Blogging about Books

Chapter 2 –

The value of anonymity: privacy and masquerade

In Chapter One, you signed up for a new email account and free Web space so you could control your online identity — operating as a private individual (separate from your company), or with an invented
“pen name” if you preferred anonymity. Now let’s explore the implications of anonymity for you and your potential customers. How does anonymity affect online behavior — including social contacts and
shopping? And what can you do when you need more than informal anonymity?

Although the technology is quite different, many people associate privacy (information about who you are and what you do) with advertising (commercial messages you see that you never asked to see).
Therefore, we’ll also touch on concerns about “cookies” and “banner ads” and how you and your customers can zap both of them.

Required assignments for Chapter Two:
• try anonymous Web browsing at anonymizer.com
• try banner-free surfing with AdSubtract software from interMute

Electives:
• set up an anonymous online surprise party for a friend

Anonymity can be passive (privacy) or active (masquerade). Privacy means preventing others from getting access to information about you. Masquerade means creating a new identity.
You may put a high value on privacy, even though you have nothing to hide. And you may value masquerade as enabling you to do things that otherwise you would never do — a liberating experience that
allows you to explore who you are and who you want to be.
Part One — Privacy: build your defenses

Don’t underestimate the importance of online privacy for your business

You probably want to have control over what other people and companies know about you and your preferences, habits, financial condition, and behavior. So do your customers.

Except in special cases (which we’ll discuss below), the spread of personal information is likely to be a nuisance, or perhaps an embarrassment, rather than leading to financial loss or calculable damage. But
this issue is emotionally charged. Loyal customers can turn into rapid enemies over privacy concerns. Hence you need hands-on experience to build a personal appreciation for the special importance of
privacy on the Internet.

Some people won’t use an online service unless they can remain anonymous. They don’t want to leave a trail, and they don’t want merchants to gather personal information about them and their surfing habits
or buying habits, mainly because they don’t want to be inundated with unwanted email and other intrusive commercial contacts.

…

Anonymity Part 2 — Masquerade: find out who you can be

Remember those free services you experimented with in Chapter One? Go back now and experiment with creating a new identity for yourself — not just a new name/handle, but a personality to go with it. Let
go. Imagine yourself as someone from another time, another place, perhaps another planet. Give yourself a history, tastes, habits, a unique voice. Imagine you’ve been invited to a Hollywood celebrity
masquerade party, and money is no object in getting a fantastic costume. What costume would you rent?

Imagine you’ve rented it and are wearing it. Tell yourself who you are now. Then begin to tell old friends who you know are online that this is who you are — sending them email under this new persona and
not letting on who you really are. Then try out this persona with total strangers in anonymous gathering areas, like live chat and email discussion groups. Enjoy. Take this project seriously enough for you to
begin to feel what it’s like to shed your everyday identity for awhile and become someone else. You’ve been reincarnated on line.

Now, as an elective assignment for this chapter, approach a friend under this new identity of yours and encourage that friend (or spouse or significant other) to don a new identity too and join you for online
discussion at a time and place of your choosing. Tell this person that you’ve organized an online masquerade party in his or her honor. Set the theme for the party. Approach at least three other people and
write them too, inviting them to the party. Follow up with online greeting cards. Go to http://www.americangreetings.com/, http://www.hallmark.com/, http://www.blab.com/, http://www.e-cards.com/, ecards.amazon.com, or
http://www.bluemountain.com/, and check out their “ecard” offerings. These are graphic and sometimes animated messages that you can personalize and send for free by email. Send out such messages periodically
to your invitees, reminding them and getting them psyched for your event.

If you regularly encounter the invitees and guest of honor in the real world, pass along some notes and pictures in the same vein, without giving away that you are the source. Maybe offer a tangible prize for
the partygoer with the best new identity in keeping with the theme or for whoever does the best job of staying in character.

If you can, hold this party now. Do it in a chat room you set up for the occasion. If you still feel ill-equipped to go that far, read ahead to Chapter Seven, where you’ll learn how to set up your own chat room,
and maybe even read ahead to Chapter Eleven and include use of a webcam in your online party. But sooner or later, do it — for the fun of it and for the experience and what you can learn about yourself and
about the Internet business environment from this experience.

Richard Seltzer

For the full text of this chapter, please go to http://www.samizdat.com/bootcamp1.html

Please post your comments/reactions/suggestions here.

From January to March [2001], I wrote a book for Wiley, entitled Web Business Boot Camp. The book covers all aspects of Web business, giving practical hands-on advice for managers, helping them get a feel for what is possible and encouraging them to get their hands dirty, actually creating and promoting Web pages themselves, instead of depending on experts. I would have loved to have pushed a button to make that text available to the world the day I finished the writing.

The book reached stores in January [2002], but meanwhile the Web business environment changed enormously.

Fortunately, the causes, direction, and pace of change were important themes in the book. And I frequently emphasized that not all of the useful services described in the book were likely to survive; and, whenever possible, I mentioned alternatives and provided instructions for what to do if any of these services went away.

To get a sense of how much the world of Internet business has changed in the last six months, here’s a quick update on some of the sites recommended in the book.

NBCi dropped its Web hosting service, which it had acquired in buying Xoom. And Homestead, which was free, now charges. But Angelfire, Tripod, and Geocities are still going strong.

