Subscribe to our feed
(?) or add to:
MyYahoo
iGoogle/Google
Reader
Bloglines
Rojo
NewsGator
|
| Friday, April 28, 2006 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:27 AM |
permanent link to this entry
 bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Thursday, April 27, 2006 |
 The Associated Press highlights along with major papers the details of McClatchy's spinoff of four newspapers recently acquired from Knight Ridder, a complex series of deals that puts privately held MediaNews in the spotlight as the principal winner of the Bay Area's San Jose Mercury News and The Contra Costa Times with support from other chains, while Hearst gains The Pioneer Press in St. Paul, Minnesota and The Herald in Monterey County. The interest in the was enough to bring Editor & Publisher's analysis of this story for a good period of time today. But apart from MediaNews becoming the fourth largest paper chain via this deal there's not a lot that's terribly new here. Like a game of Texas Hold 'Em poker most of the cards were already on the table before the final pieces fell into place. The interesting parts of this story are mostly in the little details, such as McClatchy picking up pieces of even more papers in non-major markets, emphasizing their positioning for news in markets in which electronic competitors are less likely to dilute earnings over the next few years. The other not-so-small detail is that Hearst and Gannett are picking up minority interests in the MediaNews acquisitions, which is likely to raise concerns about the concentration of media ownership again at some point, but not likely to raise dust in the short run. But with both newspapers and magazines emphasizing online video production as a hot new outlet for their content there could be more complex ownership issues emerging in local markets where print video production begins to compete effectively with local TV news producers. In the meantime a series of relatively quiet and complex deals such as those being executed via McClatchy is a good way to keep the regulatory spotlight away from potential ownership concerns. All appears to be on track in this little poker game, and perhaps everyone will go home happy yet. But if I were a betting man I'd put my money on McClatchy's markets. MediaNews knows what it has to do, but it's a far showier bet to think that any major is going to catch up with today's well-wired users that have a galaxy of good substitute content available. For now, I'm hiding my wallet.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 1:48 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 1:38 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Wednesday, April 26, 2006 |
The Times Online notes the latest chapter in the perennial battle between financial content rivals Reuters and Bloomberg in their efforts to gain market share supremacy through their services to the global securities industry. According to The Times, Reuters is claiming through its slim eking out of another one percent of market share that its 27 percent slice of the pie now places it atop Bloomberg for the first time in a decade. As noted by The Times, though, this comes in part due to the absorption of user positions gained via the Reuters acquisition of Telerate last year - an indication of just how much potential redundancy there is in the financial content game - and a more accurate assessment of how data feeds contribute to the Reuters market share. So although Reuters has much to cheer about in terms of its efforts to revitalize and consolidate its product line, the gains in market share are hardly to be called organic at this point. The broader concern, though, is whether this annual exercise in "mine is bigger than yours" is really telling Reuters shareholders what they need to know about their market position. Bloomberg is certainly facing major challenges as it tries to roll out expanded datafeed services and to fend off vendors nibbling away at their messaging services that are at the heart of their platform's value as a channel for deal-making; their monolithic pricing also faces stiffer opposition from clients as "The" Bloomberg becomes less of a desktop presence. All good news for the crew over in Canary Wharf, to be sure. But the broader issue of market share is not how much Reuters is slicing out of Bloomberg but rather the death by a thousand cuts that it is suffering from niche players, networks and content distributors more willing to bypass Reuters and Bloomberg services altogether to create a new fabric for financial content services. A new generation of content services is emerging in financial markets thanks to the rise of increasingly independent content creators and network infrastructure and standards that eliminate much of the historical need for content aggregators to manage real-time market data. In this new era of financial content value-add service providers such as Reuters and Bloomberg are still critical components but they can hardly call the tune for the dance as they did when their global technology services were the only cost-effective way to glue financial content together effectively. We'll continue to see the annual Reuters market share studies come out, no doubt, but it would be refreshing to see them consider some of the emerging factors in the marketplace for financial content services more seriously. Otherwise these stats will have all of the heart-pounding relevance of major television network rankings in an era of online access.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:17 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:14 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Tuesday, April 25, 2006 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:56 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
