Fractals of Change

DISQUS for discussions

Lately the comments and replies on Fractals of Change have gotten a lot more intense and interesting, maybe because these are interesting times.

Typepad comment handling is pretty primitive so I've switched to DISQUS starting with this post. DISQUS supports threaded comments, has a more powerful profile system for commenters across blogs which use DISQUS, lets you (and me) get email notification of replies to comments and even lets us reply to comments with comments by reply email. Should be neat; let me know what you think.

For testing purposes, I'll be making the first comment on this post.

Full disclosure: I'm an indirect investor in DISQUS through Union Square Ventures.

Blogging 101 – Comment Spam

Sometimes you will find comments on your blog which link back to commercial sites and are there to promote a product or boost the google-juice of the linked to site. Are these spam? Should you remove them all?

Here are two comments which were recently posted on Fractals of Change. IMHO, one is legit and one's not:

"what a nice post Good luck!!!!!!!!!!!!***[commercial name removed] Challenge"

"We have recently created a free link exchange directory http://www.link-exchange-submit.com. Providing people use it fairly, it should help you with your SEO link building. It is automatic in terms of your link and suggested category being added. But it is also moderated daily in terms of spam removal."

The first comment is clearly spam in that it contains no internal reference to the content of the post. For some reason, the people or bots that post these almost always stick in a generic compliment thinking, perhaps, that you are starved for praise and will leave the comment posted. This one was deleted and reported to Typepad.

Since the post that the second comment was attached to WAS about links, the comment is right on target (although it could have been posted by a smart bot). My post was against link exchanges and this is clearly a contrary view; but that's fine – good, in fact. The service which is being promoted is something a blogger thinking about link exchanges would want to look at. So the comment is likely to be useful to readers of the post. It gets to stay.

Similarly, a post of how to make cheaper cellphone calls abroad is festooned with comments containing links to SIM providers and cheap or free calling services. Again, anyone interested in the post is likely to be interested in the links. Sure, they serve a commercial purpose and I don't get paid for them as would get paid for ads. But the comments expand on the post and make it more useful to readers. On FOC, that's the spam/no spam criterion.

Blogging 101 – Exchanging Links

My friend Al is a new blogger. He's received his first requests for link exchanges and would like to know what I think of this practice. For non-bloggers: a link exchange is an agreement that says I'll put a link to your blog on my blog if you link to my blog from your blog.

The sites which have solicited Al do not particularly impress him; but they do have fairly high link ratings. That means that, if they point to his blog, he will gain Google juice and Technorati rank and possibly readers. All he has to do is point to them in exchange.

Should he agree to the proposed exchanges? If you're a blogger, you've probably already faced this question.

Links ARE important. I said that in the first post in this series and also described here how the math of a group of cooperating blogs gives the whole group a competitive advantage compared to blogs not in the group – an advantage that can be significant out in the attention-starved desert of the long tail. So should you or Al do link exchanges?

I don't do link exchanges because I want my readers to find that my links are relevant to them. I also don't because I want the blogs that I do link to know that I value them – but can't deny that I hope that they'll find that the value is mutual and that their readers may appreciate my posts and link to me when appropriate. So you might say that I do actually tacitly do link exchanges. I don't insist on a quid pro quo; I don't link to content which isn't either relevant to the current post or likely to be of general interest to my readers.

Readers who come through random links won't become regular readers; they have no reason to. Fractal of Change is eclectic (not a great way to build circulation – focus is better) so sometimes an automobile blog or a company blog or an environmental blog'll point to a single post of interest to their readers. FOC can get a flurry of hits this way and I'm glad for the chance to sound off on whatever the subject is to these people outside my regular reader group. But FOC doesn't get many return visits from these random hits – not enough here to interest them. On the other hand, if a VC blog or nerd blog or even an energy blog points here, some of the new readers become regulars because there's enough content relevant to them to keep them.

Assuming you want regular readers and not just more hits (which may not be true), then link exchanges aren't likely to get you there because they somewhat devalue your content. On the other hand, link exchanges with blogs much more linked to than yours WILL get you a higher Google rank for the subjects you write about than if you didn't have those links so you do pay a price for being a purist (nb. rumor has it that Google bots know how to devalue references from blogs which would otherwise gain authority from link exchanges but I haven't heard this directly from any bot's output device).

