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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."
If they sent it directly to your gmail account?
This is your rights online? I guess it must be a slow newsday. It might be useful for showing John Q. Public exactly how powerful these systems have become but somehow I doubt that will happen. The article even states this:
On the flipside I suppose this justifies my paranoia in continuing to use a P.O. Box for all my mail. And to think I only got the P.O. Box because I was worried about my neighbors stealing my mail. I wonder if my copy would have the Post Office circled?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
BFD. I routinely get the coordinates for addresses (usually geocaches but sometimes business addressses and residences) and make both standard Mapquest maps and aerial/topo maps of the location. Terraserver is quick and easy to use if you don't have access to some of the scripts out there for this...
How does this have far reaching implications? The information is freely and easily accessible. As databases grow? The information is out there now... It's not exactly as if magazines selling your name/address to others is a new/novel idea. It's been going on for ages.
Perhaps if they had your name and your CURRENT, exact, location on file I would be more concerned...
Of course the data itself is not new and there is nothing controversial about this per se. The real issue is in the visual representation of your geographic data which demonstrates to you specifically that your home location is *known*. Of course the magazine has always *known* where you live because they mail the periodical to your house. But for some reason, showing folks information in a graphical or visual format makes it more real. Therefore, I would not say this is a gimmick, but that it would enforce the idea to those who may not think as much in their daily lives the issues of privacy and information customization and product dissemination to consumers.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
What cover will they put on newstands? The home of the person who buys the magazine? That would be impressive.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
The magazine's trick here really isn't that hard... in that for every subscriber they of course have an address, and adresseses can be converted to geographic coordinates using the same technology MapQuest has had for years. It's just a matter of getting a satellite photo that shows that coordinate as the center point, and applying the circling to the image. After that, it's just a typical variable printing job.
Modern printing technologies make it very easy for a 40,000-subscriber magazine to send out a different cover to each and every subscriber. It's just a matter of doing a 40,000 page run of each of the "customized" sets of pages with the image database available, and then the common pages can be wrapped around after printing them the typical way. Here's the homepage for VIPP, Xerox's technology for doign such "variable data" printing jobs on its industrial class printing products.
You mean when I subscribe to a magazine they know where I live????
So that's why the NYT wants us to register! But I'm way ahead of them... the way I've polished my tin foil hat lately all they'll pick up from my location is their own flash! Hah!
... whaddayamean satellites don't use flash photography..?
"What if you received a magazine that only had stories and ads that you were interested in and pertained to you?"
They already have this. It's called the internet.
Personally, the fact that this is cheap enough to be feasible for a print medium is far more impressive to me than the fact that it is technically possible.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
Seems something like this happened not so long ago in California and somebody got upset.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...the satellite image be taken? I want to do some nude sunbathing in the backyard when it happens.
What if I live underground like the Mole People?
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
I think the point is some people don't think about/realize that the ability to integrate information like that is so easy.
Plus its pretty damn cool they can demand print the magazine covers.
Obviously its a stunt, though... anyone who subscribes to a libertarian magazine probably understands those issues anyway... its a rallying call for them.
they will see on the cover a satellite photo of a neighborhood - their own neighborhood. And their house will be graphically circled.
Hopefully some of the subscribers live in neighborhoods with a lot of rooftop pools--and pool parties.
The coolest voice ever.
Neat!
Now all I need is my cardboard mooning man cut out to put in my window. Hoo ha!
This signature has Super Cow Powers
My mailing address is a PO Box. Heh. Go get'em, Reason.
Actually, no registration is required as the link is a Google partner link.
Either:
a. Slashdot is wilfully defrauding NYT of their free registrations; or
b. Slashdot has been taken over by Google in a deal under which the existing VA Software shareholders each get one GMail account per previously held share.
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.
"Hey! I can see that cute chick's house from here! Hey, what's she doing to the fireplace?"
- Some Architect Dude
The problem with this stunt is that it is a harbinger of things to come. When marketers are able to fully customize each page of a magazine to appeal to a particular consumer, they will acquire a lot of personal information from tens or hundreds of different marketing databases in order to do so.
In essence, the improvements in printing technology that made this possible will contribute to the proliferation of your personal information.
The only way to solve this is to implement EU-style privacy protections at the Federal level. We need to ask ourselves - who's looking out for you? It's obviously not our government.
There is Constitutional "right to privacy". Some try to conjure one out of the Ninth Amendment, but the same tactic can be used to conjure a "right to security" or something else that cancels it out. Some try to conjure it out of the 4th Amendment, but it is a real stretch to apply this to information that is hundreds of miles from your house and person.
I think there should be a "right to privacy", but it just isn't there in the Constitution. Judges who conjure one out of thin air can just as easily make it go away. For such things, we should rely on the amendment process, not the fickle imagination of judges.
Maybe they just have a lot of problems with the Postal Service delivering their magazine to the wrong address.
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".
