SLOW Movement

WSJ: Professional Decorating Ideas in the Houzz

THE DIGITAL SOLUTION
Updated April 4, 2012, 2:37 p.m. ET

Professional Decorating Ideas in the Houzz

Service Brings Consumers and Interior Designers Together Through Sample Rooms and Social Networking

• By KATHERINE BOEHRET

Ask anyone who has decorated a home or even just one room in a house and they'll tell you: It's tough work. The overwhelming variety of pendant light fixtures, farmhouse sinks, transom windows, paint colors and wainscoting patterns make it clear why interior designers get paid to do the job.

People who prefer the do-it-yourself route may find inspiration in HGTV shows or Better Homes and Gardens magazine. But a free digital option is available in Houzz, which works as a website, iPhone app and iPad app.

Houzz brings consumers and interior designers together through sample rooms and social networking, Katherine Boehret reports on digits.

Depending on how you use it, Houzz can work like Pinterest, the idea- and photo-sharing social network, complete with lots of lush photos of designed rooms that users admire and save in personal Ideabooks for reference later. Also like Pinterest, users can follow one another. I followed a few designers and design firms with photos of sample rooms I liked. After following Siemasko + Verbridge, I saw all of the design firm's activity on the website in a My Houzz section.

Unlike Pinterest, which makes everything public, Houzz Ideabooks and the comments people add to photos in their Ideabooks can be kept private, which I liked.

I've been using Houzz (a combination of the words "house" and "buzz") on the Web and as an app for the past week, and I've already learned a lot. I moved into my new place last summer, so flipping through photos of living rooms, bathrooms and kitchens was motivating. I just might add a wallpapered accent wall in my living room if I ever find some spare time.

Houzz

The Houzz website and apps show rooms designed by professionals, like the architect firm pictured, and identify items in rooms using green tags.

I felt most engaged in the site when I used Houzz.com, where I could read informative discussions among designers and people asking questions about rooms. Answers included details about product pricing, availability and design tips on things like how to combine black and brown in a room (answer: use throw pillows with both colors). The prospect of getting new clients draws designers to Houzz, where they offer free advice.

But the Houzz website holds so much information, it can feel jumbled and overwhelming—especially when compared with the simple, clean interfaces of the free Houzz iPhone and iPad apps.

For home decorators, Houzz is a website and app that offers an almost limitless number of ideas. WSJ's Katherine Boehret says the site allows users to mix and match ideas and consult with other users and designers.

I especially liked a recently added feature to the site and apps: In photos of rooms, tiny green tags hang from items that have been marked by professionals, and tapping on a tag displays details like where the product can be bought and how much it costs.

I found tags on things ranging from chandeliers to painted walls (a tag on a wall told the name and brand of its paint color). In the Houzz mobile apps, these tags swing back and forth whenever the iPhone or iPad moves—a whimsical touch. Next month, the site will launch Houzz Lightbox, which automatically starts a slide-show mode for scrolling through photos faster.

One source of frustration with Houzz was that certain products I thought about buying, like wallpaper from Schumacher & Co., were only available to people in the design trade. A spokeswoman said 11% of products on Houzz are in this category. But she said more manufacturers are starting to sell to both consumers and professional designers.

While Houzz can be used to motivate people to decorate their own homes, it will also direct them to local interior designers who created an admired room. Each photo of a room includes contact information about who designed it. If you prefer to limit your Houzz to photos of rooms done by designers in your area, you can filter by location. I looked at the D.C. Metro area and found thousands of nearby designers.

Many products used in these designer rooms cost thousands of dollars, but discussions about rooms may help people get ideas for lower-priced alternatives.

Houzz

Tapping a tag displays details on the product, above. Pictured, a tagged room as seen on an iPad.

I really liked the look of Ochre's Arctic Pear Chandelier, but by reading the discussion surrounding it, I found out that it cost around $5,300. (This information wasn't readily available because Ochre doesn't sell directly to consumers.) Another Houzz user suggested a $400 alternative from Pottery Barn that looked similar.

Other items are easier to buy. The $299 Balencia Folding Chair from Frontgate is clearly marked with a green tag and a link that takes you to Frontgate.com, where you can buy the chair.

I created several Ideabooks where I saved images of rooms I liked. Shortcuts in Houzz let me share photos with friends on Facebook and Twitter, or via email. After any user saves 10 images to an Ideabook, Houzz will start recommending similar images the user might like. These are generated by an algorithm and were in line with my taste.

People who are aware of their design deficiencies and who don't think Houzz's do-it-yourself encouragement will help them can open the site's Professionals section. Here, over 1.3 million suppliers, remodeling and design professionals are listed for hire. These listings can be filtered by category or location.

Whether you are looking for an interior designer or are just looking to find some great decorating ideas, Houzz will help.

Write to Katherine Boehret at [email protected]

A version of this article appeared April 4, 2012, on page D2 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Professional Decorating Ideas in the Houzz.

WSJ: Steve Jobs - The Secular Prophet

THE SATURDAY ESSAY
OCTOBER 8, 2011

Steve Jobs: The Secular Prophet

Steve Jobs turned Eve's apple, the symbol of fallen humankind, into a religious icon for true believers in technology. But can salvation be downloaded?

By ANDY CROUCH

For every magical thing Steve Jobs revealed in his Apple keynote addresses, there were many other things he concealed. Like the devices he created, his life was more and more opaque even while becoming more and more celebrated. So his death this week came as a shock for nearly all of us, even though we knew that only grave illness could be keeping him from the company he co-founded and loved. He told us almost nothing about his prognosis—right through his last public appearance he was as turtleneck-clad and upbeat as ever. But suddenly, this week, he was gone.

Portrait by Tim O'Brien

Portrait of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was extraordinary in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (demanding and occasionally ruthless) leader. But his most singular quality was his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple's early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and turned it into a sign of promise and progress.

That bitten apple was just one of Steve Jobs's many touches of genius, capturing the promise of technology in a single glance. The philosopher Albert Borgmann has observed that technology promises to relieve us of the burden of being merely human, of being finite creatures in a harsh and unyielding world. The biblical story of the Fall pronounced a curse upon human work—"cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life." All technology implicitly promises to reverse the curse, easing the burden of creaturely existence. And technology is most celebrated when it is most invisible—when the machinery is completely hidden, combining godlike effortlessness with blissful ignorance about the mechanisms that deliver our disburdened lives.

Brett Arends discusses on Lunch Break why he believes Steve Jobs was the best chief executive of his generation and wasn't just a technology genius but also a hype master.

No company combined simplicity and hiddenness better than Apple under Mr. Jobs's leadership. Apple made technology not for geeks but for cool people—and ordinary people. It made products that worked, beautifully, without fuss and with great style. They improved markedly, unmistakably, from one generation to the next—not in the way geeks wanted technology to improve, with ever longer lists of features (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Word) and technical specifications, but in simplicity. Press the single button on the face of the iPad and, whether you are 5 or 95, you can begin using it with almost no instruction. It has no manual. You cannot open it up to see its inner workings even if you want to. No geeks required—or allowed. The iPad offers its blessings to ordinary mortals.

WSJ Personal Technology Columnist Walt Mossberg joins this special edition of Digits to discuss Steve Jobs's post-PC vision for the future and what his path would have been had he lived longer, as well as what he believes motivated him throughout his legendary career.

And so it came to pass that in the 2000s, when much about the wider world was causing Americans intense anxiety and frustration, the one thing that got inarguably better, much better, was our personal technology.

In October 2001, with the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoldering and the Internet financial bubble burst, Apple introduced the iPod. In January 2010, in the depths of the Great Recession, the very month when unemployment breached 10% for the first time in a generation, Apple introduced the iPad.

Reuters

A tribute to Steve Jobs in front of a Tokyo Apple store Thursday. The 2000s were defined by disappointments—except technologically, as Mr. Jobs strode on stage always with another miracle in his pocket.

Politically, militarily, economically, the decade was defined by disappointment after disappointment—but technologically, it was defined by a series of elegantly produced events in which Steve Jobs, commanding more attention and publicity each time, strode on stage with a miracle in his pocket.

Steve Jobs was the evangelist of this particular kind of progress—and he was the perfect evangelist because he had no competing source of hope. He believed so sincerely in the "magical, revolutionary" promise of Apple precisely because he believed in no higher power. In his celebrated Stanford commencement address (which is itself an elegant, excellent model of the genre), he spoke frankly about his initial cancer diagnosis in 2003. It's worth pondering what Jobs did, and didn't, say:

Betaworks CEO John Borthwick and Dow Jones's Neal Lipschutz discuss Apple's future and the challenges any company faces after the loss of its innovator-in-chief.

 

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become."

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died on Wednesday at age 56. Wall Street Journal managing editor Alan Murray and editors discuss Jobs's legacy, early reactions to his death and how his showmanship changed the retail and tech landscape.

This is the gospel of a secular age. It has the great virtue of being based only on what we can all perceive—it requires neither revelation nor dogma. And it promises nothing it cannot deliver—since all that is promised is the opportunity to live your own unique life, a hope that is manifestly realizable since it is offered by one who has so spectacularly succeeded by following his own "inner voice, heart and intuition."

Mr. Jobs was by no means the first person to articulate this vision of a meaningful life—Socrates, the Buddha and Emerson come to mind. To be sure, fully embracing this secular gospel requires an austerity of spirit that few have been able to muster, even if it sounds quite fine on the lawn of Stanford University.

Upon close inspection, this gospel offers no hope that you cannot generate yourself and only the comfort of having been true to yourself. In the face of tragedy and evil—the kind of tragedy that cuts off lives not just at 56 years old but at 5 or 6, the kind of evil bent on eradicating whole tribes and nations from the earth—it is strangely inert.

Perhaps every human system of meaning fails or at least falls silent in the face of these harsh realities, but the gospel of self-fulfillment does require an extra helping of stability and privilege to be plausible. Death is "life's change agent"? For most human beings, that would sound like cold comfort indeed.

But the genius of Steve Jobs was to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort is enough. The world—at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves—will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old cliché of "the Apple faithful" and the "cult of the Mac" is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty and discarded like a 2001 iPod.

It is said that human beings can live for 40 days without food, four days without water and four minutes without air. But we cannot live for four seconds without hope.

It's probably true for nations as well.

Mr. Jobs's final leave of absence was announced this year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And, as it happened, Mr. Jobs died on the same day as one of Dr. King's companions, the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, one of the last living co-founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Dr. King, too, had had a close encounter with his own mortality when he was stabbed by a mentally ill woman at a book signing in 1958. He told that story a decade later to a rally on the night of April 3, 1968, and then turned, with unsettling foresight, to the possibility of his own early death. His words, at the beginning, could easily have been a part of Steve Jobs's commencement address:

"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now."

But here Dr. King, the civic and religious leader, turned a corner that Mr. Jobs never did. "I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything, I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!"

Is it possible to live a good, full, human life without that kind of hope? Steve Jobs would have said yes in a heartbeat. A convert to Zen Buddhism, he was convinced as anyone could be that this life is all there is. He hoped to put a "ding in the universe" by his own genius and vision in this life alone—and who can deny that he did?

But the rest of us, as grateful as we are for his legacy, still have to decide whether technology's promise is enough to take us to the promised land. Is technology enough? Has the curse truly been repealed? Is the troublesome world simply awaiting another Steve Jobs, the evangelist of our power to unfold our own possibilities?

And, correspondingly, was the hope beyond themselves, and beyond this life, that animated Dr. King and his companions merely superfluous to the success of their cause, an accident of religious history rather than a civic necessity?

For people of a secular age, Steve Jobs's gospel may seem like all the good news we need. But people of another age would have considered it a set of beautifully polished empty promises, notwithstanding all its magical results. Indeed, they would have been suspicious of it precisely because of its magical results.

And that may be true of a future age as well. Our grandchildren may discover that technological progress, for all its gifts, is the exception rather than the rule. It works wonders within its own walled garden, but it falters when confronted with the worst of the world and the worst in ourselves. Indeed, it may be that rather than concealing difficulty and relieving burdens, the only way forward in the most tenacious human troubles is to embrace difficulty and take up burdens—in Dr. King's words, to embrace a "dangerous unselfishness."

Whatever the limits of Steve Jobs's secular gospel, or for that matter of Dr. King's Christian one, our keen sense of loss at his passing reminds us that the oxygen of human societies is hope. Steve Jobs kept hope alive. We will not soon see his like again. Let us hope that when we do, it is soon enough to help us deal with the troubles that this century, and every century, will bring.

—Mr. Crouch is the author of "Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling" and an editor-at-large at Christianity Today.

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

WSJ: Hey Mr.Bourdain, We Can Do Better

February 23, 2011, 8:07 PM HKT

Hey Mr. Bourdain, We Can Do Better

Wok with Nana

“Writing a food blog is passé,” says Josh Tse, a well-known Hong Kong blogger known as Cha Xiu Bao. “Video is the new frontier.”

Last August, Mr. Tse, who began blogging in 2004, paired up with fellow blogger Nana Chan (aka Nanamoose) to create a You Tube TV show. Since then, the duo have created more than 10 episodes of “Wok with Nana,” an online travel and cooking show — the most popular episode, about Taiwanese beef noodles, was watched by thousands in Asia.

“These are not amazing figures yet,” says Mr. Tse, who says they set their goal at 10,000 viewers. “But it is definitely more popular than blogs,” adds Ms. Chan. Her most popular blog entries received page views only in the hundreds.

Food video-loggers, or food vloggers, have been around for years in the U.S. — some of them post their shows directly on their blogs; others use You Tube. One of the first video chefs, Brooklyn-based Heather Johnston started vlogging in 2006. Then there’s Dani Spies, a certified health and nutrition counselor in Los Angeles who posts instructional cooking videos. Last summer, the Food Network, a U.S. channel, even used YouTube entries to cast contestants for its show “The Next Food Network Star.”

But Asian foodies are just entering the vlogging world.

On “Wok with Nana,” Ms. Chan usually starts off with a short interview with food experts or chefs – mostly from Hong Kong, where the two live, but also from around Asia — and ends with a cooking demo that she performs. Mr. Tse stays behind the scenes and mans the camera.

It’s a work in progress, but they’re not total amateurs — both have been guests on food and travel televisions shows before, including the DiscoverY Travel & Living programs, Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” (Mr. Tse) and Kylie Kwong’s “My China” (Ms. Chan). The experiences made them realize they could do their own show.

“Many of the TV celebrity chefs on Chinese cuisine have never lived in Asia and can’t even speak Chinese,” says Ms. Chan. “Hong Kong, for example, is always a popular place to cover in food and travel shows. We live here, so why not cover it ourselves?

