mediajunk

A friend of mine, crime fiction author Declan Burke, was telling me today about a new online trend that I immediately had to check out for myself -- book trailers.

Okay, most of the trailers I've seen so far are -- like the one above -- are cheesy at best. Still, what a great way for struggling writers to promote their latest offerings.

The publishing world is becoming more ever more competitive, so authors who make use of internet tools such as blogs, discussion groups and online video to add value to their offerings are more likely to succeed. Writing a decent book is still a pre-requisite, but it may no longer be enough to ensure success.

I'm sure that, as more authors cotton on to this clever marketing device, the quality of these trailers will improve.

Of course, you should never judge a book by its trailer (sorry -- it's been a long day at the office).

Update: I've just registered the name noveltrailers.com ;)

I have just returned from a holiday in Malta, which I visited not only for its sunshine, but also because I was curious about its potential as a business location.

I was pleasantly surprised by what I discovered. English is spoken (in fact, English is Malta's "business language"), personal income taxes are low, and IT companies can avail of business tax incentives. Malta is also a recent entry to the EU and, from the beginning of 2008, will use the euro as its currency.

Add to this a lower cost of living than Ireland's, a lower salary level, affordable accommodation, and I wonder whether -- in my line of work -- I'm on the right island.

Other pros: there are direct Ryanair flights from Dublin, and daytime temperatures rarely drop below 12 degrees at any time of year!

No wonder then that many UK companies are already using Malta as a "nearshoring" destination (BBC).

A lot of companies try to create viral online campaigns, but generating buzz is difficult. You've got to tap into the zeitgeist; give the punters what they want.

Burger King have got it right however with their "Simpsonize me" campaign, which has become a bit of a craze lately.

I gave it a go ... and I've even ordered my Simpsonized mug on a mug!

Yesterday I finished a book called "Wake Up! Survive and Prosper in the Coming Economic Turmoil," which I have already blogged about.

I regularly read non-fiction books, and rarely mention them here, but this one has grabbed my attention. Since reading it, I have been looking around for other opinions on the state of the US economy. A lot of people out there are very angry and/or worried.

This July article in a Canadian website called Global Research takes a particularly glum view:

Here's how I would put it today: our economy is on an artificial life-support system, a barely-breathing hostage in a lunatic asylum. That asylum is the U.S. and world financial systems which are on the verge of collapse.

Before reading "Wake Up", I thought that the American economy had recovered from the dot-com bubble, thanks to some Keynesian government intervention. Not so. It seems the Fed replaced the dot-com bubble with the housing bubble, and Americans (both citizens and government) continued to live beyond their means. From the same website quoted above:

As everyone knows, the Federal Reserve under Chairman Alan Greenspan used the housing bubble, like a steroid drug, to pump liquidity into the economy. This worked, at least for a while, because consumers could borrow huge amounts of money at relatively low interest rates for the purchase of homes or for taking out home equity loans to pay off their credit cards, finance college education for their children, buy new cars, etc.

But what goes up must come down, eventually. Americans have been spending money they don't have for over a decade. The US national debt now works out at around $30,000 per citizen. Someone's got to foot the bill. The dollar is sliding against other currencies, particularly the euro.

But Europeans will not be able to delight in a collapsing dollar (the crisis in the subprime market is only the tip of the iceberg -- the rest of the US mortgage market will soon come crashing down), since Euro exports will be hit hard too. And many European countries, particularly the UK, are also overborrowed. We may be entering a period of social and political turmoil -- depression, unemployment, civil unrest, wars -- triggered by a global economic crash.

Chandramohan Sathyanathan, an Indian blogger, suggests that a US dollar collapse is highly possible, citing the country's huge trade and budget deficits.

The collapse of the dollar will throw the world into a global depression. Those nations with large external debts will not be able to trade sufficiently to earn the income to service their debts, and will slide into bankruptcy. The economies of New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the UK will also totally collapse, as a result of their indebtedness and not being able to service their borrowings. Crime will become rampant. Law and order will cease to exist. Disease will become widespread.Though Asian economies will also be affected....they will recover after a mammoth turmoil.

So what do the authors of "Wake Up" advise? In short, be prepared for huge socioeconomic change on a global scale. Get out of debt as fast as you can. Don't take on any more debt. If you own property in the US or any other rich western country, consider selling it.

If you own property outside the US, consider switching your mortgage to a US dollar mortgage (the logic being that the US dollar amount is going to become small, relative to other currencies).

Of course, it might never happen. But will it hurt to be prepared?

Geo-redirecting -- redirecting users to different parts of your website depending on their own geographical location -- is a neat trick. It is handy when your website has different messages or product offers for users from different countries or regions.

