The next information wave

It’s easy to hate the most over-used phrases used to describe the web age – paradigm shift, knowledge revolution, Web 2.0 etc.  

But hey we’ve all faced the tyranny of an empty page – it’s tough out there. And faced with amazing changes to how we locate information represented by Google and the other search engines it’s easy to reach for the bottle of superlatives.  

Even the growth of email has meant a phenomenal change to the way we consume and create information in the last 15 years as documents and comments flow back and forth in minutes that used to take faxes, printers, and letters hours or days.  

Despite all these examples of card-carrying “gee whiz”  moments however it looks like we are just about to be swept up in another wave.  

We are just starting to consume knowledge in another way which may result in an equally dramatic lifestyle change when compared to the growth of search engines, or the early days of the web itself.  

The on-rushing wave is the e-book (or more properly the ‘E-Reader’), with an estimated 10 million being sold by the end of this year just in the US alone and dozens of different E-Readers in the works from different companies emerging in the next 12 months – with a combined marketing budget in the hundreds of millions that will make the recent Apple iPad launch look like a hiccup.  

On the surface of it is this just another example of hyperbolic silliness? Because isn’t the E-Reader just another way to consume books that we’re already reading in hardcopy anyway, and as many have pointed out there are a lot of advantages of traditional hardcopy over the electronic alternative?  

What is interesting about E-Readers is not the ‘E-book’ part at all. Instead E-Readers are going to very rapidly reshape how we consume information on the web. This is not about a ‘new device’ it’s about a new way to consume information, because as is somewhat obvious most of the information on the web is just not available in hardcopy form at all. And that really matters.  

Backlit screen reading is hard to do (sorry Apple I know you’re trying with the iPad). It’s hard on your eyes,  it’s not very portable (try reading a laptop with your feet up), and in this information-packed age unless you’re looking at a huge screen it is hard to skim read and quickly identify the key points in screen-based information.  

This has lead to an emphasis on other aspects of screen-based information that compensate for these drawbacks of the web on a computer screen by adding new functionality: dense hypertext links to make cross referencing easy, the ability to comment and interact with authors as represented by blogs, the ability to locate and reassemble information in many different ways as represented by search engines, and in most journalism courses a recognition that writing for the web requires a specific style (admonitions to not write more than two sentence paras etc).  

But the E-Reader is changing that (read “Customized newspapers on e-books: Calibre cross-platform e-book subscription management” to see how you can subscribe to websites out there on the web on your E-Reader, via their RSS feeds,  just like you can subscribe to a podcast on iTunes).  

What happens when everything from the web is as portable and easy to read as paper?  

It’s not JUST the E-Reader: the way this is going to turn our information-consuming lives upside down is driven by a groundswell of the growth of machine-readable info feeds on sites represented by Really Simple Syndication, and emerging platforms like Calibre which enable you ’subscribe’ to any website on any E-Reader – for FREE.  

The E-book just happens to be the final crest of the wave which is about to sweep away already undermined sections of the publishing industry.  

Still not convinced?  

The only thing worse than a ‘paradigm’ shift is an attempt to predict the future so here goes with a few near-term predictions:  

1. the world of journalism is about to get vastly more competitive – journalists in a newspaper will be competing with bloggers with more specialist knowledge who previously had limited circulation because you couldn’t purchase your average blog conveniently on a newstand or read it on the way to work on the train. The blogger is providing the information for free.
2. intermediaries that seek out big stories will get more important in their own verticals (wherever those stories are) whether they are using algorithms like Google or whether they are using human curated approaches like ‘The Week’, or social media mechanisms like Stumbleupon or Digg. Try and find for example, amongst the 100m+ or so out there which are the most entertaining blogs? To some extent this question was irrelevant  if those blogs didn’t get read – but not any more.
3. new ways of consuming stories will arise – for instance ‘collaborative reading’. On my Kindle or Sony Reader or iPad or whatever why should I not be able to view annotations on a text by my colleagues, or classmates, or friends?
4. we’re not talking individual wikis – we’re talking wiki world – why buy a ‘How To’ manual for  your motorcycle when there is a completely portable version?
5. traditional publishers who are congratulating themselves on being web savvy like the New York Times or Guardian are going to come under even more pressure because E-Readers in many cases will have the effect of destroying ad revenue and their ability to really track readership. With the aid of software on an E-Reader like Calibre this is the equivalent of Tivo for the publishing world: in your Kindle DX via Calibre no javascript is active (so Google Analytics aint going to know you’ve read the story) all it knows is that someone downloaded their RSS feed (not which particular stories were read).  And fancy ads are not going to come across because people writing recipes to extract your content with Calibre simply don’t want them.  Even if you instituted counter-measures by embedding an ad image joined with a story image, it’s almost the equivalent of going back to the flat ad serving done in newspapers. 
6. even the acknowledged guru of the web commerce world, Amazon, may be shooting themselves in the foot. They want you to buy e-books from them – but why? If you can read any old PDF or niche website out there on the web from the comfort of the couch? Or a million free book titles? I bought an Amazon Kindle DX and have yet to buy a book on it (but thanks Amazon anyway for paying the wireless subscription charges).
7. if it isn’t already obvious the E-reader is going to reduce further the cost of information globally even more: expect to add value with your startup company by better locating information, or better curation, but expect an uphill road if you think it’s about unique content (Mr Murdoch take note).
8. a bit like podcasting has broken the barriers to entry for local radio talk shows your decision is not ‘which paper do I buy in my home town’, instead it’s ‘which blogs do I want to read from the entire internet?’ Publications are becoming ‘unbundled’ and publishing deadlines paradoxically may actually become less important in an age of instant satisfaction. Why should I read some crap which some journalist stitched together at the last moment to make the Sun weekend edition when I can read a combination of bloggers who only produce pearls once a month? 

Like the sound of this new world or hate it?  

Is it not going to happen at all?  This is a blog – talk back.

What’s happening with internet-connected smartphones?

Looking at the current growth of smartphones where sales grew 50% in the 1st quarter of 2009 (year on year), now accounting for 1 in 4 of all phones sold, and particularly at the way that Apple doubled their share of the smartphone market with the iPhone,   it is clear there is something going on with huge numbers of people becoming ‘connected’ to the web while mobile during their every waking hour.

But what does that really mean? Is this change really significant? What is this kind of ‘always-on’ / ‘always-on-me’ technology actually used for and what kind of impact is always-on going to have on the group that uses it?

Well once people get smartphones (and particularly iPhones) this is what they do with them in Comscore’s mid ‘08 European study of smartphone usage:

• 80% of users browse web-based news sources
• 56% use web search
• 32% watch mobile TV or video
• 42% use a social networking site or blog
• 70% listen to music
• 70% use email

In the broader mobile market Comscore reckons that more than 22 million people accessed web content daily via mobile in January 2009.

Cwipes! What a scary proposition! The newspaper industry has hardly adjusted to the need to rewrite and present copy differently online, now they’ve got think about mobile as well?

What is this kind of ‘always-on’ smartphone connected world going to be like for me as an individual?

Fortunately even before smartphones came along there was a demographic that was always-on. These are the guys who were born from1980: “Generation Y”. That’s 60 million+ people in the US.