The recent SIIA Brown Bag Lunch Series panel on personal knowledge management highlighted tools from leading suppliers that support collaborative publishing by individuals in and beyond major enterprises who create collective knowledge quickly and easily. Be it wikis, weblogs, messaging systems or new forms of publishing personal knowledge management has taken content into new enterprise environments that attract people who want to share information effectively for profit with the ease that people doing it for fun on the Web enjoy. When anyone from any enterprise could be a part of this collaborative publishing environment it's time for publishers to examine more closely how their content can be central to these highly productive user/publishers. Click here to read the full News Analysis
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:23 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Monday, April 24, 2006 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 9:59 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Sunday, April 23, 2006 |
Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in review
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:56 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Saturday, April 22, 2006 |
InfoWorld picks up on a new round of PR for Congoo, a tool to make it easier to access premium content located via a Web search engine. Congoo is a toolbar that you can download for your Internet Explorer browser (Firefox promised) that will allow you to form search queries much as any other search engine's toolbar. Enter some personal information in the Congoo tool such as zip code and email address typically asked for registration-based access to premium content and you're ready to start looking for premium sources. Search results yield a section on top of the page with premium results, followed by normal query results from the Yahoo! search engine, along with sponsored links to advertisers on the right side. Click on a premium result and you can get limited free access or easy pay-as-you go access with a click from a popup box, which then stays out of the way to allow you to access premium sources unimpeded. That's the good news...now for the not-so-good news. Most of the premium sources are news and press releases stored in a subscription collection called Libraryo.com, with the most prominent direct access sources being Encyclopedia Britannica and institutional Investor. In some informal testing, I was able to find articles from Institutional Investor on the open Web that were displayed in the premium results of Congoo, as well as BusinessWire archive press releases available for free on the free side of the HighBeam research portal. However, on the plus side the Institutional Investor and EB results link to their native Web sites rather than the stripped-down Libraryo.com results for papers and press releases. The larger problem is that the Congoo tool does not work in conjunction with other search engines: you access the premium content only from the Congoo search portal, which is available today only to tool downloaders. In a general sense there's a lot to be said for having a tool like Congoo to make premium content accessible easily from an interface that includes Web content. It's an idea that has been tried from many angles already by Factiva, Yahoo!, Highbeam and other prominent suppliers. But none of these efforts have been able to detach their subscription access schemes from a proprietary search engine or database management system. At the same time Yahoo!'s Subscription Search beta has virtually disappeared: the landing page still exists but it no longer returns search results. Aggregating segregated premium content works well for some specific applications and content types, but as a general concept it's proven itself to be a loser on the open Web. The segregation of premium content in search engines has not enabled its value to be assessed in direct comparison to non-premium sources. Shore research shows consistently that people are willing to pay for premium content when it serves an important purpose in an important context, with Web search engines a key source. If that perceived value is so high, why continue to confuse content consumers by insisting on artificial segregation? In enterprise search engines and applications content from personal, enterprise and external sources are combined as needed to provide the highest contextual value possible. There's no real reason to do otherwise on the open Web - a fact that more and more publishers are beginning to appreciate without the help of traditional aggregation services. Content license management for subscription content still revolves largely around database access controls rather than the devices used by individuals and institutions licensing content. With the prevalence of search and access methods for content in today's public Web and enterprise networks, there is a real need for more universal content monetization controls that don't tie publishers to these database services. Congoo tries to look like it can provide that universal access, but it's a long way off the mark, unfortunately. Next...
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 1:53 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Friday, April 21, 2006 |
I just opened up a gift box from a company for whom I provided a presentation at a private gathering and discovered to my pleasant surprise a 500MB memory stick beautifully bound in leather and brushed metal ( photo and details). Memory sticks are now very popular as trade show giveaways, but this is a keeper, to be sure. It's very much like the difference between a fine leather-bound book and a trade paperback - except that the content inside could be anyone's, including my own. Packaging content in digital form doesn't mean that people don't care about its physical manifestation, but today's content user is less concerned about the specific item that's being cared for and more about the ability to have a treasured collection in the places where they need it most. Accessories such as my new memory stick are simple reminders that portable content is highly revered by today's users, independent of any one device on which it makes an appearance. Thanks for the gift!
