send me email about it. seltzer@samizdat.com)
The apparent success of such programs, made me think of the following memo, which I wrote back in March of 1994. It's interesting to note how the old Internet culture persists today, with the overlay that now when you spread the word about a site that you respect and value, you may be able to profit from your efforts.
Toward an "Internet Vision"
Although the influx of new users and commercial information/service providers is diluting the traditional research-and-education-based Internet culture, we can expect that the pioneer spirit of sharing and helping will continue for some time to come. This culture is self-regulating, based on mutual respect and commonly accepted rules of "netiquette." Messages of common concern are spread rapidly around the world. People band together -- at no direct profit to themselves -- to help those they perceive deserve help and to hinder those who threaten the basic tenets of the culture.
The following principles often apply on the Internet:
o The more you give, the more you will receive.
o You stand out by rallying others and joining forces with them, not by going in a different direction.
o If you say what needs to be said -- however softly -- your words will be amplified by others.
o If you speak only for your own corporate interests -- however loudly -- your words will be muffled by others.
Tuesday, July 28, 7 p.m. Eastern Time, MSNBC <http://www.msnbc.com/chat/>
Tuesday, July 28, 9 p.m. Eastern Time, Barnes and Noble Online <http://www.barnesandnoble.com/>
Wednesday, July 29, 8 p.m. Eastern Time, America Online (Keyword: AOL Live)
Wednesday, July 29, 9:30 p.m. Eastern Time, CompuServe's Electronic Commerce Forum (GO: ECommerce)
Saturday, August 1, 10 p.m. Eastern Time, Borders.Com <http://www.borders.com>
I wouldn't be surprised if this soon became standard operating procedure in the publishing industry.
(By the way, that link from the book title is an Amazon.com link. Might as well show their associates program in action.)
(Review of aol.com by Kara Swisher, Times Business/Random House, New York, 1998)
This is a very readable narrative of what happened and what happened next and what happened next, with little clue as to why it happened. It might better be entitled: The Deal Makers, for it only mentions the folks who proposed, accepted, and declined merger offers; and it goes into some detail about their personalities and their backgrounds. Every once in a while, you find a vague mention of "community" as being something that aol did well while others were neglecting it. But you get no sense of what the author means by "community," and what it takes to build and maintain a community, and how the dynamics and cultures of on-line communities affect business plans.
For some, this book would be more aptly titled -- Everything you never wanted to know about AOL and wouldn't have bothered to ask. Then again, maybe this is an aspect of new media -- business as entertainment (especially entertainment business as entertainment). Don't expect any substance, but it's a relaxing, gossipy quick-read. It harks back to the good old days when history was a narrative of court intrigue, with none of the boring complicating factors like economics and sociology.
(review of Essential Business Tactics for the Net by Larry Chase, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1998)
In this compact, anecdotal, very useful book, Larry Chase takes a shot at just about everything having to do with the business side of Internet business. Considering the machine-gun approach, his aim is remarkably accurate, especially when dealing with marketing and advertising. Newcomers to the Internet will benefit from his advice and the way he hammers home that the Internet is not just another medium, not just a place to post your pre-existing brochures, but rather a very different environment with a new range of opportunities. Old-timers will find nuggets throughout -- intriguing business models and Web-site examples that you didn't encounter before.
Larry -- speaker, writer, and consultant -- draws heavily in his experience in promoting his own Internet activities, from launching the first on-line ad agency, to publishing a weekly review of commercial Web sites -- Web Digest for Marketers http://www.wdfm.com You can sample a free chapter (the one on "Your Brand Image and the Internet") at http://www.larrychase.com
Several sites now serve as a guide to scheduled chat sessions and other live Internet events:
http://events.yahoo.com -- This piece of the massive Yahoo site is good for recurring events (ones that take place regularly each day or week or month). It takes a while to get your listing included, but then you are easy to find either browsing by category or searching by name.
http://www.onnow.com -- This site is time-oriented, providing you first with a list of events that are in progress at the time you connect. You also can select "on later" and "always on," or search (by type of event, by audience, by subject, or by producer). You also can submit information about a one-time event.
http://www.yack.com -- Organized TV-style by "event channels," this site seems to cater to large companies with money to spend and extensive event schedules to promote. They permit free submissions by email, but I see no sign of listings of small chat events in the readily accessible portions of their site. This site is heavy on advertising, and it takes forever for all their banner ads to load.
