Mantex

Tutorials, Study Guides & More

  • HOME
  • REVIEWS
  • TUTORIALS
  • HOW-TO
  • CONTACT
>> Home / Archives for Media

Dust or Magic

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

secrets of successful multimedia design

Dust or Magic is a book for people who want to know about or work in the new media. It takes the line of revealing the truth about how multimedia projects really work – pointing to both successes and complete turkeys. Bob Hughes has been active in the field over its last decade, and he discusses a fascinating range of examples – from websites and CD-ROMs to kiosk programs and interactive video.

Dust or MagicHe starts with an account of digital technology from Alan Turing onwards – but the chronology darts backwards and forwards from Russian constructivists to Greek theatre and back again to Richard Wagner. Later, he settles down to a slightly smoother chronology, but without sacrificing his wide range of reference. He offers Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, and Ted Nelson as key pioneers and presents excellent accounts of their work.

This is followed by detailed sketches of the pioneers of Virtual Reality, Interactive Video, and early hypertext programs such as Guide, Toolbook, and Hypercard – including developments which have been passed by which he claims could be revived with the development of new technology.

There’s something of an intellectual dip in the middle of the book when he compares English revolutionaries of the seventeenth century with the Guerilla Girls, and he celebrates web sites and Hyperstacks which are not much more than collections of idiosyncratic enthusiasms. Fortunately, the level rises again with a whole chapter devoted to Voyager, which he claims made innovations with the bare tools [Hypercard] available at the time.

The latter parts of the book are devoted to accounts of working on multimedia projects – one for the Nationwide Building Society, of all people – and he covers the disaster of the Microsoft ‘Sendak’ project, before passing on to discuss theories of ‘creativity’ and report on forays into the world of advertising. He discusses the psychology of idea-generation, its relation to programming and the world of computer games, the advantages of motion and sounds on screen, and there are some interesting observations on the need for visual ‘transitions’ between one screen of information and another.

Reading all this, you get an invigorating sense of intellectual excitement, the downside of which is that no single idea is pursued to any depth. This is a weakness occasionally reinforced by a surprisingly cavalier attitude towards his readers – ‘sorry – I’ve lost the URL’.

And yet he’s actually gone to the trouble of locating the original authors of some of these programs – an admirable trait in an age when a lot of software has a lifespan of five years or less. He’s very fond of using metaphors to explain his arguments, and there are lots of interesting historical anecdotes woven as side-bars into the text. At its best, he throws up novel connections from different media and sources of technology; at its weakest, he flits from one unexamined generalisation to another.

Apart from concluding that projects are best carried out by small teams, he never seems to get round to explaining the ‘secret’ in his sub-title, but this is a lively and stimulating introduction to the history of software development which should go onto the reading list of anyone who wants to know what happens on real-life projects. It’s a revelation of the costly disasters as well as a celebration of the often unsung heroes of new technology during the last thirty years.

© Roy Johnson 2000

Dust or Magic   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Dust or Magic   Buy the book at Amazon US


Bob Hughes, Dust or Magic: Secrets of Successful Multimedia Design, London: Addison-Wesley, 2000, pp.264, ISBN: 0201360713


More on online learning
More on technology
More on digital media
More on web design
More on computers


Filed Under: Information Design, Media, Online Learning Tagged With: Communication, Media, Multimedia, Online learning, Technology

eBook Readers – compared

May 15, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a comparison chart of ebook reader features and prices

eBook readersKindle eBook Reader
Main features: 6″ diagonal E Ink® electronic paper display – weight 10 ounces (290 grams) – 1.5 GB storage – USB 2.0 port – supports multiple ebook formats – download via free built-in WiFi – 2 weeks battery life (reading) – holds up to 1,500 books 

UK=£176
US=$259

 

eBook readersSony Reader eBook Space
Main features: 6″ diagonal E Ink® electronic paper display – weight 260 grams – 192 MB storage expandable via MemoryStick or SD Card – supports multiple ebook formats – download with USB connection to PC via broadband – rechargeable battery – holds up to 160 ebooks 