But many website owners mistakenly assume that their geolocation software works every time. It doesn't!

Geolocation works in two steps:
1. A script detects the user's IP address.
2. The script looks up a database of IP addresses and their associated countries to tell where the user is located.

There are potential problems with both steps:
1. Many users go through proxy servers, so the IP address that appears to be associated with their computer is, in fact, the server's IP address, which may be in a different location.

2. There are many databases of IP addresses and their associated regions (some free, some commercial) but none is even 90% accurate. For example, look at this table of accuracy for city geolocation, from one of the leading providers of such databases, Maxmind.

The problem is that many websites lock users in to a region-specific part of the website, without giving them the option of choosing a different region. For example, users from Ireland are often taken to the UK versions of product websites, where prices are quoted in pounds sterling ... but Ireland is not part of the UK, and is in the Eurozone!

Another mistake is to make assumptions about a user's preferences based on their location (why not give UK users the option to pay in euros if they want?).

In fact, the makers of Firefox have made a bad assumption about my preferences, based on my geographic location, which prompted me to write this article.

I recently downloaded the latest version of Firefox and, while composing messages in Gmail, noticed that the spell-checker was underlining almost every word in red. I eventually discovered that my language had been set to Irish ... presumably because Firefox had detected my IP address as being in Ireland. (I can't think of any other reason. Certainly, I didn't change any settings.)

If so, even the usually reliable makers of Firefox have committed a gross geolocation foul. At least I was able to fix the problem. Website users who are locked in to a set of regional pages, however, may not have that luxury.

I have a bold prediction: many (if not all) of the web services that we currently pay for will soon be offered free.

I often get clients (my company offers Internet consulting services) asking for help with their start-up. They tell me about their great idea for an online service, and how it will make money by asking people to sign-up and pay.

To which I advise: "Forget it. Make your web service free".

Why? Well, if you don't someone else will, eventually. Unlike many other types of business, it does not cost a lot of money to create a web-related venture today. (In the 1990s, start-up web companies burned through billions; today, much of the underlying technology for any web venture already exists and can be re-used at little or no cost.)

This means that barriers to entry are very low and, if you create a popular web service, it's easy for a competitor to copy your website, and offer the same service at a cheaper price.

Ultimately, in this hyper-competitive market (a true "bazaar"), one of your competitors will offer the same service for free. Instead of making their money through user subscriptions, they'll build their revenue model around advertising. True, they may not make as much profit as theirs competitors made with a subscription model, but so what? As long as they make a profit.

Across the web, I'm seeing free versions of services that, until recently, demanded a fee. And I'm not just talking about infrastructure services like web hosting and design. I'm talking about popular online activities such as dating, classified ads, etc. For example, take a look at plentyoffish.com. It's a fully-functional dating site that offers everything its competitors do. But plentyoffish.com is free, and makes its money through targetted, text-based advertising.

Now, this shift in the web's economy throws up two warnings:

1. Your website will need significant numbers of visitors before an advertising-based model becomes workable (i.e. profitable). So, while I advise clients to offer free services, I warn them to get serious about building scalable websites with high traffic volumes.

As Michael O'Leary predicted in the low cost airline game (which has emerged from similar business conditions), "there's going to be a bloodbath". Whatever web services niche you target, you've got to be "in it to win it". Every niche will be dominated by a handful of giants, while there will be many dwarves who find it difficult to make ends meet. I agree with Blogstring that some web 2.0 companies are already too dependent on advertising, without having the visitor numbers to match.

So how many visitors will you need? To break even on a shoestring budget, you will need at least 10,000 unique visitors a day. Depending on your business costs (which you should strive to keep as low as possible) you may soon need ten times this number, or more.

2. You have to build a brand, and fast. Ironically, this was one of the principles of the internet gold-rush of the late 1990s. However, the motto back then was to build a brand, fast, whatever the cost. I'm revising that last part to while keeping costs as low as humanly possible.

Why the emphasis on brand? Because brand is your only barrier to entry. Successful websites are easy to replicate. Successful brands, on the other hand, are harder to shift. People have emotional attachments to brands. Google Video arguably offered a better service than YouTube, but the latter's brand was already global when Google entered the space. In the end, Google had to buy YouTube. (If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em.)

Of course, it's important to remember that we are living in an age of temporary, ephemeral brands. Brands have always come and gone, but never at today's rate. Who heard of YouTube five years ago? Who heard of Google ten years ago? Will both of these brands still be around in ten, twenty years?

Let your users get attached to your brand ... but don't get too attached to it yourself. Always read the winds of change, in web businesses, just as in all business.