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 2:54 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
The New York Times' summary of Google's quarterly earnings is a good piece, highlighting increased revenues from value-add initiatives such as Google Maps, Google Video and Google Earth, as well as the success of new news portals in overseas markets. paidContent.org notes that Google's Jonathan Rosenberg waived off notions of monetizing GoogleBase (in spite of reports of Google Payments being in the hands of key GoogleBase users - see Ecommerce Guide) and sees GoogleBase primarily as a way to gather more content for Google's search engine. It's all about growing the contextual value of content at Google, including scattered A/B test sightings ( PC World) of expanded search results with more result-specific content, keywords, links and searching. Apparently gathering all the world's information and making it useful is putting quite a strain on Google's infrastructure: "We have a huge machine crisis," Google's CEO Eric Schmidt noted, prompting this little tidbit in the Times article: Jordan Rohan, an analyst for RBC Capital Markets, called Google's capital spending "unfathomably high," noting that it spent the same percentage of its revenue on equipment as a company in the telephone business, an industry traditionally seen as far more capital-intensive than the Internet. What's kind of ironic about this observation from Rohan is the amount of media attention being lavished on cable and phone networks trying to leverage their network infrastructure more effectively for profits via Web content. Be it native search, GoogleBase or the myriad of other content products and features being rolled out by Google and other major Web content outlets the main difference between Web companies and the telco/cable companies is that their models were designed from the get-go not to be about distribution of content so much as enabling the value of content from all sources in the eyes of global audiences. So yes, Google is a content company with a heck of a server farm and a growing network presence, but that infrastructure is always the means to a content end that eschews the "water and pipe" metaphor that the telcos and cable companies still embrace. Maybe the Wall Street analysts will come up with new yardsticks for Google that take a closer look at how well they monetize I.T. infrastructure versus the water-pipe crowd. In the meantime keep your peepers peeled for the expanded search results feature testing being conducted by Google, it's going to be a boat-rocker.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 9:55 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 9:49 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Thursday, April 20, 2006 |
Missed yesterday's Brown Bag panel? It was an excellent session, my thanks to the panelists who I moderated for a very insightful and informative event. SIIA members may catch up with it by following the link below (check in with Marion Janic if you need help logging in): http://siiacontent.scribestudio.com/ Panel summary:
Personal Knowledge Management is engaging individuals with today’s advanced collaborative publishing tools to create groups of people in enterprises and beyond who can communicate far more effectively with one another than ever before. From finance to major industries to the open Web these tools are creating bodies of content that leverage the insights, knowledge and opinions of actively engaged contributors to enable them to understand what a group as a whole understands with amazing speed and effectiveness. The technologies used to accomplish this can vary quite a bit, but they all have the same net effect: groups as large as entire enterprises can all be on the same page to respond to major opportunities and challenges without a lot of support from traditional content and technology providers. This panel will explore how Personal Knowledge Management tools are making it easier than ever for people to share knowledge with one another and how publishers will need to adapt their marketing strategies to publishing environments in which personally engaged users are the center of the value equation for content.
My panelists included:
Bob Serr, CTO, Parlano
Matthew Mahoney, Business Development, Socialtext
Greg Lloyd, President and Founder, Traction Software, Inc.
