ContentBlogger

Indepdendence Day and Social Media - ShoreViews Video

2009-07-03T10:12:00.004-04:00

As people in the U.S. and get ready for the holiday weekend, I hope that you have a chance to enjoy friends and family and to celebrate the role that content has played in making our world a better place. Below is a video capturing my relfections on the role that social media played in events in our nation more than two hundred years ago that still ring true today. Have a great holiday!

SLA Conference 2009: Tuning In to Enterprise Content Productivity

2009-06-29T14:02:00.012-04:00

The Special Libraries Association convened its annual conference in Washington, DC recently, an event which had reassuring energy and solid attendance. SLA President Janice LaChance observed that attendance was up at this year's event compared to last year's conference in Seattle, Washington, an indication that lean times may not get people to remote locations but convenient locations are worth at least a day or two of investment for this key enterprise content community. I put together a summary video for your enjoyment below and more comments below the video that expand on some of the items featured in the video.

While many of the changes in the enterprise content industry on display at the SLA conference were evolutionary in nature, the thing that struck me most about this year's event is how much enterprise content brands are being absorbed by the focus on workflow-oriented products and services. Yes, subscription database services such as Dialog, now a ProQuest property, are still popular in their own right with enterprise information professionals, but as a brand the Dialog name no longer represents the goals of many of its subscribers. Instead, enterprise content services providers are focused intently on discerning which market segments they can serve most effectively and profitably with highly tailored services.

In the instance of Wolters Kluwer, for example, this means providing a natural language interface for clinical practicioners in medicine such as nurses that will enable them to find answers to practical questions from Wolters Kluwer medical information resources.For Thomson Reuters, products such as Business Citator blend financial, legal and public information sources into a tool that can accelerate the productivity of professionals conducting due diligence efforts on business acquisitions and partnerships. For Dow Jones' Factiva unit, it's focusing on highly tailored software solutions for sales, market analytics and competitive intelligence.

These companies have been focusing on these more tailored market opportunities for quite some time, but it's clear from this year's SLA event that the lion's share of their revenues from traditional database services are diminishing in importance rapidly as these more tailored approaches to content solutions gain more favor on the end-user desktops of enterprises. As always, this leaves the role of enterprise information professionals in some flux, as reflected in a conference program that highlighted the application of infopro skills to competitive intelligence as well as more traditional information management topics.

The influx of more tailored solutions from enterprise content vendors also means that more general content access tools are gaining a broader foothold in the development of enterprise portals. Access Innovations, for example, was showing off their new alliance with Perfect Search, which enables them to combine their indexing and categorization technologies with a platform that can create tailored search solutions for both enterprises and content vendors that provide enhanced content navigation features as well as high-performance searching. So even as many enterprise content vendors are trying to integrate enterprise content into their own products, many enterprises are looking at the problem from the other side and looking at new ways to integrate external content into their own workflow services. Sometimes these types of vendors come out on top, sometimes the information vendors, and sometimes OEM partnerships allow both to win, but whoever wins in the end the competition for solving enterprise workflow issues continues to intensify.

The SLA is to be commended for shepherding an organization of highly talented professionals facing challenging times into supporting what continues to be a first-class event. While the ranks of traditional corporate infopros have thinned in recent years, the need for people with their skills is still strong, even as those skills get repurposed often for more specific functions in the enterprise. As infopros become more adept at interpreting the needs for specific applications that address people's information demands and technologies become more easily configured to respond to those insights I expect that we're at the beginning of a new era for information professionals that will see them becoming new types of "gurus" for on-demand information services. When the world is your library, it will certainly take someone special to do that.

Reinventing the Newsstand: Google Flipper Project Highlights News Content Graphically

2009-06-19T16:07:00.007-04:00

There has been a virtual tsunami of new product announcements coming out of Google lately, a wave of innovation that makes you wonder at times why private investors were so intent on putting money into in media companies with inflated multiples recently while content companies like Google were sinking significant funds into core product improvements. With consultants left and right making money telling companies how to be more innovative, the simple answer seems to be to invest in it. One key investment from Google is a new project revealed by TechCrunch named "Flipper" that offers a very different look to its online news search services through thumbnail images of news articles.

Google has been making extensive use of its thumbnail graphic generation technologies in many of its services, including up-to-the-moment screen grabs of pages recently visited in its Chrome Web browser. In the Flipper project, however, Google is showcasing not random pages selected by a browser user but articles selected by its news search engine. The thumbnails in the Flipper demo show a good chunk of the layout of selected news pages, grouped in various categories such as recent articles, hot topics, specific publications, most viewed and so on. The effect of this technique leave a strong impression that one is looking at a customized newsstand - except that instead of looking at the covers of magazines and newspapers one is looking at the images of specific articles tailored to a person's interests.

In an era in which search engines have made any page a potential first-visited front page for Web sites, this concept is particularly important to publishers. The graphics, multimedia and value-add content are supposed to be key differentiators for mainstream publishers' content, but in today's search engines these valuable assets are not well exposed in comparison to other sources when typical search results expose little other than a headline and a snippet of text. Thumbnail images can give a news browser a quick sense of which articles have deep and engaging content and which ones are a little bit thinner on content. That could turn out to be a key plus for publishers trying to differentiate their wares amidst a sea of potentially acceptable substitute content sources.

Of course, this will also put more pressure on publishers to focus more on ensuring that the layout of their content will turn out to be appealing in a newsstand such as the Flipper project is showcasing. But its likely to be beneficial pressure that may enable publishers to rise above competitors based on virtues other than search engine optimization. It also may enable advertisers to get a better sense that premium publishers offer qualities that run deeper than mere page view statistics - and to realize that providing content on publishers' sites that adds to the visual and editorial value of a publisher's content is an increasingly important virtue for promoting their advertising goals. While it's still unclear as to whether Flipper will see the light of day in its current form, it's a technology that is well adapted to mobile markets as well as PC browsers - and as such is likely to work its way into many Google offerings in the foreseeable future.

The New Stickiness: Studies Highlight Competing Sources of Online Ad Impression Performance

2009-06-19T10:41:00.017-04:00

In the beginning, there was the CPM - that enduring measurement of how many thousands of people were exposed to an advertisement as a benchmark for gauging its value. But with the rise of online advertising, CPM impression measurements began to compete with metrics such as Cost Per Click, the number of people who actually used a link on an ad to visit an advertiser's Web site. Here at last was a metric that proved that online advertising really worked - even though relatively few people actually clicked on these ads.

CPMs were great for advertisers, in that they could be assured that their money spent on ads had a measurable result that they could use to negotiate ad rates that corresponded with revenues in some meaningful way. CPMs still figured in to ad budgets, but it was hard to gauge the real effect of online ad impressions compared to leadgen-like CPC results (cut to frowns on faces of ad agency teams everywhere).

Enter the Online Publishers Association, which has released a new research study conducted by comScore of how consumers respond to online display advertising from 80 major brand campaigns running on 200 major media sites. The study measured the behavior of consumers after having been exposed to online display ads when searching for a brand trademark, traffic improvements on their Web sites and the amount of ecommerce. An OPA slide deck available at Silicon Valley Insider depcits some of the key stats from this study.

The results of the study are quite rosy: about 18 percent of the surveyed consumers searched on the advertised brand within a month period, 29 percent visited the Web sites for those brands, they spent 55 percent more time on pages at that site, clicked on 51 percent more pages and spent more on ecommerce options when available. The overall ecommerce increase was about 7 percent, spanning sectors such as autos and finance as well as others, but when looking at consumer packaged goods the uptick in ecommerce attributed to display ads was 14 percent, with consumer electronics increasing 22 percent (Cue broad smiles at ad agencies everywhere).

Clearly this is good news for media companies looking to transition from print revenues gained from impression-based brand advertising to online markets, as well as for advertisers (and, of course, for comScore, which can sell more research of this kind). Advertising benefits from "hang time" with eyeballs, not always correlating to those nifty eye-movement-scanning human factors tests which imply that nobody's paying attention to ads. The peripheral vision of humans picks up and processes far more than we may imagine, it would seem. The problem, though, is that it's not only ads in major media outlets that are claiming a benefit from this effect - and the comScore research is not the only game in town.

It turns out that Google has also been looking at the value of ad impressions relating to its own content and advertising. As related in B-to-B Online by Sam Sebastian, director of local and B2B markets at Google, a study for General Electric conducted by Enquiro, a B2B search engine marketing firm, revealed that contextual text-based ads appearing in search results also had a positive effect on brand recall. In other words, there is more than one way to skin the brand cat - and many outlets for advertisers to consider.

Moreover, as Google's own research indicated, 64 percent of C-level executives from Forbes 500 companies surveyed in their own research were using search at least six times a day themselves to locate business information. So not only is the potential for commerce to be gained from ad impressions not the exclusive domain of traditional media outlets, but it appears that many of the prime decision-makers with budgets are turning to search engines first oftentimes to get the impressions of products and services that they need. The presumption that print is a medium for the elites that many brands seek out as opinion-makers is still valid, but breaking down rapidly.

While the Google and Enquiro research doesn't refute the comScore study, it's a reminder that there are many contexts that advertisers need to think about how to convey brand value - including social media outlets and other venues beyond search engines and publishers' portals. All of this research seems to point out that advertising for brand value still matters in online outlets, even though its payback is challenged by new methodologies. Social media in particular offers a very high ratio on payback in brand investment, even though it does not provide in many instances the mass-scale impact that traditional advertising campaigns deliver.

One interesting example of the power of social media for brand marketers told by David Binkowski, Director of Word of Mouth Marketing at MS&L Worldwide, at a recent meeting of the Social Media Club in New York City, underscored the point that return on investment can still be very different in online venues even when brand impressions count. Binkowski relayed how the manufacturers of the heartburn medication Prilosec had spent big on an advertising campaign to give away tickets for a Super Bowl game one year, but then tried using social media and other Web outlets the next year for their ticket giveaway, spending about one tenth as much in the process. Interestingly, the net results from these two campaigns were about the same. So while everyone can feel good about impression-based advertising working in both traditional and new online outlets, advertising alone is no longer the only game in town for contextualizing brands online.

The good news in all of this, though, is that brands can survive and thrive online when they are using the right tools and putting down their chips appropriately. Traditional media is certainly a big part of that mix, but it's not the only game in town any more. A good page of search results that solves a very focused problem for someone can be a valuable opportunity for a brand to claim some space as a part of that solution. This has to temper enthusiasm for the OPA study somewhat as a tool to increase CPMs based on the value of impressions, but the ability of services such as comScore to quantify ROI on impression-based online advertising may help to give ad agencies a boost in their efforts to benefit more broadly from the switch to digital outlets for marketing.

The ROI value of social media as a tool for brand building is powerful in theory, but the metrics on its performance are still a work in progress and not yet accepted widely in marketing circles. This can be expected to change fairly rapidly, as underscored by a presentation by Josh Chasin, Chief Research Officer for comScore, at that same Social Media Club meeting. With services such as comScore beginning to put the finger on the pulse of cross-platform consumer behavior, marketers are entering a period in which the mysteries of unlocking ROI from online promotions and advertising are unfolding rapidly. Any way you look at it, there's a lot more "stickiness" for brands online than we may have thought previously - and a lot more reasons for marketers to push the limits of what can be done with brand marketing in online environments that much harder.

Legal River: Moving Past Directories for Legal Services Marketing

2009-06-09T13:43:00.012-04:00

It's a tough market out there for startup companies, much less enterprise-oriented content startups, but LaunchBox Digital is an efficiency-oriented funder of startups that is helping good ideas to get off the ground on a shoestring. One of LaunchBox's newer properties is Legal River, a startup spawned at the University of Maryland that focuses on enabling legal services providers to market their abilities more effectively to small and medium-sized businesses. That business model in and of itself is a tip-off that at least some of today's content-oriented startups are moving towards solutions that focus on solving very specific problems for very specific marketplaces - a refreshing change from "we have a feature, now what's the market for it?" approaches that haunted many of the early waves of content startups.