Generation Y loves phones more than any other device.

For example, how many text / SMS cell phone messages do you send a month?

30? …. 50? …. perhaps you’d consider yourself a heavy texter who sends 100 a month (roughly 3 a day)?

Gen Y teens send 2200 texts a month.

It’s an absolutely stunning number of itself but it starts to make more sense when you do a little math.

As a Gen Y’er explained to me it’s just keeping in touch with about 10 people during the day with 7 messages sent over the course of the day to each person. 

“I’d feel naked walking into a cafe without a phone,” she said,  ”the first thing I do when I sit down with my coffee is text.”

Just as the Gen X’ers had trouble explaining how they were just ‘chatting’ on the phone to their parents (who saw the phone as something you only used for a special ‘transactional’ purpose), Gen Y use text messages more like status updates which can be broadcasted to multiple people in their phone address book.

The text message also carries a relatively low level of commitment. If a social event is being planned it’s possible to give only qualified approval by text, and then, because of the multi-threaded conversations going on, preserve your options to converge with whomever of your friends make sense in just a few hours time (read short term social planning). 

Difficult conversations and conflict are avoided by text but equally you may end up maintaining more ‘low-level’ relationships (notice how on Facebook your Gen Y friends have 200 or so Friends versus the Facebook average of  120).

Gen Y’ers of my acquaintance claim that they have more problems with friends who just won’t give them ‘attention-share’. 

 ’Status updates’? ‘Social committment’? It is all beginning to sound a bit Facebooky isnt’ it? Well according to Facebook 1 in 4 active Facebookers are accessing Facebook via  mobile device anyway (or about 60 million people).

Gen Y are just at the more intense end of an always-on curve that most of us are moving along anyway (50% of internet users now use Facebook) which is why Gen Y are worth watching.

How do I know when I’m becoming an always-on digital native?

Here are some ways to tell you’re becoming an always-on digital native, and how Gen Y seems to deal with the issues raised:

1. Feel like your Twitter Followers are more in touch with you than your family? Well Gen Y have been that way for a few years (unless their family are included in their updates!). Get into your Gen Y relative’s status updates!
2. Concerned about feeling out of the loop unless you’re constantly in touch with your friends? Don’t worry, unless you’re exceeding social contact with more than 10 people a day you’re just acclimating to the environment shared by the rest of  digital natives. Despite the fact that you’ve only got 50 Friends on Facebook you need to be aware that the numbers of close friends people keep in touch with is usually totally independent of this (most Facebooker’s only regularly exchange info with 5% or less of their Friends).
3. Want instant answers to any question? Gen Y’ers have grown up with Google since it really began to make waves around 2000 (the oldest Gen Y’ers were 20). They know how to use Google’s advanced search operators and they expect to instantly be able to find the answer to any question ‘of fact’ (analysis may take a little longer).  If you don’t know for example what the [site:] operator does on Google find out. 
4. Worried about the fragmentation of your attention when you’re trying to do original work? Well at least you’re thinking about it. 36% of UK broadband users (aged 16-55) state they have both the TV and Internet on in the same room every day. On weekdays the time when TV and Internet multi-tasking is most likely to happen is around 8pm in the evening (TNS/YouTube Media & Audience Study December 2008). Be aware that not every Tweet, IM, txt or email requires any level of committed response, and your spelling or grammar doesn’t have to be correct when and if you do respond.  Put off your next bout of Facebook voyeurism till the evening or weekend when you’ve got the time. At work why not cruise through the constant stream of interruptions with an uninterrupted iPod-driven music beat, set Outlook to pick mail once an hour, and get to know the web-based productivity tools out there like Pipes or RSS readers for cobbling together streams of information in structured ways that don’t all end up in your email inbox where they have to be dealt with.
5. Tempted to send an email or IM to deal with every eventuality? Gen Y’ers for all their obsessions seem to know the limits of electronic communication (perhaps those equally endless hours of movie consumption have taught them about body language?). Remember all that non-verbal communication and get out there and actually meet people. If you’re at work, call a project meeting so you can check out the negative body language of the guy who is not saying anything over electronic channels. Use the digital native tools that are out there to help arrange ‘face time’. Online dating is ok too: 1 in 10 American internet users claim to have used dating sites even back in 2006.
6. Thinking about what other people are thinking all the time? Living in an always-on culture with an always-present peer group can make you feel insecure when you don’t receive instant positive feedback on your latest choice of fashion accessory, and let’s face it someone has to do the jobs out there that don’t come with a support group (for instance being an HR Manager in the middle of a recession). A level of concern about Gen Y ‘neediness’ for approval is easy to find on the web, and in some cases has also branched out into a belief that creativity/originality might be harder for Gen Ys. It’s a concern that arguably appears unfounded: there’s quite a lot of evidence that Gen Y’ers strive to separate themselves from the herd, and are quite self-aware when it comes to dependency on others. Do both these things yourself.
7. Worried about privacy in the always-on electronic village? This seems a harder one to deal with. In this case you have the edge on Gen Y because you can remember youthful indiscretions that did come back to bite you! Think about the implications of privacy online, and use Facebook’s privacy settings in particular. For example, you probably don’t want your Facebook profile showing up above your LinkedIn profile when a prospective employer does a search and you even may not want registered Facebook users to be able to search for you if they’re clients as you don’t want to risk offending them by refusing their ‘Friend’ requests.

Always-on smartphones. Internet 1995 all over again?

A last point worth noting is that the 3G always-on world of mobile devices is not just something that society isn’t quite ready for.  Neither are the telcos. 

AT&T’s experience with handling the surges of traffic caused by iPhones has been bumpy. iPhones are basically the bandwidth-hogging Hummer of the smartphone world which can make the experience of using 3G connections patchy as the network is just overwhelmed (try getting through the online traffic jam whilst sitting in a tech related conference session with a couple of hundred other delegates some time).

The telcos are scrambling to catch up but at the same time they are already dealing with a rapid increase in the use of bandwidth-hogging video and audio – so the backdrop for them is challenging even when they’re trying to pass this stuff down wires rather than than through the air.

A great case in point is the film “The Jane Austen Book Club”. Despite the title you really don’t have to know anything about Austen to appreciate this film.

Written and directed by Robin Swicord its dialog sparkles along at a pace that it makes typical action pics look slow. With more layers than wedding cake you could watch it half a dozen times and still not pick up on all the jokes and nuances.

Ok it is a romantic comedy but it’s also a labor of love because behind a lot of the excellent jokes and gags are some serious and subtle points about relationships.

Labelled a ‘chick flick’ any man would enjoy the byplay in this film - there are a raft of muscular characters here and not just Sylvia’s gay daughter Allegra.  It is also full of surprise twists and shocks - you’d defy anyone to come up with anything so true-to-life awful as one of the opening scenes with Daniel and Sylvia in the restaurant.

Great film – terrible box office takings

 But the thing that is really most shocking about “The Jane Austen Book Club is how such a good film did so relatively badly at the box office taking only $7 million in revenue.

“Four Weddings and a Funeral” (which is a veritable pastiche compared to ”Book Club”) took $245 million….  Even Swicord’s previous film “Little Women” took $50 million.

