Professor Sells Lectures Online
September 14, 2006 | 8 Comments
North Carolina State University professor Robert Schrag is charging $2.50 for audio copies of his lectures.
From Kelley Brackett of the Technician Online:
The professor in the Department of Communication sent his students an e-mail Sept. 7 notifying them that lectures from their 75-minute communication and technology class were available online for $2.50 each. The Web site allows students to “buy now” and hear the lecture, in an MP3 format, as often as they like.
[...]
According to Schrag, he wants to serve three “markets.” The first is comprised of students who question their ability to take quality notes in the classroom. Students that are interested in doing well in the class can, therefore, use the online lectures as a study tool in preparation for tests.
Schrag said he is also concerned about the increasing number of international students on campus. The second market is for these students who may have difficulty understanding lectures from an English-speaking professor and would prefer to review lectures at a slower pace.
The third market, he said, is for students who prefer not to attend class.
[...]
“Your tuition buys you access to the lectures in the classroom. If you want to hear one again, you can buy it.”
[...]
“Obviously all the students can get the lectures for free by coming to class,” Schrag said. “I guess you could see the service as a safety net designed to help the students get the content when life gets in the way of their getting to class.”
A fourth market he could be serving is people who do not even attend the university or students who are interested in his lectures, but do not have time or opportunity to take the class. Consider this the “long tail” of potential students. I think this is a fantastic use of media and the price seems appropriate and right.
Tags: college, communications, Kelley Brackett, lecture, long tail, ncsu, North Carolina State University, professor, technician, technician online
Save the Comics Industry, Go Digital!
December 12, 2005 | 13 Comments
The comic book industry has been hurting for a lot of years. This is no surprise to anyone who has remotely followed comics at all over the last 10 years. Comic book shops continue to close. I think the closest one to me is now over 100 miles away.
Is this because people aren’t interested in superheroes?
I’d say a definitive no to that one. Just look at what’s been coming out of Hollywood in the last 5 years: Spider-Man (1 & 2), X-Men (1, 2 & 3), Daredevil, Sin City, Electra, Blade (1, 2, and 3), the Hulk, Batman Begins, The Fantastic Four, Superman Returns, and more! I’d be willing to guess the total revenue on these movies far exceeds how much the printed material is pulling in. Not to mention cartoon series and video games…
Is this because we read less?
I’m not sure where national or international reading numbers sit, but if anything we are reading differently. Blogs and web news as well as online published magazine’s are unlikely to be tracked, but all seem to be doing well.
So here’s my theory of how to fix comics.
Distribute online. Satisfy the long tail and distribute your comics just like Apple iTunes music store. Right now tons of comics are being illegally distributed online through BitTorrent. Just go to isohunt.com and search for any superhero you can think of). This shows a clear desire by the community to get their comics in this format.
Here’s how I would suggest making it a success:
- Take a chance and distribute your comics in CBR/CBZ format with no DRM. If you put DRM on it, people will break it. Those who want to steal comics will. Don’t invest the time and resources to put some crappy rights management that’ll inevitably be broken immediately upon release. So don’t bother, it’ll just slow you down and likely produce bad press. Think about the good press of being the first industry to trust your clients.
- Do not provide comics in a Flash format that is cumbersome to read. CBR.cc currently has an indie comic called “Six Gun” that they provide as Flash. This is cumbersome to read and I’d guess most wouldn’t bother. I want to click one button and have it flip the page. Simple. Marvel also used to do this with their various Ultimates titles, providing s few issues as Flash based digital comics. I forced my way through one, loved the story but hated the experience.
- Provide comics at a great price point digitally, I’d suggest $0.99. I’d happily grab up of comics that I don’t want to preserve long term at that price.
- Release less printed copies, so there is a reason to collect and save. Collectors want to feel like what they have is valuable. Fewer actual printed copies would make this true again.
- Provide online previews of the first 4 pages of every comic.
- Try some new ideas out in a cheap digital only format.
- Allow me to one click subscribe to a printed version. Once a reader gets hooked on the digital version, it’s likely they’ll want to go further, or collect the printed ones.
- Do fantastic cross title promotion. For example if I buy mostly Spider-Man, and he is making a guest appearance in X-Men, tell me about it when I login to my account. Or, if I buy New Avengers and you introduce The Sentry, tell me about the back issue Sentry mini series you have so I can get back info on the character. Or if I love everything Brian Michael Bendis ever wrote, tell me when he decides to write a 4 part Spider-Woman mini-series. Amazon has become famous for this, follow their lead here.
