Color-Blind Technology

This is the season of Angry Birds and other apps that keep children amused and caged. I'm predisposed to the Renegade Cheetah or the Branded Monkey but will take my diversions where I can find them.

Among the half-million apps in the marketplace, there are a lot that provide utility. One caught my eye: an app for color blindness. Or more precisely, augmented reality for color blindness. This has been Dan Kaminsky's secret side project (http://dankaminsky.com/).  The DamKam app costs $3 and is available for the iPhone and Android.

I'm not an expert on color blindness but have read that about 30-40% of men have some degree of color blindness, mainly in the red-green spectrum. I'm included in that percentage. I didn't know this until I enlisted in the military and was shown the Ishihara test plates that Kaminsky describes. The test plates features the familiar colored dots with numbers circumscribed within the plate. If you are color blind you either can't read or have difficulty reading the numbers. The app makes reading the circumscribed numbers possible.

I've spent much of my life compensating for this, at red lights and elsewhere, Somehow I was able to serve as an assistant navigator on a Navy ship without running it aground.  But I couldn't qualify for nuclear submarine duty because of my color blindness. 

Here is an excerpt of a blog post on the Kaminsky site: "I used it today in the real world. It was amazing! I was at Target with my girlfriend and saw a blue plaid shirt that I liked. She asked me what color it was so I pulled up DanKam and said 'purple'. I actually could see the real color, through my iPhone. Thanks so much."

So now we know; there is a good reason men wear all those ugly shirts and sweaters and have no opinion when their partner comes out of the changing room with a dress that might as well be an Ishihara plate test. I wear a lot of black and it's not because I live in New York. (Read the blog post chain to get a sense of how infuriating this deficiency can be to woman who are not familiar with the condition).

This app resonates with utility for designers, artists, photographers, scientists, app game developers and those who design fashion for men.  One blogger suggested that the code for this app be sold to Apple who could implement it into the iOS software. Another suggested the inventor received the Noble Prize.

More than one blogger mentioned this was like an early Christmas present; technology used to advance the human condition.

I'll join that chorus.  

The Culture for Health

This is the time for lists; for the last year, decade and even quarter-century. We live our lives this way of course, measuring out our spans with T.S. Eliot's "coffee spoons." Don't get me wrong; I'm still a fan of the very demanding Gregorian calednar. And I like the number 25 because it actually represents less time than I have spent in the magazine business.

All the notables have their "notable" magazines of the last 25 years.  Elle, Oprah, Cooking Light, Wired and, of course, Men's Health, are on most lists.  In this post I'll focus on Men's Health or, more precisely, what led up to the launch. Or what made it possible.

I spent a chunk of my magazine years at Rodale and that informs my opinions and biases. I got there by accident. As a newly minted PhD I was ready to go to Detroit, Michigan or Walla Walla, Washington, or St. Louis, Missouri to earn my stripes as a non-tenured professor before Yale or Notre Dame called.  Since that involved too much packing I accepted a chance meeting with Bob Rodale, late chairman of Rodale, who gave me copies of very early vintage Organic Gardening and Prevention and told me to consume both issues and come back in the morning.

I did and told him that the magazines seemed a little "down-market." Actually that was a phrase I learned later. I think the phrase I actually used was "scruffy," in my best English accent. He laughed and we got around to talking about the "Great Chain of Being," an Elizabethan notion that had been drummed into my head in graduate school stating, more or less, that "God is in his heaven and all is right with the world."  Then Bob Rodale spoke about his world view, a manifesto that linked the health of the soil with the health of the land. He was a rough philosopher to be sure but a philosopher nonetheless. So it wasn't the publishing side of the business that took me to Rodale but rather the chairman's caste of mind, his sense of humor, his utopian dreams, and I must say humility.

Did I mention quirky? What I loved most about going to work was that Bob Rodale always had another project, if not a scheme. Soon after I joined he told me he wanted to build a veldorome (a bike racing track)in Trexlertown, PA--he had seen one in his travels and thought Eastern Pennsylvania would be a better place with one. He asked me to coordinate the project, bringing together architects, engineers, and those with knowledge of track design. I visited all available tracks in the country. The Trexlertown velodrome still stands (I've provided more details about this project in an earlier post). Perhaps the most important by-product of the track is that it encouraged Rodale to acquire Bicycling magazine, an on-ramp to the men's market.