Red Tide -- http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Museum/6963/index.html
Check this site to see what an artist -- using free space at Geocities -- can do using the Web for self-expression as well as self-promotion. In particular, check Christin Couture's illustrated autobiography. (FYI -- 25 years ago, when she was an undergraduate in college, Christin illustrated my book The Lizard of Oz. She was great then; and since then, she's gone way beyond that.)
from the Gutenberg Project ftp://ftp.prairienet.org/pub/providers/gutenberg/etext98/http://promo.net/pg/
(Adding dozens of new ones every month, Gutenberg has already made over 1000 etexts available for free over the Internet. These include classic works of literature and history, as well as out-of-print and little-known works by great authors. If you can, connect by ftp, rather than the Web, to get the most recent ones. Here's a list of those recently added, alphabetized by author. The file name is useful for fetching the text from the ftp site. Many of these are also available on diskette from PLEASE COPY THIS DISK for those who cannot get them themselves. For the current catalog, check http://www.samizdat.com/catalog.html or send your email request to seltzer@samizdat.com)
Honore de Balzac
Charles Dickens
Robert Graves -- Country Sentiment (csent10.txt)
Thomas Holmes -- London's Underworld (lndwd10.txt)
Father Jerome Lobo -- A Voyage to Abyssinia (vygab10.txt)
Percival Lowell -- The Soul of the Far East (sofre10.txt)
Katherine Mansfield -- The Garden Party (gprty10.txt)
Captain Marryat -- Masterman Ready (mmrdy10.txt)
Alice Meynell -- Essays (esyam10.txt)
E. Nesbit -- Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare (bstsh10.txt)
E. Phillips Oppenheim -- Kingdom of the Blind (kblnd10.txt)
Olive Schreiner
from Renascence Editions http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ren.htm
"Renascence Editions is an effort to make available online works printed in English between the years 1477 (when Caxton began printing) and 1799. These texts have been produced with care and attention, but are not represented by the publisher as scholarly editions in the peer-reviewed sense. They are made available to the public for nonprofit purposes only. The publisher and general editor is Richard Bear at the University of Oregon."
Assembled and edited by Richard Bear at the University of Oregon.
Hundreds of brief biographies of well-known people from about 1880 to 1920. These were compiled by Tom Layton (who teaches in the "CyberSchool" in Eugene Public Schools, District 4J, Eugene, OR) from In Memoriam: A Book Of Record and Prominent Men and Women of the Day. You can browse, letter by letter through the alphabet, or search through the whole collection.
from The Naked Word http://www.nakedword.org/
"The Naked Word is dedicated to bringing you plain text documents. All the documents brought to you by The Naked Word are in the public domain for one reason or another. That means you can copy the text, re-distribute it, and pretty much use it any way you want to, within the confines of the law."
Watching Taxi Driver (1976) on videotape, I was struck by the fact that the treatment felt dated. It could have ended with the shootout and left the viewer to believe De Niro had died. Or it could have ended by showing Jodie Foster restored to her family and transformed by the experience. Instead, we learn what happened to Jodie through a letter in voice over, and we are shown De Niro, back in his cab, essentially unchanged.
In retrospect, it seems that a number of the best movies from the late 60s and early 70s had indeterminate endings, where the main character winds up in approximately the same kind of position at the end as at the beginning. It seems that those same movies if done today would end quite differently, and decisively.
The Graduate (1967), if made today, would probably end with the emotional high when Dustin Hoffman runs out of the church with the girl. But made when it was, Mike Nichols kept it going for several more painful minutes, as the two of them, sitting next to each other on the bus, begin to realize that nothing has been resolved, and stare blankly ahead.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), for all its action, humorously emphasizes that the main characters learn nothing. Their dilemma is that the west has changed and they haven't. And when they are caught by surprise and blasted to bits by the Bolivian police in freeze-frame at the end, they are the same happy-go-lucky, likable bandits they were at the beginning.
