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| Tuesday, January 31, 2006 |
We'll be at the SIIA Information Industry Summit for the next two days, blogging along as time and batteries allow and providing you with insights into the thinking of the many leading figures in the content industry. Follow along as we add items to our Events Weblog. Stay tuned!
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:31 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:42 AM |
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 2006 is the year in which we'll see content companies making far greater investment in publishing infrastructure and in new marketing strategies to tailor their services to increasingly sophisticated users untethered from many traditional content sources, distribution channels and platforms. Shore sees four key areas where investing in users will be most active: packaging, platform, premium and personalization.. Our annual outlook details the major trends that will be impacting the content industry as seen by our award-winning team of industry analysts. Click here for details and a complimentary download
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:29 AM |
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| Monday, January 30, 2006 |
In an age of instantly available global content services the gestation period required to bring most any book to the marketplace seems to be far out of synch with the expectations of most of today's audiences. How do publishers maintain the integrity of book publishing while adapting to the expectations of an electronic era? Safari Books Online's new Rough Draft product line offers audiences a chance to peek at new books online as they're being developed and to provide useful feedback in the process - all for a premium price. In the process of doing so these publishers and audiences are reshaping the very nature of what a book is and can be as a form of vital content. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:51 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:33 PM |
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 User-generated media is still a work in progress, trying to find a model that allows it to amplify the best of mainstream media sources while adding its own unique value with original works. As noted in our earlier News Analysis on Gather mixing the two together in a community-driven publishing environment with monetary rewards for publishers is one important key to develop both ratings and loyalty, but we suggested that it would be nice to make the model more open and to onpass revenues directly to publishers. A new "private" beta product called Newsvine seems to be striking the right balance between core media, content, community commentary and original publishing. Newsvine takes news wire content from AP and wraps comments, chats, and rankings around them, but also provides the ability for users to "seed" other stories from Web links and to build the same type of community content around them, as well as around content posted from community members. Newsvine content can be fed via RSS or a Javascript tool that allows headlines from an RSS feed to be embedded in a Web page. Users whose content attracts ad clicks will get to keep the ad revenue from those pages, so there's a high motivation both to contribute content and to make a community aware of it. While the front-and-center AP content may offer a little less of a homespun community feel compared to a service like Gather it offers both strength and neutrality that is likely to accelerate contributions from a wider array of individuals who are looking for a tool that offers more real content and community than a Digg and more of an open model than a Gather. Newsvine is in its very early days but it seems to strike the most powerful balance between content from individuals and mainstream sources to date - with reasons for people to grow with the service that jingle in the pocket.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:18 AM |
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If you've been stopping by HighBeam Research as of late you no doubt have noticed that the search results from the HighBeam Library highlight both premium and free sources available from the online research service. Today this live "Beta" has been dubbed officially successful, as HighBeam announces the availability of both formerly premium sources such as BusinessWire, Financial Management and Science News for free via the HighBeam Library as well as high-quality sources from the open Web such as American History, CIO, Financial Advisor, Inc. and Wine Enthusiast. HighBeam will also gain free content shortly from the Oxford University Press, including The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English and The Oxford Pocket Thesaurus of Current English, while Oxford will also contribute additional premium content to HighBeam's reference collection. The HighBeam Library will also see new premium contributions from the archives of the Washington Post and Knight Ridder newspapers. Alexa stats show overall visits to HighBeam to be stabilizing somewhat over the past several weeks so the combination of premium and free content in a consolidated index is certainly finding some appeal among online researchers. This mix of monetization models is most likely to service the needs of online searchers who care far less about how content is gathered and licensed and far more about whether it actually does them any good. Putting free and paid sources of equivalent quality side-by-side is the best way to service these discriminating users who can choose their level of financial engagement accordingly. HighBeam is offering incremental steps towards unified searching of free and premium content, but they are steps headed in the right direction to be sure.
