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Magazine Eyeballs Its Subscribers
No_Weak_Heart writes "Talk about 'know your customers' -- the NY Times has an interesting article about Reason Magazine's upcoming June issue. Each of the print magazine's 40,000 subscribers will receive a copy of the mag with their name and a satellite photo of their home on the cover!" Although described as a "cover stunt", the magazine's editor "said that the parlor trick could have profound implications as database and printing capabilities grow."
How much do you suppose that cost them?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
As for showing John Q. Public how powerful these systems are... You should try reading some of the stuff on privacy at Reason's website. Often times, the stuff there is (believe it or not) more insightful than the stuff posted here!!!
I don't think the average Reason subscriber will be all that surprised that their house is on the cover. I'll even bet that a good portion DO have the post office or a PMB or other mail drop circled.
-bs
That that is is not that that is not. That that is not is not that that is.
I wonder if they will use an HP/Indigo DigitalPress. These things are monster offset printers that can do huge jobs, but are able to print a different image/source on each successive page.
They are really quite amazing.
Check them here: HP.com
He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
If you're in the USA, you can see your own address plotted for yourself by TerraServer at this page here. The version that the magazine is using is likely a higher resolution source that they had to pay for. These guys even have pictures over "Area 51".
More likely then not the person who submitted the article submitted it with that URL and the editors didn't notice it.
Not cool because I really don't want the New York Times to take this feature away from us. I suppose it's only a matter of time and we can all blame /. when it happens. At least we'll have a scapegoat ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
One-to-one advertising has existed for years. During the dot-com bubble I worked for a company that specialized in doing it. Really, it's just a matter that you don't usually realize that something you're reading has been customized to you because you don't have somebody else's copy to hold next to it, and the changing of content often subtile enough not to scare you, unlike this one where the customization screams out that it's just for you.
There are still things visible at that resolution that can cause problems. We used to have photo radar devices, which snap a picture of a speeding car's licence plate and mail it to the registered address with a ticket to be paid. Part of the public outcry against these involved the privacy aspect - the driver and front passenger were typically visible in the photo, so what if it catches a picture of you with someone else in the car, and you're not the one who opens the envelope? What if you're having an affair, or not out of the closet, or for that matter carrying a big stuffed panda as a surprise birthday present?
So in this case, what if the photo was taken during the day while spouse A was at work and spouse B was supposed to be, but spouse B's car is pictured parked in the driveway with spouse A's best friend's car beside it?
It's not a question of the severity or whether you ought to be doing those things anyway, it's whether it's ok to be mailing around photos that may contain information you didn't want revealed. Over a 40,000 subscriber sample, do you think this won't happen at least once?
As for the photo radar devices, they went away amid a flurry of political posturing, then I think they quietly returned. But the people behind the windscreen are now obscured or the picture is taken from the rear of the car so as not to disclose people's private business.
Ironically, for a magazine that runs so many good articles on privacy issues, they whored my address to anyone and everyone. I never got so much crap junkmail as after I started a subscription. And tenacious bulkmailers, sending thick wads every other month or so for years.
While I can understand the reasoning behind the stunt, they might want to take a long hard look in the mirror first before preaching.
...you got a mobile phone?
Is "Current Location" down to a couple of meters considered exact enough?
from the article:
"What if you received a magazine that only had stories and ads that you were interested in and pertained to you?" he asked. "That would be a magazine that everyone would want to read."
wasn't this one of the promises of the web? is "narrowcasting" in print form really economically feasible?
Yes, visual representation does tend to "drive the point home" so to speak :)
Back in the mid 90s I used to get the MAKE MONEY FAST e-mails all the time with all the addresses to which I was supposed to send a dollar. I would reply to the e-mail with an attached mapquest map to the last address and a note saying that even if only 1 in a million internet users was a complete psycho, they had just given their home address to dozens of complete psychos. Never did get any replies thanking me for pointing out the error of their ways though.
I thought most printing press houses ran high-speed presses with no time to include a specific cover for each individual issue printed. I assume the specific cover will include the mailing address for mailing purposes. If not, associating the right issue with the right mailing label on a print line is even more of a feat. What's next? Totally individualized dead-tree magazines for every subscriber of every rag out there? This could get interesting.
I'd like to see the magazine use the Freedom of Information act and insert some of a person's file into each magazine (maybe a random person?). Of course, I don't think you could automate it, it would be expensive, and the feds would give you a hassle... but if you could...
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
I think it would have scared people if they would have instead used a picture of the address the person first lived at. Just imagine getting a magazine with a picture and address that you hadn't lived at for years. That'd cause people to think more.
