The LA Times noted along with other major outlets that eBay had posted a quiet announcement that it had ceased supporting the use of Microsoft's Passport "wallet" service as a means of payment. Microsoft confirmed that in the future the Passport feature will be used to manage logins to Microsoft-owned content and media properties but would no longer be used to support general payment services. Microsoft is just the latest in a long string of players who have tried to dominate online purchasing with "grand unification" schemes which have made both purchasers and sellers uneasy with attempted dominance of privacy and profits. But in truth the proliferation of content-consuming platforms is to blame as much as any other factor: too many people use too many different devices to make the Windows-oriented Passport scheme a successful play in the long run. The world of content ecommerce still does not have an effective universal backbone for managing subscriptions to premium content online, an area still dominated by major aggregators in business and professional content and by a number of small players in individually-oriented media. Shore expects 2005 to be a year in which clear patterns in simplified content ecommerce for individuals and institutions to begin to emerge, focused on the need for content ecommerce to allow usage rights for content objects to flow naturally from platform to platform.

Searching for IBM
Desktop Search: The Game Is Afoot
Ebrary's ISIS Creates E-Collections
OPA: Spending on Online Paid Content Climbs 14%
No-go zone for Passport
What is the single most challenging Sarbanes-Oxley issue today? Robert Olson, CEO of Stellent, Answers
SEA-EAT Blog Mobilizes Fast For Tsunami Relief
BitTorrent Operator Bites Back at MPAA
Longhorn, blogs, Linux: Predicting 2005
Longhorn downsizing may threaten licensing

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Microsoft to Curtail Passport Service
FCC Will Auction Spectrum, Targets Wireless Broadband
A New Script for Searching Texts Written by Hand
Wikinews Offers Content From Citizen Journalists
The EContent 100: A useful toolbox for your Web site
Google Sandbox Mode Demythified
D&M Holdings and Tribune Media Services in Strategic Alliance for Interactive Program Guide Solutions
Data Depth Corporation Terminates Print Craft/Valeo License
Extracting Meaning From Content: FAST Speaks Out
New ContentGuard DRM patents

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Larry Page And Sergey Brin: Information At Warp Speed
4.1 Million People A Week Listen To Three Major Online Radio Networks
2004 in Review: Perspectives
Computer, Microphone, iPod Make Broadcasting Personal
ProQuest Introduces Author Profiles, Enhanced LAD User Interface
ClearForest Recognized by NIST; Scores Highest in Automatic Content Extraction for Arabic Language
FinancialContent Announces Approval for Listing in Mergent Manual and News Reports(TM)
Launch of ShoutCastingTalk.com
About.com Launches Original Video Content; New ChannelGuide Opens Advertising Opportunities
Cook eBooks Has Made Its Debut on the Internet, Selling Inexpensive Electronic Cookbooks

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CNET News notes the long-in-the-works selloff of Meta Group to rival Gartner for for $162 million in cash. Meta has been struggling to be profitable for some time, while Gartner is now eking out hair-width profits in a market for I.T. research that has seen new arrivals such as TechTarget scraping off much of the front end of content profits that can be offered in this segment. This appears to be largely a "boots on the ground" approach to sales development, as Gartner hopes to leverage a Meta sales force already familiar with its rival and able to position Gartner products in segments where their efforts have not overlapped. It's a merger long overdue, but unanswered is whether the combined forces of these two firms can address the inherent weaknesses in a market for I.T. management consulting that increasingly wants solutions recommenders to be solutions providers and content to come from a mixture of publishers, peers and vendors. Firms like Gartner struggle mightily to maintain a big-ticket approach to combined content and advisory services that will pose a greater challenge as firms like TechTarget succeed with increasingly broad portions of the content side of the business. It's not that Gartner doesn't matter anymore so much as there are so many other things that matter that deliver important value to its target market in more flexible ways that its approach to getting a healthier "share of wallet" from both content and services has to be questioned.

The recent Newsweek article on the upward mobility of recognized webloggers notes that the medium is accelerating the path for some who are lucky enough to gain cherished links from blog "big dogs", in the process becoming amplifiers of importance themselves with incredible speed. The core example given is the speed with which the concept of "podcasting", cobbling radio-like audio programs into weblogs that can be consumed on iPods and other portable devices, became a widespread buzz in the general media thanks to some of the key "Alpha bloggers" who picked up on some of these emerging trends, accelerating the Malthusian growth of podcasting references. It's interesting that podcasting is the example, because in many ways weblogs represent the kind of grass-roots interest in content by key voices that used to power the radio industry before it was swallowed whole by major corporations. With no artificial supply constraint such as government licenses to limit its growth, weblogs promise radio-like efficiency for broadcasting both content and concepts to highly targeted audiences that react viscerally to hipness and truth as much as teens wriggling to Elvis Presley tunes on the radio did in the 1950's. Today's weblog Elvises have more opportunities and techniques to get noticed than did those early popular music stars, with monetization beginning to come online in full force as a reward.

