Let’s start with the good news: We’re pretty close to making a decision about what service to bring to market. It took many long, sometimes heated debates, and in the end, Javier, our team coach had to play tiebreaker.

The bad news is that we have also decided, for the moment, not to make the choice public. We are aware, of course, that we are thereby going back on our promise to be open. But going public now would almost certainly kill our idea. The concept will not be easy to pull off in any case, in terms of developing an impressive website. But it also involves building relationships with several constituencies, both within The Economist Group and outside it.

What we can say, however, is that the core of our product will be a social network. It will also feature aspects of other ideas, such as data visualization, mash-ups and, perhaps, some user-generated content. Essentially, we’re bundling several web technologies into an online service that we hope you want to part of.

While we develop something that is presentable, we will blog about the ideas that we considered implementing, but ultimately chose not to (which doesn’t mean that other units of The Economist Group may not themselves decide to take them up). So stay tuned.

Thanks again for submitting your idea to Project Red Stripe, the small team set up by The Economist Group to develop innovative services online. We’re now done sifting through and further developing the ideas sent in - and are about to make the decision on which of them we will take to market.

If you’d like to help us make this decision, please read the idea summaries we’ve posted on our blog on recent days and add your comments. Here are the links to the summaries:

- Prediction Markets
- Miscellaneous
- Managing information
- Kids
- Wikis
- Comments, mashups and tagging
- Data services
- Ze Frank
- Social Networks

If any of these summaries inspire you to another idea - please don’t hesitate to add it to the lot. And of course, we’ll keep you posted about our decision on our blog.

Patrick Tullmann drew my attention to zefrank.com. I guess this is what happens when you live in China and your bandwith is not that great - you miss out on something where you thought, “hey, how come I’m just finding out about this now?”. I remember when the ideas starting coming in that I spent quite some time looking at Ze’s web site and thinking that ‘he’s got it’ - in fact, since then, his site is probably sitting in the back of my mind when we discuss, as a group, issues and questions about the future, such as “Will individuals will be able to make money from their blogs?”.

For those of you who are willing to watch, here’s a 20-minute, highly entertaining and very informative speech from Ze. It provides great background information about him and his accomplishments.

Pat was drawing my attention to The Show, Ze’s year-long experiment in video which ended earlier this year. A great description of the project can be found in the but to quote from the story:

{Ze} built his website (zefrank.com) into a playground for interactive Internet projects, while exploring these ideas as a speaker, university instructor and consultant. Curious to see if his ideas about online video held water, he enrolled himself in improv classes, and started The Show as a year-long experiment.

Pat elaborates on this idea further and how it might relate to The Economist.

Ze’s show accepts both content and direction from the users, but every show has a strong and clear direction provided by Ze (it is very clearly his show, even though viewers have provided intros, ideas, songs, video and stills). He posits ideas and directions, asks for input and material, and combines the results into something that is most likely not exactly what he expected, but generally something stronger and larger. But still imprinted with his style. Similarly, the strong and consistent presence of the current editorial board of the Economist and its journalists would provide the same consistent and open slant on the news that the Economist has always had.

There are some interesting things about The Show. This Business Week article points out that Ze had signed a deal with Rewer Video to have his videos hosted on their web site in return for revenue share. I’m not sure if he has changed partners to Blip but regardless, you won’t find The Show on . This means he can share ad revenue with Blip when people look at his archive of videos. What I also like is that he uses video to encourage experiments and generate ideas. He doesn’t create a page that might be a ‘call to action’. You don’t read a manifesto. You watch a video and then you act. And Ze’s sports racers have acted. You can see a list of completed projects on Ze’s wiki. You can also see current projects which are active on the ORG (need to register).

It would be great to use The Economist’s platform in a similar way to launch ‘experiments’. It would be great to have The Economist also think beyond print. As we discuss and debate some of the ideas which have come in and some that we had come to the table with already, we increasingly start to ask about how can we get The Economist’s audience more involved. While The Economist might not be designing our German kid a t-shirt, I could see Economist sports racers writing their own play.

