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This is my last slide, aside from a list of references for followup. It's also my favorite.
This is a principle called "flypaper," which I discovered at my little Web site. It comes from the combination of search engines and lots of personal Web pages.
I started getting two or three email messages a week from old friends I hadn't heard from for twenty to thirty years. At first, I thought, "Gosh. Amazing. They're looking for me." Then I started thinking, "Why would they be looking for me?"
I hardly knew these guys. I wouldn't look for them.
I pushed back. I found out they weren't looking for me. They were looking for themselves.
They went to AltaVista and searched for their own names; and there's so much stuff at my site that anybody who had any contact with me over the last thirty years or so is mentioned there. They found themselves, and they wrote to me.
The more I talked to people, the more it became clear to me that this is a matter of human nature mixing in strange ways with technology.
Human nature is that people first look for themselves or for their friends or for things that are near and dear to them. And only after they have done that do they do research.
We designed this site for research, but it's used for these other purposes, probably far more.
But you'd never learn that by checking the logs at AltaVista. Because the logs will give you the top terms that people have searched for. Well, Joe Blow from Minneapolis looking for his own name won't appear very high on that list. But that's the first thing he'd look for. And lots of people are doing that.
So it occurred to me, there's a business model there. If people act that way, I can build a better mousetrap.
Instead of going out with flyswatters to try to find things, I'll create flypaper to get them to come to me.
Say, for instance, you have a business proposal. You've been trying to get through to someone who you know uses the Web. This guy doesn't answer your email, doesn't return your phone calls. You have a really good message for him.
Well, create a Web page. The first word in the HTML title and the first line of text -- the guy's name. Then add in those same places everything you can think of that is near and dear to him. Then you add the message that you really want him to see.
You need to have hyperlinks to this page from anywhere in the world. You just go to AltaVista and ADD URL.
The next time that guy searches for himself, he finds you.
Believe me, it really changes the whole dialogue. He's coming to you; you didn't go to him.
There are two kinds of flypaper. That's what I call "targeted flypaper." Another kind of flypaper is "generalized flypaper."
I put anything and everything at my site. One of the items I posted is a list of every book I've read for the last 39 years -- since I was in junior high school. I'm obsessive. I've kept such a list. It was in electronic form. It tooks me just a few minutes to post it on the Web. So why not? It's my site. Who cares? If somebody wants to come to it, fine.
It turns out that that is the most trafficked page at my site. And I get email from authors, their editors, and their agents. They are searching for themselves and then for the stuff that's near and dear to them.
I get very good dialogues going with them and with readers who particular like those same books.
If you start thinking in that sort of vein, then the kinds of material you put on your Web site will be very different from what you are probably doing today.
I have a few examples here of bizarre things that have happened to me.
Back in the early 1970s, I self-published a book of mine called The Lizard of Oz. That was back when a lot of people were playing around with self-publishing and small press publishing. All of sudden, thanks to photo-offset, it had become cheap to print; and we made the mistake of thinking that printing was the same as publishing. So we printed all these books and went around to small-press bookfairs and met a lot of people and had a lot of fun and sold very few books. You couldn't get distribution, you could't get them into book stores.
So this book of mine had been gathering dust in the basement for over 20 years. And along comes the Web and all of a sudden distribution is free. So one of the first things I did when I got my own free little Web space was to put up the full text of just about everything I had ever written.
Shortly after I put up The Lizard of Oz, I got email from a little company in San Francisco that does interactive CD ROMs for kids. A brand new company. They couldn't afford the time or the money to have acquisition editors out looking for material. So they were using AltaVista to search the Web for stories that might be useful for their product line. They found my book. They loved it. And two weeks later, we had a contract. They still haven't come out with the CD ROM. I hope they do it soon. But it was a very good contact, and one that I would have never made. I could have never found them, because they were new and wouldn't have been listed anywhere. But they found me. And because they found me, it was a very quick and different kind of dialogue. I wasn't trying to sell the book to them. They were trying to convince me to let them publish it.
The next example is even more bizarre.
I wrote a movie script a long time ago and nothing has ever happened with it.
Now this didn't lead to a business deal. I'm not going to be famous tomorrow.
This was an eye-opener though.
I got email from a producer in Iceland. We went back and forth, and I sent him the script. He was interested, but we didn't arrive at a deal.
But would you ever have imagined that there were producers in Iceland? If you were trying to sell a script, would that have been on your list of places to try?
The next example is totally off the wall. This was due to my list of books.