Whalemail which used to offer a free Web-based service that made it easy to transfer large files (up to 50 Mbytes), now charges, but their rates are reasonable. A related paid service from SwapDrive  lets you share files with your team, and also do automatic Web-based backups.

For Web-based storage that looks and feels like an extra Windows-based drive on your PC, check Mangomind from Mangosoft — another paid but reasonably priced service. An account with them works very much like a shared drive on a local area network.

Juno made its “free” service even more annoying, with persistent ads and busy signals, trying to get more folks to migrate to its paid service.

Netzero is using the same obnoxious business model.
I still have a cable modem ISP, but I’m not sure who my service provider is at this point. At Home is bankrupt and AT&T appears to be buying their assets. I’m hoping that the transition will be seamless.  But I do not look forward to doing business with AT&T. I’ve been stung by them too many times in the past.  (The old movie The President’s Analyst expressed my sentiments very well.) In fact, I’d be willing to pay as much as 50% more to another service just to not have to have anything to do with AT&T. Once the smoke clears and they let me know aout the new pricing and services, 
I’ll probably switch to RCN. [Author's note: I did switch to RCN, and have been quite happy with their service.]
My Web hosting service Hispeed.com was just bought by US.net. I loved Hispeed because of its low cost and excellent service and also because they offered unlimited Web space and unlimited traffic. I still don’t know what the change of ownership will mean in terms of services and costs On the plus side, the new owner has added useful detailed traffic stats. [Author note: I later switched to OCHosting, which is great.]

Google now appears to have totally integrated Deja into its service. So now you can now search or browse through an enormous archive of newsgroup postings. But, of course, they bury this great resource — to get to it you have to click on “Groups” from the Google home page.

HumanClick — was free. They made it easy for visitors at your site to initiate chat sessions with you — so you could answer questions, and turn prospects into customers.  But they now charge $249/year so I’ve deleted them from my site. [Author note: I later signed up for a similar, but better service from SiteChatter, for $29/month.]

AltaVista — was the search engine with the freshest content. They added pages to the index within a few days of submission. Now they are trying to get Web sites to pay for “Express submission”.  They charge $39 for a single Web page, with a sliding scale based on volume down to $12 per Web page, if you have over 100 pages. In other words, their pricing is so high that it locks out individuals  and small businesses. Their free submission service now purportedly takes 4-6 weeks. Expect the content in the index to suffer — becoming skewed toward commercial sites, with information about 
other sites becoming very stale. In the past, I depended heavily on AltaVista for traffic. If AltaVista had a glitch, I could immediately see a dip in my traffic. Now AltaVista only brings me less than 2% of my traffic, and about 40% comes by way of Google. Also, before AltaVista had a good affiliate program, so I had lots of AltaVisa search boxes on my pages, and gave instructions on how to set up a query starting with host:samizdat.com to restrict searches to pages at my site. I was averaging a couple hundred dollars a month in affiliate revenue because so many people used those search boxes on my pages.  But now AltaVista has done away with its affiliate program. So I deleted all those boxes and replaced them with FreeFind, a service designed to do just what I wanted. I can request that FreeFind spider my site on a regular schedule or 
whenever I like, and visitors who use that search box only get results from my pages. It’s a good, useful service, and it’s still free. On the plus side, Altavista’s free translation service http://babelfish.altavista.com/ has added Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. [Author note: Overture bought AltaVista, then Yahoo bought Overture. What remains of AltaVista is far different from what it was before. I now use Google, exclusively, for search; even though I wrote the book The AltaVista Search Revolution.]

Meanwhile, two of the top three directories have raised prices for their “Express submission” — Looksmart from $100 to $299, Yahoo from $199 to $299.

Excite, one of the first and best search engines, just filed for bankruputcy.
    

GoTo, a search site that has Web sites bid and pay for position in search results (like paid advertising) is changing its name to Overture. (Author Note: see above, Overture bought AltaVisata, and then Yahoo bought Overture.]

Some very useful sites have changed URLs. Tracerlock, a service that lets you know when new results appear for pre-set searches at AltaVista and other search engines has moved from  peacefire.com/tracerlock to tracerlock.com. And the free translation service, Internet Translation, has moved to http://www.intertran.net/
Previously, the main benefit to me of the Amazon affiliate program, was that I could use my own links to buy books for myself at Amazon — thereby earning a referral fee that just about offset the shipping price. Now they are cracking down, and do everything they can to disallow purchases by affiliates — a policy which has probably backfired. At least it has in my case. Now I have no special reason to buy at Amazon and hence often shop elsewhere.
While it can be confusing and time-consuming to set up an auction at eBay, half.com, a site that eBay bought, is much easier to use. If you have books, music, or videogames you want to sell, if you enter the ISBN number or UPC number, they already have the product description and photo online. You can put your item up for sale in less than a minute. And if you want to buy second hand, you can find just about every imaginable title here, at low cost — even items that are out of print and normally hard to find. I now buy books at Half.com far more often than I do at Amazon. [Author Note: eBay made major changes to half.com. I no longer use it.]

