Showing posts with label Internet stuff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet stuff. Show all posts

Tuesday 28 March 2017

The Passing of Paper

Smash logo and brand identity
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I follow quite a few legacy publishers on Twitter and suffer from the not infrequent urge to block them as I stare, open-jawed, at their attempts at what they clearly think is 'marketing'. Where most self-published authors have worked out, often by trial and error, that 'buy my book' doesn't work, publishers are frequently to be found out there using Twitter as a broadcast medium.

My least favourite of an ugly bunch are the guys who have clearly logged into Twitter for their daily session ("Dave does Twitter from 4-5pm, then goes through the slush pile") who then retweet anything nice said about them or one of their authors. To the luckless recipient of this gold, a timeline suddenly packed with retweets of breathless praise for Dave's publishing house, event or client's book until Dave runs out of RT cruft. At this point, if you're really unlucky, you'll get Dave asking you what's your favourite colour or what book changed your life as he practices his 'engagement' skills.

The example that flashed across my disbelieving eyes last night, however, took the proverbial biscuit:


It ticks every 'shit use of Twitter by a publisher' box I can think of. What, you mean if I pre-order this book and send you proof that I have, indeed, placed a pre-order, you'll actually send ME a real whole honest-to-goodness PDF file containing chapter one of the book I can't read yet? I am SO grateful! I can't begin to thank you! Really! A whole chapter one of a book I just paid for but can't read as a crappy, bitty PDF (like the ones torrent sites serve) just for little me? Squee!

These are just a few examples of how legacy publishers are struggling to get their heads around marketing, promotion and distribution in a post-paper world. We're not quite there yet, of course - there's still a lot of papery stuff around. But anyone not habitually wedded to a paper-based business model can see that the consumption of ideas, information and narrative on mushed-up dead trees and bleached old knickers (paper) is moving to a diverse and often inter-connected ecosystem of devices with blinding speed. 

When we are using those devices, we are not pleased to be 'disrupted' and, in a device-centric world, the publishers' ability to use their market power - sales teams stocking retailers - is minimal. They're no better off than the rest of us. The Internet, as we have been seeing since 1995, is a great leveller.

The idea that there is value in selling information encoded in a 'book' or indeed any other conventionally printed product now belongs in a Cadbury's Smash advert. When was the last time you looked at a paper map? 

I fondly recall driving across Scotland in 1988, following a printout from Autoroute 1.0 and picking up some hitch hikers who, when they found out I was following a computer programme around Scotland, became very nervous indeed and wanted let out early. They clearly thought I was a madman. It's taken a while, sure enough, but the paper map today is (along with the dedicated GPS device, incidentally) a thing of the past. 

The ability to contextualise information based on a layer over the 'real' world is incredibly powerful. It's why Google has invested so much in building that layer with Earth, Streetview and the like. Apple is rumoured to be making a huge play in 'Augmented Reality'. 

Not only are we consuming information about where we're going totally differently, we can clearly see around the corner a world where we won't care where we're going. We'll just tell the car to go there and it'll tell us how long it intends to take and then provide us some entertainment of our choice as we travel. It'll probably be plotting to kill us, but that's another kettle of fish.

Newspapers are clearly in the throes of another aspect of the movement of information online. In their case they're having to struggle with the reduction of value in two ways - the loss of revenue from people buying papers and that of advertisers willing to pay to reach those readers. The problem becomes one of scale - the news gathering resource and reach of a quality newspaper is expensive - and when you devalue the good through information ubiquity, you lose the ability to pay for large teams of journalists. 

Who will custodiet custodes, then? Smaller teams working more efficiently - but also a slew of copycats, content farms and repurposers. Quality content has to fight harder to cut through the rubbish. It's messy out there, but there's one thing that's certain - nobody's interested in print anymore - and the revenue models for print don't translate online, the scale doesn't work at cents per click. Not only do you not have the resources for big newsrooms, presses and distribution networks, you arguably don't need them.

