VanityFairer: The Magazine’s Social Faux Pas?

Seems like everybody and his posse is trying to figure out how to use Twitter to promote a business. A lot of these feeds are loaded with ham-fisted promotions that are as likely to repel as attract. Mainstream media have been no more skilled than your typical supplement pusher, for the most part.

Which brings us to Vanityfairer, a Twitter “fan”feed by someone who identifies “her”self only as Vanity Fair Wayfarer and whose bio reads only “I heart Vanity Fair magazine.”

“Her” updates are really pretty good–mainly pointers to stuff about, in or related to content from the celebrity-addled, scrumptiously visual, annoyingly literate and therefore-hard-to-ignore glossy.

So is this a real fanfeed, or a Twitter Potemkin village?

I couldn’t find any reference to the Vanity Fairer feed on VF’s website.

But back in June VF Daily did a characteristically high-ironic item about the magazine’s new Facebook page. Editorial assistant Bill Bradley writes that he’d been charged with getting 10,000 members for a VF page in two months, at pain of losing his job. [As of this writing, the Facebook page has 8,610 fans, and according to the site, Bradley is no longer in the employ of VF. Of course we have no idea whether this is true.] So clearly someone at VF has been pondering what the magazine should do in the world of social media.

[In fact, read this wonderful entry from Vantiy Fair Daily about VF mid-level editorial staff's recent indoctrination to social media by Conde Nast, which led to the whole Bradley gambit.]

Back to Vanityfairer: It looks to me like the Twitter feed is an undisclosed VF inside job. Vanity Fairer is following a conspicuous list of 51 prominentos from the worlds of technology and media [including Tim O'Reilly, Esther Dyson, WSJ's Kara Swisher, 2.0 author Sarah Lacy, John Dickerson of Slate, Gawker, Ana Marie Cox and TechCrunch, A-list tech bloggers plus a few C-list hangers-on like me].

The trick to building a Twitter posse, as savvy Twitsters know, is to “follow” people whom you hope will follow you back–or actually maybe write a blog item about the Twitter stream to gain some 2.0 brainshare [!]. So there is clearly something tactical and ambitious about Vanity Fairer’s “following” list. Vanity Fairer appears to be following none of her own personal friends, for instance. A bit curious.

[I should point out that as of this date, the only people who have taken Vanity Fairer's bait are CNN social media ubiquitist Rick Sanchez, MSNBC cartoonist Daryl Cagle and someone named Vitor Fasano, who Twitters, I think, in Portugese. And me.]

I direct-messaged Vanity Fairer to see what’s up. “She” wrote this:

Good to hear from you, am actually a fan of *you*rs (Drama 2.0) too! Yes, I am just a fan of VF mag; pretty sure they have no idea I exist. [The reference to "Drama 2.0" regards a mysterious fellow from the world of online advertising and marketing whose schtick is a hilarious bitter cynicism about web 2.0 foolishness. Which is to say his blog is kind of like mine, but his is really good and apparently makes money.]

Then this, an hour later:

p.s. I wish VF HAD put me up to this, it’s something they should be doing!

Then this, after I asked why she was following only media luminaries but not friends:

Have another acct on Twitter 4 friends; this acct lets me “play” a bit anonymously. Media lums I follow here r people I think VF wld follow?

Huh.

For now, let’s have some sport and, what the heck, assume the worst about Vanit Fairer.

If Vanity Fairer is an official VF venture–someone doing the corporate flagship magazine’s bidding but disguised as an independent fan–that’s a bad move by Conde Nast.

Rules No. 1 through 10 of social media are “Don’t f*ck with people.”

Don’t use social media to play pretend. If you want to make a cool Twitter feed for your publication, go for it. But don’t make like it’s not yours. If you’re a real independent fan of the magazine, launch a Twitter feed. But if you have some some sort of entanglement with the pub, say so. No shame in it.

Of course, circumstantial evidence notwithstanding, it’s possible that Vanity Fairer is an independent effort. In which case I am once again spewing nonsense into the digital void. The only consolation is that this is not the first time, nor likely to be the last.

But if I’m right. . .

Vanity Fair has made its reputation by illuminating the world of tuxedo-and-ball-gown “high” society.

Wouldn’t it be a hoot if it stomped into this foreign new social swirl like a drunken hillbilly?

The Economist, Hyperwords & the Clickable Universe

Lately I’ve been selecting one story each week that is so worth spending time with I recommend actually printing it out on paper.

I nearly chose Rummaging Through the Internet, from the Economist, but then I caught myself. It’s important to read–but vital that you don’t print it out.

The story takes a look at some emerging technologies that enhance browsing, mostly with 3-D functionality. These are great tools, several of them new to me.

But before the article gets to the 3-D stuff, it introduces something else I wasn’t familiar with, a Firefox (3.0!) add-on called Hyperwords. This utility among many other things turns every word in a story into a hyperlink–without the annoying underline and colored font.