As announced recently by their CEO Reed Atkin, Legal River provides a marketplace in which people looking for legal services can provide information that describes their qualifications for obtaining services and that describes their needs for services anonymously to solicit offers from practicioners. While in some ways a page out of the Lending Tree playbook, Legal River is actually more of a cross between TechTarget's lead generation servicing model and a classifieds online response service. Legal River users don't reveal their personal data to potential services providers but can instead review the incoming offers anonymously and choose to deal with any of the providers who respond - or not. Legal River charges on a per-lead-provided basis, which encourages a broad range of respondents to requests, This is unlike LegalMatch, which requires an annual fee from legal professionals using the service.

Legal River is in its very early days, focusing largely on supporting tech companies in the Washington, DC area to prove out the mechanics of the model before expanding to broader markets. This is similar in approach in some ways to InsideView and Jigsaw, which honed their business information services amongst Silicon Valley companies before tackling broader markets. A good place to start as any, and one which promises to be able to scale easily into those broader markets, perhaps in partnership with some other business information services providers. I find it encouraging that companies such as Legal River are getting active backing at a time in which some business information suppliers have pulled back on some of their innovation initiatives in the face of challenging markets.

Even more encouraging, though, is that the Legal River business model focuses on key productivity challenges faced both by legal services providers who need to keep marketing time to a minimum and businesses that need to find legal services more efficiently to survive and thrive in challenging times. Instead of thinking like database curators, as some B2B directories publishers continue to do, Legal River is looking at the opportunities for transactions that generate win-win business scenarios from interactions. Expect the new wave of cost-conscious financiers such as LaunchBox Digital to eye additional business-oriented publishing models as key candidates for startups that can generate revenues quickly and scale rapidly using today's cloud computing resources.

Bright, Shiny Objects: Content in a Post-Apple, Post-Microsoft World

2009-06-09T11:41:00.023-04:00

A few years ago I blogged about Microsoft's then-CEO Bill Gates' appearance at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, in which his brand was sharing a good deal of the CES limelight with Google and Yahoo. No longer did the Microsoft brand alone command the attention of tech mavens: it was content and content-oriented features that were carrying the day. While Microsoft still enjoys an enviable position in the marketplace, there is no doubt that its ability to project presumed dominance in consumer and enterprise markets faces many challenges.

Ticking the clock ahead to today's world, it would appear that Apple may have had a similar passing of the market mojo moment at this year's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. Steve Jobs failed to deliver the event's keynote address, presumably due to health issues, but it may also have been because Apple's usual razzamataz had few blockbuster announcements off of which to leverage. The news from WWDC was about incremental changes, all good, but mostly about trying to deal with the challenges of positioning Apple as a premium brand in a world that is pushing pricing down on many bright, shiny objects.

By contrast, bright, shiny objects were found everywhere at very reasonable prices at the recent Computex Taipei event across the Pacific from WWDC. Computex featured an abundance of netbooks and thin client desktops and tablet panels running many different kinds of operating systems software, including Google's new Android O/S that was seen running alongside smart phone and netbook versions of Microsoft Windows. Windows was the first cross-platform operating system to start driving down the cost of content delivery electronics, and Android is following in its footsteps with an open-source operating system that helps to drive down the price of a smaller, cheaper and more portable generation of electronics significantly.

Apple has always managed to create a unique niche for its products by focusing on highly appealing designs and features. For example, at WWDC announcements included a slot for SD memory cards in some of its lighter new Macbook laptops - perfect for the photo and graphics afficionados who form a strong core of Apple's support. Great stuff, but ultimately still the stuff of niche brands. Call it the BMW approach to content delivery: ultimately, a Macbook or even an iPhone doesn't do much that a Windows or Android-equipped device won't do similarly, but dang, it just makes some folks feel so, well, you know..."in." Some people will always pay a premium price to be a part of that club, whatever is on the inside of it, so Apple-branded devices are not going away any time soon.

From a content industry perspective, though, the Apple wave queued up by the soaring success of the iPhone is about to gain a new sense of perspective over the next several months as netbooks and tougher competition from newer smart phone models begin to elbow into the limelight. The real star of the show is the Web, with cloud computing resources the co-star. Yes, mobile applications are helping to fuel up excitement about smart phones and other devices, but when a device with 1GB of memory can handle virtually any multimedia content display requirements, it's not realistic to think that proprietary hardware or operating systems are going to enable publishers to have technology partners that can help to buffer them against the competitive forces of Web publishing. You can increase storage for downloads to enjoy when you're not Web-enabled, but for most people the content that they want resides in the cloud and appears on whatever standards-compliant device makes it useful. Toss in the increasing availability of wireless broadband Internet connectivity and the "why" of platform-captive content makes less and less sense.

More and more inexpensive appealing devices to deliver content are pouring out of Taipei, China, South Korea and other low-cost producing markets every day, many of them aimed at global markets that have participated only marginally in the Web experience so far. While many premium content producers continue to focus on the upscale content platforms as their salvation, already more than a billion YouTube videos are viewed daily around the world. A premium strategy will work if you can attract people's attention well, but at this point in time there are really not enough fundamental technology differentiators in Apple or any other existing technology platform producer's products to justify a strong reliance on premium platforms as a buffer for intellectual property licensing. In short, the battle between the Web and platforms is over, for now, and you can put the crown securely on the virtual noggin of the Web.

If content producers want premium platform barriers to entry for their products they will have to have technology partners that are investing much, much more heavily in breakthrough innovations that deliver real differentiating value. The iPhone was merely the first in a wave of devices that are providing incremental improvements in performance in what was already a marketplace headed towards commoditization of mobile technology platforms. In the meantime, a floundering world economy is pushing more people towards cost-effective content technology solutions. Dear publishers, say goodbye to your love affair with the iPhone - before it's too late. Learn to love netbooks, a galaxy of smart phones and any other device that can get you people who whant your content on the line, and then prove your value from there.

eBooks on the March: BookExpo America Overshadowed by Electronic Upstarts

2009-06-01T22:07:00.011-04:00

BookExpo America is one of the premier U.S. trade events, encompassing more than a few Wal-Marts of display space wherever it sets down. This year's event in New York was no exception, but more than ever there was a pall in the air of its exhibit halls as much of the paper-based world of books began to come grinding to a halt in recessionary times. The other key factor, of course, was the meteoric rise of premium ebooks on Amazon's Kindle device, a blessing for publishers needing quick revenues without inventory commitments but a curse with its draconian revenue cuts and control over unit pricing. Who would have thought, then, that the name of Google would come along to offer the book industry...some hope?

As counterintuitive as it may seem to some, the light is finally going off in more than a few minds in the book publishing industry that Google's neutral stance on delivery platforms and its popularity as a destination for book readers courtesy of its library book scanning project may combine to offer publishers a more sane "plan B" for online publishing than they had originally thought. A recent New York Times article outlines some apparently positive responses from publishing executives to Google's strategic partnerships director Tom Turvey saying "We really mean it" to going live by the end of 2009 with Web-based premium ebook sales on all major PC and mobile devices. One key incentive to teaming up with Google: the promise to give publishers complete say over unit pricing.

The technology making this possible, though, is still a bit shaky. Turvey mentioned that books would be available offline only through Web browser caching capabilities; otherwise, your ebooks will be ready and waiting online for you. This is less optimal than the reader-centric features of Amazon's Kindle reader, but given the increasingly universal presence of Web connectivity, it's probably not a major hindrance for many readers more used to online access. It also underscores yet again the re-emphasis by Google of the importance of the Web browser as the most powerful platform for cross-platform electronic content delivery. "Lock-down" of content is easy enough for ebooks in whatever container a publisher would like in a browser, but more importantly it gets to live in a medium that doesn't require them to negotiate distribution deals with an expanding universe of platform providers with each new twist in their technologies. This is also bound to make more of their cash-strapped book consumers happy.

While Turvey made it sound after a fashion that Google had slipped on ebooks as a product priority, clearly there were a few other product priorities that needed to fall into place. With Google's Android operating system taking off now on both smart phones and netbooks, there is a growing Web counterforce to proprietary technologies that were hemming book publishers in to platforms that would ultimately hinder ebook growth. Google's new Wave messaging and collaboration technologies are likely in time to accelerate Google's ability to build real-time conversations around books, enabling publishers to create richer content to engage readers without having to invest in technologies that would take them away from their core editorial talents.

Although these seem to be positive trends for Google, no doubt publishers are still feeling their way through a relationship with Google that is only beginning to move past the tension and mistrust that lead up to the recent book scanning settlement covering orphaned works. It's also likely that Google will not find itself the only "plan B" that publishers investigate as they decide to expand their partnership options beyond Amazon. But when one thinks back a few short years ago when the book industry was trying to partner with Yahoo and Microsoft as alternatives to Google's book scanning efforts, it appears that book publishers, willingly or not, are ready to pursue more aggressive marketing strategies that embrace the Web on the Web's own terms.

What's Really New About Bing? Not Much. But It's Still a Good Direction for Search.

2009-06-01T20:58:00.011-04:00

There was some scuttlebutt buzzing around last week's duel between the Google I/O developer's conference and the All Things D conference to the effect that perhaps Google had some intelligence about the Ballmer announcement of the Bing-flavored preview of Microsoft's new Live Search search engine that prompted their announcement of their Wave messaging and collaboration technology. Somehow that doesn't ring true, given the breadth of the Google Wave announcement, which is a pretty encompassing technology initiative. By contrast, Ballmer didn't have anything nearly as broad to offer the ATD crowd, but at least he had something to put up against I/O to keep people buzzing about Microsoft, most of which was catch-up to counter announcement's at Google's earlier Searchology event.

If you can find any significant differences between Bing and the earlier Kumo-labeled version of Microsoft's Live Search preview, you have sharper eyes than I do. That's not necessarily a bad thing; there's a lot to be said for Microsoft's leveraging of their new Powerset technology that helps to dress up search engine results with related content and faceted navigation features. But in several forays into Bing searches, I cannot say that I am finding all that many melds of information that are truly impressive. Yes, it's nice to be able to to have comparison shopping data, reviews and related links embedded in searches such as "Samsung LCD TVs," but that's not so different than, say, a search on Google for "JFK to SFO" with the "related searches" option turned on that has comparison flight shopping tools in the search results. Bing is good, perhaps even state-of-the-art, but hardly a game-changer for the state of search in general.

What the maturing Bing search results do seem to indicate is that the lines between destination sites and search engines will continue to blur as content providers and search engines both go in search of more valuable and engaging contexts for high-quality content. For search engine providers, being able to increase engagement time on a given page of search results is good for ad revenues and overall user satisfaction and brand value. For online publishers, the melded results offered in Bing, Google's Universal Search and other evolving search portals represent opportunities to engage audiences at the point of demand with solutions that enhance their own brand value while building revenues from advertising alliances with search engine portals. You might say, even, that the Bing/Google Universal Search approach is like dialing up a custom magazine/shopping guide/newspaper, with increasingly slick and well-organized content that begins to mimic the editorial capabilities of traditional specialty publications.

The parallel between traditional media and on-demand publications assembled by search engines is underscored in Bing by the rich and engaging photographs that appear on the home page of the Bing site. Squint a little bit and you can imagine the cover of a National Geographic magazine or other glossy high-quality publications. The visual promise of Bing's home page is that what you're about to experience is really, really good at a visceral level. The guts of this "magazine" don't yet match the cover, but you can tell that over time both Bing and other search engines are headed in the direction of getting search results to be as engaging and visually rewarding as traditional magazine publications, albeit with lots of the Web-savvy functionality that keeps people coming back.

With these evolutions in mind, publishers need to be prepared to make their content brands resonate in the online pages of whatever on-demand context appeals to their audiences - including increasingly sophisticated search engines that are aiming to keep people hanging around their pages as long as possible. Initiatives such as Journalism Online will help to make search engines more profitable aggregation venues for traditional publishers, but they need to be ready to accept more willingly the idea that search engines can be great publishing partners that help them to get their content to their audiences in the contexts that they value most. Certainly Bing will help to convince some publishers of this, but it's still early days for publishers recognizing that The New Aggregation is not a mere thought piece but instead a key component in the future of profitable publishing.

