E-books and e-publishing by Samuel Vaknin (summer reading list txt) 📖

the world” (a-la artificial

intelligence) - preferably including itself, the user, and

their cumulative interactions.

It must regard all other “intelligent” machines in its

“world” (the user being only one of them) as its “clients”.

It must, therefore, be able to communicate with them in a

natural language.

Its universe must be seamless (e.g., the physical or even

system location of files or hardware or software or applets or

servers or communication lines or information and so on - will

be irrelevant).

It will probably be peer-orientated (no hierarchy).

I call it “the intuitive universal interface”.

The new media technologies were designed by engineers and

programmers - not by marketing people and users. The interface

of the future will reflect the needs, wishes, limitations, and

skills of users. This is a revolutionary shift and a natural

outcome of the takeover of the Internet by governments and

bottom line orientated corporations. The interface of the

future will seek to enhance usage and enrich the user’s

experience - not to win technological beauty contest. It is a

welcome transition - and long overdue.

 

Internet Advertising - What Went Wrong?

By: Sam Vaknin

 

The decline in Internet advertising - though paralleled by a

similar trend in print advertising - had more serious and

irreversible implications. Most content dot.coms were based on

ad-driven revenue models. Online advertising was supposed to

amortize startup and operational costs and lead to

profitability even as it subsidized free access to costly

content.

A similar revenue model has been successfully propping up

print periodicals for at least two centuries. But, as opposed

to their online counterparts, print products have a few

streams of income, not least among them paid subscriptions.

Moreover, print media kept their costs down in good times and

bad. Dot.coms devoured their investors’ money in a self-destructive and avaricious bacchanalia.

But why did online advertising collapse in the first place?

Was it ineffective?

Advertising is a multi-faceted and psychologically complex

phenomenon. It imparts information to potential consumers,

users, suppliers, investors, the community, or other

stakeholders in the firm. It motivates each of these to do his

bit: consumers to consume, investors to invest and so on.

But this is not the main function of the advertising dollar.

Modern economic signal theory has cast advertising in a new

and surprising - though by no means counterintuitive - light.

According to this theory, the role of advertising is to signal

to the marketplace the advertiser’s resilience, longevity,

wealth, clout, and dominance. By splurging money of

advertising, the advertiser actually informs us - the

“eyeballs” - that it is here to stay, sufficiently affluent to

finance its ads, stable, reliable, and dominant.

“If firm X invested a million bucks in advertising - it must

be worth more than a million bucks” - goes the signal. “If it

invested so much money in promoting its products, it is not a

fly-by-night”. “If it can throw money at an ad campaign, it is

stable and resilient”.

This signal is missing in online advertising. It drowns in

noise. The online noise to signal ratio was unacceptable to

advertisers - so they stopped advertising. When the noise to

signal ratio tops a certain level - ads cease to be effective.

The readers or spectators become inured to the messages - both

explicit and implicit. They tune off.

The noise in online advertising stems from two sources.

A critical element in the signal is lost if the ad is not paid

for. Only paid advertising conveys information about the

purported health and prospects of the advertiser. Yet, the

Internet is flooded with free advertising: free classifieds,

free banner ads, ad exchanges. The paid ads drown in this

ocean of free ads. There is often no way of telling a paid ad

from a free one - without reading the fine print.

Moreover, Internet users are a “captive audience”. It is easy

to flip ad-besieged channels on TV, or turn the ad-laden leaf

of a newspaper. It is close to impossible to avoid an ad on

the Net. Banner ads are an integral part of the page. Pop-up

ads pop up. Embedded ads are embedded. One needs to install

special applications to avoid the harassment.

This leads to desensitization and a revolt of the user. Users

resent the intrusion, are incensed by the coercive tactics of

advertisers, nerve wrecked by protracted download times, and

unnerved by the content of many of the ads. This is not an

environment conducive to clinching deals or converting to

sales.

There is also the issue of credibility. The bulk of online

advertising emanates from dot.coms. Even prior to the recent

stock exchange meltdown, these were not considered paragons of

rectitude and truth in advertising. People learned to distrust

most of what they read in Internet ads. Scorched by scams,

false promises, faulty products, shoddy or non-existent

customer care, broken links, or all of the above - users

learned to ignore Web advertising and relegate it to their

mental dust bins.

More about credibility on the Web here:

The InCredible Web

Will the medium ever recover? Probably not. As the Internet is

taken over by brick-and-mortar corporations and governments,

online fare will come to resemble the offline sort. Online ads

will be no more than interactive renditions of their offline

facsimiles. The revenue model will switch from advertising to

subscriptions and “author-pays”. The days of free content

financed by advertising are over.

This does not mean that the days of free content are over as

well. It only means that new, improved, realistic, and

clutter-free revenue models will have to be found. There are

some interesting developments in scholarly online publishing

as well as in the fields of online reference and self-publishing. But these are early days and the medium is

dynamic. Ad-driven content was a failure. The next model may

be a roaring success - or yet another dismal defeat.

 

The Economics of Spam

By: Sam Vaknin

Also published by United Press International (UPI)

 

Tennessee resident K. C. “Khan” Smith owes the internet

service provider EarthLink $24 million. According to the CNN,

last August he was slapped with a lawsuit accusing him of

violating federal and state Racketeering Influenced and

Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statutes, the federal Computer

Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984, the federal Electronic

Communications Privacy Act of 1986 and numerous other state

laws. On July 19 - having failed to appear in court - the

judge ruled against him. Mr. Smith is a spammer.