They’re not the only ones in Asia with online food shows. Four months ago, Gregory Lok and Eric Pong, friends in Hong Kong, left their respective jobs — in furniture sourcing and wholesale trading and distribution — to start an online food show on You Tube called “Wine vs. Food.” The gimmick for the show is this: two wine experts compete to find the best wine pairing for an Asian dish – the experts and the featured dish will change with every show. Diners in the restaurant where the shooting takes place (the site will vary, too) decide which pairing is best, and the loser has to finish all the leftover wine. The premier episode of “Wine vs. Food” aired last December (the dish was roasted pigeon) and got nearly 2,000 views; the second episode aired in late January (Indian lamb curry).

Mr. Lok hosts the show; Mr. Pong, along with a crew of five, shoots it on a Canon Eos 7D camera. Mr. Pong already owned all of the equipment — camera, lights and  microphones — but he estimates that those starting from scratch would have to spend more than 60,000 dollars Hong Kong (about US$7,700) for professional equipment. Of course, there are cheaper alternatives. “With technology these days, you can do a great job even with an iPhone,” says Mr. Pong.

Getting started may be easy, but how will vloggers monetize their work? “It’s a question we’ve been hoping to ask you,” says Mr. Lok of “Wine vs. Food,” who muses that someday they could offer banner advertisements or have a retail component to their website. Currently, they’ve started to charge for tickets (HK$50) to attend the videotaping. Each show has roughly 25 seats available.

Says Mr. Tse of “Wok with Nana.” “Maybe a TV network will pick us up.”

“My ultimate goal is to start a restaurant of my own,” says Ms. Chan. “And this is a platform to start building customers before the restaurant is even opened.”

Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

FT: World wine web

World wine web

By Jancis Robinson

Published: February 12 2010 15:29 | Last updated: February 12 2010 15:29

Eric LeVine, founder of CellarTracker, at Vinopolis in London

At the beginning of this year Dr Vino, one of America’s best-known wine blogs, asked visitors to vote for the wine person “who most epitomises the Noughties”. The winner was Eric LeVine, a 40-year-old oenophile from Seattle barely known outside the specialist wine world. A self-confessed geek, LeVine is the creator and owner of CellarTracker, an online cellar management system revolutionising the world of wine appreciation.

As Tobias Treppenhauer, a 34-year-old German wine merchant and blogger, explains, “CellarTracker is community-driven, it amalgamates the knowledge and passion of thousands of wine aficionados. This just wouldn’t have been possible in pre-web times; younger people are attracted by these kinds of web tools. And since wine still has a rather old and stodgy image – at least in Germany – I think CT does a lot to change this image for the better.”

London lawyer François Feuillat, 39, is another fan: “First of all, it is like an old-fashioned cellar book, only more user-friendly. Second, you can enter drinking windows [when the wine becomes drinkable, and the date by which it goes off]. So you can get the system to tell you what wine you really need to drink before it’s over the hill.”

Launched in 2004, CellarTracker now has up to 500,000 visitors a month and 47,000 active users, a quarter of whom made voluntary annual donations averaging $40 last year. But the most extraordinary aspect of what its creator proudly describes as a “deep, powerful, sticky tool” is that the entire system is managed exclusively by the obsessive LeVine and the hefty laptop that accompanies him everywhere. When we last met, in the lobby of a hotel, he was busy writing code for a new version of the site. “I’m a database functionality guy,” he admits. “When I’m awake I’m largely working on it.”

LeVine has had a keyboard at his fingertips ever since 1984 when, aged 14, he bought one of the original Macintoshes with his bar mitzvah money. “It was the only thing I could ever do endlessly that felt like play, not work.” The youngest of three children, he grew up near Boston and read history at Harvard before moving to Seattle to join Microsoft in early 1992. At that time, says LeVine, his father was mortified that Eric should have preferred a career in technology to one in law, investment banking or business.

LeVine married Suzan Davidson, a fellow Microsoft employee, and says that for the next 10 years or so friends teased him for “having a three-track mind: Microsoft, mountain biking and Suzi. I was always very driven.” Then in 1999 the couple went on a biking trip to Tuscany and on their second night attended a tasting to illustrate the differences between Chianti Classico, Chianti Classico Riserva, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, and Brunello di Montalcino – same grape, different wines. LeVine, until then intimidated by the subject of wine, was “blown away”.

Back home he became besotted by wine and its many attributes, some sensory and sensual but many of them intellectual, quantifiable and, crucially, sortable. In 2003, during an eight-week sabbatical, LeVine created a rudimentary web-based cellar management system for his growing collection of fine wines. He showed it to two friends who had previously logged their wine collections on spreadsheets. “I got them on to my site in a couple of days. We found we were glued to what the others had taken out of their cellar the night before and what tasting notes they had written. It became apparent that if three people could get something out of this, so could three hundred, three thousand or three million.”

By April 2004 he decided to “throw it out on the web and see what happened. It soon got to the point that two nights a week I was staying up all night writing code. At Microsoft I was more on the management side so it was fun for me to roll up my sleeves and do it all myself.” Postings on erobertparker.com, America’s most visited wine bulletin board, also helped to alert wine lovers to this new plaything. Numbers of users continued to grow, aided by the fact that payment is voluntary (today a minimum of $10 a year is suggested and people tend to donate according to the size of their wine collections). And in 2005 LeVine left Microsoft to work full-time on CellarTracker.

François Feuillat in his wine cellar

Eric LeVine was not alone in seeing the potential of online connoisseurship. In November 2004 Steve Bachmann, an ex-banker based in San Francisco, gathered backing for Vinfolio, an online fine wine retailer with a much flashier cellar management system, VinCellar , originally costing $20 a month. Though that fee has since been dropped, CellarTracker, its unadorned but super-functional rival, has enjoyed seven to 10 times the take-up of VinCellar.

In the past six years other online cellar management systems have been launched but what distinguishes LeVine’s site from the rest is his level of consumer service. He answers all queries himself, stressing that CellarTracker is not about him but about its users. He will admit that he has enjoyed a huge advantage in being the first into this field on the web.

In May last year CellarTracker and Vinfolio announced a surprising alliance, creating Marketplace, an online wine auction site allowing their members to trade wine between themselves, the transactions administered by Vinfolio and a commission taken by whichever of the cellar management systems is involved.

But last month, the contrast between LeVine’s one-man band and Bachmann’s much bigger operation at Vinfolio came to a head. On January 17, soon after a wine collector reported on the erobertparker bulletin board that a Marketplace cheque from Vinfolio had bounced, Bachmann announced that Vinfolio had entered into an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, a Californian alternative to bankruptcy. New funding is currently being sought for Vinfolio.

The latest version of CellarTracker, launching this month, no longer looks like a Microsoft employee’s tool kit but has soft user-friendly edges, a raft of new capabilities and even a new name: GrapeStories. LeVine intends to run the two sites in parallel for the months it will take to iron out the glitches. An observer of the tech scene, he has seen too many operators fall flat on their interfaces after triumphalist but over-optimistic product launches.

And he really does love the tech work. Suzi told me that they dine with their computers on the table. (Their four-year-old daughter already has a Barbie laptop.) And LeVine is confident he will never run out of fine-tuning opportunities, although even he admits that fitting something as fluid as wine and the pleasure it gives into such a rigid matrix as a cellar management system is not for everyone. “It appeals to a subset of collectors. [Other] people like surprising themselves with what they find in their cellars.”

It is to this unruly set of more, shall we say, impressionistic wine lovers and collectors, that I belong: I could never imagine devoting the time required to enter, record and monitor the bottles I own in a third-party database. But I realised some time ago that I was probably in a minority (the great majority of visitors to wine websites are male). Indeed, many of the members of my own website are enthralled by CellarTracker, and so, late last year, without any money changing hands, we integrated JancisRobinson.com’s database of more than 40,000 tasting notes with those of CellarTracker and VinCellar. This means subscribers to my Purple pages can access my tasting notes alongside those written by the community. I am not the first professional wine writer to make this leap. Others include Stephen Tanzer (of International Wine Cellar) and Allen Meadows (of specialist Burgundy site Burghound.com) but LeVine would really, really like to see the two most powerful sources of American wine punditry, Robert Parker and Wine Spectator, join us.

“The whole topic frustrates me,” LeVine sighs. “Integration would be a really simple thing that we could do in a couple of weeks that would benefit both our sets of customers.” Instead, Parker has excited the ire of some of his subscribers, having promised in 2006 to deliver his own cellar management system, My Wines, which has yet to launch.

Does all this sharing of notes and opinion make us professional wine commentators redundant? I do not believe so. We can offer context and probably more experience than the average CellarTracker user does; but we do complement each other. Christian Zeitler, a private wine collector from Geneva, told me: “When I joined JancisRobinson.com, I listed my wines in CellarTracker according to your ratings – this showed me immediately how you like wines against how I like them – incredibly valuable to calibrate my palate against yours and to understand better any future tasting notes you or your team will provide.”

London-based Thomas De Waen, 31, who works in private equity, says professionals tend to concentrate on young wines, whereas CellarTracker members are good for monitoring the progress of more mature wines. “I log in to the site every day, just to check whether there are any new community tasting notes of wines I own. This is wine-porn of the highest order. It allows me to congratulate myself every day on my impeccable taste (I only look at positive notes) and, also, to feel excited about drinking the wine in the future!”

Certainly the fact wine buyers now have access to many more opinions, will, with luck, iron out the more dramatic peaks in demand we have seen over the past 20 years. There is already a CellarTracker iPhone app, Cor.kz but the sheer number of opinions on it makes it seem unlikely it will cause the sort of fever we have seen in the wine guru era.

Meanwhile, does Eric LeVine really not want to hire staff or sell the business? “Most people start with a business plan but I’m more of a product guy. I seem to have backed my way into having built this company. People ask me about my exit strategy, and I’ve been approached a few times, but I always freaked out in the end. I find the more I focus on the users the happier I am.”

Jancis Robinson is the FT’s wine writer
www.jancisrobinson.com

www.cellartracker.com
www.vinfolio.com

..................................................

Eric’s stellar cellar

One of the main attractions of CellarTracker for its users is the vast database of tasting notes – now more than 1.2m – posted by its members. Founder Eric LeVine has shared more than 4,000 tasting notes since 2004. There are 3,000 bottles from his cellar logged on CellarTracker waiting to be tasted, 64 per cent of them from France, with many Bordeaux and Rhône reds. LeVine’s wife Suzi favours German Rieslings from the Mosel.

Here are some of LeVine’s most recent wine reviews:

● 2001 Zind-Humbrecht Riesling Clos Häuserer (Alsace AOC): Indice 1, the driest on the Zind Humbrecht scale. What a gorgeous Riesling. Diesel and a hint of honey are the original descriptors but the more time this spends in the glass the more insanely flinty this gets with an almost Leflaive-like personality. Wow, what an ethereal palate, rich at first and getting leaner and cleaner the longer it sits in the glass. Salty and smoky with amazing minerality and gorgeous acidity on the finish. Drinking fantastically, but I am curious to see what another 4-5 years does for this beauty. (93 points)

● 2003 Domaine Charvin Châteauneuf-du-Pape: I know the 2003s are controversial and this Charvin is a poster-child, I think, of success in an extreme vintage. Huge wine, notes of liquorice and white pepper, lush, forward Grenache, pure fruit yet loaded with herbs and spice and pepper. Some might call it over the top, but for me this is just in your face, ripe, gorgeous CDP. No heat, no bitter tannin, just loaded with pleasure. (94 points)

● 1999 E Guigal Côte-Rôtie Château d’Ampuis: Oh yeah, textbook nose of bacon and blood, absolutely stellar. Tight and reticent at first but after 90 minutes this has settled down. Singing acidity, smoke, cherries and bacon. Still tannic but starting to show awesome secondary notes. (94 points)

● 2005 Château de Beaucastel Châteauneuf-du-Pape: Great nose, smoke, mineral, truffle, mint and black pepper. Crazily complex, earthy, pure and intense. Great palate, very tightly wound, a gorgeous core of fruit to this, embryonic Beaucastel flavours, bitter chocolate, cranberry. Smacks of young Mourvèdre. Gorgeous young wine. DAY 2: Kept about one-fifth of the bottle overnight. Still quite fresh, bright red fruit, not showing any oxidation. Really great young Beau. (94 points)

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

NY Times: E-Kitchens Can Get Crowded

September 23, 2009

E-Kitchens Can Get Crowded

By KIM SEVERSON

AS the digital age seeps into the kitchen, it’s time to reconsider whether too many cooks spoil the broth.

Crowd-sourcing recipes — corralling a group of strangers on the Internet to create and edit a bank of recipes — is gaining popularity and investors.

The idea is that a thousand cooks can come up with a better recipe than any single chef.

Some cooks argue that the collective process strips recipes of their personality and their provenance. But backers believe they are creating a new authority for cooking: the Wikipedia of recipes.

“Food is untapped,” said Barnaby Dorfman, a former Amazon.com executive who a year ago started Foodista.com, one of a handful of recipe sites that let anyone make additions or changes. “We’re just starting to get into a phase of truly leveraging the Web as a medium for recipes and cooking knowledge.”

These sites are still young, and not as complete or reliable as a good cook might hope. But you can already get an idea of how they work and of their potential.

Take, for example, a tabouleh recipe posted by someone called “Shiftyenomis” on the recipe section of Wikia, a separate company started by the Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. At some point, an anonymous user changed the amount of bulgur wheat to 1 1/2 cups from 1 1/2 tablespoons. Then “Blacksteallion” changed it back.

“Rloperena” jumped in, changing the bulgur back to 1 1/2 cups. Commenting that too much parsley can make the salad unpleasant, she reduced it to four cups from seven. She also added cucumber and green chili, and better directions for soaking the wheat. That was in August. No one has challenged her yet. (To make this even more confusing, readers should note that a search for “tabbouleh” will produce an entirely different recipe.)

At this rate, creating the world’s greatest collective tabouleh recipe could take years. But then again, things move fast on the Internet.

Recipe Wiki, one of 50,000 communities, or topic areas, on Wikia.com, already has 40,000 recipes and lots of information about ingredients and techniques. It began in 2005, and lately has been one of the fastest-growing areas on Wikia.com, jumping 60 percent in traffic since January.

Like Foodista.com, it has strong backing from investors, including Amazon. The site has 6.5 million unique visitors a month in the United States. For users, being part of the community is more valuable than any individual recipe. Allowing some stranger to mess with a recipe just is no big deal.

