The native language of Hawaii has given us words like "aloha" that have slipped into general use as well as more other terms like "wiki" that have been appropriated for new uses. Add to that list of appropriations the Hawaiian word "mahalo," which means "Thank you" in everyday conversations and now refers also to Mahalo, the new user-driven search portal under development by Jason Calacanis. "Mahalo's goal is to hand-write the top 10,000 search terms," goes the boilerplate on its page templates, an objective that's being lead by ex-Anchors from Netscape and like-skilled guides. Visitors to Mahalo can suggest links for inclusion in the service. How does this all work? As an alpha-level product you have to give Jason some slack but in truth it's not something that you're going to figure out as a user in a few seconds. Thank goodness for the FAQ.
On one level Mahalo is quite simple: type in a search term, get either a page of information and links that's been largely edited by a Mahalo guide or something that's been generated automatically for terms that they haven't populated as of yet. Being day two there are lots more pages that are misses than hits, but a listing of the top 20 searches appears on each search results page to give Mahalo visitors a sense of who's looking at what. You can also enter questions in a natural language style, which will provide results that look a bit like an amateur's version of Answers.com (partnership, anyone?). An example of a topic page more fully populated by Mahalo guides is Apple, which lists a "Mahalo Top 7" links for the term, disambiguation (Did you mean: "Apple, the fruit? Apple, the Beatles' record label?"), financial information, products, news, blogs and fansites, information and reviews, upgrades and support, photos and videos, competitors, and "culture". Items that Mahalo guides really dig get a little icon. In theory users can make comments on Mahalo pages, but in my short tour I haven't seen any yet.
Well, this is certainly...innovative. Or utterly derivative, depending on your point of view. I know from personal experience that there is one huge brain between Jason's ears and it seems as if every idea he ever had or absorbed about the content industry exploded all at once from his noggin onto the pages of Mahalo. From one angle what we have here is About.com with user input: docents put together some light content that surrounds links. Okay,we know that works. Kind of. From another angle we have a dot-com era version of Hoovers, a light assemblage of business and product info to guide the initially curious. Interesting, but who is this aimed at? From yet another angle we have Wikipedia, a catch-all encyclopedia format that tries to catch a wide variety of facets about a given topic. Digg and other social bookmarking services enter into the picture with Mahalo Top 7 bookmarks, but there's not a strong sense of how useful the first seven results will be: social bookmarking services don't rank relevance all that well. And of course there's the analogy to Answers.com, one-stop answers to questions from the best sources available. Except we really have to trust someone called a "guide" as to his or her judgment on sources.
Finally, there's the question of when I will know when to go to Mahalo. Will it be when I have a question that's one of the top 10,000 search terms? Oooh, is what I want to find maybe number 15,000? I dunno. Try "most popular," Jason, people will be able to get their heads around that more easily. Do I go there to get the latest news? Hmm, they have news feeds from Fox and other partners but but why would I get them here rather than other places - and why aren't the guides lending a hand with filtering and updating the news? While Wikipedia may be in the hands of "those darn users" I have a fairly high level of confidence that information on almost any popular topic will be updated within minutes, if not seconds, of something happening in the real world across a huge array of topics. I also know that Google will insert hot news at the top of my search results and that user-generated sites will help me to find the really cool news pretty quickly. I don't know how true that's going to be of any well-intended editorial staff covering tens of thousands of topics every day - even with help from users. Will I go there for shopping? Probably not, services like eBay and Google will scrape together the information that I need more effectively. Will I go there for reference information? Maybe, but with such a generic approach to content organization I'd probably prefer to type in a term on Google and branch off to Wikipedia, Answers.com, Hoovers or other key sources that it finds so easily. Will I go there to browse their taxonomy? Probably not, I've gotten too used to getting information on any topic level with one phrase and a click.
So, when DO I go to Mahalo? That's something that Jason needs to work on a little more. There are a lot of very interesting individual features and there's definitely a need out there for something between algorithmic search engines and the chaos of social bookmarking, but I am wondering whether this is more about a product vision or more about what to do with all of those ex-Netscapers who were inspired by Jason. If it's more the latter then it's not clear that a fairly limited and relatively anonymous editorial staff is going to have the horsepower or the respect within a given topic arena to build relevance creds. It gives Jason the control over writers that he desires, but in specific topic domains it may take more editorial talent to pull this off than he can afford.
There are so many ideas forming at once in Mahalo that it's far too early to write it off as a mish-mosh of interesting concepts - especially since people are growing tired of the "gaming" of search results. Calacanis could put initial feedback to good use, form more useful partnerships and come up with a tool that really stands out for an increasingly sophisticated online audience. But at this point my bet's against it. With Google's "Universal Search" capabilities beginning to phase in and more pure user-generated content plays becoming more disciplined and deep it's not clear that the features in Mahalo will ever mature to the point where they'll gel into a useful product in comparison to more established search and reference plays. At the same time there's far too little a sense of online community in Mahalo to make people passionate about online content feel that this product is really "theirs" in any strong way. In between these approaches there's probably room for a product that combines the best of search, editorial skills and user input to create marketable context for popular topics. But for now I don't think that people will be saying "thank you" to Mahala for its attempts at filling that need.