I got email from someone who collects Gary Trudeau books (the cartoonist who does Doonesbury). He saw that I had read Trudeau's first book, which he had self-published back when he was an undergraduate at Yale. I happened to have been at Yale at the time. I picked it up at the Co-op. It had been gathering dust ever since.
I thought, "Okay. I'll sell the book. I don't have any real need for it. I haven't looked at it in nearly thirty years."
Well, the guy took a further look at my Web site. He saw that my daughter is into acting. She goes to Sarah Lawrence. This year she is doing her junior year in London doing drama. And at the time we were doing this correspondence, she was in Los Angeles for the summer, staying with my sister, trying to get summer jobs in acting. It turned out the guy who had done the query was Lee Aronsohn, who at various times has been executive producer and writer of a number of popular TV series, such as Cybill and Grace Under Fire. He, out of the blue, suggested that in exchange for the book, my daughter could get an audition for a show.
She didn't get a part, but she got an audition with someone who has won Emmys for casting. She got to meet the people. She got a sense of how the business worked. This was an invaluable kind of experience for her.
There is no way in the world that I would have ever come up with that as a business model.
The general messag from that is -- don't limit yourself to your own imagination.
You have ideas sitting in your drawers. You have works in progress. You have things that are almost there. Don't you edit yourself out of the possibility.
If you have something that might work, that might fly, that somebody might interested in, put it up and get it well indexed and see what kind of response you get.
You might be afraid that someone will "steal" your idea.
Remember that there is such a thing as copyright law. When I put a book up, like The Lizard of Oz, I include a copyright notice. And I say, "Permission is hereby granted to disseminate this in electronic form for non-profit purposes or for you won purposes. If you wish to do something commercial with it or to print it, then contact me. Here's my email address."
Now what protection does that give me? Well, if somebody is going to do a commercial edition of that thing, and they are going to make a lot of money out of it, I'm going to hear about it, and I'll sue them. And that would be fine.
If somebody wants to plagiarize... If I were paranoic I could use AltaVista periodically to search the Web for selected paragraphs of my works. I don't do that all the time, but I could.
The more frequent question I get from an audience like this is the fear that somebody will take you idea. I'm talking about writing fiction for kids and copyrighting that. But if you have an idea for a new business, what's going to happen if somebody steals that idea?
Take my advice with a grain of salt. But I believe that if the world is ready for an idea, more than one person is likely to have it. And your best protection is to let the world know that you have this idea so that you then become part of the dialogue as it goes to its next stages. And you begin the dialogue and take it to the next step. You get your writings about this subject well indexed. You get in touch with other people with similar interests, and maybe you build a company out of the people you pull together that way.
But, if you take that idea, as we always have in the past, and keep in the bottom drawer, afraid that somebody is going to steal the idea; then two years later, you are going to read in the Wall St. Journal about a $10 million company that's doing that same thing that you had the idea for.
If you are talking about software code and the kind invention that typically involves patent lawyers, that's another matter and you should get legal advice. But if you have a business idea, I'd say, tell the world about it; don't hide it. Tell them as loudly as possible, so everybody knows that you told them about it. And then you can become part of the on-going dialogue.
The underlying principle of this advice is the realization that the Web is an awful place to put totally polished, finished text. We see one after another that on-line magazines are too expensive to sustain themselves, and they fold. But the Web is a great place to put ideas and works in progress.
When you put finished text on the Web, that's like saying, "I have just returned from the mountain. I have seen it. Don't bother to write me. This is the final answer."
What you want to say instead is, "I think is headed in the right direction. I might be 80% there, or maybe 50%. But I feel good about this. I want to talk to people out there and take this to the next step. Please send me your reactions."
Then when people send their reactions, treat them with respect. And with their permission, if they've written something cogent, whether they agree with you or disagree with you, add it to your document as a letter to the editor and then go back and index again at AltaVista and let that document grow.
I mentioned my Halloween article. That's what I did with that. It's just a little article -- a couple pages long. Now it rambles on and on and on, because for three years I've had people sending me messages saying they agree or disagree strongly, and they often write very well about it. I've added those comments as letters to the editor, and some of it is very informative and some is well-argued opinion. But your one little static document suddenly becomes the start of a social experience, without needing any fancy software to do it.
Take those idea that you have been editing out, that you've been chopping off at the legs, and give them a chance. Let the world find them. Let the world do something with them.
To me that's what's exciting -- when you put the pieces together: your own creativity and the power of a search engine like AltaVista. Next slide
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