UK=£275
US=$148

 

eBook readersBookeen Cybook Gen 3 eBook Reader
Main features: 5″ diagonal E Ink® electronic paper display – weight 260 grams – 512 MB storage (1,000 books) with optional SD card – supports multiple ebook formats – download with USB connection to PC via broadband – rechargeable battery – very light – mixed reviews 

UK=£180
US=$219

 


iRiver eBook reader
iRiver eBook Reader
Main features: 6″ diagonal E Ink® electronic paper display – eBook reader, Office Viewer, MP3 Player, Voice recorder, Personal organizer – weight 500 grams – 2.0 GB storage with optional SD card – supports multiple ebook formats – download with USB connection to PC via broadband – rechargeable battery – full QUERTY keyboard 

UK=£195

 


BeBook eBook reader
BeBook eBook Reader
Main features: 6″ diagonal E Ink® electronic paper display – weight 220 grams – 512MB storage (1,000 books) expandable to 4GB via SD slot – supports multiple ebook formats – download with USB connection to PC via broadband – rechargeable battery – preloaded with 150 free eBooks 

UK=£239

Red button eBooks on Writing and Study Skills


More on technology
More on digital media
More on online learning
More on computers


Filed Under: Computers Tagged With: BeBook, Computers, Cybook, eBook readers, iRiver, Kindle, Media, Technology

Electronic Texts in the Humanities

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Electronic Texts in the Humanities is an excellent overview of the relation between computers and texts. It covers all the essential issues in understanding the latest possibilities of using digitised text in academic study and research. Susan Hockey deals with all aspects of the encoding, markup, and tagging which renders an electronic version of any text searchable and accurate. She also discusses the currently available software and indicates what future developments are required to extend its usefulness. It’s a book which will be of interest to linguists, lexicographers, socio-linguists, literary theorists, historians, and any humanities discipline which relies on the interpretation of texts.

Electronic Texts in the HumanitiesAlong the way she gives an assessment of the existing scholarship in her accounts of research papers and the most recent articles. There are some very useful explanations of SGML and XML, the Dublin Core standards for meta-data, and the Poughkeepsie Principles for encoding and interchange of electronic text. She explains how once a text is in digital form, it can be used to produce concordances, alphabetical listings, and a variety of sortings which can reveal how the same word is used in different contexts. There’s also a chapter describing how literary critics have used computer-generated analysis to assist their interpretations of texts – amongst which she also includes analysis of poetry and non-Latinate languages.

There’s also coverage of corpora – which are large databases of examples from spoken or written sources. These are used as the basis for statistical analysis to show language change, frequency of use, and contextual usages.

This is followed by what’s called ‘stylometry and attribution studies’. That is, making the case that author A wrote text B because of certain measurable word choices or patterns. These quasi-scientific tests have been used to examine cases of disputed authorship such as the Gospels from the Bible and some of the texts in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy. There are also some examples of the shortcomings of these approaches when used in court cases as evidence.

The chapter I found most interesting was on textual criticism and electronic editions. This deals with establishing editorial principles, and it also examines the possibilities of multiple editions (archives) as well as showing how these can be produced in a variety of forms once they have been tagged.

She ends with dictionaries and lexical databases, describing in detail the major enterprise of producing the Oxford English Dictionary, as well as projects which examine old dictionaries to see what they can tell us about the people who compiled them.

This study concentrates on tools and techniques for working with electronic-based sources in the humanities. Its primary audience is teachers and students working in language-based subjects. But it will also be of interest to librarians and information scientists who are now working with electronic texts. For anyone interested in digital writing, it’s worth it for the superb bibliography alone – thirty pages which will take you in whichever direction you wish to go.