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:52 AM |
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Shore Senior Analyst Deb Wiley reports on the "smaller" convocation of 11,000 information professionals in San Antonio, Texas that revealed how search and monitoring services are allowing infopros to define valuable content services that provide measurable return on investment. Read Deb's full report on our Events Weblog
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:52 AM |
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| Friday, January 27, 2006 |
CNET News offers the best coverage in a confusing field of reports on weblog comments by Linus Torvalds, progenitor of the open source Linux operating system that powers many of the Web's servers. Torvalds states in his posting that he does not plan to convert his Linux code to support the proposed new version of the Free Software foundation's GNU General Public License, the legal instrument that has been the foundation of the open source programming movement for the past fifteen years. Section 3 of the proposed license, entitled "Digital Restrictions Management" (sic), states among other things that the new GPL license will not support "modes of distribution that deny users that run covered works the full exercise of the legal rights granted by this License." This means that works using DRM cannot be used as a distribution mechanism for software protected under this proposed license, but also that it would not be possible to create an open-source DRM system using the GPL Version 3 license. While Torvalds does not rant directly against the anti-DRM stance in his post, he is clearly opposed to the measure. To some degree he is no doubt thinking about the commercial viability of the widely used Linux software in an era in which publishers are trying to adopt viable strategies for protecting copyrighted materials. But I think that the larger issue is whether this is a legal provision that serves the public or whether it is a provision being used to frame an ill-formed political debate that has no real place in a legal document for open source software or other types of electronic content. The provisions of the proposed license state that "no permission is given to distribute covered works that illegally invade users' privacy" and yet at the same time it "intrinsically disfavors technical attempts to restrict users' freedom to copy, modify, and share copyrighted works." This is the core of the problem: if users are supposed to have their rights to personal privacy protected, shouldn't those rights include the ability to protect their intellectual property via technology as they see fit? In a world of user-generated media, "we" are "they"; it's individuals as much as media companies who need DRM to manage content that finds its greatest value in the hands of the audiences who use it and create it. "The commons" is an important feature in any successful community, but its value comes from people being able to have both common rights and personal rights. Pushing away DRM developers from a GPL framework will make it far less likely that a DRM framework that works for individuals as much as for institutions will see the light of day. That's bad for the commons as much as for private goals. Increasingly the commons will be found not in central repositories but in digital works distributed to and by individuals that have both public and private elements. Every author and user should have the right to define their comfort levels for what they consider public and private use of those digital works as they please within broader legal boundaries. Open source licensing has been a boon for online publishing; hopefully its proponents can find the right mix of recognizing the rights of individuals as both publishers and users of content that will carry it forward into the emerging era of user-distributed digital works.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:09 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:07 AM |
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| Thursday, January 26, 2006 |
Well, it's one of those days when you have to go through the details of earnings reports carefully to get a clear story. The good news at Factiva is that their top line grew by 12 percent in 2005 to USD 281 million, a report in line with InfoUSA''s 11 percent increase. However operating income at Factiva was down 36 percent, including a $4.3 million "restructuring charge" that was "primarily reflecting employee severance and termination of an operating lease" according to parent Dow Jones' SEC filings. This charge presumably accounts for a negative operating income at Factiva for 4Q05, which otherwise would have been about at the same levels as 4Q04 and down only 12 percent for the year. InfoUSA provides an important benchmark for performance, though: it managed a 77 percent boost in net operating income for 2005 and a 70 percent rise for 4Q05. InfoUSA has been long known for lean-and-mean operations and with the addition of OneSource Information Services last year it has been applying those talents to a premium business information service that is benefiting from its aggressive moves into sales force automation integration. As the press release from Factiva today noted it has a lot of things to consider in its plus column for 2005: its sales integration services, reputation management and taxonomy services have advanced its ability to bring business news and information into more useful contexts in its core accounts. But as parents Dow Jones and Reuters wrestle with their own struggles to prop up their bottom lines Factiva is going to have to move quickly from being a coddled experiment to a strong contributor to both top and bottom lines. With its restructuring and a strong '06 product announcements thus far there's reason to think that it's moving in that direction, but it's going to have to be a sprint rather than a trot as competition from across the spectrum zeroes in on Factiva's core value proposition.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:27 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:09 AM |
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| Wednesday, January 25, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:16 AM |
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While there's quite a bit of excitement about Google's new video search and ecommerce service it's also taken considerable flak being generated by those claiming to be in the know about what video on the Web should be. Many of these suggestions call for slickness and more features, but the basics of what make content work on the Web don't necessarily call for the most flashy and gimmicky solutions. It's more important to think about where video content is put to use by users and portals that put it to the most use by its audiences. That may mean more than premium video benefiting from online exposure but that's the playing field that premium providers must adjust to sooner rather than later. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:38 AM |
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| Tuesday, January 24, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 6:37 AM |
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| Monday, January 23, 2006 |
For those of you who read our earlier news analysis on the potential impact of a shutdown of Research in Motion's Blackberry mobile devices, today's news ( CNN Money) that the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal on a patent infringement suit brought against RIM should leave you well prepared to think and react to this event. As popular as any given gizmo may be at one point in time, many, if not most, will fade away rapidly in the rapidly evolving world of consumer technologies. Remember TiVos? Maybe not for long. iPods? Gosh, those were neat back when, weren't they? The details of where to take your content channel strategies in this shifting world of mobile and wireless platforms is detailed in our earlier news analysis, but to put it simply, it's time for publishers to think more seriously about platform-independent content packaging and licensing. For all of those out there trying to redirect content licensing deals in the wake of this court decision, best of luck.
