So the idea was floated that we should offer web-based video calls.  We had the basic infrastructure in place.  Billing by the byte could be handled with a code patch.  We didn’t yet have a name for the service  — but the basic idea was that two people, each with a webcam, could chat face-to-face with each other.  More important than the video calls, however, the CEO saw the ability to send “video voice mails” to anyone in the country, regardless of whether or not they had the Bazillion service, as a way to draw more customers in.  With a user interface that was easy to  use, simple to understand, and viral by it’s very nature, everyone at the time thought the idea was brilliant.  It was sure to generate a “bazillion” bucks for the company.

All I could think of was that we were about to become the nation’s premier porn server.

The CEO scoffed at my concerns when I raised them.  And the company folded before the market could decide whether I or the CEO was right.   In hindsight, it really doesn’t matter.  YouTube would still have eaten our lunch in the video arena (we didn’t think in terms of broadcast — only in terms of one-on-one communication).   And Vonage, without the baggage of our bundled DSL service, would have undercut us in price every step of the way.  But I believe that the rapid growth of microblogging site Tumblr this past year illustrates my point.

Ease of Use = Increase in Pornography Postings

It’s extremely difficult to find out what percentage of Tumblr sites are pornographic in nature.  No one seems at all interested in answering the question.  Getting an accurate count of porn sites on the internet in general is not much easier, though a few sites have attempted to try.  The most recent stats I’ve found estimate that 12% of all websites have “some” pornographic content.  For the sake of argument, let’s say the number of pornographic images (vs. those images that are simply raunchy, salacious, or titillating) is only a tenth of that — or 1.2%.  And let’s assume that Tumblr’s 10 million + users (each with one or more blogs) roughly follows the internet percentages as a whole.  Conservatively speaking, that would put the number of Tumblr powered porn sites in the neighborhood of 120,000.  That’s not the number of images online, mind you.  Just the number of blogs serving images.

Honestly, I could care less whether or not Tumblr is serving porn.  And I only stumbled upon this phenomena because we were cleaning up some inactive HeyPublisher accounts and noted a number of adult themed publishers in our system — all of them hosted on Tumblr.

The people already in the industry are probably more concerned.  There doesn’t yet seem to be a way to monetize Tumblr content in a meaningful way.   Which means most of the adult content on Tumblr is being poached from other sites.  Given how easy it is to “repost” images across Tumblr blogs, a significant amount of this content will likely go into heavy rotation once it’s introduced to the platform.

This Does Not Bode Well for Copyright Holders

The thing that’s really bugging me about this is not the porn being served on Tumblr.  Really, I could care less.  What’s bugging me is the adult industry’s utter lack of response in addressing the copyright issues at play here.

The porn industry has (up until very recently) led the charge in most things internet related.   They helped work out many of the kinks in early online payment processing and were the first to prove that video streaming could scale.   But their repeated silence when it comes to copyright holders’ rights is ominous and downright disheartening.  Despite the RIAA‘s jack-booted tactics, no one can deny that they are a vigilant and tenacious guard of their members’ copyrights.  At the slightest whiff of malintent, they swoop in.  Where is the adult industry’s RIAA?  Why aren’t they serving cease and desist orders to pimple-faced 16 year-olds with terabytes of tits and ass curated on Tumblr’s servers?

We’ve seen that Tumblr is not doing anything to curb copyright violation.  Their own tools make it very easy for the malintentioned and the ignorant to post whatever they want from whatever source they want.  It’s a brilliant UX from this perspective.  But why the adult industry as a whole (or even parts of it) are not raining a shitstorm of C&D’s down on this portion of Tumblr’s user base is beyond me.

Hempel is a talented writer, to be sure.  But the traffic the magazine receives to this one short story is not due to her popularity.  It’s due primarily to the fact that her works are studied in several college writing and literature programs — and Pif is one of a small handful of sites that have published her writing online.