What IS a good strategy is to engage in a blog to blog dialog including comments on each other's posts with a group of blogs which cover the same subject matter as your blog – better if you're all NOT always in agreement; better if the links to each other have more substance than "Joe just posted something great"; but links which get each other readers AND give readers value by advancing a discussion are the best kind.

BTW, linking to new blogs which catch your interest is a social obligation of existing blogs,

Should Your New Web Business be Ad-Supported?

Contrary to popular belief, the ad-supported model for a web business is very, very hard to succeed at. I've underestimated the difficulty of living on ads a couple of times in the my investment career. Wouldn't want you to do the same either as an investor or an entrepreneur.

Google, of course, is advertising-supported and is a huge success; that's bad news for you - and Yahoo and Microsoft. Google is consuming most of the free oxygen in the ad-supported cave. If someone wants to buy keyword-driven ad inventory, they go to Google. Why should they bother going anywhere else, especially to a startup very few page views? If you want ads on your service, you'll have to sell them or get them from someone else who is selling them. No matter how neat your self-help ad engine is, no one except maybe your mother will try using it UNLESS you open the way to a significant new market AND can prove that.

OK, you say, people won't by ads from me but they'll buy them from Google. I'll create the page views with my wonderful new service and Google'll put the ads there. Google'll put ads anywhere. Yeah, but. Google will put ads on your pages; some people will click on these ads (Google charges for and pays for clicks in case you've been living on Mars and missed that). You will get a small stream of revenue; it won't bring you anywhere near breakeven. It won't impress potential investors. In fact, the trickle of revenue you get from Google might even convince potential investors that you CAN'T make a living with ads; no ads and no revenue might leave them easier to convince.

Google ads are fine for harvesting ADDITIONAL revenue. Bloggers run them because any revenue is nice; but most bloggers aren't trying to make a living from their blog or attract investors to it. If your website sells something, it makes all kinds of sense to sell additional related somethings through Google ads or Amazon ads (which you can better aim at your customers). If your website has some spare space, Google ads are something people are used to looking at and they'll make some spare change for you. But they won't make your business model.

Maybe there's a counter-example (if so, please post it). In theory, I thought, since Google does such a good job of keyword targeting and increasingly good job of geo-targeting, a well-defined site that viewers come to for well-defined reasons (not an eclectic site like Fractals of Change) ought to be able to induce the Google bot to send just the right ads to attract many clicks at a high price per click. But I haven't seen it happen that way.

Besides Google there are ad networks which will actually sell your site to advertisers. Professional blogs do get a great deal of their advertising from networks like Federated Media (FOC is a small blog using FM). But it's tough to get the attention of a good ad network if you don't already have good demographics AND high viewership. Even if a network takes you on, their salesmen aren't going to be able to do much for you unless you have numbers big enough to get their attention and the attention of the advertisers and agencies they sell to. If your content is powerful enough, you might make a living with agency ads – but it's a long shot if you're not BoingBoing.

Whether it's Google or an ad network, whoever sells your ads is going to have to keep a lot of the revenue to pay the selling expense. It's highly unlikely that they'll be enough left for you to run your business on.

The bottom line is that you have to have way to sell ads if you're going to support a service on advertising revenue. Sell as in actually convince somebody to buy something, not just take orders. Selling ads nationally means having existing contacts with people who buy ads nationally AND having such a hot property that they'll pay attention to you. Selling locally means feet on the street walking into stores and helping to build local campaigns. Radio stations know how to do that; you probably don't and probably can't afford to hire someone who does. The easy local ads were the classifieds because the newspapers didn't sell them, they just took orders. Craig and his List jumped quickly into that huge niche. Almost inconceivable that you'll make money there.

If you have a better way to sell ads, then maybe you should start an ad-supported service. If you just have a better service, you probably can't support it on ad revenue alone.

Too Much Revenue, Not Enough Growth

Jeff Jarvis posted a comment on my post In Praise of Revenue:

"I'd also like to see you reprise your lesson (from the Union Square event some time ago) on extracting minimal value from the network you create so the network grows as large as possible and the value you've created and can extract in the end is greater than if you had tried to extract more value at the beginning. Did I get that right? I quote you to that effect all the time. Did it just the other day with a big publisher whose blog ad network is taking too high a cut. I told him to just cover his costs for the first year - or less - and he'd end up growing something bigger that would be more valuable to each member, thus bigger, thus more valuable to him. Eh?"