Ben Elowitz, CEO, Wetpaint.com
I'll post a News Analysis summing up the panel later this week.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:02 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
While Alan Meckler and Jason Calacanis mix it up in a WSJ Online "Reply All" online debate on whether bloggers can make money (answer: some do and will, more could) Phil Hall in a Media Industry Newsletter commentary punctuates the debate with a commentary on how the traditional career paths of young journalists only accelerate the rate at which writing talent is lured into online niches far away from traditional publications. Phil charts the fate of poorly paid J-School grads who wind up at a trade journal trying to cover niches that they know little or nothing about and then having to make choices between paying the rent and staying a reporter. It's nothing that any journalist hasn't been through before, but the publications that they work for are now paying the price of having relied on sub-grade reporting while attractive online alternatives developed before their eyes. The key benefit that weblogging has brought to journalism is that subject matter experts no longer have to wait to be interviewed to get their views out in the press: they can just punch them in and join the online publication world. As more trade journals add their own weblogs (see today's Accountancy Age announcement) the niches for young journalists to ply are likely to become even more narrow within the traditional trade and consumer media world. Add in the wide availability of corporate press releases on the Web and the rationale for traditional trade journalism becomes more narrow yet. This is not necessarily a bad thing: the remaining journalists are likely to be left with assignments that are more worthy of the craft and develop their skills through a wider variety of outlets, including weblogs. But with all the world a-blogging, perhaps the greater question is why journalism schools are still little coddled enclaves churning out grads for a job market that no longer exists. Perhaps it would be better to include journalism skills adapted to the online era as a part of regular university curricula, so that subject matter experts can be better prepared to write to their colleagues in an online world of publishing that favors trusted peers as sources of news and insight at least as much as traditional journalism. We're entering a world in which being able to communicate with audiences online is becoming a fundamental job skill. Perhaps not everyone will churn out prose worthy of a major journal or newspaper, but the ability to communicate through writing is only going to increase the general need for journalism skills - even as specialists begin to fade into niche roles.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 9:29 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 9:26 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Wednesday, April 19, 2006 |
Several majors cover Google's introduction of the OneBox for Enterprise, a new service integrated into its enterprise-oriented Google Search Appliance that allows users to access content stored in major enterprise application platforms. Initial partners providing OneBox interfaces to Google's search tool include Oracle, Cisco Systems, Salesforce.com, SAS, and Cognos. The InfoWorld article on the announcement has perhaps the best take on it, emphasizing that this is but one element of a broader enterprise campaign that Google is rolling out to get its search capabilities more firmly embedded in enterprise markets. The OneBox approach is to extract not just text but key facts and data from enterprise application databases, providing discrete presentations of this content similar to the results in its consumer search engine for weather in a local community or other key data points that complement text searches. As a Cognos rep notes in an Enterprise Systems article Google OneBox is a great way to expose business intelligence content to people who haven't been consumers of business intelligence applications - a somewhat backhand admission that IT-heavy BizIntel solutions have not always been cost-effective for the great majority of enterprise users. For users of Salesforce.com the OneBox interfaces are available to vendors providing AppExchange modules, which includes of course premium content vendors. While this is a plus from a user perspective, in general the OneBox approach highlights the role of application providers in becoming new forces in enterprise publishing. Content aggregators are being trumped both by enterprise application developers and search engines in becoming general-purpose outlets for both premium and enterprise content. The issues of open Web access that publishers had hoped to escape in enterprise solutions are not really easily escaped when the Googles of the world are ready to treat all sources of content agnostically via tools that manage enterprise applications, publications and personal content sources with similar importance. At the same time Google is delivering a hip-check to other enterprise search engine providers, arguing that the "80 percent" solution can include the 80 percent of enterprise applications that absorb much of an organization's most critical content along with unstructured sources. OneBox may not address some of the Google Search Appliance's fundamental weaknesses but it is building a huge reservoir of strength that can leverage content from enterprise, media and personal content sources with familiar and effective results.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 8:29 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 8:27 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Tuesday, April 18, 2006 |
