Ten years ago, I published the first post on this weblog. Entitled simply "The Read/Write Web," it was a manifesto of sorts. The first era of the Web, from the 1990s to the early 2000s, had been largely read-only. It was stuck in the old broadcast model: professionals published the content, the rest of us merely read it.

But in 2002 and 2003, I could sense that a sea change was near. Tools were being developed that empowered everyone—including me—to publish to the Web.

"The goal now is to convert the Web into a two-way system,” I wrote in that debut post. “Ordinary people should be able to write to the Web, just as easily as they can browse and read it.”

ReadWrite’s Predictive Powers

Well, that goal was well and truly achieved! While nobody could have predicted in 2003 the scale of innovation that would occur, I’m proud that over the years ReadWrite did predict many technologies that people take for granted today.

For example, I remember writing a lot about the Web Office over the first five years of this blog. In our end-of-year predictions post in 2006, I wrote: “The consumerization of the enterprise trend will start to infiltrate corporate IT, in the form of Web-based office apps and more collaborative systems.” Scan your typical office in 2013 and you will see Google Docs, corporate versions of Twitter, Evernote Business, and many more applications that came from the consumer world.

Also look at the rise of Amazon Web Services, a cloud-computing platform from the online retailer that was well ahead of its time and which we wrote about extensively (mostly thanks to Alex Iskold, one of our earliest feature writers).

Our 2006 predictions post stated:

“We also think there will be moves toward an Amazon-like web services stack from other players, particularly Google. For example Google may want to catch up with Amazon’s S3 – EC2 services. And where Google goes, you can expect Microsoft to go too.”

Since 2006, not only have Google and Microsoft created cloud-computing platforms, but so have Apple, Oracle, HP, Rackspace and many other companies.

I’m also proud that ReadWrite wrote about some trends long before they became popular. For example, The Internet of Things—when real-world objects get connected to the Internet. ReadWrite was the only tech blog exploring that trend back in 2009, when only a few brave developers and startups were building consumer products. Fast forward to 2013 and the market for Internet-connected cars, thermostats, security systems, watches and other real-world objects is thriving.

A Decade of Astounding Innovation

In April 2003, I was an unknown 31-year old website manager from New Zealand, about as far away from Silicon Valley as you can get. I may not have been in the right place, but I was certainly at the right time. Over the next ten years, I got to explore and help chronicle the emergence of first the Social Web (2003-2005), then the Mobile Web (2007-2008)—arguably the two biggest waves of technology innovation over the past decade.

ReadWrite has witnessed—and written about—the creation of many revolutionary technologies:

• MySpace, the first mass-market social network, launched in August 2003.
• Flickr, which became the leading photo-sharing website of the era, launched in February 2004.
• Facebook launched to Harvard students in February 2004 and eventually opened to the wider public in September 2006.
• YouTube, the video-sharing phenomenon, opened as a beta site in May 2005.
• Twitter was created in 2006 and had its first tipping point in March 2007 at SXSW.
• The iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs in January 2007.
• Google announced its open-source mobile operating system, Android, in November 2007.
• Apple launched the App Store in July 2008.
• The first Android phone, the HTC Dream, was released in October 2008.
• The iPad was released in April 2010.
• Google+ launched in June 2011.

Here’s To The Next Decade!

When I started ReadWrite in 2003, the Web was primarily about what was happening on your home computer. And as outlined above, a lot of innovation happened in that era of the Web—Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and more.

But today, the Internet is everywhere. As Owen Thomas wrote in his introductory post as ReadWrite’s new editor-in-chief, the Internet is now in our pockets, on our bodies, scattered around the physical world. So I’m thrilled that the blog I founded will chronicle this new era of the Read/Write Web—a world where everything is read/write.

Photo composite by Madeleine Weiss.

Healthcare is a huge, important industry and it’s being transformed by technology all across the board: from the personal health apps that many of us use on our smartphones, to the electronic health records in doctor practices and hospitals, to the emerging revolution of digitized genomic data.

What all of those things have in common is digital data, much of it on the Internet. Indeed there’s so much digital health data now that the term “Big Data” is commonly used to describe it. Another trend is that healthcare is moving beyond the doctor’s office and into the daily lives of consumers, via smartphone apps and new platforms that host health data.

Surprises

I began by asking Matthew and Indu what, if anything, surprised them over the few days of the conference.

Matthew noted the evolution of natural language processing tools, which combined with Big Data are leading to surprising innovations. An example is a startup called Treato, an impressive search engine for health data that I got an inside look at during the event. Treato effectively scans millions of pieces of unstructured health data on the Web and orders it - for example creating user reviews of medication.

Matthew also noted the rise of “small data making vital connections.” He pointed to one of two winners of the DCtoVC Startup Showcase, Beyond Lucid Technologies. This company offers an electronic health record (EHR) for emergency response agencies (such as ambulances). It’s an example of a health solution that delivers the right piece of information at the right time and place, enabling better on-the-spot decision making. This service potentially saves lives.

Indu commented that big data is also enabling a “new level of personalization and targeting.” She pointed to the winner of Health 2.0 Developers’ World Cup, New York City-based MedTurner. The service uses natural language processing to monitor tweets for health-related information. It then analyzes those tweets and “offers relevant advice and resources.” Use cases include monitoring for signs of depression or suicide, tracking CDC travelers’ health, rare disease clinical trial matching and Medline Plus drug safety and side effects alerting.

Personalized Medicine

One of the most exciting areas of health technology currently is what’s been termed ‘personalized medicine.’ MedTurner is one example, but the most interest is in consumer genomics companies like 23AndMe. The hope is that genomic data will lead to hyper-personalization of disease prevention and treatment.

As Indu remarked, the current era of personalized medicine is “the oppositie of patient social network PatientsLikeMe. There’s no one like me.”

Once again, Big Data is a key ingredient. Indu explained that “in order to have hyper-personalization, you need to tap the crowd and look for the pattern. It’s a kind of closed loop.”

If there is one major concern though, it’s that doctors aren’t adequately trained to use genomic data. Indu called this a “massive gap” in healthcare. However she mentioned there are a couple of apps that help physicians navigate genomics.

The Danger Of Information Overload

One of the challenges of Big Data is that it may lead to information overload for doctors. Particularly when genomics takes off (it’s still early in that era). I asked Indu and Matthew how doctors will cope.

Indu agreed that it’s “a massive problem [and] there is a firehose coming.” But she sees a lot of potential in dashboard tools that help doctors interpret and manage the data inflow. An example for the consumer audience is TicTrac, the winner of the startup Launch! segment during the Health 2.0 conference. TicTrac, currently in private beta, lets you track a variety of health data in one place.

What’s needed is a kind of advanced TicTrac for doctors. “The hope is in some of the organizational tools that are not going to make single dumps of data, but are going to send a pattern,” said Indu. “Or they’re going to allow somebody very quickly to look at millions of data points and visualize [that] this patient needs an intervention.”

Dashboard tools that do this kind of pattern visualization will become “the doctor’s best friend,” according to Indu.

Matthew agreed, adding that post-operative apps that enable healthcare organizations to monitor a patient’s condition after they leave the hospital will also help.

Technology Down The Stack

Which leads us to another trend in health technology: spreading the workload around. Indu noted that “putting technology all the way down the stack,” so that patients or nurses can actively monitor health data, allows doctors to "just deal with things that need [their] expertise.”

In particular, “the prevention part [of healthcare] is moving more to self-management tools” for consumers.