AP reports on the new Microsoft Surface PC which provides a touch-friendly tabletop interface to a Vista PC - kind of like playing PacMan in a bar back in the 1980's, I suppose - but the real item that I wanted to highlight is that the link above goes directly to the AP site where an ad-supported version of the story can be found. That's right, AP.org provides a content portal platform for its syndication partners who want their AP content served up from AP's own host facilities. This is something that's not readily evident from the front page or site map of the portal, nor is it really exposed in search engines, but it's clear from the layout of this page that AP is now able to deliver a general news site comparable in general terms to Reuters and other wire services. AP's position as an association wire service prevents it from advancing this capability, no doubt, but it opens up some intriguing options for AP should it decide to deliver news more directly as a part of its business model. With destination portals losing market share and AP's content being embedded successfully in a wealth of mainstream and social media destination content sites, though, it's doubtful that AP really needs such a site to advance its current business goals. Ironically AP's positioning as a pure-play syndication service may have been the ideal positioning for it to weather the changing environment for monetizing online news.
CLARIFICATION: Jim Kennedy, AP Vice President for Strategic Planning, posted this comment:
I'm a great fan of Shore, but this post needs clarification. The "destination" portal you think you landed on is actually nothing of the sort.
Since 1996, AP has hosted general news pages for many of its subscribing members. The pages are generally branded for each member and carry each member's look and feel.
In this case, you found your way to an unbranded page, which we use for in-house and demo purposes.
No change in strategy here. We're not interested in creating a destination. We are doing just fine as a B2B supplier.
Thanks for the information, Jim, I understood this to be a service for AP members but I don't think that this came through clearly enough in the original post. I think that what happened is that one of your partners was using the hosted service with a frame and not a "skin", so it was easy to pop the article out of the frame and to see the hosted site in its demo form. I see this not as a budding strategy from AP but an interesting example of what AP could have done but did not do as a result of its positioning as a membership-driven syndication service.
Advanced Trading notes how the introduction of more automated quotes and trading interfaces from the New York Stock Exchange for bonds and other fixed income securities and more widely available fixed income pricing from NASDAQ's TRACE service are helping to drive a more algorithm-driven fixewd income marketplace. This premise is a stretch at best in terms of the current reality: NYSE supports trading for only the most liquid corporate bonds, leaving private markets to find their own buyers and sellers through more conventional channels for the vast ocean of debt beyond NYSE's trading operations. But it's fair to say that the sophistication of pre-trade evaluation tools for fixed income analysts and portfolio managers outstrips the ability of people using those tools to execute on their analysis effectively.
With such low liquidity in most fixed income markets it's not likely that improved trade execution channels alone are going to be enough to drive demand to the point where we'll see the kind of sub-microsecond automated algorithmic trading opportunities that we see in equities markets any time soon. But the levels afforded by improving execution technologies appear to be rising to the point that there are new opportunities appearing for decision support services. Most of these opportunities, though, are not likely to form around typical desktop technologies or back-office trading systems.
Instead what we're likely to see are systems that allow participants in the fixed income marketplace to quantify more effectively "soft" marketplace factors such as market sentiment and likely ratings changes. These factors are important in equities markets as well but in the more leisurely world of fixed income markets they have the ability to impact actual execution factors through human analysis far more effectively. We'll be hearing more about how automated trading systems are going to "revolutionize" debt markets but expect the real revolution to come in pre-trade support services that enable niche markets to understand the human-influenced trading landscape.
"Quality is as quality does" may not be a saying that came out of Forrest Gump's mouth but it's a simple formula that seems to be proving itself on the Web as traditional sources of quality content lose audience share to search engines and social media sites. At the same time, though, the ever-increasing popularity of social media sites does not always seem to be balanced by mature quality control. But don't mistake immature techniques with inadequate potential: the techniques used to generate social media are carving out a new path to content quality that's here to stay.
You've got to hand it to Time Inc.'s Chairman and CEO Ann Moore: she's a brave soldier who puts out a strong story. Echoing her presentation from the SIIA Information Industry Summit at a recent MPA breakfast (Ad Age coverage) Ann Moore quipped "You know, everybody stay calm," she suggested. "This is a great business we're in." Cheerleading aside there's only moderate cheer for Time's core print brands, in spite of a successful reclaiming of their management from AOL. Online revenues for Time properties are expected to represent about 18 percent of Time's 2007 revenues according to Moore; that's only about par with other comparable print brands these days - it's not exceptional. But Moore has provided strong brand management skills that have allowed Time.com to hold its own in a tough market for online general news content and that have propelled People.com from an online also-ran to a far more competitive position. It could have been a bloodbath given Time's slow transition into online delivery but it's turned out pretty well overall. "If you're going to spin me off, you better get a good price," she said.