- Finally, provide your entire back issue library easily accessible. Some of these books have histories that extend back into the 60’s. How am I supposed to remember something that happened to a hero before I was born in a book that I can only read if I find an old copy on eBay? Of course I can read about it on a fan site, but how does the industry profit from this and continue to produce great titles?
OK, that’s my rant. Hopefully the industry smartens up and adopts this fantastic new medium to expand to the potential we all know it has. Put it this way, make comics easy enough to get digitally, that it would be ridiculous not to.
Tags: bittorrent, cbr, cbz, comic book industry, comic books, comics, digital publishing, DRM, ecommerce, long tail, marvel
eMachineShop
October 29, 2005 | 4 Comments
Cliff pointed me at eMachineShop months ago. I’ve been patiently waiting for him to blog it so I wouldn’t steal his thunder.
Anyway, they have downloadable CAD software that you can use to mock up any part you want. Then you can instantly get a price on what it would cost to get any number of those parts manufactured. Prices drop substantially if you large quantities.
Having worked next to the engineers at Ruger Pine Tree Castings for a couple years doing computer support, I have a reasonabe understanding of how complex their jobs were. I am amazed this company can run a real machine shop, do engineering, casting, etc for parts on a potentially one off basis. I would be curious what the quality of their merchandise is.
To me this appears to be a great example of a company using long tail as their business plan in an area that was previously reserved for large companies with big clients ordering lots of parts.
Tags: casting, emachineshop, engineer, engineering, investment casting, long tail, machine shop, part, parts, pine tree castings, ruger
Web 2.0 and the Long Tail
October 9, 2005 | 6 Comments
Casey started spouting to me weeks ago about “The Long Tail”, and it’s significance in our changing online world. I read a bit, was admittedly intrigued, but haven’t thought too much about it until recently.
After noticing Web 2.0 being listed as a top search term on Technorati for the last few weeks I began looking into what this term actually means. Apparently Tim O’Reilly and others have begun talking about the next phase of the Internet. Where are we going, what is successful, and why? Obviously Google is a key part of all of this, but I was somewhat surprised to find discussion also tying back to the long tail.
At this point I realized I needed to know a bit more about this now too, so stumbled into Chris Anderson’s blog, longtail.typepad.com. Anderson discusses at great length Legos, digital music, BitTorrent, software and more. He cites intriguing examples of and detail about how companies are taking advantage of the long tail to make money in ways no one could ever imagine without the Internet and it’s grand reach. Go read his site, learn about this, it is very important.
Not surprisingly, as I began to grasp his concepts I was led right back to O’Reilly and conveniently his “What is Web 2.0?” article. This is also a must read. Let me quickly quote a brainstorm list of services that have transitioned from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0:
Web 1.0 Web 2.0
DoubleClick –> Google AdSense
Ofoto –> Flickr
Akamai –> BitTorrent
mp3.com –> Napster
Britannica Online –> Wikipedia
personal websites –> blogging
evite –> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation –> search engine optimization
page views –> cost per click
screen scraping –> web services
publishing –> participation
content management systems –> wikis
directories (taxonomy) –> tagging (”folksonomy”)
stickiness –> syndication
Somehow that list really made the Web 2.0 concepts become much clearer. Reading deeper I came upon a comparison that was most clear to me, an ex-advertising programmer:
Overture and Google’s success came from an understanding of what Chris Anderson refers to as “the long tail,” the collective power of the small sites that make up the bulk of the web’s content. DoubleClick’s offerings require a formal sales contract, limiting their market to the few thousand largest web sites. Overture and Google figured out how to enable ad placement on virtually any web page. What’s more, they eschewed publisher/ad-agency friendly advertising formats such as banner ads and popups in favor of minimally intrusive, context-sensitive, consumer-friendly text advertising.
This was a fantastic hell yeah moment for me, linking back long tail notions to these Web 2.0 ideas.
The next major point he makes is “Harnessing Collective Intelligence” which I compare to the infinite monkey theorem and is my reason why people should blog. He cites the success of Wikipedia, Flikr, open source web development, and more.
A point I find myself arguing at work constantly but didn’t have words for yet is also addressed: “End of the Software Release Cycle”. Read that section, for software developers this is a complete change in mind set, but more importantly, trainers and managers are going to need to get on board or fear missing the boat.
There is a ton of detail to absorb here, I could keep pulling at my favorite gems, but I’ll let you read up yourself. What I will do however is leave you with this final list of core Web 2.0 competencies from the article:
- Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
- Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
- Trusting users as co-developers
- Harnessing collective intelligence
- Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
- Software above the level of a single device
- Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models
Tags: Anderson, blog, Chris Anderson, collective intelligence, flickr, long tail, napster, O'Reilly, scalability, self service, software development, Tim O'Reilly, web, web 2.0, web development, wikipedia