© Roy Johnson 2002

Electronic Texts in the Humanities   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Electronic Texts in the Humanities   Buy the book at Amazon US


Susan Hockey, Electronic Texts in the Humanities, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp.227, ISBN: 0198711956


More on writing skills
More on online learning


Filed Under: Study skills Tagged With: Academic writing, Education, Electronic Texts in the Humanities, Hypertext, Media, Textuality

Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights

July 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

guide for businesses, innovative and creative individuals

Anybody involved in a creative project – particularly where a number of people are involved – knows that an early question will always be raised: “Who owns the intellectual property rights?” Or you could be selling widgets, only to find that another company has started doing the same thing. Can you sue them – or are they more likely to sue you? The product can be a manufactured object, it could be a service, or an ‘intellectual asset’. It could be designing a company web site, running a training course, writing a product guidance manual, devising a manufacturing process, or putting on a television programme.

Enforcing Intellectual Property RightsHistory is littered with cases of people who assumed that they had the rights to something they had written or produced – only to find the profits from their labours taken by somebody else. This book is a straightforward guide to all the information and legal advice you will need to guard your rights to intellectual property. It’s written by a practising barrister who specialises in giving advice to individuals and small businesses. Jane Lambert is obviously committed to helping people in the creative industries, and this is even reflected in the fact that she takes the trouble to write a book on legal matters in a style which is readily understandable – and quite entertaining.

She starts with two useful glossaries of intellectual property terms – moral rights, passing off, intellectual assets, and the differences between copyright and patent. These are followed by quite an engaging scenario in which someone seeks legal advice on the copyright to household decorations which are being made in China and imported.

The explanations being given illustrate how an apparently simple case is fraught with all sorts of legal complexities. It’s amazing to learn how different laws and conventions apply to different types of product. Copyright for imaginative fiction is seventy years after the author’s death for instance, whereas for industrial design it’s twenty-five years, and a patent only lasts for twenty.

Jane Lambert is a big fan of the Internet, and full web addresses are given for all her sources of information. She explains the common cases of protecting brands and domain names, as well as trademark infringement – against which the UK legal system offers quite strong protection. However, it’s important to realise that the law may differ in countries outside Europe and the USA, and that in some places copying somebody else’s work may not be regarded as illegal.

Having explained the rights in IPR, she then goes on to cover the resolution of disputes which arise in the courts over issues of ownership. And even though she earns her living in a practise which specialises in such cases, she warns against using the system unless it is absolutely necessary – both because it is so expensive and because disputes can often be resolved outside it. She also explains how the whole system of civil procedures was reformed ten years ago (by Lord Chief Justice Woolf).

But if you really do want to prosecute a case she explains the procedure – which usually begins with a ‘cease and desist’ letter. It should not begin with any form of threats or bullying – because such actions can themselves result in prosecution.

The legal system now requires both claimant and defendant to show that they have done everything to seek resolution and not made matters worse. In the event that agreement cannot be reached, there are a number of forms of arbitration and adjudication which can be followed.

And if all else fails, and you end up in a court of law, she explains how court cases are conducted, who decides what, and how the best cases can be made. As she explains as an aside, many people falsely believe that the success of a case depends up some form of brilliant court room oratory (as in movies). But the truth is more prosaic: it depends largely upon a well-researched and carefully prepared case – which costs time, money, and skill.

But in the event that you might need them, she also offers some templates for standard letters used in making claims and defences – as well as tips on preparing your strongest case. This is a sane, humane, and very readable account of a very complex set of issues. Anyone contemplating an entry into this arena would do very well to prepare themselves by taking her advice.

© Roy Johnson 2009

Intellectual Property Rights   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Intellectual Property Rights   Buy the book at Amazon US


Jane Lambert, Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights, London: Gower, 2009, pp.164, ISBN: 0566087146


More on eCommerce
More on media
More on publishing
More on technology


Filed Under: e-Commerce, Media Tagged With: Business, Copyright, e-Commerce, Intellectual Property Rights, IPR, Media, Publishing

Enterprise 2.0

June 12, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how social media will change the future of work

The title of this book combines two coded terms – Web 2.0 and ‘The Enterprise’ – for which read social media software’ and Big Business. And the purpose is to show how the techniques and concepts behind Web 2.0 applications (blogs, wikis, tagging, RSS, and social bookmarking) can be used to encourage collaboration efforts in what was previously thought of as secretive, competitive businesses.

social mediaIt’s an argument which is fast becoming quite familiar. To succeed in modern business, managers and directors must learn to listen and talk to their customers and staff. They need to be more agile in their thinking, less monolithic in their practices, and they need to catch up to new Internet-based activities which can sweep away unwary traditionalists overnight [look what happened to Encyclopedia Britannica] and create multi-billion pound enterprises almost as quickly [Amazon, Google].

