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| Friday, September 29, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:56 AM |
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| Thursday, September 28, 2006 |
 There's quite a storm brewing over at YouTube these days centering on the recent interview of former U.S. President Bill Clinton by correspondent Chris Wallace on Fox News. A number of people on YouTube posted the entire interview on the user-generated video service, many copies of which have turned out to be quite popular - popular enough that Fox News has apparently asked for these full-length clips to be removed. Although this is a fairly common confrontation when copyrighted content gets posted in full on online video services this time it seems to have been perceived by some YouTube posters as censorship based on building rumors that News Corp. is preparing to buy YouTube ( interesting rumor clip from YouTube covering a Fox executive speaking at a conference). Judging by the attitudes of some of the YouTube posters such a takeover by NewsCorp may wind up leaving the cupboard bare of the community-builders that are at the heart of this video service. It highlights the ongoing struggle between traditional distribution schemes based on content licensing and the power of user-enabled distribution to enable content to meet audiences in the contexts that they find to be most valuable. Unlike other media, Web-based content services based on users in control of production and distribution vote with their clicks when services don't play by the rapidly developing unwritten Constitution of this online Content Nation. In the long run these confrontations are going to push premium content away from the most influential user-distributors that can help to build online brands. As in the earlier confrontation between NBC and video sharing networks ( our earlier coverage) Fox News is in bunker mode with its own video clip access: yet again, I cannot provide you with a link to the full-length clip on their site, it's wrapped up in layers of software that make it impossible to do this effectively. So if I can't send a link to someone else easily it only stands to reason that a service that makes this easier to do would be a popular alternative (NBC has learned since February, they're now much more aggressive in enabling their own clips for bookmarking and sharing). In the highly democratic environment of Content Nation it's difficult to work against an audience that is willing to create content as aggressively as traditionally copyrighted sources. Many publishers and producers of premium content would love it if user-generated content resided in its own little ghetto, safely segregated from mainstream media content. But every indication that the Web has given us in more than a decade of use is that mainstream content benefits greatly from a well-designed program that allows it to rub shoulders with user-generated content - and that allows users to dictate its most valuable contexts. Publishers and media companies need to listen to these new online publishers and begin to negotiate a seat at the table that draws up the Constitution of Content Nation - before it's written without them.
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:00 PM |
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The Newsvine social news-gathering and authoring portal notes in a recent posting that they are beginning to pay out some reasonably serious money to its authors. Newsvine aggregates wire stories from AP with stories bookmarked and tagged by its community of news enthusiasts, who in turn post their own articles and comment and vote on what their peers produce. The site is booming these days to the point that the top poster-author in August earned USD 414 for their efforts. Not bad, and fairly close to fees paid out to some docents at About.com and not all that far away from Jason Calacanis' USD 1,000 payouts for top bookmarkers to support the new Netscape portal. Unlike About.com or Netscape, though, the Newsvine payouts are based on ad revenues associated with their content, with Newsvine paying out 90 percent of the revenues in this sharing scheme to the authors. If authors don't want to be bothered with the payouts they can donate them to a major charity. As the site's ads were only about 35 percent sold out in August and as they are targeting 70 percent sellout rates the payouts will in time be very much in line with emerging industry standards. The bottom line is that it pays all around to enable authors to focus on their work in ways that give them independence in their work and the ability to get rewarded in direct proportion to the quality of that work. This is something that magazines and news organizations have not been adept at managing to date: most writers live on meager incomes regardless of the quality of their work with a handful of superstars being paid handsomely regardless of whether they've produced revenue-worthy content or not. In theory this new meritocracy of authorship can help to grow far superior content as time goes on - probably the most significant aspect of the emergence of weblogs and social publishing tools such as Newsvine. The systems aren't perfect - clicks may equate to good search engine placement as much as to an article's inherent quality - but it's likely to favor original content producers who are respected for their work as time goes on. Four hundred bucks may not sound like a lot for starters, but think of it as 400 dollars that a mainstream outlet did not fork out - and that much worthy content that's escaped their revenue streams.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:23 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:08 PM |
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| Wednesday, September 27, 2006 |
A good article by Web Pro News covers the aftermath of a Belgian court's judgment against Google's use of content from Belgian news sources, a decision that required Google not only to pull the content from their Google News search engine but as well to post details of the decision on Google's Belgian home page. This apparently set off some sparks specific to Belgium but also seems to have triggered a new PR campaign by the search giant to bolster its image as a "good guy" player in online content. A manifesto of sorts has been posted by David Eun, Google's VP of Content Partnerships, on the corporate Google Blog. The piece outlines how Google respects copyrights, lets content owners choose their stance on Google's service and how Google's approach benefits publishers. On other fronts Google is trying to emphasize that it's role is not focused on generating original content but to make others' content more useful, as underscored by Google VP of Advertisting Sales Tim Armstrong in a Reuters article. One hopes for the sake of a vibrant online content marketplace that the Belgian judgment turns out to be a backwater decision that fails to reset the hands of the clock to a pre-web concept of copyright. Indexing and cacheing content for search purposes based on fair use doctrines inherent in most all international copyright law is the backbone of the productivity gains that have benefitted publishers of all kinds in the online environment. Fair use is also under threat from digital rights management packaging systems, a development that the British Library is pushing to have addressed more clearly in today's copyright laws ( CNET News coverage). Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, put forward the case for clarification of copyright laws most succinctly in the CNET article: "Unless there is a serious updating of copyright law to recognize the changing technological environment, the law becomes an ass," she notes. While Google is trying to mend fences with publishers uncertain about their motives the rhetoric becomes strained when one looks at products such as AdSense, Google Local, Google Earth and Google Base that are built on open but proprietary platforms and designed to aggregate a world of unique content for its own purposes. Google is most definitely in the publishing business, whether or not it has traditional media operations, and needs to adjust its rhetoric to reflect that reality more objectively. In doing so it may find itself more able to have its core mission statement resonate more clearly in the courts and in the court of public opinion. The mission is sound and the wording may be true but without further adjustments to its communications Google is in danger of it becoming rather the ass that the copyright law itself is in danger of becoming. Here's to better communications between all parties in this matter.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:25 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:21 AM |
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| Tuesday, September 26, 2006 |
When LexisNexis launches a new product line these days it takes a bit of patience to troll through all of the press releases to get the full picture of their full-featured and complex product offerings. This week's announcement of their new Client Development solutions portfolio is no exception. "Client Development" means the focus is on establishing and growing accounts for legal firms and other professional services companies with a suite of familiar (but now integrated) content and technology products. The Client Development portfolio includes the LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell database of legal professionals and legal services buyers but focuses especially on their InterAction CRM solution that provides relationship intelligence for business development. Now integrated into the InterAction platform is content from their core subscription database via LexisNexis Corporate Intelligence Subscription package and the new LexisNexis AtVantage tool that provides access to prospect lists and filtering tools to help professionals develop marketing campaigns. This is the most advanced marketing-oriented workflow integration to date from LexisNexis and demonstrates what a challenge it can be to steer a product line traditionally oriented towards subscription database sales to a true productivity tool. There are a lot of moving parts available and it may take a while for clients and their staffs to focus on how all of this works together. But once they can step back and see the sum of the parts it's a pretty impressive array of services that brings together best-of-breed content sources with both workflow tools and access to familiar LexisNexis databases to make productivity gains a reality for aggressive services marketers. As with the other LexisNexis Total Practice offerings it's about making content services of all kinds pay off for the customer in concrete and measurable ways. While rival Thomson West challenges LexisNexis strongly in the integration of legal content into internal workflows for bottom-line functions, LexisNexis Client Development focuses on developing the top line for their clients in professional services markets with highly specialized content and CRM functions that competitors both horizontal and vertical are lacking in such an integrated form. It bodes well for other content services companies seeking growth opportunities that will come out of looking at content from the perspective of helping clients in specific verticals succeed in their markets as much as in their operations. Now if only they can wrestle these press releases to the ground...