Lipstream went away, and a variety of popular voice chat services that depended on their technology disappeared.
While Hearme used to offer free voice chat both directly and through partners like Telcopoint, the free alternatives seem to have disappeared. PalTalk is a still free and allows voice chat. But it isn’t Web-based. It’s a separate app that runs over the Internet.
The choices for syndicating your content are dwindling. The largest, most professional site, iSyndicate went bankrupt and was bought by YellowBrix, which is scaling back services. Contentville too just went under. Themestream and thevines, which allowed individuals to share their content and get paid for it, both went under. I’m now looking into new players as uliveandlearn and life-tips as places where I might be able to get paid for my content — as it as, or repackaged, or presented in the form of courses. I’m also checking Content-Exchange.com, Cyberjournalist.com, and Contentious.com for writing leads and syndication opportunities.  And it is far more difficult to get free news-related content for your site. Individual.com, now owned by Office.com appears to have done away with its free services. [Author Note: Today, most content syndication seems to happen by way of blogs.]
In the realm of auctions, FirstAuction — with its 30-minute or shorter “flash auctions” of new and refurbished equipment — has gone out of business. But Egghead still remains (for now) and offers a similar service. In people-to-people auctions, Yahoo used to be free, with Amazon and eBay charging sellers. Now Yahoo too charges sellers. But otherwise things are pretty much the same as they were six months ago — with eBay totally dominating the field. [Author Note: Today eBay dominates even more.]

In the realm of services to support auction sellers, AuctionRover used to be the place to go. They were bought by GoTo Auctions, and now that site has been taken over by UPayless, and all the useful  services have disappeared.
Napster is shut down. But Yaga offers a very interesting alternative for sharing all kinds of files (not just music), and through the acquisition of a micropayments company, they could become a very interesting marketplace for buying and selling content at very low cost. [Author Note: Today's Napster service is paid not free. And Apple with its IPOD and iTunes dominates the online music business. Meanwhile Yaga has morphed into  BitPass, which does not at all look interesting.]
But new sites and services keep appearing, such as software.xfx.net which provides a free popup killer, which eliminates the popup ad windows that many commercial sites now foist upon their visitors; and http://www.marksonline.com/ and http://www.nameprotect.com/ allow you to do free trademark searches.

Business is tough out there. The winds are blowing strong and they keep changing direction. What’s free today may soon cost you. Sources of revenue, like affiliate programs, may be very slow in paying or may just go away without warning. And the service you count on today, may disappear tomorrow. But new alternatives keep appearing — with creative technology and business models. You have to stay alert and flexible — keeping you eye out for new services to add, both to replace what is going away and also to expand your business, helping you to better serve your customers.

Richard Seltzer

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This bootcamp focused what you can do now to learn how the Internet business environment works and to take advantage of today’s opportunities. But you need to balance that perspective with a sense of what is likely to happen over the next five to ten years, not just in terms of technology, but in terms of markets.

Required assignment:
• build flypaper pages

 Technology is predictable, but people are not.

Technology defines the realm of the possible, while marketing, habit, government regulations, business practices, economic conditions, and human whim determine what is actually adopted on a wide scale.

 Technology gurus can state with a high degree of confidence that the amount of information storable on silicon will roughly double every year for the near future. Known as Moore’s Law, that has been the case since the technology was invented back in 1962. Also, memory usage tends to double roughly once every 18 months, following “Parkinson’s Law of Data,” that data expands to fill the space available for storage. As these and related principles play themselves out, computers keep getting faster and capable of storing more and more data; and “standard” software programs become greater memory hogs, requiring ever more powerful computers to run them.

For more than 10 years, we’ve seen hardware capability and software requirements advance in lock-step. Intel keeps making ever faster computer chips, the storage companies make ever more powerful disk drives, and Microsoft comes up with new versions of its software that require all this new processing power and storage space. Your PC, which is quite adequate for word processing, email, and all the other tasks that you typically perform, becomes obsolete every two to three years, because you need to run the latest version of the software so you’ll be compatible with what your colleagues, partners, suppliers, and customers use. Many business people are betting their business plans that both those trends will continue for another ten years or more. But will they?

You can assume that the hardware trend, based on technical feasibility that has already been proven in labs, will hold true. But the market trend of ever increasing demand for processing and storage capacity could easily change. Alternative approaches — such as a rival operating system (Linux), increased use of Web-based distributed storage, and applications that run on the Web rather than on PCs — could break the pattern.

Similarly, the speed of Internet access has been increasing rapidly and predictably. Back in the 1970s, people connected to the Internet with 960 baud modems. By the fall of 1994 when Netscape’s first browser was released, 14,000 baud (14K) modems were common. Today, most people who dialup to connect to the Internet, use 56K modems; and increasing numbers consumers have far higher speed DSL and cable modem connections from their home, in the range of 1,000,000 baud (1 Mbit). By 2006, 100 Mbit access could be commonplace in the US, and 1 gigabit (1,000,000,000) could be available to some people. At that point, the speed that signals move over the Internet is as fast as the speed that signals moved inside computers not that long ago. Full-motion video becomes practical, as does the running of computer applications remotely, rather than on your own PC; together with a whole new set of interesting business models.