The story was first published online in 1998 but it’s only been in the past 5 years that it has garnered any significant traffic.   To the casual observer, the increase in traffic roughly mirrors the rise of the Facebook Generation.  As this generation — one accustomed to living their lives online — enters into academia, it only stands to reason that rather than pick up one of Hempel’s books at the library, they will search for her and her work online.

So when an equally aged movie review of Nicholas Ray’s 1954 western, Johnny Guitar, began seeing a significant increase in traffic, the editors at Pif thought, of course, that  something similar was happening.  Perhaps Ray’s work was being studied at one or more film schools and the students were simply doing their research online.

Unfortunately this was not the case.  Sure, anyone searching for Johnny Guitar on Google would see the review near the bottom of the first page.   But that ranking is lower than where it was  4 months ago.

With some investigation, it turns out the rise in traffic is due to the review being linked to on several “content farm” websites.   From sites that sell diet pills, to sites that sell prescription-free Viagra, a link is being included to the review in what appears to be an attempt to thwart Google’s recent changes to their search algorithm.

Put another way, Pif‘s content is being used to facilitate a scam — and there is absolutely nothing the magazine can do to prevent this.  What’s worse is the realization that all of these spam-bot link-backs are ultimately negatively affecting the actual article’s PageRank, given the recent changes introduced by Google.  Through no fault of their own, their content is seeing an increase in “traffic” while simultaneously seeing a decrease in “readers”.

All of this begs the question: How do you prevent a link-back in the first place?  Barring that, how do you prevent the link-back from negatively impacting your PageRank?

This seemed easy enough since all of the controllers had a ‘filter’ action that would call a named scope to fetch the appropriate collection of records.  But using named routes made it a bit more difficult.

I’ve over-simplified the approach, partly to contain the code within the limited width of this theme, but also to more fully explain what is going on. Our actual implementation “cleans” things up a bit.

Here is the code:

# In application.rb
# 'key' will be the name of the object `scope`
#  used to fetch the appropriate records
def filter(key)
    ctrl = controller.controller_name
    route = ActionController::Routing::Routes
    url = route.recognize_path(send("filter_#{c}_path".to_sym))
    # Need to overwrite with correct filter
    url.merge!({:filter => key})

    l = link_to key.titleize, url
    if key == params[:filter]
        content_tag(:li, l, :class=>'current')
    else
        content_tag(:li, l)
    end
end

That’s it.

What makes Instagr.am unique, obviously, is the filters you can apply to your picture.  Without the filters, it’s just another camera app.  With the filters it’s an everyman’s artbox.

Two opportunities here:

1. Open up filter development to the community at large, with the ability to “purchase” additional filter packages in-app.
2. Sell filters as a 3rd party bolt-on to, for example, iPhoto (which really could use the help when it comes to filters)

The unfortunate thing is that the small real-estate of the iPhone screen, coupled with the glossy sheen of it, makes it really difficult to get a good feel for how the final photo will look after the filter is applied.

Still – loving how these “snapshots” are coming out.

While the state may be “nickle-and-dimeing” business owners with taxes and insurance premiums and other paperwork filing fees (like the 2% charge to pay state taxes with a corporate credit card), the real cost of having an employee is in the salary and benefits you give them.

Most people think in terms of hourly wages.  They understand that it costs more to pay someone $20 an hour than it does to pay them $10 an your.  But which is more expensive?  A contractor at $100k a year and no benefits, or an employee at $80k a year with full benefits?  (hint – the employee costs more).

To help me figure out these differences, I find it useful to convert salary, benefits, paid-time off and other “costs” of having an employee into an hourly rate.  Then I can compare apples to apples.  To help in this, I’ve used the following spreadsheet for years.  It’s not perfect, but it gives me a rough view of the cost of having an employe.

Hope you find it useful as well.

Updated 2010-12-15 – thanks Alan!