Print books are a good whose price is set entirely on its own inefficiency. The cover price of a book consists entirely of percentages based on the cost of print - including the author's royalty and distribution. A tiny proportion goes to editorial costs. Oh, and profit. Let's not forget profit. An author is remunerated on a percentage of the revenue generated by the book as, indeed, is a distributor - the latter gets a whopping 50% of cover price. 

You could perhaps see how publishers would be wedded to this model - it has been thus for the past century or so. That's the way we do it around here, see?

When you go online, you not only rip out the costs of print and distribution and sales returns/stock loss but you also tear down the sales network publishers have depended on for so long. Bookshops are dead, sales are taking place on platforms the publishers don't own, control or influence. And so that most passive of sales environments (the long shelves packed with attentive soldiers of stiff-spined papery joy, the tick of the clock, Mildred sitting behind the till, reading and leaving you to have a nice, long browse) has been transformed into an online nightmare of conflicting shrill demands for people's time and attention.

In this brave new world, publishers no longer offer the significant scale they used to. Even the media they retain privileged access to are less powerful. Physical book retail is on a massive decline, despite constant announcements by 'the industry' that ebook sales are under pressure. These are mendacious and statistically skewed to an amazing degree - and they're quite poignant, in their way. 'It's going to be okay, chaps, you'll see' - that brave last sentence nobody quite believes, but they're all grateful for as they all walk into the hail of enemy gunfire.

The one thing publishers had to offer authors was scale. Scale of marketing, distribution, recognition. That's a product of marketing. Rip out the sales channel and go online and you've got some serious problems on your hands unless you can get your head around building serious online scale. Legacy big-hitters like JK Rowling or Neil Gaiman have made the leap and brought their audiences online with them and have massive reach on platforms like Twitter.

Publishers haven't. And they really don't know how to do it. They can't believe they need to do it. And they won't resource to do it properly because they're still clinging on to that last log in the sea.

Or, as an old pal once said to me (of literary agents, but never mind, it fits today's legacy publishers too), "They're like eunuchs in the Ottoman court. They see it happening all around them; they know what it is that's happening. But they're totally incapable of doing it for themselves!"

Thursday 12 January 2017

Fake Plastic News

English: A set of online ads featuring fake ne...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There's an awful lot of talk about fake news online, a background rumbling that occasionally erupts as indeed it has this week. We have all enjoyed the controversy surrounding the US intelligence dossier that purportedly places the future President of the land of the free and home of the brave in a Moscow hotel room watching gleefully as a number of ladies of dubious reputation perform vengeful lewd acts involving micturating on a bed previously used by the previous President of the LOFTAHOFB.

The fun thing about the story, which is more than likely total bunkum, is how deliciously fun it is. Liberal America would just love to believe it. So would most of us, no?

The trouble is that it's getting very hard indeed to sift the wheat from the chaff. But fake news is nothing new: we've always been rather surrounded by it. Was King Richard III really a vile, drooling hunchback who murdered two little princes? Probably not, but we've been just a tad under 500 years late coming to that conclusion. At the time, the spread of rumour was mostly by word of mouth - Gutenberg had only just invented the printing press and printed his celebrated bible - and so it was word of mouth, together with a wee dose of Shakespearean bile a hundred years later, that was to seal Richard's poor reputation.

Gutenberg's press - and pretty much every innovation in media and communications since - merely accelerated the process.

Richard was just one of a million historic examples of fake news, many of them classic examples of history being written by the victor. Sitting in Dubai, the issue of the Al Qassimi 'pirates' comes to mind - opposed to the invading British, they were quickly labelled brigands and pirates and so, for a good hundred years, the whole area was happily referred to as 'the pirate coast'. My own novels have often played with the idea that my freedom fighter is your terrorist and vice versa.

From Gutenberg to the Internet we see the rapidly evolving role of news media - from the invention of the 'newspaper' through to the era of press barons and the dominance of media by politics and big business. Idealistic journalists have constantly found themselves challenged by repressive forces, from political interference through to commercial censorship, our media has represented a combination of people telling truth to power and power telling lies to people.