You mean it will be interesting for the people whose houses are more than 10 years old. The satellite photos on the public databases are so dated it's ridiculous. Wow look, I got a magazine with a picture of a corn field on the cover!
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
The real killer app will be when Home & Garden's magazine zooms in on your home and analyzes your landscaping and house. Different people might get different covers and articles on rejuvenating dead lawns, trimming overgrown trees, or xeriscaping. You might even discover you've won the contest for most beautiful garden with an aerial view.
And they could even analyze your house & land for marketing opportunities. If the satellite veiw is oblique and the paint is peeling, they could forward your name to the local aluminum siding company or house painters.
Time to get a PO box!
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
That could explain all the email I receive about suntan oil and penis enlargement......
...by the discount the post office gives them for the thoughtfully included map to the delivery address on the cover.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
...you live in Area 51?
Bureaucracy loves company.
Ostensibly, the main idea was to make readers more aware of the realities of living life as a row in a database. But then there's Chief Editor Gillispie's closing quote: "What if you received a magazine that only had stories and ads that you were interested in and pertained to you? That would be a magazine that everyone would want to read." This seems to indicate a conflict of interests; that Reason recognizes the peril, but can't help but consider the possibilities of catering to individual readers by exploiting personal data.
Of course, this attempt at pandering generally fails in my experience. My being interested in 'Gardening' or 'Outdoor Life' is lightyears away from wanting a subscription to Better Homes and Gardens or Sports Illustrated, personalization or no. This is due to the critical distinction between essence and product.
The phrase "Free Minds, Free Markets" also seems to me to be a contradiction in terms, although "Free Markets" leaves room for interpretation. I guess I'm reading this wrong, because to my mind, the notion of individuality resists the concept of demographic marketing, no matter how "free."
My mailman will still manage to deliver it to the neighbor's house by accident.
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.
My magazine cover would feature the goatse guy.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
...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?
-wife- Hey hun we just got the customized Magazine in the mail. OH kewl it even has a picture of the whole neighborhood! What quality even!
-looks closer- Hey hun is that you? What are doing with the neighbors wife? Why is she naked??
- my $.02? - you can't have it...it's all I have!!
They've been printing my ADDRESS on the cover for months.
John.
Really anyone with reasonable knowlegde could do this with a phonebook and and internet connection. Now when the magazine comes and says, "Bob Smith, This is your life..." then I'll put my tinfoil hat on.
"What if you received a magazine that only had stories and ads that you were interested in and pertained to you?"
It's called Maxim.
See my Home Theater
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.
Any opinion you like, as long as it's capitalist extremism.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
they took the picture of your house while your mistress was parked outside?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I just got my May copy of Playboy, and it had My NAME IN BOLD PRINT AND A PICTURE OF ME NAKED ON THE COVER!!!
And that's not just my copy, that's *all of them*. I hear Hugh Hefner was pissed because I dissed him on Fark.
The Lesson? Don't mess with guys who buy ink by the barrel and can photoshop a tattoo of Fabio onto your butt.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
But what kind of magazine would it be? People read Car and Driver, Discover, Time, whatever because, on the whole, most or all of the articles already appeal to the reader. If I only got one magazine, and that one magazine had everything I might want to read in it, it'd transcend the definition of "magazine" and go straight on to "encyclopedia". After all, I'm a guy with a lot of interests - porn^H^H^H^H art, computers, little sports, little world news, little business, etc. etc. etc.
There'd also have to be a fantastic way to keep track of my changing reading habits. I'm not reading the same thing I was a year - or even 6 months! - ago.
There'd also be no more "Did you see the article in BLAH?" If they fine-tune this thing too much, get my profile so unique, it's possible that none of my friends will read the same articles as me, and have no opportunity to do so, since their ultra-huge-personalized-magazine won't include it, and they can't get just that article or 3.99 magazine on the rack anymore.
Besides, doctor's offices would be filled with magazines that nobody would want to read
I can see it now, I picture of my weedy front lawn with "Mow Your Freakin' Law, John Doe" as the cover story. What is next? A picture of my car with words "Wash Me" add to the trunk by the Magazine editors!
I can't afford a sig!
it will have my name and a sat picture of my house? What happens if someone picks up my copy first? That is a privacy concern!
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
terraserver.microsoft.com. Big deal.
The only worthwhile topic of this article is that printing technology has come down to a point where they can print a customized cover for every subscriber. Now that's amazing.
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.
Could be worse. I'm sure a lot of people would get a lot more nervous if it were not a circle but crosshairs.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
What happens if you're a subscriber but your copy has the house & name of someone else? Isn't that against some kind of privacy law for which NY Times could potentially be sued?
http://www.chmodoplusr.com/
- High-income areas get the Mercedes ad
- Lower-income areas get Chrysler
- Rural areas get Dodge Truck
thus maximizing their investment, by showing people ads for things they might actually want to buy (and be willing to afford). With access to the right data, this can be fine-tuned far beyond what census data about your ZIP code discloses.[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
while we're at it, i would imagine it's IT FAIL YOU ;)
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"