Wanted: online identity thieves

It becomes increasingly important to protect your corporate brand online. McAfee (a security software company) calculated that there are 1,9 million registered variations on 2771 most popular domain names. These variations are based upon small typing errors (typo's). Google for example had a number of variations of its brand name online: googkle.com, ghoogle.com and gooigle.com This technique called typosquatting makes fraudulent use of the well known company and can create a false and wrong image of the company. Typosquatting sites piggyback on the popularity of the heavily trafficked website and refer to porn sites, include gambling links or worse infect computers with viruses. What can happen to your brand is illustrated when you type www.microsoft.cm You will enter an election site of Barack Obama! A questionable technique of a Presidents candidate. The Republic of Cameroon -with 10.000 people online- and with the suffix cm understands that it can earn money from people mistyping. It now sells it cm suffix to companies and organisations outside of Cameroon that want to benefit from typo's.
Protecting the online brand and controlling the content of the online brand continues to be a challenge to brand owners.

Information stress reduction tools

I was reading about life hacking (programmers productivity tricks) the other day and that made me think of the way we select, process and memorise information. It seems to me that the abundance of information on the Internet suggests the illusion that we can know and learn everything. However because of the enormous amount of information that is scattered over the Internet we will never be able to maximalise our know-how. What is lacking are these life hacks that help us to select and collect the most relevant information. Search engines help us to identify the articles, images or video on the net, but we still have to rank them in terms of importance, credibility and accuracy. Most of us do not have the time for that.
Therefore consumers and businesses rely on editors to select the information. The continuous increase of the number of magazine titles demonstrates that consumers value editors that can put together information relevant for specific segments. And it is the credibility of the magazine or newspaper brand that is the reason to believe the information.
Online consumers and businesses develop other tools: lists, social networks and referrals are the new tools to select and optimise their information need. I believe that the need for editors will continue to exist and that they can help reducing the information stress related to the information overload.

Second life for books

Quite some librarians have been dreaming of a World Library System. Organising all books in all libraries so that they would become accessible for everybody. This dream may come it bit closer to reality with the Google Books project. Google has agreements with several libraries in the USA, Japan and Europe to scan entire collections. Google will make all of these books searchable by word and will make it possible to link words or events with Google Maps.

The Bodleian Library of Oxford University for example contains 11 million books and each year the collection grows with 3 to 4 kilometer of book racks. Opening-up these huge collections via electronic versions, will learn us a lot more about the our history. Come the questions of copyright, and the commercial ownership of what is today in the public domain. Most of the libraries objective is to reach a broad as possible readership, but will that objective prevail on these questions?
One point divides then though; scanning is a time-consuming and therefore expensive task. Of older books every page need to be turned by hand before a picture can be taken. (The Dutch use an even more laborious system: they have Philippine ladies retype entire books as that is more reliable than current OCR technology). Sheetfeeding a scanner will be a lot cheaper (€10) than scanning by hand (€ 150) but would need books to be cut apart and thus destroyed. Book lovers will hate the idea as they appreciate much more than the content of the book. The paper used, the type of binding, the spine, the feel and the smell of the book is part of the reading experience. Will libraries allow this to happen, even when they to have to sacrifice a second copy of a book? Will learning the world win out cultural heritage? To be continued online and in your book store.

Selling books and PDF's with a profit

The US-based National Academies Press won the prestigious ISMS Prize at Wharton University. The publisher developed a model that took advantage of the growing number of orders for electronic books. Research showed that 65%-70% of visitors of the website came to view only one page. Visitors were split into online shoppers and buyers of a printed book opposed to who were browsing books that had a PDF version available. They determined that selling the electronic version of a book at 75% of the print price would generate the highest profit. With the book price at the same level and a bundle of print + electronic at an 18% mark-up, total sales rose by 10% (and web sales by 14,4%). In the meantime the electronic books sell at 85% of the print price demonstrating the success of the model.