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:32 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:32 AM |
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| Friday, January 20, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:16 AM |
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| Thursday, January 19, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:24 PM |
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As a former radio advertising salesperson it's interesting to read the flap about the Google-dMarc deal as they acquire a major ad infrastructure provider for the radio industry. However, I think that many of the pundits may have misinterpreted what Google intends to get out of the dMarc deal. As Google does with many of its better deals, they went for infrastructure, knowing what they can grow around it. Yes, the print ad experiment was kind of a flop, and yes, there's no way that a ClearChannel is going to kiss Google's toes for trying to help them manage their monopoly more effectively. But that's not the point. Google is buying the highways of commerce for radio, knowing that they lead not only to existing channels but new ones as well. Remember that Google is rolling out wireless networks as well nationwide. Wireless IS radio - just on other frequencies. Google will probably use dMarc to tinker with radio AdSense sales on a subsidized basis to keep the monopolies happy in the short run and to then have a perfect competitive network on broadband frequencies already in place. What happens on existing radio frequencies may be moot rather quickly. The key to all of this is that Google thinks horizontally about content, as in our New Aggregation model, while most media companies think vertically. Google sees that it's better to own and manage discrete capabilities that can service a user base across all media channels than to try to own all of the channels. In today's media world, where users create a new weblog every second, you can't own it all anyway. So the whole inventory issue for ads is becoming meaningless. There's infinite inventory, with just a lack of facilities that know how to monetize it effectively. Media companies are like little city-states huddled against the edge of vast, untamed continents. Most either don't get the value of what's outside their gates or they want to turn it into a city. Google says forget that, let's just build the roads and own the traffic that takes them where they want to go. The radio model is being reborn via the Web into a much more healthy and robust advertising environment that will meet the needs of both advertisers and their audiences far more effectively.
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:16 PM |
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| Wednesday, January 18, 2006 |
As I mentioned in my earlier post on Factiva Search 2.0 it's a crowded field out there for technology players trying to corral enterprise content into the same pen as external content sources. Add in personal content on the desktops of enterprise users and the field gets more crowded yet. EMC is an enterprise systems vendor and integrator that is increasingly capable of taking on IBM and Microsoft with a sophisticated range of infrastructure, document management, content management and digital asset management capabilities. From their Documentum division comes news that EMC is extending its relationship with Google to include its Google Desktop capabilities with their Enterprise Content Integration Suite, a federated search capability that allows EMC users to query content residing in any enterprise repository as well as the Web and, now, individual desktops via Google. Such integrated capabilities are the true competition for providers such as Factiva, who face not only the need to create meaningful business content integration capabilities using external sources but as well to address the need to integrate internal sources effectively. With licensed content assets still a key portion of the revenue and profit structure of such aggregators they need to display the wares of oftentimes reluctant and uninventive publishers in the best light behind enterprise firewalls when direct access to news via the Web is increasingly prevalent. As capabilities such as Google Desktop integrated with the Google Search Appliance come along to make searching internal, external and personal sources easier from a trusted interface it challenges content aggregators to out-technology more agnostic solutions that can embrace the heavyweight I.T. requirements of many major institutions effectively. Alliances with such providers are key to the long-term success of many integrators, but as Google Desktop and other solutions that reach out to the Web directly make it easier to get access to premium content without the aggregators the battle will be only tougher.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:09 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 7:22 PM |