Jeff remembers quite accurately that I advocated optimizing for growth rather than revenue – in the extreme forgoing revenue. Jeff's advice to the publisher was right on. If you simply solve for maximizing revenue, you can end up with little growth – and little future revenue opportunity. Note, though, that Jeff did not advocate forgoing revenue; in fact, he did advise the publisher to cover costs, presumably so that growth can occur without needing to raise more capital or so that there will be a solid basis for raising capital when it can be put to good use.

The case Jeff presents of an ad network is particularly straight forward. It is difficult if not impossible to sell ads which will be seen by only a few number of people. The cost of selling the ads is too high to justify the effort; advertisers are not interested in taking the trouble to investigate a tiny potential market or put any creativity into reaching it. Other than in strictly local markets, there need to be millions upon millions of impressions AND data to do targeting with before advertisers are interested. So it is not practical for any but the very largest blogs to sell their own ad space – and even they usually don't. There is an opportunity for ad networks which aggregate advertisers and advertising on one side and an inventory of space ads can run on the other side. The network matches the ads to the blogs, typically collects from the advertiser, and pays the blogger. Google is the most successful example of an ad network but the ads it aggregates appear in many more places than just blogs. Federated Media, the ad network to which Fractals of Change belongs, is an example of a blog-based ad network.

If you're an ad network, the more page views you have to sell, the more and better the advertisers you can attract. The more advertisers and the higher the rate for page views you can achieve, the more bloggers you'll attract to make their page view inventory available through you. You obviously have to scratch to get started, need to have some credibility or an existing inventory of ads to start with, and are going to lose some money getting going. But now you've got traction: how much of the ad revenue should you share with the bloggers and how much should you keep? Your investors may be pushing for some return on their capital (profits); your compensation might even be tied to your margin on sales rather than just your gross sales. Nevertheless, charging more than you have to, even if you can for a while, is a mistake.

Charging too much stunts growth so you'll have fewer units to charge for in the future. Charging too much opens the door to competition.

The more that bloggers make from your ads, the more space for ads you'll have available as bloggers tell their friends which ad network to use. The more ad space you have, the more ads you'll get and – on the average – the more you'll be able to charge for ads because you'll have better opportunities to target and you'll have more advertisers interested. The more ads you get and the more you can charge for them, the more money bloggers in your network can make.  You want to keep this virtuous circle of growth going as long as you possibly can.

If you are extracting profits before you have to, you're forgoing future growth. In any sort of competitive market, profits attract competitors. Big profits attract lots of competitors. Would-be competitors can point to your profits and easily get funding. Funded competitors can undercut your rates and "steal" your bloggers. Whoops; the circle is now turning in the non-virtuous direction. If you're doing well but running at or close to breakeven, you've made it impossible for anybody to undercut you without running at a deficit which is hard to get funding for – at least in this market. The biggest danger to you is someone who finds a way to substantially cut costs or to deliver a better product. Obviously you've got to be vigilant about that and ought to lose some sleep over these possibilities – but keeping prices down keeps a plague of me-too competitors from cutting off your growth.

This logic goes well beyond ad networks, they just make a good example.

Craig's List has the successful strategy of forgoing revenue for MOST listings it runs and MOST markets that it's in. That strategy helped it attract a critical mass of listings and a critical mass of listings meant a critical mass of ad readers which attracted more ads etc. etc. If Craig now attempted to maximize revenue by charging for a substantially higher percentage of ads, a door would be cracked open for competition. There is no chance at current rates for a competitor to steal Craig's listings (and readers) by charging less. If and when Craig's List is bested, it'll really have to be by something which delivers a better way for listers and readers to communicate.

Unless you are a protected monopoly, high prices are a recipe for losing whatever lead in the market place you have. Low prices are the engine of growth.

The strategy Jeff suggested to the publisher and that I'm recommending here is to keep revenue as low as it can be and still fund growth. No revenue is a different strategy that I'll post more about.