Download Employee Calculator v2

If you’re currently in the profession — and your client roster doesn’t read like the New York Times Best Sellers list — you may want to start brushing up your resume. There is a fundamental shift underfoot and you’ll soon be out of a job.

Why? you ask. Because you’re about to be replaced by machines. In the same way that robots decimated the manufacturing labor market a half-century ago, software is rapidly taking over the jobs typically performed by the service sector. Not convinced? When you last booked a flight, did you call your local travel agent — or did you log on to Expedia, Travelocity, or any one of the airline’s websites? When you last were in the market for a new flat-screen television, did you consult the knowledgeable experts at the local electronics store — or did you hop on to Amazon’s site and scroll through the hundreds (thousands) of consumer product reviews before making your decision?

Literary agents at their best are little more than filters. At their worst they are funnels. Their job is to foster relationships in the industry, garner a deep understanding of what different publishers are looking for, then represent their clients to the best of their ability by routing their work to the publisher(s) most-apt to accept the work for publication. They pimp for their clients. And in order to stay in business they’re very selective about who they pimp to.

Having an agent doesn’t guarantee a writer that their work will be published. It simply informs the writer that they’ve passed by the first gatekeeper on that road towards publication: they’ve made it through the filter.

Ultimately the publishing decision is up to (yes) the publisher. Publishers read works from agents they trust to be good filters. They don’t read works from agents they don’t trust. Which leads logically to a fundamental question: other than acting as a filter and a pimp, what value does an agent really provide?

Any Service Based Solely Upon A Deep Knowledge of the Marketplace Can Be Codified

Software is infinitely trainable, malleable, and knowledgeable. People are not.

Given enough data, software can tell you tell you where you should invest your money, apply for a home mortgage, which plumber to hire, and (gasp) where you should submit your latest manuscript.

If software can be trained to be a better filter than existing mechanisms (agents) and can also introduce publishers to like-minded writers who normally would be outside of their submission stream, doesn’t it stand to reason that publishers would look more to software to find their next project?

HarperCollins seems to think so, which is why they’ve launched services like InkPop and Authonomy.

I believe so — which is why I co-founded Loudlever and launched the HeyPublisher service.

What do you think?

[We] find the results of last week’s primaries especially gratifying in that … the cocksure pundits of both parties, who pride themselves on their infallible ability to read the political tea leaves, were made to look a little silly. — Alan Abelson, Barron’s

Expert advice seems to have become a commodity lately. You can’t turn on the television without being bombarded by political experts from both sides of the aisle who assure the audience that the Tea Party movement is nothing more than the latest backlash du-jour and that once it’s run it’s course we’ll return to trusty two-party politics as usual.

I’m not so sure.

Now I don’t pretend to be a politico. Nor do I have any desire to become another of the countless Monday-morning, Meet-the-Press-type, QB-slash-pundit talking heads. But I can recognize a pattern when I see one.

The Tea Party movement is to government what Open Source is to software. This movement seems (to me at least) to be less about consistency in message and more about altering the ownership of the power structure. Where Open Source was a reaction to a handful of big corporations defining who could play on the playground (and what the cost of admission would be for each player), the Tea Party movement seems to be the same thing:  a reaction to a handful of big political parties spending the tax-payers’ hard-earned cash without allowing any input into who can represent the voters, or on what issues. Where as past political movements have been about educating voters to pick the “lesser of two evils” — the Contract with America comes immediately to mind — the Tea Party movement seems to be about fundamentally changing the options altogether.

Now don’t take this as my jumping ship (to abuse a metaphor) into the sea of Tea Party devotees. I’m not really one for joining groups of any kind — particularly political ones. But I have to marvel at their approach. If they’re half as successful in “open-sourcing” government as the open source pioneers were in changing the software industry, we’re in for one hell of an interesting ride.