That kind of prediction is based on what can be done in labs today. But will people continue to rapidly adopt this new technology? You need to be prepared for such eventualities, but without banking on them, because people and human institutions are highly unpredictable. Legal issues (affecting the availability and price of interesting audio and video content), government regulations affecting the level of competitiveness in the business of selling high speed access, government regulation of content, taxation, the state of the economy, and business practices (including pricing models), can all have a major impact. (In the early days of the Web, the rapid growth of usage in the US was fueled in large part by the fact that local telephone service in the US was based on a fixed monthly fee, rather than metered; and that
early Internet Service Providers established a practice of charging a fixed monthly fee for unlimited usage.)

For several years, we witnessed an insane rush to invest in dot-com companies. That was followed by an equally insane rush to pull out of such investments. If that downturn continues, will the capital be available for the infrastructure changes necessary to make extremely high speed access widely available? And will consumers have the cash to keep upgrading their equipment and to pay for ever higher levels of Internet service?

As you went through the exercises in this book and became familiar with a wide range of capabilities that you may not have been aware of before, you may have been tempted to try similar business models yourself. Balance that temptation with the expectation of rapid and unexpected change. The very technology advances that seem to make a business a sure winner might just as easily fuel an alternative that you can’t anticipate today.

For instance, you might consider going into some variant of the Web hosting business. With the cost of disk storage and of high-speed access declining rapidly and predictably, you’d expect that business to have a great future. And the services they provide could include remote storage to supplement the storage on your PC and for backups and archiving; and also the renting and running of applications, which today you buy outright for your PC and which you might end up paying for on a per-use or subscription basis. In other words, it looks like the world is headed toward a model where computing and storage and applications can all take place remotely, and the gadget on your desk need not be all-powerful. You might want to bet on a distributed computing model, where the Internet becomes the computer and where users turn to small, inexpensive “appliances” instead of full-blown machines on their desks.

But at the same time, we see an equal and opposite trend. At some point, the disk space on a home PC and the speed of connection of that PC to the Internet becomes so great that it is tempting to run a Web site from your home — bypassing Web-hosting services.

Will that happen? Some technical folks have been running Web sites from the PCs on their desktops for three years or more. Widespread adoption will depend on how cable and other high-speed access companies set up their service, and the business terms they adopt — to either encourage or discourage such practices. It will also depend on how quickly inexpensive and easy-to-use software becomes available for personal Web hosting. Five years from now, new PCs might ship with such software pre-installed and with the necessary business arrangements built in (as today you can buy PCs with an Internet access contract bundled into the price.) And you could have so much storage available on your PC and such a high-speed connection that it could automatically store for you a complete copy of all the content on the Internet that you have any immediate interest in. Then “agent” programs of yours could automatically fetch new material from the Web, to refresh the pages you use regularly and even anticipate your needs, guessing what pages you might be interested in and then alerting you that it’s available. In other words, instead of the Internet becoming your computer, your computer becomes the Internet.

So what, if anything, can you bet on?

Expect that the Internet itself will become less visible as it becomes so widely used and so pervasive that we take it for granted. It will become embedded in appliances and cars, and gadgets of all kinds, just as computer chips are today. You won’t know it’s there, or care. All you’ll care about is the functionality that’s based on it.

Over the last decade, you have often heard of the “convergence” of information, communication, and entertainment technologies. But increasingly, users see greater divergence and diversity.

Don’t expect one technology to deliver a knock-out punch to another. Don’t expect either the computer-on-the-Internet or Internet-on-the-desk model to win. Rather, expect a world where full-blown all-powerful PCs co-exist with inexpensive, limited, network computers and with a multitude of very inexpensive specialized devices, many of which have wireless connections to the Internet.

Soon, everyone will have gadgets and Web-based services galore, each of which, taken individually, looks like a great time-saver, opening new opportunities. But that’s like having dozens of remote controls in your living room. You’ll need new services to help you deal with all the growing diversity and to help all the underlying services and gadgets and PCs work together smoothly. You’ll need systems and agents that understand “who” you are — your needs, knowledge, tastes, and capabilities; the resources you have access to, the prices you need to pay for the resources you want, and your ability to pay and how you prefer to pay.

In other words, when assessing Internet business possibilities, you should not extrapolate the trends of current data very far ahead. Pay attention not just to the numbers, but to the human context in which you interpret the numbers. Expect the context to change, sometimes radically; but even in “normal” times expect it to change enough to distort your predictions. When you do business on the Internet, you are operating in an accelerating frame of reference, where static (Newtonian) principles of business may not apply.

But one principle appears to be constant: the Internet is primarily about people, rather than technology. While it does connect computers to computers, documents to documents, and people to documents, its most revolutionary capability is connecting people to people. It connects people together quickly and efficiently and in ways never before possible, leading to new kinds of relationships and new kinds of businesses.

Richard Seltzer

For the full text of this chapter, please go to http://www.samizdat.com/bootcamp12.html

Please post your comments/reactions/suggestions here.

While going through these lessons, you should by now have gained confidence that much of what it takes to build a business on the Web is within your control. You can make your own Web pages, build your own Web site, build an audience, and even serve the needs of an audience. You’ve seen that you can do all that with very little expenditure of cash, but a large investment of your personal time, effort and creativity. You’ve seen that you can pick up a little cash from affiliate programs and content syndication. But you are still wondering — where’s the big payoff?