Narrow it down to Austen literary territory and the comparisons look equally bad:

• “Bride and Prejudice” took $24 million
• Keira Knightley’s 2005 “Pride and Prejudice” took $121 million
• Emma Thomson’s 1995 “Sense and Sensibility” took $134 million
• and the  recent biopic about Austen herself “Becoming Jane” took $37 million

Perhaps one could argue that Austen fans like their adaptations as close as possible to the original based on the above but it is still interesting to ask why ‘Book Club’ did so comparatively badly (unless you think all of the above are so much better than it is).

What went wrong with this movie?

Here are a couple of guesses which have more to do with marketing than anything else:

•  why-oh-why did they call it “Jane Austen Book Club”? It’s like holding up a large sign to say “don’t come to this unless you are a) a woman and b) you ‘read’ with a capital R. Well, that’s 3/4ths of the filmgoing population gone then… What about Truths Not Universally Acknowledged? Read My Lips? The Club? Anything would have been better. Was Swicord so shocked when a producer said yes to her pitch (“I have this idea about a film about a book club…”) that she felt she had to stick with it?
• nobody seems to have really liked Fowler’s book amongst my acquaintances although I appreciate that somebody liked it in order for it to end up on the New York Times’ bestseller list for 13 weeks.  Was the film too closely tied to the Fowler book but actually aimed at a different demographic?
• did it need a more bankable star – would it have been the same movie with someone else as the female lead Jocelyn? It seems thoroughly unfair to even suggest this as Maria Bello played the role so well but would a Cameron Diaz or Michelle Pfeiffer have had more drawing power?  Would a better known male lead in the place of Hugh Dancy have delivered better box office returns – and again Hugh Dancy played Grigg’s role to perfection so it is unreasonable to suggest this on anything more than marketing grounds.
• did it need to be rewritten to appeal to a slightly younger audience? As a 16 year old said the other day “it didn’t speak to me” – with it’s acutely drawn portraits of middle age as delineated in the Daniel sub-plot did it just leave a younger audience too much in the cold?

We’ll never know the answer of course but someone should look beyond the box office results above and give Robin Swicord more money to make another film, this time with a better marketing plan.

The only strangely Austen-ish happy ending outcome of all of this was that the film was nominated for the Gladd Media Award and lost to another greatly unappreciated film which Drivelry has also reviewed, Stardust. The co-stars of the two films, Hugh Dancy and Claire Danes, announced their engagement this year.

There are some nervous investors in the newspaper world.  Even after the recent 30% lift in the broader stockmarket, newspaper stocks like the New York Times Company and the Washington Post Company are trading on price to cashflow multiples of 4.2 and 6.8, where their 3 year averages were 11.8 and 10.6 respectively (Gannet actually trades at 1.8 x cashflow - albeit with a lot of debt).

Newspapers were seeing revenue decline year on year even before the credit crunch started. From the peak in 2005 of about $50 billion in newspaper ad revenue in the US,  revenue declined to $38bn in 2008.

Warren Buffett wouldn’t buy a newspaper these days for any price and newspapers themselves (those that are left after companies like Tribune have filed for bankruptcy and others have shut down) are even pleading for charitable status before those oh-so-friendly politicians.

The public already seems to be voting with their feet with the Pew Research Centre results showing that the percentage of Americans getting most of their national and international news from the web has gone from 15% in 2001  to about 40% today. Environmentally insensitive as my household is, it also seems tactless to  be throwing hunks of trees out with the rubbish every week in this age of global warming concensus.

It’s fascinating (particularly for bloggers … Ahem..) to watch. Sort of like a slow motion car crash.

And it is indeed slow motion; back in the mid 1990s I worked for a  very large business magazine publishing group who were very concerned about the commodification of news on the web. This (listed) group’s response to the threat posed by the web was to spend quite a bit of money trying to build web based vertical business communities around subscription products where ‘news’ was only a small part of the offering (they were trying to sell conferences, lists, and databases etc).

Can the traditional news industry restructure before it’s too late?

Does the news industry ‘get it’ (including television news for that matter), or are they in terminal decline? And if the traditional news industry is in terminal decline where are we going to be getting our news from – who is going to take up the slack? Bloggers? Google News? None of the above?
Looking at the online output from a lot of newspaper websites you could easily come to conclusion that on the surface they don’t get it.

The response of most papers to these strategic challenges, it seems to me, is to put in systems so they can multi-purpose copy to put out web versions and hardcopy versions at the same time. Like … errrmmm … wow ….

As an approach it’s likely to be fundamentally flawed because screen reading habits are simply different from hardcopy reading habits (so you can’t easily re-purpose for both). For example conventional advice onscreen is to write no more than 2 sentence paras, use online emphasis tools like colour etc where appropriate, and heavily use subheadings.

Another key point is that online the unit of consumption is not the newspaper ‘Section’ but rather the individual story itself, much as in the online music industry consumers increasingly buy singles through websites like iTunes rather than albums.  The individual article becomes the point where most people directly enter the parent website – so links from an article to your other articles and similar techniques to generate traffic within a website become far more important than in a hardcopy publication.

Most newspapers seem not to understand search engine optimisation

Another fundamental problem that is easily recognisable on your favourite newspaper’s website is an inability to respond fully to the needs of search engine optimisation. If you want to boost your online advertising revenue you  need to pull in punters who are actually actively looking for information via a search engine rather than hoping that they will serendipitously spot your ad at the right time. You don’t have to be a genius to realize that a buyer who is actively looking is worth paying more for as a marketeer.  As a publisher you also need to recognise that (typically) 75% of the traffic to your website will come from search engines.

Google ranks words that occur in titles as more important than words that occur in body text. Yet newspaper subeditors seem to think they are principally employed to produce clever puns (‘Shopping Maul’ or ‘Welcome to the House of Funds’ in a business publication I just read) and subeditors also seem to be singularly thoughtless when it comes to choosing commonly used keywords to please Google and Co. For example, have a look at the titles on the New York Times online. Even where newspapers will go as far as encoding the title in the URL (e.g. the title of this article on Drivelry.com if you look at the url) the keywords in the title are often highly unlikely to be searched for.

To put this another way, the average blogger who uses Wordpress straight out of the box (the free pubic domain software that underpins this blog) is likely to have better search engine optimisation than most newspaper websites.

The average blogger is also likely to be heavily scrutinizing Google’s Analytics plug-in to track readership from the first day they start blogging, to see what sort of response they get from their audience. In many publishing groups in my experience that sort of data probably never even gets out of the IT Department down to the journalist…

Cost-cutting on a newspaper doesn’t get you to profitability though

Printing and distribution account for about half a newspaper’s costs. So couldn’t you just shut down the presses?

Probably not.

If say the New York Times managed to halve its quarterly operating expenses, by dropping production of the physical paper, its online advertising revenues would still only cover about a fifth of its operating expenses.

As an article late last year in the Financial Times, Lex Column (link to the original quoted on the Magforum blog) said:

“To break even as an ad-funded digital-only business, with a quarterly cost base of, say, $338m, the New York Times – already the No. 1 newspaper website in the US – would either need 4 times as many unique users or ad rates 4 times as high as today’s, or some combination of the two.”

So where are we going to be getting our news from in 5 years time?