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:06 PM |
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There are "media pundits" and then there are REAL media pundits - folks who feel specially ordained to speak about and for the general media industry. I don't put our own observations in the latter category - we're just glad to have some insights now and again - but Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff's observations on media and publishing put him in the real pundit arena by his own measure at least. paidContent.org's Executive Editor Staci Kramer caught up with a Wolff-moderated panel at this week's Online Media, Marketing and Advertising Conference and Expo in New York this week. In Staci's summary Wolff laments that the current levels or revenues and earnings that mainstream media companies are making online just aren't going to be enough for his foreseeable bar tabs. "What if what we are doing right now is creating a kind of ghetto of cheap content?" Wolff howls. "There will never be this golden era of online media?" A timely retort came from Jim Bankoff, EVP, product and programming at AOL: "If you're just a consumer, there's never been a more golden age than now." And there's the point. Most media hit their peak in consumer value before they've been packaged and channeled to death by marketing execs and other agents of profitability that whittle out the fun but unsustainable options. While this golden age of content choice may be only in its very early days its profitability is not likely to focus on just a few original producers of branded content in the ways that it used to ever again. This is probably in part because of the way that business models are approached. As Bankoff noted later on how to use a media company's content online, "It has to make economic sense as a whole. If there is no business model then it doesn't make sense." By contrast, many of the most successful online content companies started out with only a glimmer of how to monetize their offerings but a strong idea as to how to build an audience. They built it and indeed they came in many instances, at which point the audience was there to cash in on readily. And there is probably the key difference that traditional publishing companies stumble on again and again in online venues: they look at monetizing content from the product on out rather than from the audience on in. For all of the weaknesses of VC-backed content plays this technique opened up the door to radically different ideas as to how to conceive of a content product that had little to do with traditional media marketing and distribution methods and everything to do with servicing audiences where their interests lay. It's an outlook that may discourage many publishers today, but there's still plenty of time in this golden age to develop and position high-quality content in audience-friendly venues. They may not look like your typical content products of yesteryear, but after they've been chugging out profits for a few years that probably won't be of much concern to you anyway. So thanks again, Michael, for reminding that this evolving world of online content doesn't look anything like the old watering hole. Let us know when you're ready to have a round with the new crew...
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:49 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:11 PM |
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| Monday, September 25, 2006 |
While many publishers focus on search engines to get their content in the most valuable context possible that's not where issues of context begin and end for online content. A new generation of micro-context services are bringing valuable content sources down to the level of words and phrases in destination content. These new and evolving services enable publishers to expose their own content and content from high-quality content partners to give audiences a high-value experience whenever they decide to shift their focus. Think of every bit of content in your services as the potential starting point for an enhanced relationship that can keep audiences coming back for more. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 7:06 PM |
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Trends Young Internet Producers, Bankrolled, Are Seeking Act II The New York Times* Publishers aim for some control of search results Reuters The Future of the Internet II: Internet leaders, activists, and analysts see opportunities in a “flattening” world Pew Internet & American Life Microsoft May Offer Free Ad-Supported Office Reuters via Publish Web 2.0 Companies Garner $262.3 Million in First Half of 2006, Gaining Ground in U.S. VC Investing PrimeZone OMMA East: Ross Levinsohn, President, Fox Interactive Media paidContent.org Google plans product search upgrade for search engine Web2.Ohhh TechMeme Invents New Kind of Advertisment TechCrunch BuzzLogic calculates social media influence ZDNet Craig Newmark reflects on the power of the Web CNET News How to Get Attention In a New-Media World WSJ Online* Best Practices 3 Reasons Why Delicious Bookmarks Beat Digg Traffic Hands Down Performancing The 8 Free Things Every Site Should Do Squidoo It feels relevant: biological tactility in news media USC Annenberg OJR Cool Tools Add Me Unveils 'AddThis Button', Announces Public Beta PR Newswire NewsGator Partners With Directory Xpress to Help School Communications to Parents and Students MarketWire New DRM Add-on for Google Writley, Spreadsheets, Cash, Maps and Picasa Web Albums PR Web
Deals, Partnerships & Sales LexisNexis Launches Corporate Intelligence Subscription for the InterAction CRM Solution BusinessWire Products, Markets & People LexisNexis Launches Client Development Solutions, Aligning with Professional Services Firms’ Strategies LexisNexis LexisNexis Announces Launch of atVantage Business Development Tool BusinessWire Ancestry.com Adds Major U.S. Newspaper Birth, Marriage and Death Announcements, 1851 to 2003 PR Newswire Knows.jongo.com, the leading English language information tool for China-related subjects on the web Jongo Knows
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:04 PM |
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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
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:31 AM |
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| Friday, September 22, 2006 |
TechCrunch notes the debut of Socialtext 2.0, a long-needed overhaul to the enterprise-oriented Wiki publishing package. This new version provides a cleaner look, enhanced usability for non-techie page editors and an application programming interface that will enable content from Socialtext-enabled sites to be extracted for other content applications such as mashups. Our colleague Robin Good notes in comments on the TechCrunch posting that the TechCrunch review is a bit of a soft treatment and that they should acknowledge that many packages have come along in the last year that provide more streamlined functionality and features that will widen the appeal of Wiki packages to users. With packages such as Wetpaint providing very user-friendly interfaces and features tuned to make Wikis far more accessible to the users on whose contributions the success of a Wiki rises or falls Socialtext is indeed a little late to the party. But it's hard to have your cake and eat it too. With a focus on making Wiki software acceptable in behind-the-firewall environments Socialtext has had its hands full with early successes that haven't necessarily allowed them to focus on the explosion of online Wikis that are beginning to bloom thanks to more easily licensed open source packages and the new wave of less geekish Wiki products. A body of code can move only so fast, oftentimes not as fast as a content marketplace demands of its evolution. This seems to be especially true of most software supporting social media. We're in the process of vetting a number of social software packages which, while all useful, are clearly early-stage systems that are having a hard time managing the addition of enough features to provide robust publishing environments that capture the many facets of effective social media. Major publishers are not any better off with more mature content management packages that are for the most part oriented towards a more rigid view of content production and sharing. It's a bit like the early days of content management systems about ten years ago - with the notable exception of open source packages making it far easier for publishing Everymans to get in the game. In the meantime publishers impatient to have social publishing software that's both enterprise-ready to satisfy their I.T. staffs and robust enough with features to satisfy online media clients are having a hard time closing the gap this year. This tends to favor destination sites such as Wikipedia and Gather that have built up publishing communities around their own technology platforms, gaining valuable insights into how to make these packages work from their diverse and broadening audiences. The Wikimedia Foundation that sponsors Wikipedia has also spun off its Mediawiki platform as a public-license Wiki software package that's popular in its own right, though falling behind the times in user-friendly features. Where does this leave publishers? I leave the details of when these packages mature to the code hounds, but my sense is that we're less than a year away from Wiki software creating a new wave of social publishing similar to the recent weblog explosion. Some in the thick of Wikis may view that as a very conservative forecast given the stellar growth of Wikipedia but I think that the real growth has not yet arrived for the medium as a whole. Wikis need to act more like databases and less like scratch pads for them to gain full acceptance. In the meantime the rough edges of the technology are being worked out as best practices are still forming for managing the sometimes free-for-all environments that can erupt in the medium. Wikis are far from perfect database publishing tools, but then again weblogs are pretty puny content management systems - yet they have already changed the publishing world. Welcome to Wiki 2.0 - social publishing meeting the demands of both enterprise and media publishers on a common ground that attracts user-publishers far more effectively than ever before.