If Thelma and Louise had been made then and not now, it would have ended with them escaping off into the desert to an uncertain fate, unclear in their own minds whether they should have done what they have done, and unclear about what to do with the rest of their lives if they manage to survive. Instead, we have them take off dramatically over the cliff. And while no one would ever have imagined them doing such a thing at the beginning of the movie, it feels right at the end because we have seen them go through such irreversible character development.
Charly, a 1968 film about a severely retarded adult who through experimental drug therapy "awakens" into full intelligence, ends with the main character hopelessly returned to his original state. Awakenings could have ended similarly, with Robert DeNiro staring ahead, in the same deathlike state as at the beginning. Instead, it goes on for a few more minutes to show Robin Williams ready for a social awakening of his own.
Similarly, Rainmain, which could have emphasized stasis, instead focused on the growth of the relationship between the brothers, and the transformation of Tom Cruise.
Silence of the Lambs is another movie of transformation, as symbolized by the moth in the mouth shown in posters and ads. Jodie Foster matures and is in a sense liberated by her experiences with two serial killers. And in the final scene, Anthony Hopkins is quite literally liberated.
In the earlier period, people went through adventures and came out the same as they were before, and that was a source of angst, which was often the point of the film. (What's it all about, Alfie?) In current films, characters are fundamentally changed by what they go through, and there are clear winners and losers.
One could argue that audiences both then and now prefer decisive endings, that we selectively ignored and forgot the blank stare of Dustin Hoffman at the end of The Graduate, and focused instead on the glorious triumph in running out of the church. But the directors, even when telling similar stories and using some of the same leading actors we see today, approached their subject matter with an emphasis and style that now seems characteristic of an era that has passed.
With information being a form of wealth, one would expect that the sharing of information would a key element of communist doctrine, helping to achieve their ends. But the primary means chosen by communist governments was central control. Perhaps that is the inner contradiction that led to the demise of communism in Russia and eastern Europe.
Ironically, today we find the last bastions of communism (China, North Korea, and Cuba) strictly controlling the dissemination of information; while in capitalist countries, business thrives through open sharing of information over the anarchic Internet. (Richard Seltzer)
What price privacy? In Russia, there are no phone books. That started as a way for the central government to maintain control -- make it difficult for dissidents to find one another. But now the fact that there are no published telephone listings is considered an important element of personal privacy. Most Russians would be outraged if their phone number were published in a directory without their explicit permission. It is your right to not be listed. And the concept of having to pay to not be listed is totally foreign to them. (With my dinner interrupted an average of two times a night by unsolicited sales phone calls, I'm beginning to think the Russians are right.) (Richard Seltzer)
Love your sites and your advice and all your help. That's another thing I find hard to accept, as a person who worked in Journalism, an extremely competitive world. A part of me is suspicious, as to why people pass on information to others so freely. What is their motivation, I keep asking myself? So far, I have come up with no answers.
Reply from Richard Seltzer
People send me nuggets of information and insights in response to the material I post on the Web. That's part of the motivation -- what I learn directly from readers (like you) who take the time to reply. But there's another important reason as well: Have you ever had the experience that the right question at the right time can prompt you to say things in new and useful ways and can stimulate new important thoughts? I find that I'm addicted to that kind of interaction. I need it to keep my mind alive.
Good luck with your Web-based distribution. My guess is that your readership will drop sharply, so be sure to use a log analyzer to track what's happening.
Reply from Richard Seltzer
Yes, I'm sure that the number of people who see it will decline sharply, but the number of readers might actually increase. Nowadays, email distribution figures mean nothing. I delete 90% of what I receive, unread. Now those who have paid to get on the list will be strongly motivated to read, and, if they like what they see, to forward it with a recommendation to friends. Those who choose to go to my Web site have already made a commitment to read a bit; and if I add fresh and interesting content at frequent intervals, they will have motivation to return and to recommend it to others.
And, yes, my ISP (http://www.acunet.net) provides an excellent stats program, so I'll be able to track the Web-side.
I really appreciated the articles, links and reviews about online communities. I believe that they are incredibly important on the web, especially for local communities or very specific niches. However, does this mean anyone/anycorp can make a fortune from a good community? I am not sure. Are there any success stories?