This is an issue which has been exercising that compulsory oracle for news hounds, ‘On the Media’ (who now even have a specific theme tune for business models to save the news industry). In a recent interview  Brooke Gladstone interviewed ex journalist David Simon who harrumphed that:

 “The Internet is a marvelous tool, and clearly it is the information delivery system of our future. But thus far it does not deliver much first generation reporting. Instead, it leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications whereupon aggregating websites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth.”

 

[I thought it important to validate his worst fears about bloggers by doing just that.]

He went on to say:

“The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day that I will be confident that we’ve actually reached some sort of equilibrium. You know, the next 10 or 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption. It is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician, all right?”

We are watching a fascinating drama play out: an irresistible force (the creation of increasing numbers of niche content sites written by bloggers and disseminated by aggregators and search engines) meeting an immovable object (the newspaper industry) and neither charitable status nor anything else is going to save the latter from being completely transformed.

Blogs versus newspapers: who will win the battle?

Let’s draw a veil over the likelihood of bloggers or mainstream journalists attending zoning hearings. Here is a 10 point list of why newspapers have their work cut out for them: 

1. Hosting a blog costs nil (on say Wordpress.com) or $20 a month in hosting fees if you want to host it under your own domain name
2. Bloggers use free graphics libraries under Creative Commons intellectual property rules that can be used to create professional looking articles e.g. free photos from Flickr in this blog
3. Bloggers gain the inherent linking benefits from other bloggers (after keywords, linking is  a primary determinant of website results rankings on Google)
4. Bloggers live and die by search engine optimisation (and therefore are extremely conscious of it)
5. Bloggers close the feedback loop on whether their articles work by closely reviewing tracking data
6. Bloggers have interests and expertise in specific subject areas that no generic journalist can match (let’s face it, some journalists are often a pale reflection of their phone books anyway) 
7. Bloggers create sites that are extremely niche (the internet’s ‘long tail’ applies just as much to news consumption as shopping) yet because of the search engines they can be found. What publication (for example) would target the dozen or so people who would be interested in this article?
8. Bloggers are going to write for free in many cases, for the same non-monetary reasons a lot of poorly paid authors write for the publishing industry
9. Bloggers who don’t write for free will test to destruction the emerging revenue models that for the average newspaper journalist are the province of upper management: Adsense, affiliate programs, emerging electronic platforms like the Kindle, micro donations, pay-to-post, subscription lists (the old ‘controlled circulation list from the hardcopy publishing world) etc
10. Bloggers use increasingly powerful publishing platforms like Wordpress that have developed whole software eco-systems around them (where the platform itself is free)

There are other points we could make e.g. whether individual bloggers are worth going after with a lawsuit, how well some of those bloggers write (or not) but you get the idea.  To put it perhaps unkindly it could be argued that it would be great if some local and national newspapers shut down and just got out of the way – there will be someone else around to do their job at a lower cost when they’re gone (probably out of work journalists).

But (it’s incontrovertible) …. screen reading sucks

Oh yeah. Fair point. We see this in websites that I consult on commercially- we track print requests from online articles and there are a hell of a lot of them. It may sound like biting the hand that feeds you but at almost 2000 words anyone who’s got this far in this article without printing it deserves a medal.

However the response to this objection is that screen-based reading is getting better every day and increasingly it’s not going to involve a stupid laptop computer that takes 5 minutes to boot, has a keyboard and other components you don’t need to read with, and whose battery dies after 2-3 hours.

When it comes to portable screen-readers the future is now. It’s pretty clear that screen reading devices that you can read with your feet up on the couch like the Kindle (reviewed last year at Drivelry.com)  are getting there with consumers, with estimates from Citigroup that Amazon sold 400,000 Kindle units in 2008.  The newest Kindle even has a text-to-speech function i.e. it will read a book to you aloud.

And again the economics of the cost of distributing a book electronically will eventually force readers to buy a Kindle or look-alike unless they want to pay double for the equivalent in paperback.

As of May 13th 2009, David Simon (mentioned in the On the Media interview above) would be doubly horrified to learn that Amazon (at a 30/70% revenue split in their favour - the same terms they generously offer major newspaper chains) now makes the Kindle platform available to all 41 million-odd bloggers out there as a sales channel. For the modest sum of $1.99 you can even have all the articles from this website (Drivelry.com) delivered automatically to your very own Kindle reader.  Disclosure: this is a plug, run, don’t walk etc etc].

Nobody expects the Kindle to be a significant source of revenue in the short term, but in the medium to long term this is the publishing equivalent of an earthquake.

You want to:

1.  use the technology that you know is out there to have a professional small home office setup, and
2. you don’t have the information technology safety net of a large corporation at home, and,
3. you want to do it in the most cost-effective way possible.

This article looks at what you need to get, how you need to set it up, and why.

We wrote it because we wish someone had told us this stuff in advance of our learning the hard way over the last few years!

Use Ebay to acquire your computer equipment

For the particular kinds of equipment we’re recommending there are links below to custom searches on Ebay. If you don’t use it and you are a small business start using it.

It is a misnomer that Ebay is just for secondhand equipment (there are a huge amount of real world storefronts selling brand new stuff through it), buy from someone with a high feedback score, and use Paypal to pay (because Ebay insures the transaction if you do). Much of the equipment comes with good support from the seller (often better than in the bricks and mortar world!) and warranties from manufacturers.

Don’t waste your time on auctions (unless you’ve got a lot of time to waste and the cost of your time is low), use the ‘Buy It Now’ option in your searches (as is the case in the below sections). Specify ‘New’ or ‘Refurbished’ in your search. 

Even listing on Ebay puts most businesses under pressure to match the competitive pricing that is being offered by amateurs and other small businesses, so just by using it you will save a lot of money (sellers usually have to match their ‘Buy It Now’ prices to what items have recently sold for).  If you want to get a very good idea of pricing apply your search to ‘Completed Items’ only which will tell you what that item sold in the last month for.

The small home business laptop / notebook

If you don’t already have one buy a notebook PC. If you do, you may have to think about upgrading it to run a business from it. You mainly need a notebook because you need to be able to run your business from wherever  you are – you probably don’t have an assistant you can delegate to.

Get a notebook or laptop that has the following characteristics:

1. Windows XP (you need reliability so put off going Vista until it’s been out for several years!). In addition you may find some software is cheaper for XP.
2. 2 gigabytes of RAM (this machine will be running everything including the kitchen sink and this also makes it a little bit future proof)
3. 2 gigahertz processor or better (it will be running your phones – see Skype section below – and doing other stuff at the same time – it needs to be able to do all of this without degradation)
4. 120 gig hard disk or better (it will probably end up with your music, photos etc on it)
5. a 14″ inch or better screen (you’re going to want to switch between applications on the screen and have it all up at once – a big screen is a must – in addition it’s often worth buying a flat screen and extending your desktop using XP’s builtin function to do this so you can have two screens running at once, great for example when you want to copy sections from one document to a web page)
6. we’d suggest buying something relatively boring like a Dell or Toshiba machine (their support websites will have had a ton of money spent on them, you will be able to buy add-ins like new memory or other components easily, and drivers will be pretty bulletproof and regularly updated with bugfixes because of the sheer number of users)
7. try to avoid mixing and matching (e.g. Macs and PCs in the same environment, or if you’re buying smartphones for a couple in the business buy the same ones – just makes support and research easier)

Here’s a custom Ebay search for a notebook that meets these sort of specifications for memory, disk, processor, and screen. Change the country as appropriate.

