I’ve had a few days these past weeks where I’ve been kicked out by a fever and a sore throat. When you’re sick you’re not up to much. And when your 8-month daughter is sick too, it’s really no fun at all being sick, if that wasn’t enough.
On the bright side, this gave me some deserved time to finally get into Carsten Jensen’s epic Vi, de druknede (in English, We, the Drowned, appearing later this year). I’ve been looking forward to reading this novel for a long time since it was first published in 2006, and I am thoroughly enjoying it.
It is an epic about the history of a 100 years from 1848-1945, not through the eyes of kings or generals, but from the perspective of the sailor, the adventurer, the flogged, the fugitive, the runaway, the outcast, the drowned (in all kinds of meanings of that word), and the wives and children who were left behind without being asked, all native to Marstal, a Danish port town on the island Ærø. With the obvious exception of the shrunken head of James Cook, which figures prominently in book. The novel leaves one with a few interesting perspectives on things global and local, which is inspiring, not least in the context of the global internet, and in the context of Kaplak.
In a Danish context the novel is not exactly marginal. It received rave reviews and has been extensively marketed by it’s publisher and by booksellers, and has sold well. In this sense, it is an industrial product, mass produced and sold via traditional book selling channels. The book’s IP (i.e. translation and distribution rights etc.) has been sold to more than a handful of other countries.
On the global web, however, the novel is a marginal niche product. It exists at the mercy of search and an exponential growth of information on the web. In this sense it faces precisely the same challenges as a completely unknown novel by a completely unknown author, if it wants to move beyond the local context and use the internet as a marketing or distribution channel. Like many similar products, Vi, de druknede has it’s own website, but to find it one almost has to search for the book’s exact title. At least, one doesn’t find it by searching for the author’s name, which was my first choice, because apparently Carsten Jensen doesn’t have his own website! The first hit is to an architect of the same name, and another to a LinkedIn profile for a CEO with the same name. And Carsten Jensen is even supposedly the most prominent “Carsten Jensen” in a Danish context, which would lead one to think that he had a greater amount of links pointing to information about him and thus a higher Google PageRank. The most authoritative (international) source on Carsten Jensen remains a stub on Wikipedia.
Even if one does manage to find the book’s website, one will find that it is only available in Danish. Apparently the publisher has thought only about using the global internet for targeting the book to a Danish audience, even if the book rights have long since been sold to a number of other countries. This of course just underpins the status of the novel as an industrial product, which seeks to appeal to a national, mainstream audience. An English reader will learn more from this article, which appears as the second hit, when one searches for keywords such as marstal + sailors.
As a niche product, Carsten Jensen’s novel doesn’t fare much better on the web than most niche products, despite local rave reviews and traditional marketing campaigns via conventional channels. It is as less or as much seen, as it has customers who search for it. Making this easier for potential readers has apparently been of very little concern to the publisher, if one takes this superficial analysis at face value.
We, the drowned is an obvious metaphor for all the unanswered queries of the web. When writing this article I had to find out what a “shrunken head” was in English. It is easy when you know it, but how do you show a search engine what you mean? I knew the Danish word, “skrumpehoved”, but finding the English term was pretty tricky. Kaplak doesn’t have any ambitions for creating new or more intelligent ways to search, but we do think the activity of our network will likely help generate more relevant and context-rich web results, which will more likely cover a much much longer tail of niche interests and pursuits, than is the case today.
As some readers will be aware, earlier this month a Danish court ordered the Internet Service Provider Tele2 to block it’s users’ access to the bittorrent-sharing site The Pirate Bay. Mike Masnick sums it up pretty well.
One may very well wonder (as Masnick does too), if The Pirate Bay, which is essentially a search engine and consists of nothing but metadata, should be blocked, other search engines where one may find torrent-files leading to copyright-infringing material ought to be blocked too. Now Mikkel DeMib Svendsen, renowned Danish SEO-expert, internet entrepreneur and columnist, has responded in kind, to illustrate precisely this point. His column is available here, in Danish only, but his point transcends all languages.