Mr. Rodale was a bit of an iconoclast in his own company. One day he came to my office and said he thought the Book Division was moving too slowly with launches. His solution: to create another department called Fast Access Books. This department would have one employee--me; and fast meant I'd be working seven days a week. In truth this was just a way for Bob Rodale to publish The Solar Green House Book, a subject he was very interested in. The book seemed to hit a nerve; selling a couple hundred thousand copies.

Not everything worked. New Shelter magazine which became Practical Homeowner was not a success, as we didn't understand that crowded market well enough and probably didn't have the skills. But that said, the company remained dizzy with experimentation. Bob Rodale provided the cover and the culture; President Bob Teufel provided the discipline and business expertise.  As noted, the acquistion of Bicycling was fortuitous. This made it possible to acquire Backpacker (subsequently sold). Then Runner's World, which was the jewel in the crown. Add Men's Health and you have the Rodale Active Advertising Network.

I made some missteps, such as when I launched Superfit which was meant to be a cross-training, fitness magazine for those that had outgrown special-interest activities. It was a nice idea but could not find a market or a voice. But it provided another angle on the men's market and a small stable of writers.

In the meantime Prevention Editor Mark Brickin and his team were enjoying success with fitness and health newsletters for men. This was an invaluable conversion platform when the company was ready to test Men's Health. 

I had little involvement with the launch of Men's Health in the states. I did lead the team that launched the first international edition in the UK. We sold 100,000 copies of the first issue. The rest is history.

Men's Health is a very big success story, perhaps the most important launch of the last twenty-five years. It was a very big editorial idea as well as a huge business success. There were other successes but few had such a large footprint.

But that is a story for another time. I just wanted to celebrate the 25th birthday of Men's Health by saying a few things about the Rodale culture that made it possible or at least did not drag it back into committee.

Google & the Lit Crits

I recall attending a Southern Literature seminar at Lehigh University that focused on Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.  The professor had a keen interest in exploring the difference between the original text that was serialized in The New Yorker and the final novel. In fact, one of our assignments was to track, weigh and evaluate these changes. What seemed like detective work then now, after I have written and edited a dozen books, now seems kind of silly. Well, if not silly, a little laborious.

Much literary criticism entails this kind of work. At Lehigh my disseration was entitled: "Aesthetics and the Religious Mind in Francois Mauriac, Graham Green and Flannery O'Connor." A friend wrote a dissertation on the medical imagery in John Donne, probably over a weekend. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of such dissertations, both pompous and narrow, that have searched endlessly for themes, language patterns and clusters, keys words and Freud's slips of the tongue.

This was always lonely work with monk-like devotion to the text and rapt attention to the journals that were the academic version of the playbook for Monday night football. The key was finding an angle, a metaphor, a new insight that had not appeared in that scruffy journal called Notes & Queries. I can't make too much of this. I know dozens of associates who have gained tenure for noticing--when no one else had, that a particular heroine had crossed her legs enough times to be divisible by three. 

In July of this year Google awarded grants for a new digital humanities research program. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that this was Google's first formal foray into supporting humanities text-mining research on its corpus of more than 12 million digitized books.

Welcome to the world of literary metadata!

I think this is a wonderful development.  After all, literary criticism as an academic discipline has long tried to position itself as a by-product of scientific inquiry. New Criticism, developed in the South by John Crowe Ranson, Allan Tate and Robert Penn Warren after World War I, strove for a kind of linguistic exactness and stripped-down language. This school of criticism would be at home in the world of meta-data.

Literary critics have long poked through texts during their long, idle afternoons looking for word patterns and phrases that indicate narrative intent and the psychological inclination of characters. Now they have a reason for coming to work. 