“As long as the original is up there, I don’t have a problem with people adding to it,” said Jo Stougaard, who runs the blog mylastbite.com. “We all tweak recipes.” Ms. Stougaard, from Studio City, Calif., contributes regularly to Foodista, which in turns drives traffic to her site.

One of her contributions — a “porn burger” of Spam, prosciutto and beef — was deleted because it invited too many X-rated additions. Malicious vandalism is a constant worry. Substituting body fluids for ingredients is a favorite prank. A mix of staffers and volunteers police sites to catch bad edits. I tested this, adding “one small plastic car” to the ingredient list for barbecued pork on both Foodista.com and Recipe Wiki.

Two days later I got a kind slap on the wrist from Danny at Wikia.com: “If you’re new to wikis, I know how tempting it is to try out something silly and see what happens. It’s not a big deal; I took the plastic car out, so now the BBQ Pork is going to have to call for a taxi if it wants to get anywhere. :) ”

At Foodista.com, the car was taken out of the recipe two days later by Mr. Dorfman.

Still, anyone who has used Wikipedia understands the value of information that can be collectively massaged by a wide circle of people. But are recipes the same as, say, the history of Seattle or the properties of copper?

In other words, is a recipe a fact?

“Our idea is that there is this notion of a dish which is a culturally shared idea of a recipe,” Mr. Dorfman said. And people think recipes vary more than they really do. He makes his point with apple pie. Stop a hundred people and ask what goes into an apple pie and you’ll get a predictable list of flour, apples, cinnamon and sugar. Even the variations, like whether to use butter or lard in the crust, aren’t really that different.

The advantage, lovers of the wiki model say, goes beyond the chance for the collective opinion of a crowd to create a recipe. At its best, a wiki site is like being able to call up your really smart friend who can cook every dish imaginable and knows its history.

The content is, also, free of editorial interference or commercial pressure. The model, enthusiasts say, has a unique ability to capture “the long tail” — providing useful information on a wide swath of esoteric subjects, like how to make pasta in a paper shredder. And wiki contributors often search out government agencies and obscure sources for recipes hidden in the nooks and crannies of the Internet. They even use early recipe exchange databases, like those created at Yahoo.com, to seed their sites.

It’s too soon to tell whether any of the new sites will overtake Epicurious, arguably the most popular source for recipes online. The site’s 27,000 recipes come largely from the test kitchens of Bon Appétit and Gourmet magazines, but they are rated by users. Some have hundreds of comments by cooks with varying levels of skill and dedication to following the recipe. The site also has about 114,000 recipes submitted by users, some of which are original and all of which can be rated by the masses.

Tanya Wenman Steel, editor in chief of Epicurious.com, says she is “a big believer in the democratization of recipe creation” but also thinks people like to know that a prize family recipe won’t be tampered with.

Mr. Dorfman says Foodista.com has a section where contributors can “lock down” their recipes. On other recipes, readers can track what changes were made and who made them. The same is true for the Wikia recipe site, but it’s more cumbersome to use.

For many cooks, recipes are too unique to be tampered with by a mob. The creators of a Food52.com, a new cooking site that straddles the line between cookbooks and crowd-sourcing, say wikis can lead to voiceless recipes and an industrial approach to cooking.

“We felt like there was a middle ground between the old-media, top-down approach and the completely open-ended, voiceless mass recipes you get on these big databases,” said Amanda Hesser, a former editor at The New York Times who writes about food for the Times magazine. She developed Food52.com with Merrill Stubbs, who helped Ms. Hesser on her forthcoming book of New York Times recipes.

The Food52.com goal is to create a bank of well-curated recipes from good cooks who submit recipes on a theme, like beef salad or end-of-summer cocktails, and then vote for the best.

To make an informed choice, people can cook the recipes themselves and watch Ms. Hesser and Ms. Stubbs test them in a series of videos. At the end of the year, the best recipes will become a book.

Jennifer Hess, a food blogger from Providence, R.I., was an early Food52 member. Her smoky pork burger with fennel and red cabbage slaw won the “Your Best Grilled Pork Recipe” contest. Because Food52 recipes are curated and well tested, they appeal to her more than recipes from crowd-sourced sites, she said.

“It’s nice to be judged by people who also have some chops and aren’t going to say, ‘This is wonderful’ because they are your friends, or not follow it and then leave a comment saying they hated it,” she said.

Some think a crowd shouldn’t go anywhere near a recipe. Among them is Christopher Kimball, publisher of Cook’s Illustrated magazine and host of the public television show “America’s Test Kitchen.” Crowd-sourced recipes can’t be relied upon because skills and kitchens vary too much, he said. His site’s 270,000 subscribers want recipes from a reliable kitchen.

For others, crowd-sourcing removes an intangible part of a recipe: the story behind it. Andrea Israel and Nancy Garfinkel wrote “The Recipe Club: A Tale of Food and Friendship,” a novel that traces a friendship between two women, much of which involves sharing recipes. The authors started clubs for people to share recipes and the stories behind them — about as far from anonymous recipe Web sites as you can get.

At one recent gathering in Brooklyn, a woman in her 50s brought “the dullest chicken recipe you could ever imagine,” Ms. Garfinkel recalled. Her mother had been mentally ill and never cooked. But sometimes, her grandmother did.

“This was the dish her grandmother cooked for her,” she said. “It was a recipe but it was about her loneliness and her grandmother. I made that chicken, and I tasted the story of her life.”

Even for those steeped in crowd-sourcing culture, cooking can get personal. Nicole Willson, an experienced wiki administrator who has worked on recipe sites, sometimes just improvises a stir-fry or gets a recipe off a box of pasta, or even gets real old school.

“Sometimes,” she said, “it’s easier to get out a cookbook.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

NY Times: Bento Boxes Win Lunch Fans

September 9, 2009

Bento Boxes Win Lunch Fans

By SAMANTHA STOREY

ARMED with kittens of molded rice and sweet potato flowers, Sheri Chen took aim at her 2-year-old daughter, Lucy — a picky eater.

“I have to make her food look like something she recognizes,” said Ms. Chen, 42, a stay-at-home mother in San Leandro, Calif. “If her boiled egg is shaped like a bunny and it is holding a baby carrot, she’ll eat it.”

With cookie cutters Ms. Chen makes her daughter star-shaped vegetables; and with decorative skewers, a plastic top hat and pieces of nori (dried seaweed), cherry tomatoes become smiley faced, mustachioed creatures.

Her ruse includes assembling each meal in her version of a bento box, a Japanese lunch box, decorated with cute cartoon characters.

It might seem like silly kids’ stuff, but that sense of fun has helped make bento boxes — obentos as the Japanese call them — increasingly popular with grownups in the United States, too.

For dieters, they are an eye-popping form of portion control. Artistic preparation of ingredients can act as a pleasant distraction for health-conscious parents. For others, bentos are a way to make lunch pretty or indulge their love of things Japanese.

In Japan, compact, compartmented bento boxes are traditionally filled with rice, pickled vegetables and fish or meat. Japanese mothers take pride in their obentos and hope they outshine those of other mothers, said the Japanese cookbook author Hiroko Shimbo.

“Obento making is a kind of cult,” she said.

It’s approaching cult status in the United States. On Saturday in Central Park, as part of its Crossing the Line festival, the French Institute Alliance Française will be handing out bento boxes with components made by some top French and American chefs — including Inaki Aizpitarte, Pascal Barbot, Alexandre Gauthier, Michel Bras, David Chang and Wylie Dufresne.

On a more plebian level, Amazon.com said sales of the boxes and accessories like egg molds, rice shapers, plastic skewers shaped like animals or flowers have been growing.

But toothache-inducing cuteness is not the only appeal.

Jordan Smith, 20, a junior majoring in East Asian studies and political science at Yale University, started making bento boxes in high school in Port Orange, Fla.

“I was on the football team,” Mr. Smith said, “so I tried to have a balanced diet and eat healthy as much as possible.” He would group protein, rice and vegetables. “I would usually use snap peas, tomatoes, carrots; basically things that were relatively colorful and not too bland tasting.”

He endured a bit of ridicule — “like, look at that white person pretending to be Japanese” — but that didn’t stop him.

“Japanese culture here is getting more popular by the day,” he said.

He’s still making bento boxes, but now they’re mainly a way to save money by making his own lunch.

Debra Littlejohn, 52, a quality-assurance engineer from Edmonds, Wash., estimated that she and her husband were spending $400 a month buying lunch out every day.

So in June she started packing her dinner leftovers into bento boxes.

“If I had to price out all my ingredients,” Ms. Littlejohn said, “each box would probably cost $2.”

She likes to find artistic ways to present the food.

One of her recent boxes included a multihued medley of halved figs, curried eggplant, green leaf lettuce and sliced purple carrots.

“I don’t have time to break out the art supplies in my drawer,” Ms. Littlejohn said. “Every evening when I pack our lunches, I get this creative outlet. And if I don’t do something artistic, I might implode.”

Creativity matters as much as taste and nutrition to Jason Miller, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of South Florida.

“It doesn’t hurt to add a funny element as well,” Mr. Miller, 28, said. He recently made onigiri, triangles of sticky rice with various fillings. “Instead of leaving them plain, I cut nori — seaweed — in strips and made the onigiri into sumo wrestlers.” Artistry is what differentiates a bento box from a plastic container of leftovers, said Makiko Itoh, 46, who lives outside Zurich and runs the blog justbento.com, filled with how-to’s, recipes and discussion forums.

“Food presented attractively looks more appetizing, since we eat with our eyes as much as our taste buds and stomachs,” said Ms. Itoh, who was born in Japan but lived for a while in New York. “That’s emphasized more in Japanese cuisine and culture perhaps than in other cuisines.”

She said bentos often reflect the Japanese belief that each meal should have five colors — a version of the food pyramid. It helps people remember to vary their food, especially since the most colorful foods are usually fruits and vegetables.

“You can apply that to any lunch combination,” she said. “For example, sliced bread (let’s call that white, even if you use whole wheat) with peanut butter or cold cuts (brown), a green salad (green) with red peppers and cherry tomatoes (red) and a banana (yellow).”

A balance of flavors, textures and cooking methods also matters, she said.

Sheri Lindquist saw bentos as a healthy choice for her five sons and her husband after he had triple-bypass surgery. “I don’t make them bento lunches all the time,” said Ms. Lindquist, 48, who lives in Denair, Calif. “But if there is something especially yucky or healthy or new I do try to present it in a more fun format.” Like breaded spinach balls with carrot ears and faces.

Acquiring accessories like plastic giraffe picks or star-shaped nori punches, however, proved challenging for Ms. Lindquist, as most of the boxes and tools were sold only in Japan. So in March 2008 she began iloveobento.com, an online bento box store.

Another bento blogger, Jennifer McCann, began veganlunchbox.blogspot.com on her son’s first day of school in 2005.

She made him sushi for lunch in a bento box from laptoplunches.com, which sells Americanized bento boxes with lidded compartments for items like yogurt or dips like ketchup. She took a picture of it and posted it.

“I thought it might give a lot of vegan moms inspiration for other lunches besides PB and J, “ said Ms. McCann, 38, who lives in Kennewick, Wash.

Within months she was getting thousands of page views a day of the boxes she was making, she said. She’s since published “Vegan Lunch Box” (Da Capo Press, 2008) and “Vegan Lunch Box Around the World” (Da Capo, 2009), which includes recipes for a Japanese tiger bento, Caribbean plantain wraps and Indonesian tempeh.

Her son, James, now 11, has outgrown the boxes and no longer takes the bentos to school. “He wants his lunch to be totally normal now, like everyone else,” she said.

Making lunches look cute for children is an art called kyaraben in Japan.

But some bento-ists think cute takes too much time.

Deborah Hamilton, 40, who writes the blog lunchinabox.net, makes boxes for her husband and 4-year-old son of, for instance, tamales, broccoli florets, cherry tomatoes and a strawberry. “You can make these as intricate or fancy as you like,” she said, “or you can make them plain and simple. You don’t have to get all kinds of Martha with it. My regular bento takes 10 to 15 minutes, maximum.”

Ms. Itoh, the author of justbento.com, said the boxes, about the size of a fat turkey sandwich, let her control her portions and helped her lose 30 pounds.

“Generally speaking, for a tightly packed Japanese-style bento, the number of milliliters that a box can hold corresponds roughly to the number of calories it holds,” she wrote on her blog.

Crystal Watanabe, 30, an administrative assistant in Honolulu, used bento portion control when she began a Weight Watchers program in 2007. She lost 22 pounds and wrote about her experience on her blog, aibento.net (Adventures in Bentomaking).

The blog got her involved in the bento community on the photo-sharing site Flickr.com.

“We post pictures and people take ideas from each other,” Ms. Watanabe said. “It’s really a very creative community and fun. Everyone is so supportive.”

Ms. Chen, in San Leandro, one of the more prolific contributors to the photo pools, can be a little wilder when making bentos for Lucy’s brother, Koa, 6, who, unlike his sister, is not finicky.

“He even eats the lettuce I put in his boxes as garnish,” she said.

A recent lunch box for him included teriyaki salmon with peapods, two kinds of sweet potato and golden beet “maple leaves.” On the side: skewered purple carrot discs and a tomato made to look like a frog man. For dessert: a strawberry, champagne grapes, blackberries and a litchi.

“I am not a gourmet cook,” Ms. Chen said, “but when you put anything in a bento box it looks nice.”

Where to Get Boxes and Supplies

BENTO & CO Bentoandco.com (French language site, ships from Japan).

BENTO CRAZY Bentocrazy.ecrater.com.

FROM JAPAN WITH LOVE From-japan-with-love.com (ships from Japan).

I LOVE OBENTO Iloveobento.com.

JAPAN CENTRE Japancentre.com (ships from England).

J BOX Jbox.com (ships from Japan).

KINOKUNIYA 1073 Sixth Avenue (41st Street), (212) 869-1700.

LAPTOP LUNCHES Laptoplunches.com.

BOOKS: “501 Bento Box Lunches: 501 Unique Recipes for Brilliant Bento” (Graffito Books, 2009) and “Vegan Lunch Box Around the World” by Jennifer McCann (Da Capo, 2009).

Sheri Chen, 42, of San Leandro, Calif., fills her version of bento boxes for her children, assembling each meal in a Japanese lunch box decorated with cute cartoon characters. That sense of fun has helped make bento boxes increasingly popular with grownups in the United States, too.

"I have to make her food look like something she recognizes," said Ms. Chen, referring to her daughter, Lucy. "If her boiled egg is shaped like a bunny and it is holding a baby carrot, she'll eat it."

Ms. Chen's children, Lucy and Koa.

 

Deborah Hamilton, 40, who writes the blog lunchinabox.net, makes boxes like this one for her husband and 4-year-old son.