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Well, regarding last night's post, sometimes I should just keep my mouth shut and wait a day. Clare's been doing her homework, and the results are beautiful. I had an opportunity to test drive the announced Beta of Factiva's Search 2.0 interface, a stunner of a search tool with great usability and a veritable shopping mall for best practices in search. Log in to the Beta for the first time and you'll be profiled for professional focus and how you search. This brings you to a Google-like single search box: OK, we expected that. But pop in a query and wow, what an improvement. "Did you mean" prompt, quick-click categories for all Factiva sources, magazines, newswires, separate tabs for Web content and pictures. Then to the right of the search results a "Discovery Pane," which provides a bar chart of how results cluster by date, a del.icio.us-like topic cluster heatmap with most prevalent topics in largest print, and bar chart rankings of most prevalent items by Companies, Industries, Subjects and Sources. Alerts via email are bone-simple to set up for any query. Individual articles from the Factiva database are equipped with "more articles like this" suggestions and topic clusters. Web results offer only a News Clusters topic heatmap and news results from online mainstream news sources. This has its limits. For example, when using my benchmark "General Motors" query it pulls up a number of current articles for online mainstream publications but not the corporate Web site. Switch from "General Motors" to the suggested "General Motors Corp" and no results appear. Obviously this is still early days for Factiva to be taking on open Web search in a more aggressive way, but it's clearly trying to carve out a more well-defined position for corporate searchers trying to find mainstream news on the Web. The approach is likely to appeal to publishers trying to position their increasingly online content with enterprise searchers effectively, allowing them both access and segregation from competing "born on the Web" sources. While very well designed overall, it's definitely still a Beta, with some notable glitches. Once you're in "Web News" mode new queries shift you back to Factiva-internal results first rather than sticking with your current focus. One query when in Web mode returned me to a "no results" listing on the Factiva-internal results page with no option to search the Web or the pictures archive. What, if it's not on Factiva it's not anywhere? Clicking on a clustered result in the Discovery pane applies a filter for that cluster term to the original search results, but it's not entirely intuitive at first that it's a filter on the original search. But these are mostly noise-vibration-harshness critiques of a search ride that's mostly very powerful and smooth. My comments from yesterday's post on where search really brings Factiva in the long run still stand, but if Factiva had to come up with a far better weapon to convince corporate users to stick with them for general news content and research, it would be hard to think of a better job being done on fairly short notice. There will be many companies this year arguing to enterprises that their search interface can provide the highest value to their users. With Search 2.0, Factiva has earned themselves a place at the negotiating table for business news users.
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:14 PM |
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| Tuesday, January 17, 2006 |
While Amazon's A9 search engine is not the most popular search engine on the Web its federated approach to finding high-value content on the Web is gaining validity and a broadening audience as the range of content types and sources available via the Web soars. So a partnership between A9 and personal profile aggregator Zoominfo to make their content easily accessed via A9 seems like a natural fit. Click on a checkbox for "people" on the A9 interface and you'll get a column of Zoominfo listings next to your other search results. Click on an individual profile and you're off to the Zoominfo listing for that person. Maybe not the sexiest thing in the world, but good luck finding another provider integrating personal bios for millions of professionals into a major search portal. An affiliation with a major search engine has been a key requirement for Zoominfo to move up from being a reasonably popular destination to a default "go to" source for personal profiles. Hopefully this alliance gives Zoominfo a boost in recognition that can be used to increase its range of user-generated content to supplement its web-mined content. The breadth and quality of its unique destination content seems to be the key to Zoominfo's continuing growth, leaving other services such as LinkedIn that lack a broad base of compelling content far behind.
