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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."
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.
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.
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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????
"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
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.
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.
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......
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.
They've been printing my ADDRESS on the cover for months.
John.
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'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.