The Wall Street Journal offers up an interesting profile of Pearson PLC and its CEO Marjorie Scardino's efforts to focus the sprawling publishing empire "like a laser" on its core education, financial news and book publishing units. Hmm, never knew a laser could focus in three unrelated directions. While Pearson may not face some of the dilemmas that conglomerates such as McGraw-Hill must address (time for that Standard & Poor's spinoff?), the truth is that large publishing empires built up largely in a pre-Web era are faced with a galaxy of issues trying to scale their operations efficiently for divergent content markets that no longer operate like a string of contented cows. Education markets are very lucrative but require packaging and marketing efforts that offer less and less operational synergy with trade book publishing and financial news, two sectors in which profits are increasingly elusive and perhaps headed for permanent downtrends without radical intervention.

Large holding companies for publishing serve many purposes, but it's not clear that the repurposeable general management "know-how" that once allowed executive talent to flow from division to division and make an impact increasingly requires a new set of management techniques to define success in today's content markets. Those managemet tools are both more general in terms of dealing with a flattening of the general marketplace for content and an increasingly user-focused application of that content in specific market sectors. There will doubtless be a place for large corporations in publishing for many years to come, but unless they focus more on developing management talent that can reapply lessons of how to succeed with vContent in multiple market settings they're not likely to be the large holding companies that we know today for very long.

The Alpha Bloggers
Blogs Provide Raw Details From Scene of the Disaster
Information wave: Today’s real-time disaster relief may be tomorrow’s real-time rescue effort.
Gartner acquires smaller rival Meta
Pearson's Plans Face Big Test
Study: Craigslist Costs Bay Area Papers $50M in Ad Revenue
Google’s Library Project: Questions, Questions, Questions
Viral Marketing and Media: Mutually Exclusive?
Steinbeck's hometown to close all its libraries
Digital music: flat fee futures

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Please join us in welcoming Patricia Joseph, our new Senior Analyst, to Shore's expanding team of industry experts ready to service your needs for industry-leading insights through our research and advisory services. Patricia brings to Shore a deep understanding of new information product and service development, competitive analysis, e-business and turnarounds that's sure to be of great interest to Shore's core clients. In addition to her own highly successful independent practice she has held senior management positions at Dun & Bradstreet, ACNielsen, The Washington Post and Hanley-Wood. We know that you will welcome Patricia's contributions to our publications and services and look forward to introducing you to her capabilities in the months ahead.

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Last year at this time Shore's crystal ball was bringing into focus many trends in content that may have been hard to believe for some - yet the ol' sphere seems to have had a pretty good year of target practice. From the rise of the Publishing Organization and The New Aggregation to the monetization of Weblogs to the commercial success of DRM-managed content, many of the trends forecast last year unfolded on schedule, while some such as weblogs exploded with even more vengeance than even we had anticipated. Join us as we look back on the progress of our predictions and take a gander at how these trends will fare next year.

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Will Google stay as hot as its lava lamps?
At I.B.M., That Google Thing Is So Yesterday
Are Media Buyers Facing Extinction?
FinancialContent Develops IMV 1.0 to Track Momentum Stocks
Google Designs an Engine for Eggheads
Digital inheritance raises legal questions
Fate of ALA's Midwinter Meeting Stirs Debate
SEO Gurus Merge Services To Form SEO-Specialists.org
2004 Year-End Google Zeitgeist
$10 for a Plain CD or $32 With the Extras

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Where The Real Internet Money Is Made
Groups Debate Use of Digital Information After Death
'St. Louis Post-Dispatch' Blogger Outed, Suspended
Wikis at Work
SMART Expands Product Offering with Actalyst Interactive Digital Signage
ED2K and Bittorrent raids
New Year's resolution for Firefox: Grow
Innovative Adds B&T’s Content Café
Adobe Reader 7 now available
PDAs Come of Age

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U. Nebraska, With ProQuest, Digitizes All Dissertations
Bacon's Cuts through the Blog-Clutter; New Service Mines the Blogosphere for Relevant Content
Magazines Sort Drinking-Age Readers for Ads
Free ebooks from Project Gutenberg
Europe's Newspapers Adopt Tabloid Format To Boost Circulation
Statement of SIIA on the Order From the EU Court of First Instance
Innovation vs. Copyright: Supreme Court Must Find a Balance in a World of Easily Shared Content
Mashboxx Aims to Make File Sharing Legit
The [very] ugly side of DRM
The Weed Files to Host CD Baby's Catalogue, Largest Independent Music Seller on the Web

