Mike Cooper's Blog

 

Better than actually creating great, compelling content, that is — who wants to spend the time? No need to bother when you can pay your way to viral success with Buyral:

 

 

yesterday’s advice on out-of-the-box self-promotion probably ought to take a look at Buyral too.

Delete! Delete!

Criminal hackers are now remarkably well organized. Although reporters still call them “gangs,” the groups are more like boot-strapped startups, with franchises, different shops, and an increasingly degree of specialization — and all are available through standard internet storefronts.

A recent report on the Russian “underground cybercrime market” makes clear how business-like it’s all become:

Wanna buy a botnet? It will cost you somewhere in the region of $700. If you just want to hire someone else’s botnet for an hour, though, it can cost as little as $2.

Maybe you’d like to spy on an ex — for $350 you can purchase a Trojan horse that lets you see all incoming and outgoing texts. Or maybe you’re just in the market for some good old-fashioned spamming — that will cost you $10 for someone to send a million e-mails on your behalf.

These are the going rates in Russia’s underground cybercrime market — a vibrant community of ne’er-do-wells offering every conceivable service at dirt-cheap prices.

I don’t know about you, but I read that and I though, “hmm … how can I use this to sell some books?” In particular: a million emails for only ten bucks? Why not??

“Conversion rates” — the number of people who end up buying something — average around 3.5% for legitimate email marketing. For spam, according to one study, it’s 0.000008%.

Gee, that doesn’t sound so good. On the other hand, click-through rates (they respond, but don’t necessarily buy anything) are much better: as high as 6%. For porn, it must be noted, but pharma and penny-stock spam is still not bad.

And as an author thinking about the long game, building name recognition is as important as book-by-book sales. Maybe more important.

So, maybe it makes sense to get my name and current book jacket in front of a few million people. It’s only ten bucks! Can’t hurt, right?

Spam sent to verified email addresses does cost more — between $50 and $500 per million — but you have the reassurance of knowing real people get the messages.

Given the lengths that authors have gone to, it wouldn’t surprise me if someone has already tried this. I can’t see any downside. Write your message properly and it won’t look at all like spam — correct spelling and grammar, etc. The filters are set to catch Viagra and pump-and-dump schemes, so a book promotion would be more likely to slip through. And if you DID get caught, well, all publicity is good publicity. In fact, the first novelist to be outed would probably see her or his story go truly viral. You can’t buy better attention than that!

Of course, after a few dozen book-spam blasts, the novelty will wear off, no more gains will be had, and everyone will be a little more fed up with self-promoters. But that huge first-mover advantage is just sitting there, waiting.

Who’ll go first?

Zeroing in on the problem

I’ve written recently about Facebook’s painfully obvious strategy to make more money by suppressing posts unless you pay. Ars Technica has a nicely balanced summary of the issue, and one of the comments caught my eye:

Absolutely this is a money grab. I work for an author and spend a lot of time on his Facebook page. The number of comments have gone way down since Facebook started doing this. Obviously people liked seeing the posts before because they were commenting, so Facebook deciding people didn’t want to see the posts is dumb.

That seems about right. Facebook can do whatever they want, of course — it’s their space, as the Terms of Service make eminently clear. But authors trying to stay in touch with their readership need deep wallets if they want to use Facebook as a primary channel.

By the way, Dangerous Minds has a follow-up to their original post bringing this issue to the world. Worth reading, here.

How the algorithms work

Post-superstorm, price gouging is back in the news. Gasoline, food, water — a few opportunistic merchants are braving general condemnation to raise prices on things people really need.

On the one hand, why not? Free markets and all that — the invisible hand works only if buyers and sellers are free to negotiate whatever price point they want. Governor Christie, after invoking an anti-price-gouging law this week, is under fierce attack from the libertarian right:

Gov. Christie has demonstrated once again his betrayal of free-market principles and sound economic policies and his embrace of left wing ideology to shore up his popularity.

The governor has taken a page out of the command and control polices of Presidents Nixon and Carter …

On the other hand, people really don’t like price gouging. It offends deeply held concepts of fairness, of equal treatment, of the haves not being allowed to exploit the have-nots.

Which brings us to today’s topic, dynamic pricing. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s not just airline tickets. Bus trains and Amtrak do it too; check a fare today and tomorrow it might be much more or less. Amazon prices vary so widely and frequently that one company is making a business out of simply keeping track.

Amazon appears particularly egregious — or efficient, depending on your point of view — in this regard. The price of an item can apparently leap upward even after you’ve placed it in your cart, if their algorithms decide you’re a mark.

Nothing seems to have a fixed price any more.

Remember, price gouging is no more than charging what the market will bear. Dynamic pricing is exactly the same thing, with “the market” reduced in size to individuals.

This is what the most advanced economy in the world has come to? Talk all you want about the incredible computing power, the terabytes of data being sifted, the desire to match a unique and perfect price to every transaction — and all we’ve done is work our way back to the bazaar. It’s no better than haggling in a medieval town market.