If you're not familiar with QPass from their recent success in supporting content ecommerce for mobile content you may recall them from the bad old dot-com days when they tried with less success to combine an aggregation and cross-portal ecommerce model into a universal premium content access mechanism. With customer management solutions provider Amdocs having announced their acquisition of QPass, both visions of independent success with content ecommerce fade into the scenery. It comes after this year's earlier acquisition of content ecommerce specialist eMeta by content tools provider Macrovision and Bitpass' acquisition of Yaga, leaving few independent suppliers of content ecommerce services. Most content suppliers have implemented basic subscription management and "shopping cart" capabilities already through these and other of suppliers content ecommerce systems. As they do they focus less on transaction and subscription controls and more on leveraging the relationships that come through those transactions and visits into more engaging and profitable client relationships. Content ecommerce today is less about the transaction and more about using sophisticated tools and marketing techniques to mine the most out of premium content relationships in all of the venues that audiences find to be appealing. One key element of the original QPass model had it right: make accessing premium content as transparent as possible through a wide variety of venues. What they missed is that a separate aggregation of content would make this rather unappealing to publishers trying to develop sophisticated relationships with their audiences, even as they try to broadcast content themselves via RSS feeds, podcasts and other developing channels. Years later we are for all intents and purposes no closer to a universal subscription access model than we were in the dot-com era. Open-source DRM solutions hold out some hope that the infrastructure will be there to allow standard rights-managed content to pop out the back end of any number of ecommerce solutions, and accelerating markets for video and audio online content may push more producers towards open DRM. But it's more likely that we'll see a Google or other common online access point for content provide hooks that will allow publishers to have more universal access controls that complement their client care strategies effectively. QPass has moved on to new parents, but the problems that they wrestled with remain with us years later.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:52 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 9:44 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Monday, April 17, 2006 |
While many business publishers and aggregators still disdain exposing their content in Web search engines this appears to be the year in which their arguments are beginning to crumble away. ECNext CEO Pamela Springer's new eBook on search engine marketing points to many of the key reasons. Amongst them are the need to recognize that for highly focused premium content SEM techniques are very cost-effective ways to draw audiences to content in the venues in which they seek out first-try answers most often. Publishers may not like the "riff-raff" still found in many search engine results but when you're investing in a gentrified neighborhood it pays to service the trend-setters early on. Click here to read the full News Analysis
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 2:54 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:46 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Sunday, April 16, 2006 |
Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in review
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:31 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Friday, April 14, 2006 |
Earnings week for many U.S. major newspaper chains surfaced fairly gloomy reports, according to The New York Times, paidContent.org and others this week. Print ads were down in key areas such as automotive where online has started to pay off in a big way for local and national advertisers, even as production costs such as newsprint continue to climb. Online news sites were reporting healthy gains, but the highlight was in Staci's report on paidContent.org where she noted that NYT's About.com was reporting about 40 percent margins on USD 18.8 million in revenues - earnings that the Times believes are highly sustainable. So in part the answer to the "can we afford to be in the news business" dilemma is to accept that today's news is but one form of content that people reference to get answers to key questions. The About.com portal was in many ways ahead of its time when it launched back in the dot-com heydays, providing a personal editorial voice to knowledge on specific subject matters long before weblogs and wikis ever pushed to the front of the buzz stream. News has editorial control as well, but there is something about having "real-world" experts providing editorial control in the About.com portal that provides a different level of trust in people's eyes when they are researching a topic. Online news portals are getting more sophisticated as well in providing background content on key topics in the news, but with news finding its value in many contexts beyond newspaper portals such as weblogs and social content sites it's not clear that newspapers have perfected the formula to build online margins significantly beyond their current levels through news alone. As more pressure is put on news organizations to keep margins up during the shift to online consumption expect them to pursue additional acquisitions and alliances that will broaden the range of content that their ad services can support. While many worry that this drift of revenues away from traditional news organizations is worrisome for the future of journalism, in the long run it is likely to mean that we'll have media organizations that are able to monetize news far more effectively through a broader variety of multi-faceted content outlets. It promises to be a rocky road for news organizations for a couple of years yet, but at the end of that road could be a new "golden age" that will bring new life to quality news production efforts.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:26 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:56 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Thursday, April 13, 2006 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:45 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