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:01 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:59 AM |
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| Thursday, September 21, 2006 |
Trends Web 2.0 entering corporate world slowly CNET News At Los Angeles Times, a Civil Executive Rebellion The New York Times* Are Search Engine Spiders Infringing On Copyright? SearchNewz Pew Report: One In Five Seek Political Info Online Online Media Daily YouTube’s Magic Number - $1.5 Billion Tech Crunch Facebook, Riding a Web Trend, Flirts With a Big-Money Deal WSJ Online* The Books Google Could Open Washington Post Who Cares About Acrobat 8? Publish The Google Goal Of Indexing 100 Billion Web Pages Site Pro News Over Four Million North Americans Will Subscribe to Mobile Broadcast Services in 2007 Wireless Developer Net Google and MarketCast Release Benchmark Study on the Internet's Influence on Consumer Moviegoing BusinessWire Yellow or Otherwise, American Newspapers as Media That Molded the Masses The New York Times* P2p and the ephemeral P2P Net Best Practices Content Is King in Professional Services: The Key to Effective Marketing is ``Thought Leadership'' BusinessWire How to explain RSS the Oprah way Back in Skinny Jeans Applications That Unify Access to Information Will Fuel Growth in BI, Search, and Discovery Markets BusinessWire Cool Tools Tracking the web with Single Page Aggregators Solution Watch Some Hot Recorders for Those Cool Podcasts The New York Times* Blogoozle.com takes your blog exposure to a new level. PR Web
Deals, Partnerships & Sales Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.net Gets $100,000 Boost From Reuters paidContent.org TheStreet.com, Inc. and DirectoryM Launch TheStreet.com Business Directory PR Newswire ‘Billboard’ inks deal to distribute content in Japan BtoB Online Products, Markets & People Voxant’s Viral Syndication Network™ for online news Web 2.0 List Factiva Webcast to Demonstrate How Enterprise Search is Disrupting Existing Online Profit Models BusinessWire
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:22 PM |
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| Wednesday, September 20, 2006 |
Answers.com has a wealth of reference content aimed at both consumers and professionals that has brought it a solid audience and strong revenues. Nevertheless it lingers oftentimes in the shadow of Wikipedia's growing online following - in spite of incorporating Wikipedia as a key source in its own product. How to get more visibility and contextual value for the product? Having links from Google's search results page on an experimental basis hasn't hurt (look for the "definition" link up on the right hand side), but something more was needed to accelerate growth. That something is coming in the form of an announcement of a new deal with The New York Times that brings Answer.com's " one-click answers" to New York Times news viewers - without the hassle of a user software installation.  From any online NYT article (NOTE - not on headline pages) any reader can point at a word, press the ALT key on their keyboards and while doing so do a mouse click. Up will pop a NYT-branded window into Answers.com reference content ( demo) that applies to the selected word or phrase. This elimination of the user software download enabled via a simple piece of code added to content pages makes this a completely natural function that adds immediate value to the site's content. In doing so both the Answers.com brand and the site's brand gain prestige and value also. That's important from the Answers.com perspective because their database contains many branded content sources that deserve the recognition that high-quality content partners can provide. From the New York Times perspective it enables their content to be seen as a more high-quality source of reference for people who like to dig into topics. This is but one completed deal for Answers.com but clearly the simplicity and elegance of the solution are going to make this a popular option amongst destination content sites, most especially sites oriented towards news and research. What's missing is some compact little icon equivalent to the little buttons now prevalent on Web sites equipped with RSS feeds that will alert users to the availability of the feature. Will this little graphic become as prevalent on sites as much as RSS buttons? Perhaps not, but with the simplicity of implementation and the power of contextual content becoming ever more important in content product development there's reason to think that Answers.com may be on to a solution that will have very broad appeal. In having done so they may have created a content contextualization tool with far broader potential for marketing content than even their current plans encompass.
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:39 PM |
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The online video scene seems to be moving along at the pace that weblogs had set for fomenting online change not so long ago. In addition to recent deals for music videos to appear on YouTube from major music distributors comes word from The Hollywood Reporter that News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch is now ready to flip his interest in the DirectTV satellite television distribution network back to rival John Malone in exchange for Malone's interest in News Corp. Murdoch is also cooling on the idea of building traditional Web portals as aggregation centers, noting in an AP article "We're not sure the portal model is the way of the future at all,...We think people are going straight to the sites." Whatever doubts one may have had about Murdoch "getting" The New Aggregation as a model for online success have to be put aside at this point. He understands clearly that the future is not in aggregating and distributing mainstream content but in aggregating audiences who are themselves consumers, creators, aggregators and distributors of content in all major media forms. In the meantime former U.S. Vice President-turned-media-entrepreneur Al Gore seems to have soured on his Current user-generated TV project's Google relationship and is sidling up to Yahoo to have a more mainstream service alongside its user-generated videos, according to a great summary by paidContent.org. The Yahoo! Current Network is to expose Current's online user videos alongside studio-produced content generated specifically for YCN. A post on Current's weblog seems to capture Current's frustration with the Google approach to video: "Here's what I've learned already: once you create a system in which everyone can participate, you need to brace yourself for how ridiculously random the participants are inevitably going to be." In other words, there's something to be said for blending professionally-produced content alongside user-generated content. Gore's insistence on the lingering power of mainstream television may be valid for a new outlet trying to develop a first-Web-then-TV model, but Murdoch's outlook from the perspective of an established media giant trying to plot out its future seems to be more in focus with where video and other online media types need to go. Traditional broadcast media will be with us for at least one more generation in one form or another but the power shift away from distribution-centric content business models is disintegrating far faster than most experts would have predicted even six months ago. Lonelygirl15 seemed to figure that out easily enough - why hassle trying to get on some TV talent show to promote your acting career when you can start it right away online? In trying to help users decide who from the democratic field of content producers gets to be seen on a broadcast outlet Current still presumes that those users really need that broadcast outlet to have market impact and importance. Yes, the rabble of user-generated content may not command the revenues at this stage that Current's investors expect, but with brand advertisers rushing in the other direction towards online outlets the money is in chasing publishing-empowered audiences, not distribution channels. Current may yet succeed via its online alliance with Yahoo in creating a solid path to mainstream ad revenues online and via its cable TV channel, but the odds are that the Murdochs of the world will beat Current to the punch via TiVos equipped to feed video from the Web directly to TV tubes. Sorry, Al, the climate's warming faster than you think...