Blogging 101 – The Importance of Links

An old friend recently started blogging and was kind enough to ask my advice.

Bonus hint #1: whenever you are about to write something that isn't a secret and isn't boring, turn it into a post on your blog. I'm taking my own advice.

The world wide web is all about links. Blogging differs from offline writing mainly in its use of links. Every two weeks I select one of my posts to run offline in some Vermont newspapers. Many of them simply can't be considered because they crucially depend on live links in them. Spelling out URLs on paper for people to type in is not at all the same thing. Blogger Galeal Zino posted a good rant on how dumb it is that his first grade son is only being taught to write on paper.

Links both help a blog attract readers and help a blog's readers find and access information and entertainment. Links are much more than just live footnotes but they are that as well.

The ethic of blogging is that you are always welcome to quote excerpts from another public blog provided that:

1. you quote accurately (copy and paste preferred);
2. you give proper attribution;
3. you link back to the source blog.

The link serves multiple purposes: it lets your readers verify that you quoted accurately and in context; it helps your readers find more information if they want it; it is your thank you to the blogger you quoted and helps him or her attract new readers; it may get the blogger you quoted to read your blog; it may even get him or her to link back to you and help you get more readers.

Bloggers have many ways to know what sites sent traffic to their site including tools built into most blog hosts. If I see any substantial amount of traffic coming to my site from another site, I almost always take a look at that site to see why. If the site's interesting, there's a good chance I'll link to it at some point. Linking to other bloggers gets you their attention.

It IS bad manners to quote 100% of someone else's post without explicit permission. If you think your readers should read all of someone else's post, link them over to that blogger's site.

There is a mechanism called "trackback links" that is meant to allow one blogger to put a link on another blogger's post as a sort of comment saying "I blogged about this post here". Unfortunately, phony trackbacks are used as spam to increase traffic and google juice for sites so many blogs don't allow trackbacks. Fractals of Change does allow trackbacks; but, unlike comments, they don't go live until I OK them. Most ARE spam.

However, if you have posted something which significantly continues a discussion which began on another site, it is perfectly good manners to post a substantive comment on that site and include a link back to your post.

End of today's lesson. BTW, you can read Al's first post on why 3% down payments are a bad idea here.

 

Testing Office 2007

Meant to start this series on moving to a new computer (gulp) and upgrading to Office 2007 (gulp, gulp) and Vista Pro (GULP!) in an orderly way with a post on how computers get old and slow. But when I told the new Microsoft Word that comes with Office 2007 that I wanted to create a new document, it asked me if I really meant a document or a blog post. Well, this is meant to be a blog post so…

Word asked me, reasonably, who my blog provider is – it's TypePad – and then for my TypePad ID and password; it warned me that these would be transmitted in the clear. Since I have several test blogs on TypePad as well as Fractals of Change, Word asked which one I wanted. Maybe I should have started with one of the test blogs but what the hell… let's give it a try.

If you read this post, it is possible to go directly from Word to a post without cutting and pasting. I'll let you know what steps intervene after I click the Publish icon.

Reset#1: After I clicked Publish, I noticed two typos and that there is an Insert Category button. Clicked cancel. Word became unresponsive for a while according to Vista but did recover and say that the blog service provider wasn't responding.

Clicked Insert Category; got back my category list from Typepad (nice) but can only choose one category even though TypePad makes it possible to choose several (not nice) but will continue the experiment.

Reset#2: OK. It did publish; in fact, so did my previous attempt. There is an Open Existing option so have done that and now am presumably editing and able to repost. Tried to use this option to delete the earlier post but can't do that (no big deal). Will try reposting by clicking Publish again. Then will go directly into TypePad to add more categories and Technorati Tags (too bad but not critical).

Just saw an option for handling pictures (imbedded, I hope) by uploading them to the blog provider (default) or somewhere else (which the documentation says can be anything with a public URL including Flickr). Will insert a picture below and leave the default to have it hosted at TypePad. Hmm.. scaling only gave a choice of 1% (maybe for a thumbnail?) but could simply specify a new height and the width adjusted to keep the aspect ratio. We'll see what happens.