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:07 PM |
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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.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:55 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:37 AM |
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| Monday, January 16, 2006 |
Would-be authors have a myriad of options for publishing on the Web today, but few are sure-fire roads to a professional career. In the meantime, a lot of people would like to have their writing noticed and appreciated by an audience without having to wrestle with traditional publishing channels. The Gather.com platform is one new tool that's helping amateur authors to find some modest revenues alongside professional content in an easy-to-use online portal that encourages ratings, feedback and participation from its online community. It's "eBay for content" in the minds of some - but there's more required to make the concept work than just a database and a friendly interface. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:47 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:00 AM |
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| Sunday, January 15, 2006 |
I had an update from Jigsaw CEO Jim Fowler the other day on their progress in developing their online database of business contact content. Already holding more than 2 million business contacts and growing at a rate of about 10,000 new contacts a day, Jigsaw's formula for developing high-quality business information from content contributed by business professionals seems to be unfolding rapidly on both the individual and institutional front. While sales and contributions on an individual basis are still the key to Jigsaw's success - especially for sales people who are more likely to want to keep their own contacts and contact history from job to job - Corporations are excited to get what amounts to a near-realtime update service for their sales forces. This is especially important for keeping up with middle management contacts who are oftentimes the doorways in to corporate accounts, contacts that are far less likely to crop up in updates from Web mining services and traditional database services tracking more senior management positions. While social networking services for business contacts such as LinkedIn and OpenBC offer the ability to traverse business contact networks to get from one professional to another, people on these services are typically reluctant to onpass sales-oriented requests from relatively unknown contacts. This helps to increase the quality of referrals, but sometimes you just have to get to a contact no matter what. The transparent market model of Jigsaw offers sales professionals a marked advantage for those who need to find contacts for a particular account regardless of the quality of their social network. Content from public sources such as Jigsaw may never replace completely private databases of business information, but they are beginning to develop momentum and breadth of content that's likely to create a "go to" source that will challenge major database providers of business contacts to rethink traditional content collection methods sooner rather than later.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:08 PM |
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The consensus is that Google is off to another slow start in terms of site design with the premium portion of Google Video, relying on users to help them tune what they really want and need from an online video service. Although that's somewhat of a risk given the rate at which Yahoo is developing a very media-savvy balance of professional and amateur sources, it's early enough in the development of online video services that listening to your users carefully is probably a very good idea. More to the point, Google is much more in-your-face than Yahoo with selling premium video content - from any source. The advent of more mature DRM functions is providing a somewhat different playing field for video producers than other content producers had bringing professionally-produced content to the Web earlier in its development. Effective DRM will allow premium content to be exposed toe to toe with free results and to be monetized very effectively. This is something that in general the traditionally print-based publishing community has stayed away from, but now with video searching trying to take hold in a mixed free/premium model we may see some changes in this area. In the long run that's a good thing for the content industry, but it will mean some significant pressures for producers to rethink how they are monetizing content. The movement in content monetization is towards making profits out of context, not out of distribution. Pay per view will help video content from existing premium channels to get out to some degree in the beginning of online video. But amateur sources are as likely to gain as social bookmarking, social content distribution and enhancement of socially distributed video take off , as seen in phenomena like the Star Wars Kid video. This will begin to make the video industry look increasingly like weblogs and other user-generated media that rely on the acceptance of peers to create content value more than centralized marketing. While a strong focus on amateur sources won't be an excuse for Google to drop the ball on gathering video content from mainstream sources more effectively it will challenge mainstream sources over time to create products that can compete on a more level playing field with amateurs. The topsy-turvy world of online content is about to get a little more shaken up - again.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:43 PM |
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| Friday, January 13, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:31 AM |
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| Thursday, January 12, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:23 AM |
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| Wednesday, January 11, 2006 |
It's not the best of times for independent scholarly journal publishers, a fact that keeps them moving towards distributors with more marketing and distribution savvy. Blackwell has announced that it will begin 2006 with 39 new publishing partnerships and 59 journal titles added to its of more than 600 society publications. Not a bad short-term solution for journals challenged by open access publishing and lacking the marketing muscle to distinguish themselves via online search solutions. Notably quite a few of these titles include converts from other aggregation and marketing services that were not as focused on facilitating journals as independent publications. Blackwell offers a quality publishing solution for journals that provides cost-effective technology and marketing infrastructure that can help them to be more effective independent publishers. But in spite of its Synergy online search interface it's still a heavily print-oriented marketing solution. As independent journals choose marketing partners it's important for them to recognize that these partnerships and alliances offer them the opportunity to become more educated about content marketing - and to use the strength that they gain from these partners to consider how they can become more effective electronic publishers. Making sure you can milk the most from the print model is certainly important in this era of transition for print publications, but bridging the gap between online and print means a lot more than just lowering your costs for print production and having a nice "walled garden" for the curious online patron. It's important for independent publishers to consider their options for improving online and print marketing through partnership very carefully for options that will carry them aggressively into online revenue streams as more of their audiences make the shift to online as a primary consumption channel. For many publishers the move to Blackwell will be a positive experience in the short run, but it's a move that won't eliminate to consider long-term marketing solutions carefully.
