I am going to be moderating a panel on the opportunities for publishing in cloud computing on November 19th - more to come on that - so needless to say my head is in the cloud (computing) to some degree already. But when Microsoft announces a major initiative to adapt its Windows operating system for cloud computing for Amazon's web services platform you know that the balance of power is shifting away from enterprise servers faster than you might think. This is great news for network services providers and potentially good news for Microsoft, whose desktop Windows operating system is becoming ever more ponderous and is being readied for a crash diet. The bottom line from a technology perspective is that we're returning to the days of complex technology being "out there" in the network and user-oriented technology being oriented away from general computing and towards serving up content from network services.

The move towards cloud computing may seem rather "back to the future" in some ways for those of us who lived through the days of mainframe computing and (really) dumb terminals, but when did it really make sense for companies to have thousands of dollars of over-complex content and software on people's desks in the first place? The network is the natural place for most content services to live, making it far easier for peers to communicate and collaborate with one another as publishers and to provide them with the ability to benefit from sophisticated services with a minimum of in-your-face technology hassles. This is no surprise to publishers that are succeeding with the move to online digitual publishing services, but it does pose an issue for content and technology companies that had been focused on enterprise sales.

In recent years much of the "value-add" component for sophisticated enterprise content services and the technologies that support them has revolved around tailored software and information services based on integration with enterprise I.T. platforms. The early enterprise entrants in cloud computing such as Salesforce.com's network-based services have strong participation from many enterprises, but the big push for margins has positioned many enterprise content providers towards strategic sales that involve I.T. teams in major companies. Cloud sales were an investment in the future, to be sure, but present revenues were focused behind the firewalls of enteprise publishing clients oftentimes.

Clearly the rapid acceleration of enteprise-oriented I.T. services towards network services available via highly scalable Web infrastructure is going to put more and more pressure on this line of marketing for high-end enterprise publishers. Web services, which enable publishers to integrate their content easily and rapidly with other content via standardized programming techniques, are flourishing in cloud computing environments, enabling user-defined "mix and match" content services intergrated into a wide variety of platforms and productivity tools. This is good news for publishers who want to get their content up and running as quickly and as easily as possible in enterprise-oriented applications - but bad news for publishers who wanted to sell people on the idea that doing so was really expensive and hard.

The go0d news for enterprise publishers is that cloud computing is likely to spawn a widening breed of tailored content applications that can be deployed more rapidly and efficiently. Long and risky product development cycles for advanced publishers are likely to give way to general frameworks for cloud-enabled content applications that will have easily tailored core functions that can be changed to meet individual client needs more rapidly. In the process of doing so, many major aggregators may begin to look at what their real core strengths need to be, leaving some likely to look further and further afield for just the right content sources to aggregate as needed for specific client applications. Instead of focusing on database curation, it's more likely that tomorrow's major enterprise publishers will be focused on Web services curation, being experts in assembling just the right content from any number of databases and Web sources that meet their clients' needs.

While in many instances existing staff skill sets will be transferable to the cloud computing environment, I expect that more than a few of the major publishers are ill prepared for the cultural leaps required to survive and to thrive as content services experts in cloud computing. We're all familiar with the reogranizations that have been the focus at major enterprise publishers such as LexisNexis that are aimed at blasting away very I.T.-centric product development cultures in favor of more client-centric cultures. What happens when the Web services-centric model of cloud computing impels these companies to accelerate the culture change for their core revenue lines that much more quickly? There are great opportunities for major publishers in the shift to network-oriented enterprise services, but I suspect that more than one five-year plan may be floating out their H.Q. office windows shortly as the depth of the impact of cloud computing services on the enterprise content industry becomes more clear to them.

Labels: amazon, cloud computing, enterprise, LexisNexis, Microsoft, publishers

AP notes along with others the announcement that Google plans to extend its print archives scanning program to include the print archives of any newspaper that would like to participate in their program. This new effort builds upon Google's existing scanning efforts to capture books and other materials in the archives of major libraries. Early participants in the newspaper scanning program include Montreal, Quebec's Chronicle-Telegraph, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the St. Petersburg Times in Florida. Regional newspapers are struggling to find sources of revenue for their print assets what will offset plummeting print ad income, so the prospect of exposing their archives for revenues from Google's AdWords and to benefit from referral links to their subscription signup pages is found money for assets that are otherwise sound asleep in most library collections.