Torrent Search is simply a custom search engine built using Google’s own tools, which trawls all of Google’s index for torrent files. DeMib’s point being of course to illustrate the absurdity of the block and of the court’s findings. If The Pirate Bay should be blocked, so should Google. And so should every other search engine or index of metadata, which allows one to find hyperlinks to material, which someone deems infringing on someone’s copyrights.
If Kaplak is to succeed in ‘making the world’s ends meet’, we need to get in touch with potential customers globally. This is a daunting task, to say the least, and not something you do from one day to the other. Kaplak’s product may depend on technology, yet we can build the best solution in the world technology-wise, but if noone uses it or knows about it, it doesn’t matter. This is where this website, and this blog in particular, comes into the picture.
We need to connect niche producers with new markets, document that we are able to do this, and that our efforts pay off. What’s more important is that we have to do this simultanously with our product development, not after we’ve spent millions building the product, only to find out things didn’t look exactly the way we imagined.
In this respect, it is interesting to take a small peek at some of the traffic data we’ve collected so far.
This model shows an early tendency which is very reassuring. After the last two months of this website’s uptime, there’s a clear indication already, that Kaplak will not simply remain an obscure Danish project. We’re capable of reaching out and building a larger global base. The important question to ask at this point is why this is possible?
The model illustrates the effect of something I find incredibly important for the Kaplak Project, but which is often difficult to describe and communicate even to people involved in the project. This is why I wanted to show it here.
We have thought and contemplated Kaplak in a Danish context, in one particular local spot of the world. We’ve performed no marketing efforts at all, besides spreading the word through our local off- and online networks. Our initial traffic therefore consists mostly of our friends and colleagues, and their friends and colleages. But it may very well be, that our best, most motivated first customers are in Buenos Aires or in Koala Lumpur, and not in our local spot. We don’t know yet.
But we do know, that the only thing which have made it possible for us to attract visitors from as far away places as Uruguay, Viet Nam or Ireland until now is a mixture of hyperlinks pointing to our site and of texts, images and links, which makes it possible for search engines to index our site appropriately. This is why I make such a great fuss out of cultivating as much activity on the blog (among other things), as we possibly can, including real case studies with real answers from real people and companies, who feel what life is about on the slim end of the long tail. Because every time someone searches for terms in a unique way which matches the way our site has been indexed, we gain contact with someone who may share the aches, challenges and opportunities we describe.
The model also shows, how much more work we still need to do in order to accomplish what we’ve set out to do. It’s an uphill struggle for each blog entry, each reference, each visitor, each comment, each link which may connect us with someone, who really feels the niche producer’s ache.
We don’t need or want massive amounts of traffic for our website, at least not for the time being, but we’re very interested to see a healthy growth and composition of our traffic evolve over time, which makes it possible for us eventually to reach someone who is motivated enough to single our site out of the millions, and sign up for our mailing list, if he or she is interested in Kaplak.
Thomas Magnussen is a British-Danish actor with a voice talent. His first job was a minor part in Tom Hanks’ tv-series Band of Brothers (2001), and since then his work has been a mix of theatrical plays, voice work and a number of roles in film and television. He has done a few international commercials. On his website, Thomas uses this video to introduce himself :
Thomas was kind enough to send me a quicktime file of the film, which I uploaded to YouTube (whose true merits we discussed briefly here), because I think it is important to show the video here as well. When you expressly put a text, an image or a video (like in this case) into a new context, it makes it stand out in a new way and helps create new meaning. And create meaning is what we want to do, because this creates value for this particular spot on the internet. I’m surprised, with Thomas’ resume, that I couldn’t find him on YouTube or in other places, because this kind of activity helps build traffic for his website, and it doesn’t cost anything.
Kaplak : Can you tell us a little about yourself and your niche business? How did you get involved with your line of work?