First, consider our initial purpose. You were to learn the basics of the Internet business environment so you could operate an existing online business at low cost, if necessary; and so you could see alternatives and opportunities that could help make that business successful. Or as an entrepreneur, you were to learn how to get started, to take care of all the basics of setting up an online business without depending on investors.

Still, it’s only natural to look for the winning formula — the insight that could lead to riches. It’s simply not satisfying to hear that success depends on hard work, and is not guaranteed.

Cheer up. Today, we see two huge waves of business change and opportunity coming on the Internet. One is based on high-speed access. The other is wireless. These waves will bring new issues, new opportunities and new risks.

In this chapter, we’ll give you some preliminary experience in those realms, adding capabilities to your experimental Web site and gaining insight into possible new business models.

Required assignment:
• use Realaudio to record and post a message (need microphone)

Electives:
• add voice chat to your Web site,
• use Napster,
• buy a webcam and use it at Spotlife

Making audio books

I used to be a text-bigot. Yes, I enjoy good graphics, music, and videoclips when I encounter them on the Web. But, with text, I was in control, and with everything else I was just another passive consumer. I
could easily create and post text on free Web space. And with text, I could count on people finding my pages without my having to spend money on advertising. Multimedia was beyond my creative reach.
Besides, I told myself, the bandwidth isn’t there yet. Even with DSL and cable-modem speeds, video is still a bit of a joke.
 I dreaded the coming of truly high-speed Internet and the inevitable onrush of pre-packaged, high-production-cost multimedia content, that little guys, like me, couldn’t hope to compete with.

Then, last month, I put an audio book on the Web — nearly 20 Megabytes for a single book. Before that, my entire Web site, which gets over 1500 unique users a day, took up less than 15 Megabytes. So
why was I suddenly being so wasteful? What’s going on?

What I hadn’t realized, but should have, is that disk space on the Web, not bandwidth, was the main barrier to the proliferation of creative do-it-yourself multimedia.

Quality streaming audio has been available, working well even with a 28K modem, for years. With “streaming” media, compressed content flows to you continuously over the Internet. That means that you
don’t have to wait a long time for a file to download to your hard drive for you to play back later. It also means that you don’t need a huge hard drive to save all the multimedia files you enjoy.

Real.com makes available for free both the basic player software (RealPlayer) and the software you need to create streaming media files (RealProducer). I had enjoyed audio and video on the Web as a
consumer, but had never considered producing my own material and making it available on the Web because the files were immense compared to text, and my space on the Web was severely limited. Sure, I
could experiment, making files for my own consumption, and taking advantage of the extra gigabytes on the hard drive of my new PC, but Web space was still precious.

Now, all of a sudden, disk space on the Web is abundant and free or inexpensive. That makes an enormous difference, unleashing my creative instincts, and probably the instincts of many others as well.

A couple years ago, free Web-hosting sites like Xoom (now NBCi), Geocities, and Tripod typically made available 10 Megabytes of space. Now they’ve all raised their limits considerably, and NBCi offers
unlimited disk space for free. If you don’t like the response time, or you’d prefer your own domain name, and you’d like a service that’s set up to efficiently handle streaming media, professional Web hosting,
with unlimited Web space is now very reasonable. I recently moved my Web site to http://www.hispeed.com/. This new service is in California. I live in Massachusetts and my former ISP was in Massachusetts as
well. But while it was a long distance call for me to get support from the local ISP, it’s a toll-free call to reach the one in California. And while the local ISP didn’t have support during the night and only a
skeleton crew on weekends and holidays, the new one offers 24/7 support. At Hispeed, in addition to unlimited Web space, I get unlimited traffic, and an account with my own domain name for just $19.95
per month. For a couple dollars more a month, I get support for doing RealAudio and RealVideo. Suddenly, I can freely experiment with audio and graphics.

So I took The Lizard of Oz, a fantasy that my wife Barbara and I had self-published as a paperback back in the 1970s, and recorded it, chapter by chapter using the microphone on my PC and the
RealProducer software. Then I used Bob Zwick’s free eBookIt software www.cottagemicro.com/ebooks. I wound up with an online edition of my book that includes the text and illustrations very slickly and
readably presented. To hear the narration, you need the RealPlayer, but the free version will do just fine, and it works great. Check the book out at www.samizdat.com/liz

In other words, anybody can now make attractive and useful audio books. A high school class or even an elementary school class could, with the equipment and Internet connection they already have, make
online editions of public-domain classics — recording the narration themselves, and posting the massive files in free Web space. They could do the same thing with their own writing as well. And anyone,
anywhere in the world, with an ordinary modem-based connection to the Internet could enjoy these creations. And if you have a PC with a read-write CD drive, you can make copies of these books on CDs
and sell them through online book stores, like Amazon.

In other words, a revolution has happened, quietly. And it didn’t happen because of some great new technological advance or some massive increase in bandwidth. Rather, with the decreasing cost of
high-capacity hard drives, unlimited disk space on the Web became available at low cost, and that has made all the difference.

Richard Seltzer

For the full text of this chapter, please go to http://www.samizdat.com/bootcamp11.html

Please post your comments/reactions/suggestions here.

Often the authors of Internet business plans glibly note that the Internet is a “global marketplace” and then proceed to apply projections based on global statistics to specific regions and industries.