The seventh in the series on the ideas we received

As I’ve written previously, I think data is fun. Understandably a lot of the submissions revolve around data, and the possibilities in this area are massive. With a ton of the stuff in Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) vaults and a huge community of economists, what couldn’t we do? In the main, the ideas submitted revolve around three issues :

• make data free
• make it interactive
• show the links between data

“Information wants to be free” is a commonly held tenet by webbies. The expression was coined by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers Conference in 1984. It is worth reading the entire quotation :

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

The argument goes that due to the elimination of distribution costs by the web we should now distribute this data for free. This would be a valuable service due to the EIU’s enormous info stash. This information is current and historical, giving us the opportunity to give away feeds of old data sets and up-to-the-minute info.

Giving away the data for free is the first thread of ideas, but the key is to make it interactive. An EIU data API would then put the tools in the hands of our users who would be able to create all manner of wonderful graphs, tables and visualisations. (What’s an API? An API is data that can be reused by developers. Companies give away their data in publicly usable APIs thinking that the ideas of the public at large will be more innovative than their own). By opening the data up to the collective intelligence of Economist Groupers, we’d definitely get some brilliant insights.

The value of this type of service can be seen in the sites Swivel and Many Eyes which share data sets and then give readers the chance to create interesting visualisations. Here are some of my favourites on Many Eyes:

• 100 top Bible Characters by Frequency and Dispersion
• CO2 Emissions in 2003
• Distribution of Guitar Shops by US State

The best headline we had from this set of ideas was Give The World Your Curves. Naturally, he was referring to the curves of the graphs in the Economic Indicators section of The Economist, and suggesting that they should be customisable on the web. This is clearly an idea that just makes sense. I remember a Canadian telling me how annoyed he was that he never saw Canada listed in any of our tables. The magazine has also dropped one page from this section, annoying numbers freaks. That wouldn’t happen at Curves Online because it costs nothing to have an extra page (that might not be the best name for the section).

The last group of ideas concentrated on the idea of showing the links between data. Super Size the Big Mac Index (another great name) wanted to use the fast food industry as a prism through which to go deeper into society. After extreme weather damaged the US tomato crop in 2005, tomatoes were removed from standard burgers. The idea leant itself to examinations of unionism, environmental issues and agro-industrialisation.

This deeper insight was in contrast to Paul Pedley’s (disclosure: Paul works for the EIU) desire for us to save him time, by quickly showing the inter-relationships between data. Information overload is a messy reality for any number of data professionals so a page that visualised these links would save time.

Naturally the issue here is that the EIU charges money for the data so why make it free? There are a few ways of looking at this. The easiest way would be to liberate some of the data. This could be toyed with by developers and manipulated in an interesting fashion and, by spreading this out, we’d in fact be advertising the EIU. More radical, though, would be turning a business with a few subscribers into one with many more monetised customers.

There are many ideas around data but here’s the nub: the tools that web developers now have in their hands mean that data can be freed from the two dimensional representations that we have today. Multimedia tools, from Flash to Google Maps, mean that data can be turned into compelling stories. Whether we do anything on this during Project Red Stripe remains to be seen, but I think The Economist Group should take advantage of this, and quickly.

(In addition to those mentioned in this post, we would like to thank all those who have contributed suggestions related to data.)

———————————–

Update : Show’s how much I know. It turns out an API is not the data from a site, but a way of accessing the data from a site. This shows not only my ignorance, but also that you don’t have to know all the technical stuff to love the web. The technology’s not the exciting stuff, the ideas that it enables are.

I suspect that this is a one day only offer.

There are some pre-requisites:

• Windows XP/Vista (Mac and Linux support coming soon)
• Internet Explorer 6.0+ or Firefox 1.5+ with the Google Toolbar
• Round-front or elongated toilet providing at least 1.0 gallons per flush
• Use of automatic toilet bowl cleaners is not recommended

Here are some screen shots, (just in case it’s not there tomorrow!). Click to enlarge.

Intro

Installation

How it works

The fourth in a series about the submissions we received.

Alan Hansen was proved wrong and a few of our contributors think otherwise too.

A fair number focused their ideas on a younger audience than The Economist currently enjoys. These fell into two areas - the first focusing on providing a version of The Economist for kids and the other on their educational needs.

