Alertbox
Aug. 1995 Online publishing
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useit.com
Alertbox
Aug. 1995 Online publishing
|
Online publishing of newspapers, magazines, and books is really a meaningless concept. We have to leave the legacy publications behind as we invent the world of online publishing. Information will have to be organized in new ways that match the properties of the new medium rather than being derived from the way the physical limitations of the old medium caused information to be split up among specific publications. For example, all styles of online publications should offer ephemeral interest groups where the users can write "letters to the editor". This popular feature does not need to be restricted to newspapers in an online medium. As another example, restaurant reviews are more properly considered as a database than as a series of articles, and users should access them in a table-driven search and/or be informed personally when a restaurant appears that has a high similarity score with other restaurants preferred by each individual user.
I don't think that the launch of the Microsoft Network (msn) this month will mean the death of the Internet for online publications. First, Bill Gates says that msn will "become a part of the Internet rather than strongly distinct from it," so it is not being positioned as an Internet-killer. Second, even if msn wanted to kill the Internet, it couldn't.
msn does have three advantages over the Internet:
Many websites currently perform user authentication by registration where the user has to select a userid and a password and enter them every time he or she accesses the site. User registration will have to die: you don't need much human factors expertise to predict that a human being cannot keep track of fifty or more different userids and passwords, and yet it is not at all uncommon for users to have at least fifty sites on their hotlist. Users will be writing down their passwords (leading to complete loss of security) and they will rebel against the time wasted in finding their userid and password every time they follow a link to a different site. The user's computer will have to negotiate registration information with the remote site automatically, based on user-controlled preferences for what demographic data to reveal to whom.
In her seminal article on how to compensate intellectual property creators in a digital world where copies can be distributed to thousands of unpaying readers at the touch of a mouse button, Esther Dyson argues that payment for information will be replaced with payment for human time. For example, book authors often make more money from lecture fees and consulting than from royalties, so the lack of a system for collecting the royalties should be no big deal. I agree 99% with Esther.
Even though the cost of information will be driven down to almost zero, the authors will still have to receive some compensation for high-value information (my 1% disagreement). The solution involves microtransactions, where the user has to pay the information provider some small amount of money (e.g., 5 cents) for each information object used. Microtransactions need extremely low overheads (you can't spend 32 cents collecting a 5 cent charge) and they are thus well suited for computers as long as a simple billing service is available. No credible billing service exists on the Internet today for microtransactions, but I predict the emergence of one within a very short amount of time.
Once the Internet solves these three problems, it will be unbeatable due to its basic advantages: dynamic, open development of new features, cross-platform protocols, and a huge world-wide user pool.
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