Actually, the global nature of the Internet fosters two diametrically opposite trends at the same time. Yes, geography ceases to be a barrier to commerce; and companies anywhere can serve customers everywhere. But at the same time, cultural and language differences, that made little difference when markets were fragmented geographically, become major barriers to companies that would like to sell everywhere, and major opportunities to companies that can help deal with those barriers.

Required assignment:
• go to babelfish.altavista.com and translate at least one of your pages to the language of your choice.

Elective:
• try chat translation at Multicity

The three stages of market growth

Large companies determined to do online business globally use services and software provided by such vendors as GlobalSight http://www.globalsight/ and Uniscape http://www.uniscape.com/ to deal with cultural and language differences and issues related to national boundaries.

Smaller companies, without such expert help, should proceed carefully. Over-optimistic expectations of an expanding global business could either undermine the credibility of your business plans or lead you to waste precious resources at a critical time.

Frequently quoted global statistics of Internet growth are primarily based on experience in the US, which, until recently, dominated the Internet. But circumstances elsewhere can be quite different, leading to quite different outcomes.

The US has enjoyed the benefits of flat rate Internet pricing and free local phone calls. In many other countries, both Internet service and local telephone service are metered — which can easily make Internet connectivity far too expensive for the average household.

The telecom infrastructure of a country also matters. In some countries, telephone lines are slow and unreliable, and it is virtually impossible to get a second line to your home.

On the other hand, cell phone pricing in the US usually includes air time and other metered charges; while in some other countries cell phone service is at a fixed, reasonable rate. In such countries cell phones (and services built on them) have spread rapidly, with many households having only cell phone service, and wireless Internet access might take off much faster in those countries than in the US.

Also, the word “user” may mean something very different in one part of the world than another. In some parts of the world, rental Internet access from Internet cafes is common — where people have to wait in lines or schedule time in advance and pay high per-minute rates. People in such circumstances are very impatient with pages that are laden with ads, slow to load, and low in real content. In some countries business travel and use of laptops are common, and there’s a need for services that help people keep track of files and appointments and email messages across multiple machines. In other countries, travel is restricted, laptops are rare, and people have access to just one machine and only at limited times. In the US, today, we typically have multiple computers per person, both at work and at home. But in some
countries, it is common for there to be 6-8 users per computer, even in a business setting; with almost no access from home.

Keep in mind, too, that the success of your business model isn’t likely to depend on the total number of Internet subscribers or users, but rather the interests, habits, and buying power of those who have subscribed. The total number of subscribers might keep increasing, but with different waves of newcomers — like different waves of immigrants — each using the Internet in different ways. So even if total numbers roughly tracked predictions, demand for particular products and services might shift sharply, following a different pattern. The next wave of newcomers may or may not have as much disposable income as the those who came before, and may or may not be more inclined to buy online, or to buy the same kinds of things. When sales projections based on sheer size fall apart, investor confidence falls as well.

So far, we have gone through two stages of development in the Internet market in the US, and seem to be starting on a third.
• Stage one — Access is primarily from businesses and universities. A well-educated, high-tech audience dominates. English language rules. The vast majority of users are male.
• Stage two — Large numbers of consumers come online, accessing the Internet largely by dialup from home. The percentage of women goes from very few to more than half. Children arrive in large numbers. Online shopping takes off, but the people doing the shopping have less buying power than the average user in Stage one.
• Stage three — We are probably just at the beginning of this stage. Everyone who wants an Internet connection is connected. The number of new individuals connecting slows dramatically. But households already connected are itching to upgrade from dialup to continuous high-speed connectivity. And Internet growth continues in terms of the number and variety of gadgets connected, with the average person connecting to the Internet in multiple ways (including wireless) for multiple purposes.

Other geographic areas will probably go through such stages, but not necessarily in the same order. For instance, we’d expect local language to become very important in Stage Two, with its masses of consumers. Hence it would be important to build portal sites catering to local languages everywhere, and to provide many local-language versions of the content of major sites serving a global audience. But parts of the world where women and children have lower social status and more limited roles than in the US, may not go through Stage Two at all, at least not soon. Rather they might go straight from Stage One to Stage Three, with very little growth in consumer-oriented shopping among average citizens, and relatively little need for local language, for now.

Also, the level of Internet usage that represents “saturation” — the point at which Stage Three begins and growth continues by adding new gadgets more than by adding new people — may vary sharply from country to country and culture to culture, maybe going as high as 80% in some areas and staying well below 50% elsewhere.

Basically, even if markets are “global” geographically, they may still be diverse, fragmented, and complex because of language, culture, economics, and telecommunications infrastructure. Proceed cautiously, with an appreciation for the differences you are likely to encounter.

But at the same time keep your eyes out for unique new opportunities. If you or your ancestors came from a different part of the world than you live in now, consider the possibility of serving a diaspora audience — people with a common culture who happen to live scattered throughout the world. And if you happen to be familiar with two languages/two cultures, consider running an online business that acts as a bridge between them, helping companies and individuals on either side to work smoothly with one another. For instance, consider the possibility of facilitating online multi-language/multi-culture business meetings, with live translation and culturally sensitive facilitation available.