One Space to Rule The Cloud: Google Wave Creates a Backbone for the Real-Time Web

2009-06-01T17:07:00.011-04:00

It's been a busy week for attention-getting events in content technologies, with the Google I/O developer's conference in San Francisco vying for mindshare with the All Things D conference in San Diego. Both were important events in their own right, with Steve Ballmer's announcement of a preview launch for Microsoft's new Bing search engine facing off against Google's announcement of Google Wave, a new technology that promises to deliver a new standard for common messaging and collaboration infrastructure for both the Web and enterprises. Hmm, yet another stab at launching a Live.com successor versus a reworking of email, wikis, real-time messaging and file sharing in one swoop. Which event should Walt and Kara have been covering in more detail? I think that I'll take door two, though Bing is worth taking a gander at in its own right. Mind you, Google giving away free Android phones with a month's free call and data time to developers at I/O certainly upped the attention-getting factor a little bit, as well.

Google Wave is important for any number of reasons, but it's important first and foremost because many major technology companies could have done this, and probably should have, but chose to stick with incremental improvements to older software technologies. Back in the 1970s, for example, when it was a big deal to get messages from one person to another person on a remote computer, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) was an important tool to facilitate widely different computing platforms to pass messages to one another. Good stuff in its time, to be sure, but today the fundamental concept of email is entirely out of step with today's communications methods, where message content tends to be shared and stored in Web cloud infrastructure rather than being scooted around to storage devices at the edge of the Web. Add in mashups, instant messaging and the real-time broadcast capabilities of services such as Twitter and it's clear that email is a completely inadequate messaging infrastructure for building content services that really satisfy today's sophsticated consumer and enterprise audiences. Yet for decades interoperable standards for a successor to email sponsored by major technology companies have been no-starters.

Enter Google Wave, a new communications technology that made its debut at Google's recent I/O conference for developers. Built to leverage the emerging HTML 5 standards for content and software services delivered via Web browsers, Wave is an open-source set of protocols, platforms and products that enable anyone to put together services that allow people to create and share content and display applications with one another using non-proprietary Web programming standards. Given that the Web has been overshadowed recently by proprietary products such as Apple's iPhone and Amazon's Kindle and applications environments such as Adobe Air, Google Wave is a very strong statement from Google that the common and open standards of the Web are the key to unlocking the full potential of the most valuable communications medium ever invented.

Wave is also an extremely strong challenge to Microsoft and just about every major software and services provider hoping to take some piece of the emerging world of real-time collaborative communications that spans consumers, enterprises and an expanding multitude of mobile and desktop computing platforms. While other companies are still trying to leverage their ownership of technology intellectual property, Google learned long ago that it's far more important to own the moments that people interact with technology. Some people try to call those moments "media," but Google was one of the first companies to realize that these transitory moments were far more valuable and complex than both traditional media companies and technology companies had imagined.

If you can find the time it's really worth it to go through the full video of the demo video that shows all of the potential of Wave as a messaging medium. For those that don't have the time, here's a brief tick list of things that will leave you oohing, aahing and - hopefully - thinking:

A "wave" can be any number of digital objects - messages, documents, images, embedded applications - that can be exposed to people just by dragging and dropping a profile icon into the Wave object.
Wave enables concurrent real-time information transfer to and from collaborators. So although you can view completed messages in Wave as you would an email, instant message or other completed communication, you can also experience it as a real-time conversation or collaboration. As you type, the characters of your message appear in the other person's browser as they are being typed. People can type together in multiple languages (with real-time translation as needed). The real-time semantic spell-checker is pretty amazing in the demo. The open-source Wave protocol makes this all happen.
Wave objects can start out as a simple message, have replies and participants added, enables people to share private messages from within the wave, can allow people to edit an object concurrently and to view those edits as they are happening concurrently, can use rich text with drag and drop hyperlinks, allows the dragging and dropping of videos, images, texts, hyperlinks, enables rich tagging - and can do this all in real-time on any platform that uses the Wave protocols, including enterprise platforms.
Anyone can develop Wave-compatible applications, including those who want them "inside the firewall" of an enterprise. Demos were given on Wave working in Google's own Chrome browser but also Firefox and on iPhones as well as Google's own Android mobile smart phones. Examples in the I/O demo of an "Acme" third party implementation of Wave and an embedded "Twave" application for including Twitter messages in Wave underscored that any developer can use Wave protocols and standards to develop compatible applications that leverage Wave capabilities.

In other words, this is a complete rethink of how we use Internet-based messaging to communicate and to collaborate, enabling content to be assembled in Web cloud infrastructure as real-time conversations. It's young technology also, to be sure, but it rides on the back of the enormous cloud infrastructure resources that Google and others have assembled over the past several years. Whatever scalability and reliability issues need to be worked out for Wave are small compared to the decades of effort it has taken to get infrastrcuture in place already to keep up with Wave's potential. If you think of how the relatively simple Twitter infrastructure has been tweaked and kept alive with fairly few "fail whale" outages during its exponential growth of the past year, then it's probably safe to say that the potential for Wave to grow rapidly as a market force in real-time and collaborative messaging is not likely to be gated by basic issues such as networking and servers.

Given the slow adoption rate amongst software developers for Google's Open Social programming interface, though, it was far from certain that developers were going to get jazzed up about Wave as something that deserved their attention - hence the high-energy introduction for Wave at the I/O event. The giveaway of Android phones to I/O attendees was no accident, of course, in this regard. What other real-time messaging medium has the potential to be changed by I/O's potential? Why telephony, of course. With millions of phone calls being made already on services such as Skype and even Second Life, the telephone networks' days as the universal real-time messaging medium are numbered. Google's open-source Android software is about to empower dozens of new and more affordable smart phone models around the world, making Wave a perfect tool to help accelerate the demise of telephony as we have known it. It's likely that Wave will be a key component in accelerating the acceptance of Android, and vice versa.

As traditional content and software publishers continue to try to wrestle the Web into one proprietary box after another to suit their established business models, it's important to remember that the world is aching to have cost-effective productivity improvements that will help to boost the global economy. Wave is a good example of a content technology that has the potential to sweep aside many drags on Web and enterprise productivity in ways that can help to create and to contextualize content in more valuable ways than ever before. In the long run, that can only be good for publishing. My suspicion is that you'll see Wave in a Gmail inbox near you pretty soon. For those who were hoping that there would be a breather from the pace of change being fomented by the Web with the introduction of platforms like iPhone and Amazon's Kindle, I am sorry to say that you had best get down to the gym and start getting used to more fast breathing ahead in the emerging Web cloud economy.

June 24 SIIA Panel - Google, Kindle, iPhone: How to Leverage Hot Content Delivery Platforms for Profits

2009-05-28T09:57:00.000-04:00

I've had the privilege to have moderated many great SIIA panels over the years, but the 24 June Brown Bag Lunch mid-day event at the McGraw Hill building in New York City (online video available) certainly ranks among the most important topics that I've had the opportunity to moderate with some excellent panelists who will stimulate your thinking on how best to monetize content on today's hot distribution platforms. Please register soon, the last Brown Bag Lunch event was a sellout both in-person and online. If you have suggestions for questions that the panel should address, please add them as comments to this post. A panel summary and a list of our truly distinguished panelists follows. See you there!

Google, Kindle, iPhone: How to Leverage Hot Content Delivery Platforms for Profits

Today's publishers are finding both great opportunities and great challenges in using leading-edge technology platforms to deliver revenues for their premium content sources. iPhones, Kindle e-book readers and Google Books and search services are being adopted by both consumers and enterprises to access premium content at a pace that challenges publishers to come up with effective pricing and marketing strategies. Key questions that arise include:

• What are going to be the most successful business models on these platforms for news and information, books and magazines - and what are the up-and-coming platforms that will challenge publishers to keep those business models working?
• In locking down deals and settlements for content distribution on these platforms, who are the winners and losers?
• How does the availability of premium content on these platforms change how publishers manage the value of their brands?
• What will be the emerging role of the open Web in an environment that is seeing more proprietary content distribution technologies emerging?

A panel of leaders from the worlds of media, enterprise and academic publishing and intellectual property management will explore how news, books and other intellectual property from publishers can best take advantage of emerging technologies to generate revenues from premium content in mobile and online markets and on the open Web - and how these platforms are likely to affect how content creators view the role of publishers in delivering them value for their efforts.

Panelists:
Alisa Bowen, Senior Vice President, Head of Consumer Publishing, Thomson Reuters
Gordon Crovitz, Co-Founder, Journalism Online
Chris Kenneally, Director of Author Relations, Copyright Clearance Center

Expanding the Shore Team: Welcome John Buckman, Marketing Communications Expert

2009-05-22T13:26:00.012-04:00

You may have noticed that Shore is beginning to build up its team of content industry experts, expanding our ability to help companies targeting media and enterprise content markets. Our mission is to help organizations to know their markets for content and technology products and services through industry research and intelligence, to focus their marketing strategies with ground-breaking market insights and to implement those strategies with highly effective marketing communications. Over the next few weeks I will be highlighting new members of the Shore team who are helping our clients to meet their marketing objectives more effectively than ever before. First up is a person who may be well known already to many of you: John Buckman, who is helping Shore to expand our ability to support your marketing and communications needs.

With John's in-depth industry experience and his global network of information industry contacts, he is a perfect complement for our decade-long mission of helping our clients to succeed. John expertise adds marketing communications muscle to Shore's team has he helps our clients to spearhead marketing communications, that enable them to reach and to motivate stakeholders in their markets with clarity and impact.

John Buckman is an information industry veteran who has worked as an independent consultant for many years to support leading information industry companies. His information industry career began with DataTimes, a pioneering aggregator of newspaper content. For more than a decade John managed DataTimes’ marketing program, helping the growing company to project a large image in the marketplace. He also was instrumental in introducing DataTimes to Australian, Asian and European markets.

Later, John was retained by Information Access Company (IAC)., where he managed all the external and internal communications for the three-way merger of IAC, Gale Research and the U.K.’s Primary Source Media. As a consultant with Gale Group, the resulting company, John developed an e-customer communications program that Gale continues to this day. For Dialog, John had responsibility for worldwide media relations, a post that enabled him to extend and nurture his broad network of media and analyst contacts around the globe. He also helped Australia’s Ibisworld bring its business research services to the U.S.

With a predecessor of the Software and Information Industry Association, John produced a series of special features published in FORTUNE magazine about the information industry. Earlier in his career, John was a journalist, working for Time Magazine and living in Johannesburg while reporting for South Africa’s The Financial Mail. He also wrote a column about technology for the London-based Investor Relations magazine. John was educated at The George Washington University and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

I think that you'll agree with me that John offers an impressive range of talents proven through a long and proven track record of accomplishments that will be useful in helping you to improve your marketing communications efforts. Feel free to contact John and to welcome him aboard!

Reference Publishing Meets Digital Objects: Wolfram|Alpha, Google and Yahoo Pursue On-The-Fly Curated Content

2009-05-20T17:37:00.028-04:00

While the tsunami of buzz surrounding the Wolfram|Alpha reference service (by their own claim not a search engine) seems to indicate a desire for novelty at least as much as interest in its actual merits, the service is one of a few major announcements this week which indicate a shifting attitude towards online publishing that is catching up with the realities of today's publishing technologies. Wolfram|Alpha offers a simple "white box" query interface with semantic parsing of requests that access a fairly limited, curated set of reference data feeding through display functions such as tables, charts and graphs. The W|A team is careful to note that these images and data displays are not search results but useful publications unto themselves - hence a bit of static about their terms and conditions, which emphasize that query results are W|A's intellectual property.