Software: get Microsoft Office

Ok I know there are lots of other solutions out there, open source etc. But in a startup small business you’re running from home familiarity is number 1 and cost is equally important (Office aint free but the upfront cost is dwarfed when it comes to training, patch maintenance etc). If you’re used to something else by all means get that.

Here’s a custom Ebay search for Microsoft Office disks (this search avoids you getting things like training disks and academic versions in the results). It’s not expensive. And even better if you can an older version, say Office 2003, it will still do everything you need it to do. Change the country as appropriate.

Home networks and WiFi (wireless networks) for small business

Wireless (802.11G/B) shouldn’t really be a critical component for your small home based business – it’s fine to have it but it’s only really adequate for casual home users.

The problem is usually interference from other wireless LANs around you or neighbours who are using cordless phones or other devices transmitting on the WiFi frequency. This can result in your connection dropping out. When you’re using critical apps that rely on the internet like IP telephony / VOIP calls for your small business you need better reliability.

“Doesn’t happen to me when I’m using it so far,” you might respond, well when you’re using it 8 hours a day you might notice things could be different … still don’t believe me stick some software on your PC and monitor the uptime of your connection continously for day or so. You can even find that it’s only unreliable on certain days, depending on when your neighbours with the interfering device are home and using it…

In addition to a wifi network get ‘power over ethernet’ connections based on the ‘HomePlug’standard which you plug into your router at one end and a power socket, and then transmit the network traffic through the electrical cables in your house (the other network connection plugs from the power socket at the other end to your PC’s RJ45 network port). You will then have a full hardwired network connection to the internet that you can move around the house (at around 80 mpbs) and, which, doesn’t involve an expensive electrician.

Here’s a custom Ebay search for these type of devices to give you computer network connections by using your house’s wiring. Change country as appropriate.

Choosing an Internet Service Provider (ISP) for a small business 

Again, don’t get a wireless connection e.g. 3G card or something of that nature. Make sure your connection uses DSL and the phone line or possibly cable.

Four things are worth bearing in mind about chosing an internet service provider for a SOHO business:

1. It’s not just download speed that matters. It’s upload. A single VOIP call is about 40k of bandwidth. Couple that with say an online-demo running or a conference call with a couple of other parties and say another user in the house and a 256k uplink can be maxed out (most network connections start to degrade at about 50% utilization).  Make sure  you have 1MBPs upload speed and for download you want 4MBPs or better. Often cable systems give you really fast download but considerably slower upload where ADSL is not affected by this. 
2. Get a router that knows something about Quality of Service (QOS) so that it can prioritize voice traffic over say video downloads. This is not expensive (say $100 or so).
3. You need a router at home (this will have its own hardware based firewall and will allow you to get access from multiple machines at the same time to the web)
4. Maybe think about using a smaller ISP and check out the performance of that ISP in your neighbourhood if you can by Googling something like ‘review’ and the name of the ISP you plan to use.

Get a Skype ‘Unlimited’ Plan so you can make virtually unlimited global calls for any length of time at a fixed cost

This enables you to make and receive calls from normal phones at a fixed cost per month of $10 or so at the time of writing. And when I say ‘fixed’ I mean it. You can call most major countries under this plan for as long as you like and it’s free (i.e. covered by the subscription). Set up a Skype Business Control Panel account so you allocate credit between you and other users.

Oh yeah – and download Skype from www.skype.com because you’ll need that to get Skype in the first place!

You can cancel your unlimited sub at any time e.g. no yearly subscriptions or whatever.

These accounts come with voicemail, calls through Skype through your mobile/cellphone, and the ability to record calls and quickly and easily set up conference calls between multiple parties.

The really neat part if you have international clients is that you also get 3-4 phone numbers in different countries. In other words you can have a ‘US number’, a ‘Hong Kong’ and a ‘UK number’ and pretend you are a lot bigger than you are by listing these on your website to imply you have offices in each country…

All of these are rerouted behind the scenes to your Skype voicemail and main Skype user a/c. In addition you can pick up your Skype voicemail from your mobile and you can get an SMS and/or email every time someone leaves a message. You can even have your mobile/cellphone number voicemail redirect to your Skype number so everything comes in the same way to one place.

Here’s a link to some info on Skype for business. Voice quality will not be as good as in a normal phone call but with a headset it works fine. Where voice quality is poor we have generally found this is because of connectivity issues as hinted at in the above sections on choosing an ISP and implementing a home network, rather than because of Skype itself.

Skype is also valuable when collaborating with suppliers if they’re using it: you can actually see when they’re available by the Skype status icon (less wasted calls), it’s free, and you can easily drag and drop large (i.e. too large for email) files to them, and download the free Skype Outlook toolbar so that you can one-click dial or SMS people straight from your address book (no more typing text messages into handheld devices, just use your keyboard).

Install MX Skype Recorder from www.skyperec.com and now you can record any of your calls or conference calls.

Backups for your home / small business network

You don’t have to back up data. As the saying goes you only need to backup things it is too costly to lose…

For each PC/laptop that you value data on on your home network (e.g. if you can’t afford to lose certain emails etc) buy an external $75 USB connecting hard drive.

Here’s a custom search on Ebay for this type of equipment (plug and play hard drives that sit in external enclosures and connect to your laptop’s USB port). Change countries as appropriate.

Then, and this is a critical point, install Norton Ghost or equivalent and set it to automatically backup once a week.

The difference between Ghost and say copying files or a normal backup is that Ghost ‘images’ your whole hard drive (Oops! Turns out that a critical spreadsheet file that was on my desktop or some other ‘temporary’ place wasn’t in my ‘directories to back up’ list)….

You can take the USB drive plug it into another laptop, hit restore, and the whole laptop including operating system and applications will be as before (in say, under an hour). If you can afford for your small business to be offline for a couple of days with no access to your email archive etc then don’t worry about buying Ghost!

If you want to even more bullet proof (at low cost) buy a cheap secondhand laptop of the same brand and model, pre-load it with XP and Ghost and then if your whole laptop blows up (the memory on mine went fubar in a client demo last week and wouldn’t even switch on afterwards) you are ready to go immediately. I swapped in the memory from my standby machine and was back up and running immediately.

Virus protection

Unless you know what you’re doing (i.e. you know exactly what attachments are safe and which are not), you rarely visit dodgy websites, and assuming you have a notebook that has the spec to handle the load that antivirus programs put on it, get virus protection.

Consider ignoring the entreaties to upgrade to the paid version and get the free antivirus sofware from AVG. You can’t do better than that (or get the paid version).

Turn off the signature on the paid version in the option (which tells your email recipients that you’re using it).

Spam protection

If you have a website which your email address is listed on (and by definition that means most small businesses) you need it, even if it’s already provided by your ISP to some extent.

Get the free Spambayes plugin for Outlook here.

As a ‘Bayesian’ filter, it learns what you think is spam. As such it never gets out of date. And the price is pretty good too…!