 

Another one of Ms. Hamilton's creations. "You can make these as intricate or fancy as you like," she said, "or you can make them plain and simple."

Creativity matters as much as taste and nutrition to Jason Miller, 28, a graduate student at the University of South Florida. The bento he created at far left includes onigiri, triangles of sticky rice with various fillings.

Aster Sentiati goes by the name "bentomom" on the photo-sharing site Flickr.com, where she posts photographs of the bentos she makes for her children, like this one at left.

Another one of Ms. Setiati's bentos. 

A balance of flavors, textures and cooking methods matters in assembling a bento, said Makiko Itoh, who runs the informational blog justbento.com. At left, a bento by Ms. Setiati.

Debra Littlejohn, 52, from Edmonds, Wash., estimated that she and her husband were spending $400 a month buying lunch out every day. She started packing her dinner leftovers into bento boxes.

Debra Littlejohn, 52, from Edmonds, Wash., estimated that she and her husband were spending $400 a month buying lunch out every day. She started packing her dinner leftovers into bento boxes.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

BusinessWeek: Thanks to Blogs, a Bigger Menu for Food Criticism

What's Your Story Idea August 21, 2009, 7:25PM EST text size: TT

Thanks to Blogs, a Bigger Menu for Food Criticism

The proliferation of blogs and tweets by culinary pros and amateurs alike is changing the landscape and purpose of food criticism

By Aaron Ricadela

Here's a sampling from the food criticism smorgasbord of summer 2009: Some 1.3 million people have signed on to follow Martha Stewart's tweets about condensed recipes for bruschetta and rack of lamb as well as about tomato blight in her garden and a fiery car crash near her property. Meanwhile, Travel Channel star Anthony Bourdain rants on his popular blog about "blissed out St. Alice" Waters, one of the nation's most vocal proponents of locally grown, organic food. As for food critics, some big names, including The New York Times' (NYT) Amanda Hesser and Gael Greene, formerly of New York magazine, are turning to blogs and Twitter to promote themselves, trading some of the elitism of the country's culinary and media capital to join the faster-paced, less rarefied cadences of food conversations on the Web. Hesser's new Web site, Food52, is tapping readers' recipes to assemble a cookbook.

A chorus of amateur food bloggers, meanwhile, is singing the virtues of everything from frontier-style fried steak and cornbread to Sex and the City-inspired New York cupcakes. Their ranks could swell even more in the wake of the new Meryl Streep movie, Julie & Julia, based partly on the story of New York food blogger Julie Powell, who cooked every recipe in Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The film's Web site features rotating links to various food blogs. In an Aug. 5 blog post, The New York Times' new restaurant critic, Sam Sifton, said the abundance of Internet critics is creating a discussion reviewers would do well to join.

At a cultural moment when food consciousness is in ascendance, helped by a national conversation about healthier eating and a recessionary revival of do-it-yourself cooking and gardening, the proliferation of food blogs, foodie twitterers, and celebrity chef sightings online ironically is making it harder for diners and grocery shoppers to get what they traditionally sought from food writing: guidance in determining what's good to eat.

Opinions of Their Peers

Chefs and bloggers are trading on upscale urbanites' current fascination with food in part to sell merchandise, promote TV shows, and forge personal brands through their online musings. "It's completely changed the face of food criticism," says Andrew Zimmern, host of Bizarre Foods and the upcoming Bizarre World on the Travel Channel. Zimmern, a former chef who also writes for Mpls. St. Paul magazine and Delta's (DAL) Sky in-flight publication, reads more than a dozen blogs each week about dining in the Twin Cities alone to keep up on what's current. "My audience has changed over the years, because now they have access to the opinions of their peers," says Zimmern, who lives in Minneapolis. "There's so much more to hear on the Web."

But the hordes of Web critics dishing up praise and scorn can deny diners the benefit of professional critics' breadth of expertise, Zimmern says. Missing from many food blogs are knowledge of a chef's range and the ability to cast a gimlet eye on some establishments' dubious claims of authentic cuisine. "A lot of the people who are doing food writing who don't know what they're talking about will disappear," he says. "There's no way for the dining public to tell who's full of [it]."

Chefs too are turning to blogs to flog their eateries, a pursuit that doesn't always leave time for actual cooking, says Chris Cosentino, a chef at San Francisco's Incanto and host of the Food Network's Chefs vs. City. "It's getting harder and harder for chefs to write and cook," says Cosentino, who often stays up until 2 a.m. writing about cooking on his Web site, Offal Good, after leaving the restaurant at midnight. "A lot of times I try reading it the next morning, and it's such f---ing garbage I can't make sense out of it," he says.

Fresh Voices

Still, the spread of culinary blogs has brought a passel of fresh voices to the food conversation. There's a food blog for seemingly every taste. On Chocolate & Zucchini, Clotilde Dusoulier, a 30-year-old Frenchwoman who discovered cooking in California, dissects the finer points of terrines and flambé and has parlayed her franchise into printed cookbooks. In The Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond, a self-described "thirtysomething ranch wife [and] mother of four" in Oklahoma, teaches readers how to make down-home fare such as cornbread and caramel apple sticky buns. Searching "cupcake blogs" online turns up scores of sites, including one called Legalize Frostitution.

BlogHer, a network of women's blogging sites, plans to host its first food blogging conference Sept. 26 in San Francisco, with a keynote speech by Drummond and other prominent bloggers. Food-related sites attract about 30% of the network's 15 million monthly unique visitors, according to Elisa Camahort Page, a co-founder and chief operating officer. "What's been gained is this plethora of new voices," says Gretchen Kurtz, a former food writer for The New York Times and 5280 magazine in Denver, who in January started Seed to Spoon, a blog that combines guidelines about healthy eating with tips about how to safely store and handle food. Blogs can "have a freshness and an immediacy you lose when you've been in the business for a while."

What's fading is the power of the trusted guides consumers had for decades to tell them where to eat, what to cook, and what was better left untouched. "In the old days, before the blogs, people trusted a brand like Gourmet or Bon Appétit" magazines, says Kurtz. "The days of the lengthy food review are kind of over."

There's little doubt that the economic recession has fueled some of the interest in cooking, gardening, and talking about food that's spilling into the blogosphere. Cookbook sales are up, seed sales are booming), and homeowners are planting more gardens, à la Michelle Obama's patch of White House ground. The fortunes of Whole Foods Market (WFMI) and Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) have diverged as grocery shoppers become more price-conscious. In another sign of the downturn (or the apocalypse) 4,800 volcano burrito fans have signed up to follow the perambulations of a Taco Bell truck on Twitter.

Hungry for More Than Food

Another reason the food blogs have blossomed is the 360-degree marketing plans that encourage TV chefs and cookbook authors to interact with their fans through every possible medium. "The fans are insanely hungry for the content," says Zimmern. But many readers of his Travel Channel blog are more interested in his exotic destinations, such as India and Cuba, than in the food he eats during the show. Similarly, fans of Anthony Bourdain flock to his blog "because they want more of Tony," says Zimmern.

A lot more than food is being dished on the celebrity blogs. Visit Food Network star Rachael Ray's blog, and there's precious little discussion of recipes. Instead, she's documenting the bands she caught on a trip to Austin, Tex.; hanging out with Miley Cyrus; and a recent surgery to remove a cyst from her vocal cord. In essence, Ray's blog is an avenue to advance Ray's brand.

Ultimately, the appetite for deeply researched, meticulous reviews that put chefs and restaurants in gastronomical context may be vanishing. As with many of the business and societal changes the Internet has wrought, what's arrived instead trades more on enthusiasm than deep knowledge. An optimistic reading is that the food blogging movement is long on potential.

Gastronomes hope the more self-promotional blogs wither and say culinary culture would benefit from a winnowing. Yet foodies' national moment has sprung partly from anti-elitism. "Attention spans are shorter," says Seed to Spoon's Kurtz. Then again, "if 300 people are blogging about cupcakes, I'm all for it because they're passionate about their food."

Ricadela is a writer for BusinessWeek in Silicon Valley.

Copyright 2000-2009 by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.

NY Times: Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts

August 24, 2009

Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts

By ALEX WRIGHT

Computers may be good at crunching numbers, but can they crunch feelings?

The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window onto the collective consciousness of Internet users.

An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.

This is more than just an interesting programming exercise. For many businesses, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency that can make or break a product in the marketplace.

Yet many companies struggle to make sense of the caterwaul of complaints and compliments that now swirl around their products online. As sentiment analysis tools begin to take shape, they could not only help businesses improve their bottom lines, but also eventually transform the experience of searching for information online.

Several new sentiment analysis companies are trying to tap into the growing business interest in what is being said online.

“Social media used to be this cute project for 25-year-old consultants,” said Margaret Francis, vice president for product at Scout Labs in San Francisco. Now, she said, top executives “are recognizing it as an incredibly rich vein of market intelligence.”

Scout Labs, which is backed by the venture capital firm started by the CNet founder Halsey Minor, recently introduced a subscription service that allows customers to monitor blogs, news articles, online forums and social networking sites for trends in opinions about products, services or topics in the news.

In early May, the ticket marketplace StubHub used Scout Labs’ monitoring tool to identify a sudden surge of negative blog sentiment after rain delayed a Yankees-Red Sox game.

Stadium officials mistakenly told hundreds of fans that the game had been canceled, and StubHub denied fans’ requests for refunds, on the grounds that the game had actually been played. But after spotting trouble brewing online, the company offered discounts and credits to the affected fans. It is now re-evaluating its bad weather policy.

“This is a canary in a coal mine for us,” said John Whelan, StubHub’s director of customer service.

Jodange, based in Yonkers, offers a service geared toward online publishers that lets them incorporate opinion data drawn from over 450,000 sources, including mainstream news sources, blogs and Twitter.

Based on research by Claire Cardie, a Cornell computer science professor, and Jan Wiebe of the University of Pittsburgh, the service uses a sophisticated algorithm that not only evaluates sentiments about particular topics, but also identifies the most influential opinion holders.

Jodange, whose early investors include the National Science Foundation, is currently working on a new algorithm that could use opinion data to predict future developments, like forecasting the impact of newspaper editorials on a company’s stock price.

In a similar vein, The Financial Times recently introduced Newssift, an experimental program that tracks sentiments about business topics in the news, coupled with a specialized search engine that allows users to organize their queries by topic, organization, place, person and theme.

Using Newssift, a search for Wal-Mart reveals that recent sentiment about the company is running positive by a ratio of slightly better than two to one. When that search is refined with the suggested term “Labor Force and Unions,” however, the ratio of positive to negative sentiments drops closer to one to one.

Such tools could help companies pinpoint the effect of specific issues on customer perceptions, helping them respond with appropriate marketing and public relations strategies.

For casual Web surfers, simpler incarnations of sentiment analysis are sprouting up in the form of lightweight tools like Tweetfeel, Twendz and Twitrratr. These sites allow users to take the pulse of Twitter users about particular topics.

A quick search on Tweetfeel, for example, reveals that 77 percent of recent tweeters liked the movie “Julie & Julia.” But the same search on Twitrratr reveals a few misfires. The site assigned a negative score to a tweet reading “julie and julia was truly delightful!!” That same message ended with “we all felt very hungry afterwards” — and the system took the word “hungry” to indicate a negative sentiment.

While the more advanced algorithms used by Scout Labs, Jodange and Newssift employ advanced analytics to avoid such pitfalls, none of these services works perfectly. “Our algorithm is about 70 to 80 percent accurate,” said Ms. Francis, who added that its users can reclassify inaccurate results so the system learns from its mistakes.

Translating the slippery stuff of human language into binary values will always be an imperfect science, however. “Sentiments are very different from conventional facts,” said Seth Grimes, the founder of the suburban Maryland consulting firm Alta Plana, who points to the many cultural factors and linguistic nuances that make it difficult to turn a string of written text into a simple pro or con sentiment. “ ‘Sinful’ is a good thing when applied to chocolate cake,” he said.

The simplest algorithms work by scanning keywords to categorize a statement as positive or negative, based on a simple binary analysis (“love” is good, “hate” is bad). But that approach fails to capture the subtleties that bring human language to life: irony, sarcasm, slang and other idiomatic expressions. Reliable sentiment analysis requires parsing many linguistic shades of gray.

“We are dealing with sentiment that can be expressed in subtle ways,” said Bo Pang, a researcher at Yahoo who co-wrote “Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis,” one of the first academic books on sentiment analysis.

To get at the true intent of a statement, Ms. Pang developed software that looks at several different filters, including polarity (is the statement positive or negative?), intensity (what is the degree of emotion being expressed?) and subjectivity (how partial or impartial is the source?).

For example, a preponderance of adjectives often signals a high degree of subjectivity, while noun- and verb-heavy statements tend toward a more neutral point of view.

As sentiment analysis algorithms grow more sophisticated, they should begin to yield more accurate results that may eventually point the way to more sophisticated filtering mechanisms. They could become a part of everyday Web use.

“I see sentiment analysis becoming a standard feature of search engines,” said Mr. Grimes, who suggests that such algorithms could begin to influence both general-purpose Web searching and more specialized searches in areas like e-commerce, travel reservations and movie reviews.

Ms. Pang envisions a search engine that fine-tunes results for users based on sentiment. For example, it might influence the ordering of search results for certain kinds of queries like “best hotel in San Antonio.”

As search engines begin to incorporate more and more opinion data into their results, the distinction between fact and opinion may start blurring to the point where, as David Byrne once put it, “facts all come with points of view.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Foreign Policy: Think Again - Twitter

Think Again: Twitter

The groundbreaking microblogging service is great for sharing links and communicating with friends. It's not so good at spreading democracy and overthrowing dictatorships.

BY EVGENY MOROZOV | AUGUST 6, 2009

"Authoritarian regimes should fear Twitter"

Not at all. You can't fear what doesn't exist -- and Twitter barely exists, if it exists at all, in most authoritarian countries. Generally, either they have their own microblogging services or Internet access is too slow and expensive for Twitter to be broadly useful. Furthermore, anyone who does use Twitter probably speaks English, has international contacts, and travels more than the rest of the population -- in other words, they are already lost causes, as far as the regime is concerned.

Combined with other tools - e-mail, social networking, and blogs -- Twitter can certainly be helpful in spreading news about upcoming flashmobs and protests. The demonstrations following Moldova's disputed election earlier this year were a perfect example, where a dozen local Twitter maniacs used the service to spread news about their flashmob. Eventually, their campaign (which went beyond Twitter and included Facebook and LiveJournal as well) attracted thousands of people and spilled into loud protests. While the Moldovan "Twitterati" had very little impact on the events on the ground, they did a great job using Twitter's global, viral reach to keep the protests in the international news.