Wolfram Alpha is an interesting reference tool for people wanting to chart and graph contrasting points of data, but it's hardly alone in the movement towards more robust on-demand content. Recently Google announced at its Searchology event a range of enhancements to its emerging Universal Search capabilities, including search options that enable one to embed relationship trees, videos, reviews and other displays that relate to a query - in addition to already embedded rich content such as maps. For example, the image to the right shows a relationship tree for people relevant to Apple CEO Steve Jobs as well as relevant video clips. Included on this menu of options is a feature called "rich snippets," which enables publishers to encode content that's related to a particular item from their Web sites that appears in a search result using a microformat specification provided by Google. Examples of this feature in use are fairly thin so far, but it holds out the promise for a wide range of content sources to be placed in context with content returned from Google searches. Google's open approach to helping publishers to develop search-embedded display applications for their content returned from queries, as opposed to Wolfram|Alpha's "it's our content" approach, is far more likely to accelerate the development of rich content applications cued by queries into a wider array of databases.

The team at Yahoo has been looking at this emerging landscape for enriched queries and is trying to steer somewhat of a middle course between the Wolfram|Alpha approach of tight curation of sources and applications and the content available on the open Web. As noted in SearchEngineLand recently. Yahoo is ceding the "all the world's information" indexing battle to Google and is instead focusing on doing a better job of curating specific types of Web sources more effectively and serving them up through a variety of display objects. Yahoo's Search Monkey display capabilities, similar to the "rich snippets" microformats announced by Google at Searchology, already help to power rich content in Yahoo search results, and will be folded into broader use of digital objects that get served up via Yahoo queries.

This is all a way of saying that search was never really about "just search" to begin with. Search results are and always have been content in and of themselves, a collection of content sources that are arranged to enable people to determine what's the most relevant information on a given topic. In other words, search is an editorial function, albeit one that's highly automated, but it performs much the same function as an editor working on a news article or an encyclopedia entry - except that it is done on an on-demand basis. We've seen many efforts through recent years to enrich search results with more robust graphics and related content, making a given search result more like a reference compendium rather than just a listing of links. But what we seem to be moving towards at a faster pace as of late is the realization that the digital objects served up by search engines are increasingly likely to be the objects where people get their answers and insights in full, rather than trudging off to various links to get more in-detail answers.

Now, this is usually where some of my good friends in publishing start to howl about the evils of search engines, but realistically this kind of aggregation is happening whether publishers want it to happen or not. The only question is how they want their own content to participate in this automated just-in-time editorial environment. I believe that the most constructive answer for publishers is to embrace the increasingly object-oriented environment of search warmly and to recognize that there are opportunities abounding in getting more of the right content in front of the right audience at the right time through enhanced search services. For example, instead of having to compel someone to click on a link to read a news story on your own Web site, you could have either a lede paragraph or an entire article come up in the search results page. That article could have your own embedded ads, or links to a subscription or micropayment monitoring service that would enable the publisher to expose premium content in a search context.

However it's done, query results on a search engine represent the point of highest demand for much of today's content. Getting the right content into those results with the right monetization scheme gives a publisher a potential jump on the competition that hopes that someone will click on their link into their Web site. Destination Web sites serve an important purpose, but in the world of distributed online content aggregation, but relying on them solely is a little bit like saying that one should only buy newspapers at a publisher's printing plant. Search engines and other content technologies that allow on-demand contextualization of content for an audience are the newsstands of today, leaving publishers with but one choice: do you want to hide your content behind the counter or do you want it where people can see it? The serving up of rich content through digital objects asks the question more loudly and with more and better answers to the "how" of meeting this challenge, but it's the same challenge that's been with us for many years.

The most important innovation that publishers can embrace over the next several years are the technologies that enable them to have cross-platform digital objects that are easily monetized and licensed for monetization through a broad array of partners adept at on-demand contextualization of content. While the Wolfram|Alpha platform offers an interesting view of how a limited range of sources could be curated into a useful reference service, ultimately it's a model that is far too limiting to allow most publishers to succeed. A handful of content-serving graphs and charts is useful for only a few types of information sources. Publishers need a robust array of content-serving objects, ones that enhance their own content and that allow it to trigger the integration of other content sources more easily for enhanced value.

Search engines and social media tools have empowered a new generation of editors and curators who have the power to put a publisher's content in its most valuable context more quickly and more effectively than traditional distribution media. Hopefully the efforts by Wolfram|Alpha, Google and Yahoo begin to make publishers think more actively how their content can be served up more automatically in more contexts through their object-oriented publishing technologies.

The Great(er) White Hope of Publishing: Kindle DX Enables Locked-Down Content to Live On. For Now.

2009-05-07T00:46:00.026-04:00

The landscape of Europe is dotted with the ruins of hundreds of castles and city walls dating from the Medieval era of feudal rule, when local kings, dukes and other land-owners defended their claims to farms and forests through their ability to repel invaders from behind their castles' walls. Castle defenses worked reasonably well for several centuries, but eventually the use of castles as power bases became obsolete. Was it improved war technology that made castles charming antiquities? To some degree, perhaps, but the larger force that made castles irrelevant was the rise of a new way to store and protect wealth: banking. Once the rise of wealthy merchants made the marketplaces of towns and cities the real battlefields for proving out power, castles protecting farmlands became far less important for securing power than having an economic system that could enable efficient trade. Yet those old castles still stand, and, darn, they do look rather nifty even today.

Fast-forward to 2009, as Amazon introduces its Kindle DX, the latest iteration of their wireless ebook reader that offers a larger screen with eInk technology. Just as those kings and dukes were thrilled to build ever-larger battlements against their enemies, publishers are flocking to the Kindle as the wonder machine of choice, now with a screen size that lends itself to larger materials such as magazines and newspaper articles. With a USD489 price tag, the Kindle DX is hardly an economy model digital device; in fact, many new netbooks with similar screen sizes go for hundreds less and offer color displays with Web and PC functionality. But as the copy from the Amazon catalog page reminds us, this new Kindle is slim, "Just over 1/3 of an inch, as thin as most magazines." Why even compare a Kindle to a netbook when it offers such obvious advantages and comforts to print readers? And if the price is a little to steep for some people, a few of them may be able to rejoice (a little): some major newspapers such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Boston Globeare offering a discount off of a USD400-plus annual subscription to their papers via the new Kindle - if you live beyond the delivery range of their paper editions. This new-fangled technology does allow some miraculous breakthroughs, doesn't it?

It's not as if the Kindle does not have its own unique virtues - or its own promising revenue streams. Sales of smaller Kindle units have been brisk, and the affluent older people buying them online are also fueling skyrocketing ebook sales. Silicon Alley Insider notes that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos brought a stunning statistic to light during the Kindle DX intro show: when Kindle-formatted books are available on Amazon, about 35 percent of those books' sales are now through Kindle editions. There was no breakout as to how many buy a print edition as well, but the chart behind Bezos at the intro showed this percentage hockey-sticking from only 14 percent in February of this year. Based on my own experience with getting my Content Nation book into a Kindle edition, much of this growth is actually publisher-driven: titles are being pushed into Kindle format as quickly as Amazon can handle the conversions and postings. In a year in which print book sales are sluggish, the reduced price of Kindle-edition books offers publishers a discount-bin pricing strategy with zero inventory or print-on-demand cost exposure.

In other words, in a year in which the slowly-moving denizens of print are trying to salvage some semblance of sensible quarterly earnings, the ability to charge a premium for access to content on electronic platforms - or any platform, for that matter - has to be a strong plus. Yet in doing so many of these publishers continue to invest minimally in developing a more competitive stance in the more competitive markets of online publishing that are able to reach younger and broader audiences far more effectively than Kindles. Kindle is attractive to newspapers and magazines as a platform that can be used to appeal to older and more affluent audiences who are the targets of their advertisers, a fact that fuels hopes that a larger Kindle will enable them to sell display ads at good rates for this elite group. Yet where will tomorrow's older and more affluent audiences be congregating? Kindle, we hardly knew ye.

Kindle is an important content delivery platform that has enabled the book industry to begin its slow transition to the online era and that has offered a shelter for premium content sales in the face of an online content industry that largely baffles most publishers. Yet for the most part it is a transitional proprietary platform, much as Prodigy, Compuserve and America Online were proprietary transitional services for premium online content prior to the emergence of the Web as a dominant content delivery network. Publishers are welcome to continue to build short-term profits on Kindle as part of their transition away from the printed versions of their content, but the rush to Kindle at this very late stage in the online game is ultimately yet another indication that many publishers are ill-prepared to compete in the Web world of highly distributed content production and aggregation.

If there were a commitment by publishers to use some significant portion of their revenues from Kindle sales to invest in making a more effective transition to Web revenues, then perhaps there would be reason to think that Kindle will represent an effective transitional strategy. But with a soft economy making profits in publishing more elusive, it's more likely to turn into a strategy that yet again kicks key decisions about Web strategies down the road. In the meantime billions of people around the world are going to be equipped with very affordable netbooks over the next few years - many of them being about as slim as a magazine, no doubt.

My book royalty checks say "Thank you" to Kindle for the time being, but underinvestment in advanced Web strategies is making publishing via traditionally print-oriented publishers an increasingly unattractive option for authors trying to reach both mass audiences and affluent audiences. The skyscrapers that house major media companies will stand for many years, no doubt, just as Europe's feudal castles still stand today. But unless those companies start to gear themselves for the reality of a market-driven content economy, instead of a property-driven content economy, we may see those glass buildings as tourist attractions displaying the hubris of a bygone era sooner than one may imagine.

Brill, Crovitz & Hindery Launch "Journalism Online": About Time or Out of Time?

2009-05-04T07:03:00.000-04:00

When Gordon Crovitz left Dow Jones several months ago, I knew that his experiences in helping to build the most successful premium online news brand would be likely to result in good things somewhere. Gordon’s insights into the value of traditional journalism and his online savvy are an unusual combination in the world of today’s content industry. So it was with some interest that I have been learning about Journalism Online, a new initiative captained by Crovitz, content industry veteran Steven Brill and former cable industry CEO Leo Hindery. In a detailed press release – more of a mini-business plan, actually – the Journalism Online (JOI) team has outlined a multi-pronged strategy to enable traditional journalism to reap new revenue streams from online sources.

As many of the elements of the JOI plan are in sync with what Shore has been advocating for many years to promote the health of premium content sales (I briefed Crovitz on the concepts of The New Aggregation about five years ago), I would be contradicting myself to say that his team’s plan doesn’t hold water. In fact, much of what Journalism Online advocates is sorely needed in the news industry and will be likely to offer professional journalists a chance to benefit from more sensible online business models in tune with how content is actually distributed and consumed online. However, there are some troubling aspects in both the details and the broad brush of this plan that should be considered carefully by publishers as they weigh its merits.

The first concept in the Journalism Online plan is really a no-brainer and long, long overdue. JOI would set up an online system that would enable anyone to sign up once for access to premium news content across the Web. Payment models via this system would vary, and would include subscriptions for individual premium publications, pay-per-view access and royalty-driven payments in a cross-source subscription model. This would enable any publisher participating in Journalism Online to share in common payment and billing infrastructure that would make a wide variety of premium business models possible. While JOI does not target mobile and television markets explicitly, clearly this is a system whose basic cross-source payment model based on open Web access can be easily extended to other content delivery networks.

So far, so good, most especially on the cross-source royalty model. In essence the Web is a broadcast medium that enables people to tune into multiple streams very easily, so tuning premium content delivery into a payment model more like radio’s royalty payment system for music producers is a strong plus. When specific content becomes very popular online, the spike in views of that content can result in direct revenues to its producers. In theory this helps to resolve the ongoing dilemma of having to expose content to search engines that’s monetized with ads that just don’t seem to take advantage of oftentimes brief spurts of interest in news items to the point of paying the bills for many publishers. If the QPass cross-platform payment system of ten years ago had not flopped by trying to control content distribution via their service we’d have had this type of payment management service in place years ago.