Unlike previous arrangements for newspaper archives, which were arranged based on access to subscription or pay-per-view databases or limited access to "snippets" of copyrighted content, the newspaper scanning program's direct parallels with the Google Books program means that people will be able to benefit both from the literal image of a newspaper as it existed at the time but also from text-based searching of those news sources. The differences in approaches are clear and somewhat startling when you compare the scan-based approach to other approaches. For example, a Google News search for "Man Walks on Moon" in the Google News 1969 archives, for example, yields dozens of pay-per-view articles on the topic, but eventually one can look at an ad-supported article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that captures not only the words but also the flavor of graphics, editorial cartoons and other features that were of importance in the era of the early space program, with key search terms highlighted in the scanned text image.

For larger media organizations this approach may not be as appealing as waiting for the "big fish" of pay-per-view and subscription database revenues, but for regional and local newspapers this is likely a very attractive alternative to microfiche collections which are expensive to create and will have relatively low-volume, one-time sales, versus the evergreen potential for revenues from online scanned archives. This alternative to microfiche and subscription databases also puts pressure on suppliers such as ProQuest and Cengage to justify the breadth of their archives as a key selling point. AdWords revenues will not be the answer for every publisher's need to monetize archives but it appears that Google has found another way to add value to hard-to-find content sources that challenges publishers to think more creatively about how they intend to add value to the delivery of their archived content.

Labels: adwords, archives, FAST Search and Transfer, Google, Monetization, newspapers, pay-per-view, scanning, subscription

Amongst other things that I was checking out during my book-writing sabbatical was Amazon's Kindle portable reading device, courtesy of the Westport Public Library's lending desk. I checked out the unit for a few days, which actually turned into about two weeks due to a bad cold that caught me unexpectedly, but it was long enough to appreciate the ins and outs of this increasingly popular device.

A Kindle starts up easily enough by sliding a slim switch on the back of the unit, though its being next to a switch that activates the unit's wireless networking capabilities makes this something a bit awkward to do by habit. You have to flip the Kindle unit over to make sure that you're hitting the right switch most time. There are a lot of little ergonomic issues like this in the Kindle, ideas that look good in the design phase that perhaps could have been better thought out in real life. The keyboard of a Kindle falls into that category also, being barely usable for hunting and pecking but with a slippery and ambiguous feel that makes it unthinkable to use it for more than a few must-do tasks.

Overall, though, many of the key features are remarkably easy to use. The unit boots up quickly and its basic page turning functions are remarkably intuitive, with large broad keys on each side of the unit for turning forward and backwards. A Kindle will boot up to where you were last looking at content, so it's not always necessary to bookmark where you were last reading - same when you return to a specific book. There is a small scroll wheel at the bottom of a thin channel that parallels the main screen: scroll the wheel and a kind-of cursor will move up and down next to the screen and allow you to select from pop-up menus or to click on links. I thought that this would be a really inconvenient interface but you get used to it fairly easily. I can see how its steadiness will be useful in bumpy environments like subway trains. So for basic functions and navigation control you can give it a "weird but usable" rating for the most part.

The eInk display was somewhat disappointing in that the background was rather grayish rather than whitish, which made many illustrations almost impossible to make out clearly and made it a little more difficult to use in dim light. But in spite of this the display was remarkably readable for text - especially when the font size was bumped up a bit. Whew - for those of us who rely on reading glasses or progressive lenses, this is a blessing. There are plenty of great books that I'd love to pore through that have bitsy little print that wears my eyes out very quickly. With a Kindle you don't get print fatigue or the fatigue of looking at a backit screen. With bumped-up font sizes there's not that much information on any given page but the ease of turning to a new page of content makes up for that mild inconvenience easily. I found that I really enjoyed reading materials on the Kindle once I got settled in for a good sit-down.

The early Kindle models now available do provide Web access, but except for a handful of Web sites well adapted to the unit it's largely an exercise in fumbling through awkwardly formatted content - and also a feature that led to the unit freezing twice. A push of a bent paper clip into the unit's reset hole got it back to good order, but this is not a unit meant to replace mobile units with more robust Web browsing capabilities. Still, for a quick sneak peek at the headlines, it beats going back to the PC sometimes. The wireless service was quite good at my home, so chances are it will perform reasonably well with its network connectivity turned on wherever broadband services perform well. However, leaving the wireless connection does drain the batteries far more quickly than normal local -only reading would. In reading-only mode the Kindle batteries last for many days of typical use.