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:40 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:08 AM |
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| Tuesday, September 19, 2006 |
Whatever you can say about Microsoft these days it's trying hard to listen more to its online audiences to craft an effective online strategy. First came last week's launch of its production version Windows Live search engine, with many of the goofy Windows-esque features that hampered the early Beta version eliminated. Stripped down to a light Google-weight interface and very serviceable search results (though its news algorithms are still needing a tune-up), Windows Live is a viable alternative to Google that offers its own flavor of content. They're high quality in overall relevance but tending to favor mainstream/established sources of information more than those that come out on top based on popularity. That's not necessarily a bad thing for searchers looking for a viable "plan B" when seeking out quality content - especially those in a work and study environment who need to cite reference-worthy sources. Then came the announcement of Zune, Microsoft's erstwhile iPod-killer, compatible with a wide range of audio file formats - including MP3s and the iPod-compatible AAC format - and equipped with the ability to share DRM-encoded content with other Zune users within wireless range of one another. Users get three plays of a shared song and then the option to purchase it from Microsoft's online music store - kind of a simplified version of the Windows Media-compatible Weed file sharing DRM system that we've heralded over the past few years. Zune is slick, tuned for both openness and rights-savvy use and ready for users who are tired of iPod's service limitations and looking for the "new, new thing." Now comes word gleaned originally by TechCrunch from a Microsoft employee's weblog of Soapbox, the invitation-only beta debut of Microsoft's YouTube competitor, complete with multiple formats for uploading, user tagging and categorization, simultaneous viewing and browsing, RSS feeds, weblog embedding and hooks into Microsoft's Live Spaces social networking service. Feature-wise it sounds like a hit, though the quality of the content in the eyes of highly democratic audiences will tell all. These are all Johnny-come-lately services, of course, but if you're going to be late to the party at least come dressed appropriate for the action and with a unique proposition that your audience will find to be appealing. While there are still obvious tie-ins to Microsoft products these new content-oriented product efforts seem to be a far more concentrated on leaving the traditional software business to fend for itself and to earn their stripes one user at a time on the stand-alone merits of what works for users today. It's a positioning that overall has more media savvy than Google but one that's less tied to older online media and marketing models than Yahoo. I am sure that Microsoft would like to think of itself as "plan A" for online content but as a starting point a user-friendly approach to developing content products that leverages the best of its existing relationships with publishers and media companies is a good place to begin building deeper street creds in the eyes of today's savvy online audiences.
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:26 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:11 PM |
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| Monday, September 18, 2006 |
The time for puffery and posturing about print's power and supplemental online revenues is officially past for many publishing companies, yet many of those same companies have failed to assemble a coherent strategy that will take them forward into an era of online-dominant revenue models. The latest market statistics point to an environment that will not favor those who have not prepared to make that transition. Getting content into context, going toe to toe with private investors and building management that thinks like digital natives are the keys to jumping on a train just about out of the station.
Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:00 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:21 AM |
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| Sunday, September 17, 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
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:54 PM |
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| Friday, September 15, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:46 PM |
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| Thursday, September 14, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:37 PM |
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The server for downloads of the latest and greatest version of Google Earth was pretty well hosed yesterday so it took me a while to get the new version that supports contextual featured multimedia content. An example screenshot is below:  It's not all that remarkable a feature in and of itself - contextual content has been on Google Earth, Google Maps and other mapping services for quite some time, not to mention a growing galaxy of mashups - but it's interesting to see the type of content and the caliber of players taking part in this feature. National Geographic and Discovery Networks content is featured prominently, the two major U.S.-based suppliers of travel media, with links to their ad-supported online content from the Google Maps callout boxes. Video clips of interesting stores and destinations is provided from the TurnHere online collection, more mini-documentaries than ads but nevertheless having a promotional bent. Other content from the United Nations and other non-profit sources is featured as well. These content partnerships are providing first-rate content via Google Earth, not user-generated sources which are left at this point to the mashups to play with. It's a small enough collection with high enough quality and filtering capabilities that Google Earth can act as a visual taxonomy device, allowing users to define the geographic scope of their interests and then overlay the type content that's of interest to them at that time. There is already a fairly rich layer for other types of content for dining, shopping and travel in Google Earth, but in this new step of Featured Content filter allows publishers to promote premium content contextualized in ways that go well beyond simple maps or search engine results. So in a sense, think of the various filters on Google Earth as sophisticated vertical search tools. As more video content makes its way into the mix one can see tools like Google Earth becoming guides to video viewing when people have a hankering for a particular region. With a growing array of content visualization software packages coming to market for professionally-oriented content it's important to consider how tools such as Google Earth can be used to provide a new kind of visual taxonomy that can support a deeper analysis of problems and opportunities that relate to one another in geospatial terms. Some of these are already integrated into Google Maps via its API facilities, but for users seeking a more high-power tool the Google Earth platform may provide a higher performance value-add platform on which to build them for premium audiences. Just as Google itself seemed like a trifling plaything when it first launched many years ago, these seemingly trivial tools wind up forming the foundation of powerful content services before you know it.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:58 AM |
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| Wednesday, September 13, 2006 |
I was able to pop out to Newport Beach, California this week for the Fall Meeting of ASIDIC, the Association of Information and Dissemination Centers. ASIDIC meetings have a "just right" size to them that attracts top-level managers who are there to really discuss matters and to put active ideas out on the table: very little posturing and lots of substance. I will try to pull some top-level insights into a News Analysis later this week but there were some key insights, technologies and concepts that surfaced. A fair amount of stuff here, wade through the bold headlines to the topics that interest you most (or heck, read the whole thing). Licensing Services Well-Positioned for Online Growth
Ezra Ernst, CEO of Swets, gave a great keynote outlining their role in content licensing, highlighting how their services are very much in the center of the " long tail" of content: while the top 8 publishers using their services to license content for academic, corporate, government and medical markets comprise about 40 percent of their revenues, a third of their revenues are coming from the bottom third echelon of publishers. Getting that middle tier to perform adequately is where "the real action is" according to Ezra. Models for his professionally-oriented publishers are shifting: where it used to be print with an electronic supplement for licensing, now it's largely electronic licensing with the print component thrown in for free oftentimes. Online content in his mind is becoming the content of record, especially since speed of delivery ensures its freshness. His recommendation for libraries: focus on analyzing your user statistics more carefully to build ROI arguments. I see services such as Swets very well positioned to play a more aggressive role in enabling institutions to access licensed premium content online via search engines - with Swets seeming to have a more aggressive approach towards this particular opportunity than EBSCO. From Licensing Chicken Farms to Selling Chicken Parts