Other countries still have deep cultures of haggling. I spent long periods in Southeast Asia when I was younger, and in a place like Indonesia, you have to bargain for everything. Food, lodging, public transit, haircuts, anything tangible you might buy – if you simply took the first price offered, you’d overpay by multiples.

Some people enjoy that: the thrill of the chase, the joy of winning a good deal. But mostly it’s just exhausting. Who wants to argue, all day, about every little transaction? Who wants every trip to a store to be like dealing with a car salesman?

Not me, and not most Americans. Back to our 21st-century intertubes bazaar: 87% of people surveyed think that charging different prices for the same item online should be illegal.

Good luck with that, though. Congress will never act. As computers get more powerful, and as more and more data is hoovered up to make the real-time adjustments possible, dynamic pricing will only expand. Clothing. Groceries. “Non-essential” healthcare. A candy bar at Walgreens.

For decades we’ve been drifting into a value system that holds “price” as the ultimate arbiter. When all of society is marketized, dynamic pricing is an entirely logical outcome.

And where are the idealists, the brave thinkers who might propose alternative systems? Once they’d have been Marxists … now they’re building Bitcoin.

It’s enough to make barter look good.

The most deadly snake on the planet

Pedants will insist that black mambas actually earned the name from the inside of their mouths — the snake itself is a rather unprepossessing gray. But on Halloween, a black mamba MUST be black.

The eyes illuminate. Construction is mostly cardboard, with various salvage for the lenses. Total cost

Cloudy but no rain yet, so trick-or-treating looks good.

Where are the animated GIFs?

Another day, another long complaint about Facebook. Everyone’s favorite go-to metaphor is deployed again, although this guy actually knows what he’s talking about:

Is Facebook becoming the next MySpace?

… A lot of ads, which makes me use AdBlocker+. Content which is most often boring and not worth to waste time in this busy age. My profile is sold to some unknown people. And you can’t reach all the fans of your page when you post new content. That’s true – Facebook recommends me to pay when I want to reach all my fans.

Why should I post content to Facebook when nobody reads it? Why should I communicate trivial things to my friends and pay for that? Telephone is cheaper. Why should I pay for my band which does not bring any revenue in these days?

But the analogy to MySpace is too convenient. It only ever was kids and musicians there, and the whole thing collapsed before it was taken over by brands. Not to mention the notoriously garish user-created pages (like that of Baby Sloth Spirit, above). Facebook is at once much more and much less than that.

But parallels to another M-named tech gorilla are less farfetched: Facebook could be the next Microsoft. Consider:

It dominates the world. Microsoft: 92% of desktop operation systems. Facebook: 1 billion users. Enough said.

But everyone disparages them. “Facebook sucks” actually gets twice as many Google hits as “Microsoft sucks” (and the ratio is even more lopsided if you omit delimiting quote marks in the search). Try it yourself!

Yet…no one is ready to switch yet. Oh, sure, there’s Google+ (1.03% market share! Which is, um, less than Pinterest). Or various open-source attempts — Friendica, anyone? Pretty much everyone hated Vista, but instead of switching to Apple or Linux, they just gritted their teeth and toughed it out until Win7 finally came along. Facebook has little to fear from its current competitors.

On the other hand, eventually a sufficiently disruptive technology will appear. For Windows, it may well be mobile. Microsoft has gone all in with Windows 8, trying to shift to tablet/phone based computing. But they’re just playing catch-up to iOS and Android. Whether they’ll succeed is an open question.

So the real question is not “what will displace Facebook?” but rather, “What will make Facebook irrelevant?”

Of course, if I knew that, I’d build it myself.

And in the meantime, I’ll struggle along with FB as it is, grumbling, whining … and staying.

Hard to believe it’s not real

As some of you know, we do a fair amount of work with cardboard around here — spaceships for the kids, that kind of thing (click for an example). But this guy’s cardboard art is just astonishing.

All the images seen below are made from cardboard ~ boxboard to be precise. They are cut into manageable pieces using a surgical scalpel (blade Nº.11) and assembled intuitively by hand using a plain well known brand of wood glue, without detailed plans or drawings. The process is a kin to drawing in three dimensions with cardboard.

That’s pretty much how we do it — just start cutting and assembling, and see what happens — though we use packing tape and small bolts rather than glue, and his results are museum-quality.

Amazing work. See more here.

“Facebook sucks” gets 349,000,000 hits on Google

Lots of authors love Facebook. Maybe I would too … if I had set up my page properly in the beginning. But I didn’t, and now I’m stuck with an irritatingly dysfunctional Facebook presence.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

 

WRONG: Set up a “fan page” rather than a “personal profile.”

I was trying to follow the rules. Facebook says that personal profiles are for individuals sharing their lives; fan pages are for public figures making money. (A fan page is just another name for a “business page,” but it’s the big brands and companies that use that appellation.) The main difference is that you cannot friend anyone from a fan page — you can only wait around for them to “Like” you.

Believe me, you can wait a very long time.

 

RIGHT: Start a personal page, and build to 5,000 friends.

5,000 is the limit, because Facebook assumes (reasonably) that no one can possibly have more friends than that. But it’s much easier to acquire the 5K, because the relationships are reciprocal: you friend someone, they accept, they’re automatically friended back. So you friend, friend, friend, get to 5K … and then convert your profile to a fan page.