It's certainly a unit that I would consider as a convenience for future book purchases, especially given Amazon's pricing that enables one to purchase both a printed book and a Kindle-compatible copy for one purchase price, or get a Kindle-only copy for an even steeper discount. But what of gift books - or, for that matter, the huge library of printed books already at my disposal? The huge gap in Kindle's market strategy is a lack of "hooks" to keep people attached to their existing libraries and to be able to move on to new books once their usefulness has run their course. There's no real concept of a "used" market for Kindle books, much less the ability to add significant value to them in a way that could be onpassed to others.

More importantly there is little ability to use a Kindle book to activate online content. For example, if I am reading a passage and would like to research a specific person or historical event mentioned in the book, there are no "hooks" to online content that would make that easy - nor any way to store that research with my Kindle book copy for future reference. It's still a fairly unimaginative approach to book marketing. This may reflect the generally conservative approach to book packaging and marketing that still grips many publishing houses, but this conservatism now competes with a demographic curve that is racing against the clock.

Like the music industry print publishers have locked in their future to proprietary technologies to protect existing business models, but in the process of doing so they may have sold away their futures. With an explosion of different kinds of portable devices reaching the marketplace today and the promise of an even more complex array of devices fitting people's lifestyles in the future, why on earth would an entire industry select a proprietary platform to develop their future revenues? In a few years I believe that we will look at experiments such as the iPod and the Kindle much as people today look back on proprietary electronic content services such as Compuserve or the original AOL and ask themselves, what were we thinking?

The future of book publishing will rest on more open publishing platforms that enable book content to move to the contexts and popular devices in which it's valued most far more effectively and that will enable others to add value around a given book independent of its initial publisher. Book publishers already are more aware that their best strengths lie in talent management, providing services that leverage as many aspects of an author's value as rapidly and as effectively as possible through the lifecycle of a given work of authorship. But expect that more nimble companies who see the ability to manage talented authors more effectively through a variety of publishing media to challenge traditional publishing houses over the next few years, especially those who are best able to leveral social media outlets to build and maintain loyal communities of readers and commenters. The Kindle is a nifty little device, but it's just a hint of where the future of book publishing could take us in the not too distant future.

Labels: amazon, books, eInk, fm publishing, kindle, review, Trends, usablity

Hi, sorry that the blog's been a bit slow, back in book-writing mode, will have more soon.

On a personal note I couldn't be more happy that after pioneering serious blog journalism on the business of media Rafat Ali's ContentNext is being acquired by the Guardian Media Group for north of USD 3o million, according to Dow Jones' All Things Digital blog (and of course it's very appropriate that Dow Jones returns the favor to Rafat after his many scoops on them). Rafat's worked very hard for this moment and had the wisdom to assemble a great team to help him make it happen. The story seems to be that contentNext will remain an independent product with the Guardian helping to provide growth and outlets for its content and events for professionals.

That's the key point to remember about this acquisition: it's not really a "blog acquisition." Rafat Ali started with a relatively simple blog structure but he focused early on broadening the mission of the publication as a source of serious trade journalism and on attracting a global clientele of serious media business people to his content and his events that made it far more like a traditional B2B trade publication with a strong events component than a blog without a magazine. That's hardly a bad thing, but from an acquisitions standpoint this is really about a traditional publishing group broadening its portfolio with a B2B play that just happens to have started life using blogging technology. ContentNext puts together great events, has great industry reporting and was smart enough to do all with from day one useing Web-based publishing and marketing methods. In fact there's no reason why a publication stable like ContentNext couldn't add a print component and be entirely successful - though it's not likely any time soon.

The real question isn't why ContentNext got a fairly healthy multiple for its operations but rather why more B2B publications don't look more aggressively at acquiring born-on-the-web publications that can help them to trim down to similarly responsive and profitable proportions. The worst enemy that B2B trade journalism has is the legacy of born-in-print executives who are trying to find a place to employ their dated skill sets in the digital age - and dragging down the long-term profitability of B2B media in the process. With a core publication family like ContentNext under its belt the Guardian Media Group has a publishing team that's successful in its own right but which can also provide a blueprint for managing B2B media successfully for years to come in other market sectors. Getting a team that does it the right way already may be a better option in many instances to provide existing internal Web operations a model to follow.

In the meantime, congratulations to Rafat and to all of the great people at ContentNext - enjoy every moment of it.