 

FeedBlitz, Gawker Media, and Amazon S3

FeedBlitz (in which I’m an investor and board member) recently announced that all Gawker Media sites are offering weekly updates of their top five stories via FeedBlitz-generated email. Gawker needed to be able to customize the look-and-feel of the newsletters which go out to match the appearance of the individual sites and needed to be able to let readers manage their own signup, email address changes, and unsignup; FeedBlitz is an answer to these needs.

Not coincidentally, FeedBlitz CEO Phil Hollows also blogged that FeedBlitz has begun using Amazon S3 for many of its storage needs. Huge potential traffic from Gawker properties and similar megasites makes it essential to be able to scale fast but impossible to predict how fast. S3 is an answer to these needs (I have no financial interest in S3 but am fascinated by its potential to enable rapid prototyping and scaling).

Phil describes Gawker this way: “Gawker sites… are well written but often irreverent, somewhat profane, sometimes politically incorrect and frequently deal with topics you might not want to discuss with your mother.” They include Valleywag, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, and Defamer among many others and are, to say the least, often visited. To see how closely Gawker was able to reproduce the graphic elements of the websites in the automatically generated email, look here for a Valleywag sample and here for Gizmodo.

FeedBlitz is sending out more than 3 million emails (double opt-in emails, not spam) per day. In the old days when a company grew, it brought operations inhouse in order to save money – it verticalized. That was then and this is now. The fastest way for FeedBlitz or any other modern company to grow is to outsource everything that’s not a core competence. So FeedBlitz moved all of its image and script-serving to Amazon S3 rather than just keep buying bigger and bigger servers. Total bill at this point: about $3/day for a significant amount of both storage and traffic. And Amazon’s multiple connections to the Internet backbone and replicated database can serve this stuff up much faster than any local hosting site or a (shudder) in-company data center. No matter how fast FeedBlitz grows, its growth will be easily absorbed within the Amazon cloud. FeedBlitz engineering is free to concentrate on adding new functionality for publishers of newsletters as it worries less about pure scaling of existing functionality – often an Achilles heel for fast-growing services.

Phil says: “If you're running a site or service that is going to get big, I'm now of the opinion that you're nuts not to outsource to S3 or a similar service to store and serve objects that aren't core to your value add. It's faster, better and cheaper and whole lot less hassle. Do it!”

Third Life: Social Networking Breakfast with Jeff Pulver

“It’s like Facebook only it’s not online,” someone at Jeff Pulver’s social networking breakfast in Tel Aviv explained to somebody else. “There’s tagging and everything but it’s not virtual.” That’s a pretty accurate description of these real world events which build on not only connections but also techniques learned online.

Look at this picture of Jeff Pulver, himself:

The elements’ll be familiar to you if you use Facebook. The stickers on Jeff’s right side are his wall, meant for other people to write on. One way the ice gets broken between strangers is that they put tags on each others walls. You can see a yellow sticky someone put on Jeff and there are some little white ones as well.

The sticker on Jeff’s right side has his name and what is meant to be a conversation starting line he wrote about himself. His says “I take having fun seriously.” He does. Below that Jeff tagged himself, accurately, as a geek (unlike me, I’m a nerd).

The printed tag in the middle of Jeff’s chest is from the Marker COM.Vention in which this particular breakfast was imbedded. Craig Newmark of Craigslist and superblogger Robert Scoble were both at the COM.Vention, at Kinnernet which preceded it, and at the breakfast. Most of Jeff’s breakfasts are standalone; most guests are not famous. If you’d like to attend a breakfast near you, best things to do are either read Jeff’s blog or follow him on twitter. I’m trying to convince him to have one in Burlington, Vermont.

Just because the social networking breakfasts are live doesn’t mean technology goes away. At this one, and I suspect most others, there a huge variety of high tech cameras being used almost recursively. Note people taking pictures of each other and of others taking pictures of others and me (not seen) taking this picture and possibly someone taking a picture of me.

If you’d like to hear more about the social networking toolkit, which Jeff says he’s gonna patent, watch the inventor explain in the video below:

Smart Reader Solves Mystery

Smart reader Chris quickly solved the mystery of the cloned blog which baffled me yesterday when I discovered a Japanese version of Fractals of Change. Daughter Kate verified the solution by following Chris’ prescription to make a Japanese version of her blog, On Jewels:

The solution has a zen-like essence to it. The clone doesn’t exist until you look for it! If you type the URL http://hot-news.coresv.com/doctor-xxx  and replace “xxx” with the name of almost any English-language (I didn’t test other languages) website, a Japanese clone of the website as it exists at the moment is created and returned to your browser. I don’t know how to figure out if the clone is retained somewhere after that or disappears until someone wants to look at it again (maybe this is also a philosophical question).