Niall Cook realises that there will be problems and resistance to such suggestions from within orthodox business communities. But he also points to their existing weaknesses.

Companies spend millions of dollars installing information and knowledge management systems, yet still struggle with the most basic challenges of persuading their employees to use them.

Will it be difficult to persuade large organisations to adopt these very democratic tools? He offers case studies from companies such as the BBC, IBM, Microsoft, and BUPA and others to show that it might. He even makes a case for the use of instant messaging and social presence software (MSN and Twitter).

He also has an example of the US Defence Intelligence Agency using mashups to provide simultaneous streams of information through a single interface (because that’s what its users want), and a multinational software company using Facebook as an alternative to its own Intranet (because its employees use it more).

He gives a very convincing example of the creation of a wiki running alongside the company Intranet in a German bank. The IT staff started using the wiki to generate documentation, and within six months use of the Intranet was down 50%, email was down 75%, and meeting times had been cut in half.

In fact he misses the opportunity to point out that one of the biggest incentives for companies to embrace Web 2.0 software is that much of it is completely free. Almost all major programs are now available in Open Source versions – including such fundamentals as operating systems (Linux) content management systems (Joomla) and virtual learning environments (Moodle).

In the UK, government institutions have invested and wasted billions of pounds after being bamboozled by software vendors. In the education sector alone, VLEs such as Blackboard and WebCT have proved costly mistakes for many colleges and universities. They are now locked in to proprietary systems, whilst OSS programs such as Moodle run rings round them – and are free.

Is the embracing of social software solutions likely to take place any time soon? Well, Cook has some interesting answers. His argument is that these developments are already taking place. Smart companies will catch on, and obstructors will fall behind with no competitive edge.

Bear in mind that within just five years, members of the MySpace generation are going to be entering the workforce, bringing their collaborative tools with them. If you don’t have the software that allows them to search, link, author, tag, mashup, and subscribe to business information in the ways they want to, they are going to do one of three things: use third party software that does; leave to join a competitor that does; not want to work for you in the first place.

Even the software solutions in this radical, indeed revolutionary development, must be fast, light, and quick to implement.

Speed and flexibility. Oracle’s IdeaFactory took just a few days to build. Janssen-Cilag’s wiki-based Intranet was purchased, customised, and launched within two weeks.

This is all part of what Peter Merholz in his recent Subject to Change calls agile technology. Cook provides strategies for those who wish to implement these ideas within their own company – and it has to be said that he assumes a certain degree of subversiveness might be necessary.

The book ends with a review of the literature on social software and a comprehensive bibliography – so anyone who wants to pursue these matters at a theoretical level has all the tools to do so. But I suspect that anybody who is taken with these new ideas – if they have any blood in their veins – will immediately want to go away and put them into practice.

This is a truly inspirational book which should be required reading for managers, IT leaders, systems analysts, developers, and business strategists in any enterprise, small, medium, and especially large. I can think of two organisations I am working with right now (one a university, the other a large city college) who ought to be implementing these ideas but who are doing just the contrary – stifling innovation. One, following its culture of ‘no change’ has just been swallowed up by its rival. The other is running onto the financial rocks precisely because it refuses to learn from its users and its own staff – whilst claiming to do just the opposite.