Good may be good enough in today's market for deals driven by private equity: the spreadsheets will hold up long enough to justify a decent sale for a few months at least. But after that, all bets are off for print-dependent properties. With a likely recession looming freely available online content is going to make it easier for consumers to make budget decisions against print subscription products. Add in and recently raised postal rates putting the squeeze on magazine margins and all but the most efficient print distributors are going to be feeling major additional pain in the next six to twelve months. But even with these gloomy clouds on the horizon Moore does have some justification in feeling bullish about Time's potential. With a broad base of mass market publications Time has the potential to become a leader in mass-customized print delivery - allowing consumers to cherry-pick the types of articles that they'd like to see in print from Time's family of publications. As important as brand management can be in this era of look-alike online and print publications a rethinking of the ability of print to aggregate brands may be the ultimate salvation of execs with portfolios like Time Inc. For the rest there's always private equity - or perhaps Google Magazines.
Inxight has provided content organization and visualization tools for many years and picked up federated search tools along the way to provide more content value to enterprise and publishing clients. But like many content technology companies Inxight has had a very difficult time differentiating its capabilities from a broad pack of similar services aimed at similar clients. So after several reorgs and repositionings it's probably a good thing that Business Objects has announced its acquisition of Inxight to round out its broad portfolio of enterprise business information services. As enterprises focus more on solutions that deliver measurable results for specific business functions they have had to view unstructured content assets from inside and outside their own organization as key inputs for their business intelligence efforts. Inxight's ability to process and organize unstructured content adds enables Business Objects to compete more effectively with business information vendors focused on building insights from news, social media and other unstructured content.
Coming on the heels of Reuters' acquisition of ClearForest this signals a ramp-up of the battle between content technology providers and traditional publishers and aggregators for the lead in providing value to enterprise accounts. The content side of this equation prides itself in understanding the business objectives of their clients more clearly, but if the history of financial content vendors is at all instructive it's the enterprises equipped with the technology tools to give them proprietary advantages in market insight that will win the majority of budgets spent on content services. Will content vendors become more adept at delivering technology solutions more quickly than technology companies will become more aware of how those solutions add value to business information? This is going to be a race to the finish - with enterprises wanting to get more value for their content investments the clear winners.
The only losers will be publishers and technology providers that fail to see that their futures depend on them putting on both content and technology hats to deliver high-value solutions to their clients. The era of stand-alone technology features and stand-alone content services is coming to a close rather quickly as businesses try to leapfrog over the inefficiencies of both traditional I.T. solutions and traditional subscription database solutions to gain insight from wherever it's available.
On one level the news from WaPo and others that Salesforce.com is discussing an alliance with Google to integrate Google's office applications, messaging and other key components into their offerings has to be welcomed at business information providers' offices. Many business information services companies are already taking advantage of Salesforce.com's AppExchange service to integrate their content and functional capabilities into SF.com's increasingly popular sales and marketing platform, so SF.com's success will help to enhance their successes as well through on-demand content services sales. But this development must be absorbed along with the announcement of SF.com's launch of a venture funding network to accelerate the development of business information services through their platform. Put the two of these together and you can see a perfect storm brewing for business information providers that have assumed that their investments in enterprise software to drive content sales will flourish indefinitely.
Why be worried about SF.com and Google? The key factor is that bit by bit the enterprise's information base is being absorbed into proprietary Web databases. That's likely to turn out to be a good thing for many enterprises trying to compete in a cost-conscious global environment: the "pretty good" infrastructure of SF.com is increasingly more than just adequate to perform crucial tasks, especially when extended by third party services through SF.com's AppExchange services. Add in the "pretty good" Google office automation services and you can envision a day not too far down the road when many enterprise users will be using the combination of Google and SF.com services for 80 percent or more of their day-to-day business information generation and use. Throw in Google's Web and enterprise search services along with their robust and open development APIs and you can imagine more than a few of those SF.com venture dollars funding business information solutions that will make solutions like Factiva's SalesWorks look fairly limp by comparison.
While a stronger SF.com is in the interest of business information providers who want fast inroads into sales, marketing and management teams in enterprises this ally is beginning to recognize the gravitas that its platform-independent approach to business solutions has to provide leverage over these same vendors. As publishers thirsty for new revenue channels open up more to enabling access to premium content through Google search interfaces the combination of SF.com and Google could spell trouble for traditional licensed database services over the next few years. If SF.com and Google own the development and marketing environment and publishers no longer require traditional subscription services to leverage their content into enterprise applications then it is going to be a far more competitive environment for business information services providers who count on aggregated subscription services for their revenues.