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:26 PM |
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ComScore's November '05 search engine rankings are in, indicating a growing lead for Google amongst major search providers. Year-on-year the November totals show Google growing by 5.2 percent while Yahoo's search function dropped by 2.5 percent. The only other gainer amongst majors was AskJeeves, which posted a 1 percent gain. Overall Americans conducted 5.15 billion searches online during November 2005, up 9 percent from November 2004. General search remains a powerful magnet for content, with Google becoming increasingly the brand name that is synonymous with it. This may accelerate the push towards more focused vertical search solutions and more use of user-generated indexing as ways of organizing content effectively based on users' interests: "Everyone knows what general search looks like, now what do we do?" may be the question being asked by many - including Google, with its increasingly popular Local search and other specialized searches for journals, books, weblogs, video and other sources. It also means that general aggregators will continue to position their search services increasingly for specific verticals, as with the recent repositioning of Dialog's services for scientific and business intelligence audiences and Factiva's focus on sales integration. We may not see these trends in the general stats, but it's likely that we'll see a continuing general growth in search with increasing growth in Google that doesn't quite match up to the general growth - with focused search and indexing solutions filling the gaps, detected or otherwise. The key to this growth, though, is not "vertical search" per se. Just putting a filter on the same technology is far from the answer. Instead focused search is about getting the focus on the needs of specific audiences and the unique characteristics of specific content types. In other words we've been doing "vertical search" all along in the content industry - and the media is just catching up.
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:36 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:49 AM |
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| Tuesday, January 10, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 6:53 AM |
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| Monday, January 09, 2006 |
For all of the content company convergence showmanship at this year's CES show in Las Vegas publishers and producers are running scared as they try to not cede control of their value propositions to technology partners trying to lock down their content in proprietary schemes. Consider the humble open-source ThoutReader that is gearing up to read DRM-enabled OpenReader files. It offers a low-overhead solution for publishers and users that may actually allow them to control their own premium book and journal content without being beholden to the tech biggies. Glitz may sell in Vegas, but it's the packaging that satisfies users' needs the best that will win out in the end. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:44 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:15 AM |
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| Friday, January 06, 2006 |
Call it the year that content went toe to toe with technology, the year that convergence became less a buzzword and more of a reality and that online content technologies began to have clear dominance of consumer electronics. This year's CES coverage features many great reports, the best of them summarized best with additional original reporting at paidContent.org. Yahoo's cross-platform Go product, which will be introduced modestly at first on one model of Nokia cell phones but promises components for PC desktops and home video that will allow content and services selected in one Go presence to be available in other Go presences automatically - kind of like a personal file-sharing service. Search Engine Watch notes that the demoed desktop version of Go looks remarkably like the Google Desktop Sidebar that's been out there for several months, combining personal and online content in one easy widget. On the Google front they've announced a premium video download service that will be compatible with Intel's new Viiv video technology platform and that will incorporate DRM, possibly of Google's own design; Google will take 30 percent of the sales based on whatever prices premium providers want to set. Google also is launching Google Pack, a combined package of popular content-oriented applications including Firefox, Norton AntiVirus, Adobe Reader, RealNetwork's RealPlayer, Trillian IM, and Ad-Aware antispyware. Short of office-ware (for which Sun's OpenOffice could fill the gap) this represents a core of what could be the basic equipment of the rumored Google PC. Maybe. Not surprisingly Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates pooh-poohed all of the limelight that Google and Yahoo were enjoying at CES ( CNET), perhaps just a little bit miffed that the crowds at CES no longer part Moses-like for him alone. Gates' demo of Microsoft's new Vista operating system highlighted integration with home entertainment, its own Sidebar-like application and some vision-thing demos of where convergence technologies are taking us. All potent stuff, but in "the future is now" world of CES it seemed to ring a little hollow, a bit like General Motors hawking concept cars that may or not be built in time to make a difference. The key to CES this year was content, with traditional content and technology companies learning with some awkwardness how to dance with one another much more closely than they really