I like infoporn. I love to pore over traffic charts for websites, or look at survey numbers from opinion polls, or sit back and marvel at a really good graph, which is infoporn’s centerfold. One area where the data-crunching promise of personal computing has delivered is in capturing, assembling, and displaying this kind of labor-intensive data for easy access by the layperson.

It’s become ubiquitous, too: think about how every social network service presents some sort of low-level and instant feedback on itself, from Twitter followers to Facebook friends, Diggs to Google Reader Likes (also now in use on Google Buzz). Older Internet communication, like email or instant messaging, tended to focus on two-person relationships and relied on self-evident participation measurements–you could ask the other person if she received your email, or see for yourself whether she responded in your IM chat. As soon as more than two people are involved in communication, however, the measurement burden begins to grow, and the PC is there to start measuring and reporting on that relationship.

The promise of analytics–data presented in a way that helps you make more money, to put it crudely–is a component of this new publishing world that has the potential to dramatically empower authors and help them make money. On the other hand, like every other aspect of new publishing it’s also potentially disruptive, or at the very least distracting. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone who writes or publishes wants to know how to use Twitter as a promotional tool to drive sales, and to that end the British book reading website Lovereading–sort of the ugly UK cousin to Goodreads, only with a smaller membership and more directly tied to big publishing houses–just completed a survey of members to ask them about Twitter. The results weren’t favorable to Twitter as an effective recommendation source or promotional tool, with The Bookseller going so far as to write, “The book-buying public may be largely immune to suggestions from Twitter, Facebook and other sites.”

Uh oh.

But wait! Before you dismiss Twitter as an also-ran in marketing, check out who Lovereading surveyed compared to who uses Twitter the most. As with all online communities, the only way to successfully connect is to figure out what kind of person participates in Twitter, and how he uses the service.

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