There will be more good news than bad news for a while out of this impending alliance but business information services will be well-advised to sharpen up their strategies as to how to preserve and accelerate revenues through this alliance. Nimble competitors are likely to do quite well if they adjust quickly - but odds are strong that more than a few business information providers will stumble along the way.
Ad-supported online video is the hot ticket but nobody really knows how to do it effectively yet... The Race to Conquer Video Advertising Read/Write Web
But even when you find a valuable context is the hunt for search engine positioning compromising quality...? Forbes: Revolt of the Page Slaves? The New York Observer
The New York Hilton was again the setting of this must-attend conference for search professionals focused on implementing search in their organizations. Opening keynoter, Susan Feldman, Research VP of Content Technologies, IDC, framed the dilemna well. Search is hot, and the vendors happy with over 30% growth, busily rolling out new product features. But as the use of search within the enterprise grows, integration with other applications is more important. So enterprise search companies are repositioning as Business Intelligence platforms, rather than solely search. At the time time, other companies in the Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise content Management(ECM), Knowledge Management (KM) spaces are integrating more search capabilities.
For attendees looking to buy their first search engine, Theresa Regli, CMSWatch, described the infrastructure analysis that needs to be done prior to establishing the evaluation framework. She emphasized selection of a search engine involves more than a checklist of features. Jennifer Whalen, Portal Manager, Deloitte, spoke to lessons learned about working with a currently installed search engine (Sharepoint), and no budget for a replacement.
A common themes in the speakers was that search is more than technology. Content and business rules determine successful implementations. Content includes what should be indexed, as well as content types. It comes in the form of unstructured content created at the desktop, but also as structured content found in databases. And increasingly, content includes images, and video content (included in over 20% of current search applications according to the Shore/Information Today report,Enterprise Search, Deployment, Usage and Trends). This was reinforced by the booming attendance at the co-located Streaming Media Conference right next door to Enterprise Search.
Underlying search are the bigger issues of security and compliance. The implications of the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedures (FRCP) which went to effect on 12/1/2006 were clearly explained by Prudence Zalewski, Software Synthesis. The financial costs involved in the discovery process mandate risk management planning, particularly for email retention! These developments will force a more explicit role and responsibility for search and records management within the organization, and demand for experienced search professions....see you next fall at Enterprise Search West!
Tim Ferriss highlights an over-the-shoulder video (embedded below also) he shot of leading weblogger Robert Scoble discussing and demonstrating how he absorbs content from over 600 feeds from weblogs and other sources. The short answer: pretty much the same way that anyone else does from a technology standpoint. Robert's equipped with Google Reader, with which he scans headlines - including content more personal than professional - checks out the authors that he cares about most and leaves the rest for another day. Probably the key insight that Robert tends to focus on bloggers who he knows or may meet personally moreso than the big-name sources who play to the masses. But in the process of creating his own weblog that's fed from this culling process he's creating both an intimate fabric of insights that amplify the value of a small and very personal community which in turn get amplified by the general media's attention to Scoble.
This points to a couple of key points. First, the technology used to look at weblog feeds today is about where news feed readers were about twenty years ago in Wall Street's minicomputer-fed desktop displays - perhaps not even that, as they don't even have very sophisticated alerting features for the most part. So much for "cutting edge" technologists. This points to tremendous upside for using feeds to develop more mature content products. The second point is that most advertising in weblogs is utterly wasted - everyone's trying to go for huge audiences to build up substantial ad revenues through mass programs such as AdSense or semi-tailored programs such as FM Publishing when in fact the people who you really want to influence constitute very tiny audiences who should command far greater rates. Ads in a person-to-person publishing environment should be far more equivalent to stock traders seeking trading partners in a relatively small community of professionals.
Where I think that this goes is that just as today we have blogrolls to provide endorsements of others' weblogs we will see some time in the not so distant future "adrolls" - small and not-so-small networks of like-minded people who are willing to accept ads in content that they receive along with trusted peers. Adrolls would be opt-in networks in which people would specify specific types of ads or other sponsored content that they like to see and/or to specify the types of companies or partners from whom they would like to see them. Members within an adroll network could share their taste in ads with other adroll members and/or keep some tastes private based on filtering criteria - or perhaps triggered by other content filtering mechanisms. Why bother spending on ads on thousands of web sites and search engines to reach a few hundred key decision-makers when you can tap into the handful of sites that they really care about on an opt-in basis with the ads that they're most interested in? The messaging that one may get through an adroll may be significantly different from today's Web ads - more equivalent to direct response marketing than mass advertising - but in the end far more cost-effective.