Matthew remarked that this will allow doctors to see fewer patients for longer time periods, because they will be focusing on the patients that need them the most. So for example, instead of a doctor seeing a lot of patients for 7 minutes each (which is the norm these days) they will be able to spend 45 minutes on 7–8 patients per day.

In summary, the Health 2.0 Conference showcased a lot of innovative health technology that will soon be not only in your physician’s hands - but yours too. Big Data is driving much of this innovation. The more health data we have and the better it is analyzed and structured using technology, the more effective our healthcare system will be.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Jeff Tangney is a 40-year old entrepreneur whose first company, Epocrates, did an IPO in 2011. The windfall from that made Tangney a wealthy man. But rather than go into retirement, he dived back into the digital health market with a new startup called Doximity. It's a "professional network for physicians," allowing them to collaborate and share information.

During his DC to VC keynote, Tangney announced that Doximity has reached 100,000 physicians on its network, which is 16% of all U.S. physicians. 15% of Doximity's physicians use the product at least weekly.

One quote from Tangney during his speech on stage really brought home how difficult the digital health space is. He said that "fax machines are the lingua franca of healthcare." According to Tangney, 15 billion pages of faxes are sent in the U.S. every year.

Indeed, when I asked Tangney after his keynote what are the main features of Doximity, he replied that eFaxing is one of the top ones. Even with a modern electronic tool like Doximity, faxing is ingrained in the workflow of physicians. Or as Tangney put it to me, "it's still an industry that runs by and large by the fax machine" - as well as doctors talking to each other on the phone. So moving physicians to digital communication and record-keeping is hard.

But who can blame doctors, because they're forced to be very vigilant about patient privacy and legal compliance risks every day. I asked Tangney about how these factors influence the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) by hospitals and physician practises, which has been generally slow. I described my own experience as a patient with diabetes type 1 - I said it's frustrating that I cannot share my daily blood sugar readings electronically with my doctor.

Tangney's reply highlighted the real-world issues that he and other digital health entrepreneurs face. While I can send my blood sugar readings to my doctor, as a CSV file by email for example, my doctor could potentially be sued if he sends it onto a specialist for an opinion. Those risks are a disincentive to adopt new digital technologies.

To tackle those kinds of barriers, Tangney thinks that the health IT market will "start to break off and create its own Internet" - because it needs security and authentication. There will be a highly secure Internet network for physicians to swap data, such as my blood sugar readings. The consumer Internet will intersect with health networks, but essentially the infrastructure and legal requirements for health data will require a much more secure environment.

So there are difficult challenges for health 2.0 entrepreneurs. But I got the sense that Tangney would be happy enough right now just to transition doctors from fax machines to the iPad!

Health 2.0 feels like it's at the same stage in 2012. The big companies are present at this event, all of them selling "platforms" for digital health. In a single panel today, four BigCos presented their versions of such a platform: AT&T, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Aetna. I sat down with AT&T's Chief Medical Officer after the panel, to see what it has to offer.

The panel I'm referring to was cheekily entitled 'Platforms for Unplatforms' and it was moderated by Matthew Holt, who co-founded the Health 2.0 conference with Indu Subaiya in 2007. The panel description made it clear that these BigCo platforms are a new phenomenon:

"For years at Health 2.0 we've been describing the mix of applications and devices working together as "unplatforms". In the past few months several major health care technology organizations have announced the launch of platforms and are trying to attract developers and health care technology companies to use them."

The panel itself was an interesting look at the platforms for each company, but to better understand why the BigCos are now entering this space I sat down with AT&T’s Chief Medical Information Officer, Dr. Geeta Nayyar, to talk about its new AT&T mHealth Platform.

As the name suggests, the AT&T mHealth Platform is mobile-focused. It aims to "provide a single environment where consumers can securely aggregate their data from across silos — insurance companies, doctor's offices, connected devices, applications — and other data sources for better and easier access." AT&T is partnering with startup health products like Fitbit, myZeo and the Withings WiFi Body Scale. It also plans to create an open platform, meaning that third party developers must make their data available for sharing across applications.

Currently the AT&T mHealth Platform is targeted to enterprises, as an offering for employees. 

An early AT&T health product, although not on the mHealth platform, is DiabetesManager. It was developed in partnership with diabetes software company WellDoc. AT&T tested this out on its own employees, in a pilot program for people with Type 2 diabetes. Dr. Nayyar reported back, in a blog post, that "72 percent rated DiabetesManager as a “highly useful” as a tool to help them manage their diabetes."

OK, the pilot was somewhat biased - an AT&T product tested on AT&T employees. But after meeting Dr. Nayyar today, I was impressed by her passion for health technology. As well as being AT&T's Chief Medical Information Officer, Dr. Nayyar is an iPad-toting Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine for the Department of Rheumatology at George Washington University. She definitely walks the talk.

Dr. Nayyar explained that health data is distributed across many "data islands" currently, which is another theme I'm hearing regularly at the Health 2.0 Conference. The reason why AT&T built a platform - indeed the reason why each of the BigCos in the panel I mentioned built a platform - is to aggregate those data islands for users.

It's a noble goal and one we all want to see achieved, no matter which company - big or small - does it. The scale of technology and expertise of companies like AT&T, Qualcomm, Microsoft and Aetna gives them an advantage. That's why they're all building platforms. I do wonder though if AT&T's approach is too focused on its actual customers: enterprises. I have some doubts about the others too - for example, would you trust all of your health data to an insurance company (Aetna)? I wouldn't.

One thing is for sure: the digital health platform is a huge opportunity and the market is up for grabs right now. We don't know which of these, or other, BigCos will end up being the main players. But I for one welcome their entrance to the digital health market.

For Health 2.0 in 2012, just as it was for Web 2.0 in 2006/07, it's business time.

Top image: IBM at Web 2.0 Expo 2007; photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

DrBonnie360 principal Dr. Bonnie Feldman, a former dentist, health consultant and sell-side equity analyst, identified six ways Big Data is being applied in healthcare:

• Support Research - Genomics and Beyond
• Transform Data to Information
• Support Self-Care
• Support Providers - Improve Patient Care
• Increase Awareness
• Pool Data to Build a Better Ecosystem

The report neatly outlines an "evolving ecosystem" of healthcare companies that are implementing these types of Big Data solutions.

An example of the first type ("Support Research - Genomics and Beyond") is GNS Healthcare, which I profiled on ReadWriteWeb earlier this year. GNS Healthcare builds cause-and-effect models, using large genetic data sets, to determine what drives diseases and cures.

Towards Personalized Medicine

Personalized medicine has been a catchphrase of digital health, for good reason: it puts the patient at the center of healthcare.

“Genetic information by itself is useless, unless we can put it into context for the patient," said Sultan Meghi, Vice President of Product Strategy at analytics company Appistry. Indeed, if you replace the word "genetic" with "health," you have a good summary of what all of these Big Data focused digital health companies offer.

One of the most exiting aspects of Big Data in healthcare is the potential to predict - and hopefully then prevent - disease. A company called Predixion Software offers "cloud-based predictive analytic software to hospitals [...] to reduce readmissions and prevent hospital-acquired conditions." It might also be used in the near future "as a tool for prevention of chronic disease – e.g., diabetes."

This wouldn't be a digital health story without mobile devices being mentioned. The fifth type of Big Data healthcare company is focused on "Increasing Awareness." A mobile app called Asthmapolis is an example of this type. A mobile sensor device is attached to an asthma inhaler, which then monitors where and when asthma attacks happen. The device wirelessly syncs with an iOS/Android app, allowing users to track their triggers and symptoms.