Sure – it will be utter and hellacious chaos in the beginning. Anyone remember what it was like setting up a webserver in the late ’90′s? It was pure hell. You first had to pick an operating system, then configure BIND, set up the webserver, customize it’s configuration for your environment, pick a database (or flat-file system), then configure it and install the bindings for your Perl or PHP/FI2 install. This was all before you could begin writing the actual code for the application you were building.

Pure and utter hell, I tell you.  But we all learned how to do it.  We did all of those things, and more,  for ourselves. We didn’t rely (yet) on a 3rd party hosting provider to do them for us. We had no other choice.  So we did it. And some of us became pretty good at doing it over time.

The same could be true of government.

This, to me, is a glorious possibility.

But then again, what do I know? The experts will tell you that what I suggest would lead to nothing short of the apocalypse.  But I’m no expert. Thankfully.

I started my first company when I was 10.   During the summer months, each afternoon around five, I’d set a sprinkler to a different patch of lawn in our front yard and let the water run for about an hour.  Later, after the sun had set, I’d head out with a bucket and a flashlight to collect the nightcrawlers that had wriggled up to the surface.  I needed to collect at least two-dozen a night.  Some nights it would take over an hour to gather them all.

The next morning my brother and I would pack up our wagon with the bucket of worms, our tackle boxes, fishing rods, a small metal lunch box of peanut butter sandwiches and Saltine crackers, and walk the half-mile down to the river.  Selling the worms was easy.  We’d developed a reputation very quickly.  The men who fished the river swore by our product.  We were twice as expensive as the local bait shop, but our worms were three times as large.  All of the big fish caught out of that river were caught with Rich’s Wrigglers.

We made exactly $1 a day.  Exactly.  We’d sell worms for 30 cents a half-dozen, 50 cents a dozen.  And when we’d sold a dollar’s worth of worms, we’d close shop.  We’d take our earnings for the day over to the road-side stand and invest every bit of it in candy.   After that, we’d spend the rest of the day fishing under the train trestle, gorging ourselves on Now & Laters, Mike and Ikes and Smartees, swimming in the river, and basically enjoying the day to its fullest.

It’s taken a couple of decades for me to realize this, but this same philosophy towards business has imbued every company I’ve started since.  When I was 19 and a buddy and I started The Word, a night-club in Salt Lake City, our goal was not to make a killing in the entertainment business.  We started the club because we wanted a place to hang out and listen to great bands.  All of the other venues in town were solely for the 21 and older crowd.  We had to create the business we wanted to frequent.  Nobody else was doing it.

The same is true of Loudlever, the business Brad Tayan and I started back in March.  We looked around, thought it a shame that most of the businesses revolving around writer/publisher relationships actually neglected the writer, and decided to create the service that we ourselves wanted to use.

Years ago Rich Kiyosaki of “Rich Dad” fame observed that he started his first company because he had to.  No one else would hire him.  I think this is true of most entrepreneurs, truth be told.   We don’t play well with others.  We have very strong ideas of how the world should be.   And we’re basically curmudgeons until that rare moment when we are able to manifest our vision into reality.

I’ve heard dozens of CEOs around town speak about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.  Glenn Kelman consistently rails against the “most screwed up industry in America”.  Dan Shapiro was flabbergasted he couldn’t get photos off of his phone so he co-founded Ontela (now Photobucket) to fix the problem.  Todd Hooper, T.A. McCann, Marcelo Calbucci, and the hundreds of other entrepreneurs who frequent every NWEN, SST or Seattle 2.0 event in town — they all have one thing in common: they have an unwavering belief that some segment of their universe is extremely screwed up and, come hell or high water, they’re going to fight tirelessly to fix it.

When people ask me “Why did you start your company?” I have to chuckle.  It’s like asking a parachutist why they decided to pull the rip-cord on the way down.  I really had no other choice.  This segment of my universe is extremely screwed up and no one else will hire me to fix it.

I really have no other choice.

3D.

Let me repeat that.  In bolded font and with multiple exclamation marks:

3D!!