However, Twitter use in authoritarian countries comes with major drawbacks. Twitter creates an extensive online paper trail that can be easily used against dissidents. In fact, as Twitter use becomes more common, authoritarian governments are likely to exploit Twitter to gather open-source intelligence on the opposition -- not a difficult task for anyone with an Internet hook-up. So Twitter could help authorities identify dissent at very early stages, tracking not just individual activists, but entire activist networks. An online friend list could enable a serious crack-down.

"Twitter was the best source of news about the post-election protests in Iran."

It depends. Twitter was a great resource during the protests -- for people who knew how to use it. If you had spent the previous six months carefully studying the Iranian Twitterverse, you would already know who to trust and who to ignore. Unfortunately, 99.9 percent of the readers around the world who turned to Twitter during the uprising had absolutely no idea what they were looking at.

Most of them relied on particular "keywords" (like #iranelection) to read everything that was being posted about the events in Tehran. After a few days, the #iranelection and #moussavi channels contained so much noise that they became attractive destinations for spammers and marketers. (Many of these spammers are clearly run on some sort of auto-pilot, because #iranelection is still one of the most popular trending topics on Twitter, though very few users seem to still be talking about the election.)

To make things worse, supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad began spreading misinformation.  Some of them were quickly ferreted out on sites like Twitspam.org, but the damage was done.

Of course, not everyone was going into the Iranian Twitterworld blind. The best way to read the Iranian tweeters was probably second-hand on the sites of established bloggers like The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan and The Huffington Post's Nico Pitney, both of whom did admirable work curating the valuable posts and vetting out the junk. Still, the Iranian protests pointed out some of the dangers of relying on Twitter for breaking news from abroad.

"Twitter is a great organizing tool."

Perhaps. If your objective is to get 500 people to do the Thriller dance in Grand Central Station, Twitter, with its penchant for all things viral, is your best friend. The NYPD (which also Twitters, by the way) might even decide to let you get away with it.  But if you're trying to overthrow a tyrannical government somewhere in the Middle East, you may want to think twice. Members of the local Mukhabarat (secret police) may trail behind the NYPD in their tech-enthusiasm, but chances are they are also reading your feed. You'd be much better off organizing your revolution with more secure tools -- like encrypted e-mail or even instant messaging -- and turning to Twitter only to publicize the protests that are already underway. 

The events in Moldova fell somewhere in between: a flashmob that, rather unexpectedly, grew into a mini-revolution. The events in Iran were part of an organized campaign by the Moussavi camp and, as such, were probably carefully planned offline by a handful of Moussavi's top aides who spread the word using tools they learned as young revolutionaries in 1979. Leaflets, posters, and even fax machines can still be very effective organizing tools, precisely because they are not dependent on the Internet -- which, as Iranians found out during the protests, can suffer from unbearable slowness or equally unbearable censorship. Twitter was instrumental as a publicity tool, but played little role in instigating or coordinating the protests.

"Twitter is replacing blogging."

Not quite. Twitter is surely taking over many of the niches previously reserved for blogging: simple link-sharing, for one. It also seems much better positioned to allow discussions of breaking news -- checking multiple blogs takes an eternity compared with Twitter's instant flow of information. But blogs still have a good chance of survival.  One-hundred-forty characters is not very much; blogs could become a space for longer, more analytical writing, an ironic fate for a medium once mocked for its own brevity and shallowness.

The mainstream news media also continues to be suspicious of Twitter. It took about five years to convince most newspapers and magazines that blogging was an acceptable medium for reporting news, and many are still catching up. Twitter may take less time to sink in, but don't expect it to happen overnight.

The situation in the developing world is different, particularly in countries where blogging hasn't yet fully taken off or where zany platforms predominate that define what "blogging" is and how it's done. Russians love LiveJournal, Brazilians love Orkut, and the Chinese love QQ; for them, these sites offer a platform not only for blogging, but also for social networking, instant messaging, and other online distractions. Thus, even if they do find Twitter very appealing, their primary digital life happens on other platforms. 

On the other hand, the proliferation of the mobile Internet in Africa might cause millions of new Web users to skip the blogging stage altogether and jump straight to Twitter: After all, it's hard to write an 800-word essay on a cellphone keypad.

"Twitter doesn't have a business model and might go under soon."

Don't worry. First, Twitter is very addictive -- and people are usually eager to pay to keep their addictions going. Second, it's a great intelligence-gathering tool for news organizations, marketers, and even the CIA. As with very good network, its value will rise as more members join. There's still a need for better tools to make sense of all the data generated on Twitter -- but this is not an insurmountable task. Someone will eventually figure out how to unlock Twitter's data reservoirs for the wider public (that is, the wider paying public).

Third, it still makes a very appealing acquisition target for Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. The problem is that none of them know how to keep its entrepreneurial spirit alive. (Google already has a dismal record of killing similar companies by buying them. Just look at Twitter's early, ill-fated competitor, Jaiku -- or, actually, don't look.) But this problem isn't impossible to solve either.

Finally, the more we talk about "Twitter revolutions," the more American diplomats and policymakers fall in love with the tool. "Twitter diplomacy" might soon replace the expensive efforts of the struggling Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). So what that they would only get 140 characters to express the American position on a given subject? Stripping these messages of the legalese would only add to their appeal, while helping to tap into the otherwise ADD-ed minds of the "digital natives" who might never have heard the radio broadcast of BBG's Voice of America because they don't know what radio is. And given how much U.S. government money has spent to bolster the BBG, even buying Twitter outright would look like a rounding mistake.

"Twitter is brimming with spammers, impostors, and just plain crazy people."

Sure.  But that's also true of the Internet as a whole, and it doesn't stop us from using it. Compared to e-mail, Twitter spam doesn't really look that menacing, and its administrators are beginning to crack down on those who abuse the system to push sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll on unsuspecting tweeters.

Impostors are indeed in vast supply. For instance, I suspect that the funny "Slavoj Zizek" that I am following on Twitter is not really the radical Slovenian philosopher. But this endless guesswork only makes it more fun. Twitter is a very curious universe in which even impostors add value, as long as they share cool and interesting links. (Would the real Zizek have turned me on to the marvelous site "White People Who Study Hegel?") The proliferation of impostors might even present Twitter with an actual business model, something it lacks at the moment: charging celebrities for authenticating their accounts and displaying a proud "I've been authenticated" badge. Successful companies have been built on less.

"Twitter conversations are shallow and serious people should avoid it."

Who cares? Obviously, Twitter is not the letters section of the New York Review of Books. Those looking for deep, long, insightful conversations shouldn't bother. But what attracts so many smart people to Twitter is a chance to follow what other smart people are reading and browsing -- and to do so in real time. What "Twitter virgins" do not understand is that Twitter actually facilitates the discovery of all those long and uber-insightful conversations that are happening elsewhere. As a discovery tool that works for everyone, it beats everything else out there, from syndication services like Delicious and RSS to aggregator blogs like Kottke and BoingBoing.

In the Twitter universe, you are what you follow -- so if you find Twitter boring, you're probably following the wrong people. Figuring out how to sift through all the noise and actually get hold of signal can be a challenging task, of course, requiring time and a fair amount of tinkering. But ultimately it pays off. A carefully maintained Twitter feed can deliver you information that is far more diverse and interesting than it was in the pre-Twitter days. One-hundred-forty characters are more than enough to describe a link or express one idea. 

So far, Twitter's influence on global politics is still very marginal; while it helps to draw public attention to otherwise overlooked problems and places, this will stop as soon as the media discovers yet another digital darling. But despite what you may hear from the overly conservative naysayers, Twitter's cultural impact is far greater. We may currently be at the very dawn of the era of Twitter Renaissance. Avoid it at your own peril.

Evgeny Morozov is a fellow at the Open Society Institute and sits on the board of OSI's Information Program. He writes the Net Effect blog on ForeignPolicy.com

All contents ©2009 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLC. All rights reserved.

NY Times: Mom-and-Pop Operators Turn to Social Media

July 23, 2009

Mom-and-Pop Operators Turn to Social Media

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

SAN FRANCISCO — Three weeks after Curtis Kimball opened his crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, he noticed a stranger among the friends in line for his desserts. How had the man discovered the cart? He had read about it on Twitter.

For Mr. Kimball, who conceded that he “hadn’t really understood the purpose of Twitter,” the beauty of digital word-of-mouth marketing was immediately clear. He signed up for an account and has more than 5,400 followers who wait for him to post the current location of his itinerant cart and list the flavors of the day, like lavender and orange creamsicle.

“I would love to say that I just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty essential to my success,” he said. He has quit his day job as a carpenter to keep up with the demand.

Much has been made of how big companies like Dell, Starbucks and Comcast use Twitter to promote their products and answer customers’ questions. But today, small businesses outnumber the big ones on the free microblogging service, and in many ways, Twitter is an even more useful tool for them.

For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.

“We think of these social media tools as being in the realm of the sophisticated, multiplatform marketers like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, but a lot of these supersmall businesses are gravitating toward them because they are accessible, free and very simple,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst who studies the Internet’s influence on shopping and local businesses.

Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word of mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network.

Umi, a sushi restaurant in San Francisco, sometimes gets five new customers a night who learned about it on Twitter, said Shamus Booth, a co-owner.

He twitters about the fresh fish of the night — “The O-Toro (bluefin tuna belly) tonight is some of the most rich and buttery tuna I’ve had,” he recently wrote — and offers free seaweed salads to people who mention Twitter.

Twitter is not just for businesses that want to lure customers with mouth-watering descriptions of food. For Cynthia Sutton-Stolle, the co-owner of Silver Barn Antiques in tiny Columbus, Tex., Twitter has been a way to find both suppliers and customers nationwide.

Since she joined Twitter in February, she has connected with people making lamps and candles that she subsequently ordered for her shop and has sold a few thousand dollars of merchandise to people outside Columbus, including to a woman in New Jersey shopping for graduation gifts.

“We don’t even have our Web site done, and we weren’t even trying to start an e-commerce business,” Ms. Sutton-Stolle said. “Twitter has been a real valuable tool because it’s made us national instead of a little-bitty store in a little-bitty town.”

Scott Seaman of Blowing Rock, N.C., also uses Twitter to expand his customer base beyond his town of about 1,500 residents. Mr. Seaman is a partner at Christopher’s Wine and Cheese shop and owns a bed and breakfast in town. He sets up searches on TweetDeck, a Web application that helps people manage their Twitter messages, to start conversations with people talking about his town or the mountain nearby. One person he met on Twitter booked a room at his inn, and a woman in Dallas ordered sake from his shop.

The extra traffic has come despite his rarely pitching his own businesses on Twitter. “To me, that’s a turn-off,” he said. Instead of marketing to customers, small-business owners should use the same persona they have offline, he advised. “Be the small shopkeeper down the street that everyone knows by name.”

Chris Mann, the owner of Woodhouse Day Spa in Cincinnati, twitters about discounts for massages and manicures every Tuesday. Twitter beats e-mail promotions because he can send tweets from his phone in a meeting and “every single business sends out an e-mail,” he said.

Even if a shop’s customers are not on Twitter, the service can be useful for entrepreneurs, said Becky McCray, who runs a liquor store and cattle ranch in Oklahoma and publishes a blog called Small Biz Survival.

In towns like hers, with only 5,000 people, small-business owners can feel isolated, she said. But on Twitter, she has learned business tax tips from an accountant, marketing tips from a consultant in Tennessee and start-up tips from the founder of several tech companies.

Anamitra Banerji, who manages commercial products at Twitter, said that when he joined the company from Yahoo in March, “I thought this was a place where large businesses were. What I’m finding more and more, to my surprise every single day, is business of all kinds.”

Twitter, which does not yet make money, is now concentrating on teaching businesses how they can join and use it, Mr. Banerji said, and the company plans to publish case studies. He is also developing products that Twitter can sell to businesses of all sizes this year, including features to verify businesses’ accounts and analyze traffic to their Twitter profiles.

According to 

NY Times: Site Wins Fashion Fans by Letting Them Design

July 27, 2009

Site Wins Fashion Fans by Letting Them Design

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

The fashion Web site Polyvore allows users to build collages with photos of clothing, accessories and models that they think go well together.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — The fashion magazines Vogue, InStyle and Lucky may rule the newsstand racks. But online, they are also-rans, overlooked by the fashion-conscious in favor of Polyvore, an upstart Web site far from Fifth Avenue.

Polyvore is a user-generated fashion magazine filled with user-generated ads. The people who go to it play fashion editor and create collages featuring pictures of clothes, accessories and models from across the Web. Readers view the collages, which the site calls “sets,” and if they click on a dress or necklace, they are taken to the Web site that sells it.

Founded by three ex-Yahoo engineers, Polyvore has been focused on getting people to visit the site. It seems to be working. Polyvore had more than 835,000 unique visitors in June, almost 25 percent more than the traffic to Style.com, run by Vogue, and InStyle.com, according to Compete, a Web analytics firm. It is also far bigger than the Web sites of Lucky and Harper’s Bazaar. While other fashion magazine sites have been struggling to hold an online audience, Polyvore has tripled its traffic in the last year.

Now it is shifting its focus to making money. It runs ads, like the magazine sites do. But it also earns a commission when users click on or purchase clothes from certain e-commerce sites, though only about a quarter of outbound clicks make money for Polyvore. The company is now trying to forge relationships with clothing and accessories sites in return for uploading their product catalogues to the site.

“To compete with the Vogues and InStyles, it’s not just about transacting and maximizing the dollars per page view,” said Peter Fenton, a partner at Benchmark Capital, which invested $2.5 million in Polyvore. “There’s this aspirational side and entertainment side, which none of the sites up until now have done a good job at tapping into.”

At the same time, Polyvore is giving stale e-commerce sites a much-needed jolt of inspiration. “Online retail started around digital cameras. Now, sites are using the same engines to sell shirts, but that’s not the way they should be sold,” said Pasha Sadri, co-founder and chief executive of Polyvore. “Clothing is much more visual.” And unlike cameras or books, clothes and accessories are bought as part of a whole outfit, though many sites still show pieces of clothing individually.

Mr. Sadri, a corduroy-wearer who is not particularly fashion-forward himself, conceived the idea for Polyvore in 2007, while working at Yahoo. He was the software engineer behind Yahoo Pipes, a tool that allows people to pull together content from across the Web, similar to what Polyvore does.

When Polyvore users surf the Web, they use a tool called the Clipper, downloaded and saved on the toolbar, to select images and save them to Polyvore, where anyone can use them in a collage.