The next leg of Journalism Online’s plan is a little more shaky. JOI has put under its wings two of the most prominent legal talents in the U.S. – former Microsoft anti-trust attorney David Boies and former U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson – to lead some strong-arm negotiations with search engines and online aggregators to pony up licensing and royalty fees for the right to link to JOI member content. While one has to respect the considerable judicial, political and corporate gravitas of these two legal heavies, I am concerned that their efforts seem to be misplaced. There is now a substantial body of law which makes it clear that indexing a link to a headline is not a crime and falls comfortably into the concept of fair use of copyrighted content. By the logic outlined in Journalism Online's stated focus they should be suing newsstands in cities across the world for exposing the headlines of newspapers to people walking by, or charging millions of dollars for copies of the venerable Periodicals Index on library reference shelves. I believe that this tactic is in large part a sop to news publishers who have been relying thus far on the Associated Press’ failing negotiations with Google and other search engines based on similar issues.

Strong-arm legal tactics for search engine licensing are also largely unnecessary, in large part, if the JOI system works as it ought to. Access policies could be enforced on all participating publisher sites, and terms of bulk access licensing could be managed for search engines and other corporate entities from the same system that services consumers. It’s more likely that the JOI legal team is a stick for the carrot of negotiating some meaningful price points for bulk indexing access – price points that are likely to disappoint many publishers, since the search engines know that news ad revenues would die without search engine links. What’s more promising is having legal and technology infrastructure in place that could facilitate bulk relicensing of content for reuse in new content aggregation schemes such as online mashups and in enterprise software applications.

The most concerning aspect of Journalism Online, though, is the sense that their team harbors a dogged determination to preserve the status quo at traditional news media outlets in the face of more than a decade of change fostered by online access to news. The following quote from Brill seems to set the tone for much of what JOI is trying to accomplish:

“We’re also convinced,” Brill added, “that readers, who have been paying billions of dollars a year for print journalism, will continue to support journalists by paying a modest, fair price for original, independent, professional work distributed online. They realize—as we do—that quality journalism is a vital component of a functioning democracy and free market.”

While I would agree that many people are willing to pay a premium for high-quality products and services, the implication in Brill’s statement is that they are out to support the journalists creating the news in a way that will sustain the traditions of print journalism. Given that many journalists caught up in newspaper cutbacks now have to accept wages that are getting closer to those offered for low-level services jobs while many media executives continue to do rather well by themselves, I think that it’s fair to say that the merits of the print journalism model's ability to support journalists are largely at question. This sales pitch for Journalism Online is not so much about preserving journalists as it is about preserving some portion of the lavish profits once enjoyed by a news publishing industry that no longer has near-exclusive access to publishing technologies. A “modest, fair price” doesn’t sound like the type of monies that will support glitzy skyscrapers that were paid for by those technologies. Promises and realiteis seem to be out of sync in this instance by a broad stretch.

In sum the Journalism Online initiative holds out a great deal of promise for the news media to revise its thinking on how to acquire revenues more realistically in an online environment, albeit with some sentimental froth around the edges of that promise for those not quite ready to accept the true value of news in today’s online publishing environment. In a world that has empowered over 1.6 billion people as publishers, it’s no longer realistic to think that only a handful of people who carry the official title of “journalist” are defining the supply of quality information and insights in the world. The key factor that Journalism Online really doesn’t address at all is that the news industry is surrounded by valuable sources of information that leave them struggling to define a fundamental value proposition, regardless of how it may be financed. News organizations are also surrounded by technology platforms that make it possible for consumers and enterprises to aggregate, filter and analyze news far more efficiently than via their own publishing platforms. The “let’s tame Google” approach to trying to control content linking and access belies the reality that the contexts in which news is most valuable are increasingly far away from publishers’ own Web sites. There's some tacit acknowledgment of this concept in the JOI positioning, but only time will tell if they can emphasize licensing of content for reuse efficiently enough to make a real difference for news producers who must compete with and complement new sources of engaging news and information.

The search for subscription and royalty payments fostered by Journalism Online also tends to gloss over the ad-driven culture of most of today’s news organizations that restricts fairly radically what topics and personalities gain their attention in their search for an increasingly limited “truth.” If JOI could help fund a broader approach to journalism that gave coverage to less ad-worthy topics, then truly it would be living up to its ideals. It’s far from clear, though, that the news organizations that Journalism Online intends to support are likely to maximize the funding of such “news for the sake of news” journalism any time soon, though. But as an alternative to AP’s trenchant response to online publishing, it at least offers some hope for the news industry as a whole as a means to overcome some of the challenges posed to it by online content distribution capabilities.

The concepts behind Journalism Online may yet succeed in helping the news industry to secure more revenues from online publishing, but it is already a far different industry than the one that used to be dominated by the organizations which JOI is approaching to use their services, an industry which needs to support independent journalism far more effectively and which benefits from content being aggregated in any number of venues. In the meantime, technology and services providers such as Sonoa Systems and Zuora offer their own broad approaches to content distribution and monetization that offer a broad array of publishers their own alternatives to the ads-only monetization game. It’s about time that industry veterans like Brill, Crovitz and Hindery got up the gumption to try an initiative like Journalism Online to shake the news industry out of its doldrums. Hopefully they will not run out of time to convert existing news organizations to the use of their proposed sevices before their potential revenue streams have drifted towards newer sources of journalism for good.

Silicon Alley Journal: Driving Up the "Stack" of Content Value

2009-04-28T13:10:00.033-04:00

In my recent trip to San Francisco to speak about Content Nation I headed down U.S. Highway 101 from San Francisco with Shore's John Buckman to a string of appointments that moved towards the bottom of San Francisco Bay in Santa Clara and worked up 101 towards San Francisco again. As you may know this stretch of Highway 101 is the main artery of the bay area's tech industry, dotted with office parks that house many familiar tech brand names. I think of it also sometimes as a horizontal shopping mall for the content industry, with many of the companies that are driving the new value propositions for publishing flanking this highway as much as the hardware and software vendors that drove "big iron" used to dominate its multi-lane landscape.

At the end of our day's appointments, Rand Schulman, Chief Marketing Officer for InsideView, offered us an excellent dinner in the hills of San Francisco's residential neighborhoods during which he noted that there was another angle to Highway 101's linear relationship to content and technology. Rand observed that the bottom end of the bay was historically home to many of the companies that specialized in the lower-level aspects of the information industry such as hardware and operating systems, and that as one drove up the bay on 101 towards San Francisco you passed by the headquarters of companies that moved further up the technology "stack" towards the media-centric companies in and close to San Francisco itself. While it's easy enough to find exceptions to this rule, in broad concept it makes strong sense. If you're working for company "A" and decide to strike out on your own or to join another company, chances are you're going to choose a spot that has people who have sets and professional interests similar to your own. You see this also in the general design of places such as New York City, which traditionally had warehouses for raw materials lining the streets next to the cargo docks along the Hudson River, with the next tier of blocks dedicated to functions such as garment fabrication and the next tier of blocks inward from the river dedicated to the stores selling those garments.

Rand's model is particularly telling in relation to the content industry when you look at what happens in the middle stretch of Silicon Valley along 101. You have companies such as Google in or near Mountain View, rather on the southern-middle end of 101, that perhaps seemed to some like low-level technology plays when they were first launched that today have an enormous influence over the content industry as a whole. When Google's executives say again and again "We're not a content company" it is perhaps as much an affirmation of their south-Bay roots and culture deep in the technology stack as much as anything else. To some degree "content" to these folks means "those people at the top of the Bay." Looking at Oracle's recent acquisition of Sun Microsystems, it makes perfect sense that a company in Redwood Shores, much further up the bay from Sunnyvale, would be far more in tune with the need to move more towards serving up content solutions rather than just hardware and systems software?

In the dead center of this stretch in San Mateo you find the headquarters of Mark Logic, a company specializing in XML server technologies that enable publishers and enterprises to create content services from multiple content sources. At our meeting with the team of Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg we heard how Mark Logic is enjoying prosperous times, in part because they've honed much of their infrastructure for delivering their services to a highly operable and scalable level and in part because they're looking up the highway, you might say, towards opportunities that service the content end of Silicon Valley more effectively. In a sense much of the center of gravity in the content industry is heading towards such technology companies that used to be thought of as "middleware," rather industrious but supposedly dull bits of this and that that helped to glue diverse information systems together. With source-agnostic content aggregation the focus of much of the value in the content industry these days, you can hardly call companies like Mark Logic dull, much less similarly focused companies such as Google, MuseGlobal and Really Strategies.

Then at the top end of the valley you have companies like Rand Schulman's InsideView, which specializes in providing value-add context to content from multiple sources for sales force automation platforms. InsideView's "secret sauce" is its ability to parse content from both traditional and social media sources through semantic filters which identify events that are likely to be triggers for specific kinds of sales and marketing activity. That description may not sound like a traditional "top of the stack" publishing company, but in fact that's where the top end of value is in the content industry these days - not in delivering content from a single source but in adding value to content regardless of its source. So what better place to find InsideView than in the hills of San Fran itself?

Based on this new "stack" for the content industry I have to say that I was a bit confused when John Battelle noted in a recent blog that Google was going to "act like a publisher" because it may be in the process of matching display ads with news content from premium sources in its news offering. Truth be told, in the new content stack Google's been thinking - and acting - like a publisher all along. If the middle of the technology industry's stack is driving much of the value in today's publishing, then Google's contextual ad-matching capabilities are a perfect match for placing ads against the highest point in the content value chain. This is why we're seeing many major media companies such as Time, Inc. becoming more aggressive in marketing their own contextual ad matching networks - and why Battelle himself continues to operate his own Federated Media contextual ad network.

Battelle notes in his blog post "Supply means branding, and branding happens in the magical world of publishing." Well, John, the magic means something different these days - a fact that many marketers are still having a hard time grasping. The magic happens wherever people find good content, a concept that's no longer restricted to a narrow group of denizens on the top of the old content "stack." Any good content produced or contexualized by anyone can have value - either for advertisements, subscriptions or high-value enterprise services. Traders at investment banks figured this out years ago when they started parking themselves in front of computer screens connected to hundreds of information sources from around the world. That same style of content value now reaches well over a billion people in the world today. The supply that people need is the most valuable contexts for good content, not just the content itself.

There are any number of reasons why the traditional publishing industry is struggling these days, but certainly one has to look at the "stack" concept carefully to realize that the enormous technology changes over the past decade-plus of Web development rewrote what publishers assumed was their value points in the traditional publishing stack. Some still struggle valiantly to redefine technologies that will set everthing "aright" again, but who's to say that it was really right in the first place? Technology changes, and with those changes value propositions change inevitably. Here's three cheers for any and all companies who can figure out how to deliver value in the content industry - on whatever street or highway may lead to them.

Silicon Valley Journal: Sonoa Builds the Enterprise-Class Content Policy Cloud

2009-04-16T02:39:00.002-04:00

Cloud computing is an increasingly popular concept for enterprises trying to control their content and technology acquisition and distribution costs, enabling them to get more "bang for the buck" by turning many I.T. and publishing functions that used to be managed in-house over to third party infrastructure providers. Estimates of cost-efficiency benefits from using cloud computing services range in the 10x to 20x range over traditional in-house software solutions, so the motivation to use cloud computing services is clear. But as much as cloud computing is gaining in popularity, the ability to have business controls over who gets what content in cloud computing in a way that can scale with a company's operations has been a challenge for many companies on both sides of the content equation.

My recent trip to speak at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on Content Nation brought me down the bay to a company in Santa Clara that is working actively to build content policy controls right into cloud networking infrastructure. Sonoa is a company that brings the problems of managing content distribution and management via cloud computing down to a level that fits many publishers and their consumer and enterprise customers like a glove. From the perspective of Sonoa, the problems of content distribution in cloud computing revolve around now to meet client expectations for content and applications services in a Web/intranet environment and how to enable service providers to understand who is using their content in a transparent and efficient manner and to establish quality of service controls. The solution to these problems from Sonoa's view is to give both sides in this struggle more intelligent network management tools to help both sides monitor, control and understand who's getting what content more effectively.