Thomas Magnussen (TM) : I am an actor, trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, working freelance in both theatre and films. I have several years of experience in doing various voicework such as: Documentary speaks, cartoon dubbing, voiceovers and commercial speaks. As I am bi-lingual English-Danish I’m equally skilled in both languages, and therefore work in both.
Kaplak : What kind of digital product do you produce (if any)?
TM : The digital products I produce are primarily the above mentioned voice related works, but I would be open to any idea which could involve acting related jobs, such as e-learning products for instance.
Kaplak : What constitute the greatest opportunity for your business on the internet?
TM : The greatest opportunity the internet offers me is that I can reach out to potentiel clients/employers in every part of the world by simply being visible via my website.
Kaplak : What are the greatest challenge?
TM : The greatest challenge is to find out where to focus my attention and how to get people to find out that I exist.
As an actor, Thomas is a hired gun. He is primarily a freelancer. The main portion of his work is done for clients, i.e. other creative producers and companies. Even when hired by a theatre, jobs are per project and run for a limited time. In several respects, this makes him different from the hobby-oriented “just for fun” niche producer and the professional-level producer we’ve met earlier on this blog.
First, he doesn’t usually own the digital end products he helps create. There could be exceptions to this, and surely there’s a lot of convergence happening, where a one day freelancer may be a producer on his own terms the other day (I’ve worked like that myself for years). As a “classic” freelancer though, one doesn’t usually gain rights to the work produced, but more often has to give them up.
Second, Thomas’ primary problem is visibility. But not towards people who buy the end digitial product (still, we keep out all points about convergence for now), but towards his clients, the producers all over the world, who want the product he offers. In other words, to get in touch with the producers who will want to hire him, if they knew he existed.
To sum up, it’s not the visibility for “end customers”, transport of data og payments which are Thomas’ challenges. In this sense, at first glance, he’s not an obvious Kaplak customer. But still he’s a very attractive customer for Kaplak. Why? Because he has a website! And he has something to sell, besides his acting product.
Thomas’ website is right now not much more but a showcase of his previous work, a curriculum vitae and some contact information. But it is also (or could be) an entry point to Thomas’ fan base or network. These people are valuable customers for the products, which Thomas’ acting efforts help produce, and possibly also for other types of related products. Imagine, that Thomas could help sell one of his recent projects, i.e. James Barclay’s next feature film Aurum, via his website. Imagine that the entire cast on this film (most actors have their own webpages) could help sell the film via their websites. Not only would this be great marketing news for the producer, but could also help provide a little extra for each actor.
Last year I discovered Twitter, inspired by video blogger and online infopreneur Raymond M. Kristiansen. Raymond worked very hard during the national election last year to introduce Video Blogging as a serious campaigning tool for the candidates of Radikale Venstre, the Danish Social-Liberal Party, of which both Raymond and I are members. I met him briefly then, and was tremendously inspired by his rigourous online activities.
Twitter allows you to post short (below 140 characters) messages about anything, and to follow others who do the same thing. One can send and receive messages via mobile phone as well as directly via the web. What is this useful for? Well, I’m still investigating. The constraint and mobility creates interesting results. Twitter can be anything from an individual’s stream of consciousness, two people exchanging mood swings or girl trouble or interesting links, or a group brainstorming ideas and theories. Twitter is a funny little thing. I haven’t quite figured out yet what to use it for, but today an occasion arose, which makes sense.
I’m participating in Oplevelsesiværksætter, a course in project leadership and investor relations for startups in the experience economy. The course runs for the next 4 months and focuses (unsurprisingly) on project leadership and investor relations. I decided today to use Twitter to share notes and thoughts about the course in relation to Kaplak. It fits perfectly with the way I write notes. I usually write things down to learn them better and reflect about what I’m doing. I don’t throw my notes away after such a course, but I very rarely read them again. I may as well share some of these thoughts and ideas online, while I’m at it. It tells a much less filtered story about Kaplak, as it unfolds from my perspective as leader of this project, which could be interesting for other entrepreneurs. All the time, everyone reading (other Twitter users) has the opportunity to comment and engage in the process as we go along.