Early thoughts, but bear this theme in mind, I think that it's what we need to look at to take full advantage of the power of social media as an advertising medium. Original video:
On one level Google's announcement of the impending unveiling of a new search interface that unifies many of its key content assets is just a catchy filler for its analyst briefings: since when does improved navigation make for real headlines? But when you delve into the details Google's "Universal Search" is going to reset the bar of audience expectations for content search services yet again. In a nutshell, Google is working on new technology that will intuit when content from the dozens of Google properties - Scholar, News, Book Search, YouTube, you name it - is appropriate to a given query and assemble results in a combined search results display. Yes, it's federated search, but with relevance capabilities that promise to make results far more useful than ever before. In addition to information and media that will make its way into the main search results the navigation options that are displayed in a search results page will change according to the search terms. For example, searches for information about programming languages will display links to Google Code, Google Groups, Google Books and other sources that may have relevant content. Hello, faceted navigation.
This level of integration of content from Web pages, news sources, video, books and other sources such as public records and Google Base content will be challenge enough for open Web content vendors. But think also of the impact as both Web search results and results integrated with enterprise content via the Google Search Appliance make their way into the corporate realm. For nearly a decade business information services such as LexisNexis, Factiva, Hoover's and OneSource have seen responding gingerly to user expectations set by Google searches: what happens when those expectations now include by default sources such as video, books, public records, data and other rich content that can solve business problems? Add Google's APIs into the mix along with some clever developers and publishers eager to reach business audiences in more profitable arrangements and business information services must ponder again what to do with Google's increasingly universal content aggregation capabilities.
To some degree all subscription business information services rely on inertia in their market segments to power their sales: if your customer had a content budget last year chances are they're going to have it next year as well. And certainly sector-specific and role-specific premium content services will continue to warrant strong ROI arguments for many vendors. But as more and more content types are made available via Google in a neatly integrated form via a largely free-to-users business model the aggregation model for business information will be challenged by a far wider array of content sources than most will be ready to integrate as cost-effectively as Google. Expect these changes to be subtle at first, then increasingly obvious, then completely evident about the time that it's too late for traditional licensors to react effectively. Kind of like what's happened with everything else Google has done.
The Wall Street Journal reports on NewsCorp CEO Rupert Murdoch's attempts to have conversations with the Bancroft family and other majority shareholders of Dow Jones - efforts that seem to have been spurned so far in spite of promises of editorial independence and limited control over hiring and firing. The article cites a Bancroft family member who saw Murdoch's offer as "the usual stuff" (one wonders what other "usual stuff" has been offered to Dow Jones in recent months). It's understandable that a company with the heritage of Dow Jones would balk at an offer that looks more like a hunt for a trophy wife on the surface than a well-planned merger, but in the details of Murdoch's offer is plenty of evidence that there may be some strong vision at work here.
Specifically of interest is Murdoch's willingness to invest in political and global economic coverage that would make The Wall Street Journal a more attractive international journal of record for business-minded people. In an increasingly global economy Murdoch sees no doubt in Dow Jones the core of an editorial and production team that has the ability to muscle into a more pronounced global leadership role in business media through localized print and online content. WSJ's readership is broad but not broad enough to allow Dow Jones to invest in a major global push effectively. It would be hard to imagine someone other than Murdoch who would have the cash, the influence and the market presence that would allow Dow Jones' brands to thrive in international markets to the extent that his tutelage would allow.
It's understandable that a proudly American brand like Dow Jones would resist Murdoch's advances but the sad fact of the matter is that U.S.-based business media services aimed at mass markets are not going to thrive in the years ahead unless they're more effective on a global scale. U.S. markets for business information are becoming far more data-intensive than overseas markets thanks to both the U.S. regulatory environment and the automated trading capabilities fed by that data. The in-depth journalism that is the specialty of Dow Jones will be focused more effectively on more opaque markets where insights beyond the reach of fair disclosure are needed more urgently. Other offers that are beyond this "usual stuff" may come along at some point but one wonders whether Dow Jones will have the market leverage at such an undetermined point in time to leverage its brand's strength as effectively as it can today. They may not like the suitor but Murdoch is leading with a strong suit that should be considered with a hard-nosed look at the spreadsheets as well as with a journalist's gut.
As Thomson prepares to subsume the assets of Reuters many eyes are on the impact to financial content markets from this historic merger. But with Reuters CEO Tom Glocer expected to take the overall helm at Thomson the more important impact might come from the lessons that Glocer is prepared to apply to Thomson's other divisions. With decades of experience in both real-time and media markets Glocer may have the opportunity to transform Thomson into a far more agile player in global markets for business information.
Download Squad highlights a new experiment on YouTube to embed advertising in its online video footage, using a small text box appearing under the live video box with a link to the advertising video. According to Download Squad a limited number of video clips are being exposed via this method in the YouTube site, with ads not appearing when clips are embedded into other sites. Download Squad sees this as a plus, as the embedder of a clip does not benefit from the ad revenues.