The highlight of the meeting was doubtless a video clip (QuickTime) assembled by DeepVertical, a vertical search and content development service, set in an (empty) butcher shop in New York City. A fellow comes in asking for a chicken. The butcher/aggregator says that he can't give him a chicken, but that he can license him a chicken farm for a whole year if he signs a licensing contract. It gets even better from that point, with the moral of the tale being: "Let your content hang out where they do, then slice and dice. The customer is not the enemy: don't force them to buy the farm." A great message for this era of The New Aggregation, to be sure, though there are opportunities for both butcher shops and farm lessors abounding through online search engines. It takes some experimentation to find the right mix of licensing, direct sales and free content: as Bill Burger of Copyright Clearance Center put it in a later panel, "You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince." Or, to put it another way, if you want to succeed in a Google-ish world you need to be willing to experiment like a Google. Our thanks to DeepVertical CEO Paul Levy for a compelling argument that all senior publishing and licensing executives should spend a few minutes watching. Federated Search is Everywhere - Quietly
During a great dinner at Joe's Garage, which hosts a phenomenal collection of vintage hot rods and racing cars, a search-oriented person asked me what had changed in the last year in federated search, a topic of much discussion at the meeting. I answered not much from a technical standpoint but from a market standpoint there had been a great deal more penetration of federated search into both corporate and online spaces. MuseGlobal's VP of Marketing Frank Bilotto was the host of the meeting and their successes in powering federated search behind the scenes in a widening swath of OEM agreements is emblematic of the state of federated search: it's everywhere, and yet because it's being implemented as part of a greater product or enterprise solution you don't necessarily hear about it that much. Then again, as Google takes in more content from aggregators into its premium search services it winds up federating the federators, as well. The bottom line is that via a wide variety of technologies formerly disparate content sets are being assembled more effectively than ever before to service a Google-trained generation of users who expect simplicity and transparency in content access. Federated search was also a topic amongst the meeting's presentations and panels. CSA Product Manager Leslie D'Almeida did a fantastic job standing in for President Matt Dunie describing how their MultiSearch federated search service integrates content from their own databases with content from client-specified sources via an interface that's very similar to their Illumina database product. The sales cycle for these kinds of content integration services may challenge traditional publishing sales forces, but it's a different kind of client relationship once you're embedded in their operations via federated search. Up-and-Coming Content Technologists Strut Their Stuff
ASIDIC meetings seem to manage to attract an interesting array of content technologists, and this one was no exception. Some of the key new content technologies coming your way: - Sign up for the BuzzLogic beta, a new service from some high-tech veterans that is going to provide some very interesting twists to determining authoritative voices in the crowds of weblogs and other user-generated content sources to help executives to determine who are the real the movers and shakers on key issues. Hint: it's not always who you think it is. A major consumer product goods company was trying to figure out how they were getting so much negative press on a particular product; BuzzLogic traced it down to one obscure "squeaky wheel," who they invited out to their headquarters and turned into an evangelist for their brands. While immediately applicable to many kinds of consumer goods companies I think that it has some interesting potential for helping to transform peer review publications down the road. - Try out a new contextual link serving product from Infocious, a service that provides highly relevant alternatives for content embedded into the hyperlinks of your online content. It's a very crucial factor for enhancing Web site performance: you can provide your audience with contextually relevant links to your own content or external sources in a popup window that appears when the user cursors over links in your site. This provides contextuality far more granular than the "related links" content usually found on Web pages and provides opportunities for partnerships with other sources that can make the best use of these highly focused contexts - including advertisers, of course. - Todd Malicoat of Stuntdubl gave a great presentation on how content from many online services is still opaque to the world of search engines - even though it's already online. Our own Shore site used in his demo fared pretty well, though it's clear that we need to tweak our page designs to get optimal performance. The cobbler's children are still catching up on their footwear, yet again. I got a good feel for Todd's expertise in some offline conversations, if you're looking for someone with whom to partner on a very deep level for site analysis and improvements Todd's an excellent resource. - Nigel Hamilton of Trexy.com highlighted how this new service can help searchers to take advantage of others' quests for content on very focused topics. Users of the Trexy service can store searches that they've performed to allow themselves and, if they choose, others to see the trail of how they finally found their results. Interesting in concept, think of it as a social search service rather than a bookmarking service -sharing the journey as well as the destination. While many users may prefer the beaten path offered by the major search engines Trexy offers a unique toolkit for those who want to blaze new trails. - I had a brief meeting with Sam Leonel, President of IndeXet, a company that offers a comprehensive toolkit for publishers trying to make the most of online content. While IndeXet tools could be used for a variety of purposes I'd say that one of the key virtues of their modular approach is that it will help publishers to aggregate content from a wider variety of sources than they may have assembled otherwise via an integrated set of indexing, publishing and ecommerce tools. Still in the formative stages as a company, but keep your eyes on them. Bert Carelli is providing senior marketing input for IndeXet. A good sampling of new approaches to content, all of them worth a serious gander. Thomson Gale Adapts to Digital NativesMatthew Hong, Vice President and General Manager of Open Web Markets for Thomson Gale highlighted how one of their major challenges is adapting to the habits of the new generation of "digital natives," many of whom have rarely if ever darkened the doors of a traditional library. In the traditional product model the user was not the customer, but in a world of digital natives the user has become the customer, regardless of how content is paid for. An outgrowth of this phenomenon is Thomson Gale's Access My Library online service, which places articles from their collection into both their own portal and into the premium content services available via Google's new News Archive Search service. Access My Library helps to accelerate the use and value of subscription collections to a given user base that's not used to pulling out their wallet for news and information sources. But the emerging challenge is how to service an emerging user base that is used to being their own publishers. Amongst the stats that Matt shared: 57 percent of U.S. teenagers have created their own Web content and 62 percent of the content that they view is created by someone who they know. Libraries need to become far more adept at considering how they can be archivers of content generated by their own digital natives. Vertical Search Searches for Distinct Value PointsA panel with representatives from Infocious, Inform.com and VerticalSearch.com helped the meeting to wrestle with the value of vertical search engines in a Google-centric world. The bottom line is that vertical search is not so different from what other search technologies per se, making it important to provide more inflection points to add value to a search portal as a destination. For Infocious, it's providing highly contextual searches playing off of links to provide alternative destinations for exploring a topic; for Inform it's providing highly refined news results consumed both by their own portal and via links embedded in major news sites; and for VerticalSearch.com it's providing Web searches for a wide variety of business-oriented topics supplemented with premium content from HighBeam. Whatever the "secret sauce," vertical search is less about how to refine the raw as it is being able to put both raw and refined content in the best context possible and to make it useful for specific audiences. In other words, it's about providing services for specific audiences within a vertical that add value. Some of these tech-oriented vertical search plays are not likely to have a long shelf life as companies, but the ones that adapt to the needs of their highly targeted audiences with more multi-dimensional services are likely to form a core following - or find themselves OEMing to major publishers. Paul Gerbino, the (Un?)Sung GeniusASIDIC host Frank Bilotto held a great on-stage conversation with Paul Gerbino, Publisher of the Product News Network, an online directory service published by the Thomas Publishing Company. Thomas pulled the plug on their print publications last year, making them a 100+ year old publisher that has crossed over completely into the digital era - with great success. Paul's key quote relating to pulling their venerable print product: "We were the world, but now it's a bigger world." 