Using Twitter for this kind of intimate log is also an interesting method of providing value to our company. Why can this be? Answer : it helps drive relevant traffic to our site. In this case, we want to attract potential “first” customers for Kaplak who are visionary and adventurous enough to seek out information on how to meet their online distribution challenges. Or simply feels the financial pain of imprecise distribution methods much harder than anyone else, because their market is too thinly spread for traditional retail systems.
On a related note, I’ve never experienced something as hard to explain to people than this, the intimate relation between hyperlinks and value. For most people it somehow seems utterly incomprehensible, that a hyperlink can be worth something. But in the end, this is what we at Kaplak is going to create our product around. Links matter, and it matters where you find them. The context the hyperlink appears in makes meaning. I’ll be very happy for any inputs on how to illustrate this connection between a “simple” reference and value.
I also want to say a big thank you to all of you, who have linked to Kaplak.com. It really is a great deal and means a lot to us, if you link to Kaplak.com from your website, blog, forum or email signature, or from your Facebook account.
We now have a Squidoo page on Kaplak. It’s been interesting to play around with creating this page!
Services such as Squidoo and NING present great filtering opportunities for niche oriented projects such as Kaplak, and I’ll return with more in-depth analysis of these services.
Nicolas Carr has written an in-depth analysis of Google and the implications of the company’s rapid growth and business style, which is well worth the read. It is a clearheaded and concise piece, which is a must read for anyone with even the slightest interest in Google’s business model. Here’s an excerpt :
The way Google makes money is actually straightforward: It brokers and publishes advertisements through digital media. More than 99 percent of its sales have come from the fees it charges advertisers for using its network to get their messages out on the Internet. [...]
For Google, literally everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes. In addition, as Internet activity increases, Google collects more data on consumers’ needs and behavior and can tailor its ads more precisely, strengthening its competitive advantage and further increasing its income. As more and more products and services are delivered digitally over computer networks — entertainment, news, software programs, financial transactions — Google’s range of complements is expanding into ever more industry sectors.
Carr’s latest book The Big Switch came out earlier this month (January 7th), and I’m looking forward to reading it. I’m curious if there’s a level in the book beyond the dreary dystopic visions of a future beyond our control, which is a dominating theme in many of the reviews I’ve managed to trawl tonight.
At first mention, I have difficulty swallowing Carr’s notion of a World Wide Computer. Yes, it is true we leave information everywhere about ourselves and our online behaviour patterns whenever we use the internet, and companies (such as Google) are able to collect and analyze a lot of all this data. What’s critical IMHO, is not that this data is available and can be analyzed by individuals as well as companies, but that the means of creating the technological architectures of it’s control are as widely distributed as possible (as well as, which follows, the tools and methods of collecting, analyzing and consuming the data produced by these architectures). Which is why open source software, or more importantly free software, is so important, and why the use and spread of open file formats (as opposed to proprietary formats) should be as widely encouraged as possible by policy makers.
I also have some difficulty with the idea (in the excerpt) that everything happening on or with the internet is somehow beneficial to Google. At a superficial level, Carr is right, new websites is the lifeblood of Google, but the same lifeblood may choke the company, if it doesn’t develop methods of finetuning or reforming search as a method. Google as well as other search engines face an unprecedented growth in the amount of accessible information globally which presents great difficulties for search fundamentally as a method of finding information, at least as any kind of general purpose tool. Anyone who in recent years has experienced lousier and lousier search results can testify to this.
On a related note, I’d like to highly recommend David Vise’s The Google Story for anyone who’d like an enjoyable introduction to the amazing story of the rise of an amazing company - also available in a convenient audio format.
I’ve had a few days these past weeks where I’ve been kicked out by a fever and a sore throat. When you’re sick you’re not up to much. And when your 8-month daughter is sick too, it’s really no fun at all being sick, if that wasn’t enough.
