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Fountain Flowing:
Can Factiva Redefine Premium Aggregation Value with IBM? |
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22
September 2003 |
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As Factiva
announces the deployment of
its vast content collection on IBM's new Web Fountain
platform, it is being heralded by these partners as the
dawn of a new world of content value. Complex, human-scaled
questions can now find answers in a flash from a sea of
premium, public and private content. But will this fountain
of knowledge flow as freely and steadily as they hope? The
very thing that makes Web Fountain formidable - its scale -
may in fact turn out in the long run to be as much an
impediment as a strength in helping companies to create
highly valued content efficiently. |
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In the beginning, there was the
database. The aggregator gathered premium content into the
database and the institutions paid for the content, and lo, it
was good. Then the aggregator created the search engine, so
that expert users could access the premium content in the
database more efficiently, and lo, it was good. Then the
aggregator made the search engine available online, so that all
who paid for the premium content could share in it easily, and
lo, it was good. Then the aggregator made the premium content
available in Web services, so that it could be useful in yea so
many enterprise portals, and lo, it was good. But the
aggregator became troubled, for the revenues received for the
premium content ceased to flow generously from the database. So
the aggregator said, "Behold, I shall make all things new, I
shall call upon the technologist to create a new database and a
new search that shall cause the premium content revenues to
spring forth again from the database like a Web Fountain
flowing."
And lo, is it good?
The announcement by
Factiva
of its plans to make its content sources available on IBM's new
Web Fountain information discovery system
is certainly an exciting step towards the aggregator's
asserting its premium content as
vContent - highly valued content that maximizes its worth
through a deep understanding of both technology and human needs
- and away from the commoditization that threatens so many
premium aggregators today. For Factiva, being able to assert
the value of its huge content collection in aggregate on a
platform such as Web Fountain is essential in an era when more
contextual content sales are gradually carving its revenue pie
into smaller and more discrete slices. Web Fountain's ability
to store and digest massive quantities of information from
virtually any and every source and to infer human relevance
both from search-keyed content and the context of the searcher
promises to create a new level of relevance that may yet live
up to the boast of Paul Horn, IBM's senior vice president of
research, that Web Fountain is
"Google on Steroids". The combination of vast stores of
public content, premium content and institutionally-generated
content with intelligent text and relationship analysis
promises a great deal to major institutions everywhere.
But with most highly hoped-for promises come potential
disappointments, as well. Here are a few potential pitfalls to
watch out for as the Factiva/IBM marketing alliance begins to
flow forth:
- Beware the "Alta Vista Factor".
You remember
AltaVista,
don't you? When first it sprang on to the Web scene in the
early days of the "dot com" era, it was supposed to be the
biggest, baddest search engine ever - "Yahoo on steroids," if
you will. Well, it was big, and it was fast,
but soon people discovered that it was mostly a pretty weak
search engine on top of a very powerful - and expensive -
hardware/software platform offered by Digital Equipment
Corporation. Turns out that DEC was interested mostly in
pushing iron, software and services, which caused them to
miss the ball on what people really needed in a search engine
portal. DEC was ingested by Compaq, and AltaVista lives on as
a widely used search engine, but the biggest/baddest hype
died out fairly quickly. While IBM is to be commended for its
commitment to open platforms in many areas, it is clear that
Web Fountain has a similar biggest/baddest proprietary
platform link that has allowed them an early lead, but not
necessarily a sustainable lead. The onus is on IBM to
be willing to build on the Web Fountain concept and to create
highly valued content first and foremost, no matter what the
implications may be to platform-related sales.
- Beware which content provides
added value. Having a vast collection of premium content
such as Factiva's incorporated with other sources on a very
powerful problem-solving platform is quite a coup indeed. But
which sources are really providing the leverage that plays
into Web Fountain's strengths? Premium content is highly
valued because it is well filtered and edited, the exact
opposite qualities that make much of the open Web that Web
Fountain leverages valuable. Authors, editors and
publishers of professionally produced content provide much of
that human intelligence of filtering the nuances of available
sources already. While this may in one sense provide a more
refined source to mine, professionally produced content may
in fact turn out to be TOO refined for a tool such as Web
Fountain to extract more valuable generalized inferences in a
much more raw universe of facts and rumors. Good answers may
be returned, but learning which kinds of sources provide the
real return on investment may require some less than
intuitive analysis.
- Beware how big content and
technology services get packaged for tailored content needs.
There is certainly no shortage of major institutions with big
questions that need to be answered far more efficiently than
their human-scaled management structures can handle
effectively - hence the enduring appeal of information
technology. To some degree IBM sees Web Fountain as an
opportunity to redefine that equation to a new level of
problem solving, with at least a nostalgic eye turned towards
the days of scores of white-frocked technicians with pocket
protectors crawling over mammoth computing machines. IBM has
grown immensely in its sophistication in managing and selling
content services through its growing Web oriented services
and software offerings, but one wonders whether Factiva and
IBM will scale their operations for moon-shot like returns on
content when what in fact people are looking for is a lot of
efficient trips to the corner content store.
Any way you look at it, though, the
fountain is about to start flowing with vContent, and it
promises to be a very interesting show. However, it's a safe
bet that the aggregator won't be taking a rest on the seventh
day of this creation - lest the snake run off with all the fun.
-
John Blossom
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