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Authority Figures: ASIDIC Uncorks a
New Blend of Professional and Personal Content |
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19 September 2005 |
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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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This year's
edition of the
ASIDIC Fall Meeting amidst the ripe vineyards of
California's
Napa
Valley poured out a full-bodied blend of views on
how emerging authoring, publishing and content disseminating
techniques
are shifting electronic publishing into a broadening array
channels and business models. From the opening keynote by
Answers.com
Chief Revenue Officer
Jeff Cutler to Google Director of Business Development
Cathy Gordon's endnote address the conference demonstrated
that this shift in publishing is as much about who's in charge
of quality as it is in the quality of any given content product
or outlet.
From the perspective of Answers.com,
which combines content from both professionally published
sources and community-driven
Wikipedia,
quality is in the eyes of users who seek quick agnostic answers
to pressing questions via an interface highly tuned to their
needs. From the perspective of the panel scoping out
user-generated media, quality increasingly is in the hands of
audiences who have learned how to make their own powerful
content statements using highly affordable and accessible
publishing technologies. From the array of the conference's
publishers, aggregators and technologists focused on generating
value in content for major enterprises, quality is determined
far closer to the user than ever before in portals and workflow
applications, but the products that they consume are still
largely based on older publishing models - and oftentimes
missing revenue opportunities in this new mix.
As
Adaptive
Path CEO
Janice Fraser noted early on in the conference the key
factor to note is the shifting nature of authority in
determining what content's worth using. Search engines with
links analysis introduced the concept that a collective
consciousness as expressed through links to Web resources could
be a highly powerful authority in determining content quality.
User ratings, reviews and comments embedded in Web sites
accelerated this trend until personal authoring tools such as
SixApart's
weblogging products and
Socialtext's
wiki software blew open the authoring gates to allow tens of
millions of contributors to broaden the consciousness of
authority. Who's "king" of content? We are. That is, any "we"
that matters to a given audience in which the audience itself
oftentimes becomes part of the "we".
The good news emerging from the ASIDIC
conference is that these new lines of authority are not
hijacking the value of professionally-produced content.
Instead, professional content producers are learning how to
generate value alongside and with the cooperation of these new
players. Here are some quick takes on how the conference
reflected on the shifting nature of authority in determining
content value for products aimed at individuals and
enterprises:
- Monetization models are still
catching up with new models of authority. Both publishers
and enterprise purchasers reflected on the need for content
product pricing and licensing that could adapt more
effectively to a more distributed landscape of purchasing
authorities. Ad models cannot work universally to monetize
content in a given instantaneous context, yet as noted by Ian
Hersey, SVP of Corporate Development and Strategy at
Inxight,
the shelf life that used to justify pricing of
professionally-produced publications has largely disappeared.
David Oakley, Director of Licensing at
LexisNexis, pointed out that that the task-based
aggregation products of the 1990s used to sustain
subscription revenues are beginning to show their age and
that users are ready for something else. The time may be
right for new monetization models that embrace the timeliness
of ad monetization but with different payout methods. Perhaps
it's what some at the conference were calling "Cost per
Context" - being able to assess the value of content for very
specific audiences in very specific contexts - regardless of
its original source or payment method.
- Branding must adapt to new lines of
authority. Conference panelists wrestled with the nature
of content brand value in an age of branded search engines,
found even on the home pages of major libraries. But the
presence of such new branded authorities may be quite
beneficial in the long run for publishers and aggregators.
Cathy Gordon of Google demonstrated how fair-use extracts
from copyrighted materials could expose commercially dead "long
tail" content in Google's indexes in ways that could be
highly beneficial to publishers seeking new revenues from
content that's not finding valuable audiences. Some of the
solution may also be content licensors developing their own
brands to help their users appreciate the authority of the
source that supports their access to premium content, as was
demonstrated by Librarian Karen Andrews of the
University of California Davis. Increasingly publishing
authorities and access management authorities must deal with
a more distributed concept of brand value that oftentimes
separates these two attributes.
- Smaller worlds, personal
opportunities for expressing authority. With an increase
in content acquisitions and creation by individuals in both
consumer and professional roles, the importance of building
trust at a much more personal level is becoming a cornerstone
for authoritative content.
Michael Fergusson, VP of Product Strategy at
Blast Radius,
noted how the Web's universality has allowed content to be
consumed in smaller, more granular audiences. Michael gave
the example of very personal photo sharing in Yahoo's
Flikr
online community, but the same could apply to peer-reviewed
scholarly content, which cries out for more effective and
efficient ways of building up the authoritativeness of
changing views on key research topics.
Major publishers and aggregators have had
to reach out aggressively to new content sources and
integration methods to keep up with this changing landscape of
authorities producing value in content. Increasingly the value
in publishing is appearing at the intersection of personal and
professionally produced content. Each amplifies and complements
the other's authority for specific audiences, creating a new
level of value in content that would not be possible with
either of them in isolation. The authoritative value produced
by this intersection of audiences and publishers is only
beginning to be exploited to its fullest, certain to be a
potent vintage when it reaches its peak. Perhaps the next
ASIDIC meeting will give us a good sample of how far we've come
in a short time.
-
John Blossom
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