The core of Sonoa technology is in essence very efficient software that can operate in top of most popular Internet and intranet network router devices and identify which content and services are getting to which clients and end-users and to control both access and service quality. Because Sonoa technology works at a very low level in network infrastructure, it's easy to implement Sonoa capabilities without interfering with the overall design and management of both networks and applications platforms. This is a key factor for content that's delivered via feeds, digital objects such as video streams, widgets and embeddable software and services defined via programming standards such as SOAP and REST. Unlike DRM systems, which try to do the near-impossible (and largely undesirable) task of "locking up" digital objects once they've arrived on a digital platform, Sonoa is focusing on whether and how digital services get delivered to specific clients and the measurement of how they are used and maintained. This makes a lot of sense especially for digital services that rely on a network connection to remote resources to deliver their value: why lock up the payload that you're delivering when you know that they need that network tether anyway?

Sonoa Systems capabilities can be delivered via its own networking cloud as well as via a client's own networking. In other words, the policies for accessing content can be built right into a highly efficient cloud networking infrastructure, making administration highly cost-efficient and execution of service-level agreements with content licensees very efficient. I think of these capabilities as a "content policy cloud" - in other words, Sonoa technologies help to build into network infrastructure the implementation of agreeements between a publisher and an enterprise partner or client and makes it easy to enforce and monitor those access and service agreements. Unlike typical networking infrastructure, Sonoa's technology does this for individual content services and objects. This aligns perfectly with where many enterprise and media publishers are taking their business models - towards agreements in which their content gets integrated any number of ways into their clients' platforms. Instead of turning that embeddable content loose in the client's cloud and losing track of it, Sonoa enables complex deployments in client platforms to be monitored clearly at most any scale.

Sonoa technology enables publishers and enterprises to work cooperatively with their business partners to work towards both specific access limits and specific service level agreements that meet both parties' needs. Unlike earlier attempts at baking content distribution controls into network infrastructure such as Bang Networks, Sonoa Systems has the benefit of more mature and widely implemented object programming standards, more acceptance of external services coming in through the Web to enterprises and a more highly scalable design for supporting clients. Instead of beginning to wheeze after a few hundred clients are supported, Sonoa has the ability to scale up to mega-clouds of high performance content streams.

Sonoa Systems has a growing client list, including media companies such as MTV and Warner Music Group and enterprises such as J.P. Morgan, Pfizer, Wells Fargo and IBM. I find it very interesting that major enterprises interested in both productivity and security are opting for this technology. To me, that means that some enterprise-oriented publishers are behind the curve in terms of what their major clients are putting in place to implement and monitor content services. In earlier days we always worried about feeds and APIs creating "escaped" content services; with a service such as Sonoa Systems, it becomes far easier with this era's networked services to monitor usage more easily and to implement levels of service, access and performance that are easy to administer and that allow clients to use embeddable content in their own applications far more easily. Our visit to Sonoa Systems was well worth a trip down to the shallow end of the bay; I hope that major publishers have a chance to check out this emerging technology that can help them to forge more effective business models in today's content distribution environment.

Sorting Out the AP Moves: What Will Really Work for Its Members?

2009-04-09T11:37:00.021-04:00

There's been a whirlwind of announcements, commentary and downright bad blood beginning to steam up around the Associated Press' moves to position news content from its own reporters and its member organizations more effectively in the online environment. The latest developments in the war for news organization survival were kicked off by the AP board's announcement that it would be moving aggressively to identify and to challenge Web site publishers that were using unlicensed AP content illegally. The "why" of this move, largely ignored by media reports, is contained in the rest of the announcement: AP is introducing a new schedule of lower fees for its member news organizations that will make it easier for them to participate in AP distribution and news use. Faced with having to respond to the revenue crunches experienced by most news organizations this year, AP has no choice but to ensure that their online revenue streams from organizations consuming AP content can be captured as effectively as possible.

From the perspective of public relations, any constructive aspects of the latest AP moves appear to have been lost in a sea of furor rising up from bloggers, Twitters and other online voices. TechCrunch viewed AP's moves as being akin to the RIAA's moves to prosecute consumers for downloading relatively meager quantitites of music on to their PCs - legal moves that have backfired in many ways both from a legal and public relations perspective for the music pubishing industry. TechCrunch also highlighted a cease-and-desist order sent by AP to a Web site using AP-posted video from YouTube in an embedded video player. Of course YouTube videos are made for embedding in other Web sites, and the site that happened to be using it was that of WTNQ-FM, already an AP affiliate member. Google CEO Eric Schmidt commented in the wake of these PR fiascos by AP that it's a good idea not to "piss off your customers"- especially those who are doing their very best to abide by fair use policies for the reuse of copyrighted content. AP could certainly take some lessons from Google's efforts to get publishers to swallow some of their own bitter pills with much kinder and gentler approaches to public and professional-level communications.

The question is, though, what is really the most effective path towards revenue growth for AP at this time - and are they handling the rollout of new strategies in a way that will help those new revenue streams to materialize? From the looks of things, AP is still struggling to find answers to that question. Certainly pursuing legal enforcement against blatant content pirates is one possible route, and it's not without its merits. Data published by Attributor indicates that nearly half of the Web sites taking content from major publishers are copying more than 90 pecent of the original text of articles. Knocking out parasite Web sites that copy unattributed content strictly for the purpose of sucking up ad revenues that would go otherwise to the original publishers would do the bottom lines of all online publishers a great favor. It's a shame that AP's initial efforts along this vein have resulted in embarassing misfires - it's an important goal that should not be sidelined by a mishandling of the policies built on top of the underlying copy detection technologies.

But the larger concern is whether AP is really "getting" how to make money in the online publishing environment. The AP board announcement included a statement indicating AP's intent to build a search portal that would feature only content from "authoritative" news sources. While this is a constructive goal of sorts, we've had such search engines for years already. The Topix search engine focuses primarily on traditional media sources, and, for that matter, Yahoo! News and other major portal news services have focused on aggregating and searching mainstream news even longer. Both are good efforts in their own ways, but they're not floating the boat for most online news publishing revenues and they're not growing in any significant way. Why would yet another search portal wind up being the solution to news publishers' concerns?

The future that AP needs to embrace can be summed up in a fairly simple phrase: get news content that people really want to read to where it can make money. In broad concept that's pretty much what AP's mission has been all along, but in insisting that that mission cannot be expanded or altered significantly in light of how news is created today is holding back both AP and its member organizations from surviving and thriving in online news markets. Media organizations need to become better at aggregating sources of news more agnostically: if someone is streaming live video via Qik from their mobile phone at the site of a plane crash, then AP should be the natural source to which news organizations would turn to find such content as breaking news, not "i-reports." The idea of "authoritative" news need not always be synonymous with editorial and news-gathering methods that grew up in the era of printing presses. With today's publishing technologies editorial values can be implemented in many ways that can expedite the most compelling information getting to the right audiences at the right time.

This recognition that its own members need better agnostic aggregation of news sources is key to AP supporting the economic performance of those news organizations. Thomson Reuters CEO noted recently at a conference, "Why does The New York Times need to have 600-700 journalists? Why not 30 journalists with 30 apprentices?" In other words, if the economics of news have shifted permanently, why try to justify subsidizing jobs that need to move elsewhere in the news economy simply because you want only specific people in specific organizations producing news a specific way? With billions of people around the world equipped with real-time news publishing tools, including increasingly successful independent journalists, the world's attention span has permanently embraced this "Content Nation" as a source of information that they trust. That's a fact that will simply never go away. Trying to make it go away is about at pointless as anyone who tried to sift the tea thrown overboard in Boston Harbor back in 1775. Even if you could do it, who would want to drink it?

Instead of arguing with people who are both consumers and sources of news, AP needs to take a deep breath and think about how they can power the profits of today's news organizations using whatever content - news, metadata, links, video, anything - will help them to make money. In some instances this may mean new members and approaches to membership, in other instances it may mean playing a very different role with existing members and in how they participate in its editorial efforts. This can be a hard thing for any organization with a venerated history as rich as AP's to do, and I know that they are trying their best to move in that direction. But if they were able to leave the confines of Rockefeller Center behind to set up shop in dot-com West Side digs, one would hope that AP could help to carry both its traditions of excellence and of innovation to new levels of performance in the news industry that take it in directions that others have yet to dare to imagine. The time to dream a new dream at AP has come. I do hope that they start to envision and to realize that dream aggressively some time soon, both for its own sake and for the sake of its members.

Mobile Beyond Carriers: VoIP and the Web are Here, But Are Content Companies Ready?

2009-03-30T07:37:00.005-04:00

As CNET reports along with others the launch of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone services via an iPhone application from Skype the world does not seem to be shifting on its axis, yet it's a significant step towards a new era in mobile communications. Already the introduction of Web capabilities on Apple's iPhone became the cornerstone of the appliance's widespread appeal among mobile content enthusiasts, fueled by the iPhone's Web browser that works pretty much as any Web browser should and by the iPhone AppStore's content applications that make use of Web communications. Now that VoIP is available on the iPhone - presumably with Apple's tacit blessing - one wonders who is eating whose lunch in the battle for the future of mobile services.

Certainly in the U.S. you can give the opening round of mobile battles to AT&T, which inked an exclusive deal with Apple for the iPhone's launch similar to exclusives that Apple negotiated elsewhere in the world. But as part of that deal Apple got AT&T and other global carriers to subsidize a huge chunk of the iPhone's retail price, enabling it to spread like wildfire amongst the "gotta have" gadget crowd. Now that VoIP services are beginning to make their debut on the iPhone - followed soon by emerging voice services by Google via their Web sites and, quite soon, via their Android mobile platform - the question becomes, have the mobile phone carriers been subsidizing the emergence of cross-network voice communications that will break their voice and content pricing strategies?

If this is the case, then I can't say that I can offer them much sympathy. AT&T happens to be the carrier for my local telephone service, which still has me guessing virtually every time whether a call to the towns next to us will be a local or "long distance" call. If I didn't need a copper-wire circuit for my home's burglar alarm I'd be done with them altogether. While VoIP is hardly a perfect voice medium, for eighty percent of our communications is just fine. Moreover, for many younger people spending more time texting than speaking on their phones it may be more than enough most of the time. In the meantime we're stuck with voice and data plans on most mobile carriers based on the premise that voice is a doggone hard service to provide. Well, that's good for the tech players such as Apple who want someone to subsidize their push into mobile services, but it is at the expense of a broader iPhone-less marketplace that is in effect subsidizing the upper end of mobile content comsumption.

This is not a scenario that is likely to change gracefully for the communications carriers. Web and VoIP-based services are going to start dominating mobile communications far more quickly than many imagine, especially as Google Android's cross-platform mobile operating system offers struggling communications companies some alternative pricing and marketing strategies. In the U.S., for example, Sprint is moving to lease out some of its underutilized mobile bandwidth to device and services vendors other than smart phones. How long is it before a number three or number four mobile carrier begins to smell the coffee and begin to offer pricing that reserves traditional mobile voice communications as a "just in case" or high-quality backup to a predominantly Web-based communications plan? Not long, by my estimate.

Content companies should bear in mind this more-rapid-than-expected shift towards Web-biased mobile carrier pricing when contemplating their own mobile pricing and marketing strategies. Already with the iPhone AppStore publishers and other content suppliers see the outlines of a premium content strategy that emphasizes functionality as a key part of their services as much as information. But as the Web and VoIP push in at an accelerated rate to drive more competitive carrier pricing, it's likely that revenues from these applications are going to be the icing on a much bigger cake of content services for the greater marketplace that will resembe more the Web as it is today than any return to a Compuserve-like "walled garden" era of application-enabled services.

The iPhone AppStore is a model for the emerging electronic newsstand era, but the content that will power the most successful of those applications will not come from a particular branded content producer oftentimes. The subsidization of iPhones by the carriers makes the prospect of endless premium content revenues enticing, yet as those subsidies fall by the wayside and the broader marketplace turns to mobile Web content it's doubtful that the novelty of mobile content applications alone will be enough to power publishers' mobile revenues. In short, the mobile Web has arrived and is going to drive publishers to have to confront the same issues of commoditization and increased competition that it faces today via desktop and laptop content consumption. Most publishers may look at Skype's move as little more than a bird flying by, but for those that know it's the canary in the coal mine of old-era mobile communications content pricing.