Also importantly it looks far more professional than spam filters which insist on applying a ’signature’ to the bottom of all your outgoing emails…

Email is going to be critical to your business and by having multiple email addresses that all come to you, you can seem bigger than you are. Take a look at this article on advanced email tips and email privacy for more info.

Install local text search on your machine

Install Windows Search or equivalent for free. This indexes the full text of all your documents and emails and understands their properties e.g. author fields in Word documents or the difference between an Outlook Task and a Contact.

You can type a few Words in or much more sophisticated searches (full boolean search is offered) and then execute the same search on the web as well with one click using your favourite web search engine.

Don’t waste any more time running the built-in search offered through Outlook or combing through directories looking for files (and BTW when you save files or send emails use sensible filenames and subjects).

More information and download links for Windows Search here.

Web 2.0: For collaborating with suppliers use Google Docs or Windows Live

Google Docs or Windows Live enables you to share things like spreadsheets so that you and other partners out there on the web can both view and update them at the same time. Very handy for instance if you’re trying to track inventory, commissions etc. Easy to use and free.

Go further if you like to full web based CRM with something like Salesforce.com which is a totally web based customer relationship management system. Great if you work with a couple of other people at different locations. All it requires is a web browser and you ‘rent’ the web based software rather than having to buy it and install it (about $2000 per year for licenses for a couple people).

Also get to know Google Adwords, or preferably find someone else who does.

Have your web developer install Google Analytics on your website so you start to know where you are losing prospects.

If you don’t have a web developer use a website like Elance.com to find one by specifying a project and getting people to competitively quote on it.

Find someone who will provide you remote PC support if you need them

By using free software like WinVNC or XP’s built in remote desktop support you can have a lot of your technical problems solved by a remote technician. Best to find them before you need them…

Find a company that is more than a one man band but charges less than a Logica or Siemens or whatever.

Google something like “remote (computer OR PC) support for homes or small businesses” and check out the sponsored links in your area.

Email is now obviously a core part of our lives.

Yet despite this there are still a range of people using it who make significant mistakes that can cost them jobs, friends, or just the respect of others!

The following is a list of key things about email that even basic users these days should know. Some of the instructions given refer to Outlook for the sake of being brief but the same issues apply to other email clients.

1. Switch off Outlook’s automated send and receive so that emails are only sent when you specifically hit Send/Receive. Inevitably there will come a day when you hit Send on an individual email and the email is not ready … or worse.  In addition you will find you are much more productive. There are many studies that show that having your attention constantly interrupted by incoming email fragments your concentration and reduces your productivity.  To do this in Outlook go to Send/Receive -> Send Receive Settings -> Disable Scheduled Send/Receive.
2. When sending an email that has a long chain of replies below it READ them carefully before sending and delete those that are not appropriate. Maybe someone who has been referred to derogatively is now in your list when they weren’t in the original list.
3. Email sysadmins (of which I was one) can and do occasionally read your email. Many corporations have their whole email database full text searchable i.e. someone can sit down and do a search across everybody’s mailboxes for phrases like ‘interview’ or whatever.
4. If your name has a non-standard spelling e.g. Cate instead of ‘Kate’ or whatever, try and persuade mail admin to create an ‘alias’ for the common misspellings which also goes to you. It will be embarrasing when Dan who you had a one-night stand with last night mails you and says “Hot night babe, I want to lick you all over” and it is delivered to the default mail administrator because he mispells your name (yep, I’ve read a few of those).
5. Don’t use stupid Hotmail addresses when you apply for jobs. ‘JungleBoy@hotmail.com’ probably isn’t going to impress your prospective employer. 
   

   Classic email blooper from recruiter I received Friday with 152 recipients in the To box

    

6. When you are sending an email to lots of people use mail merge out of Word which is easy to use - do not use the ‘To’ box. The image above is a classic blooper I received Friday from a recuriter. She sent it to 152 people, all of whom had email addresses listed in the To box, and all of whom are likely to be in related jobs. The other advantage of using mail merge is that many ISPs have an absolute limit of emails that you can send at the same time in one distribution list. Mail merge sends each email one at a time. The BCC list is not such a good option as many spam systems are more likely to score your email as spam if you use that instead.
7. When sending an email to a group of people also be aware that you can use ‘Reply-To’ in Outlook to send an email from yourself but have replies routed to someone else. For example, if you’re arranging a meeting with 5 people setting ‘Reply-To’ may save everyone getting myriads of different preliminary responses. 
8. Understand email tracking (answering the question did Fred actually open my email?). If like me you prefer to be able to choose whether or not a sender knows you have received something turn off Outlook’s receipt function: Tools -> Options -> Advanced Options -> Tracking. Also be aware that a number of systems embed images in emails which on display indicate whether a user has read the email (for example Salesforce.com uses a system like this). This is why most email clients now by default do not show the images in an ‘untrusted’ email.  And be aware that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: yes, you can set up an email identity to send an email ‘from’ pope@vatican.com but someone looking at your mail header (see image) can look up your IP address. If you are on a corporate network with a fixed IP range this can often identify your company, and if you’re on a private home address then it will identify your ISP and your general geographical location. 
   

   Internet headers for your email which reveal your IP address

    

9. Your friend Pam has just sent you an email telling you that the Bill Gates Foundation will donate 10 cents to child welfare for every email copy received to the address childwelfare@microsoft.com, or that there is a new virus around which you get just by opening emails with “Re:” in the subject. The old adage that if it’s too good to be true it probably aint true applies. Check out these things before you forward on the email to 100 of your closest friends and business associates and make a fool of yourself.
10. When sending an email marketing yourself or something else be aware that images in your email will not by default be seen unless you are regarded as a ‘trusted’ sender, so have some text that explains what it’s about and try not to include ’spammy’ words/phrases like ‘free offer’ etc. For more information about setting up spam and virus filtering on your own email take a look at “Setting up cheap and professional technology for a home-based small business: networking, laptops, web, and software issues“.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - further reviews on Amazon

I have a feeling I may be about to break the code of conduct of the Royal Society of Book Reviewers (if they’d have me as a member) because I feel compelled to comment on Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers before I’ve even finished it.

Sloppy indeed. It’s just that it plays to all my prejudices. It’s one of those ‘a ha!’ moments where something you’ve suspected without a shred of evidence might actually have a grain of truth in it.

You remember Malcolm Gladwell?

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell on Amazon

The Tipping Point, a story about how there were a few ’super communicators’ around who spread the news, a sort of codifcation of the ‘in crowd’ and the ‘out crowd’.

Sounded plausible but later I listened to a devastatingly nice rebuttal of the whole concept on NPR’s ‘On The Media’ podcast (Brooke and crew you’re so nice I sometimes gag in my iced coffee listening to you). The interviewee essentially said there was little evidence that there were a few super-connected types around who were somehow enormously influential.

In Outliers though, Gladwell looks at something close to my own mean-spirited heart, the concept that perhaps some of the super-successful were not especially gifted, instead a series of ‘outside’ forces came together to put them where they were. Something that Karl Marx would no doubt have agreed with, but Malcolm Gladwell’s angle is somewhat different.