If a Google indexing bot crawls my link to the Japanese version of my blog or Kate’s, it is likely that a clone will be created for it to look at and index. If someone subsequently Googles in Japanese, these links to transient Japanese versions of the websites’ll be returned if the sites are relevant to their query. Even more magically, following these links will bring the cloned versions of the websites back into existence. Wow!

Interesting implication is that you can link to the Japanese version of your blog following Chris’ recipe above and the Japanese clone will exist for anyone who follows the link. Test before you do this, though; whatever this process is, it doesn’t seem to be able to deal with some complex websites: www.feld.com doesn’t translate at all and avc.blogs.com translates only partially. Both Brad Feld and Fred Wilson have complex blog layouts with lots of widgets, gidgets, and gadgets.

Apparently the business model for this service is appending ads of its own to the blog clones. The ads below showed up on the bottom of the On Jewels clone:

Mystery of the Cloned Blog

Clearly a bot did it. But whose bot? Who is hosting this mysterious (and unauthorized) Japanese clone of Fractals of Change? Why? You can help solve this mystery.

Because someone followed a link from this site to the real FOC, I accidentally found this at http://hot-news.coresv.com/doctor-blog.tomevslin.com. A Google popup displays the original English when I mouse over it so I’m guessing that a Google capability was used to automatically translate it. Some of the links and some of the ads work. Some links (comments, for example) don’t work. The ads I’ve authorized are here. There are also unauthorized ads apparently added by whomever owns this site.

I’ve done a little investigating but haven’t found much other than that there are other cloned blogs on the same domain and that CoreSv is the name for a technology used to manage streams of web content. I haven’t been able to find anything about the owners. A WhoIs search just reveals that the domain name was registered in 2006 and gives information about the registrar but not the owner.

Presumably the bot will faithfully clone this post. My hope is that someone who is reading it on the cloned site will tell me more about that site by writing to tevslin at gmail dot com or by going to http://blog.tomevslin.com and leaving a comment on this post (not the cloned post). Of course would be glad to hear from anyone who knows more about this than I do.

Post2tweet – Convergence is Happening

Now I can tell you what I was testing yesterday.

From now on, whenever I post a new article to Fractals of Change, a tweet with the title, the first little bit of text, and the URL of the post will be visible to anyone who is following me on twitter. Moreover, the tweet becomes a status message which my Facebook friends can see. Stuff is actually beginning to come together.

twitter is meant to answer the question “what are you doing right now” assuming there is someone who really cares about the answer. Being that I’m a rather private person, the answer often might be “none of your business”; of course I don’t twitter that but silence means almost the same thing. However, when I write something and post it to my blog, I do want those who care about what I’m doing to know about that. So automatically having it turned into a tweet and Facebook status is a good thing.

FeedBlitz (in which I’m an investor) is the app used to make sure your blog posts turn into tweets (I’m an indirect investor in twitter as well). Use of both FeedBlitz and twitter is free for this purpose. Of course you have to have a blog with some sort of RSS feed as well. Assuming you have a Twitter account, here’s what you do:

1. Go to www.feedblitz.com/.
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the home page (you are acting as a subscriber here, not a publisher).
3. Enter the URL of your blog.
4. Click Subscribe.
5. Select Twitter (public, for your followers)
6. Enter your Twitter name and password.
7. Copy the captcha to prove you’re not a bot.
8. Click Subscribe.

That’s it. A few minutes after you post, a tweet will appear.

In order to get your tweets (any tweet, not just these) to become your Facebook status, you need to install the twitter app on Facebook (I am NOT an investor in Facebook).

BTW, you can also use the FeedBlitz to twitter interface to get notified via twitter of new posts to almost any blog (any blog with an open feed which is almost all blogs) whether or not the blogger is using twitter or FeedBlitz. Maybe you want to know when I post but have no interest in my other twitter updates. Maybe you want to know whenever your competitor posts – or your significant other. Remember, you can even get your tweets by cellphone so you’ll be right up to the minute.