As James Toomey and Chris Redmann pointed out, there is a feeling that The Economist creates content that “is over the head of younger readers” and that the web provides the opportunity to address this without incurring significant distribution costs. Daniel Collender suggested that “The Economist should start building brand loyalty at an early age by creating products and services for young people that will help develop their minds”.

Publications that aim to educate and enlighten younger people exist around the world, from Piers Morgan’s FirstNews, the Newspaper and the digital Newsademic in the UK, to Le Petit Quotidien in France, Time for Kids in the US and the Little Masters in China (a bi-weekly with a circulation of 1 million). Then, in Germany, there is the best-selling Kinder-Uni book series, that have given rise to lectures targeted at children. However, the quality of these publications varies, so there might just be a way for The Economist to plug a gap.

The suggestions are for something that young people would want to read rather than something that they would have to read as part of their coursework or that is aimed at their teachers. This last distinction was also a key to the BBC’s Jam service which was suspended last week under instruction from the BBC Trust. There has been widespread condemnation of this decision because of the lack of a serious alternative and more importantly because the 170,000 people that we using it have lost their work, so maybe suggestions that fall into the second area around coursework and curriculum development have some traction.

Caroline Meeks, a founder of .LRN, an open source learning management system pointed out that “Universities are producing and distributing for free a remarkable amount of content but adoption is lagging behind because it’s not in a particualarly usable form nor is [it] being marketed”. MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) was cited by Caroline as an example and in the UK, the Open University’s (OU) OpenLearn similarly puts course material online for anyone to access.

MIT’s OCW, though initially funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is very patchy in its coverage with no content available for some modules within courses and some consisting of no more than an unenlightening single side of A4. The Open University’s coverage is better with the material that is online at least being complete. However, although the OU enables collaboration, the material is somewhat dry.

Using a community of teachers to create a curriculum plus teaching materials is suggested by Enrique Eder: “…K-12 and university curriculums can be built by communities of teachers from around the world, and accessed by students to learn and be tested.” He goes on to explain that entire lessons or tests, or individual text, video or test questions would be copyable from one curriculum to another.

This is interesting because of the growing use of Moodle, an open source course management system (Moodle is an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment and a good summary of what it is is on The University of Manchester’s site). UCLA has announced that it would start using Moodle and the OU has started what is reported to be the world’s largest rollout of Moodle. Moodle contains functionality that allows the creation of course materials including lessons and tests as well as wiki functionality.

Moodle also makes it easy to do just what Enrique suggests; course modules can be copied from one installation to another (including to local ones, on a student’s computer, for example). As initiatives such as the e-Learning Foundation, a UK-based charity that aims to put computers into the homes of disadvantaged children, take off, more and more children will have the capability to use systems such as Moodle both in the classroom and at home. This leads to the opportunity to deliver non-goverment mandated material easily directly to children.

There are existing initiatives to create curriculae online, such as for South Africa on Wikibooks (Wikibooks is part of the Wikimedia Foundation, a charitable organisation that also includes Wikipedia) and for K-12 textbooks in California. Wikibooks has also created text books, but seems to be struggling to maintain momentum with the Wikijunior project having as few as 11 people voting to decide on what book becomes the project for the quarter.

Nevertheless, our contributors seem to think that The Economist’s clout could create the momentum needed to make the promise of some of these projects become reality.

So, maybe we can win someting with kids….

(In addition to those mentioned in this post, thank you to all those who have contributed suggestions related to education or a younger audience for The Economist.)

…we’ll collect our ideas like this.

The third in a series on the ideas we received

Undoubtedly one of the key challenges in today’s world is managing the ever growing information tsunami. Accessing and creating huge quantities of information is easy, but sorting the wheat from the chaff is the problem. A significant number of responses from our idea collection drive challenged The Economist to present a solution.

Enthusiastic readers of The Economist often hail the publication as their primary trusted source of global news and analysis. While they may read traditional newspapers daily, either in print or online, their weekly issue of The Economist provides the aggregation of the most important issues of that week plus analysis and opinion. In our idea collection, many contributors suggested expanding The Economist’s service of “trusted advisor and overseer” and applying it to information available online.

