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NEWS
ANALYSIS ARCHIVE |
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Date/Headlines/Author |
Summary |
| 26 December
2005 |
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Investing in
Users: 2006 Forecast Preview |
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Content crystal ball-gazers, rejoice: the best is yet to
come in 2006 as publishers and technology companies vie for
the hearts of publishing-savvy users looking for personal
and professional content. Shore sees investing in content
users for 2006 revolving around four trendy "Ps" shaping
content today: Packaging, platform,
premium and personalization. Watch the cash
flowing into these investment area quickly as both
established and new players in publishing get very, very
serious about who is going to be on top when realigning
business models settle down. You'll need real-time
tea leaves to keep up with the content deals in 2006, but
fear not - we'll be with you every step of the way. |
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| 16 December
2005 |
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New Tunes:
User-Generated Media Creates New Models for Quality and
Cooperation |
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As surely as the birth of jazz music was shunned by many
classically trained musicians the rise of user-generated
media has gained the scorn of many professional content
producers. But when you're using pretty much the same tools
as any professional producers in a medium that reaches the
world as easily as any one the differing qualities of
user-publishers should not be discounted too quickly.
User-generated media from individuals and institutions is
more than just a fad - it's the major publishing trend of
our times that has informed and modified how we approach
professional publishing forever. |
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| 7 December
2005 |
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Objects of
Desire: Finding the Right Content Platform Strategy Amidst
Changing Technologies |
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With patent spats in U.S. and Canadian courts threatening
to unplug Blackberry users from content on their objects of
desire it's a good time to consider how wise it is to be
chasing one hot content platform after another with content
licensing deals in hopes that publishers can keep in touch
with their users. The ideal digital content platform for
publishers is not the latest faddish gizmo but the digital
objects that they create to run on these hardware
platforms. Keeping content highly profitable in the midst
of disposable technology wars means thinking long and hard
about how you're really going to make money in the long run
on from content users using these devices. |
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| 28
November 2005 |
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The
Publisher's Dilemma: How to Build Shareholder Value and
Future Revenues? |
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Break out the pitchforks and the torches, the shareholders
are restless in the once-happy realm of publishing. While
the likes of Google and Yahoo gobble up capital chasing
extraordinary growth and healthy earnings, traditional
publishers are caught trying to please institutional
investors who may have very unrealistic expectations about
what it takes to transform older business models into 21st
century profits. But all is not lost for publishers that
are willing to learn how to sell their positioning to
investors with straight talk about both short-term and
long-term expectations. The time for gladhanding colleagues
on cushy buyouts is passing by as the time for true
publishing survivalists to take charge comes into focus. |
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| 21
November 2005 |
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Ground
Support: The Shifting Role of Print Publications in B2B
Media |
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Ah, print, the darling of trade publishers everywhere. It's
still a potent weapon in today's B2B marketing wars, but
with trade events and online publications soaring in their
revenue mixes today's B2B publishers are oftentimes
perplexed as to how to deal with the shifting strategic
role of print. Just as yesteryear's battleships and today's
aircraft carriers had to adapt their strengths to new types
of missions B2B print publications can find important roles
in today's business marketing mix - if they cede their
former glories to new types of strategic and tactical
roles. After all, how many things does an executive get in
the mail these days that they really want to open? |
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| 14
November 2005 |
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InfoCommerce 2005:
Connecting Quality Content with Today's Professionals |
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Database and directory publishers assembled at this year's
InfoCommerce 2005 conference to trade insights on how to
create quality content, an objective that is taking on new
meaning in an era of user-driven content products. Today's
content quality is as much about being able to respond to
client needs uniquely and responsively as it is about I.T.-driven
process controls. Users are in the driver's seat for
defining what really makes a content service successful, a
fact that forces publishers to reach out to their audiences
in new and sophisticated ways. Today's content quality may
be in the hands of the user, but it beats spending tons on
second-guessing their needs. |
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| 9
November 2005 |
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Amazon Jungle:
Book Purchasing Models Struggle in the Digital Objects Era |
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Who'd have thought that in the height of growth in online
content the sexiest thing out there would be...books? With
major announcement in recent weeks from Google, Yahoo,
Microsoft and now Amazon the stage is set for dramatic
efforts to digitize and commercialize book content. Yet
books have been digitized for online search, subscription
and enhanced functionality for sometime now by a number of
vendors focused on scientific and technical content. What
the new efforts lack so far are commercial models and
packaging that are clearly in the best interests of
publishers undertaking them. Time for some more careful and
creative thinking about what it means to offer digital
books for long-term commercial success. |
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| 31
October 2005 |
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Potato Heads:
Silicon Valley's Content Leaders Keep Basic Research a
Priority |
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Basic research is at the heart of many of the companies in
Silicon Valley that are driving the value in publishing
today. When the revenue and margin leaders in electronic
publishing are plunking down 10 percent of their budgets on
R&D it's hard to imagine how traditional publishers and
aggregators are going to wheel and deal their way to a
superior position against these competitors any time soon.