As you browse, select any word and a small menu pops up, offering a bewildering range of actions you can take regarding that word. But the money feature here is the ability to highlight a word–like, say, Hyperwords–then click on Hyperwords/Search/Google first result. . .and up pops a visual of the site represented by the word.

It’s a cool utility, with all of the neat features and bloatware excesses of most.

Still, the reason I mention it is this: The Economist article about all this neat new browsing functionality  has no hyperlinks [shake head here at how mainstream publishers whose businesses are collapsing due to the web don't take even the most rudimentary actions to optimize their content for the web].

So: Install the Hyperwords Firefox plug-in, then read the Economist article.

Select the name of a 3-D browser mentioned in the story you want to check out, click on it as if it’s a hyperlink using Hyperwords, and you’ll go directly to the page. For instance, highlight PicLens, a CoolIris product, and here’s what you get to in one click:

Otherwise, you’d have to go do a Google search on the product name, click on it, lose your place in the Economist article, hate life briefly, etc.

Anyhow, the Economist article is a good one, but it’s worthless online unless you download the Hyperwords tool it writes about in order to easily access the other cool tools it cites. (Do make sure you check out SpaceTime whether you read the Economist article or not).

And ask yourself:

How could a medium as web-stupid as the Economist co-exist in the same digital universe as these advanced technologies it writes about?

And which of them do you think will own the future?

Web 2.D’oh! Roundup

The Weekly Print ‘n’ Read Feature

Last week I introduced a new feature, the Web 2.Oh. . .Really? Print ‘n’ Read (sm). Each week I highlight one piece of journalism so worthy of extended attention that it’s actually worth printing out and reading later on, away from the computer.

So fire up the ol’ inkjet and click “print” for Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

This selection is either incredibly on-point or ironic, depending on the state of your particular neural network.

Carr’s story offers the rather obvious conclusions that: (1) adult brains can be remapped through repeated activity; and (2) this includes activities like the constant click-and-dive of typical web use. Ergo: Web use makes our brains more acclimated to skimming wide rather than reading deep.

But, as Carr points out, forever has it been thus. When Neitzsche shifted from writing longhand to writing with a typewriter, it changed the way he thought:

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

Which is to say, printing out and reading this article about the effect of web use on your brain may help preserve your current style of brainwork. My small contribution to the status quo.

n.b. Do not miss digital journalism bodhisattva Scott Karp’s response to Carr’s article. Karp’s determined, mapcap journey through the world of analog and digital journalism to track down the magazine, the article, the quote attributed to him, and the proper context for that quote is likely to remap your prefrontal cortex  all by itself. I’d tell you to print it out too, but I’m afraid your printer may pull a HAL.

Great Moments in Digital Journalism History, Cont’d

A blog entry last week in which I gave positive reviews to The Washington Times’ renovated website provoked a response from a reader whose confession may mark a key moment in newspaper history: A reader who canceled a subscription to the print edition because she thinks the website stinks.

I am not making this up. Witnesseth:

Karen LH Says:
9, June, 2008 at 9:38 pm

The Washington Times redesign is a disaster. We actually cancelled our subscription over it. . .

[A moment of silence, please, while we all ponder the baffling implications of this.]

Who says newspaper advertising is dead?

On Wednesday, CMS launched a national advertising campaign to promote its Hospital Compare Web site, which provides data on the quality of care in hospitals across the U.S., USA Today reports.–From California Healthline

And finally: A solution to social network overload

Know a candidate for this job? Growing company now hiring a Facebook Secretary

Forbes.com Gets Social [Media]

Magazine publisher Malcolm Forbes was a famous socialite known for throwing fantabulous parties for his rich pals. The online partner of the magazine bearing his name is getting pretty social too. It’s no boozefest on a yacht, but it invites its readers to a lively get-together.

[End of party metaphor here, just in time.]

Most publications now accept that their web sites shouldn’t just present published content with multimedia accessories. They’re slowly giving up on building “walled gardens” that try to prevent visitors from escaping. What’s evolving is widespread use of social media that engage readers to respond to, evaluate and create content. It’s tricky. It’s scary. But it’s essential.

Forbes.com’s social media features:

Reader recommendations: The site gives readers a nearly equal say in surfacing the good stuff: A “Top Rated” module appears above the fold, just below Top News. Too many sites bury this feature.

Community: Its “Stock Pickers Community,” puts a different civilian investor, with picks and a detailed performance record, on the main stage every day. Community members can choose to “follow” people (like Twitter or Facebook, but with a purpose). In aggregate, the number of followers constitute a group endorsement. It’s easy to see how this can encourage to Digg-like mischief ["follow me and I'll follow you!"]. But hey, welcome to 2.0, where the wisdom of the crowds battles the self-interest of the cabal constantly.