© Roy Johnson 2008

Enterprise 2.0   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Enterprise 2.0   Buy the book at Amazon US


Niall Cook, Enterprise 2.0: how social software will change the future of work, London: Gower, 2008, pp.164, ISBN: 0566088002


More on eCommerce
More on media
More on publishing
More on technology


Filed Under: e-Commerce Tagged With: e-Commerce, Enterprise, Media, Social media, Technology

Essays on the History of Copyright

August 4, 2010 by Roy Johnson

This is a collection of academic essays that seeks to establish legitimacy for a relatively new intellectual discipline – the study of the history of copyright. The editors in their introduction maintain that new academic disciplines arise when it generally becomes felt that there is need for them. It is certainly true that many of the technological advances of the last twenty years (in the digitization, reproduction, re-purposing, transmogrification, and distribution of various media) have brought issues of copyright, ownership, and intellectual property rights into sharp focus. And it’s important to realise that this does not only affect the printed word: films, photographs, music, paintings, even simple trademarks and branding logos have all been the subject of amazingly expensive legal disputes recently.

Power and Privilege: Essays on the History of CopyrightThe essays as you might expect take a long historical perspective. Issues of copyright (indeed, even of authorship itself) did not arise as a problem until the invention of the printing press made the mass production of an important cultural object (the book) available in the fifteenth century. So, the collection begins with the granting of the first patent in 1469 for a five year printing monopoly in Venice. It’s interesting to note that since many of the first books put into general circulation were versions of Greek and Roman classics, it was their formal appearance, font design, and physical shape that was protected, not their intellectual content or authorship.

It was only later, as the number of original published works started to rise, that individual authors began to apply for what we would now call copyright; and in their cases it was permission to print and sell a single edition of a work over a long enough time span (five years) to give them a chance to cover initial costs.

In 1644 Milton issued his Areopagitica as a protest against state censorship and in favour of freedom of the press. The important point to stress here is that he was explicitly championing the free circulation of ideas. The licence-free period that followed saw the establishment of English newspapers, with sales by 1711 of up to 70,000 per week.

Meanwhile, in America, the arrival of the first printing press in Massachusetts was greeted with prohibitions, censorship, licensing, and colonial control. It was only after the War of Independence that authors successfully applied for copyright to their work.

There are chapters tracing the slight variations in law that sprang up in France, Italy, and Germany. All sorts of different systems were tried, from temporary arrangements affecting only a single work, to ‘perpetual copyright’.

There are (understandably) quite a lot of legal and even philosophical issues at stake in some of these battles over rights and regulations. These become even more complex as the first attempts were made in the late nineteenth century to establish international agreements. It should be remembered that authors such as Dickens were forced to struggle to establish their rights in the USA.

Many of today’s commercial strategies were already in play in previous centuries – so long as the technological means to create copies and profit were available. The painter Benjamin West made £400 for his famous 1771 depiction of The Death of General Woolfe, but almost one hundred times more from the engravings that were made from it.

It is also worth noting that two other factors complicated the drafting of legislation on these matters. One was the fact that the law (in Britain) was also being framed to protect the interest of the owners or the public against possibly unscrupulous artists. The second was that the idea that a work of art should be ‘new and original’ was a surprisingly late consideration, introduced only to the 1862 Fine Arts Copyright Bill.

There was also separate legislation covering copyright in works of dramatic art and performance rights. Amazingly, the nineteenth century world of theatre was rife with stenographers in the audience recording the text of new plays as they were acted out on stage. These were then sold on to other theatre managers, who often claimed copyright, rather than the original author.

What this impressive collection of articles does not do is bring the arguments up into the digital age. That is understandable when its very objective is to establish a long history on which to build a new discipline. But anyone with the slightest interest in these issues of copyright and intellectual property rights will be keen to know how digitization and ease of reproduction are changing many of the traditional assumptions. Mashups, print-on-demand, open source software, file-sharing, and the new ‘hybrid economies’ of eCommerce are changing the face of copyright, ownership, and commercial rights. To keep up with these issues, you will need to look beyond the traditionalists to the work of Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, and Cory Doctorow.

It’s an interesting book production in its own right. OpenBook Publishers are a new business supplying academic print on demand (PoD) titles. The books they publish are available, free to view on line as searchable PDFs – but a file can quickly be turned into a conventionally printed and bound book for those who wish to pay for it. This title, I must say, is a handsome volume you would be pleased to have on your shelves.