The New York times reported today that scholars at George Mason University, with a Google grant, are scouring every 19th century British book for keywords and phrases that might offer fresh insights into the minds of the Victorians.  So far they have charted more than two dozen words, including: God, love, work, science and industrial. I assume they'll get around to sex.

No offense meant but it wouldn't be a bad idea if this new generation of digital tools would put some literary critics out of work or at least send them back to the classroom to teach Johnny how to write a Hemingway-worthy sentence, at least before Google does that too.

I'm applying for a Google Humanities grant to help codify this work. I hope once and for all, as Google is my witness, to finally vanguish the phrase "hidden meaning."

Magazines as Culture

I've written extensively about how magazines are a very good lens through which to view developments in various countries, particularly in China (see www.magazine.org/international).  In the U.S. it took the better part of fifty years for magazines to shift from being broadly general-interest to having more of a special-interest focus, matching the changes in demographics, income, leisure time and wealth. After all, consumers probably wouldn't have much interest in health, fitness or sports magazines if they remain, in Maslow's words, pinned down at the safely level.

I've published magazines and digital businesses in twenty countries and found the above trajectory generally true everywhere.  In every country or region I have observed the transition from general to special-interest titles has taken less time than in the states. As late as 1995 in China the bulk of the many thousands of magazines were gray, faceless products that served as an arm of the government's formidable propaganda machine.  Go to Beijing or Shanghai today and the fashion, service, auto, health, and even psychology magazines will seem indistinguishable from their Western counterparts. To be sure the long arm of censorship--or more correctly, self-censorship--is still more or less enshrined in law there. However, unlike news or business magazines that write about sensitive subjects, special-interest magazines stay with the safer subjects.  Make no mistake about it these magazines nonetheless serve as a projection of Chinese self-confidence and self-worth.  After all, magazines reflect the national psyche and even censorship can't completely hinder that celebration.

A couple of weeks ago NYT columnist David Brooks wrote an interesting piece on the role of general-interest print magazines in U.S culture, using as his starting point the merger of Newsweek and The Daily Beast, a marriage that seemed to be greeted by the sound of one hand clapping.  Brooks reminds us that general-interest magazines were a by-product of the Emersonian push for self-improvement. He writes: "This ethos shaped the American news media for more than a century. Poor families scratched together their dollars to buy an encyclopedia, to join the Book of the Month Club, to buy Will and Ariel Durant's 'Civilization' series or the Robert Maynard Hutchin's Great Book."

In Brooks' view a generation ago everything seemed to change and general-interest magazines began to pay more attention to the readers themselves than to cultural issues. Then came the inevitable segmentation by interest and desire hastened by technology. Just as Twitter and Facebook to this list, and you have a perfect recipe for a National Solipsism.

I started my day reading about Flipboard's plans to get beyond offering an enhanced RSS feed to something that will look and feel more like a "social" magazine. This seems like an elegant idea even though I might end up with my highly personalized, individualized magazine of one, a future many of us in the media have hoped and planned for.

I was thinking about Brooks' proposition while I was reading the current issue of TIME in which Managing Editor Rich Stengel interviews Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. It is a remarkable interview, not necessarily because it sheds additional light on the recent leak of diplomatic cables.  This is service journalism at its best and the service provided is a wonderful look at how a free press and engaged citizens should operate when governments continue to grow in power and secrecy.

If high schools in America are still teaching courses in Problems of Democracy, this should be required reading. Toss the textbook and listen to Stengel and Assange, two really good teachers, address some of the most serious issue of the day with a sobriety and seriousness that Brooks would surely applaud.  

   

The Attributor

I met the founders of the Attributor, a West Coast web tracking service, about four years ago.  I featured them at an MPA Innovator's session and introduced them to publishers.  Over the years I have watched the company undergo various iterations as they explored ways to get web sites and especially portals to pay for using content without permission.

From the beginning the central question was whether content producers would make use of this service? And did the Attributor have the guns and the staying power to get offending parties to remove content or pay a CPM-based revenue share? I was a big fan of this company from the beginning because I believe that technology can solve problems induced by the Internet; not legislation. But a getting a slice of a portal's advertising revenue seemed like a long shot, especially when you are using a hammer.