Brands and e-commerce sites can also upload their items to Polyvore, though today 95 percent of the images come from users. Polyvore attributes images with a hyperlink to the original site. (It gets about five requests a week, usually from photographers or painters, to remove images.)

To create a set, users drag and drop images and manipulate them. Polyvore also offers fonts for text, and audio clips from Amazon. Its 928,000 registered users create 28,000 new sets a day. A set inspired by Blake Lively, the “Gossip Girl” actress, includes a picture of her with a leather jacket similar to the one she is wearing, available on the Zadig & Voltaire Web site for $840. It also features accessories for the outfit, like Coach boots, Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses and a T-Mobile Sidekick.

On a blog called Boutonnieres & Bow Ties, brides-to-be submit photos of their wedding dresses. Samantha Shih, owner of a menswear company called 9Tailor, uses Polyvore to create the groom’s outfit, complete with tie and cuff links, and uploads it to her blog.

To increase revenue, Polyvore is engaging fashion companies to sponsor content on the site. Tory Burch promoted its summer collection, which was inspired by Venice, by running a contest on Polyvore that asked users to create Venetian-themed sets using the new Tory Burch pieces.

Lori’s Shoes, a boutique in Chicago and online, recently noticed a surge of traffic coming from Polyvore, which John Coyle Steinbrunner, the company’s creative director, had not heard of.

Now Lori’s Shoes wants to advertise on Polyvore. “It just gets us a better customer than banner ads or cost-per-click ads, they’re just instantly more loyal,” Mr. Steinbrunner said. “As opposed to just being a customer, they get to help determine what the look and aesthetic of the shoe is.”

Some online retailers, including Charlotte Russe and Torrid, license Polyvore’s technology to use on their own sites. Sucharita Mulpuru, an e-commerce analyst at Forrester Research, says she thinks licensing is the most promising use for Polyvore and competitors like Kaboodle.

“On the retail sites themselves, people are looking to be inspired and are down the funnel of the purchase process,” she said. But while using Polyvore’s site, “people are in a different mind-set, they’re looking to browse, they might not be looking to buy.”

Polyvore also plans to sell data on customer preferences it compiles on the site. It could potentially tell a retailer that a type of shoe is more popular in Manhattan than Los Angeles, so it would know where to stock the shoe. Or designers could upload images of new items before deciding to produce them to get input from fashion-savvy users.

It could also give buyers information about trends in real-time, faster than monthly magazines, said Jess Lee, Polyvore’s product manager. This fall, for example, watch for recent trends bubbling up on the site: exposed zippers, fingerless gloves and butterfly prints.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Non Sequitur: Twitter

Do not attempt to send abbreviated SOS message via Twitter :P

WIRED: Balance Your Media Diet

WIRED MAGAZINE: ISSUE 17.08

Balance Your Media Diet

By Steven Leckart 17 hours ago

Illustration: Jason Lee                          

Source: http://www.wired.com/print/culture/lifestyle/magazine/17-08/by_media_diet                                               

London Telegraph: Twitter gains entry in dictionary

Twitter gains entry in dictionary

Twitter has gained academic respectability with inclusion in the Collins English Dictionary.

 

By Ben Leach
Published: 7:00AM BST 06 Jul 2009

More than 220,000 Iran tweets were sent through Twitter every hour at the peak of the unrest

The social networking tool, which has 1.8 million users, will be listed in the 30th anniversary edition to be published later this year.

The website, which allows users to send brief online updates to their friends and family, will appears as both a noun and a verb.

The entry under noun will read: "a website where people can post short messages about their current activities" and under verb it will read: "to write short messages on the Twitter website".

The word Twitterati, referring to users of the website, will also be entered, as will Twitterverse, which defines the website and its users.

Elaine Higgleton, Collins editorial director, told the Daily Mail: "Hardly a day goes by when you don't see some Twitter-related article. Hence I find it entirely unsurprising that this year we have not one Twitter-related entry in the dictionary, but three."

Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Stephen Fry and Lily Allen are all regular users of the website. During Wimbledon Andy Murray posted updates, including one which revealed the Queen had wished him luck.

Other regular users include Ed Balls, the Children's Secretary, Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, and Boris Johnson, the London mayor.

FT: Brands show off niche side

Brands show off niche side

By Jenny Wiggins

Published: July 1 2009 22:35 | Last updated: July 1 2009 22:35

When Mars, the maker of M&Ms, Skittles and Twix, embarked this year on its first new confectionery brand launch in 20 years, it turned to women for inspiration.

Fling, a chocolate bar on sale in California and online at www.flingchocolate.com, is quite clear about who its target market is: the slim fingers of shimmering chocolate are packaged in a bright pink wrapper with the slogan “Naughty, but not that naughty” while claiming to contain less than “85 calories per finger”.

“We really went unapologetically feminine,” explains Thomas Pinnau, vice-president of indulgence for Mars’s snackfood division. “We had lengthy discussions about whether pink would be too feminine but we decided if it’s polarising, that’s good.”

Although other chocolate brands have often subtly pitched their products to one gender or the other – about 65 per cent of Dove chocolate bar buyers are female, while 70 per cent of Snickers bar buyers are male, and Nestlé prints the words “not for girls” on the Yorkie bars its sells in the UK – what is unusual about Fling is the overt nature of its gender bias.

“This brand is taking it a step further,” says Rita Clifton, chairman of Interbrand, the brand consultancy. “It feels overtly female.”

Some consultants are sceptical that Fling will work. “Consumers happily buy into brands that cleverly target them but if the brand image is too obviously transparently marketed, they can feel patronised,” says Don Williams, chief executive at Pi Global, a London-based brand consultancy .

But Ms Clifton says Mars can succeed by tapping into online social networking sites that allow companies to target specific groups of consumers. “You can get a critical mass of people around a particular [brand] at very low cost,” she argues. “Providing you can sell enough of your brand at the right price, you’ve got a business model.”

Mars is promoting Fling on websites, such as Facebook where the brand has more than 5,600 fans. Comments have included: “Had my first naughty fling in the office yesterday ... YUMMY!”

Other food companies also use the internet to approach women.

PepsiCo, the snackfoods and soft drinks group whose brands include Lay’s crisps and Sun Chips, is taking a similar approach via two websites: www.awomansworld.com and twitter.com/awomansworld, the Twitter site (which has nearly 3,000 followers). The sites are used to pitch snackfoods like popcorn and vegetable crisps at women. “Snacks made just for you,” the womansworld website says.

PepsiCo developed the online sites as part of a strategy to “better communicate” with women, says Becky Frankiewicz, vice-president of women’s portfolio marketing at Frito-Lay. “Consumer goods companies have long recognised the purchasing power of women in the household ... but less so her purchasing power for herself,” she explains.

Doug Anderson, senior vice-president of research and development at Nielsen, the US market research group, says these kind of gender-specific marketing strategies reflect the “overall decline” of the mass market, in part due to a drop in the number of households with children.

He argues that consumer products will increasingly need to be targeted at niche markets of all kinds, including those differentiated by gender, age and ethnicity. “The consumer marketplace is more fragmented than ever –  there’s clearly a risk in business – as usual,” he says.

Andy Fennell, chief marketing officer at Diageo, the UK distiller, agrees that consumer goods companies can no longer blithely mass market their products.

“Consumers have an expectation that you’ll get into some kind of dialogue,” he argues, adding that consumers now expect to be involved in the development of brands. He points out that while there are some 600 Face­book pages dedicated to Diageo’s Baileys liqueur brand, the company has initiated only one of them.

Diageo has taken advantage of this changing dynamic by employing the rapper Sean Combs, who goes by the name of P. Diddy, as a “marketing partner” for its Ciroc vodka brand. Mr Combs is paid to help develop the brand, and he tweets about it at twitter.com/iamdiddy“.

Thousands of people follow him,” says Mr Fennell. “Fundamentally, the way human beings interact with each other has shifted.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: A categorical imperative to twitter

A categorical imperative to twitter

By Gideon Rachman

Published: June 29 2009 19:00 | Last updated: June 29 2009 23:17

Most days I get an e-mail informing me that somebody or other is “now following you on Twitter!” I find this slightly baffling, since I hardly ever tweet – that is, broadcast my every thought and deed to the world, using 140 characters or fewer. I tried Twitter out on the night of the US presidential election in November and did not like it much. One of my very last tweets was: “This is possibly the most moronic form of journalism I have ever done.” Since then, I have fallen largely silent.

But now I am having to rethink my disdain. Twitter is the most fashionable political medium of the moment, widely hailed for the role it played in allowing Iranian demonstrators to stay in touch with each other and avoid censorship. The US state department was so impressed by the role the microblogging service was playing it asked Twitter to delay an update that would have taken it off air. A headline in the Los Angeles Times summarised the conventional wisdom when it roared: “Tyranny’s new nightmare: Twitter”.

Even before Iran, Twitter was becoming increasingly trendy. Everybody from Senator John McCain to Britain’s Foreign Office was tweeting. The whole phenomenon has made me belatedly accept that the most important and profound political messages can, in fact, usually be encapsulated in 140 characters.

The power of extreme brevity was brought home to me in another context when I told a friend that I was thinking of writing a book. He said: “It won’t work unless you can summarise the argument in a single sentence that can fit on Twitter.” Initially, I found this a repulsive idea. How stupid, I thought – name me a great book that can be summarised in 140 characters? But when I considered the matter further, I realised that most great works of political philosophy could be summarised on Twitter. Indeed, their very greatness lies in the fact that they can be boiled down to a sentence.

The Communist Manifesto is often summarised by the very twitterable: “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.” (Marx’s original version was less succinct.) Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, would also have been a natural on Twitter. “The greatest happiness of the greatest number” is fewer than 50 characters. Kant is a bit more long-winded. But even the categorical imperative makes it under Twitter’s limbo bar: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”, is fewer than 140 characters.

There are some great works that have not produced that single killer sentence that encapsulates the whole thing. Still, even they can usually be summarised in a tweet. Machiavelli’s The Prince comes down to “nice guys finish last”. As for the Bible, how about, “God made the world in seven days. Respect”.

Twitter, it seems, is the ideal medium for both politics and philosophy. In practice, however, the tweetings of western politicians and civil servants are often disappointing, even alarming. Colleen Graffy, one of the first senior American diplomats to latch on to Twitter, was criticised for tweeting about her visit to the Apple store, as Israel invaded Gaza. I was worried to find that on the morning of the North Korean nuclear test, Britain’s Foreign Office twittered: “North Korea – what are your views?” This sounded a bit forlorn.

Mr McCain is certainly keen – and is currently twittering three or four times a day. His tweets are authentically personal, unlike the wooden scheduling updates, filed by the likes of Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the UN.

But I cannot say Mr McCain’s twitters fill me with regret that he is not sitting in the Oval Office. They seem to be a mixture of sports scores and self-congratulation. He crowed recently about the number of followers he has on Twitter: “800,000!!! Think we can make it to one million?” Some of the senator’s tweets make him sound like a peasant. On May 19th he said: “Meeting with Dr Kissinger – the smartest man in the world.”

The problem is that Twitter simultaneously encourages extreme brevity and endless communication. Each shot is short but you can keep twittering all day if you want – and many addicts seem to do just that. If Marx really had lived in the age of Twitter, he would probably not have been sending out thunderous political messages. It is more likely that his Twitter feed would have read: “Just arrived at British Museum. Going for a cup of tea.”

Marx never got a chance to consider the importance of Twitter to a successful revolution. But my feeling is that it is mainly hype. The French revolutionaries somehow managed in 1789, without being able to tweet to each other: “Big demo planned outside Bastille.” The Iranians of 2009 look likely to fail, in spite of the invention of Twitter in the intervening 220 years.

Still, even if Twitter will not clinch an Iranian revolution, it does a fine job of providing snap-shots of unfolding events. Under normal circumstances, Twitter is a compendium of banalities. But in Iran, the medium’s terseness and immediacy came into its own.

One day some great thinker will have the time and the perspective to make sense of the real role played by Twitter and the communications revolution in the challenge to the Iranian mullahs. Whatever the ultimate conclusion, I strongly advise that it is summarised in 140 characters or fewer.

[email protected]
More columns at www.ft.com/rachman
Read and post comments at Gideon Rachman’s blog

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Control, halt, delete

Control, halt, delete

By Joseph Menn, Richard Waters and Kathrin Hille

Published: June 26 2009 19:30 | Last updated: June 26 2009 19:30

User ID: a police officer checks registrations at an internet café in Xuchang, central China. From next month, Beijing wants new computers to be installed with extra controls

This week, an open letter appeared on Chinese blogs and online bulletin boards. “Hello, internet censorship institutions of the Chinese government,” it said. “We are the anonymous netizens. We hereby decide that from July 1 2009, we will start a full-scale global attack on all censorship systems you control.”

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Editorial Comment: Internet censorship - Jun-28

Obama aide hints at perks for cyber security - Apr-23

Back seat for NSA on cyber security - Apr-22

Analysis: Deeper peeper - Apr-14

Efforts to fight cyber-crime fall short to virus - Apr-02

Report reveals China-based cyber spying ring - Mar-30

Beijing’s attempts to manipulate the internet would, the message predicted, “soon be swept on to the rubbish pile of history”.

Chinese internet users, although skilled at dodging the censors, are angrier than they have ever been. The anonymous declaration of war is just one sign of the strains emerging as the global spread of internet access, and its embrace by activists of all stripes, triggers an unprecedented crackdown by national governments that threatens to transform the way hundreds of millions of people communicate.

China is trying to force censorship software on to every new personal computer, while Iran succeeded this week in virtually eliminating the spread over the internet of first-hand accounts from protests in the streets at the handling of its presidential election.

That stifling of web freedoms that many people around the world take for granted are being accompanied by more novel means of combating cyber opponents. Those methods range from directing stealthy technological attacks that shut down dissident websites to unleashing swarms of paid commentators to argue the government position on supposedly independent blogs.

Both carry the added attraction of deniability: many regimes are employing advanced repressive techniques that are hard to identify in action, let alone circumvent. At a time when new communication technologies, from text messaging to Twitter, promise to put greater power in the hands of the individual, these techniques are having a chilling effect. Internet experts from more open societies fear that this will lead to greater self-censorship by organisations and individuals, which they see as the most effective tool of all.

Even the optimists warn of setbacks. “In the end, the winners of the race are most likely to be citizens and activists who use these technologies for democratic purposes,” says John Palfrey of Harvard University, an authority on internet filtering. But he adds: “With respect to individual battles, the states that practise censorship and surveillance are winning some of them.”

