Publishers: Avoid Apple’s “curation” at all costs

By Michael Fraase

Wednesday, 28 July 2010 07:47PM CST

Section: Publishing

ArrestBefore my Internet Tour Guide became a best-seller, but after the acquisitions editor pulled my proposal out of the publisher’s trash bin, the book almost didn’t get published. Writing books and magazine articles had become a full-time gig for me from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s and I saw a way to expand. My idea was simple: Merge the best parts of magazine publishing with book publishing. And try it on someone else’s dime. In the back of the book would be a tear-out card for two free quarterly electronic updates to the book, along with an offer to subscribe for a year’s worth of updates. Get it?

This was 1993—the dawn of the commercial internet—and the only interaction I had with my readers was through email and speaking engagements. I wanted to know more about what they were interested in because I suspected it was the same folks buying each work.

Having written for a lot of magazines I was always curious about why the business side—especially the circulation director—was paranoiacally protective of and disturbingly enamored with “The List” (of subscribers). It didn’t take me long to figure it out. Here was a list of hundreds of thousands of people who were willing to pay for what you produced. In addition to name, address, phone, and the like, it had a good bit of demographic information about each individual, as well.

My publisher for that book, skunk that he was, was not stupid. He understood the value of “The List” as well as I did. Probably better. He argued that readers should send their cards to him, not me. I was having none of that, and it took us several days to negotiate an arrangement: The publisher would receive the cards from the readers, have an employee enter the data in a database, and send me the files. It was pitched as saving me the trouble of data entry. I stupidly, stupidly took the deal. Stupid because the skunk publisher never sent the complete database.

That’s the frame of reference for what Time, Inc. is currently going through with Apple. Time, Inc. wants to sell iPad subscriptions to its publications through Apple’s iTunes Store. Not being stupid, it’s not about to let Apple control it’s list. But Apple, not being stupid either, won’t have it any other way.

More...

Permalink | (0) Comments

Medicare issues dialysis payment rule

By Michael Fraase

Tuesday, 27 July 2010 07:07PM CST

Section: ESRD

DialysisThe US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS; Medicare) has issued its long-awaited final rule for dialysis patients. Entitled “Medicare Program; End-Stage Renal Disease Prospective Payment System,” (.pdf; 1.3MB) the final rule contains the “bundling” arrangement for dialysis services which becomes effective 1 January 2011. (Here’s the much easier to digest CMS fact sheet.) Under the new rule, Medicare will pay a single, predetermined fee for each dialysis treatment, covering the entire “bundle” of services (dialysis, supplies, drugs, and lab tests). As a result, the use of intravenous drugs to treat anemia—notably Amgen’s Epogen—will likely be sharply reduced.

Previously, Medicare paid a predetermined fee for dialysis services, but some drugs—like Epogen—were reimbursed separately. That system gave dialysis providers a financial incentive to overuse Epogen which increased the patients’ risk of heart attacks and strokes. Because Epogen is now part of the “bundle,” it will likely be underused and patients’ quality of life will suffer. While Medicare has set up adequate standards for quality of care—including maintaining patients’ hemoglobin levels between 10-12—it remains to be seen how these standards will be enforced. When my hemoglobin falls below 11.3, I’m wiped out; when it’s below 10, I’m virtually immobile and barely conscious.

Cheryl Clark, writing for HealthLeaders Media, cites CMS as saying, “the law requires CMS to reduce the payment rates to a dialysis facility by up to two percent if that facility fails to meet or exceed the established performance scores with regard to performance standards established for each quality measure.”

More...

Permalink | (0) Comments

The blotter: Week ending 25 July 2010

By Michael Fraase

Sunday, 25 July 2010 12:09PM CST

Section: Blotter

Janis Joplin blotter acid

ESRD

Renal Business Today reports a Rhode Island Hospital researcher has found that hemodialysis patients are at “increased risk of carrying methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in their nose.” The study appears in the June 2010 issue of the University of Chicago’s Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology (not yet available online). MRSA in the nose increases the risk of developing an invasive MRSA infection. In the US general population, about one percent of people carry nasal MRSA. The Rhode Island Hospital study found that 15% of outpatient hemodialysis patients carry nasal MRSA.

Internet

Facebook announced it will be using OAuth, an open source protocol that enables secure API authorization. That’s the big news. The little news is that Facebook is repositioning itself as an organizer of the web around relationships between people. As users click the “like” button for various websites for example, Facebook will aggregate that data, mapping it to individual recommendations. Facebook has a mistaken mind map of the internet and the web, as clearly exemplified in Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 keynote: “Open Graph puts people at the center of the web. It means that the web can become a set of personally and semantically meaningful connections between people and things. ... We’re going to connect all of these graphs together to form the Open Graph. And when we connect all of our graphs together, the web is going to get a whole lot better.” Thanks but we don’t need—or want—Facebook intermediation for making our semantic connections. Nor do we need—or want—Facebook’s crappy widgets cluttering up our websites. Facebook’s “map of the graph” is not the web. I’ve been told I’m wrong about this by people I respect, but I can’t help it: Facebook 2010 = AOL 1991.

Dave Winer asked (and answered) a seemingly innocuous question: “What comes after location?” The answer is what Winer calls “vector-awareness.” It’s really simple in concept: Don’t give me information just about where I am; give me information about where I’m going. Winer expanded on the concept the next day. This is a Really Big Deal, folks.

More...

Permalink | (0) Comments

Page 1 of 362 pages ‹ First  < 360 361 362