History of Copyright   Buy the book at Amazon UK
History of Copyright   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


Ronan Deazeley et al (eds), Power and Privilege: Essays on the History of Copyright, Cambridge: Open Book Publishing, 2010, pp.438, ISBN: 190692418X


Copyright links

Red button Content: Copyright and DRM

Red button Intellectual Property and Open Source

Red button Plagiarism, Copyright, and New Media


More on digital media
More on technology
More on theory


Filed Under: Media, Publishing Tagged With: Copyright, Cultural history, History of Copyright, Intellectual Property Rights, Media, Publishing, Writing

Essential Blogging

June 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

writing for the Web – a popular revolution

Blogs (it’s a contraction of Web Logs) are a form of personal diary kept as Web pages. They can record anything from the trivial details of your own life to online political manifestos. But why would anybody want to read them? Well, some people have transformed the personal diary into an art form, most sprinkle their pages with useful links, others develop what amounts to a one-person daily newspaper, and a few manage to spin out an entirely new form of instant journalism.

Essential Blogging It’s so easy, you see. All you need to do is register with a Blogging site, type your thoughts into the templates they provide, and press the Go button. A few seconds later, you’re published on the Web. Of course there’s a little more to it than that – but not much. This book offers a tour of the best blogging sites, how to upload and maintain your pages, and how to configure the options to get the best effects.

A series of chapters, clearly written by enthusiasts, takes you through which Blog sites and software are available – from Blogger, Radio Userland (free software), Moveable Type, and WordPress. Some of these have developed rapidly beyond mere blogging tools into small-scale content management systems.

All this is expanding at a breathtaking rate. Some people even have blogs running alongside serious Web sites. When you come to look at the thousands upon thousands of blogs, you will be amazed at the variety and the skill of the best.

There’s an element of evangelical fervour in all this. Many bloggers seem like techno-Hippies, but the most thoughtful, such as Meg Hourihan, have made claims for blogging as a new form of writing:

Freed from the constraints of the printed page (or any concept of ‘page’), an author can now blog a short thought that previously would have gone unwritten. The weblog’s post unit liberates the writer from word count.

And just in case you think this might all be a little trivial, these blogs are real Web pages. So they are tracked by search engines – and if enough people read them, they might therefore become ‘famous’. Many are already joining affiliate programmes and even attracting advertising.

If you want to join in this frenzy of personal expression, build your own soap box, or develop your own one-person newspaper – everything you need by way of instructions is in this one book.

© Roy Johnson 2002

Essential Blogging   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Essential Blogging   Buy the book at Amazon US


Cory Doctorow et al, Essential Blogging, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2002, pp.244, ISBN: 0596003889


More on publishing
More on journalism
More on creative writing
More on writing skills


Filed Under: Journalism, Media, Publishing Tagged With: Blogging, Cory Doctorow, Essential Blogging, Journalism, Media, Writing skills

Flickr Hacks

May 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

tips and tools for sharing photos online

Photo blogging is one of the most expansive parts of the Internet and online media just at the moment. You take a picture with your digital camera or your mobile phone, and blog it straight onto a public site. Flickr is owned by Yahoo! They allow you to upload your photos into a web space, and you are given 20MB per month, which is quite generous. Instead of keeping your snaps just for yourself and family members on your hard disk, you can store them, share them with the world, tag them, and make them available for worldwide consumption. You can even make money out of them if you play your cards right.

Flickr HacksAlthough your photos are in the public domain, you can control who is allowed to see them. There are full instructions here for setting your privacy options. Tagging and meta-data are fully explained (that’s giving titles, categories, and links to your photos) and there are also tips on resizing photos to save on your allotted storage space.

When extra information in the form of meta-tags is added to the images, all sorts of new possibilities are created. Paul Bausch shows games involving comparisons with similarly tagged photos, and he demonstrates how geo-tagged images can be mapped.

With so many of these images being viewed and viewed across the web, it’s good that he also explains issues of copyright and licensing, including the relatively new Creative Commons licences.