But on the other side of the coin, what if the site DID want to benefit from the ad revenue stream? Sites such as TheNewsRoom allow a viral distributor of their videos to take a piece of the revenues from their pre-roll ads, which they hope would entice users to choose their footage from major video outlets for embedding. But there seems to be some push-back from webloggers and other social media outlets on pre-rolls in embedded content. Embedding is a form of personal endorsement for the core content being inserted: the person choosing the content being embedded doesn't necessarily want to endorse a brand advertiser as well. Enabling the embedder to participate in the revenues seems to mitigate this somewhat, but the magic formula for embedding viral video for profit seems to be elusive.
The YouTube experiment seems to point in one key direction in finding a good balance in embedded video ads: sponsored links. As with Google search results in which AdWords sponsored links exist alongside non-sponsored search results the text bar appearing under the video clip enables a viewer to be exposed to the concept of looking at and ad while looking at the clip in question. The key concept of the ad gets exposed to the viewer without creating an interruption. Presumably Google's AdSense infrastructure could enter this picture and allow sites embedding YouTube content to turn on these sponsored links and to participate in their revenue stream.
This Google/YouTube experiment holds promise, but traditional video advertisers are going to want more out of the equation. And perhaps they can get that - for a price and in specific contexts. But in trying to define a new common-denominator formula for online video ads Google's enormously successful experiment with AdSense and AdWords may point to approaches that will be drawing video advertisers away from interruption-driven advertising and towards a level of engagement that may put their content in front of more highly engaged eyeballs.
An old Wall Street trueism goes "Buy on the rumor, sell on the fact." There is lots of carefully culled research and data that goes into executing deals but a lot of business still hinges on front-line ears to the ground sifting through possibly true events. No surprise, then, that a new online play is focusing on the entertainment of culling out rumors. TechCrunch reports on Truemors, Valley startup maven Guy Kawasaki's new play that allows people to phone in or post rumors anonymously and to have site visitors to Truemors rate the rumor, spread it, tag it, link to it or comment on it. While Truemors has some posts that are tagged as business, most of the content in this still-early-days play focus on the usual media figures and fixations - celebs, tech toys and other titillating buzz. There is one post on the rumors of Microsoft acquiring Yahoo that were circulating last week, but with a relatively small community there is not real discussion or details that surfaced.
It's an interesting play, and one that's likely to gain a certain amount of momentum, but at the end of the day there's a distinct odor on the methodology that's not likely to give this much long-term momentum. Most worrisome is the voting system combined with anonymity: it's all too easy for someone to post a red herring and to have malicious cronies pump up the votes to give a rumor unwarranted legs. The fun of debunking rumors will attract some people, but it's a negative premise that is not likely to build market share against services like Yahoo! Answers that help people to develop authority in a more trusted community environment. A better play would be to use mining technologies to go through weblogs, message boards and other community content sources to see what's buzzing strongest before it's confirmed by mainstream media sources and to use these seeds to move a ratings process. At least then one would have the ability to evaluate the strength of a contributor's following amongst their peers in a community before moving it on to a rumor board.
Kawasaki finds himself oftentimes in the middle of highly buzzy trends so expect that there will be more services of this kind this year trying to sift out truth from "truthiness" - and that Truemors will become a tool more likely to feed the truthiness side of the equation. With so much raw information hitting weblogs and social networking services before it's packaged via traditional journalism the need to make sense of this raw input more efficiently is certainly pressing, but peers who come to trust both one another and the sources of rumors are likely to form the foundation of what will motivate people to move from being entertained by rumors to taking action.
When paidContent.org noted last December that the Weed file sharing rights management software had been licensed by Microsoft we were pretty excited about the potential for the future of this ground-breaking approach to making money from viral premium content distribution. The future may yet be bright for the IP that Weed licensed to Microsoft but it's rather dim for Weed itself. In a recent visit to the Weedshare.com site Weed's parent Shared Media Licensing , Inc. notes that it has suspended operations of Weed for the indefinite future. The FAQ page notes that the latest version of Microsoft's Windows Media Player no longer supports the Weed rights management capabilities. Hmm, so much for coopetition. Perhaps the Weed system makes its way into a more robust DRM for Microsoft's Zune platform, but with Apple pushing to eliminate DRM altogether for music distribution the future doesn't look bright for users sharing in the profits of premium music distribution.
Yet at the same time services such as TheNewsRoom are pushing forward with sharing ad revenues for virally distributed video, audio and text content from premium sources. It's interesting that major news and entertainment media companies are waking up to the potential for viral revenues even as Microsoft and the music companies fumble with the concept. Perhaps the idea of sharing revenues with audiences is just one more wrinkle in licensing that they're not ready to deal with - and yet it's the way in which independent content creators are most likely to be rewarded quickly and effectively from viral content distribution. Seeing Weed fall into the weeds is kind of a saddening and sobering lesson but I still believe that there is great potential for viral distribution of premium content - and for the users distributing it to benefit from helping that content to find its most valuable contexts.