This short video from Asthmapolis shows how it works; and also succinctly demonstrates the value of Big Data in healthcare.

What About Privacy?

The report does a great job of showcasing current and future Big Data services in healthcare, but it also doesn't shy away from the elephant in the room: privacy. DrBonnie360 interviewed more than 30 companies for this report and all of them were concerned with privacy. The report states that each company declared "at the very least, adherence to HIPAA requirements, and many claim more."

The report identifies one company, behavioral analytics platform Ginger.io, as having "a particularly progressive view of data privacy, which includes the philosophy that patients own their own data, they can opt-in, choose when and how to share their data and can discontinue data sharing at any time."

Reading this excellent white paper reinforces that Big Data will be a big driver in digital health innovation. The full presentation is embedded below.

The Facebook of 2007-09 is a totally different ballgame to the Facebook of 2012. Here are three of the more obvious reasons why:

1. Your Facebook profile page used to be a "Wall" of messages to and from your friends. Now it is a multimedia-filled "Timeline" of your everyday life.
2. These days we're accustomed to using lists to segment our friends. We post different things to different lists.
3. Facebook now allows you to post updates publicly, a concept which didn't exist back in 2009. Related, people you don't know can now "subscribe" to your public updates.

The upshot: while those old Wall posts probably were always visible on a user's profile page, that's a very different thing to those posts being visible on today's Facebook Timeline.

Even the concept of a "friend" has changed. In 2008, your entire Facebook network may have been what is now labeled "Close Friends". In 2012, we also have "Acquaintances" (as the name suggests, people you don't know very well) and "Subscribers" (people you probably don't know at all). Not to mention the many custom lists we're encouraged to create - I have one entitled "Tech Influentials", for example. These aren't necessarily friends of mine, but they're people who I befriended for professional reasons.

The point is, being social on Facebook encompasses far more today. Back in 2008, if you posted something on your Wall then it was very likely meant for real-life friends. But nowadays, if you post something to all your Facebook friends, then it will almost certainly be seen by people you don't know in real life. Some of us have several hundreds of such "friends". That's a big change in context.

Put another way: in 2007-09, Facebook was an exclusive, private social network. You had no reason to think that would ever change. But change it did, from December 2009 when Facebook suddenly set the new default for status messages as public. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote on ReadWriteWeb at the time that "this move cuts against the fundamental proposition of Facebook: that your status updates are only visible to those you opt-in to exposing them to."

And that's the crux of this latest privacy bungle from Facebook. Once again, the company has unilaterally decided to impose a new concept of privacy onto its users. It may be technically correct of Facebook to claim that what you posted to your friends via your Wall in 2008 is equivalent to a Timeline post to your friends in 2012. But for most Facebook users today, a friend in 2012 simply doesn't mean the same thing as a friend in 2008.

So the problem isn't that Wall posts from 2007-09 "were always public [and] looked like something you might say privately today," as Gizmodo and other publications are characterizing this.

The problem is that Facebook in 2007-09 was actually a private space. Not quasi-private. Not public-but-looked-like-private. In 2008, Facebook was - hard as it may be to fathom nowadays - private.

But in 2012, that is no longer the case. So when we have something to say to real-life friends, we either use private messaging or we do a post to a small subset of our friends - our "Close Friends" or a custom list of people (such as "Family").

So this isn't the fault of Facebook's users. We knew what we were doing then, when we posted to our Walls. And we know what we're doing now. The lesson here is that Facebook should have given us the option of selecting the privacy setting for those old Wall posts. Or maybe even made those old posts available to "Close Friends" only, as the default. Then we could adjust if we wished.

Facebook's mistake was that it had no right to assume that our "Friends" of 2007-09 means the same thing as "Friends" in 2012.

The 2012 EMR Impact Report from drchrono surveys the usage and impact of EMRs in practices of 25 physicians or less. Drchrono surveyed 1,300 U.S. physicians who currently use EMRs, over a 30 day period. 77% of the practices surveyed were independent practices and over half (52.2%) had just one medical practitioner. Only 10.9% were practices with more than ten practitioners.

It should be noted that EMRs still have a fair way to go until they are commonly used by physicians. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2011 55% of physicians had adopted an electronic health record (EHR) system. That indicates that drchrono's report is a study of relatively early adoptors. Indeed, the report notes that the majority of respondents (60.1%) had only used an EMR for less than one year.

But already, nearly 3/4 (74.5%) say that an EMR has increased the efficiency of their practice. The key efficiency metric, according to drchrono CEO Michael Nusimow and COO Daniel Kivatonos, is time savings.

Doctors are usually busy and harried individuals, as I witness firsthand whenever I go to see my own doctor. So an EMR system that saves a physician time every day is a top priority, Nusimow and Kivatonos told me. The report states that the average time saved using an EMR is 61.7 minutes per day.

Other benefits to physicians include reduced patient paperwork and reduced time spent charting.

What About The Patient?

I asked Nusimow and Kivatonos whether the patients themselves are seeing much benefit of EMRs at this time. The report indicates no, stating that patients are not yet "fully utilizing enhanced forms of patient communications enabled by EMRs." For example, only 10.9% of physicians reported that patients access test results online via their EMR platform. As a patient myself, with diabetes type 1, this is precisely the kind of data I want to access electronically.

Drchrono's focus at this time is very much on getting small to medium physician practices to adopt its iPad-based EMR for their own internal records keeping. Because this type of EMR is so new, Nusimow and Kivatonos told me, doctors might not be able to cope with patients pushing a lot of data to them.

However, they view usage from tech savvy patients as an important part of EMR adoption. In order to fully realise the potential of EMRs, patients must become more engaged with their own health data. So the aim of drchrono, said Nusimow and Kivatonos, is to build a great patient-doctor relationship.

Why drchrono Is Bullish On The iPad

In a study by Manhattan Research released in May 2012, 62% of physicians stated that they used a tablet for professional purposes. The iPad was "the dominant platform" in that figure. 62% of physicians using a tablet professionally is an impressive figure and it shows why the tablet - and in particular the market-leading iPad - is key to continued EMR adoption.

Drchrono is a vendor of iPad and iPhone EMR applications. It currently has around 30,000 registered providers and 1 million patients on its service. [note: in my July post about drchrono, I quoted a January 2012 article from the New York Times stating that 50,000 doctors used drchrono. In today's interview, I was told that the figure the NY Times used was incorrect and should've read 15,000.] Drchrono is one of a number of startups offering EMR software. Others include Practice Fusion, HealthFusion, CareCloud, Athenahealth, GloStream and ElationEMR.

It's clear to me that the tablet is going to be the defining platform for EMRs going forward. It's the perfect device for an EMR, since the physician can carry it around everywhere they go and the patient can monitor their own health data from home. I'm looking forward to the day when I can sit down with my doctor, iPad in hand, and discuss the EMR data that is so important to my health.

23andMe's API (application programming interface) allows authorized third-party developers to build applications that make use of your genetic data - if you give permission! The latter point will be a big concern for many people, because according to API specialist blog ProgrammableWeb, the 23andMe API gives access to personally identifiable data such as profile information. As a new 23andMe user myself, I'm going to want some reassurance from 23andMe before I give my permission. Giving third parties access to that kind of data could have big implications down the road, for example being refused access to medical insurance or losing out on a job.

But let's assume for a moment that the privacy protection gets tighter, or 23andMe is able to convince me and others that their genetic data is safe. What kind of things can we expect from the API?