He also show how you can subscribe to a news feed which will notify you when other people upload new images. Then the later part of the book offers some fairly simple scripts for constructing screensavers, tracking your friends’ favourites, and even plotting your personal contacts using Google Maps.

Assuming you eventually end up with a large collection of photos, the next more advanced level shows you how to back up the collection, then how to store and sort them.

Finally, for those who might wish to interact with Flickr and operate at an administrator level, there are some advanced scripts which allow you to act as a moderator, create custom mosaics and collages, and mash up your photos to produce all sorts of special effects.

© Roy Johnson 2006

Flickr Hacks   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Flickr Hacks   Buy the book at Amazon US


Paul Bausch, Flickr Hacks, Sebastopol: CA, O’Reilly, 2006, pp.335, ISBN: 0596102453


More on digital media
More on technology
More on theory


Filed Under: Media, Technology Tagged With: Flickr, Media, Social media, Technology

FREE: The Future of a Radical Price

August 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The Economics of Abundance and Why Zero Pricing is Changing the Face of Business

FREE is Chris Anderson’s follow-up to his best-selling and very influential book The Long Tail. In his first book he discussed

the new shape of consumer demand, when everything is available and we can choose from the infinite aisle rather than just the best-seller bin. The abundant marketplace of the Long Tail was enabled by the unlimited ‘shelf space’ of the Internet, which is the first distribution system in history that is as well suited for the niche as for the mass

FREE: The Future of a Radical PriceThis new book explores the logical consequences of the digital revolution in terms of storage space becoming virtually unlimited, the transfer of bits being more or less costless, and the new economic models of ecommerce driving the price of (some) products downwards. That is, down towards and including zero. he discusses all aspects of the term ‘free’. That’s free as in beer, speech, gifts, offers, and so on. How can an airline company afford to give away free flights, or a telephone company offer free mobile phones?

The answer is that they make their profits selling peripheral services – such as an expensive in-flight coffee or premium call charges. At first it seems to be a contradictory, topsy-turvy world, but the closer you look at the details and take note of the implementations, the more sense it makes.

His approach is thorough. He looks at the history of ‘Free’ (which goes back further than you might think) and then presents recent examples which illustrate the fact that when a price gets low enough, collecting the income from it may not be worthwhile, and you might make more money by giving it away. In fact many companies make a profit precisely because they offer a free version of their products alongside a ‘paid-for’ version. He cites the example of an open source hardware company:

This is why Free works so well in conjunction with Paid. It can accommodate the varying psychologies of a range of consumers, from those who have more time than money to those who have more money than time. It can work for those who are confident in their skills and want to do it themselves, and for those who aren’t and want somebody to do it for them. Free plus Paid can span the full psychology of consumerism.

There are a couple of in-depth case studies. One shows how Microsoft first ignored then was forced to face up to the threat posed by Linux open source operating systems. Microsoft has now developed its own open source research centre. The other is a pure case of storage costing that shows how Yahoo beat off the threat of Google G-Mail by offering even greater amounts of free space for storing emails.

I was glad to see that in a chapter on new media and new models of distribution he included the traditional printed book. Sure enough, his own book FREE is available gratis as an online download, but like most readers, I was prepared to pay for a printed version I could read by the pool.

The other examples he offers provide fascinating glimpses into the new economics of new media. Musicians such as Radiohead and Prince gave away the whole contents of their latest CDs, but in the end they made record-breaking profits – from concert performances or special editions and deluxe box sets of the same CDs.

He even makes out a reasonable case for piracy in China and Brazil. Western musicians might not agree, but local artists tolerate it because it acts as a form of free publicity : they make their money on concert appearances and sales from merchandising.

He also refutes all the common objections to the case he is making – such as ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’, and ‘No cost = No value’. The fact is that the lunch may be paid for by somebody else in exchange for your attention, and the ‘No cost = No value’ argument is completely refuted by the examples of Google and Wikipedia – both free and both highly valued.

But haven’t many people tried to make money from Free, and failed? Yes – they have. And it’s to Anderson’s credit that he looks in detail at the examples which appear to disprove his thesis. But he points to flaws in their economic models and explains why they failed.