When robust R&D is at the heart of your company's culture,
innovations that surface as highly profitable products just
seem to follow naturally. It takes more than R&D types to
understand today's publishing environment, but if you're
not attracting the best and the brightest of them you've
got to wonder what tomorrow will bring to your bottom line. |
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| 24
October 2005 |
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Fair Game: German and American Book
Publishers Wrestle with Google Print |
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This year's Frankfurt Book Fair drew more than 250,000
people to the world's largest content event, but the
biggest event for books during the fair was the alignment
of camps in the fight over Google Print. American
publishers are suiting up for a fight on copyright issues,
while German publishers seem to be more wiling to let
Google be Google and to get on with building stronger
online presences for searching and consuming books. Given
the history of other recent wars on copying premium content
guess who's likely to be the richer of these two camps in a
few years' time? It's time for all publishers to embrace
fair use of book content for searching and to focus on how
they're going to make money in a search-enabled world. |
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| 17
October 2005 |
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WFIC 2005:
Financial Content Searches for New Profits in Open Markets |
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The
World Financial Information Conference (WFIC) gathers
every two years to contemplate the state of global
financial content markets, an exercise that this year
attracted some of the best minds in the business to the
conference's Rome venue. The big picture emerging from the
conference is that increasingly transparent markets for
securities trading are placing enormous pressure on
exchanges, vendors and institutions to find profitable
positions in highly regulated markets. Financial content
services that can drive the top line of profits as much as
bottom-line cost savings are desperately needed, but the
big ideas seem to be waiting in the wings for new players
to push them through. Texas Holdem, anyone? |
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| 10
October 2005 |
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Content 2.X: The
Clash Where Publishers, Technology Companies and Audiences
Meet |
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The excitement brewing around the recent Web 2.0 conference
is palpable in Silicon Valley as the literati and
glitterati of content technology cook up a heady batch of
concepts to attract new investment. But before intelligent
and savvy investors start writing out checks it would be
wise for them to consider just what kind of businesses
they're underwriting. There's a lot of power in the Web 2.0
framework, but it's a loose framework that doesn't define a
powerful and effective scope of business operations against
which to measure success and failure. Enter Content 2.X,
Shore's definition of the powerful and rapidly evolving
union of technology, publishing and audiences partnering
towards common goals. |
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| 3
October 2005 |
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Open
Sandbox: The Open Content Alliance Forges the Ultimate
Content Collection |
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If there's one thing that Yahoo! knows how to do it's
building effective partnerships with media players. The
announcement of the Yahoo!-sponsored Open Content Alliance
that aims to counter Google's library scanning efforts
underscores that it pays to play nicely with some of
today's leading content archivists. The OCA has openness,
voluntary participation by publishers and a global set of
participants on its side to help to accelerate its efforts.
But as powerful as its proposition may be there are many
consortia that have fallen by the wayside as others with
fewer vested interests to negotiate sped along. Google may
have a "sandbox bully" image to contend with at the moment
but there's nothing to say who's really going to build the
better sandcastle. |
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| 26
September 2005 |
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Science Fact:
The "Google Grid" of EPIC 2014 Takes Shape |
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As Google prepares to assemble and test a new content
distribution network the content industry is caught like a
deer in the headlights trying to figure out the
implications of this initiative. Is this the beginning of
the "Google Grid," that omnipresent publishing environment
foreseen in "EPIC 2014", the online sci-fi multimedia
presentation that emerged last fall? It could be that
and much more if Google succeeds in deploying a network
environment that creates a new world of highly localized
content monetization. Be prepared for publishing business
models to take yet another bumpy ride along the road of
change as the "there" of content moves ever further from
central control. |
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| 19
September 2005 |
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Authority
Figures: ASIDIC Uncorks a New Blend of Professional and
Personal Content |
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With new authoring tools such as weblogs and wikis
coalescing professional and personal content more
effectively than ever before, what's a professional content
producer to do? Embrace the best of them effectively,
according to panelists and attendees at this year's ASIDIC
Fall Meeting in Napa Valley. New ways of packaging
authoritative content are emerging that promise higher
margins and better branding for content companies.