At the Quantified Self Conference in Palo Alto earlier this month, 23andMe director of engineering Mike Polcari announced the API. Polcari told genetics news website BioInform that conference participants expressed "a lot of enthusiasm" about the API. He mentioned some examples of apps that might be developed:

[...] apps that would incorporate an individual’s DNA into his or her family tree; apps for running candidate gene studies using data from CureTogether — a community-based health site that 23andMe acquired this summer; and a sleep tracking app that would import SNPs associated with caffeine metabolism and circadian rhythms.

The API may also enable researchers "to perform linkage studies or genome-wide association studies using 23andMe data," Polcari told BioInform.

These potential genetic applications won't assuage the main concern people have with 23andMe and its DNA tests: do you really want to know about your genetic risks, given that it could cause more worry than good? A discussion on Q&A web service Quora has 30 mostly pro replies to that question. Jason Menayan found his results to be "incredibly useful" - for example, he discovered that he is a slow caffeine metabolizer and so "should limit my caffeine intake for my cardiovascular health."

Ultimately, it's your choice whether to do one of these tests. The price is still an obstacle for many, but that will continue to come down (it started out at $1000 when it launched at the end of 2007).

The results could potentially be of great benefit to my health. I'm pretty excited about that alone. And I'm cautiously excited about the future applications by third-party developers, because it will hopefully enable me to do useful things with my genetic data.

Have you had a DNA test done and if so, did you find it useful?

The so-called "big six" in trade book publishing across North America consists of Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Group, Random House and Simon & Schuster. There are hundreds of other publishing firms, some of them subsidiaries of the big six. But for the purposes of this post, we'll focus on the biggies and highlight three of the main social networks they use: Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

Twitter Book Clubs

Penguin USA has done an innovative thing with Twitter, holding a monthly book club with the help of hashtags and tweeting authors. Every month Penguin staff selects a book by one of its authors and invites people to tweet about it using the hashtag #readpenguin. It holds "mini book club meetings" during the course of the month, in which the book author answers questions from readers. The current book of the month is Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures by Emma Straub.

Simon & Schuster also runs book club type activities on Twitter, plus Facebook.

Facebook - Differing Strategies

The big six don't all use Facebook in the same way. Hachette irregularly updates its Facebook page (there are only 3 updates in September so far) and probably as a result it only has 3,998 likes currently. Compare that to Random House, which appears to do 3-4 Facebook updates per day on average and has 38,369 likes.

However, it could be that Hachette is simply trying a different Facebook strategy from the norm. Because instead of focusing on its corporate brand page, Hachette promotes the Facebook pages of its authors and fan pages for Hachette books.

One of Hachette's leading authors, novelist James Patterson, has 3.4 million likes. Patterson appears to be regularly - and personally - updating his Facebook page. He's not quite as prolific as Paulo Coelho, the master of social media among authors, but it's still a good effort.

Tumblr Is Popular With Book Publishers

Blog advertising company Blogads did some research In January this year and found that Tumblr is especially popular with book publishers.

HarperCollins, which has a presence on just about every social media service, has a couple of good Tumblrs. The corporate HarperCollins Tumblr features blog posts by staff, alongside quirky promotional ideas like "Seen on the Subway" (photos of everyday people reading HarperCollins books). One of the company's divisions, Harper Perennial, also does a colorful Tumblr.

The Author & Reader Take Center Stage

That's just a taste of what book publishers are doing with social media. I got the sense that it's incredibly varied and that each of the big six is experimenting with social media in a different way. They all had one thing in common though: the author and her audience is paramount when it comes to social media.

Whether it's helping promote an author's Facebook page, blogging about an author on Tumblr, or organizing a Twitter discussion between an author and her readers, the publishing houses understand that the Social Web is all about authors engaging with their readers.

The American Library Association (ALA) released a report earlier this year entitled The 2012 State of America’s Libraries. The report states that "Facebook and Twitter in particular have proven themselves useful tools not only in publicizing the availability of online collections, but also in building trusted relationships with users."

According to a survey conducted by the South Carolina State Library, 88% of respondents (all library workers) claimed to use Facebook in their work. Twitter was second most popular, at 46.8%.

So what are libraries using Facebook for and what does "building trusted relationships with users" mean? The ALA report elaborated:

"Social networking is used to publicize library events such as gaming nights; to alert users to additions to collections; to provide links to articles, videos, or Web content that might prove relevant or helpful to patrons; and to provide a conduit for community information. Social media also play an important role in fostering relationships with the community by allowing patrons to ask questions or provide feedback about library services."

This is precisely how my own local library, Wellington Library, uses Facebook. It's on a raft of other social media platforms too - including Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. Wellington Library even updates its Facebook page using IFTTT, a syndication service beloved by Web geeks.

Enhanced Catalogs & Mobile Apps

But there's more that libraries can do to create a social experience for their patrons, other than being active on Facebook. LibraryThing for Libraries is a set of services offered by the company LibraryThing. It features catalog enhancements (such as user-generated book reviews and recommendations) and a customizable mobile app called Library Anywhere.

In June, LibraryThing for Libraries had 800,000 "professionally vetted reviews." While library users could just go and get reviews and recommendations from Amazon or Goodreads, it does seem useful to have them integrated into a library's catalog.

In a discussion in Branch, Portland librarian Justin Hoenke called LibraryThing "the ultimate social reading tool for libraries." Although Sarah Houghton, Director of the San Rafael Public Library in California, cast some doubt on whether library patrons use the reviews regularly.

Reimagining The Library Book

Some libraries are experimenting not just with socializing the library catalog, but the reading process itself. New York Public Library has released an interactive website called Candide 2.0, a community annotated version of Voltaire's 1759 book called Candide. The NYPL version is described as an "experiment in public reading and communal annotation."

It'll be fascinating to track how libraries continue to bring the Social Web to their organizations. I haven't even touched on the increasing prevalence of e-books inside libraries - another trend that potentially creates a more social experience for library patrons (for example, with social book highlights).

How about you, do you still go to your local library? If so, I'd love to hear your thoughts on how Web technologies are being deployed by your public library.

Last year Amazon launched Kindle Profiles, a kind of homepage on the Web for your Kindle reading. But while indie social network Goodreads has almost doubled its user base over the past year, to now boast 10 million registered users, Kindle Profiles hasn't captured the imagination of book fans online. That's because a lot of Kindle activity is private by default. In other words, Kindle Profiles isn't as social as Goodreads.

It's not that Kindle Profiles doesn't offer social options. It does, but they're usually turned off by default. What's more, the social options in Kindle Profiles seem almost half-hearted. Take its Facebook integration, for example. Compare the long list of things you can update your Timeline with on Goodreads, to the meagre "change the status of a public book" actions in Kindle Profiles:

Kindle Profiles: Geared Towards Private Highlights

Here's how Kindle Profiles works. It lists out all of the books you have purchased on Amazon, or that are on your wish list. These aren't necessarily Kindle books either - the paper-bound books you bought or wish to buy are included in your books list. Each book in your list has a reading status and rating, which is populated from your Amazon profile if available.

The most useful aspect of Kindle Profiles for me over the past year, since I last reviewed it in August 2011, has been the Your Highlights section. This displays all of the - mostly private - highlights I have made in Kindle e-books. I read a lot of non-fiction and highlight passages that interest me. So Kindle Profiles gives me a great archive on the Web of those highlights, for my future reference. I can also save them to Evernote (which I have done for a few recent books).