Finally, just to drive his points home, he offers checklists of principles to work by, and a list of fifty examples of business models built on Free – all concentrated in his refreshingly cryptic style:

  • Give away the show, and sell the drinks (strip clubs)
  • Give away the drinks, and sell the show (casinos)

It’s important to realise that most of his arguments are heavily related to bits, not atoms. Digital products have a tendency to become free, whereas physical objects do not. Motor cars and refrigerators are not likely to be free for a long time yet, but software and online content is definitely heading that way. It will be interesting to see if Rupert Murdoch’s plans to charge for online newspapers will work. I suspect it won’t. But then, what do I know – I’m not an international media multi-millionaire.

© Roy Johnson 2009

free   Buy the book at Amazon UK
free   Buy the book at Amazon US


Chris Anderson, FREE: The Future of a Radical Price: The Economics of Abundance and Why Zero Pricing is Changing the Face of Business , London: Random House, 2009, pp.274, ISBN: 1905211481


More on eCommerce
More on media
More on publishing
More on technology


Filed Under: e-Commerce Tagged With: Business, Chris Anderson, e-Commerce, free, Media, Technology

GPO Design

November 27, 2010 by Roy Johnson

posters and propaganda for the post office 1930-1970

GPO Design is a very stylishly produced collection of posters and information graphics commissioned for the postal services between 1930 and 1970. It’s supported by a well-informed essay on the relations between government, propaganda quangos, and the world of what was then called ‘commercial art’. It has always been a mystery to me why a monopoly should feel the need to advertise its services. Mrs Average of Pinner, Middlesex has until very recently had no alternative but to use Royal Mail to deliver her birthday cards and letters to friends. The same has also been true for gas, water, and electricity. Nobody had access to alternative services, so why bother to advertise their virtues?

GPO DesignBut the GPO has from its earliest years made a habit of commissioning artists to design posters to promote its services and reminding us to post early for Xmas. In fact there has been a quite deliberate campaign to both educate the public and promote an impression of efficient, modern technology driving communications at a national level. This has been coupled ideologically with folksy images of the village postman delivering letters in all weathers, and at the same time promoting an empire of connectivity that embraced the globe.

But not all the postal service’s posters and advertising campaigns were corporate vanity. The campaign to advertise postage stamps in little booklets was apparently an attempt to reduce the waiting time spent queuing to buy a single stamp.

It’s not surprising that all decision making in matters of acceptability was in the hands of establishment appointees who despite their efforts to employ modern artists, generated an output that was pretty near indistinguishable from Soviet propaganda posters of the same era

Hans SchlegerThe range of artists and designers they did use included E.McKnight Kauffer, Graham Sutherland, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell. But the most artistically advanced was Hans (Zero) Schleger, one of the many European immigrants who fled to Britain during the inter-war years.

Paul Rennie suggests however in his contribution to the elegant Design series that their work was more successful politically and technologically than their Soviet and Nazi counterparts. He also points out that the GPO’s emphasis on the modern technology of communication – cars, boats, trains, telephones – was a distinctly progressive and modernist theme radiated into society by its educational and service-promoting publicity.

The examples in this collection from the award-winning series are drawn from the poster collection of the British Postal Museum and Archive in London. It sits very neatly alongside its recent fellow publications on David Gentleman, El Lissitzsky, and Alexander Rodchenko.

GPO Design   Buy the book at Amazon UK

GPO Design   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


Paul Rennie, GPO: Design, Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club, 2010, pp.96, ISBN: 1851495967


More on design
More on media
More on web design


Filed Under: Graphic design Tagged With: Art, Cultural history, Graphic design, Media

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • …
  • 6
  • Next Page »

Get in touch

info@mantex.co.uk

Content © Mantex 2016
  • About Us
  • Advertising
  • Clients
  • Contact
  • FAQ
  • Links
  • Services
  • Reviews
  • Sitemap
  • T & C’s
  • Testimonials
  • Privacy

Copyright © 2025 · Mantex

Copyright © 2025 · News Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in