zine very much appreciated by the professional user-experience community. interactions provides— as named above—a great entrée point: to ideas, people, and potentially, to our funder, the ACM.

Mark and I simply scratched the surface on the issues involved. What are your views? Are you someone who would/ do pay for the subscription, who would pay to download the articles? Do you have artful suggestions for business models not explored in this brief article? So the question is, what does open content mean for a magazine like interactions Please share your thoughts on the interactions site at http://interactions.acm.org.

September + October 2008

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interactions

6,000 professionals a day

3. A reputation—a company that has its finger on the pulse of what is going on;

4. A brand—substantial brand recognition for a company that is not even three years old;

5. Loyalty—readers feel involved in the content that is given for “free” (Putting People First has become a professional research tool for many, thanks also to its categories and effective search engine), and this openness creates loyalty;

6. Regularity—the blog is updated nearly every day, so to some extent Experientia is constantly in the minds of its readers;

7. Relations —people contact the company regularly based on the blog; the blog offers a social nexus;

8. Jobs —Experientia even got a few new clients through its blog, although that is not the main reason for the firm’s doing this; if anything, PPF confirms the firm’s reputation rather than landing new clients out of the blue;

9. PR opportunities— Experientia staff is regularly invited to conferences and offered writing assignments based on their perceived qualifications;

10. Dialogue—reactions and reflections on what is going on, either informally or publicly, either directly, or because people link and relink to the site

As the Experientia example suggests, the value-add of the open content is the ripple effect—the other things that become known, which do generate monetary reward. In the case of scholarly journals and magazines like interactions, much of the labor of content production is volunteered, not for monetary gain. But the labor fits within a system in which the rewards are

very real—promotion of ideas, of products, of companies, of self, personal satisfaction, growth of future opportunities.

Printing a magazine has a price tag of course. The costs of magazine production include editing, illustrating, layout, printing, distribution, and archiving. Online distribution does not erase operating costs; funds are form and and maint and archiv model cur these cost what has b page char we can sta • Free a go period— want cont after a wh become fr is one of a tiered reve • Autho charge au • Institu and vested with open demic dom taxpayers for govern through ta should be • Adver model tha Internet • Spons possibility _{based spo} needed to cover plat-interface development enance, promoting, ing. The revenue rently in place to cover s is subscription, or een called “reader ges.” Other models that rt playing with are: ccess after an embar- _{charge those who} ABOUT THE AUTHORS Dr. Elizabeth Churchill is a ^{ent immediately, but} principal research scientist ile the content can at Yahoo! Research leading eely available; this research in social media. _{number of possible} Originally a psychologist by training, for the past 15 years she has stud- ^{nue models} ied and designed technologies for effective r page charges— social connection. At Yahoo, her work _{thors for the content} focuses on how Internet applications and _{tional, governmental,} services are woven into everyday lives. Obsessed with memory and sentiment, in ^{agency payment—} her spare time Elizabeth researches how content in the aca- people manage their digital and physical _{ain, many argue that} archives. Elizabeth rates herself a packrat, her greatest joy is an attic stuffed with _{have already paid memorabilia.} ment-funded work _{xes, so the results} Mark Vanderbeeken is one of four partners of ^{freely available} Experientia, an international tising—arguably, the experience design consul- _{t drives much of the} tancy based in Italy, with particular responsibilities for strategic communications. He has ^{orship is another} worked in Belgium (his home country), the —this could be issue- United States, Denmark, and Italy for both _{nsorship or section-} profit and nonprofit organizations, and

studied visual and cognitive psychology at ^{based sponsorship} Columbia University. Mark is the author of

Mark and I argued on the panel Experientia’s successful experience design that there is a great opportunity blog Putting People First; he also writes for with interactions to generate inter- ^{other publications such as Core77.} est and gain momentum around important sociotechnical design issues through a thoughtful, well-written, and well-edited maga- DOI 10.1145/1390085.1390093