Why haven't I made my Kindle Profiles highlights public? Because I can't be bothered changing them from the default private. I see no need to either, since I'm not overly interested in what other people have highlighted in a book I just read myself.

Amazon doesn't seem that concerned about marketing Kindle Profiles as a social tool. In my review last year, I remarked that "as Facebook has done over the past couple of years with its initially private service, over time Amazon will likely prompt and tease you to make your private content public."

But Amazon hasn't done that. Judging by the Books with the Most Public Notes page, a relatively small proportion of Kindle users are making their notes public. The Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, number 5 on that list, has public notes by 485 people (make that 486, as I just made mine public too - what the heck). 486 Kindle readers with public notes is nothing to be sneezed at, but it's probably a small percentage of the total Kindle readers who made highlights in this highly quotable Jobs biography.

Findings: Goes Straight For The Public Highlights

While Amazon keeps Kindle Profiles a mostly private affair, a startup is making a bold attempt to turn book highlights and quotes into social objects. Findings was launched in October last year by writer Steven Johnson, BetaWorks Founder and CEO John Borthwick and developer Corey Menscher.

Findings can import your book data from Kindle, via a browser bookmarklet. Interestingly, Findings has opted to make your Kindle highlights public by default. The bookmarklet page warns:

"All of your Kindle highlights (regardless of whether they are marked public or private on Amazon) will be synced to Findings and default to public visibility."

While I can see the rationale in reversing the privacy settings of your Kindle highlights in bulk (to make Findings social out of the box), it's also quite presumptuous. Your Kindle Highlights may be private for a reason - for example, you are reading a job hunting book and don't want your highlights to be made public. Sure you can change the public setting for a particular book back to private, but it's easy to forget to do that.

Update: The day after this post was published, Findings announced that Amazon has requested the Kindle sync functionality be removed: "Another part of our service has been the ability to make your Kindle reading more social by importing and sharing your Kindle highlights. A few days ago, Amazon formally notified us that they believe this functionality violates their terms of service."

So are book highlights as social objects going to be a phenomenon? I'm skeptical. Highlighting and note-making in e-books is a personal thing. I make highlights in a book because I want to remember a passage or idea in it. While I am curious sometimes to see what other people highlighted from a book I read, it's far more valuable to me to see what books other people are reading - and Goodreads is the place to go for that.

So I think Amazon is doing the right thing by keeping highlights and notes private by default. Well, let's face it - Amazon doesn't stand to gain much by giving external parties (like Findings) that valuable reader metadata. So it's simply choosing the path of least resistance.

While I admire the gumption of Findings to try and make highlights social, it will be an uphill battle fighting Amazon's privacy settings and Goodreads' social momentum.

My current tally of magazine subscriptions is 12. Of those, only one is not a digital magazine that I read on my iPad - and that's because it's a niche health magazine that isn't available digitally. I also discovered in my review that only two of my twelve annual subscriptions cost more than US$50 per year. So not only are most magazines that I'm interested in available digitally, they're all relatively inexpensive.

Here's a table showing ten of my digital magazine subscriptions: what I pay annually for each of them, and which platform I use. For various reasons, the prices I pay aren't necessarily the cheapest available. Sometimes my location (New Zealand) increases the cost, or sometimes I opt for a higher priced better reading experience on a certain platform. But in general, I do tend to go with the least expensive option - because the reading experience usually isn't that much different across platforms. The exception is when a publisher creates an interactive experience for tablet devices, which is Wired's approach. But a simple PDF is the most common format these days for digital magazines.

As you can see, the pricing is probably the most attractive feature of digital magazines. I pay from 39 cents to $2.50 per issue (if I discount Scientific American, as my subscription for that is for both digital and print). Of course, American customers are long used to paying ridiculously low prices for magazine subscriptions. That's because advertising is typically the main revenue source for commercial magazines - and that advertising mostly targets US customers. So publishers take the hit on printing and delivery costs, in order to reach the US audience. But what my American friends may not realize is that for the rest of the world, prices for popular magazines like Rolling Stone and Wired have traditionally been high. So digital magazines make the low priced magazine subscription model available to the rest of the world.

Which brings me to the second major advantage of digital magazines: they're available immediately, no matter where you are located. For me, out here in Middle-earth, that is most appreciated.

The Bad News: Apple & Amazon Don't Make It Easy

The only bad thing about the state of digital magazines is how poor the user experience for subscriptions is on both iTunes and Kindle.

Apple has a Newsstand concept, but it's confusing. You first have to download the publisher's app, then subscribe either from within the app or on the publisher's website. Once downloaded, each of these apps is housed in the Newsstand - a kind of meta-app. But the user experience leaves a lot to be desired. For example: you need to manually move around the magazine apps, to separate out your subscriptions from magazine apps you downloaded but didn't subscribe to. Then sometimes you find yourself in the iTunes Store, when you thought you were in Newsstand (or are they the same thing? Yes, kind of... but then no, Newsstand is a separate icon on your iPad). The user experience of Newsstand is very unlike Apple: it's unintuitive and a bit disorienting.

Managing your subscriptions in iTunes (what you're subscribed to, when it's up for renewal, etc.) is even more confusing. Every time I want to check my iTunes magazine subscriptions, it takes me 5 minutes or so to work out where to go. For the record, you need to go to your iTunes account page and it's an almost hidden option on there.

As for Amazon's Kindle, if anything it's even harder than iTunes to manage your subscriptions. There is no option to manage your subscriptions from within the Kindle iPad app, as far as I could see. I eventually found it on the Amazon website under Your Account > Manage Your Kindle > Magazines.

One last confusing aspect for digital magazine consumers is that often publishers have subscription offers on their own websites, which can be different from what's available in iTunes, Kindle or Zinio. That's entirely up to the publisher of course, but it does add another level of head scratching for the consumer.

The shining light in the digital magazine space right now is Zinio. It offers a wonderful selection of digital magazines and its pricing is almost always better than either iTunes or Amazon Kindle. After my review today, I ended up moving a couple of my subscriptions from Kindle over to Zinio because the pricing and overall experience is better. While Zinio's user interface for managing subscriptions is not perfect, it's markedly better than iTunes or Kindle. Plus it's about to improve even more, with a redesign (currently in beta, screenshot below).

We can only hope that Apple and Amazon get their acts together and follow the example set by Zinio. Because right now, managing digital magazine subscriptions is a frustrating process.

Like many entrepreneurs, Moysidis is a very determined person. After being largely ignored by publishers, her next step was to take an intern job at Simon & Schuster. There she was dismayed to find her very own novel - submitted under a pen name - in the slush pile! On the plus side, Moysidis saw first hand that it was impossible for a publishing house like Simon & Schuster to pick up every book sent to them. They simply receive too many manuscripts.

After seeing the writer submission process from the other side, Moysidis concluded that publishers are so overwhelmed that they aren't discovering enough new talent. She felt that writers needed a better way to try and get noticed, which ultimately would help publishers too. So she created Writer's Bloq, a wonderfully named social network where writers can post snippets of their work and network with others in the industry.

The first thing that struck me about Writer's Bloq when I signed up for a nosey, was the crisp and clean design. Goodreads could learn a thing or two from that.

Writer's Bloq has two main sections: a writing section and a reading section. As with any social network, it's advisable to have a look around first before posting your own content. There are many ways you can discover the writing of others - by genre, format, status (published or unpublished), or tags.

You can choose to read a piece immediately, or save it for later. You can also send it to your Kindle. The staples of social networks are all there: comments, likes, sharing via Facebook and Twitter, the option to subscribe to the author.