Conference panelists demonstrated that although the best
solutions for profiting from blending personal and
professional content are far from in hand, those that are
pushing to embrace the blend are creating some of the most
potent value in content today. |
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| 12
September 2005 |
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Common Market:
The Power of Transactions Draws in Business Publishers |
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Reed Construction Data has dipped a toe into the surging
world of online ecommerce with a new relationship with
eBay, the world's largest public online marketplace for
goods. While the deal is fairly tame in its overall shape,
it's an indication of where business database and directory
publishers are going to need to head in the months ahead to
position their content effectively as eBay grows its
business-oriented services. Where transactions take place
is where content reaches one of its most valuable contexts,
a concept long exploited in financial markets but an idea
whose time appears to be dawning now in new Web-driven
markets. Business database and directory publishers need to
move quickly to consider how eBay and other online
marketplaces can help to position their content most
effectively in the transaction-driven workflow of today's
business content users. |
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| 6
September 2005 |
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The Big Blow: The New Pecking Order of
Content Looms Large in Katrina's Wake |
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Cataclysmic events such as Hurricane Katrina do not create
trends in content, but they do help to forge into harder
forms trends that were already forming. In the wake of this
natural and human disaster Web content has emerged as the
definitive focus for people needed both fast-breaking
general news and very personal news on events and locations
impacted by powerful events. Traditional outlets that once
leaned tentatively on user-generated media discovered that
combining personal content with their professional product
can point the way to both hard facts and a sense of
community that is impossible to replicate with just a
polished professional product. The raw, the cooked and the
cooking are all required to provide today's definitive
picture of unfolding events to the satisfaction of
sophisticated content users. |
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| 29
August 2005 |
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Copy Right:
LexisNexis, Copyright and the Search for Today's Most
"Useful Arts" |
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The LexisNexis announcement of its sophisticated and
powerful CopyGuard service is meant to send shivers down
the spines of copyright violators. But its ability to
compare works for suspicious similarities is more likely to
protect publishers from plagiarism problems with its own
staffs than to reap any revenues from content snatchers
caught in the act. The problems of copyright law have far
less to do with inadequate enforcement of outdated
regulations than they do with technology that makes copying
itself hard to avoid, much less control. Publishers need to
focus more on copyright enforcement that enables users to
get more value once they've received copies of content than
on trying to control the copying process itself. |
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| 22
August 2005 |
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The Little
Package that Could: eBooks and Their Friends Prepare for
the Limelight |
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Alas, the poor eBook has suffered quite an identify crisis
these past few years - in spite of the fact that their
sales growth continues to surge impressively. By some
reckonings electronic books will be outselling their
paper-bound counterparts as soon as 2010. But the key to
the future of electronic books lies not so much in getting
existing book formats into electronic packaging as in
creating new concepts for packaging content for portable
use that extend the concept of the book in new directions.