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I downloaded the new VIYYA tool from Viyya Technologies, Inc. shortly after its announced commercial availability last week, but received no follow-ups to prompt me to give it a spin. But its little icons continued to pop up in the notification window of my Windows taskbar, so I finally took a little time to give it a whirl. The VIYYA pitch is to provide "automating and managing "favorites" and routine search functions, and reducing the time an individual spends online by as much as 30 to 40 percent!" per the press release. VIYYA provides a point-and-click method to define content that one wants extracted from various sources and to be able to easily form that information into alerts streams and to search extracted content via VIYYA's own search utility. A neat concept, but how does it play?

Clicking on the VIYYA icon on the Windows taskbar links to a browser-based program that allows one to select a target source - Web pages in the free trial version and presumably adding the greyed-out options of local databases, email, RSS feeds and weblogs in the premium version. Once a page is up you point your cursor to what you want to be a headline and click: VIYYA then decides what's a headline. Click the next item that you want as a headline and VIYYA builds the pattern to follow - and so on for summaries and text bodies until you've built your "anchor". The "build anchor set" tab in the program then allows you to associate one or more "anchors" into a set of outputs with specific formatting. You can then set up alerting to have these sources extracted on a regular basis and searched via the VIYYA search utility.

It's a nicely designed interface and workflow from many perspectives, but it's still a work in progress in the using. VIYYA does fairly well at identifying blocks of text for headlines and such but it's very eager to pick stuff that's not appropriate - and not very willing to let you tune it easily. The ticker window is like a private RSS feed of sorts and the search window a private Google Desktop, but it's also available to a limited range of applications (email and mobile phone oriented SMS alerts so far). A very useful tool for people on the go fingering their Blackberries or mobile phones, but limited in use for the desktop so far. Given the limited output format that it's trying to produce it would be very useful if it could republish the content into an RSS stream that could be used by local applications without resorting to email. You'll have some local search capabilities indirectly via email search, but that's less than optimal.

VIYYA offers an interesting foray into a service-based approach to personal content extraction - available for a subscription at USD 9.95 a month or USD 79.00 annually. Content extraction of this kind was once the exclusive purview of major institutions and now through this service becomes available to individuals needing to create their own personalized content streams. Many purveyors of content extraction technology fall short of understanding how to create user-oriented content value out of their wares, but VIYYA is barking up at least some of the right trees to enable individuals and institutions to become their own powerful sources of content aggregation.

Court upholds Microsoft sanctions
Bloggers, Citizen Media and Rather's Fall -- Little People Rise Up in 2004
Despite Earlier Predictions, 'Free' Web Is Going Strong
2005 Predictions - The Coming Year of Hyperfragmentation
Gallup: Online News Hasn't Beaten Old Media -- Yet
Microsoft sells Slate magazine
Yahoo! unveils video search
American Lawyer Media Chooses NewsStand For Digital Delivery of The National Law Journal
Pamela Springer Selected to Lead ECNext; Former Vice President of Sales named President and CEO
About.com Adds Comparison Shopping Through Exclusive Partnership with PriceGrabber.com
Healthnostics Enters Digital Rights Partnership with Valeo IP
BostonWorks Launches ''The Job Hunt''; Tools and Information Help Job Seeker Find The Next Opportunity

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As noted by eWeek and other publications enterprise search engine provider Verity has integrated Web searches into its enterprise search platforms, including not only the raw search listings but Overture-serviced contextual ads provided by Yahoo!'s search service. Verity will take a percentage of the click revenues Yahoo! gains from these ads, placing Verity in one swipe of a mouse into the revenue-generating content business. While traditional aggregators serving institutional markets test the waters of contextual ads behind the firewall gingerly, this bold move marks a huge step towards enterprise search engines positioning themselves far more effectively as gateways to the full range of content value found online today. While it's a long way from this point to the full-range subscription services offered by major aggregators, there is going to be a race to the middle of these two relative extremes to a point at which enterprises will have search access to all external content via one provider, with commercial terms managed in a number of models that may or may not rely upon the search provider's infrastructure. We're betting on "not" as the long-term trend, which is more likely to favor technology specialists like Verity and Vignette within the institutional framework over traditional aggregators.