Labels: contentnext, paidcontent.org, rafat ali

Currently I am working on Chapter 6 of Content Nation, which focuses on the impact of social media on politics. It seems only appropriate to be doing this on our nation's Independence Day. Below I share you a video that celebrates how content was such an important part of the story of that fabled day in 1776. For those of you celebrating today, have a great day!

Labels: content, freedom, independence day, politics

LinkedIn's growing success is both admired and feared by many in the content business, but the rap against them for quite some time has been, "Well, yeah, but where's the monetization?" In truth LinkedIn has been growing revenues steadily through traditional brand ads, partnerships and payments for premium services. But with two key moves LinkedIn is raising the bar on its prospects for revenues - and for a potential exit at a more appreciable price.

The fist LinkedIn initative is its new DirectAds service, which enables LinkedIn members with profiles to produce simple text ads on a self-service basis that can appear in other members' profile pages. Similar in overall concept to Facebook's SocialAds program - a link to the advertiser's profile appears in each ad to ensure that marketing is on a conversational basis with a known entitiy - DirectAds has the added benefit of being able to target executive peers in the LinkedIn network with a great deal of granularity - and charges healthy but affordable minimum rates to do so - a $25 minimum for a flight of ads, with impressions based on a variable formula. Filtering options include many of the criteria found in a typical member's profile, including the ability to limit ads to specific geographic regions.

The potential for DirectAds is very strong within LinkedIn itself, but it also has the potential to provide B2B publishers with some real concerns as this evolves. Though there is no announced plan to take DirectAds off-site into other publishing venues, certainly classifieds in B2B journals and Web sites could be easily targeted by LinkedIn with its extensive network of top-shelf executives and salespeople. More importantly, it's not too hard to imagine that a B2B publisher seeking revenues from companies trying to get a message through to very specific executives would jump at the chance to use DirectAds to get rates far higher than classifieds for its very targeted profiling capbilities. In very tightly knit B2B communities DirectAds would play very well in B2B publishing venues. Technologically, it would not be hard to implement at all - it would only take enabling a B2B publishing site with Google's OpenSocial API. With such a combination DirectAds would have a Google AdWords/AdSense revenue combo for on-site/off-site revenues that could be impressive indeed. If done properly - hopefully avoiding Facebook's pratfall with its Beacon program that released private data in a user-unfriendly manner - this has the potential to be to B2B publishing what Google was to consumer publishing, turning advertising into relationship building with one click of the mouse. With its potential for ultra-precise targeting, it could put somewhat of a dent in marketing lists services as well in time.

The other interesting new program at LinkedIn is the LinkedIn Research Network, which leverages some of the concepts that it employed in LinkedIn Answers to provide a tool that can enable executives to conduct peer-to-peer industry research. As in LinkedIn Answers members of LinkedIn can pose questions to peers in the LinkedIn network, using LinkedIn's extensive structured and unstructured member profile data to zero in on just the right people to target for questions. The Research Network provides its users with a workbench to monitor responses to questions and to in effect build research panel who can be contacted for additional questions.

The revenue hook in Linked in Research Network is its use of LinkedIn's private InMail network to contact members. Members may use InMail for contacting up to 20 people at a time, presumably to cut down on "spam" research requests and presumably to make it easier to meter the pricing to a reasonable block of minimum requests. Of course, one can sign up for InMail at any number of premium levels, so the real hook is to promote InMail premium subscription revenues as much as possible. Given that the demo video was intent on saying that this product was targeted primarily at financial industry analysts trying to contact experts in companies and market sectors, perhaps their initial expectations for its use are limited. But clearly its ability to combine the art of research into the art of marketing will make this a popular option for many over time.

With both of these options LinkedIn is taking a relatively low-key approach to product development, moving relatively slowly to ensure that their most valuable asset - the trust and security that the LinkedIn system of opt-in relationships has protected through its development - will not be tainted or abused. Executives are a conservative bunch when it comes to dealing with their personal reputations, but LinkedIn has proved to more than 20 million professionals so far that it is by and large a very trustworthy environment. With that trust as a primary asset, it's likely that LinkedIn has set the stage for some solid revenue development that is likely to upend a few B2B applecarts in the long run. For the time being, though LinkedIn is just at the begininning of what promises to be a long battle for the rights to what professionals value most in carrying out their business - trusted relationships that can yield revenues.

Labels: advertising, financial information, LinkedIn, Monetization, Research