The number of such states is in the dozens, researchers say. In Burma and Moldova, governments recently resorted to pulling the plug on mobile phone networks amid unrest magnified by text messages; in Uzbekistan, there is widespread suspicion of internet monitoring but few ways to prove it. That is despite the fact that a lot of the surveillance and security software in the hands of governments across the world comes from western suppliers. In what is by its nature among the most globalised of industries, technology companies are seeing a revenue boost from governmental interest in data mining, search and storage products, though they periodically draw fire from activists for assisting repressive states.

The most gripping evidence of the change at hand has come from Iran. The theocratic regime has been in a protracted struggle over the free flow of information and communication with many of its largely young urban populace since the day after this month’s disputed election.

STRONG-ARM TECHNIQUES

How curbs on net users work:

Internet filters
Method: Set up on the main conduits of the internet, known as backbones, these software filters block traffic from websites on a proscribed list.
Example: “Great Firewall of China”.

Deep packet inspection
Method: A layer of software that looks to identify the content of individual pieces of information, or “packets”. This can be used to read, store or block individual messages and connections to websites.
Example: Commercial providers including Phorm and NebuAd.

Denial of service attacks
Method: Large numbers of PCs bombard a website with requests, making it inaccessible to other users.
Example:Sites in Estonia and Georgia during conflicts with Russia.

Toeing the party line
Method: Some regimes recruit people to present their case online, sometimes paying them.
Example: “50-cent bloggers” in China.

Self-censorship
Method: Governments bring pressure on companies to restrict access to content. Bloggers must register.
Example:MSN Spaces, Microsoft’s blogging service in China, bans phrases including “human rights”.

Edge-of-network restrictions
Method: Censors push control to a more local level. Internet providers’ terms of service make them act as agents of the state. Restrictions at the edges of the network can reach all the way to curbs installed in PCs.
Example: China’s Green Dam/Youth Escort software.

Tehran has a decided advantage in that it runs the country’s leading internet service provider. Called DCI, it throttled back the amount of bandwidth available to its citizens so that web video traffic dropped by as much as 90 per cent and e-mail leaving the country fell by nearly as much.

Data assembled by Arbor Networks, a US internet security company, show the Iranian government was picking and choosing what types of traffic to let through and which parts of the net to leave unimpeded. Just as the security forces adjusted their response to counter the changing nature of the protests on the ground, Iran’s internet police changed which sites could be reached.

Facebook and other social networks were easy to block and fell quickly. Twitter, a web-accessible broadcasting service that can process messages from mobile phones, proved harder to take down without killing off all text messaging.

Activists proved agile at hopping from one medium to another. For more than a week, outsiders would send people in Iran the addresses of “open proxies”, computers outside the country set up to relay traffic. That way, Iranians could still reach sites they were blocked from accessing directly. But the authorities hunted down most of those proxies and cut off access. Finally, on Thursday, they killed most outgoing traffic, including Twitter blasts.

“It’s a big problem when a government is just willing to shut down communications,” says John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in San Francisco, who was helping dissidents get the word out. “If they do that, you’re down to smoke signals.”

Iran’s response evolved rapidly, aided by filtering technology in place long before the election. No country, though, has been as thoroughly policed through as many means as China, which has long been on the cutting edge of censorship.

Now, Beijing is trying to cement its control with a decree that from July 1, all computers sold in the country must come with a program called Green Dam/Youth Escort, which the government says will be used to block access to pornography sites. Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other computer makers are protesting and have won the support of US trade officials, who are threatening to bring the matter to the World Trade Organisation.

“Green Dam will be a game-changer, if in fact it goes into effect,” says Harvard’s Mr Palfrey. “The desktop is the last bastion of personal freedom. It would change the way people use these devices in extraordinary ways.”

Beijing has for years blocked many sites by setting up filters on the country’s largest internet backbones, using a method nicknamed the Great Firewall of China. The central government has more recently heaped additional blocking and monitoring responsibilities on to internet service providers, web companies and local censors, all of which have been upgrading the technology they use.

TRS, a Chinese supplier of internet security products, says growing numbers of police departments are replacing their traditional search engine-based efforts with state-of-the-art data mining applications, which are capable of analysing large bodies of information.

All this has its limits. “Controlling public networks is very, very difficult,” says Tony Yuan, chief executive of Netentsec, another Chinese security provider. “Bandwidth and traffic are huge, so normally you don’t have the computing power.”

But the latest effort by China’s central authorities takes them further still, to the PCs that stand at the edge of the network. It is not clear they will succeed. The computer makers and US government are being joined in their opposition by security researchers who have identified flaws in Green Dam that could allow third parties to take control of PCs.

Even if the blanket order is delayed, circumvented or quietly forgotten, the Chinese government has already gained access to many PCs. Earlier this year, Beijing made the bundling of Green Dam a precondition for eligibility of PCs in its subsidy programme for PC sales to rural residents. In May, it ordered all schools to install the program. “I would estimate that we’re already looking at more than 10m computers in China with Green Dam installed,” says an executive at a Beijing internet portal company.

An estimated 300m Chinese have online access. Though the more determined among them are likely to find ways around Green Dam, many may not even try to defy the message of disapproval being sent by Beijing.

Some of the surveillance and censorship technology in Iran and China is home-grown but much of it is western. Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture between the two European companies, says, for example, that it was required to sell Iran equipment for monitoring phone calls as part of a contract for a communications network. Cisco has periodically come under fire for selling its routers to China but says the same equipment is used in both open and closed internet systems.

Under laws in the US and elsewhere, telecommunications companies must make it easy for law enforcement agencies to conduct authorised wiretaps – and equipment providers say they cannot shut that capability off depending on the customer.

Collection, in fact, is no longer so much the problem: analysing the masses of data is a bigger issue, as is massaging search technology to look for more than simple keywords that alarm officials, such as “Tibet” and “democracy”. That technology is becoming much better – spurred in part by the increasing global attention to cyber security. Notably, the US defence department this week approved a new military cyber command that will answer to the National Security Agency, which in recent years has been exposed for mining Americans’ e-mail without warrants.

Concerns about pernicious criminal software and “denial of service” attacks, which have shut government websites in Estonia and elsewhere with bombardments of useless data, have prompted further efforts to scrutinise internet traffic. But according to some researchers, technologies developed to counter insidious attacks such as these will only serve to advance the techniques of information control – to the eventual detriment of future mass revolts against oppressive political forces.

“If security starts becoming job one, then a lot of things being used by repressive states will become commercialised and normalised,” says Rafal Rohozinski, a founder of the OpenNet Initiative, which tracks filtering. “We’ll be doing the same thing as Iran, or using the same technologies. And that’s what I worry about.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Economist: Twitter 1, CNN 0

Coverage of the protests

Twitter 1, CNN 0

Jun 18th 2009 | LOS ANGELES
From The Economist print edition

But the real winner was an unusual hybrid of old and new media

ON SATURDAY June 13th, as protests began to flare on streets across Iran, 10.5m American TV-viewers naturally turned to CNN, a cable news channel founded in 1980. It was a vote of confidence in the traditional news media. Unfortunately, instead of protests many of them saw CNN’s veteran, Larry King, interviewing burly motorcycle-builders. The programme was a repeat.

No other American television news programme, cable or broadcast, did better (though the BBC and Al-Jazeera were both swifter and more plugged-in). But that was little comfort. Thanks to the internet, dedicated news-watchers knew what they were missing. Twitter and YouTube carried a stream of reports, pictures and film from Iran’s streets. The internet also facilitated media criticism. Twitter hosted an extraordinary outburst of fury against CNN and other news organisations. A typical post: “Iran went to hell. Media went to bed.”

For a while it looked like a clear-cut victory of new media over old. Cable news channels, which had supplied wall-to-wall coverage of the disappearance of John F. Kennedy junior on another Saturday ten years ago, had neglected a big story. Yet old media recovered. Responding to what Tony Maddox, head of CNN International, delicately calls “real-time audience response”, the network ramped up its coverage of Iran. By June 16th Americans were getting decent reports, and even Mr King was paying attention to the story. In a back-handed compliment, the Iranian authorities cracked down harder on journalists.

Meanwhile the much-ballyhooed Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness. By deluging threads like Iranelection with cries of support for the protesters, Americans and Britons rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran’s government had tried and failed to do. Even at its best the site gave a partial, one-sided view of events. Both Twitter and YouTube are hobbled as sources of news by their clumsy search engines.

Much more impressive were the desk-bound bloggers. Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times waded into a morass of information and pulled out the most useful bits. Their websites turned into a mish-mash of tweets, psephological studies, videos and links to newspaper and television reports. It was not pretty, and some of it turned out to be inaccurate. But it was by far the most comprehensive coverage available in English. The winner of the Iranian protests was neither old media nor new media, but a hybrid of the two.

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

FT: Marketing's new vein

Marketing’s new vein

By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

Published: June 10 2009 23:01 | Last updated: June 10 2009 23:01

An e-mailed invitation dropped into journalists’ inboxes last month, announcing a party on the rooftop of Gawker’s Manhattan office. The event was to celebrate the addition of Bloodcopy, a new blog, to its network that already includes technology, lifestyle and gossip sites such as Gizmodo, Lifehacker and Jezebel.

Bloodcopy offers a familiar mix of viral videos, online discoveries, celebrity sightings and opinionated riffs on stories in the news, all in the irreverent tone for which Gawker’s blogs are known. The only difference, as explained by “Andrew”, Bloodcopy’s “editor-in-chief”, is that the site is “a blog about vampires, by a vampire”.

Visitors might also have noticed unusual advertising from some familiar brands: a Gillette promotion of a “True Blood special edition” of its Fusion Power razor under the slogan “Dead Sexy”; a Geico ad asking how much you could save on insurance if you were immortal; or a picture of a convertible Mini Cooper inviting readers to “Feel the wind in your fangs”.

Clicking on the marketers’ messages would take you to a site for HBO, the Time Warner-owned subscription television channel, promoting the second season of True Blood, its series about vampires, starting on Sunday.

As consumers increasingly fast-forward through conventional 30-second spots and flick past advertisements in newspapers and magazines, marketers are becoming seduced by the promise of viral marketing.

The search for ideas that inspire potential customers to discuss them and pass them round their online networks of friends is turning advertisers into content creators, generating campaigns around campaigns, fictional online worlds and back stories to the narrative of their core marketing message.

The campaign for True Blood is a rare example of the elaborate lengths to which such thinking can be taken.

In its effort to develop the show’s conceit that vampires are now able to live among humans, HBO has gone far beyond traditional teasers that typically accompany a new season.

The Bloodcopy blog has attracted more than 11m page views – remarkable for a piece of advertising content – but behind it lie dozens of other online initiatives. They include websites such as AmericanVampireLeague.com and FellowshipoftheSun.org that purport to be for pro- and anti-vampire groups, a vampire soap opera, a fake weekly news show and viral videos peppered around YouTube.

The co-branded ads are appearing in newspapers and magazines and on billboards, which have also carried more traditional posters with details of the show’s launch date.

HBO’s offline promotional efforts extend to an “advertorial” created with Vanity Fair, mimicking the magazine’s celebrity party coverage in a photo shoot of “celebrity vampires” and their human friends.

The ‘blogvertorial’ that divided a company but pleased its client

“Vampires are not real,” began a post on Gawker’s io9 science-fiction blog last month. It wearily explained that items on the site appearing to be from a sister company called Bloodcopy were, in fact, promotions for HBO’s True Blood series and not an editorially driven Gawker blog.

In a split with his commercial colleagues, Gabriel Snyder, Gawker’s managing editor, was denouncing the campaign they had agreed.

Such tensions occasionally flare up over newspapers’ “advertorial” deals. Online, however, sensitivities are particularly high.

What Forrester Research calls “sponsored conversation”, or paying bloggers to write about a brand, has had a chequered past. The soft drinks group Dr Pepper/7Up ran into a boycott six years ago after using bloggers to promote its Raging Cow drink.

But the desire of advertisers to reach influential audiences means that “blogvertorials” are likely to become more common. Chris Batty, a Gawker marketing executive, told Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab that most of its advertising revenue could come from sponsored posts within four years.

Ironically, Gawker’s client appears delighted with all the fuss. For HBO, it all adds to the viral buzz, says Jeremiah Rosen of Campfire, which devised the Bloodcopy strategy.

AM New York, the commuter freesheet, will also feature an eight-page evening edition tomorrow, targeted at the undead reader, while evening wake-up calls will be aired for the nocturnal vampire audience on local radio stations across the US. 

“We started out conceptually trying to figure out ways to hack reality,” says Jeremiah Rosen, director of accounts at Campfire, the New York agency that created Bloodcopy for HBO. “In a world where vampires exist, they would act stupid as well. There would be celebrity sightings and launch parties.”

Campfire was founded by the team that teased cinema audiences with The Blair Witch Project, a fictional horror film presented as an amateur documentary, more than a decade ago, and has won plaudits for past campaigns such as The Art of the Heist for Audi, which staged the theft of a vehicle and involved consumers in trying to find it.

Its pitch is that audiences are no longer satisfied with old-style marketing messages. “They want experiences that will make them think and make them realise they’re part of a community,” Mr Rosen says.

The message resonated with Zach Enterlin, vice-president of advertising and promotions at HBO. “The days of a traditional print ad or 30-second spot really cutting it with the consumer, I think, are gone,” he says.

If so, what may replace them is a complex web of small initiatives requiring tight co-ordination, if HBO’s experience is any guide. The True Blood campaign involved no fewer than 12 different agencies, media buyers and in-house creative teams.

For Don McNeill, president of Digital Kitchen, which worked on the co-branded campaigns, viral videos and a fake cinema ad for vampire dental care, the biggest leap was the decision to mingle True Blood’s message with that of other brands.

“My pitch was ... let’s do something that would scare the hell out of NBC or CBS,” he says, “but even for HBO, this was pretty exotic, so I’m quite surprised they went for it.”

Mr McNeill was equally surprised to secure six willing brand partners, including Harley-Davidson motorcycles (“Outrun the Sun”), Ecko Unltd perfume (“Attract a Human”) and Monster, the jobs website (“When you sleep inside a coffin, it’s easy to think outside the box”).

“I think it’s pretty amazing these top-tier household brands would allow us to blur the line between fact and fiction,” he says.

Some partners had concerns about whether it might interfere with their core campaigns or confuse customers who might want vampire-targeted motorcycles that did not exist. What won them over, says Mr McNeill, is down to the continuing struggle for brands to find original ways of breaking through to consumers in a cluttered advertising market.

Steve Sylven, a Monster spokesman, says that “being singled out by HBO as the de facto brand for employment – even for vampires – solidifies our leadership position”.