The good news is that the resulting packages offer premium
content providers significant revenue opportunities - if
they can learn how to create products that appeal to users
used to both text and interactive capabilities. |
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| 15
August 2005 |
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Return on
Context: Thomson Scientific to Measure Content's Contextual
Value |
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As publishers and content services wrestle with content
collection managers to prove out their slice of
institutional library budgets based on collection user
stats, Thomson Scientific is looking beyond traditional
stats to come up with measurements of how content gets used
and cited beyond the collection. While its forthcoming
Collection Development Manager may be fairly limited in
scope it's an important step towards helping collection
managers to understand the return on a content investment
in the context in which published content is most valued by
its users. Think of "return on context" as the new
measurement for weighing the total value of content to an
institution's intellectual capital - and start thinking how
you're going to be doing it some time soon. |
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| 8 August
2005 |
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Express
Yourself: Major Business Publishers Search for Winning
Online Brands |
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American Business Media's "B2B Meets..." events draw
top-drawer panelists to chat about key topics in the world
of business publishing. The most recent session was
supposed to be focused on the impact of weblogs and RSS on
business publishing, but much of the talk from the
blue-ribbon panelists was about how their editorial
operations are still focused on getting the basics of their
online brands right. The good news is that they are
succeeding in expressing their brands in many instances,
but it's with a recognition that they're used to creating a
product that's far different than what many born-on-the-Web
content brands are able to assemble. Seismic these changes
may be, but the shaking has hardly begun. |
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| 1 August
2005 |
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Now See Here:
Online Video Enters the Mainstream of Business Content
Services |
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Corporate video services supplying broadcast TV footage
used to be rather sleepy affairs, forwarding tapes and
transcripts well after broadcasts had aired. Today's
Web-oriented video environment is changing this snoozy
status quo rather rapidly, though. In addition to
consumer-oriented moves by Yahoo!, Google and others,
business-oriented Web services that can trigger awareness
of online broadcasts seconds after they hit the airwaves
are beginning to catch on in the marketplace. These
services offer invaluable strategic and tactical input to
corporate and governmental professionals, as well as a
nifty supplemental revenue stream for broadcast outlets now
able to reach behind-the-firewall online audiences. It's a
young marketplace that's developing far more rapidly than
many may imagine - a sure sign that more imagination may be
required to harness profits from it sooner rather than
later. |
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| 25 July
2005 |
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Extra Baggage: Older Content Companies
Weigh the Growing Earnings Gap |
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O, to be a content company without content ownership and
licensing issues. Then our financial reports would boast
the operating margins of companies like Google, which has
perfected ad revenue generation from just about everybody's
content quite effectively while owning or licensing hardly
a stitch of the stuff. Owning content can be great but when
you're competing for revenues and margins with monetizers
that can take or leave the ownership game rather casually
it can make you feel like you've been left holding the bag.
There's lots of hope yet for publishers and aggregators
working to sort out this equation to their satisfaction but
it will require traveling far lighter than many in the
content industry are used to. |
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| 18 July
2005 |
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Vanishing
Frontier: Online Premium Content Pioneers Adapt to a
Crowded Neighborhood |
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As the second decade of the Web unfolds pioneers in premium
Web content such as Amazon and Hoover's are adapting to
increased competition from a broadening array of online
premium sources. While still holding advantages as
well-regarded online brands, these content pioneers are
having to redefine the frontiers of premium content profits
on both their home turf and arenas more familiar to their
more established competition. There really isn't an "online
content market" but instead many opportunities to leverage
online and other channels for maximizing penetration of
business and consumer content markets. The
pioneers may yet cut some fresh new ground in the process
of responding to these challenges, but it's a race to do it
before the competition gets more imaginative. |
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| 11 July
2005 |
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The Solutions
Solution: Business Publishing Moves to Client-Centric
Content Systems |
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With VNU and other major publishers and aggregators
focusing on solutions providers for businesses, the art of
business publishing is taking a turn away from its roots of
title-centric publishing towards client-centric business
solutions. The channels through which business media
companies need to communicate with readers increasingly are
in the hands of businesses themselves, forcing media
companies to acquire a hand in defining the premium
contexts in which their content is demanded, viewed and
used by their clients. Not every business media company can
afford to become a full-range content solutions provider,
but every business media company needs a strategy for
adapting their products for maximum revenues in solutions
environments. |
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| 5 July
2005 |
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Pro/Am
Tournament: Colloquial Content Converges in Text, Audio and
Video |
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Today's Web portals abound with text, audio and video
content from both amateur and professional sources the
movement towards content convergence is taking on a grass
roots flavor that few in mainstream media companies would
have predicted a few years ago. Video broadcasters and
syndicators compete with homespun video from newspapers,
corporations, governments and
amateurs, even as podcasting opens up streams of audio
content from more sources than ever before. The mixture of
professional and amateur content keeps the convergence of
media sources increasingly in the hands of users equipped
with more than enough horsepower and storage to take them
all on. In this mix there are no safe niches, only
strategies that can get the right content into the hands of
the right audience. |
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| 27 June
2005 |
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Riding the
Long Tail: Libraries Confront the World of Infinite Content
Supply and Demand |
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Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine,
unleashed a global debate with an article last December on
"The Long Tail," the huge portion of content that's thought
to be of residual value to companies catering to mass
audiences but turning out to be both powerful and
profitable to a wide range of audiences. Companies like
Google and Amazon prove out this model every day on the
web, but so do corporate librarians who focus increasingly
on the bulk of content in their own organizations beyond
the reach of commercial services. The future for librarians
serving local communities can be found in looking at both
online and corporate models for tips as to how to manage
the content that matters most to highly contextual
audiences. |
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| 20 June
2005 |
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Where the Buys Are: Small and Medium
U.S. Businesses Step Up to Business Information |
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Shore's new survey of small and medium sized U.S.