What's In It For Writers

Writer's Bloq is clearly very early in its evolution - there isn't a huge amount of activity on the site right now. That is of course the problem every new social network has. Goodreads is at the opposite end of the social network spectrum. It's a mature social network that reached its tipping point a few years ago and is now in the midst of mainstreaming (10 million users and counting!).

So the challenge for Writer's Bloq is to get its core user base - budding writers and people in the publishing industry - to sign up. I asked Nayia Moysidis why new writers should post their work on Writer's Bloq. Why not just self-publish, if they aren't able to land a traditional publisher? She replied that when writers submit a manuscript to a publisher, essentially they are after the following three things:

1. Editing and serious feedback on their work.
2. Marketing.
3. Validation.

Writers can't get those things by self-publishing, said Moysidis. The aim of Writer's Bloq is to give writers a better opportunity to attract publishers. They can promote their work on Writer's Bloq and get feedback from peers - and perhaps even from publishers sniffing around the site. The community helps self-select the best writing, through ratings and comments.

Not a Novel Idea

There are many other social networks for writers on the Web. So getting new users is going to be nearly as much of a challenge for Moysidis as getting a publisher to notice her debut novel.

But according to Moysidis, most of the existing social networks for authors are geared towards helping writers self-publish. Writer's Bloq is all about helping new writers get the attention of publishing houses. Which begs the question: how will Writer's Bloq attract publishing industry people to the network?

Moysidis replied that Writer's Bloq is starting out with a focus on writers, but it intends to open up to publishers officially at a later date. In the meantime, she said that industry professionals are already registering... as writers. Many in the industry are budding writers themselves.

Like any new social network, Writer's Bloq has a very tough road ahead of it. The key is to get network effects going, in other words get more and more writers - and ideally publishing industry people too - signed up and using the site regularly. Easier said than done. But Writer's Bloq has a great design, enthusiastic early users and a Kickstarter project (see video below) to raise money for offline meetups - cleverly called "bloqparties."

Perhaps most importantly, Writer's Bloq has a passionate, focused founder in Nayia Moysidis. Whose ultimate goal, by the way, is still to get her first novel published.

Goodreads was launched in January 2007 and currently has over 10 million registered users, who have collectively added 370 million books to the site. Goodreads has experienced strong growth over the past 18 months. It had 5 million registered users in May 2011, increasing to 6 million by December. In 2012 the growth of Goodreads went up another level, thanks mainly to its integration with Facebook Timeline in January.

Goodreads: Onto A Good Thing

In Goodreads you're encouraged to add books into custom shelves (a.k.a. lists), such as "Currently Reading," "Read," and "To Read." That way, anybody you have connected to can see what you're reading or intend to read - and vice versa. Goodreads also has all the other common features of a social network: discussions, ratings, reviews, messaging.

Goodreads also has groups galore. Founder and CEO Otis Chandler told ReadWriteWeb in April that "we have 20,000 groups on our site, such as The Sword and Laser (part of the new Geek & Sundry YouTube channel), The Next Best Book Club and small, private, meet-in-real-life groups like the Boston Book Club."

The foundation of Goodreads is providing social recommendations. As Chandler wrote, when explaining why he built Goodreads, "when I want to know what books to read, I'd rather turn to a friend than any random person or bestseller list." That core functionality got a huge boost from the Facebook integration in January. After all, the more friends you can connect to on Goodreads, the more books you'll discover.

One interesting thing to watch is Goodreads' partnerships with publishing houses and authors. Chandler wrote on Quora last year that "we work with all major book publishers and many mid-majors to help them launch their books to our audience of book readers." It also helps self-publishers promote their books.

Even authors who aren't officially connected to Goodreads have their own profile on the site. For example, I'm a fan of Michael Lewis on Goodreads - his page features biographical information, book links, blog posts (from his Blogspot site), video and more.

Are There Good Alternatives To Goodreads?

Goodreads competes with LibraryThing and Shelfari. Both are far behind Goodreads in number of users, however Shelfari remains a threat because of its owner: Amazon. Indeed, as Goodreads has grown, its reliance on Amazon's product advertising API for book information became untenable. That's why in January of this year, Goodreads announced that Ingram, the largest wholesaler of books in the U.S., was its new primary data partner.

Whatever qualities LibraryThing and Shelfari have - and both have a better design than Goodreads - it's hard to go past Goodreads, due to its large user base and excellent Facebook integration. When it comes to getting social recommendations for books, those are the two key factors.

The two biggest threats to Goodreads now are: 1) if Facebook decides to do book reviews itself; and 2) if Amazon gets its act together and starts pushing Shelfari (or Kindle Profiles, its own semi-serious social experiment). However I think the chances of either Facebook or Amazon ruining Goodreads' good thing is slim, at least in the short term. Facebook is better off supporting and partnering with Goodreads, as it does with other specialist networks (like Spotify). Meanwhile Amazon is too busy trying to control the e-reader and book retail markets, so Shelfari will probably continue being largely ignored by Bezos and crew.

2012 has been a good great year for Goodreads. If you're a bookworm like me, I recommend you check it out - and friend me there!

The premise behind Prismatic is that you connect to one or more of your social networks, then it will create a personal newsfeed based on your interests. It's not quite as simple as that though. You first need to add your social networks and then select news sources and topics from suggestions that Prismatic makes.

You can do the initial setup in the iPhone app, but there are more options on the website - for example adding a connection to your Google Reader account. I found this rather confusing, since it wasn't clear on the mobile version that there was actually a Google Reader connection. Also the navigation took some getting used to, on both platforms. For example, you access the home screen on mobile by swiping from the right of the screen to the left. But despite these minor problems, eventually I managed to select a bunch of news sources (such as ReadWriteWeb and Wired) and topics (such as "Innovation" and "Health Care").

Let's now look at the reading and browsing experience on the iPhone app. The app presents you with a home screen that looks like this:

One of the challenges of news browsing on mobile is how to present multiple topics or folders on such a small screen. Other mobile news apps, like Feedly and My6sense, take the approach of utilizing Google Reader's folders. To its credit, Prismatic is attempting to go beyond the folder metaphor. By listing your most recent topics first - and making a 'More' button available if you want to browse more topics - it does a good job of showing you your main interests.

When you click on a topic, this is the kind of screen you see:

To read a story, click on it. Another nice touch is that within each story, there are a few relevant tweets - which you can re-tweet, favorite or reply to.

Topic discovery is also nicely done. You can find new topics via tags on stories, or by browsing "Global News" and "Suggestions" (the latter comes from your social network connections).

The Verdict On Prismatic

In June of this year, I chose Feedly as ReadWriteWeb's recommended mobile RSS Reader. But in all honesty, I haven't used Feedly much since then. That's because I generally don't do targeted browsing on my iPhone. However I sometimes do serendipitous browsing, usually on Flipboard's iPhone app when I have a few minutes to spare. In other words, I tend to use my phone for very casual browsing and not so much for digging into topics of interest.

So where do I do most of my topic browsing? On the computer, using Google Reader and some of the services I've mentioned previously in this series (Webicina, Reddit, Engagio and Bottlenose). I then either read the story on my computer, or save it to Instapaper for reading later. So while I do a fair amount of reading on my phone - usually in Instapaper - I prefer the power of my computer for targeted browsing.

I like Prismatic, it has a nifty design for mobile and the navigation is better for topics than the likes of Feedly and my6sense. But I'm skeptical that I'll find much use for it. As with the other apps in this series, check back with me in a month's time to see if I'm still using it. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on Prismatic and how it compares to other mobile RSS readers.