There is wide coverage of Microsoft's launch of the Beta for Windows Live Academic Search (WLAS), the new search portal that includes content from many major scholarly publishers. Initial partners in journal and indexing content include CrossRef, the IEEE, the ACM, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and Elsevier include: Taylor & Francis Group, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics, Ex Libris, TDNet, Blackwell, Nature Publishing, British Library, and OCLC, according to Web Pro News. Free and premium scholarly content is served up via the OpenURL and DOI link resolvers of partners, providing consistent references for researchers requiring stable citation information. The interface is quite nice, if a little quirky. Glide your cursor over a given search result and an article abstract pops up in the left-hand portion of the display, as well as BibTex and EndNote data tabs, further facilitating citation for researchers. The abstract panel can disappear easily if necessary. The search results themselves scroll in a sub-window of the page rather slowly, which is a little annoying if you're trying to find a result that's not near the top of the stack. My assumption is that this "user friendly" feature is probably a way to provide an interface that will work consistently on both PCs and mobile devices. There are other nice little touches in the interface that add up to something that is tangibly different from Google Scholar; it's a tool for researchers rather than search results for researchers. Still missing is metadata on purchasing that's already available in Google results - only a warning message "The search results contain freely available and access-restricted content from peer-reviewed journals." appears in a banner above WLAS search results (premium content as a danger sign...?). Also missing is consistent navigation: at least in this early Beta version there's no tracking back to the Academic search box. But the proof of the value of this service will be in the search results themselves, which is a little difficult to judge in an offhand test with the very esoteric topics covered in the service. In general WLAS appears to rely a little more on the cataloging metadata from partners to provide relevant content in high-level category searches. Windows Live in general is trying to carve out a feature-by-feature competitor to Google services, neutral in its approach to content sources and attempting to provide superior usability for its audience. The WLAS facility offers a lot of promise as a tool, but it will do little to ease many underlying issues faced by publishers trying to define their own online futures via an expanding array of search partners. If WLAS succeeds it will take some share of the market for online scholarly content search: others such as Google and Yahoo will take their own part as well, but it's a given that none of these will ever "own" the market for scholarly content searching. In short time this will require scholarly publishers to provide a more consistent cross-platform approach to content licensing that will empower content subscribers to use whatever search tools work best for them at the moment. Pay-per-view access alone as a solution in these environments is not likely to suffice for many of their targeted users. This new entry from Microsoft is sure to heat up the competition for effective scholarly content search services online with its distinct and useful features, but it is far from solving the many commercial issues that scholarly publishers must address to thrive in an online search-driven world.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:42 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
This year's Buying and Selling eContent conference brought on a much-improved range of topics and participants who delved deep into many of the toughest issues faced in today's content industry. Yet in spite of the improved representation from enterprise content buyers and online media giants some of the most important publishers and buyers were nowhere near the Camelback resort this week. When everyone within reach of the Web can create, aggregate, enhance and distribute content themselves with amazing ease the dialog required to "get it" in today's content marketplace requires including the users who do far more publishing and aggregating than any one else today. Click here to read the full News Analysis
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:38 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Tuesday, April 11, 2006 |
The toy with buzz this week is Webaroo, a new service that provides Web users with the ability to download content from the Web automatically that can be synced with memory cards used in mobile devices via a PC or directly to a Windows-enabled mobile device. Kind of dull-sounding on the surface, but what's interesting is the packaging. Content comes down from Webaroo in convenient "web packs", files that have stripped out content from various sites and optimized it for display in mobile devices. These web packs are not small: the typical web pack is about 256MB of data, enough to fit into most memory sticks or thumb drives these days but hardly a smidgen of stuff. It's essentially creating mini-webs of content that can support people on the go in a variety of contexts. Web pack titles thus far include major cities (night life, tourist attractions, local news), world news, and world soccer/football sports reports. An included browser-based search utility makes it relatively easy to locate content on a specific topic. Pages appear in roughly the same form that they appeared on the Web, including ads and page layouts. Clicking on links will bring you to cached pages if available or to the option to go to the Web if connectivity is available. The product itself is fairly rudimentary though it has the ability to define custom web packs: what you get it what you get. In some ways it's not much different in net result on a PC from the caching function on a browser used in combination with a local search utility such as Google desktop. But it's a hint of the scale of convenient content that can be made available to users in today's high-capacity devices fed by broadband network connections to the Web. With gigabytes of storage available in many of these devices users have the ability to aggregate mini-Webs of content that can travel with them with or without a network connection. In essence these mini-Webs are publications in and of themselves, synced up as needed with fresh content. This adds a whole new layer to what could be accomplished in the publishing industry to make content available to their users in a delivered service - which could include premium levels of content as well. Syncing content on wireless connections into local caches is one of the huge missed opportunities in publishing today, one which is likely to gain more traction as ad-supported wireless connections begin to take off. In the meantime, ponder what the future might bring by downloading this simple utility. UPDATE: Webaroo came in handy on a tedious flight back home yesterday, allowing a little content into my life that would otherwise be unavailable in the air. I have tried a few sites and search engine queries for my custom "web packs": results are fair. Some pages outside of Webaroo's preprocessed universe can get rather messy as they get packed for efficient mobile use. But overall it's a handy tool that I look forward to testing further.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:02 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:24 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Monday, April 10, 2006 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 2:10 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:13 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