Also, don’t presume that large companies will want to simply make their sites available in multiple languages. Providing foreign language versions of content is a cost — and a major one, when you consider the need to translate every change as well as all new pages. But a local ecommerce site in the target country could be a profit center. In other words, a company like Amazon might be reluctant to take on the task of translating everything at its site to German, but might welcome an opportunity to open a business in Germany (which, in fact, it did). In other words, you should distinguish between a local language version of a Web site, and a fully operational local site. Don’t expect single monolithic businesses to dominate each market niche globally. Rather, if you are located outside the US, consider the possibility of working
with a global leader and creating and running a local business in partnership with them.

Richard Seltzer

For the full text of this chapter, please go to http://www.samizdat.com/bootcamp10.html

Please post your comments/reactions/suggestions here.

If you have created interesting content and used it to build a loyal audience, now what can you do with it? What’s your business model? How can you convert content and audience into cash?  In this chapter, we’ll consider:
• a tool that helps turn visitors into customers,
• affiliate programs and other ways to generate revenue for your audience, and,
• syndication and other ways to generate revenue for your content.

Required assignment:
• use HumanClick
• join Amazon affiliate program

Electives:
• join more affiliate programs

Turning Web page visitors into customers

Your visitors are strangers. You know nothing about them except statistics, except in the rare instances when they decide to send you email. Yes, you had a dozen visitors to your marketing page today, but who were they? What were they looking for? Were they confused or helped by what they found at your page? If only you had some way to talk to them, you could help them and learn from them at the same time. Maybe you could even turn them from casual visitors into a regular “members” or even customers.

Richard Seltzer

For the full text of this chapter, please go to http://www.samizdat.com/bootcamp9.html

Please post your comments/reactions/suggestions here.

 How can you attract users and build their loyalty, without having to make large investments?

Services built around email, forums, and chat make it possible to create environments where visitors can congregate to share their experiences and insights, as well as to learn and to shop.

For examples of large-scale businesses based on this concept of online community, check: about.com (which now includes the expert service allexperts.com), clickzforum.com, workz.com, ivillage.com, office.com, smallbusiness.com, and lifetips.com.

Those businesses have staked out broad territories and, in some cases, use sophisticated technology to accomplish their ends. With your site, you might want to target a narrow, well-defined niche and serve it well by simple means that are within your budget and your capabilities.

Such environments build on the old Internet culture of sharing and helping  with no expectation of payment. It’s a culture of pull rather than push, where unsolicited mailings are taboo. If you invite people to come to your Web site, and make it interesting and useful enough, they will not only come, they will return, and bring their friends. To be successful with such a business model, you need to understand the old Internet culture, respect it, and work within its bounds.

Required assignments:
• participate in the “Business on the Web” chat program
• set up your own forum or regularly scheduled chat

Making sense of the Internet business environment

Yes, the Internet can serve as a place to put and find information (an immense library), and also as a place to shop for everything imaginable. But the main reason people come to the Internet is to relate to other people through email, newsgroups, Web-based discussion areas, auctions, games, etc. They want to talk freely and candidly with other people who have similar interests, and  to engage in entertaining and perhaps profitable joint activities.

The Internet isn’t an alternative to human contact (like a one-player videogame), but rather enables human contact — removing such constraints as shyness and self-consciousness, and barriers like physical distance. Many people have problems initiating or engaging in face-to-face conversation with strangers. They feel vulnerable, and have learned to be cautious. They may be wary of what they say even to friends, for fear of how it might affect their relationship. Online, you can have a wide variety of relationships — from simple asking and answering questions to building business partnerships and emotionally intimate relationships, without feeling the same sense of risk that you would in the physical world. You can build businesses around Web environments in which people can interact in these new ways, with a focus on particular niche subject areas.

Imagine a series of concentric circles, like the orbits of planets in a solar system. People-to-people interaction is in the middle, with the gravitational/attractive force of the sun.

Next comes the circle of free information — everything that libraries, educational institutions, governments and well-meaning individuals and companies have made available.

Next comes the Value-Added Services zone. This includes information by paid subscription and all the tools and services that help you find just what you want when you want it. People are willing to pay more to get less — if it’s just what they want. Even if the raw information is free, it can be worth a lot to be able to find the right information when you need it. This could include  access to specialized databases, participation in specially staged on-line events — including opportunities to interact with celebrities and experts, participation in on-line training/distance education courses, opportunities for multi-media personal interaction, and mixed media services (combining Internet use with CD ROM, telephone, radio, or television). The list keeps getting longer.

The farthest circle is the realm of transactions, where people buy and sell ordinary goods by credit card. The goods are branded and available through many different sources, both offline and online. People shop for convenience and price. Competition is intense. Loyalty to a particular vendor is slim.

In other words, the gravitational pull of the Internet as a whole is toward users interacting with one another and toward the rich resources of free information. In building your online business, you should try to take advantage of that tendency rather than fight it.

Try to create a Web site that not only provides information but also acts as a place for visitors to talk to one another, share their insights, express their opinions, and help one another. You can do this simply by inviting reactions to the articles that you post, and including those reactions in the form of on-line Letters to the Editor. You can also take advantage of the free facilities of such sites as Topica and Yahoo’s eGroups to build your own email and Web-based discussion areas. You can schedule regular events, with invited guests, in free chat rooms. And you can use summaries and simple links from your main Web site to tie together this wide range of activities that actually take place at multiple sites.