know how to or really want to. The "old guard" producers of consumer content are beginning to recognize that there's more to be gained than lost by moving more aggressively with online partners, but regardless of what the agreements and supporting spreadsheets may say they're not really sure whether they've made effective moves or not: they just know that whoever doesn't try to move at all will regret it in a big way. Experimentation is the order of the day, and as long as some sort of DRM is out there to lower the fear levels they're going to give any number of things a try. It's necessary experimentation, to be sure, but extraordinarily short-sighted for the most part. Content producers have an enormous opportunity to set the table for themselves far more effectively by creating and embracing their own open cross-platform strategies that will give them much greater leverage across all of these increasingly sophisticated delivery options. That's not likely in the short term, though: instead content companies will continue to play the field of portal and platform providers who will take the lead with DRM and other knotty technology issues. But as the reality of being locked into technology partners for core content licensing sinks in, there will be an evolving counter-movement towards publisher-controlled digital packaging of content. The convergence battles have just begun, but already they are beginning to define for some time to come the field on which content ecommerce is evolving.
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:04 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:56 AM |
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| Thursday, January 05, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:17 AM |
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| Wednesday, January 04, 2006 |
The world reports on the announced appointment of COO Richard Zannino to the CEO role at Dow Jones & Company, besting Karen Elliott House, wife of retiring CEO Peter Kann, and Dow Jones SVP L. Gordon Crovitz, head of online publishing. Zannino becomes the first non-journalist at the helm of Dow Jones since 1933, an indication that the DJ board is confident in the editorial integrity of their products but eager to find ways to position the company more attractively for investors existing and otherwise. This is a sensible goal, but while Zannino comes in holding many of the necessary cards already to make effective changes the legacy of non-journalists stepping in to the shoes of CEO-journalists is not altogether attractive. One thinks of the trials that Peter Jobs took on in the wake of the much beloved ex-journalist CEO/MD Glen Renfrew at Reuters. Jobs also was brought on to instill investor confidence, but failed to crack many of the hidebound traditions in that organization to the point that real change could be affected. Zannino assumes the helm of a company with enormous credibility and still-strong fundamental assets, but needs to consider how to preserve editorial integrity while at the same time trimming Dow Jones into an organization that can compete more effectively in the shifting marketplace for business news and information. Inevitably this will mean more profound culture changes than have been undertaken to date. A non-journalist may be the more objective type required to accomplish these changes, but the best of luck to Zannino in navigating one of the strongest news room cultures on the planet. One way or another Dow Jones is about to confront its future as both a news property and an investment; hopefully their chief intellectual assets will be up to the task of imagining what a strong Dow Jones can be in the 21st century. Our best wishes to Peter Kann as he moves on from his strong legacy of maintaining Dow Jones credibility and value through some of the most tumultuous times in publishing.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:07 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:26 AM |
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| Tuesday, January 03, 2006 |
BusinessWeek covers along with Engadget and others Sony's second attempt at launching an E Ink-based eBook reader, this time targeted towards U.S. markets and with a solid base of more than 50,000 titles from Simon & Schuster, Random House, and HarperCollins. The new gizmo will offer more popular memory and connectivity options (USB and SD media cards) and will feature both Sony-proprietary ebooks and PDF support. The obvious hope at Sony is that they can replicate the success of Apple's iPods and iTunes store and create a new fashionable gizmo for readers. Likely? Not. The iPod's success was built on an already robust marketplace for downloadable music that had been established by independent and open technologies and numerous experiments with devices. Apple simply packaged it into the most appealing form possible and marketed it like crazy. While Sony will enjoy strong support from book publishers now ready to take control of their electronic future and actively seeking solutions for electronic marketing, the public as a whole is indifferent to electronic books as media that require a special device. We have iPods for our ears, and the screens of PCs, cell phones, PDAs and other electronic devices for our eyes (and yes, iPods for eyes now, also). What is it about a book that is so unique that it requires a special device to read? This is not to slight the E Ink technology: it's neat stuff that has great promise to deliver paper readability in electronic form. It's more an issue as to whether consumers really want another device that's dedicated to one form of content that's evolving rapidly towards new packaging and