businesses reveals aggressive spending on business
information that these businesses find to be highly
valuable. Not surprisingly much of it is now online
information, but it's not just purchased information that
powers these businesses to success. A combination of
original sources outside of subscription products and
carefully purchased premium content is the key to small and
medium businesses making the most of business information
without huge I.T. investments. There's lots of opportunity
in this changing mix of business information usage for
vendors that want to help these businesses to grow. |
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| 13 June
2005 |
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A Place for
Everything: Content Vendor Taxonomies Hook Clients to
Useful Structure |
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The recent debut of LexisNexis Taxonomy puts the business
content giant toe to toe with Factiva in the arena for
extending the organization of vendor content into
enterprise portals. It's a great play and will certainly
provide LexisNexis with some important traction in the
portal wars, but it's not going to stop clients in their
tracks. Taxonomies used to organize content from a client's
files alongside vendor content can easily organize other
content - including content from competitors' services.
It's nice to get close to your clients hooked to you via
taxonomies, but don't count on them keeping your database
pricing warm and snug forever. |
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| 6 June
2005 |
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Now Hear This:
Publishers Use Broadcasting Models to Widen Content's
Appeal |
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As publishers move to online content as a mainstay of
revenues, a surprising number of them are moving past
standard models of text delivery to delve into models that
borrow both content technologies and management models from
their broadcasting brethren. These experiments are no
longer limited to teens in pursuit of online thrills:
they're rapidly penetrating core news and business content
publishers' operations. It takes more than a title and a
good Web site to attract an audience into a loyal
relationship with a content producer. Audio podcasts,
interactive online "talk shows" and TV properties becoming
Web properties are but a few examples of the merging of
content production disciplines. Reaching audiences through
all of their senses and using all of their media-spawned
sensibilities is an essential consideration for business
and consumer publishers alike. |
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| 31 May
2005 |
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Lost in
Translation: Japan's Industries Consider the Integration of Enterprise Content |
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At a recent conference in Tokyo, Japan executives from
leading industries convened to hear about the latest and
greatest technologies and techniques for integrating
content within their enterprises. Some of these
capabilities are fairly new to Japanese industrial markets,
which have not advanced as far as U.S. industrial markets
in integrating internal and external content sources into
useful portals and applications for solving business
problems. As Japan and other nations consider how to
compete with countries that benefit from both globally
accepted languages and advanced content integration
capabilities it will be important for them to consider how
to leverage assets beyond their traditional I.T. strengths
to create strong content-centric cultures in their
organizations. |
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| 23 May
2005 |
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Gold Rush:
Heady Days for Enterprise Search as Institutional and
External Content Merge |
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This year's Enterprise Search Summit was a well-attended
and robust expression of just how vital and important
search functions have become for enterprises of every
scale. Maturing enterprise search solutions included
offerings from Google that are putting pressure on many
other search engine providers to provide more internal and
external content sources in a simple package with more
features that make answers easier to find. Any way you
measure it enterprise search has reached a new level of
maturity that places far more emphasis on performance and
results than experimentation and partial solutions. Users
are coming out winners in this gold rush, but a broader
array of sophisticated content sources and content
organization tools will keep those users clamoring for more
precious gold than ever before. |
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| 16 May
2005 |
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Radio Days: RSS
Gains Steam as the Content Broadcast Stream of Choice |
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While people associate the Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
site feed capability with weblogs, it's really a medium
unto itself that just happens to be populated with weblogs.
More to the point it's essentially a broadcast medium,
returning the Internet to its Ethernet technical roots and
promoting the ability to push content from anyplace to
anywhere via a common network | |