To turn what is a very readable book into a 5 minute parlour sketch Gladwell argues that it is often historical accident or significant practice that makes someone successful. For instance it is ‘accident of birth’  that many top Canadian hockey players have birthdays around the beginning of the year because when they are ’streamed’ into hockey teams at school the slightly older kids have an edge which then is widened as they receive special training. It is both accident and ‘practice’ that Bill Gates was succesful because he had access to rare computing resources (for that time) as a teenager and then spent thousands of hours programming. Gladwell also looks at why kids of ‘engaged’ parents (often from upper socioeconomic brackets) gain a sense of their own entitlement (and are more successful) where kids of ‘disengaged’ parents (often from lower socioeconomic brackets) tend to be less successful in negotiating obstacles in life.

Why this struck a chord with me though about Gladwell’s book is that you so often hear echoes of the alternative (‘everyone is equal’) around well-heeled dinner parties e.g. “well if those guys down the street struggling away just exercised a little initiative then they too could have what we’ve got.”

The problem is that there really are advantages that are given to many in our society which really are just accidents of birth or circumstance as Marx was keen to point out when he talked about ‘class struggle’.  Fred can take career risks because he’s got parental cash to fall back on, Maisy has a generally more positive outlook on life (which is often associated with success) because she has an upper middle class upbringing where basically she’s never had anything really awful happen to her, Andrew just happened to be the right place at the right time in technological cycle or economic cycle.

Yep, we’ll all like to think that our own status (modest or not) is a product of our own cleverness but sometimes it’s just dumb luck. If you don’t believe this (or even if you do) Gladwell’s book is worth a read.

Surprisingly we are not talking about television, we are not talking about the phone, and we are not even talking about the internet. Even more surprisingly we are talking about a technology introduced to the mass market more than 75 years ago.

It’s a medium that has become so ubiquitous we almost don’t notice it: radio. Before television started to establish itself in the 50’s its much more heavyweight cousin had been in 2/3rds of American homes by 1935 – by 1950 radio had penetrated 94% of all American households. A little perspective is interesting: these days we regard it as a remarkable achievement that the internet in the UK is now available in 2/3rds of homes.

Now the 30’s to 50’s is known as the ‘Golden Age of Radio’ and the excitement radio’s introduction engendered is only remembered by an older generation that is fast disappearing.

Despite the competition from other electronic media, the benefits of radio haven’t dissipated with the years: for the consumer radio doesn’t require online metered connections, the receiver is a fraction of the cost or complexity of a personal computer, you can listen to it whilst doing visual chores like commuting or cooking dinner, and for the radio producer the production cost is miniscule compared to visual mediums like television.

Traditional radio also has its disadvantages: there is variable transmission quality in a world of high-rise buildings, there is unrelated chatter from the electronic signals fog we live in, a limited transmission footprint based on the power of the transmitter, and government restrictions on electromagnetic spectrum use. The result is what economists refer to as an oligopoly: competition between local radio stations is restricted to the dozen or so in range of any particular receiver, most of which sell news-talk and music formats stuffed with indigestible ad breaks.

Yet there are changes taking place that could leave radio almost unrecognizable in a couple of years.

On-demand radio 2005-style

Cut to 2005 and maybe nothing has changed in traditional radio but everything has changed in music leaving the fault lines visible all over the industry.

In October 2004 Swedish DJ Eric Prydz’s single, “Call On Me”,  topped the UK singles chart with the lowest sales of a number 1 since chart records began in 1969. People seem to still be listening to music but it seems like they aren’t acquiring it in the same way.

Music majors like Sony and Bertelsmann have suffered heavy downward pressure on their share price in recent years, blaming online file-sharing from companies like Napster as a significant factor. Since then we have seen the systematic legal targeting of both corporates and individuals who are seen as encouraging copyright breaches by helping to distribute online music. Most recently there was the June 27^th US Supreme Court ruling against Streamcast Networks who authored the Grokster and Morpheus file-sharing systems.

Downloadable songs, distributed by whatever means, are normally encoded in the MP3 format, a compression format that collapses your normal 3 and half minute single into a 3 megabyte file. For the downloadable music industry the switch from dialup internet to broadband has been a godsend. In the UK the number of household connections with broadband has just passed the number with dialup this year with a resulting greater than tenfold increase in speed – one song downloads in 30 seconds.

For those of us with internet-based technical backgrounds the legal maneuvers are finger-in-the-dyke stuff – they are no more going to stop downloading than radar stopped speeding. The
legal and technical beauty of these ‘peer-to-peer’file-sharing systems coupled with the anonymous and global nature of the internet means that there are no central servers to seize (each user effectively becomes part of the ‘infrastructure’) and there is always another variant of the software available from some offshore jurisdiction. Want to find and download the soundtrack of ‘Skippy The Bush Kangaroo’ from the 70s TV serial of the same name? Somewhere online it’s there.

In tandem with the music majors’ legal maneuvers, vendors like Apple are also providing condoned legal download services like the iTunes service. At the time of writing, iTunes has sold more than 500 million individual singles with more than 1.5 million tracks online. And online you can often preview tracks before you buy by listening to the first 30 seconds.

It’s not just music we’re talking about here. Respected talk radio broadcasters like the BBC, National Public Radio in the USA, and thousands of other stations all over the globe are
providing high quality streaming audio online – for free.

Digital players

Apple iPod classic on Amazon

While some of the downloaders out there are listening to tracks on PC speaker systems, the transition to radio’s new golden age is hastened by the emergence of the ‘transistor radio 2005′: the portable digital music player. The current Apple iPod with its 20 gigabyte capacity can hold approximately 6000+ tracks, or roughly 300 hours of music, and can be plugged into everything from the car to your home stereo

To think about it another way, that’s the size of a 5 week, non-stop, radio station playlist – for all your waking hours – with no ads …

Like the transistor radio, these digital players are cheap. The high capacity players like the iPod can be had for about US$299, but you can also buy players for $40-$50 dollars that hold ‘only’ 500mb or 150 tracks (still 10 CDs!) which are the size of a cigarette lighter. With no moving parts, and cellphone-driven battery life improvements, these players run longer than you can listen.

Have you started to notice the increasing number of people listening to iPods and other MP3 players on public transport? Apple sure has: in Q3 04/5 they sold 6 times the number of iPods they sold in the comparative quarter from the previous year. Get used to it, you’re going to see a lot more of these players than you’re going to see cigarette lighters – notice that a lot of the new mobile phones come with integrated MP3 players for example?

Connecting the dots

Ok, so there’s a huge amount of music and news audio available online. Ok, so broadband availability has soared, and ok, there’s all these cheap players available on the market. But what has all this got to do with radio: surely the iPod is just an updated Sony Walkman circa 1979? After all, the portable cassette player didn’t exactly redefine radio as we know it.

The difference this time is the emergence of freely downloadable management software running on personal computers. Want to have the top 50 tracks available for your MP3 player automatically downloaded to your digital music player every week? Or every album ever produced by the Cowboy Junkies? You can.

Out there in commercial online music vendor-land there are hundreds of software developers building online music shopping engines that match genres and individual tastes – if their cross-selling database tells them that 9 out of 10 people who buy Coldplay also like Joss Stone then as a Coldplay buyer you can bet you will be offered Joss Stone real soon.