We used to depend on those solid journalists and their editors to help us better understand the world around us from an informed viewpoint and we were, up until pretty recently, happy to buy whatever narrative they decided to shape for us. If we suspected any interference behind the scenes, we tended to gloss it over. For our media and governments would never tell us porky pies, would they? Our government, after all, governs in our name, does it not? Represents us? Why, then, would they lie to us?

It's not just governments, of course. Big business loves fake news. Advertising and PR agencies have long placed fake news stories in media. You can spot the weasel words, 'studies say' and 'most folks agree' are just two of many sure-fire signs that studies don't and most folks wouldn't. Palm oil, gun lobbies, Israeli settlers, big pharma selling GMOs to Africa - you name 'em, they've been manipulating news by seeding untruths and obfuscation disguised as surveys, research and expert opinion.

As the Internet has whipped the news cycle into a news cyclone, we have seen the erosion of trust in 'mainstream media' and politics become a dominant force in our society. Last year's two most savage political upsets were arguably driven by public anger and disaffection with politics, following on from the waves of disaffection which washed around the Middle East and made their way to Europe with the riots in Britain and Occupy Wall Street in the US. We've seen growing disaffection with big business, too. That wave of disaffection has moved with blinding speed because of the Great Networks of our age.

In the face of that disaffection, our media has been failing - plummeting revenues and the slow death of print have led to staffing cuts and a growing pressure to keep up with the twin-headed Gorgon of Twitter and Buzzfeed. We need clicks, boys, and we need them fast - realtime if you please.

If you want to see the result of this dual pressure to make old media models perform in the new media age, you only have to wander around the Daily Mail, the world's most popular news website. It's not a terribly edifying experience, especially if you believe (as I do) that we tend to get the media we deserve. The difference between the Mail's mainstream content and the stories in the 'Taboola' tabs is getting frighteningly slim. Real 'news' is starting to mimic fake news.

Making it all worse, alongside these pressures we have the very nature of the Internet. Ubiquitous, always-on, filled with people, animals, trolls and lice and all their spurious motivations and agendas. What would have been irrefutable proof in Richard's day (a letter, say) or Nixon's (a tape, say) is worthless today. We can Photoshop images, edit sounds, manipulate documents and fake testimony.

We can harness the news cycle and network effects to put untrue stuff out there and by the time anyone's got around to saying, 'Wait, what?' it's too late. Site X has run it, sites A-W have picked up from site X in the relentless rush to harvest those early clicks and suddenly the whole Web is full of the Spurious Thing. You can probably correct Site X, but that's about as far as you're going to get in terms of actually slipping a cork in the bottle. By about now you've got yourself a nice little hashtag and you're the talk of the town.

But this all has just democratised demonisation. We've always had fake news. It used to be the preserve of the wealthy, powerful and the victors. Now spotty Herberts in tenement bedrooms can do it. And there are companies out there who are harvesting clicks by the million by intentionally creating alarmist rubbish and pushing it with 'clickbait' headlines. Filtering the truth from the fake these days can be a bewildering game. And most people couldn't be bothered.

Which is, to be honest, a worry...

Monday 30 March 2015

The Vicariousness Of Self

Burj Khalifa in Dubai is the tallest building ...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I'm constantly battling the urge to beat people to death with their own selfie sticks. I know it's their life and they can do with it what they will, but for some reason the whole performance irks me in a deep and profound way.

We nipped up to Hatta a while ago for two days of mountain air and Martinis in my favourite bar anywhere in the world ever (the luxuriantly '70s brown velour and walnut charm of Hatta Fort's Roumoul Bar) and I sat, aghast - interrupted in my mission to lie sunning myself by the pool and consuming as many books as a Kindle Voyage can carry - as a couple swooshed around in the water gurning at a GoPro hoisted on the end of a selfie stick.

They were filming themselves so that in 20 years time they can look back at that time in Hatta when they didn't enjoy the pool because they were too busy filming themselves not having fun so they could capture their strange, onanistic non-fun pool filming for posterity.