Easy! Now you have 5,000 fans. And when more people want to sign up, you let them “subscribe” — which means they see your posts in their feed, but aren’t actually “friends.”

I don’t think this strategy breaks any rules. In fact, it seems to be what Facebook wants you to do.

 

RIGHT for Facebook, WRONG for you: “Promoted Posts”

You may have heard that Facebook went public recently. Only it didn’t go so hot, the stock price collapsed and now they’re desperate to make money. All true! Naturally they’re now scrabbling for ways to “monetize” the service, and the latest is “promoted posts.”

Not “sponsored stories,” that’s different. (I suppose it’s a minor irritation, relatively, but just keeping up with FB’s constantly changing framework is a job in itself.) When you pay to promote a post, Facebook shoves it into more of your fans’ newsfeeds.

But wait! I thought that once someone “Liked” me, everything I wrote would automatically show up in their feed. Is that … not so??

Indeed not. Facebook uses their nicely titled “Edgerank algorithm” to determine what posts are actually posted where. Overall only about 16% of your fans will, on average, see any given post of yours.

That’s one out of seven. Yikes! Do I need to write seven times as many posts? I already spend way too much time on this social media stuff!

Well, there’s a shortcut. You can pay Facebook to place your posts in more of your fans’ feeds. Costs vary depending on you, your fans, the post content, and Facebook’s current stock price (haha, just kidding on that last one…I think) but can reach $200.

By the way, right before FB announced this opportunity, “organic reach” as they call it — the number of people seeing your posts — fell off a cliff. Gosh, let’s see: they throttle your feeds way back, then they offer to bring the number back up … if you pay.

Hmm. Some people see a deliberate conspiracy here. Some people are very upset.

(Note that even personal profiles are getting this “opportunity.” Individuals will shortly be able to pay seven bucks to promote a status update — i.e, to push it into more friends’ feeds.)

It doesn’t help FB’s reputation that more and more “engagement” — when a user “likes” a post, clicks through, accepts an offer, or whatever — is coming from suspicious users. Countries like India and Thailand seem to have large numbers of Facebookers madly clicking “Like” buttons. Note: the company does claim to be “cracking down,” so … we’ll see.

Is it all worth it? Maybe not. For me, with my small “Like” count, certainly not.

Oh, by the way, there’s one more point to consider, apart from reach and cost. According to their terms of service, Facebook can do whatever they want with your content. Specifically, you’ve granted them a “transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license” to use your text, photos, videos, whatever.

Okay, even as an author you’re probably not posting your manuscripts on FB. But the idea of ceding control of anything I’ve written bothers me — especially if I have to pay for the privilege.

What’s the answer? For myself, I think it’s putting more content on my own website (yes, this one). I’m in control, not Mark Z, and anyone who wants to follow can subscribe in a variety of ways. I’ll continue to use Facebook — one billion users, yadda yadda).

But as a “social engagement channel,” Facebook increasingly seems too clogged with chaff to be a primary tool.

Halloween, my favorite holiday, is only one week away, and we’ve barely begun the costumes!

Our daughter is working on her own. Our son had a very specific request. I won’t say what he wants to be — we’ll save that for the day. But the photo shows the current status.

It’s just cardboard and tape so far. Yesterday I tried forming plastic (into giant eyeball lenses) with a heatgun, which did not go well. It’s going to be a busy weekend.

Real mixed use

How much land does a typical, four-person family need to grow all their own food? Everything included — vegetables, wheat, dairy, meat — the answer is not that much: about two acres.

(That’s 1.5 football fields, or a square plot 200 feet on a side.)

As it happens, the US supports a population of 310m people on 1.2bn acres of cropland, rangeland and pasture — about four acres per person, or sixteen per family. Yes, we export a lot of food, and yes, some of the “pasture” component is probably not in productive use. But this rough comparison does suggest that industrial agriculture is not as efficient as usually thought.

(That’s perhaps not too surprising. Small-scale agriculture is far more efficient in terms of physical inputs, though it does require greater labor.)

The photo above is from Japan, where archaic land-use regulation has long kept small farm plots in use throughout the highly urbanized Tokyo-Osaka megapolis. When I lived there twenty-five years ago, one room I rented looked right out onto a quarter-acre rice paddy — not an unusual juxtaposition.

What about closer to home?

Detroit, poster child for contemporary de-urbanization, has 40 square miles of vacant, unbuilt land within the city line. That’s more than 25,000 acres — or enough to support almost 13,000 families. But with 700,000 people still living in the city, this means that urban gardening could feed only about an eighth of them. (Of course, if city parks and public open space were taken over as well, the figure would be higher.)

On the other hand, most suburbs have lots of room yet. Looking at entire metro areas, rather than just the smaller, denser cities proper, the proportion of people who could be fed hyper-locally is sure to be higher. Include intensive operations like vertical gardens and aquaculture, and 100% might not be unachievable.

Perhaps the next Green Revolution will take place — literally — in our own back yards.