'Nuff said. Paul's one of the leading industrial publishers who has been able not only to attack his markets aggressively with leading content technologies but to implement a successful transition of their sales force to support this new positioning of its product line. It's in the grunt work, sometimes, and Paul churns it out as well as anyone to make the high-flying vision of business content succeeding online a financial success. Paul sees his well-placed search results in Google and other search engines as the equivalent of direct mail to potential product users - even better in a sense, since it's as if you are mailing only when your prospects are interested in your content. Would that more publishers thought of search engines in this context. RSS feeds from their site help with advertising as well, generating 10 percent of their Web site clicks and supplementing the bottom line with in-line ads in the feeds themselves. With thoughtful attention to details such as this Paul has created a prototype of how other business-oriented publishers can embrace today's online content technologies aggressively and leave the past behind with a clean conscience. Turning a Specialty Database into an Online ServiceRuth Koolish has been selling her TecTrends reference database covering technology-related companies, products and news through Thomson's Dialog service for many years, but she's no stranger to the potential for her product in an online world. At the ASIDIC meeting she demoed the latest and greatest version of her service, which has transformed itself into a very appealing online presence supported by Google AdSense and with the beginnings of search engine placement appearing for leading users to her content. Registrants can access the full range of TecTrends content. TecTrends is an excellent example of how what was once a product with relatively specialized exposure through librarians and limited user features can become a widely accessed resource that can appeal to a very broad online audience interested in technology oriented companies and products. One expects that its more direct exposure to technology users will help to amplify and accelerate the product's growth. O, for the golden days of Dialog...not. A Debate on the Value of Taxonomies - Kind OfMarjorie Hlava of Access Innovations Inc. held a spirited on-stage discussion with HighBeam Research CEO Patrick Spain on the state of taxonomies and their value to the publishing industry in an era of Google-ish search engines which bypass user-exposed taxonomies. Patrick is no stranger to the value of taxonomies so it was a bit of a set-up in terms of the topic. But it's clear that as much as taxonomies are surging as an interest in enterprise and online circles they have to find their right context in a search-centric world. Are people going to search through 50,000 search results that fit a particular node in a taxonomy? Not likely; but when they are browsing to understand what should be their scope of interest in starting a research project taxonomies can be a very useful tool to help people understand how to trigger searches. Taxonomies will take the spotlight in finite content collections where it's really possible or necessary to get your hands around a comprehensive content set. In broader search environments, though, taxonomies are important but secondary navigation aids helping search results behind the scenes through controlled vocabularies associated with a taxonomy more than they help users who have become used to multi-word searches that transcend established taxonomies. Be it for the enterprise or online, though, it's a land office business for taxonomy developers these days. Information Today, Inc. CEO Tom Hogan noted that in a recent five-track ITI conference more than half of the attendees chose the taxonomy track. U.S. government edicts to organize all federal content into taxonomies helps to heat up the environment as well. Taxonomies are also driving many advanced features for online navigation, including faceted navigation, search engine clustering and matching contextual ads and links to text. Even when you're not immediately aware of them, taxonomies are everywhere... If Mobile is the Future, Why Does it Feel Like 1990...?Tony Phillip, CEO of UpSnap gave a great overview of the state of the mobile content industry, expected to grow to a USD 200 billion industry by 2010. Tony cataloged all of the great services coming on board from audio, video and text providers for smart phones and other mobile platforms. No question that mobile is huge, and in some ways may come to drive online services as much as the other way around. But as I mentioned in a question to Tony, whey does it feel as if we're looking at Compuserve in 1990 when we're looking at these typical "walled gardens" of licensed content on mobile devices? Tony acknowledges that these are likely to be challenged in the years ahead - certainly the digital natives aren't keen on paying premium rates - but there's money to be made in mobile services that focus on contextualizing a users' geographic whereabouts with both mainstream content and content that will help people within social networks. As strong as mobile services have become I expect that the real growth will come when broadband Internet services come into mobile devices in full force and broaden the range of services and of innovation available to users of Web services in mobile environments. We've only begun to scratch the surface of mobile's full potential. The Terminology Changes, But the Concepts RemainShore Senior Analyst Jean Bedord gave a short presentation on how many of the terms and concepts that are being touted as new in search these days are in fact very well-established concepts that have been underlying the information industry for forty years. Is everything old new again? Yes, in many ways. There are only so many ways to organize content and the groups of users needing service are still pretty much the same as well. What we confront in our industry is pretty much the same issues that publishing has always faced, just in different buckets. But the big difference this time around is the involvement of users as publishers. The scale of user-generated media being produced via the web for use and reuse is completely unprecedented. We have many good and powerful analogies that help us to understand this growth, but at the end of the day a truly global Content Nation built on individuals as publishers has begun to change the world in a scope that we are only beginning to understand.
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:27 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:31 PM |
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| Tuesday, September 12, 2006 |
Every time that I visit ECNext's Manta business intelligence portal it gets a little bit more slick and a little bit more plump with premium content. This time around the announcement is the addition of three years of company news archives from Newstex, which are being offered as premium content to both registered and non-registered visitors. Will there be tons of executives willing to put down ten U.S. dollars for a news story on General Motors? Probably not, but then again given that the Manta portal offers primarily high-end reports from D&B, Datamonitor and other sources an additional ten bucks for a news story may be just the thing for a busy executive to round out a shopping cart before they hit the checkout line. Think of it being like the candy bars next to the register - there for the asking. Manta's a la carte approach to business intelligence reminds me of the high-end natural food stores that are sprouting up in more affluent neighborhoods. Not everyone will spring for a five dollar bag of lettuce, but there are enough that will to justify having a full range of premium products for that marketplace. While Google's new premium news archive provides a relatively unfocused approach to exposing a la carte news Manta is working to create a true high-end store for news and research tailored to the needs of high-caliber executives needing quick answers to support key decisions, with ad-supported content to help monetize the window shoppers. It may not be everyone's cup of tea for business information, but it seems to be filling a definite niche in the spectrum of online services available today.