They probably shared the moment they never really had. Up on Facebook it goes, that time we walked around a pool filming ourselves so our friends could see what wonderful lives we're leading together and experience the moments we never got around to having because we were so busy making sure everyone else had a glimpse of what it is we haven't got.

I stopped taking pictures of food for Instagram quite quickly. I realised I had started to eat excellent food that had gone cold. I have since come up with the brilliant scheme of Instagramming empty plates. Those smears I'm sharing are the meal I enjoyed all the more because I didn't share the moment of epiphany when a plate of really good food leaves a kitchen and is slid noiselessly under your nose with a murmured 'Bon appetit'. There I said it. I care more about food than you.

This is not new behaviour, just in case you're tempted to think it is. It's more aggressive because of the Internet, but I remember walking the bounds of Chester a decade or so ago because Sarah was attending a course there and I was left to spend my days fossicking around the city's ancient ruins and medieval buildings. The city was full of chattering groups of excited Japanese people who thought the world was square, their view of anything of even the slightest significance being captured from behind a viewfinder.

By the way, apropos nothing really very much, this tumblr blog is rather brilliant: Pictures of Asians taking pictures of food.

We're constantly being egged on to share, seek the approval of our peers, our 'friends' and 'followers'. But sharing a moment doesn't signify enjoyment: it means you've denied yourself that moment. And approval isn't experience.

Live it. And just be aware, as you raise that selfie stick to capture yourself and your pimply moon-faced girlfriend framed by the Burj Khalifa, you might be the ones that make me finally snap.

Yes, yes, I do feel better now, thanks for asking...

Sunday 8 February 2015

Strange Searches Ride Again

English: The CERN datacenter with World Wide W...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Search engines are funny things. There they are, making billions of dollars out of giving you what you're looking for on the Internet and here I am, clearly screwing up that process for a small but frustrated number of searchers.

Sure enough, some people get what they're looking for - and there is a constant stream of people finding out what's in Tim Horton's deeply egregious French Vanilla coffee as well as crappy, additive-packed products like Pringles, Aquafina, Big Mac Chicken Nuggets and their (mostly really gross) ilk.

And there are quite a number who find their sojourn here truly useful, believe it or not. I know, I know, I'm amazed myself. But thousands have landed here and found, for instance, the secret to how to switch off the trackpad on a Samsung S5 Ultrabook - I am truly glad to have helped so very many of my fellow sufferers. And many searchers for Sri Lankan gems have found my 'buyer beware' post, which is a good thing, I would submit.

But others haven't been so lucky...

Here follows a compilation of some of the stranger recent visitors to this dusty and neglected backwater of the Internet.

Subsy onche emarat
You never know, you might win a game of 'Internet Era Trivial Pursuit' with this. Nokia's head office in Finland enjoys the IP address 131.228.29.81. Which is how I know that the person searching the World Wide Web for 'subsy onche emarat' works for Nokia. Other than that, and the fact this blog is the second Google result for the phrase, I am utterly baffled. What on earth was he/she looking for?

Food adultery
This one seemed funny until I found the post the searcher found and, clearly finding it amusing at the time, I had actually headlined it 'food adultery'.

Tent Grand Hyatt Dubai octoberfest shirt
It's an oddly specific search string, isn't it? It gets you this here post from a search on Bing, sadly not the first result. However, I had totally forgotten the post and it brought back memories of an ancient - and glorious - promotional fail.

tim hortons french vanilla ingredients
*little first page win dance*

mkene fishermen in  lotoboka
It's not that someone searched Bing for this odd - inexplicable even - phrase. It's not even that they landed on the blog by searching for it. It's that when I repeat the search, Bing or Google, it returns no results. SO HOW DID THEY GET HERE? Doodeedoodoo doodeedoodoo...

faking girl sudani dubai uae
Look, I don't mean to be rude, but if you can't spell it, I don't think you should be allowed to do it. The charmer searching for this got to this post, which I am glad to say was no help whatsoever to him, but did amuse me greatly as I had forgotten it.