The Attributor through its Fair Use Consortium might finally have an answer to some of these vexing questions.  The company conducted a five-month study that looked at new models and rules for online content syndication.  Research shows that 75% of sites that copy content without prior authorization are willing to alter their behavior when approached in a reasonable manner.

In 2009 the Fair Syndication Consortium (FSC) developed a monetization model called FairShare. In short, syndicators share advertising revenue with content portals. But what to do about the bad actors who are unwilling to share revenue?  Next the FSC developed an approach called the Graduated Response, a development framework on top of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The assumption was that citizens of the Internet would do the right thing if given the opportunity to do so.

A Graduated Response starts with a friendly email reminding the site owner of multiple infractions--my term. If no response is received or the offending copy is not removed, a second email is sent informing the site owner that if no action is taken search engines will be contacted and told to remove the offending content from their indexes. If after 14 days there is still no response the host site is contacted and asked to remove the copy in question under DMCA.

The compelling question that remained; "Can site owner behavior be adjusted through thoughtful and strategic escalation, rather than starting with content removal notices?" The research seemed to say yes.

A representative sample of 70,00 original news articles, representing regional, national and international newspapers was processed.  More than 400,000 full, unauthorized copies were identified across nearly 45,000 web sites. Each of these copies contained one or more advertisements. That was the focus. The trial randomly selected 107 sites.  Within a month 75% of these sites had removed content or started a conversation with the content owner about becoming a licensee. Search engines and advertising networks complied with each of the more than 15,000 removal requests, typically within a 24-hour period.

FSC understands that some in the community don't like any system that uses the DMCA and others much prefer the hammer. But this seems an intelligent ways to use technology to police in a reasonable manner the use of unauthorized content.

Plastic Logic

When Plastic Logic came on the media scene in the spring of 2009, it garnered a lot of attention. Plastic electronics were an advance as was the device form factor, the size of a standard magazine. The device seemed a step-up from the Kindle and other e-readers coming to market and seemed ideal for the publishing community. Except it didn't have a color display. The consensus was that this device would go through a number of iterations and come 2012, more or less, color displays would be available.  The dozens of e-readers shown at the January 2010 CES provided evidence that other device manufacturers saw color display technology coming soon, just not tomorrow. So with iRex and other e-readers, the focus was not so much on technology because under the hood most of these devices looked similar. The focus was on the business model and ways to be unlike the Kindle in terms of revenue share, ability to share content, and rights issues. This made an awful lot of sense in an orderly market. Plastic Logic was at CES with its smart Que designed for the business user.  Plastic Logic had a smashing booth, a convincing narrative and a $200 million investment in technology.  That they missed the delivery date did not deliver a major body blow. It was the introduction of the iPad that was mercilessly teased at CES and however absent, still stole the show.  Soon Plastic Logic went quiet. The chatter in New York was that the company, burdened by an expensive fabrication factory in Dresden, was not long for the market.

The chatterers were wrong. Today Plastic Logic announced an agreement with the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies to establish new plastic electronics production in Russia for the creation of its next-generation plastic electronic display.  And to establish a plastic electronics industry in Russia.

This "significant investment" will certainly help Plastic Logic bring to market their next generation  electronic reader for business. The company seems to be betting on the prospect that plastic electronics technology, for economic, environmental, manufacturing and form-factor reasons, will ultimately replace traditional silicon display products.  And they know as much about this sector as any company.

But the market is very different than eighteen months ago. It is no longer as easy to carve out a distinct business user, many of whom have iPads under their arms.

Bike Tech

Rodale recently announced that the company was folding Mountain Bike into Bicycling. It was probably time. Mountain Bike had served the market well for over twenty years. I was there when Mountain Bike, the West Coast/Mountain upstart covered with tattoos and parading bling swaggered into a sedate Emmaus, PA. promising to re-order the cycling world.