The McGraw-Hill family of publications is no stranger to mixing enterprise and media content, having developed many successful mergings for aviation and construction but with relatively limited media play for enterprise content from its Standard and Poor's division. That's changing now with the announcement of the new Company Insight Center being launched under McGraw-Hill's BusinessWeek brand. The Company Insight Center provides corporate data, news, financials, charts transactions, executive salaries and other key data from the Standard and Poor's Capital IQ database for public companies. A profile on the new BW service compares favorably with a similar one from popular services like Yahoo! Finance, with more details on analysis of executives and less emphasis on real-time information. It's a good tool that's been well integrated into the BW portal, with lots of thought given to usability and information design.
But is it enough to ease the slow slide of BW as a destination for business information seekers? Rich data is touted as a solution to add depth and "stickiness" to business media sites, but unlike other market sectors such as aviation and construction rich financial content has been available from a wide variety of sources online for more than a decade. BusinessWeek provides excellent content, thoughtful in-depth analysis and a widening set of weblogs and podcasts, so the enhanced rich data from Capital IQ will certainly be an effective complement to their core content. However, the style of BW online is still somewhat reflective compared to sites such as Forbes that have positioned their content to appeal to a younger, blog-centric audience more aggressively than BW. It's not necessarily that BW misses beats so much as they sometimes miss the pulse of what makes today's real-time oriented online users tick. So although rich data can be a welcome addition to a business information Web site it's important to make sure that it's data that will help to expand an audience as much as maintain relationships with existing loyal site visitors. Build up your rich data assets, to be sure, but make sure that you understand how they're going to add depth and breadth to your audience for advertisers as well.
Social media is booming, but is all of the activity surrounding its growth a precursor to a dot-com-like bubble burst? While in some ways investors may overextend themselves on the social media trend as much as any other social media is growing to become a trend that is based on countless tiny bubbles rather than the huge risk-takers that we're used to seeing in the media limelight. At is core social media is about human communications returning to normal levels of discourse that may have been forgotten in the push to cash in on electronic content - and that will require more sophisticated monetization models than those being pursued by most media companies.
One of the ongoing debates in business information is how to deliver high-quality content to enterprise marketers and sales forces. Traditionally this discussion revolves around how to cleanse contact information through traditional methods such as phone interviewing and more advanced methods such as Web data mining. But what sales and marketing professionals really want to know is who of these contacts will turn out to be good targets for marketing campaigns. Acxiom is taking on this challenge with the announcement of a service that will allow marketers to filter contact lists quickly through a predictive modeling system. The system will allow them to determine quickly which of their prospects is likely to respond to a given marketing offer, making it easier for marketers to select lists with appropriate demographics to maximize the effectiveness of a campaign.
Large-scale marketers have been able to afford such technologies but with the introduction of Acxiom On-Demand Targeting it's a capability that small and medium businesses can take advantage of as needed - and that larger businesses can use without having to resort to custom analysis and coding. It's a reminder that "data quality" is a relative factor in determining which premium content service is going to yield the most return from an investment. We're going to see more analysis tools making their way into business information services that move past contact accuracy and further into giving marketers accurate knowledge of intents. Statistical analysis based on deep data knowledge is one path to this insight, but there will be qualitative paths to understanding human behavior as well. In both cases quality content that leads to quality transactions will be the key to premium business information value.
The wires are ablaze with takeover rumors, the leading buzz being about an offer from Thomson to acquire Reuters. Reports put NewsCorp in the race as well, but this sounds like a tepid "Plan B" as a backup to Murdoch's intents with Dow Jones. The matches in a Thomson-Reuters merger are fairly obvious - Thomson gets Reuters' low-latency content delivery and automated trading platforms for the investment bankers that they've been unable to woo in quantity as well as online ad revenues from Reuters' media offerings, Reuters gets fingers into the securities industry "buy side" and retail operations - but I wonder whether EC regulators are going to feel comfortable with such a dominant combination. On a global basis that would leave Thomson and Bloomberg as the only really viable content alternatives for supporting large-scale securities trading operations.
Then again, perhaps that's all we need these days: the content that's driving securities transactions increasingly comes from sources outside of traditional vendor databases, leaving enterprise-oriented content vendors to perfect data plumbing and desktop tools. In a rapidly consolidating global securities marketplace two may be the magic number for the years ahead. With plenty of cash on hand for just such a takeover Thomson is in an excellent position to tuck away a revitalized but still-fragile Reuters team.