production methods. Book publishers need to accept more deeply that they need to do a far better job of popularizing the consumption of books on electronic platforms that users already have in hand - and to adapt packaging that will allow books to flow from platform to platform as easily as a reader shifts a book from the coffee table to their briefcase or handbag. If publishers do this correctly they may not wind up with the same panache of an iPod in the short term but they will find themselves with a much broader marketplace for their products that will then allow for competitive sources of technology to adapt to the most appropriate platforms. Let's hope that in a few years' time we're reading books on PDAs, cell phones, PCs and any other number of devices equipped with high-readability displays and the ability to swap favorite titles from one device to another with ease - and with customization options that will make individual copies that much more valuable. Somehow I don't think that's what's about to come out the doors from Sony. Oh, well, we can wait.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:39 PM |
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The New York Times reports on the expansion of Bloomberg News' Washington bureau with the hiring of Roger Simon as a chief political correspondent. While not known widely for its political coverage Bloomberg has been leveraging its strong base of revenues from financial information systems and media to build a more general media capability step by step. While the core Bloomberg product faces new competition of its own its news organization is unfettered by the traditions of print and likely to evolve into a service equivalent in some ways to the Reuters news service - able to service general media audiences effectively while maintaining an elite core financial audience. But at the same time these revenues are likely to remain a sliver of Bloomberg's overall offering. In the meantime the development of in-house news staffs at portals such as Yahoo are likely to absorb other refugees from traditional editorial news capabilities into general online media. Electronic-first journalism that's long paid its bills very effectively is going to thrive for some time to come as it learns to dance with user-generated media more effectively. Enough of the moaning and groaning - there's plenty of money to be made in news in the right contexts.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:26 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:58 AM |
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| Monday, January 02, 2006 |
The year has barely begun and already the battle cries against publishers and content collectors failing to pass public tests of integrity and security are swelling up to deafening levels. At the same time user-generated media producers are beginning to recognize that they need far more legal leverage to protect their own rights to intellectual property. The power of publishing-empowered citizens is not just a financial force but increasingly a political force that is compelling publishers to consider many new forms of legal and technical protection against legal action and intellectual property theft. The push for an effective framework for guarding the interests of individuals and institutions in electronic publishing is moving towards a far broader debate as to what the boundaries of personal rights are going to be in a content-driven global economy. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:57 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:51 AM |
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Ken Yarmosh at Corante notes that in spite of optimistic forecasts for ad growth from financial analysts at CSFB pointing towards 32 percent overall growth in online advertising ( Bloomberg coverage) there is still a finite pool of advertising that's not likely to fuel every new business plan tooling up on Web 2.0 dreams. Ken's likely on the money overall, given the enormous share of online ad growth that's being absorbed by major outlets such as Google and Yahoo: there's only so much left over for others through traditional channels. It's a bit reminiscent of business plans for enterprise software products a few years back: everyone built the same spreadsheets and came up with the same buyers willing to buy a supposedly infinite supply of $250,000 software packages. There are very optimistic expectations for online ads but it's also important to recognize that ads are not going to be the only story for online profits in content for 2006. Subscriptions will be increasing along with one-off purchases as complements to advertising, even as new ways of creating value from online context provide deeper value from each online encounter through advertising and lead generation tools. The real challenge for business plans relying on ads in 2006 is being able to have systems in place that are going to be able to target audiences with enough precision to satisfy increasingly sophisticated online advertisers. There will be no lack of online ad dollars this year, to be sure, and a continuing explosion of pages on which those ads can appear. But being able to move into higher-value relationships through more sophisticated online marketing will move the overall pie into channels that will favor sophisticated advertisers both in traditional and user-generated media. So have fun, business planners - just make sure that you have the right ad tools at hand that will allow you to grow your ad base more effectively than your competitors.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:17 AM |
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