This is is what print publishing has come to?  3D Boobies on Parade?  Really?  Have we all sunk so low?  What’s next?  Where can we possibly go from here?  “Playboy : The Pop-Up Edition”?  Or “Playboy : Now With Scratch-n-Sniff.”  Really?  Really?? Is it only a matter of time before an actual Playmate comes shrink-wrapped with each issue, delivered discretely to our door  for our “reading pleasure” (nudge-nudge, wink-wink)?

To be sure, this is a publicity stunt of the highest order.  But the need for such a stunt speaks volumes about an industry in decline.  Playboy has seen it’s readership slashed in half in 4 short years.  It’s bleeding money at an astonishing rate.  And what makes all of this the more worrisome is that it is happening to a publication that is known the world over, has brand recognition that rivals that of Coca Cola, and has a long history of publishing really good content.  (I’m talking about the world-class fiction and interviews here, folks).

If Playboy can’t make it work in this environment, who can?

There used to be a time when a gentlemanly reader would turn to Playboy because Playboy delivered.  It was the complete package.   For the discerning bachelor with wads of cash to blow there were articles on picking the best bourbon, previews of coming fall fashions by the best designers, and drool-inducing photo layouts of cars whose lines rivaled those of any centerfold.  There were interviews with important heads of state bookended by racy yet funny cartoons that reminded you to not take life too seriously.  And the fiction — did I mention the fiction?  Where else could you read original works by Phillip K. Dick or Gabriel García Marquez or Vladimir Nabokov while surreptitiously ogling the buxom blonde on the opposite page?

Playboy offered it all.

And then the Internet appeared.

And suddenly we had more than we could ever want.   And it was free! And it was even more discrete than the black plastic wrapper cuddled around Playboy because in the privacy of our own home, hunched over a computer screen in the dark, not even the mailman would know what we were viewing … err … reading.

Granted, most of the content that now floods across our screens may be a trailer-court cousin to the posh fare Playboy has offered up over the years.   But some of it is actually better.  Flickr aficionados can find gorgeous automotive photo spreads that rival anything Playboy has done recently.  A few keystrokes in Google and you have several thousand designer homepages, product reviews, and up-to-the-minute guides on men’s fashion.  And let’s not forget the fiction.  There are literally a thousand great literary magazines out there (including Pif Magazine) that can give you what you need.

But what about the pictures of beautiful women? you ask.   Seriously?  If you as an adult between the age of 18 and 40 can’t rattle off a list at least half-a-dozen online sites that will satisfy whatever pervy little fetish you secretly harbor, then you really aren’t a card-carrying member of the modern age, are you?

No – the future of publishing is not 3D centerfolds.  The future of publishing has yet to be written.

The only thing we know for certain at this time, at this moment, is that publishing is undergoing a dramatic metamorphosis.   That – and that print, apparently, has finally outlived its usefulness.

24 million adults in the United States consider themselves creative writers but less than 5% have ever been published anywhere.

5% is 1.2 million published writers in the US!

The internal numbers I’ve gathered from my years working with Pif Magazine is that the magazine sees roughly 9 “amateur” writers for every one “professional” writer who’s work crosses the editor’s desk.  The US Census Bureau states that there are currently 151,000+ professional (non-technical) writers in the country, which puts my number of ‘published’ writers at a little over 1.3 million.

1.2 vs. 1.3 – either way, that’s a hell of a lot of writers out there looking for a home for their manuscript.  Which makes me very excited about what we’re doing with Loudlever and the HeyPublisher.com offering.

I truly believe that in this day and age, there is a publication out there for (virtually) any piece of writing.  But finding that home for most authors is like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.

Part of our challenge will simply be finding these markets.  The net is a big, woolly ether of wonderful.  It seems like more websites then people are created daily.  How does one keep up?

If you are a publisher looking for writers, please let me know.  I remember what it was like in the early days of Pif.  Just getting the word out seems like a daunting task.  And I, personally, would love to help.