There was strong support among idea contributors for The Economist to become the “gateway” or “sorter” of a wider body of information beyond that purely generated by itself. Colin Henderson wrote: “I trust the Economist, I trust the content, I trust their analysis and their predictions. But I get all the rest of the information from the internet sorted through Google…..I need a trusted source…that assimilates all the news and information, assesses it, within my personal context and presents it to me.”

Many internet users are already taking advantage of using and “readers” (such as ) to streamline their online information intake, but this is often based on the user having previously visited a site and having chosen to receive the information feeds from it. Colin’s proposal suggests The Economist becomes the user’s primary respected source which also trawls the internet on the user’s behalf delivering content it feels is most appropriate based on The Economist’s assessment of value, reliability and news-worthiness.

“It learns from me as I read”, Collin adds. This type of benefit can, to some extent, be achieved with community feedback, as suggested by Earl Killian. With the ability to rate articles and add comments before sharing one’s reading with one’s friends, you build a communal system of receiving information which is most likely to meet your fields of interest. and currently allow this type of interaction with their “tagging” and “posting to friends” functionality. In one of our brainstroming sessions we also came up with the thought of somehow collecting data of our subscribers’ surfing behaviour to compile lists, such as “The Economist’s reader’s favorite websites” and “what other readers of this article have read”. Sites like and Last.fm - go some way to carrying out this type of action.

Iain Wicking was on the same train of thought with his proposal suggesting readers could set up specific preferences of their interests, to guide the delivery of preferred information. As Iain notes, “the issue is not the quantity of information but the difficulty of finding, making use of and sharing relevant information”.

An Economist Intelligence Unit colleague suggested exploring the application of tools which show the interrelationships between concepts, as a possible solution. Such services can ease information overload or highlight information clusters. Dann Anthony Maurno suggested a point’n'click globe: Economist data and analysis overlaid on allowing the reader to scan the globe and zero in on a location of interest to access the relevant country and regional data. Reuters have a Beta version of a map that does something similar (see below). Alternatively, one could move the mouse over a timeline which tells you about major events by time and a keyword.

Such developments look like they could be implemented by primarily using new and developing technology, but another contributor, Jing (who doesn’t want us to publish the surname), points out that “people still like an editorial staff to screen for quality and relevance”. Its this kind of thinking that suggests to me that the traditional role of publisher could move from their managing their own-produced content to managing a “standard”. Jing’s idea was more specifically related to consolidating and summarising the blogosphere, but the principle could be applied to other online content: that a respected source like The Economist could present for its readers the dominant viewpoints, showcase the various views for debate and even link to wider related event coverage, including multi-lingual reporting.

Shannon Bauman is supportive of a similar concept of multi-level news access, further proposing this to be available as a mobile, audio version allowing one to delve deeper, or skip and skim the various articles as suits one’s requirements.

The Economist and other publishers of much loved media are in the very fortunate position that they already provide their readership a service for which they are often well regarded and respected. Rather than sounding the death knell of such media, the internet may, by its own complicated nature, provide the new direction by which such media can flourish in the future: as the font of all knowledge, in your chosen publisher’s colour.

(In addition to those mentioned in this post, thank you to all those who have contributed suggestions relating to managing information.)

The second in a series on the ideas we received

While many of the ideas we have received have been similar, there have been many unique ones, or ones that are about The Economist itself and some of its ‘products’.

(Disclosure: the ideas mentioned in the next two paragraphs were submitted by Economist Group colleagues David Shirreff and Edward Lucas.)

David felt that it would be a good idea to put The Economist’s Style Guide online (in its entirety, as you’ll find that there is already a large amount of useful information on the web site) so that readers could ’suggest updates and log mistakes that they see in The Economist’. David feels that an online guide would help The Economist ‘achieve that perfection of style and content for which we strive’. I can see the Style Guide becoming a wiki online, where users can change and update the guide. David notes that as ‘the English language is constantly evolving, the Style Book would become a living arbiter of what is good, elegant, pleasing English’.

Edward takes this idea a step further by suggesting that we run an online prose clinic. Again, this idea would work well as a wiki and perhaps freelance or retired journalists could be paid for significant contributions to the work.