Bloggers: Okay, the Forbes.com bloggers are gathering communities of readers, but someone has to tell these folks to write shorter. Their entries are as long as front-of-the-book magazine articles or in-print opinion columns. That’s not going to work on the web. Five hundred words, two links and out, gang. [I exclude myself from this edict, of course.]

A wiki: The OrgChart wiki is one of the coolest and most wonderfully dangerous features I’ve seen on a suit-and-tie site like Forbes.com. Type a company name and out pops a visual representation of who falls where on the food chain, with little popup notes. Have information to add? Corrections to make? Have at it. It’s like Wikipedia for pod-dwellers and corporate climbers with bad attitudes. Demote your enemies! Appoint your pals to the board! In Web 2.0, you’re in control.

It’s encouraging to see Forbes.com continue to evolve, even after its big renovation last year. That’s the way the web works: Iterate, don’t redesign.

And invite your guests to the party. They’ll misbehave, but that’s part of the fun.

Atlantic.com: They Get It, They Really Get It!

The Atlantic, the magazine that is rarely described without the adjective “venerable,” has undergone an astonishing web rebirth–or, rather, series of rebirths.

I don’t mean they’ve gone on the web. They did that a long time ago. I mean they’ve gotten the web.

The magazine (which, with its we’re-doing-it-meta-so-we’re-not-really-pandering cover story on Britney Spears is perhaps trying to earn the adjective “venereal”) has updated is website three times in the past year. Each time it’s gotten better–more web-savvy, more accessible and less self-infatuated.

With its first re-do in August 2007 (for which I gave it this fanny-slam), it retained its dead-from-the-neck-up policy of asking readers to pay to read the full text of the best articles that appeared in the magazine. It also pretty much kept readers out of the game entirely, sticking with the other dead-from-the-neck-up policy of pushing material to web readers but hardly letting them talk back. Smug.

A few months ago the Atlantic website was re-iterated, guillotining the pay-to-play policy and letting readers romp a bit–adding a not-very-venerably-named “Hot Reads” box of most read, commented, etc.,  splaying out an excess of thinky blogs on the home page, and opening up to reader comments.

And this month a new iteration takes the website into the new world almost fully. Its new section, named The Current, features

• Three blissfully short contributions daily, navigable by calendar
• Links to “best opinion”–off-site
• Comments galore–including a Post and Riposte forum section
• Smartly curated related-content links, both off- and on-site
• Free access to back-issue (and related web-only) content back to 1995 (for issues before that, you still have to pay)
• Continuation of the high-cranial blogs, some of which now integrate multimedia

I could pick nits, but won’t. The Atlantic has demonstrated one of the most important concepts of web development–repeated iteration and continuous improvement. I suspect more improvements will come, but already the website has cleared a very high bar.

Who knows? Someday people may refer to theatlantic.com itself as “venerable.”

The Atlantic: Finding Its Sea Legs

I’m delighted to report that as of today the website for The Atlantic magazine has stuck an epee in its self-infatuated, self-destructive policy of permitting only subscribers of the print edition to read articles published in the printed magazine online.

A New York Times story reports on the change of heart. The Atlantic’s policy, while not entirely uncommon, is so dunderheaded it’s hard to know where to start.

• People who subscribe to the print edition don’t need to read the stories online–so they essentially receive nothing of value for their patronage.
• Potential new readers are punished and insulted when they go to read an article and get stopped by the dead-tree police. Subscribe or pay $2.95 to read any further, pal. You got a problem with that? 

This kind of policy begins when someone in a corner office sputters, “But we can’t give it away for free, we’ll erode our subscriber base!” and turns into reality when others in the room lacking the courage or brains to  explain why this is a terrible way to treat high quality content these days.

Atlantic’s operators got religion when they realized, hey, the site’s excellent blogs were getting enough traffic to sell–they’ve even hired some people to sell ads for it now!  

Go to theatlantic.com and you can–if you’re feeling like a chair in front of a computer is a good way to spend the next 45 minutes or so of your life–read every freaking word of Jeffrey Goldberg’s excellent piece on the Middle East after Iraq. Or  the usually brilliant Dana Milbank’s not-all-that-funny excerpt of his new book about lifeways along the Potomac.

Interesting fact in the Times story: 308,000 visitors hit the Atlantic’s web site last month; 400,000 subscribe to the magazine. (Atlantickers say the web site traffic really a lot higher. Wish I had a Facebook stock option for every time I’ve heard that one.)

The last time I looked at Atlantic’s site, I cited them for highbrow contempt of reader–not even having the decency to  publish a most read/most e-mailed listing to allow their readers to have some sort of say in what appears on the site.

Well, that’s changed too.

There is now a lipstick red box that squeals “Hot Reads” and includes most popular items from the magazine and online, and the items with the most comments. Good move, but now they’re trying too hard to be with the smart set: Lookit, kids, I get it now! 

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