Time MINE: Online Lessons Creep Into Print Content

2009-03-19T19:00:00.033-04:00

With newspapers and magazines folding virtually every week now in the face of a global economic crisis Clay Shirky is comparing the scope of change being experienced by the rise of online publishing's challenge to newspapers to the tumultuous change sparked by the rise of printing presses nearly five hundred years ago. From my perspective I think that the scope is actually far broader than that. As I outline in the Content Nation book, the scope of change fomented by the rise of online publishing is likely historical on an even broader scale, a scale perhaps never seen since the rise of centralized publishing by the world's first recorded civilizations thousands of years ago.

Whatever the ultimate breadth of the challenges facing traditional publishers, one thing is for certain: timidity in addressing the challenges presented by online publishing has not served them well. This timidity reflects not just in the online portals offered by most traditional media companies but as well in their print strategies. You'd think that some of the lessons learned from online publishing would have worked their way into print offerings a long time ago. Yet more than two years after Wired Magazine offered its users the ability to put their own photo on a customized cover of their magazine (part of a promotion by Xerox), the mass customization of print remains largely a novelty in the eyes of most mass media publishers. But there are glimmers of hopeful signs that publishers may be getting ready to push further on into print customization.

One recent sign of hope for mass customization is a new offering from Time, Inc.'s consumer media group called MINE, a service that allows people to build their own custom magazines from articles found in eight of their leading consumer publications. The actual customization seems to be quite limited at this point - you may specify your address, your age, up to five Time-owned magazines that you'd like to have content from and provide answers to four questions that indicate your presumed tastes (Like sushi or pizza? Sing in the shower? Would you like to learn juggling or celebrity impersonation? Would you like to have dinner with Leonardo da Vinci or Socrates?). From these choices Time will pop out articles tailored to your profile in five issues of your MINE magazine print or digital form, all for free (Lexus appears to be the major sponsor for this effort).

On the scale of today's print offerings this is a fairly bold experiment, enabling Time brands normally built up separately through their various flagship publications to comingle in a common publication. It echoes in some ways the use of The Wall Street Journal's branded business content in some local newspaper editions, but with a level of customization not seen heretofore the editorial side of a magazine cover. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki notes tongue in cheek in a recent Twitter message that perhaps it's even a copy of his Alltop's "online magazine rack" of popular topics concept. While I wouldn't discount that self-flattering comparison of Guy's entirely, I think that it's far more likely that Time has finally started to consider a broader range of lessons from online publications - albeit a bit late in the game - and how they may apply to their traditional strengths as direct marketing mavens.

The truth is that Time has been customizing both editorial and ad copy for years based on zip codes and other key demographic groupings. It may not be apparent to the typical person flipping through Sports Illustrated or whatever, but oftentimes they're highly tailored publications. With the technology in place already to do this type of customization on a per-title basis, it's a relatively small step to stage content on a more granular level from multiple titles into MINE issues. So in most respects MINE is an evolutionary step towards enabling multi-branded content in one delivery package. In a way MINE is akin to a "my [name of portal]" type of customization that has been part of online offerings for more than a decade - not only just evolutionary from a print perspective but old, old news from an online perspective.

So while MINE is a positive development, why is it that it is taking traditional publishers so long to develop business models that make more efficient use of print technology as a content delivery system? I for one don't believe that print is at all a dead medium: it's just a horribly neglected medium that has been allowed to die in the hands of very inefficient business models as all of the publishing efficiencies flow to online venues. Reprint services demonstrate every day that print can be a highly effective and profitable targeted communications medium. Yet most publishers derive single percentage digits of their revenues from custom printing. Hmm, tiny slivers of highly profitable printing versus huge swaths of increasingly unprofitable printing...what's wrong with this picture?

It's great that Time is trying out the market for custom aggregations of its own content, but let's he honest - publishers need to be far, far more aggressive in packaging their content in personalized publications tailored for individuals. Unfortunately for some publishers, the greatest opportunities in custom printing lie with those who are willing to let other business models drive the aggregation technologies that make that possible. Some of those business models may yet wind up in the hands of major publishers, but it's far more likely that after years of whining and wrestling, newspaper and magazine publishers will finally surrender to the notion that enabling their content to be licensed through whatever print or print-like electronic vehicle services their audience most effectively is going to be the most profitable and effective way for their print-formatted content to gain exposure. Applying the lessons of the Web to print must be a priority for print publications to survive and to thrive.

While I agree with Clay Shirky that the triviality of making electronic copies of content has changed the economics of the publishing business fundamentally, until some electronic medium has the simplicity, ease and readability of print publications there will be a highly exploitable market for print. In many instances people love to curl up in a time of relaxation to catch up with a print publication, oftentimes on a weekend or during travel. It's a luxury to spend time reading "unplugged" content - a luxury that will only be spent on a handful of print publications. Why not enable people to put whatever content will be of interest to them into that luxury experience? Branded portals for publishers are becoming less and less of a driver for building online revenues: why shouldn't publishers become more aggressive in putting their audiences in the driver's seat for aggregating the content that's of interest to them in print as well?

So kudos for Time testing the waters for their MINE publication, but I do hope that major publishers will finally begin to see the light and start enabling the printing of massively customized print and print-formatted publications that aggregate content from whatever sources interest their audiences the most. The result will be far higher ad rates, far higher returns on investment and a much more healthy print publishing business in the long run. Let's stop allowing printing presses to go dark in major cities just because the one publishing company running them cannot build a business model to support them. Let those printing presses role with whatever content will command the highest interest from audiences from whatever sources produce it, and the money will follow with due haste.

Closing the Online Revenue Gap: Attributor Powers Automated Monetization Solutions for Distributed Content

2009-03-12T14:28:00.055-04:00

A fundamental problem that the publishing industry faces in getting revenues from online content is that most of the value that can be created from their content lies beyond their own Web sites and portals. With billions of Web publications vying to get people's attention and a relative handful of professionally produced publications to compete for that attention it's no small wonder many media executives are humming the now-familiar "content in context" meme as they ponder how to make use of the Web's ocean of content to promote their own wares. The sad truth, though, is that most publishers are ill-equipped to get any money from their content beyond their own online publications. Most media organizations have tiny content licensing business development teams that typically trudge through protracted deals with a handful of publishing partners, leaving the lion's share of potential revenues from partners on the table.

Attributor Corporation has been hot on the trail of how to close the gap between potential revenues from content used across the Web and and the ability to extract those revenues. The Attributor system works by listening to feeds of content from participating publishers. Attributor captures what they've published and then compares it to content that's been published on the Web. When Attributor finds content that's a full or partial match it compiles content usage reports for clients who can then can use automated tools from Attributor or their own methods to pursue the reuse of their content from a business and legal perspective.

How big is the opportunity for monetizing reused content? Recently Attributor shared with me some research based on content from prominent publishers' Web sites fed into its system along with Compete.com usage data that surfaced some profound statistics. The key thought-provoker emerging from this research is that the audience for people viewing content on sites that were not active syndication or licensing partners was more than five times larger than the audience on the publishers' own sites. Almost half of these largely "passive syndicators" were copying 90 percent or more of the content from publishers' articles and more than 70 percent of the copied articles were using at least half of the available content from articles. Before the publishers reading this post slip on their hair shirts and moan in protest, please consider this first: what publisher wouldn't want to have a 5X increase in potentially monetizable content inventory with no additional overhead?

The research also indicated that two-thirds of the sites using content from these leading publishers were providing links back to the publisher's sites, indicating that they were at least nominally cooperative in building traffic to their sites. Armed with data from Attributor, publishers can pursue on a more highly automated basis Web sites that use their content and turn passive syndicators into active publishing partners - and in the process of doing so shift the balance of traffic back into sites that will feed revenues to the publisher. Attributor projects that using their technologies could help to reduce non-cooperative passive syndicators significantly, potentially doubling traffic captured at publishers' own sites and nearly tripling the traffic visiting cooperative syndication partners. No doubt it would also help content reusers pressing the boundaries of fair use policy to understand what individual publishers considered to be fair use more quickly and effectively.

Attributor sees its data gathering and analysis tools as a key to unlocking significant new online revenues for publishers. It sees at least two basic options that publishers using its data can undertake to establish revenue streams rapidly. Option one: Attributor helps publishers reclaim their fair share of ad revenues from ads served up by existing ad networks on sites using their content. This could in theory help for managing both active and passive syndication partners. Option two: enable Attributor to funnel ads from existing networks and publishers' own direct ad sales to syndication partners. Obviously there are other steps that publishers could take based on Attributor data, but either of these options suggested by Attributor help both to reclaim ad revenues for legitimate publishers and syndicators efficiently and to reduce the revenues fed out by ad networks to non-legitimate syndicators.

To make it easier for publishers large and small to get an idea of the potential for Attributor to help them monetize content they have launched FairShare, a no-fee service that enables people to get data on sites using their content from Attributor analytics provided in an RSS feed. FairShare will pump out stats on individual articles and how they've been reused on specific Web sites, including data on what percentage of an article has been used, whether the reuser is using ads on the page on which it appears and whethe there are linkbacks to their original content. As an option FairShare makes it easier for people using Creative Commons licensing to map their license terms to the patterns of use found in Attributor's Web site analysis. Although launched just a few days ago FairShare is already tracking more than 150,000 articles and has found more than 3.3 million shared copies of content. As seen in the example to the right, FairShare is finding sites that use just fair use snippets of ContentBlogger's content as well as sites that seem to take more than their fair share. If ContentBlogger were ad-supported and Attributor were funneling this data to the ad networks that support content clippers I could be seeing some automatic revenues from these sites. A nice thought in a slow ad economy, no?

Attributor technology has been launched recently as an underpinning for FreeWheel, a service that enables videos from YouTube and other outlets that are embedded on other Web sites to be served up with the ads that benefit the original video publisher the most. FreeWheel calls this concept "Monetization Rights Management," as opposed to the Digital Rights Management packaging that tries to keep others from distributing content themselves. FreeWheel notes - quite rightly, I believe - that legitimate viral distribution of content needs to be encouraged so that content can find its most valuable contexts. Once content is in a valuable context it can be monetized with ads and other marketing mechanisms that benefit both the creator of the content and the publisher that found a valuable context for their content.

As major publishers mull over the capabilities of Attributor technologies, hopefully they begin to see that it offers a key solution to the dilemmas of how to make money on content in an era in which controlling distribution is not only less feasible but also less desirable. To borrow from the language of my book Content Nation, the world is now a nation of publishers, a nation whose value cannot be ignored by traditional publishers as a source of monetizable contexts. Since most non-subscription Web content relies on search engines to maximize their ad revenues, Attributor's search-based technologies can enable publishers to understand who's using their content with the same tools that those publishers use to drive monetizable traffic to their sites. Using Attributor data and tools can enable a highly automated and efficient approach to revenue generation from viral distribution that would eliminate friction with those outlets that use a publisher's content fairly and that can allow publishers to keep on top of "bad apples" on a daily basis.

As major publishers such as The New York Times and The Guardian begin to set their content loose via sophisticated programming interfaces the Attributor concepts of using searching and content identification to establish commercial relationships automatically with publishers using their content can open up an era in which reused content is creating higher value and revenues rapidly for publishers with lower audience acquisition costs. With revenue acquistion schemes such as Attributor in place publishers can concentrate more on making their content as useful and as accurate as possible - and leave the inventiveness of where it's going to be most useful to the world at large.

Certainly publishers will continue to compete to make their own publications a destination of choice, but with only thousands of traditional publishers and billions of self-empowered Web and mobile publishers the time has come to use technology to harvest the value of content in as many publishing contexts as posssible as efficiently as possible. Most especially in the news industry, where getting people's attention in fleeting moments is increasingly difficult, the ability to harvest revenues from content reuse and linking more automatically is an absolute necessity.