Two may also turn out to be the magic number in online content as Microsoft and Yahoo reopen talks to figure out a better fit. The Wall Street Journal reports that the shelved discussions have been brushed off in light of Google's now-leading Web presence. Yet again, this may be a merger or alliance of necessity. It would cede that Yahoo has largely missed the boat on enterprise content while Microsoft has stumbled with consumer content, even as Google has forged highly profitable paths into both arenas.
As in the securities marketplace for Thomson and Reuters the potential for a Microsoft-Yahoo alignment is as much about global competition as it is with any U.S.-oriented concerns. Asian and European markets are tipping Google's way in comparison to Yahoo and Microsoft, a trend that may be accelerated by Google's office automation tools that would allow developing nations just starting to come online to avoid the dominance of Microsoft Office tools as a prerequisite for playing in the digital economy. It's not clear that a Yahoo-Microsoft merger would help either party in developing markets but it may be powerful enough to act as a brake of sorts on further Google dealmaking and advertising alliances in developed markets.
In both of these potential deals, as well as in the potential acquisition of Dow Jones by NewsCorp, is the looming presence of gigantism in publishing that seems somehow unable to counteract the emerging trend of micropublishing. Huge collections of copyrighted content and patented technologies don't seem to be able to make a dent in the explosion of content developed by and for peers who are able to collaborate effectively with relatively little help from media giants. If there's anything to be said for any of these potential deals to deal with micropublishing it would be to acknowledge that Yahoo has been good at attracting user content while Microsoft has an improving stable of collaboration tools. On the enterprise side Reuters has decades of experience in enabling market conversations and promises to do moreso with emerging social media technologies.
But in both of these instances it may very well be the case that the distraction of merger politics would decelerate rather than accelerate these crucial efforts, leaving these companies further behind in the race to capture value from social media. The time may be right for these potential super-mergers and the resulting balance sheets are likely to look pretty healthy at the end of the day, but gigantism may prove to be a very temporary stop-gap measure in efforts to counteract changes in publishing that seem to favor small and medium publishing efforts that grow organically from open source tools and Web-based communications standards. Which bring us back, as always, to Google, which is glad to sell people valuable contexts for monetizing all of this content in whatever medium is of interest to marketers. I'll avoid the usual dinosaur-versus-mammal metaphor and just say that in a rapidly changing publishing ecology we're better off chasing the mammoth of contextual content value than focusing on building city-states of traditional publications that rely on a vanishing economy based on the value of copyrighted content.
CNBC Reports along with others on the USD 5 billion cash offer from NewsCorp to acquire control of Dow Jones & Company from the Bancroft family and other majority shareholders. Dow Jones has long been in the eyesights of Rupert Murdoch who prizes the Wall Street Journal editorial page's outlook as much as its healthy subscription revenues and improving online profile, but certainly the recent reoganization at Dow Jones under CEO Richard Zannino doesn't hurt the prospects of Dow Jones getting a good asking price for a traditional news and business information service in a problematic market. The broader problem is what happens if the Bancrofts et al. come back and express interest. Certainly Bloomberg and other business information companies may be willing to put in an offer as a prophylactic move to ensure that another well-funded global competitor is not breathing down their necks, but few outside of NewsCorp would have a globally positioned product that would complement Dow Jones' existing media and business information capabilities effectively.
In the CNBC article Mort Zuckerman notes that NewsCorp's efforts to launch a cable business news channel to compete with offerings from CNBC, CNN and Bloomberg can make this a good fit, and it's a key point. Dow Jones' footprint in video has been very limited so a broadcast-savvy ownership provided by NewsCorp's Fox division would certainly position their editorial assets more effectively - especially in exploding online video markets. The same factor argues somewhat against a Bloomberg acquisition, as it already has a reasonably successful broadcast presence in both television and radio. But the ringer in all of this is business information. The Dow Jones Enterprise Media group under Clare Hart provides NewsCorp with an enterprise footprint that it lacks - and that it needs to give it a more interesting balance sheet compared to Reuters, which maintains growing media interests and solid enterprise interests.
All in all this may be the offer that the Bancrofts can at last not refuse. Expect considerations from Bloomberg and others to enter the picture in reaction to the bid but my sense is that this may be the time for Dow Jones to move into the hands of new ownership - and for Zannino and crew to benefit from a broader array of outlets through which to market their editorial products.
UPDATE: ABC News reports that Dow Jones rejected the NewsCorp bid within hours of its posting. The article mentions, though, that there is no statement from DJ indicating that it would not consider other bids from NewsCorp or other companies. This is not entirely surprising - Dow Jones is likely to want to remain in U.S. ownership, given its history - but my comments stand. This may have been the last best chance for Dow Jones to bail out under reasonably good conditions. Their online operations are doing well enough and they are finding more innovative ways to market non-financial content but the long-term trend for print revenues is not promising. To stay healthy more video production is a must.