I am going for a career in Interactive Marketing and I speak of my community organizing experience in interviews. Lately, especially with the sale of electric minds http://www.minds.com, and last year's relaunch of utne reader's online salons, I have been hearing from interviewers at Interactive Agencies and online game companies, that online communities are not profitable or even viable business models. I think they are great and important things, but I would love to know if any communities are generating or augmenting business either through ad sales or ecommerce or some other way, such as loyalty measures. Is IVillage the leader in this field? Perhaps the promise of online communities is yet to be realized? What do you think?
jared goldstein, Columbia Business School's first Interactive Marketing Major, http://www.columbia.edu/~jbg34
Reply from Richard Seltzer
I believe that the promise is not yet realized. I wouldn't want to point to any current Web sites.
The holy grail of communities has been The Well, America-on-Line, and various large repositories of notes files (as the one we have at Digital Equipment). But those successes all depended on there being a defined large pool of users who are given a limited set of choices. Within each on-line environment there would be one and only one place to talk about any given subject. The Web makes that model obsolete. There are no monopolies. It's wide open territory. There are hundreds or thousands of different places to talk about any given subject, and there isn't even any reasonable way to find out where such conversations are going on.
I'm not saying it can't be done. Rather I'm saying it should be done -- but isn't a matter of technology.
You might want to check my article on How to Make Business Chat Work from an earlier issue of Internet-on-a-Disk and now at http://www.samizdat.com/events.html You might want to take a look at the transcripts to my weekly chat session at http://www.samizdat.com/#chat and join in on Thursdays.
So, yes, you can find lots of good quotes in books like Net Gain about how communities should be the heart of any successful business. And, yes, I believe that in principle. But turning that theory into reality is a difficult, people-intensive matter, with lots of costs that haven't been sorted out, for job functions that still need to be defined, that need to be filled with trained people, when there are no training programs and there's very little opportunity to get practical experience.
All in all, I'd say it's an enormous opportunity. The harder it is to do it, the more valuable a skill it is to make it happen.
Reply to reply Date: Sun, 3 Aug 1997 19:58:31 -0400 (EDT)
I am co-founding a nonprofit that will be using Internet community building strategies to get low-income families and businesses online through their housing. Your website will provide us with a good framework for us to use in our plans and initial service launches. If you are interested in our plans, please check out the community section of this link http://www.columbia.edu/~jbg34 Our group is called HER, Housing Education Resources. If you know of anyone that can help us with a web page or setting up chat/collaborative spaces within our site, please let me know.
Thank you, Jared Goldstein
>> ... there is nothing to prevent ordinary home users from creating Web sites on their PCs ... limited by the disk space on their own machine
Excellent point - But don't I need a fixed IP address ? And don't I need my Cable service provider to provide it ? Mine (Cablevision of Long Island) did not when I asked a few months ago.
Jake Moskowitz
Reply from Richard, seltzer@samizdat.com
Yes, you would need a fixed IP address. And you'd also want some easy-to-use tools for building your site on the PC. But that is an enormous business opportunity, and there will soon be a swarm of companies rushing in to help. In fact, last night I got the attached message from someone with just such a notion...
From: Jeff Field <jfield@namesecure.com> Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1998 12:02:20 -0700
I just read your article about cable modems, "From Web-hosting back to do-it-yourself" [Internet-on-a-Disk #22]. I am a firm believer that people will eventually be hosting their own websites in their own homes or offices as you mention in your article. In fact, I run a company that registers domain names and we currently provide DNS services for many who host their own websites through cable modems.
The reason I am writing to you is because I believe that Compaq and others will eventually be bundling in tools to simplify web hosting by consumers (BTW, I also believe that people will also have their own mail servers on their own machines.) NameSecure (the company I run) is in a great position to be the major player in the registration and hosting of domain names (DNS services) for people that are hosting their own websites and e-mail.
FYI, NameSecure is currently in partnership with some major Internet companies including GeoCities, iCat, XOOM, Netopia, etc.
Jeff Field, Founder/CEO, NameSecure, jfield@namesecure.com, http://www.namesecure.com
[For lots more discussion about Web hosting and cable modems, see Letters to the Editor in issue #24].
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