Equally interesting to those of us who like news or current affairs radio you can freely download software like iPodder that will ’subscribe’ to specific shows you like for free – the software checks for new online episodes of your favourite radio shows and automatically downloads these to your digital music player.

Although ‘podcasting’ (a contraction of ‘iPod’ and ‘broadcasting’) only emerged in October last year there are already thousands of podcast subscriptions available: ranging from one man bands like John Smith Jnr in Saskatchewan Canada to Melvyn Bragg’s BBC discourses on philosophy in “In Our Time”. When you next sit next to a teenager on a bus with earphones it’s entirely possible that they may not be listening to the latest cool track from Gorillaz, they may be listening to a Forbes investment podcast. Already in a matter of 10 months since podcasting got started, online podcasting directories like Podcast Alley have emerged that provide a guide to the best podcasts out there on the web.

Thinking back to the ‘disadvantages of traditional radio’ list at the beginning of this article there’s a sea-change going on with on-demand radio delivered via digital players. You’re no longer limited to music or talk radio stations from inside your local transmission footprint but have the choice of the best of radio globally, you’re listening without ads and can fast forward, rewind and pause, and you can be sitting deep in a train tunnel with crystal clear sound. And best of all, unlike the web, radio doesn’t demand your whole attention: jog, commute or cook; you don’t have to be staring at a screen for this stuff. Finally, the appeal is completely cross-generational: Gorillaz or the Archers it caters to both young and old.

Paradigm shift anyone? One sugar or two?

Now somewhat devalued, Kuhn’s phrase refers to “a radical change in personal beliefs, complex systems or organizations, replacing the former way of thinking or organizing with a radically different way of thinking or organizing.” It’s no exaggeration to say that on-demand radio could be internet ‘97 (when the web went mainstream) all over again – and will definitely make the
current hype about blogging look overblown. People in the technology industry get sold the idea of ‘paradigm shifts’ about as much as they get offered cups of coffee so it’s easy to be cynical but on-demand radio looks like a damn good candidate for cultural and consumer change, and industry disruption.

If you’re a music publisher and you’ve spent all that time and effort building up retail relationships with Virgin Megastore, that’s no longer where the sales growth is. Start looking online – fast. Also be aware that Joe Bloggs in his back bedroom can distribute his new mix online almost as easily as you can.

If you’re a radio station you’re going to have do something more than just provide music – you’re now competing against radio stations all over the world – not just the ones in your transmission footprint. And start looking at more than just ads for revenue.

If you’re a broadband provider you’d better not be providing flat fee internet access – I now download 500 megabytes of podcasts a week where it used to be 250 megabytes a month.

If you’re providing operating systems like Windows or Linux; if you’re selling PCs and hard disks, you need to be able to effectively support large volumes of digital audio files.

If you’re providing high quality audio news/analysis the size of the market for it has expanded worldwide overnight and for the best there will be people who are prepared to pay for
it – but if you’re someone like the BBC how do you tell whether they’re an existing UK license payer or not? And if you don’t put your own programs online in podcast format is someone else going to do it before you and land-grab your niche?

If you’re a consumer congratulations! Roll up for personalized radio. Out there somewhere on the web there’s a podcast for every interest and directories to find them – any time you’re bored on a commute or exercise bike you needn’t be. And be aware that over time your CD collection is migrating to hard disk to be available throughout your house via any device connecting to your wireless LAN.

Get ready for a generation who are resurrecting several hours a week of currently dead time into entertainment and information. Yep, it’s 1935 all over again. The golden age of radio is here – but sell your radio shares and buy Sony.

Competitively-priced eStarlings can be found on Ebay or Amazon

If you’re like our household you probably no longer own a conventional film camera. You may even have multiple digital cameras: a compact one for quick snaps, and a larger body digital SLR.

You snap away in the knowledge that digital photography now costs you money if you print something, and digital photos proliferate in directories on your PC and in your inbox from friends.

Going back and finding digital photos to print is tricky; you then have to copy them out of the relevant directory and upload them to a photo ordering service, or stick them on some memory device and physically take them to photo processor, and then go and collect prints later.

In reality most prints sit unlooked-at, in photo albums next to your shoes in your cupboard, and you rapidly run out of the space for photo frames on tabletops and shelves.

Digital photo frame fears

Obviously part of the answer is electronic photo frames, but for a while we held back because of various reservations:

• How would the frame look – ugly and bulky?
• Is it all too ‘bleeding edge’?
• How would the pictures look? 
• How could we easily get stuff onto it and how many photos does it hold?
• How does it fit in with the flow of photos going into and out of our email inboxes?

New generation wireless digital picture frames are connected and intelligent

It now looks like the digital photo frame has moved on from being a physical product rebuilt in the digital world (with all its physical world disadvantages) to being re-engineered to really take advantage of things you could never do with old-fashioned wooden picture frames.

We’re talking about digital picture frames that are:

• connected to the web with a built-in wifi card (although you can plug in all the various memory cards as well if you don’t have a wireless network) so can be placed anywhere in the house
• the frame has a unique email address so your friends and family can just email pictures to it
• equally you can receive a picture by email and just hit ‘Forward’ and it’s on your frame
• because of the frame backlighting, pictures look better than those sitting in old metal picture frames
• intelligent: pictures are synched and managed from a website where you can even tell the frame who you’ll accept photos from, when to turn on & off, and how long to display each photo in your slideshow
• social media linked: if you’re into pictures via Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Myspace, Photobucket etc it will accept feeds directly (our frame is streaming a photo feed from Flickr)

Desktop versus wall-mounted photo frames

To really take advantage of these frames you need a wireless network. The next question is whether you are looking for something for a desk (i.e. you’ll be sitting there working with the frame on the corner of your desk) or whether you are after big-impact wall-mounted frames.

We went for the desk-size 8 inch digital picture frame because it is less obtrusive (amazingly some manufacturers are selling frames with sound and movie capability and think it’s a plus point … it’s difficult to imagine anything more annoying) and it gave us the opportunity to try the concept out at a reasonable price.

PhotoVu Digital Picture Frame on Amazon

For these sort of 8″ frames you will pay the equivalent of around US$199 or £150 or A$250. If you want a large wall-mounted frame the 19″ PhotoVu frame starts at about US$800 at the time of writing and also has a wireless connection – but not the email to frame function.

Our review of the best desktop digital photo frames out there

Kodak digital picture frame with wifi

The two main desktop-size frames that we looked at were the Kodak EX1011 and the eStarling (model WPF-388B which is the new version 3 of the eStarling frame). Despite the slightly larger screen (10 inches) the Kodak model ended up showing more of a cut-off letter box cropped picture and again did not have a simple email address that your family can send pictures to like the smaller 8 inch eStarling frame.

We’ve had the eStarling now for a couple of months with no glitches. It will hold about 600 photos and as well as the web interface has controls set into the top of the frame itself if you want to rewind, delete the photo of your Aunt Maude as you see it, etc. It was very easy to set up.

You can pick up eStarlings from Ebay shops at competitive prices - here’s an Ebay search for current eStarling items.

If you want a longer review of the eStarling itself, rather than the concept generally, you can find a recent one from Maclife here, or Crunchgear here.

There are also other models like the Phillips digital frame, Westinghouse digital frame, Digital Spectrum model etc etc.