In the earlier days of the Web many startups were trying to emulate the "ticker" model of financial content providers and stream headlines and stock quotes through a wide variety of downloaded programs. These applications would reside on one's desktop and pop out stock quotes and news headlines as well as sports scores and other content of interest to consumers. These tools still exist, but once the dot-com bubble burst they lost a lot of their appeal. But with the rise of weblogs and the simple syndication model afforded by XML-based protocols such as RSS streaming updates have regained their cachet. ALM has picked up on this streaming trend and announced the release of NewsPoint, downloadable software that provides streaming headlines collected via RSS feeds from a stable of weblogs and Web sites covering legal matters - including, of course, ALM's own subscription-based publications. NewsPoint wraps RSS updates in a reader that makes it easy to print, email and copy articles read in the reader, as well as to read the entries on the native Web sites from which they originate and to maintain content received in the news reader. Text-based ads which are targeted towards the interest of legal readers appear as well. The screen format of NewsPoint is well adapted to portable devices, making it easy for lawyers on the go to keep up with legal news and opinion. None of these are extraordinary capabilities in and of themselves given the fast pace of product development in the weblog community. But the fact that they are playing out in legal content circles via a major legal publisher underscores how professionals in many business sectors are beginning to adapt attitudes towards their core business content that are not unlike those of their colleagues in financial circles. With the popularization of streaming content targeted towards specific professional audiences business content is beginning to move towards a "real-time"attitude in monitoring developments in their sectors, with opportunities and threats appearing with a regularity that is not too unlike the scrolling of a stock ticker. The fact that it is a business media company and not an aggregator rolling out this tool also underscores that publishers that specialize in specific market sectors are out to claim their own share of the content integration opportunities that used to go to content aggregators in the past with nary a peep of product development from publishers. The New Aggregation is in full swing in legal circles, challenging all suppliers to find new indispensability as users gain the upper hand in choosing the media, enterprise and personal content sources that matter most to them on a daily basis.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 9:25 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in review
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 9:25 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Friday, April 07, 2006 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:52 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Thursday, April 06, 2006 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 9:54 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Wednesday, April 05, 2006 |
Perhaps I am getting a little jaded in the middle of a busy week but I have to yawn just a little bit when I encounter Federated Media's new Tech portal. With folks like Rafat Ali at paidContent.org having been out there for years proving the value of weblogs as destination news sites for tech and media audiences why should we turn our heads that far for a fairly humdrum aggregation of weblogs? It's done nicely enough, and I have a great deal of respect for John Battelle's efforts to redefine how media properties can be assembled, but at the end of the day the net result is not that much different from a CNET News - except that it lacks much of a typical news portal's sophistication in terms of editorial control, ad placement, taxonomies, search tools and other convenient features. Why oh why do people seem to think again and again that simple aggregation of proprietary content is the cat's pajamas? John has proven his point easily enough - yes, you can create a media portal property built entirely out of weblog-driven content - but the acquisition of major weblog networks by Yahoo and AOL while Battelle has been heads-down on introducing Federated Media has made the debut of this portal rather moot. Weblogs can be aggregated anywhere by anyone, with their highest value being assigned in context to related materials that could come from a wide variety of sources. Building a portal out of a finite set of weblogs only replicates the same set of issues that most publishers struggling to own their destinies online have to wrestle to the ground every day. As long as the quality of the content provided by FM Publishing's contributors remains high it is likely to have some moderate degree of success, but for those who were expecting an earth-shaking debut of Silicon Valley's answer to Madison Avenue please move along; there's nothing to see here.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 4:53 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
1 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