If you want notifications about new posts to a blog, follow the same steps as above but in step 5 Select Twitter (private, direct to you only) and supply your twitter direct ID in step 6.

What this is about is reader choice which all authors are wise to encourage. Some people want to go directly to your blog site; others use feed readers or subscribe by email; some live for tweets; some want to be notified through AOL or Skype instant messenger services. These happen to be the options which FeedBlitz supports directly today; there’ll be more, not less, tomorrow is my guess.

What’s twitter? is a primer on that service.

Kindle – Book Reader’s Review

Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader came and got buried among the holiday packages. But it emerged from post-holiday pile of cardboard, wrapping paper, and ribbons. Since we were planning a three day trip, it was a good time for a road test.

Not surprisingly, there is no access to the Sprint network – the network which underlies Amazon’ WhisperNet - in ruralVermont so couldn’t download any books before leaving home. Contented myself with reading the introduction already loaded onto Kindle and with practice page-turning.

The electronic ink IS amazing. As you “turn” each page by pressing a next page bar on the side of the unit, there’s a flicker as the ink drops rush from their old positions to their new ones. Reminds me of the Harvard University Marching Band which, in my day, eschewed marching; a pistol was fired and each player ran from his current location to wherever he was supposed to be in the next formation.

Once the ink drops reassemble, the look is much more like good ink on good paper than dots on a screen. You read by reflected light; no light comes from the screen – just like a “real” book.  Better in some ways because you can change the font size on Kindle to suit your eyes. Black ink on a white screen is the only option – just like the first Macintosh.

This architecture not only makes Kindle pages very readable, it also prolongs battery life since there is no backlight and energy is only required to move the dots, not to keep them in position.

Kindle travels in a felt covered case about the size of a paperback and clearly designed to say “book”. Only quibble is that there’s nowhere for the Kindle charger in the case so it goes with the rest of the tangle of wires in your computer bag.

At Burlington airport Sprint was four bars and, immediately, my novel hackoff.com:an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble and Fractals of Change – both of which I’d ordered when I ordered Kindle – downloaded. Whole download took no more than a minute or so. Note excellent Amazon customer experience: didn’t have to register because Amazon knew I’d bought the unit; didn’t have to register for the Sprint service because it comes with the unit; didn’t have to ask for what I’d already ordered to be downloaded. Got a nice thank you letter from Jeff Bezos, too. Device can hold 200 books BEFORE you add expansion memory AND everything you buy is archived forever at Amazon for redownload in case you lose or have to delete some.

I looked for books for the trip in the Kindle Store, which is never more than a click away. Naturally Amazon’s suggestions based on my past orders and promotional fees paid my publishers were there just as if I’d been on my computer. I downloaded Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex Systems from Proteins to Social Networks and, once I noticed that I had the option to do this free, the first chapter of No Country for Old Men.

Weak Links appears not to have been formatted correctly for an electronic edition (more on this when I post on implications for authors). Some of the letters are incomplete; there are spaces in the middle of words and hyphenation in the middle of lines. I wrote Amazon and asked for a refund (book content seems interesting though). Update: Amazon responded to my email to customer service within 24 hours, verified what I saw, apologized, and gave me a credit

No Country formatted well and was a pleasant reading experience except that the pages are a little smaller than those of a paperback, the lines a little short for the way I read, and the flicker at page turn a little distracting. My guess is these are all things readers’ll get over quickly and we’ll retrain ourselves. Decided not to order the book based on its style but that’s a plus for the first chapter free policy.

Noticed that all three books on my Kindle opened in strange places when first accessed although it’s easy enough to get back to the cover or table of contents. I suspect this is a problem in book prep seeing how much trouble I had with this when preparing the e-book edition of hackoff.com. Still annoying.

Reading Fractals of Change as a paid subscription ($.99/month) was a good experience on Kindle. Formatting was right; color pictures rendered well into black, white, and grey; links were live. However, reading Fractals and other things in the browser (which provides FREE Internet access), is problematic. See this post for a review of Kindle’s browser for more on that and even more in an upcoming author’s post.