Brightmail, a vendor of e-mail filters and anti-spam

applications warned that close to 5 million spam “attacks” or

“bursts” occurred last month and that spam has mushroomed 450

percent since June last year. PC World concurs. Between one

seventh and one half of all e-mail messages are spam -

unsolicited and intrusive commercial ads, mostly concerned

with sex, scams, get rich quick schemes, financial services

and products, and health articles of dubious provenance. The

messages are sent from spoofed or fake e-mail addresses. Some

spammers hack into unsecured servers - mainly in China and

Korea - to relay their missives anonymously.

Spam is an industry. Mass e-mailers maintain lists of e-mail

addresses, often “harvested” by spamware bots - specialized

computer applications - from Web sites. These lists are rented

out or sold to marketers who use bulk mail services. They come

cheap - c. $100 for 10 million addresses. Bulk mailers provide

servers and bandwidth, charging c. $300 per million messages

sent.

As spam recipients become more inured, ISP’s less tolerant,

and both more litigious - spammers multiply their efforts in

order to maintain the same response rate. Spam works. It is

not universally unwanted - which makes it tricky to outlaw. It

elicits between 0.1 and 1 percent in positive follow ups,

depending on the message. Many messages now include HTML,

JavaScript, and ActiveX coding and thus resemble viruses.

Jupiter Media Matrix predicted last year that the number of

spam messages annually received by a typical Internet user is

bound to double to 1400 and spending on legitimate e-mail

marketing will reach $9.4 billion by 2006 - compared to $1

billion in 2001. Forrester Research pegs the number at $4.8

billion next year.

More than 2.3 billion spam messages are sent daily. eMarketer

puts the figures a lot lower at 76 billion messages this year.

By 2006, daily spam output will soar to c. 15 billion

missives, says Radicati Group. Jupiter projects a more modest

268 billion annual messages by 2005. An average communication

costs the spammer 0.00032 cents.

PC World quotes the European Union as pegging the bandwidth

costs of spam worldwide at $8-10 billion annually. Other

damages include server crashes, time spent purging unwanted

messages, lower productivity, aggravation, and increased cost

of Internet access.

Inevitably, the spam industry gave rise to an anti-spam

industry. According to a Radicati Group report titled “Anti-virus, anti-spam, and content filtering market trends 2002-2006”, anti-spam revenues are projected to exceed $88 million

this year - and more than double by 2006. List blockers,

report and complaint generators, advocacy groups, registers of

known spammers, and spam filters all proliferate. The Wall

Street Journal reported in its June 25 issue about a

resurgence of anti-spam startups financed by eager venture

capital.

ISP’s are bent on preventing abuse - reported by victims - by

expunging the accounts of spammers. But the latter simply

switch ISP’s or sign on with free services like Hotmail and

Yahoo! Barriers to entry are getting lower by the day as the

costs of hardware, software, and communications plummet.

The use of e-mail and broadband connections by the general

population is spreading. Hundreds of thousands of

technologically-savvy operators have joined the market in the

last two years, as the dotcom bubble burst. Still, Steve

Linford of the UK-based Spamhaus.org insists that most spam

emanates from c. 80 large operators.

Now, according to Jupiter Media, ISP’s and portals are poised

to begin to charge advertisers in a tier-based system, replete

with premium services. Writing back in 1998, Bill Gates

described a solution also espoused by Esther Dyson, chair of

the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

“As I first described in my book “The Road Ahead” in 1995, I

expect that eventually you’ll be paid to read unsolicited email. You’ll tell your e-mail program to discard all

unsolicited messages that don’t offer an amount of money that

you’ll choose. If you open a paid message and discover it’s

from a long-lost friend or somebody else who has a legitimate

reason to contact you, you’ll be able to cancel the payment.

Otherwise, you’ll be paid for your time.”

Subscribers may not be appreciative of the joint ventures

between gatekeepers and inbox clutterers. Moreover, dominant

ISP’s, such as AT&T and PSINet have recurrently been accused

of knowingly collaborating with spammers. ISP’s rely on the

data traffic that spam generates for their revenues in an

ever-harsher business environment.

The Financial Times and others described how WorldCom refuses

to ban the sale of spamware over its network, claiming that it

does not regulate content. When “pink” (the color of canned

spam) contracts came to light, the implicated ISP’s blame the

whole affair on rogue employees.

PC World begs to differ:

“Ronnie Scelson, a self-described spammer who signed such a

contract with PSInet, (says) that backbone providers are more

than happy to do business with bulk e-mailers. ‘I’ve signed up

with the biggest 50 carriers two or three times,’ says Scelson

… The Louisiana-based spammer claims to send 84 million

commercial e-mail messages a day over his three 45-megabit-per-second DS3 circuits. “If you were getting $40,000 a month

for each circuit,” Scelson asks, “would you want to shut me

down?”

 

The line between permission-based or “opt-in” e-mail marketing

and spam is getting thinner by the day. Some list resellers

guarantee the consensual nature of their wares. According to

the Direct Marketing Association’s guidelines, quoted by PC

World, not responding to an unsolicited e-mail amounts to

“opting-in” - a marketing strategy known as “opting out”. Most

experts, though,