Other users have also commented on how we can expand on some of our existing features. One user feels that we should elaborate on our Big Mac index to include ‘the price of ingredients, labo r costs, expense of complying with health regulations, and shipping expenses’. He references the ‘Great Tomato Shortage of 2005′ when several hurricanes (including Wilma) hit tomato crops in the US and affected the price of tomatoes - causing some fast food chains to remove the fruit from their burgers or charge extra for them. This user suggests that The Economist could ‘analyze how weather affects food prices’ and then ask fast food eaters if ‘the price changes caused them to adjust their eating habits or alter their restaurant preferences’. (Yes, I realise a Big Mac has ). The user then suggests that The Economist could then cover labour conditions, and sanitary regulations to get a wider picture of the influence of the Big Mac.

Bradley Skaggs’ idea submission was also along the line of developing an existing product at The Economist. Except he’s talking about The Economist, itself, and having it translated into different languages. Brad does not suggest a word-by-word translation of each issue into a foreign language but suggests that articles can be translated wiki-style, with the most relevant (or highly debatable) articles being translated first (Brad points to a recent article about property law in China). Having moved to London from Beijing, I like this idea and its related implications (some of which Kirk MacDonald mentioned in his submission). Much like the elaboration on the Big Mac index, a wiki-style translation of articles from The Economist would also open the doors to further discussion on related issues (like this English-language debate on the opposition to the property law).

The first in a series on the ideas we received

Wikis. Blogs. Social networks. When we started gathering ideas two weeks ago, I expected we would get a lot of submissions related to the concept of user-generated content (and we did, as the tag cloud next to our idea submission form shows – a subject for a future post). Yet there were also a dozen entries in an area where I did not think we would receive much input: prediction, information or decision markets.

For those not familiar with the concept: these are speculative markets set up to make predictions on the outcome of a particular event. The most popular example is the US presidential election. People can bet on one candidate by buying a “contract”, essentially a promise of the seller to pay, say, a dollar if the candidate wins and nothing if he or she loses.

Those certain of the candidate’s victory should be willing to pay up to a dollar for this contract (they’ll pocket one dollar minus the price they paid). Those confident of a loss should want to sell such a contract, expecting to be able to keep the money they got for it (and not having to pay the one dollar to the buyer). Given enough buyers and sellers, this market should establish a price for the contract – which represents the probability of the candidate’s victory.

© Iowa Electronic Market

Although this may sound somewhat complicated, such markets have been around for over a decade – and have rather a good track record. The Iowa Electronic Market, for instance, which was launched in the late 1980s, predicted a narrow win for George Bush in 2004 (see chart above). Wikipedia lists some 30 websites offering prediction markets in one form or another. Their main differentiator is whether they use real cash (Intrade, HedgeStreet and WeatherBill) or play money (Foresight Exchange, inkling markets and NewsFutures). Whatever the currency, most predict a democrat to end up in the White House in 2008. Here is a chart of the relevant market on NewsFutures (the figure to the right is the current probability of a democrat winning):

© NewsFutures

Most contributors in this area would like The Economist to launch an online service allowing subscribers to participate and even create such prediction markets. “The Economist has a perfect userbase for running policy analysis markets. Every article should have a sidebar with the relevant market(s) displayed”, suggests Mike Linksvayer. And Scott Harper writes: “Implement online decision markets for Economist subscribers. Open at least one every month with a 12-24 month maturity. Each will relate to a featured article and let subscribers compete with peers in a running points total.”

Some added a special twist to the concept. Rafe Furst wants us to develop a system for “truth claim markets”, which amounts to using markets not to predict future outcomes, but to evaluate current truths – a tall order. Nathan Miller proposes “an index for worldwide memes, ideas, and trends that rates their popularity and value much like a stock index”. And Randall Burns suggests using prediction markets to identify individuals with good prediction skills and tap them as a resource for The Economist.

Perhaps the most intriguing ideas are those suggesting The Economist should create its own private currency, which subscribers could use to make bets on prediction or other markets. Simon Stuart, for instance, suggests that every Economist subscriber receive one thousand Economist dollars per year to trade. This triggered another thought within the Red Stripe Team: Why not let subscribers earn some money (by contributing to a wiki, for instance) and spend it (by donating it to a charity of their choice)? Now there’s an idea: turning the Economist into a real economy.

(In addition to those mentioned in this post, we would like to thank all those who have contributed suggestions related to prediction markets.)