The flight attendants say “the cabin door is closed. Please turn off all devices with an on-off switch. We will tell you when it’s safe to turn on approved electronics.” Of course this means that you have to carry at least a magazine to read during taxi, takeoffs, and landings. Else you might find yourself talking to the person next to you.

Kindle does have a simple switch to turn off its radio for use aloft where radios are forbidden.

I give it a B+ as a book reader based on initial experience.

Kindle – Reader Questions and Comments

In a recent post, I opined that Kindle may be more important as a crude opening wedge for free (sponsored) Internet access than as a change-agent for the way people read books.

Reader ellen has a good question:

“The free internet service after the $400 buy price sounds too good to be true. I would certainly buy one for that reason alone.

“I am going to ask a really dumb question. Does getting wireless access to the internet mean every time you are near any wireless you will be able to log on or does it mean you have to go through the same towers as cell phone access? Having had so much trouble with at and t cellular for my phone would sprint have to be well covered in my state? No one around here uses sprint for cell access. Everyone uses verizon, because for some reason it is best in my area of massachusetts. After many years and 4000 leftover rollover minutes I a dumping at and t for verizon.”

Ellen, that’s a good question. You shouldn’t buy a Kindle if you aren’t usually in a place where there is a good signal from Sprint. EVDO uses the same towers as voice service; so, if Sprint voice isn’t good where you are, EVDO won’t be either. Verizon also supports EVDO but that won’t do you any good with Kindle because it’s tied to Sprint’s network. Moreover, it is possible to be in a place where voice service is good and data not. If you know someone with a reasonably modern cellphone who has Sprint service, ask him or her to look at it near your house and see whether it says “EV” or “1X” where it shows the data connection (different phones display this differently). 1X is a slow data network and Kindle won’t work on that; it is rapidly being replaced by EVDO by both Sprint and Verizon.

Reader Aswath, who is a smart guy, is confused:

“I am a bit confused about the "free" access to the Internet. If I am right in interpreting this, then why do I have to pay a monthly fee to read FOC? That is why I thought that I could access only those sites to which I have subscribed (signified by a bookmark in the browser?). But then both you and Pogue [nb. NY Times writer David Pogue in this article] say it differently. Hence the confusion.”

Internet access IS free through the builtin browser on Kindle. You can, for example, read Fractals of Change in the browser – free – just as you do in the browser on your PC or Mac. However, you can also elect to pay 99 cents/month to subscribe to FOC. That is confusing; why would you pay for something you can have free?

Well, two possible reasons. One, the version you pay for is presumably (I don’t have a Kindle yet) better formatted for the Kindle screen. It has no ads and doesn’t have the sidebars that the browser version does. The Kindle browser is described by Amazon as “basic” so that may make FOC pretty ugly when viewed that way.

More important in the case of a blog or other periodicals which you can subscribe to is that they are downloaded to the Kindle automagically rather than being fetched from the web. That makes a difference if you are going to want to read this content when you’re offline – on a plane, for example, or traveling through country where Sprint EVDO (and therefore Amazon Whispernet) is not available – assuming you were online at some time so that the download could take place.

Both of these reasons for buying content rather than consuming it free are even more important for books. You can read my novel hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble free at www.hackoff.com. Many people, however, don’t want to read a whole book online. You can also download and print PDFs free.(but not on Kindle). Or you can get it nicely formatted so that you turn pages as in a book rather than scrolling and read it on Kindle offline – but that costs $4.76. If you do that, BTW, Amazon stores it on your virtual bookshelf forever even if you delete it from Kindle to make room for more books. Probably the real comparison here is with the hardcover edition available from Amazon for $18.96.

Reader Marc Orchant did try hackoff.com on Kindle: “hackoff.com looks great on the Kindle. The formatting is clean (e.g. Q&A in the first chapter) and I'm looking forward to reading it as I count myself among the survivors of those perilous bubble days.” Nice to hear. Thanks, Marc.

Reader Terry Gold also likes Kindle (wish I had mine): “I've had a Kindle all weekend, and I'm already planning on how I can get rid of most of my paper books. I'll keep the ones that mean the most to me, but for everything else, this is the way to read. I just had Amazon send me a sample of your book even though I have the hard copy and I can read it on the web. The Kindle changes reading for me.”

On a somber note, reader