Bob Rodale, the late chairman of Rodale, loved all things cycling. An Olympic skeet shooter, Mr. Rodale saw a velodrome--a bicycle racing track--on one of his international trips and thought that was precisely what the farmland in Trexlertown, PA. needed.  He sent me to racing tracks in New York, Georgia, and Illinois for my velodrome tutorial but soon realized these were medieval designs.  He opted for track designs from recent Olympics, including Mexico City and found a local engineering firm to oversea the project. My job was to convince the granges and Future Farmers of America that this was a good idea. I was neither a farmer nor a serious cyclist and my audiences knew this. And I had not yet perfected my Pennsylvania Dutch accent.

If there was going to be a velodrome, then there needed to be some history of the arcane sport of bike racing. Mr. Rodale asked me to prepare a book on the history of bike racing. I spent a good part of a year visiting bike shops and sorting through tons of papers about cycling's glory days; that is, in the latter part of the 19th century. The book, American Bicycle Racing, came of this effort.

When the velodrome was completed Mr. Rodale noted how much energy track cyclists, especially sprinters expended, when they were moving at 40 mph. Always a practical man, he wondered whether this energy could be translated into uses such as splitting logs, generating electricity, pulling a plow and the like. He set up an incubator at Rodale to explore these possibilities.  And Mr. Rodale decided that the company needed a book to record these and other efforts.

I was surprised that engineering professors at Oxford and MIT were also looking into the mechanics of pedal power and with their help I edited a book: Pedal Power in Work, Leisure and Transportation. I was told it was translated into a dozen languages.

Mr. Rodale thought it would be a good idea to share this information and utility with the developing world that is often the recipient of "inappropriate" technology. I took this idea to the World Bank, asking for financial help to develop pedal power prototypes, with particular focus on pumps for well water--still a major issue. I was told our request--for less than $1 million--was not enough.  I remember all the flags in that Washington DC board room more than the people.

It was only a matter of time before Rodale acquired a cycling magazine. We looked at the various racing titles but focused on Bicycling Magazine, a Marin-based general interest title.  I was part of the acquisition team led by President Bob Teufel. We brought the operation back to Emmaus as Rodale would later do with Runner's World.

Geography wasn't an issue but our first business model was. Initially we relied on Rodale's considerable expertise in direct marketing that had been so successful with Prevention and Organic Gardening. We quickly realized that Bicycling represented a specialty audience and we would have to edit and market to this end. Even with this initial storm and stress the magazine was cash positive in about five quarters. 

Bicycling had a good and profitable run for about a decade. We heard the rumblings of the mountain bike in Marin County and knew pioneer Gary Fisher who was one of the original tech contributors to Bicycling. I was editor and publisher at the time and recall surveying our readers about the best name for this new and unruly bike. The answer: All-Terrain Bike. Wrong answer. Wrong question.

Manufacturers saw this budding interest in the mountain bike and pulled back on road and fitness bikes to concentrate on this new category. Advertising followed with some of it leaving Bicycling, Mountain Bike magazines started to pop up, getting the love that we thought Bicycling earned. Bicycling added mountain bike coverage but in that first wave of mountain bike purity, our editorial was probably somewhat unbalanced. After all, we were largely a staff of road bike riders and ex-racers. and it probably showed.

At a strategic planning meeting we decided to join the competition and in a sense compete against ourselves. This was not roundly applauded by all the editorial staff. In short order we purchased the fledgling, Colorado-based Mountain Bike magazine and hired as editor "Zap."  He was the guy referred to in the first paragraph wearing tattoos and parading bling and was perfect for the job. Bicycling and Mountain bike got better from the competition.

In the early stages mountain bikes were very much an American phenomenon. These bikes were the perfect answer to Americans who weren't interested in drop handlebars and hard, thin saddles. In time this sector probably suffered from over-design and adding enhancements for the sake of the upsell.  The addition of front and rear suspension, as well as other features, were probably a little over-the-top, especially since most cyclists don't use their mountain bikes off-road.  The hybrid bike category seems the perfect answer to what many middle-of-the road, so to speak, cyclists need. And road bikes are about all I see in my neck-of-the-woods around Nyack, NY,

I understand that Bicycling magazine has never been stronger. Folding Mountain Bike into the "parent" should be uneventful.

Mountain Bike has served a worthy purpose.