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:59 PM |
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Thank you, public data. Engadget highlights some photos and stats gleaned from the Federal Communications Commission's Web site where it posts information on new electronic products seeking their blessing. The sneak peak in this instance is a product called "Kindle" from Amazon that appears to be an eBook reader with 6-inch eInk display and 800x600 pixel resolution. While the unit is rather unattractive and with a keyboard that looks about as awkward as Sony's ill-fated LIBRIe reader apparently it has broadband wireless communications capabilities that will enable it to download content easily on the go - presumably from the Kindle Store mentioned in the product's user manual. This could be a nifty scoop by Engadget but given that the product looks more like a prop from an early Star Trek episode than a finished consumer product we might be looking at an early product prototype being readied for field tests. Nevertheless it's clear that Amazon has decided to go the iPod route and to provide a simple device that can be used for enjoying books on the go from its own retail outlet. Hey, if it worked for Apple why shouldn't it work for the world's largest online retailer? If the device is right and the online consumer experience rewarding there's reason to think that the right gizmo could spark eBook consumption in the same way that the iTunes store helped to power the iPod - tuned to the "n"th degree and filled with Amazon's extensive inventory of electronic titles. We'll see if this particular gizmo ever sees the light of day but in the meantime book publishers that have lagged in their efforts to define cross-platform eBooks packaging and rights management capabilities are going to find themselves at the mercy of one or another proprietary readers that will haunt them as much as they may provide thrills in the early days of their acceptance. As Amazon and other online book services make it easier for emerging authors to be discovered and provide the major distribution technology for books one wonders just what will be left for major book publishers to do in a few years' time.
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:11 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:34 PM |
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| Monday, September 11, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:56 PM |
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The Microsoft Windows-based PC has been a staple of enterprise offices for more than twenty years, a technology that has created a stable environment for publishers to develop value-add services. But with the arrival of new office technologies that rely on open Web-oriented standards the broad assumption of having Windows as the foundation for those value-add revenues is being challenged. Office 2.0 is a nascent movement with plenty of rough edges, but tomorrow's winners will be those publishers who are embracing and shaping the services available in the Office 2.0 environment today. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:58 AM |
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| Sunday, September 10, 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
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By John Blossom - posted at 7:14 PM |
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| Friday, September 08, 2006 |
Jim Murphy at AMR Research has posted a great summary of the state of the art for digital rights management technologies used in enterprises. As we've mentioned many times in our publications DRM has been taking off in the enterprise in recent years, fueled by corporate compliance concerns as well as by competitive issues. As Jim points out DRM is turning out to be a solution which, when implemented properly, simplifies access to crucial content in the collaborative environments that are so crucial to productivity in today's enterprises. Instead of having to muss with access to content at the database level, which can stifle collaboration and expose far too much content than may be advisable in many instances, DRM allows enterprises to allow the right content to be shared and forwarded by peers and partners with far less administrative overhead and far fewer concerns about exposing intellectual property improperly. And where are publishers and aggregators in this mix? Still back in the "Old Aggregation" model for the most part, using database signins as "choke points" or trying to build workflow applications that are oftentimes far too expensive and slow in coming to meet the immediate collaboration needs of professionals. DRM can allow content to into the right contexts with fewer worries about who's using what and encourage value-add access through content relicensing at the point of greatest need. As pointed out by Jim many infrastructure companies have been absorbing the best-of-breed enterprise DRM providers, encouraging stable product support and beginning to whittle down a confusing field of suppliers down to a manageable list of front-runners. The time is right for publishers and aggregators to consider how best to integrate with enterprise DRM systems - and in doing so begin to consider how DRM can help them to leverage peer-to-peer content distribution in many venues.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:00 PM |
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The Wall Street Journal (subscription) reports along with many others on the quick feature revision that social networking site Facebook had to take in the wake of user protests. Facebook had introduced without any "heads up" new feed features that allowed participants in the online community to monitor when specific people had changes in their online relationships such as adding or dropping links to friends in their social network. In response Facebook quickly introduced a feature that would allow users to specify which types of content and behavior they are willing to have monitored. Although data mining services are common on the Web now the key factor that Facebook missed out was one of the great commandments of Web publishing: thou shalt not force your audience to offer or receive information. The other thing that they missed out on was the fundamental concept of users as publishers. Social networking services may be one big database behind the scenes, but to the users they are seen more as advanced internet services providers supporting their own unique publishing personas. Your terms and conditions may say that you own their content but you never "own" them as publishers. The talent can walk at any time. In a product in which the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts failing to treat your users as client-publishers can be a fatal mistake. Social networking services need to think of themselves as community-driven Internet service providers, delivering hosting services that enable publishers to meet their audiences and to meet their communications needs. This is a concept that services such as Craigslist and Digg have embedded in the heart of their services. It's a factor that can slow down service development if you don't know how to move in new features with the proper "don't do evil" communications pioneered by Google, but better to move a little more slowly with consensus than to try to act in an overtly proprietary manner. Publishers who know how to treat their users as publishers are going to be very successful in the years ahead; those who cannot manage that paradigm, whether they be trendy or established, are not likely to build the implicit trust that's required in a more democratic arena of content aggregation. We have met the publishers, and they is us.