According to Michael Norton, communications director for Gillette, a further attraction was the unique chance to be involved in an HBO series because the subscription-only channel does not normally carry advertising.

Mr McNeill predicts that such joint initiatives will become more common, saying: “Brands can piggyback off each other.”

Nobody involved in the True Blood campaign would discuss how the brands shared costs but Mr Sylven says “this is a cost-effective way to get our brand in front of people”.

Campfire’s Mr Rosen argues that the True Blood campaign will also encourage clients who are already asking why they should have to rely on traditional broadcasters to create content alongside which their brands can appear. “Why shouldn’t they have content they create themselves and have control over?” he asks.

It is a labour-intensive process, but according to Mr McNeill it serves three key purposes: generating buzz for HBO; rewarding its most ardent fans; and engaging those who have yet to tune into the show.

As HBO and its disruptive marketing partners plan a television-style “season finale” for Bloodcopy, the True Blood campaign is drawing to a close.

According to Mr McNeill, a campaign about the undead may offer ideas for an advertising revival: “Is advertising broken and do people have to do something different? I think so, absolutely.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

TIME: How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live

Friday, Jun. 05, 2009

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live

By Steven Johnson

The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."

I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood? (See the top 10 ways Twitter will change American business.)

And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn't be taken lightly. But I think there is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.

In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.

The Open Conversation
Earlier this year I attended a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform. Called Hacking Education, it was a small, private affair: 40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about the future of schools. Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact. (See the top 10 celebrity Twitter feeds.)

But this event was happening in 2009, so trailing behind the real-time, real-world conversation was an equally real-time conversation on Twitter. At the outset of the conference, our hosts announced that anyone who wanted to post live commentary about the event via Twitter should include the word #hackedu in his 140 characters. In the room, a large display screen showed a running feed of tweets. Then we all started talking, and as we did, a shadow conversation unfolded on the screen: summaries of someone's argument, the occasional joke, suggested links for further reading. At one point, a brief argument flared up between two participants in the room — a tense back-and-forth that transpired silently on the screen as the rest of us conversed in friendly tones.

At first, all these tweets came from inside the room and were created exclusively by conference participants tapping away on their laptops or BlackBerrys. But within half an hour or so, word began to seep out into the Twittersphere that an interesting conversation about the future of schools was happening at #hackedu. A few tweets appeared on the screen from strangers announcing that they were following the #hackedu thread. Then others joined the conversation, adding their observations or proposing topics for further exploration. A few experts grumbled publicly about how they hadn't been invited to the conference. Back in the room, we pulled interesting ideas and questions from the screen and integrated them into our face-to-face conversation.

When the conference wrapped up at the end of the day, there was a public record of hundreds of tweets documenting the conversation. And the conversation continued — if you search Twitter for #hackedu, you'll find dozens of new comments posted over the past few weeks, even though the conference happened in early March.

Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.

SI.com: See how Twitter is changing the face of sports.

See the best social-networking applications.

The Super-Fresh Web
The basic mechanics of Twitter are remarkably simple. Users publish tweets — those 140-character messages — from a computer or mobile device. (The character limit allows tweets to be created and circulated via the SMS platform used by most mobile phones.) As a social network, Twitter revolves around the principle of followers. When you choose to follow another Twitter user, that user's tweets appear in reverse chronological order on your main Twitter page. If you follow 20 people, you'll see a mix of tweets scrolling down the page: breakfast-cereal updates, interesting new links, music recommendations, even musings on the future of education. Some celebrity Twitterers — most famously Ashton Kutcher — have crossed the million-follower mark, effectively giving them a broadcast-size audience. The average Twitter profile seems to be somewhere in the dozens: a collage of friends, colleagues and a handful of celebrities. The mix creates a media experience quite unlike anything that has come before it, strangely intimate and at the same time celebrity-obsessed. You glance at your Twitter feed over that first cup of coffee, and in a few seconds you find out that your nephew got into med school and Shaquille O'Neal just finished a cardio workout in Phoenix. (See excerpts from the world's most popular Twitterers.)

In the past month, Twitter has added a search box that gives you a real-time view onto the chatter of just about any topic imaginable. You can see conversations people are having about a presidential debate or the American Idol finale or Tiger Woods — or a conference in New York City on education reform. For as long as we've had the Internet in our homes, critics have bemoaned the demise of shared national experiences, like moon landings and "Who Shot J.R." cliff hangers — the folkloric American living room, all of us signing off in unison with Walter Cronkite, shattered into a million isolation booths. But watch a live mass-media event with Twitter open on your laptop and you'll see that the futurists had it wrong. We still have national events, but now when we have them, we're actually having a genuine, public conversation with a group that extends far beyond our nuclear family and our next-door neighbors. Some of that conversation is juvenile, of course, just as it was in our living room when we heckled Richard Nixon's Checkers speech. But some of it is moving, witty, observant, subversive.

Skeptics might wonder just how much subversion and wit is conveyable via 140-character updates. But in recent months Twitter users have begun to find a route around that limitation by employing Twitter as a pointing device instead of a communications channel: sharing links to longer articles, discussions, posts, videos — anything that lives behind a URL. Websites that once saw their traffic dominated by Google search queries are seeing a growing number of new visitors coming from "passed links" at social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it's just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit.

Put those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching. At its heart, Google's system is built around the slow, anonymous accumulation of authority: pages rise to the top of Google's search results according to, in part, how many links point to them, which tends to favor older pages that have had time to build an audience. That's a fantastic solution for finding high-quality needles in the immense, spam-plagued haystack that is the contemporary Web. But it's not a particularly useful solution for finding out what people are saying right now, the in-the-moment conversation that industry pioneer John Battelle calls the "super fresh" Web. Even in its toddlerhood, Twitter is a more efficient supplier of the super-fresh Web than Google. If you're looking for interesting articles or sites devoted to Kobe Bryant, you search Google. If you're looking for interesting comments from your extended social network about the three-pointer Kobe just made 30 seconds ago, you go to Twitter.

From Toasters to Microwaves
Because Twitter's co-founders — Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey — are such a central-casting vision of start-up savvy (they're quotable and charming and have the extra glamour of using a loft in San Francisco's SoMa district as a headquarters instead of a bland office park in Silicon Valley) much of the media interest in Twitter has focused on the company. Will Ev and Biz sell to Google early or play long ball? (They have already turned down a reported $500 million from Facebook.) It's an interesting question but not exactly a new plotline. Focusing on it makes you lose sight of the much more significant point about the Twitter platform: the fact that many of its core features and applications have been developed by people who are not on the Twitter payroll.

Watch a video of the 2009 Weblog Awards.

Read "Twittering in Church, with the Pastor's O.K."

This is not just a matter of people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else. In Twitter's case, the users have been redesigning the tool itself. The convention of grouping a topic or event by the "hashtag" — #hackedu or #inauguration — was spontaneously invented by the Twitter user base (as was the convention of replying to another user with the @ symbol). The ability to search a live stream of tweets was developed by another start-up altogether, Summize, which Twitter purchased last year. (Full disclosure: I am an adviser to one of the minority investors in Summize.) Thanks to these innovations, following a live feed of tweets about an event — political debates or Lost episodes — has become a central part of the Twitter experience. But just 12 months ago, that mode of interaction would have been technically impossible using Twitter. It's like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and seeing that your customers have of their own accord figured out a way to turn it into a microwave. (See the 50 best inventions of 2008.)

One of the most telling facts about the Twitter platform is that the vast majority of its users interact with the service via software created by third parties. There are dozens of iPhone and BlackBerry applications — all created by enterprising amateur coders or small start-ups — that let you manage Twitter feeds. There are services that help you upload photos and link to them from your tweets, and programs that map other Twitizens who are near you geographically. Ironically, the tools you're offered if you visit Twitter.com have changed very little in the past two years. But there's an entire Home Depot of Twitter tools available everywhere else.

As the tools have multiplied, we're discovering extraordinary new things to do with them. Last month an anticommunist uprising in Moldova was organized via Twitter. Twitter has become so widely used among political activists in China that the government recently blocked access to it, in an attempt to censor discussion of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. A service called SickCity scans the Twitter feeds from multiple urban areas, tracking references to flu and fever. Celebrity Twitterers like Kutcher have directed their vast followings toward charitable causes (in Kutcher's case, the Malaria No More organization).

Social networks are notoriously vulnerable to the fickle tastes of teens and 20-somethings (remember Friendster?), so it's entirely possible that three or four years from now, we'll have moved on to some Twitter successor. But the key elements of the Twitter platform — the follower structure, link-sharing, real-time searching — will persevere regardless of Twitter's fortunes, just as Web conventions like links, posts and feeds have endured over the past decade. In fact, every major channel of information will be Twitterfied in one way or another in the coming years:

News and opinion. Increasingly, the stories that come across our radar — news about a plane crash, a feisty Op-Ed, a gossip item — will arrive via the passed links of the people we follow. Instead of being built by some kind of artificially intelligent software algorithm, a customized newspaper will be compiled from all the articles being read that morning by your social network. This will lead to more news diversity and polarization at the same time: your networked front page will be more eclectic than any traditional-newspaper front page, but political partisans looking to enhance their own private echo chamber will be able to tune out opposing viewpoints more easily.

Searching. As the archive of links shared by Twitter users grows, the value of searching for information via your extended social network will start to rival Google's approach to the search. If you're looking for information on Benjamin Franklin, an essay shared by one of your favorite historians might well be more valuable than the top result on Google; if you're looking for advice on sibling rivalry, an article recommended by a friend of a friend might well be the best place to start.

Advertising. Today the language of advertising is dominated by the notion of impressions: how many times an advertiser can get its brand in front of a potential customer's eyeballs, whether on a billboard, a Web page or a NASCAR hood. But impressions are fleeting things, especially compared with the enduring relationships of followers. Successful businesses will have millions of Twitter followers (and will pay good money to attract them), and a whole new language of tweet-based customer interaction will evolve to keep those followers engaged: early access to new products or deals, live customer service, customer involvement in brainstorming for new products.

Not all these developments will be entirely positive. Most of us have learned firsthand how addictive the micro-events of our personal e-mail inbox can be. But with the ambient awareness of status updates from Twitter and Facebook, an entire new empire of distraction has opened up. It used to be that you compulsively checked your BlackBerry to see if anything new had happened in your personal life or career: e-mail from the boss, a reply from last night's date. Now you're compulsively checking your BlackBerry for news from other people's lives. And because, on Twitter at least, some of those people happen to be celebrities, the Twitter platform is likely to expand that strangely delusional relationship that we have to fame. When Oprah tweets a question about getting ticks off her dog, as she did recently, anyone can send an @ reply to her, and in that exchange, there is the semblance of a normal, everyday conversation between equals. But of course, Oprah has more than a million followers, and that isolated query probably elicited thousands of responses. Who knows what small fraction of her @ replies she has time to read? But from the fan's perspective, it feels refreshingly intimate: "As I was explaining to Oprah last night, when she asked about dog ticks ..."

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End-User Innovation
The rapid-fire innovation we're seeing around Twitter is not new, of course. Facebook, whose audience is still several times as large as Twitter's, went from being a way to scope out the most attractive college freshmen to the Social Operating System of the Internet, supporting a vast ecosystem of new applications created by major media companies, individual hackers, game creators, political groups and charities. The Apple iPhone's long-term competitive advantage may well prove to be the more than 15,000 new applications that have been developed for the device, expanding its functionality in countless ingenious ways.

The history of the Web followed a similar pattern. A platform originally designed to help scholars share academic documents, it now lets you watch television shows, play poker with strangers around the world, publish your own newspaper, rediscover your high school girlfriend — and, yes, tell the world what you had for breakfast. Twitter serves as the best poster child for this new model of social creativity in part because these innovations have flowered at such breathtaking speed and in part because the platform is so simple. It's as if Twitter's creators dared us to do something interesting by giving us a platform with such draconian restrictions. And sure enough, we accepted the dare with relish. Just 140 characters? I wonder if I could use that to start a political uprising. (See the 25 best blogs of 2009.)

The speed with which users have extended Twitter's platform points to a larger truth about modern innovation. When we talk about innovation and global competitiveness, we tend to fall back on the easy metric of patents and Ph.D.s. It turns out the U.S. share of both has been in steady decline since peaking in the early '70s. (In 1970, more than 50% of the world's graduate degrees in science and engineering were issued by U.S. universities.) Since the mid-'80s, a long progression of doomsayers have warned that our declining market share in the patents-and-Ph.D.s business augurs dark times for American innovation. The specific threats have changed. It was the Japanese who would destroy us in the '80s; now it's China and India.

But what actually happened to American innovation during that period? We came up with America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Craigslist, TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter itself. Sure, we didn't build the Prius or the Wii, but if you measure global innovation in terms of actual lifestyle-changing hit products and not just grad students, the U.S. has been lapping the field for the past 20 years.

How could the forecasts have been so wrong? The answer is that we've been tracking only part of the innovation story. If I go to grad school and invent a better mousetrap, I've created value, which I can protect with a patent and capitalize on by selling my invention to consumers. But if someone else figures out a way to use my mousetrap to replace his much more expensive washing machine, he's created value as well. We tend to put the emphasis on the first kind of value creation because there are a small number of inventors who earn giant paydays from their mousetraps and thus become celebrities. But there are hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses that find value in these innovations by figuring out new ways to put them to use.

There are several varieties of this kind of innovation, and they go by different technical names. MIT professor Eric von Hippel calls one "end-user innovation," in which consumers actively modify a product to adapt it to their needs. In its short life, Twitter has been a hothouse of end-user innovation: the hashtag; searching; its 11,000 third-party applications; all those creative new uses of Twitter — some of them banal, some of them spam and some of them sublime. Think about the community invention of the @ reply. It took a service that was essentially a series of isolated microbroadcasts, each individual tweet an island, and turned Twitter into a truly conversational medium. All of these adoptions create new kinds of value in the wider economy, and none of them actually originated at Twitter HQ. You don't need patents or Ph.D.s to build on this kind of platform.

This is what I ultimately find most inspiring about the Twitter phenomenon. We are living through the worst economic crisis in generations, with apocalyptic headlines threatening the end of capitalism as we know it, and yet in the middle of this chaos, the engineers at Twitter headquarters are scrambling to keep the servers up, application developers are releasing their latest builds, and ordinary users are figuring out all the ingenious ways to put these tools to use. There's a kind of resilience here that is worth savoring. The weather reports keep announcing that the sky is falling, but here we are — millions of us — sitting around trying to invent new ways to talk to one another.

Johnson is the author of six books, most recently The Invention of Air, and a co-founder of the local-news website outside.in

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