With some business models, your value added might include your editing and selection — choosing just the right remarks from participants to highlight and to encourage reaction to. In other business models, you keep the raw input expecting that, as with talk radio, for certain subject matter, the candid comments of ordinary people in the audience can be compelling.

Don’t interpret this advice as a formula for easy success. You are competing with millions of other Web sites for the attention of visitors. Your competition is just a click away. It takes considerable dedication and creativity to provide real value and earn the loyalty of your audience. But it need not take much in the way of money and technology.

Richard Seltzer

For the full text of this chapter, please go to http://www.samizdat.com/bootcamp7.html

Please post your comments/reactions/suggestions here.

To improve your Web site, you need to clearly understand your objectives and how they relate to traffic at your site, and you also need reliable ways to monitor your progress. Unfortunately, your biggest obstacle is likely to be the misinformation spread by companies purporting to help you in these areas.

Required assignments:
• download and try WebTrends
• try host: and link: searches at AltaVista

What’s your goal?

You probably want people to visit your site so you can sell something to them or win other kinds of business with them.

But don’t forget the benefits of building a reputation, establishing and cementing contacts that could prove valuable later. For instance, about once every two weeks, I’m contacted by some reporter who wants to interview me as part of an article, because they found related material at my site.

Also, not all “wins” are represented in cash, and some of your best are likely to be totally unexpected — not at all what you were targeting.  For instance, I translated two books by a Russian officer (Alexander Bulatovich) about his experiences in Ethiopia around 1900 (from the Russian). I was unable to sell the translation to book publishers. Publishers all said that there was no market for anything about Ethiopia, regardless of its merit. I then posted the full text of both books at my Web site. I got interesting email from people all over the world (including a grad student in Poland, who based her doctoral dissertation on my texts). Then I got a postal letter from Professor Pankhurst in Addis Ababa, the world’s expert on that period of Ethiopian history. Someone found my translation on the Web, printed the whole thing out, and gave it to him. He said that this book “must” be published. Shortly thereafter I got email from a professor in Bremen, Germany, who happened to be the great-grandson of the Emperor Menelik II (mentioned in the book), who was adamant that they must be published, and even offered to help the would-be publisher financially. With those two messages as ammunition, I went back to an editor who had previously rejected the manuscript, and he almost immediately accepted it. It was finally published last summer. As this is an “academic” book. I’m only paid in copies and reputation. But I consider this an extraordinary success, which was made possible by my Web site. In Chapter Twelve, we’ll talk more about such bizarre occurrences, and what you can do to increase their likelihood.

Richard Seltzer

For the full text of this chapter, please go to http://www.samizdat.com/bootcamp6.html

Please post your comments/reactions/suggestions here.

Yes, you can advertise, send out press releases, and use other traditional techniques to let the world know about your new Web site. But first you should take advantage of free opportunities for publicity on the Internet — activities that are acceptable to the Internet community and won’t alienate your potential audience.  That’s what we’re going to deal with in this chapter:
• using directories and search engines, and
• spreading the word by personal contact, taking full advantage of the discussion capabilities of the Internet.

With this activity, you will begin to build an audience, developing relationships with people who, before, had been total strangers to you. You should pay careful attention to their feedback, and seek new ways to help them and meet their needs. In so doing, you can build online people skills that are important for success in any online business.

Remember that although your site is now public, you still have the ability to change any page any time you want, and very quickly. These pages are yours — not subject to corporate rules. Experiment freely. If you make a mistake — and you almost certainly will make many — take the page down and post a new version. Dare to try new things — that’s the only way you’ll learn.

Part 1: search engines and directories

Required assignments:
• submit your site to major directories
• create a sitemap page.
• submit your sitemap page to the major search engines

Elective:
• use AltaVista to send “secret” messages

Part 2: Spreading the word by personal contact

Required Assignment:
• Participate in online discussions on subjects related to your site

Elective:
• join an expert service

Richard Seltzer

For the full text of this chapter, please go to http://www.samizdat.com/bootcamp5.html

Please post your comments/reactions/suggestions here.

If you can type, you can create Web pages — simply and easily. There’s no need to learn a computer language, or even to learn “HTML” — the markup code that Web pages use. Simple, readily available
tools can automatically add all the code you need.

 Don’t worry about graphic design. You don’t need to be an artist. We’ll be dealing here with basic, functional pages consisting almost entirely of text. These pages are easy to create and also easy to find with
search engines.

Whenever you use complex techniques to produce fancy graphic effects, you need to weigh the certain costs of such an approach (both the design cost and the added cost of publicity that comes when pages
are difficult to find) with the alleged benefits.

Once you make your own Web pages and link them together, you’ll be able to submit your pages to search engines and let the world know about them in other ways. We’ll cover that effort in Chapter Five.
By so doing, you’ll begin to understand what your company could do — what’s involved and what kinds of results you could reasonably expect. That should put you in a better position to talk to vendors and
technical staff and let them know what you need and why, and to judge what you should pay for tasks related to Web page design and maintenance and publicity.

Required assignment for Chapter Three:
• Create Web pages on your PC, without using templates.
• Move your pages to your free Web space.

Richard Seltzer

For the full text of this chapter, please go to http://www.samizdat.com/bootcamp3.htmlÂ

Please post your comments/reactions/suggestions here.Â

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