Series Summary: 5 Social Media Filters To Check Out

1. Webicina (niche content example; in this case health)
2. Reddit (community topic filter)
3. Engagio (Gmail integration)
4. Bottlenose (automated topic filter)
5. Prismatic (mobile filter)

Bottlenose was founded by well-regarded Semantic Web geek Nova Spivack. At first glance, it seems like a jumble of information: messages, links, topics, comments, streams and who knows what else. But once I got over that hurdle, Bottlenose delivered me relevant news and social media discussion about Andy Murray - and other topics of interest.

Like Engagio, which I reviewed yesterday, Bottlenose is less than a year old. It was launched last December and version 2 was released in February.

Essentially Bottlenose is a social media dashboard, allowing you to manage your Twitter, Facebook and a few other social streams. You can read and share from your Twitter and Facebook accounts using Bottlenose, much as you would do in a similar dashboard product like TweetDeck and Hootsuite. What makes Bottlenose different is that it attempts to automatically filter the information you see from your social accounts. 

Like Spivack's previous product, the knowledge management service Twine, Bottlenose uses semantic web technologies and machine learning to sort and filter information. Unfortunately Twine was plagued by usability issues, so I was curious to see whether Bottlenose would suffer the same problems.

The Murray Test

One of the trending topics in my social network when I tested Bottlenose was "Murray." I was rather hoping this would be about the talkative Flight of The Conchords manager, Murray Hewitt, but it turned out to be about British tennis player Andy Murray. He just won the US Open title, so he is understandably trending on Twitter and Facebook right now.

The default view, when you click the "Murray" tag, is a 3-column page of Andy Murray related content entitled "Now." It's a mix of news and social media information. The left-hand side of the page has a list of news articles. If you click one, the beginning of the article slides out from the right-hand side of the webpage. The middle column features trending Twitter topics related to Andy Murray. Below that is a list of the most relevant Twitter users, including the official Twitter account of the man himself: @andy_murray. The column to the right of the page features comments, mainly from Twitter in this case - but it could include Facebook and any other social network you connect.

So if you're looking for the latest news and discussion about Murray's US Open victory, then Bottlenose certainly obliges.

And that's just the "Now" view. There are four other views: Stream, Paper, Pictures, Sonar. The Stream is a straight chronological list of the latest activity for the "Murray" tag; Paper is a Flipboard-like view; Pictures is...well, you can guess; Sonar is a graphical layout of keywords related to "Murray."

As well as trending topics from your own Twitter and Facebook social networks, you can see what the global trends are (click "Global Trends" in the main navigation). Say you want to see the latest news and social chatter about Mitt Romney, the Republican Presidential candidate. Clicking the "Romney" tag brings up some interesting information, both news and discussions on social media.

I also searched for several topics of interest to me personally and Bottlenose presented a lot of useful information. Note though that (at least for me) the "Save to Dashboard" link did not work.

Bottlenose has a lot of other features, which Our Jon Mitchell described in detail last December. Check out his review if you have power user tendencies.

The Verdict

So is Bottlenose easy to use? While it took a couple of minutes of clicking around for me to make sense of the homepage, after that I found it much easier to understand than Twine. My one suggestion for Bottlenose would be to find a way to make the product less forbidding on first glance. Perhaps highlight a trending topic on the homepage, which would give new users an easier entry point.

As to whether Bottlenose is useful, in my tests Bottlenose delivered a relevant mix of news and social media content about topics of interest to me. But, as with Engagio, check back with me in a month or so to see if I'm still using it. In the meantime, I recommend you give Bottlenose a try yourself and see if it meets your needs as a social media filter.

Series Summary: 5 Social Media Filters To Check Out

1. Webicina (niche content example; in this case health)
2. Reddit (community topic filter)
3. Engagio (Gmail integration)
4. Bottlenose (automated topic filter)
5. Prismatic (mobile filter)

Engagio is a way to track many of the social discussions you have online. Every time you post an update or make a comment on a connected social service - such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, ReadWriteWeb and other blogs that use Disqus (a social blog commenting service) - the resulting conversation is stored in Engagio. Many of the most popular social media services can be hooked into Engagio, although some (like Reddit) can't.

For all its utility, I must admit that Engagio became one of many, many apps that I signed up for and used enthusiastically for a day or two... but then rarely, if ever, went back again. Ironically, it became just another Web destination to visit every day - and I had enough of those already. However, today I re-visited my Engagio account in order to research this article and happily discovered the email integration. Since I use Gmail every single day, this is a great way to entice me back!

Specifically, Engagio now offers a Chrome extension for Gmail. Actually this was released in May (our coverage), but for whatever reason I didn't test it out back then. The extension means you no longer have to go to the engagio.com website, you can use Engagio from within Gmail. Obviously you need to use both Gmail and the Google Chrome browser in order to take advantage of this feature.

Not only can you track your social conversations from within Gmail, you can also compose updates to several of your social networks - including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Engagio is less than a year old, having first launched in a private beta last December. It launched publicly in February this year. Because Engagio is still young, it has some user interface issues to iron out - for example I had trouble filtering out Twitter re-tweets. That said, there are some nifty filtering options such as viewing direct replies only.

Give Engagio a whirl, if you're looking for an easier way to manage your online social activity. I especially recommend the Chrome extension for Gmail. Although... check back with me in a month or two to see if I'm still using it!

Series Summary: 5 Social Media Filters To Check Out

1. Webicina (niche content example; in this case health)
2. Reddit (community topic filter)
3. Engagio (Gmail integration)
4. Bottlenose (automated topic filter)
5. Prismatic (mobile filter)

While Amazon faces stiff competition in the tablet market, in the eReader market Amazon is dominant. The latest version of the Kindle eReader, named the Paperwhite, boasts a higher resolution, front-lit screen and will retail from $119. It's a compelling upgrade, but the real reason for Amazon's dominance in the eReader market isn't the hardware - it's Amazon's continued innovation and market power in eBooks.

On stage today, Bezos confirmed that sales of Kindle eBooks overtook paper books around the beginning of 2011. Kindle eBook sales have trended steeply upwards since then.

It's notable that paper books have also grown, which is evidence of Amazon's power in the book industry. As Borders and Barnes & Noble shut down more and more of their bricks-and-mortar stores, Amazon's e-commerce business continues to increase sales - in both paper books and eBooks.

Another reason for Amazon's increasing book sales is that people are buying more books. In a Guardian article last month, Amazon.co.uk described this as a "renaissance of reading." Amazon claims this renaissance was ushered in by the Kindle. The UK arm of Amazon told the Guardian that "British Kindle users were buying four times as many books as they were prior to owning a Kindle." That statistic was repeated by Bezos today.

eBook Sales Now 15% Of Total Book Sales

According to BookStats 2012, a mid-year report from the Association of American Publishers and Book Industry Study Group, eBooks made up 15 percent of all trade book sales in 2011. In particular, in 2011 eBooks became the number one format for adult fiction.

OK, most of that is 50 Shades of Grey, The Hunger Games and similar populist fare (says the snobbish english lit grad). But regardless, it's undeniable that eBooks have finally taken hold of the publishing industry.

Amazon is profiting mightily from eBook trends - whether or not it caused them. Its new eReader, the Kindle Paperwhite, will very likely increase its market leadership.

It isn't just eBook trends and new eReader hardware that is responsible for Amazon's prime position in the book industry. The company is also shaking things up in book publishing and formats.