If it's a satellite photo, you would put the mooning man on your roof, the satellite can't peep into your window, agles, laws of phsycis and all that...
Oh my God! A magazine has been able to successfully transform AN ADDRESS into a GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION.
Powerful indeed....
Yes, I know--they also showed they could link my address to a low-res satellite image. Good gravy, they know I live in...a light gray pixel.
It's a nice publicity stunt, but I'm not terribly concerned about my privacy being infringed by a mapping satellite. You could get *much* better pictures of my house from a private plane. Or by parking across the street with a camera. There are many real ways in which my privacy may be trampled by government or business; this just isn't one of them.
~Idarubicin
showing folks information in a graphical or visual format makes it more real
;)
I agree. As a demo to a new government GIS system I'm working on, I created a web service: enter any street address in New York, and you get spit back a 1 pixel/foot aerial photo of the property embedded with the parcel boundaries. The premise is to settle border disputes between neighbours without going to the planner's office for the plat blueprints. And some people are just shocked that we have the ability to do this...they're of the opinion that we're taking the photos real time (not so -- it takes about a year to scan and process the data for 1/3 of the state). The neat thing about this is all the data is freely available from NYS -- gigabytes and gigabytes of geographic data, census data, elevation data, orthophotography (overhead pictures), raster graphics (scanned maps), polygon files (which contain in them a bunch of fantastic parcel data)...and linking them all is as easy as layering them in ArcMap.
Is prividing so much data online a privacy thing? Maybe. But the information is so valuable -- to planners, developers, ecologists, home buyers, home owners and just plain curious folks that I think it's worth it. I mean, I don't freak out over the town pruning trees along the right of way , the census man, or USGS surveyors. Besides, the data over my house is so old, it has the driveway in the wrong place and trees that aren't even there any more.
BTW: NY did shut down access to detailed maps and orthophotgraphy files after 9/11. The came back up in November, 2003, even more detailed. We heal quick in the Empire State.
BTW2: I can't make the webservice available, because the machine it's on is laughably underpowered. If you want access, convince your town to buy our software
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Not if they use the billing address of the credit card you use to pay for said subscription.
What if the billing address of the credit card is also the po box? this how I've been doing it for years. was there a point ot your post?
Remember the ads in Minority Report that talked to you as you walk past the displays?
I wonder how long it will be until every page is customized according to your personal tastes. You might receive your issue of Popular Electronics filled with ads for embedded systems and circuit boards while your neighbor receives the same issue but with ads for mini spy cameras and weird sex toys.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Its called DPOD . digital print on demand. Customize the marketing and sales to a person entirely ... not just a word mail merge... a photo merge, where the vacation photo you took on your cruise is sent back, superimposed on the larger, cooler cruise ship out this year. a few companies merge output from popular graphics design tools, like quark, with XML and other stuff, which get their feed from marketing databases.
I work for a small firm who develops software that is sold to companies that do specific mail marketing. a lot of people are looking for this.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
I'm a pretty bad satt map junkie. I've built a collection from various web sources of old home towns, vacations spots, places I've been, etc.
I don't really see the problem with it. About the only thing that's roughly close to being up to date is the landsat 7 IR maps, and those will give you a headache if you look at em too long.
But for general viewing, I usually go though lostoutdoors.com or teraserver depending on what kind of map format I want. lostoutdoors has a pretty limited interface, but if you get your coordinates narrowed down from teraserver, you can get a nice big detailed map of the area, as well as the topo map. Usually you can get something within the last 5 years from airplane survey photos stitched together.
Was fun looking at old places I'd been and seeing what had changed. Was disapointed that the hardware store in marshalltown iowa had not kept the writing on their roof so I could see it on there. Was primarily something used by the local pilots back in the day. Would have been really cool to read it off of satellite, web server airplane photos, or even landsatt(unlikely on that though as the resolution is iffy).
Until you have cheap lifting vehicles for space, you can forget the enemy of the state nonsense. You'll get some interesting views, but the chance of it being more recent than a year ago if you live in the sticks is nil. It would simply take way way too many birds to get same day data on everyone, not to mention a lot of luck unless you were also in a very arid pollution free area. Being a several thousand feet about sea level helps too.
Also this will be a great personal collectors item to subscribers. But I suspect in time it'll be like the national geographic holographic skull pic. A neat gimick, soon to be copied by everyone and old news really fast.
I think the upside will be that interest will spike for a while, and people will want more up to date and higher rez photos, faster web servers for the data, etc.
For me though, there is no downside, I got most of what I want for the moment, so if all the USGS servers choke for weeks, its no big deal.