paper,printer,ink to print fake money
I love this one. The putative commencement of an international criminal's career, cut short not by enforcement agencies acting on his/her clearly larcenous search history but by said criminal finding instead of the clear instructions he/she sought, this blog. How that happened, I do now know, because searching the first ten pages of results on Bing, I couldn't find the offending post myself!

best way to stop my etisalat frm consuming so much dataplan in a very little time
Clearly an unhappy customer. The answer, of course, is turn off data on your mobile. You're unlikely to find any answers here, of course...

dubai faking girls sex pics
This delightful person a) can't spell and b) works for (or has access to the network at) Lutheran General Health Systems in Chicago, Illinois. The visit came from 168.235.196.136, see. Not very Lutheran as searches go, is it? 

Monday 12 January 2015

Googled!

The Whole Story
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
You're like my yo-yo
that glowed in the dark.
What made it special,
made it dangerous.
Kate Bush, Cloudbusting

When you're using Gmail and send someone a mail saying something like 'The quotation is attached' and you forget the attachment, Google pops up with a wee dialogue saying 'Are you sure you want to send this email? Only you've forgotten the attachment, you dufus.'

Which is sort of cool and, certainly the first time it happens, sort of pulls you up a bit at the same time. This 2008 three-part video series, about inviting Google into your life is, incidentally, remarkably prescient.

On leave in the UK, I started to notice Google doing 'stuff'. I was getting wee notifications letting me know that Google had 'Auto-Awesomed' pictures I was taking on my mobile. But it wasn't until I got back that I got a BlipVert telling me that Google had made me a 'Story'. It was illustrated with a photo I'd taken of my 18 month-old niece.

I clicked on the link and watched with growing, sick fascination as a line on a world map led from Dubai to Heathrow and photos I'd taken - 'moments', apparently - started appearing in a day by day sequence, each locationally tagged and accompanied by a placename and map. Then a red line led from Wales to Hilltown and I got to see all my Christmas snaps, from the present opening frenzy (and subsequent cacophony of not one but TWO Elsa SnowGlow Dolls singing 'Let it go' to the accompaniment of small girls marching around with one hand, for some reason, waving in the air) to walks in the woods, parklands and seaside, including a red line to Castlewellan, where we spent a frozen afternoon getting enjoyably lost in the 'Peace Maze' to be found there. Google had 'Auto-Awesomed' a photo of a duck I had taken, which I had posted with a note (in a slightly scared sort of way) on Google+ - my note had been automatically added to the image in my 'Story' as a caption. Our trip back to Heathrow was another red line on a map before my New Year snaps and then 'The End'.

Like so much Google does, it both impressed and scared me. Even this 1.0 version is pretty slick, but I can see where we're going with this and, well, I'm not sure about it if you know what I mean. Goggles can identify books from their covers, landmarks from their image. Google knows when you were born, where you are now, where you've been - what you're doing and what you like. It can serve you with contextual stuff to enrich your life. It can help you with that illness by inserting itself into your DNA. Google welcomes you to the hivemind. Now, just do your bit to help feed the Queen, drone...

I was still turning this stuff over in my mind when Dina, the organiser of the MENA.Online.Literature.Today conference in Cairo, emailed me my ticket to travel there this weekend (the conference, postponed in December, is on again at the Townhouse Gallery this Saturday & Sunday). Her mail contained little more than 'Attached is your flight' and a PDF from the travel agent with the flight details.

Yesterday I went to Google Calendar to update a meeting. And I found my flight had been added as a calendar event. By Google. From the email content. Airline, flight number, time and booking code all noted.

I am under my desk typing this as we speak. I am dressed in tinfoil and have a colander on my head to stop them reading my brainwaves.

(I may also be doing a little 'I found an excuse to put a gratuitous image of Kate Bush on my blog' dance.)

From The Dungeons

Book Marketing And McNabb's Theory Of Multitouch

(Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I clearly want to tell the world about A Decent Bomber . This is perfectly natural, it's my latest...