O'Reilly News & Commentary

Why Posterous Is a Smart Tool For Informal Government Blogging

By Mark Drapeau
October 19, 2009

For a few weeks, I've been testing a tool called Posterous, and I've come to like it a lot. You can post blogs simply by emailing post@posterous.com or a similar address - you don't even need an "account" or a "login" or a "password." Even in the private sector, this is considered a cool feature. But for government employees, it could be a breath of life in an otherwise locked-down state of cybersecurity affairs.

Four short links: 5 October 2009 - Bozo Cloud Talk, Annotation Fail(ish), Python MySQL Slash, and Infinite Books

By Nat Torkington
October 5, 2009

Brown Cloud Marketing -- An advertorial "interviewing" the general manager of a company offering "DNS in the cloud". This might be a worthwhile service, but the way he markets it (by saying open source is "freeware" and the market leader is "legacy") reveals a rich vein of bozo. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

The App Store and the Long Tail Part 2: The Real "DRM" At Stake

By Andrew Savikas
August 11, 2009

A few weeks ago I wrote about how the small number of sales from many different countries were adding up to more than the large number of sales from the US in the App Store for our books. Our success got me wondering why there's not stronger interest from other publishers, especially trade publishers, in iPhone apps (besides concerns about pricing and the approval process). Then as I was looking at rankings for some of the top paid book apps, I spotted a possible answer.

Anderson: "It's All About Attention"

By Andrew Savikas
July 29, 2009

Over on Spiegel Online, Chris Anderson does a great job responding to nearly all of the standard old-media responses to new media. Unsurprisingly (I'm sure Wired would have done the same) they pulled one line from a lengthy response to create the provocative title "Maybe Media Will Be a Hobby Rather than a Job." The full passage is much more useful and nuanced:

Content is a Service Business

By Andrew Savikas
July 13, 2009

What you're selling as an artist (or an author, or a publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing something that the customer/reader/fan wants. That may be entertainment, it may be information, it may be a souvenir of an event or of who they were at a particular moment in their life (Kelly describes something similar as his eight "qualities that can't be copied": Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability). Note that that list doesn't include "content." The thing that most publishers (and authors) spend most of their time fretting about (making it, selling it, distributing it, "protecting" it) isn't the thing that their customers are actually buying. Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business.

The First Step into the Cloud: Which Kinds of Applications Make the Most Sense?

By George Reese
June 24, 2009

A key to successfully integrating the public cloud into your IT infrastructure is identifying a first application that will provide you with measurable results and learnings that can apply to future deployments without putting your business at risk. IT annoyances make the ideal first cloud projects.

Indigo's Shortcovers Launched Today: A Good Start, But Room for Reader Improvement

By Andrew Savikas
February 26, 2009

The Shortcovers website and companion iPhone and Blackberry apps launched today. Put simply, it's a website for buying ebooks. But there's a few interesting twists that (for now) set it apart. Though most of the current content is books, the primary unit of the service is the "shortcover" -- things like an article, a blog post, and a book chapter. That means publishers have the option of making individual chapters available for sale (or as free samples). But perhaps the more interesting consequence of that is something they're calling "mixes," where readers can combine multiple shortcovers into a single "mix" (think iTunes playlist), and share that with other readers.

Why Jerry Seinfeld Probably Cost Microsoft a Lot More than $10 Million

By Nitesh Dhanjani
November 10, 2008

In this article, I want put forth a case study to demonstrate how capturing feelings on the social web can allow companies to measure the reputation of their brand.

Do Publisher Brands Still Have Relevance?

By Peter Brantley
October 3, 2008

Kate Eltham espies HarperStudio, asking whether they should have a separate Web portal/site, or just operate with a blog. She wonders: can a publisher drive a brand these days?...

Relationship is miles ahead of frequent flyer programs

By Emerson Niide
September 25, 2008

Many companies think they are investing in the relationship with their clients, but in fact, they are only establishing a points program.

Is the Long Tail Getting the Short End of the Stick?

By Kurt Cagle
July 6, 2008

The idea has gone from statistical curiosity to a deeply entrenched belief - especially in Silicon Valley: We are moving toward an economic state where it no longer becomes necessary to invest just in the top 1% of all ideas, but that instead an investor could create strategies using the web to take advantage of the statistical long tail - small niche markets (perhaps only one consumer deep) that in the aggregate can prove more lucrative than the blockbuster.

Analog to digital conversion of your marketing strategy

By Bryan Rasmussen
June 23, 2008

Someone going by on a train seems to have snapped a picture of a Capital One Sales strategy, The implicit violence of the marketing speak leads to a feeling that one has been insulted, and potentially assaulted.

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