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By John Blossom - posted at 7:34 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:51 AM |
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| Thursday, September 07, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:52 PM |
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TechCrunch reports on the acquisition of RSS Rojo Networks by weblog software developer SixApart. Rojo is a feed aggregation and social bookmarking service that has a strong but limited following amongst weblog and news devotees. Like so many Silicon Valley inventions Rojo was one of a field of news aggregation services launched a few years ago that never gained momentum in the face of substantial competitors such as Digg and del.icio.us. paidContent.org reports on interesting wrinkles in the deal: SixApart plans to combine Rojo capabilities with the LiveJournal community publishing portal and the Vox social networking service to forge a more powerful social media property that can be spun off as a new service. The management of Rojo is going to stay in place, apparently, a trend that paidContent.org Editor Staci Kramer calls "acq-hires." With a wide array of sources for private equity there is a great deal of competition for leadership and vision in spending their money effectively. Increasingly this calls upon both startups and developed properties and their management to be "hired" in effect to help the "winners" finance their next dreams. It's a natural adaptation to an investment market that's much less likely to push half-baked ideas to a hasty IPO and far more likely to invest in people with the acumen to move quickly and effectively in rapidly shifting content markets driven by equally rapid shifts in technology. It is likely to accelerate the power of the visionaries who are able to call these shots, helping them to build portfolios of new and reinvented properties in a new-generation approach to the portfolio building performed by large media companies through the years. Unlike those traditional building processes, though, the money from private investors and their increasingly dominant ownership of media properties allows capital to flow to the idea-realizers more quickly and effectively than public or in-house ownership allows for oftentimes. Thinking of the VNU acquisition and management restructuring covered in our recent news analysis the scalability of this approach covers publishing properties of all sizes, not just Valley startups. It's a trend that's likely to place ever-greater pressure on publicly owned publishing and media companies to react to these instantly empowered visionaries who can collect and assemble highly competitive services rapidly and, sometimes, rather effectively. A Thomson, an Elsevier or a Wolters Kluwer has the patience, infrastructure and capital to nurture acquisitions that fit into a general marketing plan, but they're much less likely to take a chance on visionaries with 10x potential in their ideas with quarterly or semi-annual earnings reports looming. The public giants will continue to buy these 10x-ers for a while, but eventually the efficiency of the properties that they're buying built on collaboration via virtual infrastructure may overtake the efficiency of traditional media buyers and make it harder for them to be in on these deals. There may be somewhat of a bubble effect in this process as investors consider the same formulas for attacking finite market share and revenues but the power of private investment is becoming an increasingly permanent fixture in content property development that's likely to shift the power structure of publishing even more as many of these 10x bets begin to pay off handsomely. Watch the "acq-hire" market carefully for forces that can combine both established and emerging properties quickly and effectively to create new competition in publishing faster than ever before.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:19 AM |
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| Wednesday, September 06, 2006 |
The New York Times reports along with a host of others on the new Google News Archive feature launched to cries of "What took you so long?" from aggregators and publishers eager to expose their "dark" content via Google's search facilities. The feature mixes a range of free and premium content covering archives from suppliers such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Guardian Unlimited, Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, HighBeam Research and Thomson Gale - some going back centuries. While the emphasis is on archive search it's also the debut of features from the Google Premium capability long in development. In an email from Google to Google Premium program participants it was described as "an evolution of that initiative," an indication that Google is still trying to determine how best to position premium content in open Web search. The problems with placing premium content in a valuable perspective via Web search are illustrated well by the News Archive Search feature. With only metadata from publishers and the content itself to provide search cues, the relevance sorting in News Archive Search does not necessarily show off the "best stuff on earth" automatically. Taking a relatively recent event, the search result in News Archive Search on "Bill Clinton" "Monica Lewinsky" returns a relatively hodge-podge list of results, mostly from 1998. By contrast, using the same terms on Google's Web search returns a list topped by the Wikipedia entries on Monica Lewinsky and a summary of the events surrounding her relationship with Clinton, followed by a CNN timeline summary of key moments in that story thread and several key weblog entries highlighted in that period. If I am wanting to start research into this historical event, which of these two are likely to provide a good starting point? It's great that these archives are available, and it's clearly a stronger showing than Yahoo's aborted attempt at premium search but it's not clear that they're being put in the best light via this isolated search feature. But then again, perhaps that's the point. As with so many new Google features its value needs a lot of tuning before it can really take off in a big way. With a relatively isolated set of content Google can see what content people are looking for and begin to tune the service for enough relevance that some level of integration with other search results would be fruitful. With all this said, the basic design of Google News Archive Search is pretty good and there's lots of value integrated into the details. Results come back for the most relevant time periods, with faceted search indexing on the sidebar offering quick access to other potentially interesting time frames and highlighting the most relevant time frame overall. In the instance of the Clinton/Lewinsky search the News Archive Search navigation highlights content from 1998 as the most relevant time frame. Slick. It's a much broader set of content than found in Yahoo's premium beta last year, with the Google Premium metadata providing important and powerful queues as to how to access the content right in the search results. Those queues include pricing for purchase via the publisher's own ecommerce facilities and other access options such as Thomson Gale's Access My Library feature that allows free access to subscription content for local library patrons (see our earlier coverage). There are also links to related Web pages and features from Google News that provide related news coverage for specific search results. Who wins with Google News Archive Search? Certainly major publishers and aggregators stand to benefit from a new facility that is likely to become a "go-to" spot for starting search for premium content available on a free or a la carte basis. But it's probably at least as much a boon to an extensive network of small to medium publishers and aggregators who need an effective way to get their premium content exposed to broader audiences and compared to the big services on a more level playing field. HighBeam Research's mix of free and premium content gets good placement in many search results, providing a new way for people in a research mode to appreciate their content in the context of a very broad array of archives - and to appreciate their easy-on-the pockets pricing for individual researchers. There are also databases such as Ancestry.com and NewsBank that will gain exposure to new audiences looking for point solutions for specific research requests. People have been clamoring for access to the "dark" content for some time, but I doubt that few realized how this kind of broad exposure for this content would open so many new competitive opportunities and challenges. Overall it's a pretty good debut for Google's archive search, isolated but with a broad enough exposure that further refinements and integrations should follow fairly rapidly. In its current incarnation its features may not be overwhelming (I disagree with Steve Rubel's assessment that Topix offers better archive search - Topix is fine for recent news but fails on anything of any significant age - see Topix results for our sample query) but they provide a solid foundation for researchers looking for a universal starting point for the world of archived content that's available from high-value publishing sources. The key tuning required is on relevance. Our standard General Motors search returns navigation highlighting the 1981-1982 time frame as the most relevant - perhaps appropriate given that this was a moment of great pain and transformation for GM - but the search results are a hodge-podge of old news reports dating from 1925 onwards. While the "advanced archive search" feature can help users whittle this down to more specific types of results, the lack of a clear criteria for relevance ranking may frustrate users used to Web search results. That's a common problem for many archive search services, so it's probably not to be faulted too much at this stage. Over time as more people access these archives via Google more online publishers will provide links to this content, which will improve their ability to demonstrate relevance alongside open Web content. When that starts to happen we're more likely to see this content surfacing in open Web search results with true relevance. Premium publishers have great opportunities via Google News Archive Search - if they have already prepared aggressive marketing strategies for open Web marketing. For those that have been more timid, it's not clear that the highly competitive environment provided by Google for premium content is going to favor slow-to-adapt premium publishers. For those that have been brave enough to play Google's game to get in on this first wave of exposing online databases, congratulations, you have some very interesting problems to solve, now...
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:13 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:43 AM |
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| Tuesday, September 05, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:54 PM |
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With a plethora of new services and access models the music industry is the poster child for publishers gone wild trying to adapt to changing content distribution patterns. Experimentation can be great, but many publishers are poking and prodding spreadsheets rather than users to understand what's going to result in highly profitable content services. Publishers need to focus on keeping their purchasing and access options simple and to do so in an environment in which users are empowered as distribution agents as well as suppliers of valued content. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:11 PM |
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| Monday, September 04, 2006 |
Local Holiday - U.S. Labor Day
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:33 AM |
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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
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:32 AM |
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| Friday, September 01, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:38 AM |
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