Leave it to Clare Hart to leverage two of Factiva's strongest assets - her insight and her go-getter personality - to promote their outlook via her new "From the Hart" weblog, with weekly entries on the content industry. Clare's entries thus far are pretty insightful, if tending to reinforce the marketing themes of Factiva (hey, it's a CEO blog, after all). Clare emphasizes the importance of metadata, enterprise search, vertical search, visualization - all of the tools that have been our focus at Shore for some time. But does this add up to an effective growth strategy yet for Factiva? With newly patented content categorization software to take on unstructured content there's reason to think so, but it's early days for a company that's forging into ground well-occupied by many sophisticated content technology vendors.

Factiva's push into more sophisticated taxonomy and categorization services will serve it well in the months ahead, but it's far from clear that it will be enough to carry the weight of a general-purpose subscription database that is rapidly aging in its usefulness as direct access to premium content via Web search engines gets incorporated into enterprise federated search infrastructures. Clare is pushing all of the right buzz words and has the right big picture from a technology perspective, but let's hear some chat on her blog about how an aggregator can become a "go to" content service that can turn in impressive growth and margins. Looking forward to hearing more of Clare's observations.