You may not care to poke through the technical details of the W3C recommendation for XInclude, here's the short version, as covered in W3C's press release: XML standards now make it far easier to assemble modules of content into an XML-managed content and application framework. Where prior XML definitions were rather fussy about managing external entities XInclude is far more forgiving and flexible, allowing default content to be supplied if the included content is not available when invoked. In short, digital content objects can be assembled within this framework from a series of content subcomponents. This could be as simple as taking the output of a database query and plugging it into an XML document or could be as complex as an XML-defined personal online newspaper that aggregates content from multiple XML-defined content objects into a coherent display. But where are the modular content objects to include into this scenario? Mostly within XML-savvy institutions right now, but expect publishers to take a careful look at XInclude for innovative new ways to package their content for modular use. We hope.

Google fixes security flaw in desktop search
BitTorrent file-swapping networks face crisis
Will online archive access lure subscribers?
Bear Stearns More Than Doubles Desktop Deployment of Thomson ONE
ContentGuard Bulks up Property Portfolio
Thomson Financial Adds Twelve Independent Research Firms To Its Premium Research Collection
W3C Issues XInclude 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation; XInclude Makes It Easier to Create Reusable Content
FinancialContent Launches Finesse 1.0 for Online Publishers of RSS News Channels
Digital Garage and Technorati Sign Distribution Agreement
Complinet Plays Host to Enhanced NASD Manual

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In our Finance premium weblog Shore Analyst Jack McConville provides decisive insights on these and other late-breaking events in the world of financial content.

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Another week, another earth-shattering headline about the machinations of Google. Or is it so earth-shattering? Google's plan to scan materials without clear copyright in major libraries is really just a continuation of their original battle plan. What's more at question is how publishers and aggregators have been asleep at the wheel in thinking that copyright law would promise them growth - as opposed to how it is protecting dwindling profits based on old business models. Content value is exploding in electronic form, much of it well beyond the purview of traditional copyright protection. The effective use of copyright is far from dead, but its users must adapt to an era of getting to know its client base in far more cooperative ways.

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A very handy new tool called Copyscape has been announced is making its debut, an online site that allows you to plug in a given URL and follow who's been pinching your prose in the online world. This bone-simple lookup service is bait for a questionnaire that probes what people would be willing to pay for an alerts service based on this technology. Notably also, though, the service comes with a small banner that can be embedded in a page indicating that a given page of content is monitored by the service. This is copyright enforcement with teeth, if you will: the copyright notifications found on most Web pages are about as effective as "Beware of the Dog" signs in yards without a pooch. While this tool may not prevent content from escaping behind firewalls or onto personal devices for illicit reuse, it's a step in the right direction towards awareness of rights monitoring as the best way to protect a publisher's intellectual property in the realm of text content. It's a crude tool for now, but expect services such as this to evolve into a standard part of the online publishing infrastructure. It's a concept that may also evolve from mere rights awareness to content use awareness, enabling sites to collect link references on a proactive basis without having to resort to trackback mechanisms. Content awareness can create and enforce content value on many levels.

The New York Times notes notes the pending plans of Random House to start selling its wares direct to consumers via its own Web site, hoping to improve on its margins as book store sales continue to wallow in the doldrums. Given the advanced state of online content shopping offered by sites such as Amazon this may seem to be a rather chimeric effort by the major publishing house, but looking at the efforts of today's journals to find their place in the online world without the help of traditional aggregators perhaps it's not no unwise. With the movement of content towards an increasingly uniform and universal search infrastructure and tools such as weblogs making aggregation much more of a personal matter, perhaps Random House is getting more in line with today's content ecommerce trends, wittingly or unwittingly. Web publishing has allowed more high-value personal relationships with authors and publishers in many venues, including but hardly limited to Weblogs. If Random House sets up shop with just another storefront, it's likely what we can say "so what?" to some degree. But if they use this new venue to prepare for the future of highly personalized publishing, then they may just be on to the core of tomorrow's book publishing essentials.

As noted in a press release from i-newswire the best practices of online ecommerce have reached the world of weblogging as veteran bloggers Darren Barefoot and Jeremy Wright auctioned off their corporate blogging services on eBay, generating a bidding war or sorts for the services of these established webloggers. I've held for a long time that certain forms of content are going to be open to the auction model increasingly, especially in venues such as finance where the model is well established. The weblogger is one step away from content auctioning, but it represents another solid move towards monetization of weblogs that comes close to closing the loop on the "how can weblogs be monetized?" question that some have been asking while others have been answering it. Content for hire has been a strong trend this year in ad-oriented venues, so it's not surprising that the institutional arena is beginning to pick up on this as well. Talented webloggers have many logical channels now through which to peddle their wares. In the era of vContent, in which today's leading publishers are the individuals and institutions equipped with powerful and affordable publishing technologies, that should come as no surprise.