O'Reilly Media is a leading innovator in online book marketing, slicing, dicing and bookshelving all manner of tech-oriented titles in electronic form for online audiences. Its Safari U portal extends this concept by allowing educators to create custom textbooks from specific sections of content sourced from any number of titles available in the O'Reilly collection. A great concept, but getting it working properly in a scalable environment with open source technology was proving to be a challenge until O'Reilly signed on with Mark Logic to get some highly potent standards-based technology to drive the process. The result is the announced rebirth of Safari U, which facilitates the assembly of custom books and course packs from texts and multimedia sources as well as materials from the instructors assembling these materials. These packages are custom printed for as little as USD sixteen cents a page and can be made available to others as templates for their own custom packs via Safari U's Learning Objects Exchange. All of this is free to the instructors and oftentimes a significant savings to students, who can avoid buying stacks of books that are used only in part during their courses. While the claims that this is a Web 2.0 phenomenon are a little suspect, it's nevertheless a key indicator that custom publishing at the behest of technology-empowered users is about to come of age. With infrastructure such as that provided by Mark Logic it's now possible for publishers to assemble virtually any combination of content sources quickly and easily at a into a format suitable for mass-scale custom printing. This begs the question: why are we doing this only for text books? The whole concept of what's needed in a printed collection of materials is moving away from book, magazine and newspaper editors to technology-empowered users, who are able already to do their own custom printing in a crude form from materials garnered via Web browsers. Custom publishing will enable these users to save a ton on printing materials and get both premium and ad-supported content to them in convenient packages suitable for both short-term and long-term use, along with electronic copies. As portals such as Google and Amazon gear up for custom printing services the question will no longer be whether print is dead but rather whether print-based publishers who base their models on single-source print runs are dead. For all of those who are smirking about this being a pie-in-the-sky notion, let's talk in a year or so. I prefer blueberry myself.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 4:10 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
If ever you've wondered whether weblogs were considered important by enterprise content users your answer comes from LexisNexis, which announced the availability of weblogs via their online news and business information services. The weblogs are sourced from the Newstex Content on Demand service, which licenses content from leading news feeds and weblogs and provides a number of add-value services such as adding metadata and references to company ticker symbols, formatting, custom feeds and segmenting content for specific market segments and geographic sectors. Specific to the LexisNexis integration Newstex added a number of weblogs that were in demand from their enterprise users - including our own ContentBlogger(TM) news feed. The LexisNexis announcement notes that enterprises are keen to be on top of key opinion influencers in the marketplace, which now includes many influential weblogs that drive both consumer and business opinions. The arguments from last year as to whether weblogs are valid journalism are now relatively moot. Whether they are journalism or not, weblogs are read widely and have the ability to move minds and markets as much as any mainstream media outlet in many circles. Given the proven worth of mixing weblogs and mainstream news in Web portals such as Topix this ground-breaking move by a major aggregator is not likely to be the last but it is a very significant first. When serving enterprise clients that are increasingly agnostic about how they source their content enterprise aggregators have little choice but to make available the widest array of sources that their audiences consider to be quality content. Leveraging the efficient centralized capabilities of Newstex to incorporate weblogs into their infrastructure allows LexisNexis to focus on their clients rather than on a myriad of small publishers with their own peculiar requirements. Compliance-conscious companies are also likely to find this solution offered by Newstex via LexisNexis appealing, as its weblog licensing eliminates any issues about usage rights that may otherwise crop up unexpectedly (have we forgotten already the successful suit against Legg Mason brought by a small-scale newsletter publisher?). Weblogs will continue to gain their popularity and influence via direct Web access but being able to access then via LexisNexis will be a huge plus for enterprises trying to keep abreast of market opinion via their business information and intelligence tools.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 3:22 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 3:17 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Tuesday, April 04, 2006 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 1:29 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Monday, April 03, 2006 |
The New York Times has taken the plunge into a data-enriched online offering designed to lure in investment-oriented readers and to make much more potent use of its interactions with readers. In doing so they are positioning themselves for online-first competition with general purpose portals that offer a broad array of rich data sources. Publishers have much to gain from such rich data initiatives but they have far more to gain from recognizing that rich data is only the beginning of building effective brands around online audiences that have many choices of sources and venues for high-quality content. In doing to they may discover that getting both feet in to rich data offerings requires different strategies for different circumstances. Click here to read the full News Analysis
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 5:52 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:22 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Sunday, April 02, 2006 |
Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in review
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:37 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