Kindle Direct Publishing

Amazon's self-publishing service, called Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), gives authors 70% royalties. In a remarkable statistic, Bezos revealed that 27 of the top 100 Kindle books are from the KDP program.

Kindle Singles

Kindle Singles are short-form books that typically sell for a couple of dollars each. Bezos positioned Kindle Singles as halfway between a magazine article (under 5,000 words) and a book (over 30,000 words). 3.5 million Kindle Singles have been sold to date, said Bezos, 35 of which have reached the Kindle Top 50.

Kindle Serials

Today Amazon introduced a new Kindle book format, which harkens back to an old literature publishing strategy: serials. Just as Charles Dickens used to publish his novels in monthly or weekly installments, Kindle authors can choose to release their books in serial form.

From the consumer's point of view, buy the first "episode" and you'll receive all future episodes as they are released.

Amazon is releasing eight serials initially, priced at $1.99 each (which includes all future installments). In addition, Charles Dickens' books being re-released as Kindle Serials.

All Hail King Jeff

Add to the mix other Amazon offerings - like Kindle Owners' Lending Library, Kindle-exclusive books and Kindle Highlights - and Amazon has a formidable service offering for books, of all kinds.

Amazon reigns in the book kingdom, which seems to be a good thing for readers and authors. For readers: books are cheaper than ever before, the eReader hardware is getting better (as evidenced by the Paperwhite Kindle launched today), Web services are becoming more flexible (serials, singles) and social (Lending Library, Highlights). For authors: there is an easy and attractive self-publishing option (KDP) and more flexibility in format.

Of course some of King Jeff's subjects aren't as happy: book publishing houses and competing book retailers probably see it more like The Spanish Inquisition, than a renaissance. But such is the price of progress. For now King Jeff reigns.

Photos: The Verge

Regardless of whether you want to participate in reddit's community, which tends to be dominated by the younger demographic, reddit's topic filtering is a great way to keep track of topics near and dear to you. Reddit's own description of itself sums it up: "reddit is a source for what's new and popular online."

Using Reddit As A News Filter

All you need to register a Reddit account is a username (that isn't already taken) and a password. There's no Facebook, Twitter or Google+ connection - you don't even need an email address to sign up.

Content-wise, reddit is based around topics. The site's FAQ explains how this works:

"Reddit is made up of hundreds of sub-communities, each focused on a specific topic. There's a reddit for science, a reddit for music, and probably a reddit for your nearest city. By default, new users are subscribed to a selection of the most popular ones, but you'll get a lot more enjoyment out of the site if you take the time to subscribe to ones that appeal to you. After doing so, the front page will change to show a customized listing tailored to your interests."
(Emphasis ours)

Specifically, when you register you're automatically subscribed to 20 of the most popular topics. But as the FAQ points out, you'll want to personalize this - which means unsubscribing to the default topics that don't interest you and searching for topics that do.

To find new topics to subscribe to, either check the sidebar of a reddit (see screenshot below, of my Technology reddit page), or use the internal search. There are also several external directories. One called metareddit is currently tracking 167,388 reddits!

The reddit frontpage will show the hottest stories from the topics you're subscribed to. You can order the news in other ways, such as chronologically or by "controversial." To manage your topics, go to the my reddits page.

Niche Topics Galore: subreddits

Reddit covers all the bases for general interest topics - such as technology, politics, baseball and so on. But where reddit really shines is in its niche topics, or "subreddits" as they are termed. For example, suggested subreddits on the Technology page include: Privacy, Renewable Energy, Kickstarter, and (one of my personal favorites) Imaginary Technology.

Although this post is focused on using reddit as a topical news filtering tool, you may get a lot of use out of reddit as a discussions forum. In the Neuro reddit, for example, the top two items currently are questions posed by people wanting information about an aspect of neuroscience. One asks, "What would you ask a world-class neuroscience researcher if you had the opportunity to talk with them for 10 minutes?" The replies vary in quality, as in any social media site, but there are often great discussions in reddit - across hundreds of topics.

If you have any tips for using reddit effectively as a news filter, please leave a comment - or create a reddit thread!

Series Summary: 5 Social Media Filters To Check Out

1. Webicina (niche content example; in this case health)
2. Reddit (community topic filter)
3. Engagio (Gmail integration)
4. Bottlenose (automated topic filter)
5. Prismatic (mobile filter)

Webicina was founded in 2008 by Bertalan Meskó, a doctor from Budapest, Hungary. He also runs the well regarded medical blog, ScienceRoll (one of my personal favorite blogs). Webicina is aimed at both medical professionals and "e-patients" (the "e" in this case stands for "empowered"). Included in Webicina is an RSS tool called PeRSSonalized Medicine, which creates personalized feeds of your favorite media sources.

Webicina covers over 100 medical topics - the latest addition being COPD, or Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. It's able to cover so many topics because it crowdsources the curation of each category.

Tracking Medical Topics With Webicina

Here's how to get started using Webicina, using my own medical interests as an example. I have diabetes type 1, so I clicked the e-patient option and sure enough diabetes is covered in Webicina.

For each topic, Webicina has curated resources in a variety of content types: news, blog, podcast, Twitter, and so on. For example, the Twitter page listed thirty leading diabetes-related Twitter accounts.

You could simply browse the Webicina topic pages, but to get the most use out of Webicina I recommend you set up at least one personalized RSS feed. Click on the "Follow this category on PeRSSonalized Medicine" button (see bottom-left in the screenshot below) and it will open up the filtering options.

Firstly, sign up for a free Webicina account. This option only seems to display when you land on the PeRSSonalized Medicine front page (one of a number of design issues I noticed in Webicina). However, it's a simple sign-up process from there, as you can register using your Facebook, Twitter or Google+ credentials.

Now it's time to create your personalized feeds. To do this, go to a category of interest and click each of the four tabs (for example, "Medical Blogs"). Click "personalize it" in each tab to select your sources. You can choose to either create four separate feeds - one for each tab, using the "follow this page" RSS button - or create a feed for the entire category by clicking "follow this category."

Since there are no descriptions of the sources, it's difficult to know which to select. Also, in a rather confusing design choice, you need to check the sources you don't want.

In the blogging tab, I decided to choose just five diabetes blogs - in order to keep the noise down. I then clicked "save settings," which displayed the five blogs I chose.

You can either use that filtered webpage as your regular checkpoint, by bookmarking it in your browser, or subscribe to an RSS feed of the page. RSS is preferable if you plan to monitor the topic regularly, since updates are sent to your RSS Reader. Unfortunately, this is where the design got awkward again. I initially clicked on the "follow this page" button and it saved the RSS file to my desktop. Not very practical. I eventually figured out that I need to right-click and save the RSS link, then copy it into my RSS Reader (I use Google Reader).

As you have seen, the trouble with Webicina is that it isn't particularly user friendly. Even a simple thing such as explaining the difference between "follow this page" and "follow this category". It may sound obvious - the former is a feed of just that page (in this case, of diabetes blogs), the latter is a feed for the whole category. But it could be explained much better by Webicina.

In conclusion, the personalization of Webicina is a little clunky and the design is, well, very web 2.0 (we're now onto 3.0 at least!). But the curation of Webicina, judging by the diabetes topic I saw, is high quality. Overall, Webicina is a useful resource for anyone who wants to track a particular medical topic.

Series Summary: 5 Social Media Filters To Check Out

1. Webicina (niche content example; in this case health)
2. Reddit (community topic filter)
3. Engagio (Gmail integration)
4. Bottlenose (automated topic filter)
5. Prismatic (mobile filter)