This need to chase the contexts of content use in order to make money in online media does not mean that copyright is a dead concept. Far from it: copyright ensures that the creators of original works of authorship have the ability to claim ownership of the intellectual property that is rightfully theirs, especially when it is used in contexts where its use is harder to verify, such as in enterprises and in private communications such as emails, photocopying and reprints. But it's important to remember that the concepts of copyright were introduced into law when publishing was still a relatively fledgling industry, with few commercial outlets available and with the need to support getting information and ideas out to the public via a still-young technology a crying necessity. The "printing press" of today is not any particular Web site or service but the Web as a whole: every person has the potential to play a role in the mechanism of publishing. As such, copy rights, while still relevant, have become less important than context rights - the ability to say how participants in a global peer publishing and aggregation process should recognize the value of a creative work. Nearly three years ago I introduced this concept at a presentation at BookExpo in Washington, DC, using the above square logo as a symbol for context rights.

Today in the work of Attributor we see the beginnings of the effective monetization of context rights taking form. I am hopeful that publishers will finally begin to see the outlines of how to use technologies such as Attributor to forge more effective relationships with the global publishing mechanism of Content Nation to benefit the creative forces behind their content and to create new ways to define the value of their brands. It's a far different methodology than most publishers are used to, but in a world in which the fundamental nature of publishing has changed far more radically than most traditional publishers have dared to acknowledge, it is time for publishers to embrace context rights and to define their value propositions more effectively in a world whose very survival may depend upon the power of ubiquitous publishing to solve problems facing humanity rapidly.

(Full disclosure statement: I really have nothing to disclose, I have had no past or present commercial relationship with Attributor. I just believe that they are pursuing one of the most effective routes to content monetization available today and I hope that publishers pay close attention to their efforts.)

Amazon Kindle on iPhone: eBooks go Mass Market. Kind Of. Almost.

2009-03-05T22:31:00.010-05:00

The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberger and other prominent lights are weighing in on the launch of an application on Apple's iPhone that enables reading e-books compatible with Amazon's Kindle mobile device, with many analysts cooing about this as a huge event. There's no doubt that Kindle e-books have everthing to gain from leapfrogging out of a pond of half a million Kindle devices into a lake of thirteen million-plus iPhone owners (just in time for "Content Nation," which is now available on Kindle). Better yet, since the Kindle application does not tie down Amazon to any exclusive marketing deal with Apple, the doorway is open for Amazon to march onto Nokias, Blackberries and phones equipped with Google's Andriod application. As people owning Kindle-compatible book titles move from one mobile device to another, the Kindle Store on the Web will make it possible for them to use their e-book on any equipped device, "closing" their book on one gizmo and being able to "open" it on another one at the same spot. Think of it as an iTunes for books that's not tied down to any particular player. Not much to complain about here at first glance: it's the creation of the first true mass market platform for electronic books from major publishers. Kudos to Amazon and to the publishers that are playing with them to advance Kindle sales.

But let's look past the first glance and get to what this really means for book publishing. The good news is that Kindle books can now reach the relatively affluent and educated audience that has enough money to buy iPhones - many of whom may have the money for both an iPhone and a Kindle reader but not necessarily the desire to lug around two book-reading gizmos all of the time. Now e-books get to take a major step towards the "nearly everywhere" profile that Web content has on both Internet and mobile-based devices. The bad news, though, is that the book industry, already beholden to Amazon almost as much as music companies are beholden to iTunes for electronic sales, appears to be repeating the mistakes that are likely to prevent their revenues from growing quickly enough to sustain their business models. Put simply, book publishers have turned over the keys to their electronic printing presses to Jeff Bezos and said, "Knock yourself out, you know what to do more than we do." E-books will progress only as quickly as it suits Amazon - and on only those platforms that suit them.

A benevolent monopoly of this kind for electronic book distribution might be beneficial for publishers if it had global reach, but those 13 million iPhones represent only about half of the greater New York City metropolitan market. A good chunk, to be sure, but a far step away from, say, the 1.6 billion people using the Web or the billions of mobile phone users around the world. And even within that universe of 13 million iPhone users, a fair amount of those people fall into the category of folks who Steve Jobs believed would never really read much of anything. In the meantime the audience for books continues to get grayer and grayer. To put it another way, I don't see all that many people in book stores toting around iPhones. The Kindle packaging for iPhone solves a key licensing and distribution problem for book publishers that's likely to improve their profits in the short term, but it does not come even close to building marketable exposure for books on a scale that is likely to draw attention away from other forms of electronic content.

This brings us back to those music publishing companies which had such high hopes for the DRM-enabled iPhone agreements that they signed only a few years ago. This "magic bullet" seemed great at the time - and it certainly has been great for Apple's profits. But it did little to slow the rapid erosion of profits from music sales at most of the major music publishers. Put simply, the insistence on having packaging that seemed to protect their existing business models only delayed the point at which music publishers had to face that their models were going to miss the lion's share of revenues that could be generated online from music. What they saw in the Web was the world's largest music store. What they should have seen was the world's largest theatre and radio station rolled into one.

Book publishers in general don't suffer from the electronic piracy problems that plagued the music industry, so no doubt it seemed like a logical step to move into rights-protected distribution that enabled book publishers to manage industry metrics in much the same way that they have managed metics on print book sales. But in focusing on protecting their existing business model, like the music industry the book industry is largely delaying the more troubling question of how they can make the most money possible from the global audience of billions who engage the Web and mobile devices daily.

Kindle book packaging is useful for traditional reading, but how, for example, can it facilitate even the most basic collaborative use of books? Basic uses of books such as discusions via book clubs, classroom discussion, fair-use excerpting, note-sharing and other value-add services are nowhere near the surface of the stack of potential Kindle developments. Beyond replicating basic uses of print books there is little if any thought given as to how multimedia can be integrated into Kindle books effectively. For example, the online version of the "Content Nation" book has about a dozen video clips embedded in the text. Even still photos of most of these clips did not make their way into the print edition because of traditional print publishing standards. Yet these same clips would be great to have in an electronic, Web-enabled version of the book.

While it's possible that an aggressive roll-out of Kindle readers on most major mobile devices could help to stave off some of the worst problems that are looming for book publishers, the truth is that they are years behind in developing the real opportunities for books in electronic format. Book publishers are facing the same revenue gaps that confront music, newspaper and magazine publishers that waited far too long to build robust online revenue models that could sustain them as their traditional revenue sources moved into legacy status. In the meantime the Google e-books initiative that builds on their book-scanning initiative promises to put millions of book titles on electronic devices that are no longer controlled by book publishers. In other words, Kindle may just turn out to be the "eight track tape" solution for books - a technology that seemed to be extremely popular at first with the public for listening to tape-recorded music but that turned out to be a dead end for early adapters when more flexible and higher-quality technologies came along.

Every time publishers resist the fundamental dynamics of the Web, they usually come to regret it. Traditional book publishers still have an opportunity to redefine their future independent of the Kindle, but it's more likely that the explosion of alternative online book publishing services will begin to overtake Kindle-based books over the next few years as sources of content that are more flexible, more shareable and more attuned to the needs of new generations of readers to whom the term "cracking the books" is largely a metaphor. Traditional books and book publishers will live on, and Kindle will help them to live on for many years to come. But in the meantime a new book industry is being defined that will be the true future of books - with or without Kindles.

Microsoft's Kumo Prototype Wrestles Powerset Search Features into Live Search

2009-03-03T11:30:00.006-05:00

While the concept of the content organization features found in the Powerset search application was always compelling, the original content in the demo application set up for the early version of Powerset was not the most powerful presentation of its strengths. Now in the hands of its acquirer Microsoft, the Powerset features appear to be ready to take on a much-improved content set and interface in the guise of an internal project at Microsoft labeled "Kumo." As revealed by Kara Swisher at All Things Digital, an internal Microsoft memo is encouraging staff to play with the prototype search engine to get some initial feedback.

In spite of some scathing negative reviews from the search engine intelligentia, the screen grabs provided by ATD of the Kumo interface look to be pretty competent. Gone is the over-busy Powerset interface, replaced by and interface that is at once Google-esque and yet unique. The top five web results are followed by results that match different facets of a search term. For example, results for the recording artist Taylor Swift return groupings of content available for her songs, her lyrics, her bio and her music downloads and her albums. On the left are possible searches by related artists and categories, as well as the ability to initiate new searches in video collections, bios and so on.

It's unclear at this point whether Kumo will be just a project name - it's apparently a word that means both "cloud" and "spider" in Japanese - or whether it's just an internal marker that may disappear at its features get absorbed into Microsoft's Live Search engine. For that matter, it's unclear that the features will make their way into production at all, though they are certainly useful enough. What is clear, though, is that Microsoft is going to continue to search for new ways to make alternatives to Google palatable in a way that might appeal to both enterprise and media audiences. I don't think that too many people harbor illusions about the ability to crack Google's dominant market share in search any time soon, but competition is good for the breed, they say.

I suppose the most intriguing aspect of Google's success that challenges the challengers such as Kumo is how Google has attained its success without explicit content categorization features. One can go to dozens of knowledge management and search conferences every year and hear about how important good content categorization features are for the success of search engines - and then look at the nearly naked search results on Google to contemplate just how true that may be. The assumption that categorization specialists have is that having categories makes it easier to browse content collections. Well, that may very well be true if you are in fact interested in browsing relatively finite and well-organized collections of content, but in general search engines have become less about browsing and more about delivering specific answers for most people. The average searcher seems to be trained now to refine their own searches via the "white box" rather than to traverse through browsing categories.

This isn't to say that content categorization isn't useful: it's more a matter of where it turns out to be most useful. Where it does seem to help most is in portal solutions where someone has come to a specific page of content and may want to explore that site or database from different facets. Where people understand that there's a finite, well-curated collection at their disposal, categorization seems to do quite well. Where it's a matter of sifting through billions of pages for the needle in the haystack, most folks are getting used to typing in the best search string that they can think of. With that said, the features in Kumo do provide an interesting and engaging alternative to Google search results, but they'd probably be better off either in specific content portals that need enrichment or in creating an on-demand portal from its results sets, so that it will be a more browsable set of content in its own right - and then, perhaps, attract a higher breed of advertising, if that's the goal. Instead of trying to out-Google Google, perhaps challengers such as Kumo need to think about how to out-aggregate the aggregators to build better revenue margins for smaller search operations. Something to wrestle with, perhaps.

Rich Content for Everyone: Zemanta Brings Semantic Analysis to Blogs and CMS Platforms

2009-03-01T22:04:00.015-05:00

Last week's Social Media Club meeting was great for any number of reasons that I covered in my Content Nation blog post, but it was capped by one of those moments of serendipity that come along only so often. As I settled in to my train seat on the way home, I noticed that my friend Jim Hirshfield was sitting in the seat behind me. Jim and I had last seen one another at last year's Cluetrain@10 celebration in New York City, just as he was looking to re-enter the startup space. Today Jim is VP of Business Development of Zemanta, a European startup with development offices in Slovenia that has developed a nifty platform that enables publishers to enrich their online content via their semantic language processing tools.

Zemanta technology operates via a plugin for popular blogging and Web CMS platforms and with popular brower-based email services such as Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. As with other semantic processing services that parse documents to suggest related links, tags and content, Zemanta semantic processing technology pumps text that's being typed in by a document author through its semantic filters to come up with relevant rich content that can be inserted into these documents. This in and of itself is not terribly revolutionary: publishing platforms have had similar tools for years to facilitate the development of rich content that can attract search engine traffic and keep audiences engaged in their content. What's highly interesting about Zemanta's approach is that it is a free download that can be integrated within seconds into platforms that are popular with both bloggers and professional publishers. A "pro" model is available that can be tailored for a publisher's own content on their own platforms.

Best of all, the stuff just plain works. As you type along, Zemanta's suggestions for images, links, tagging and related content pop up in convenient spots near a page's editing window. This real-time analysis is quite impressive and remarkably effective: it seems to take only a few sentences to get going and it gets only better as you type in more. A quick click or drag of the mouse and rich content is integrated into a blog post or article easily. It's giddily easy to enrich your articles: virtually every link, image and tag in this article was implemented with Zemanta. Zemanta's free download links into 10 million-plus items of content from free sources, including rights-cleared images from sources such as CrunchBase, Flickr and Google Maps, articles from key bloggers and Wikipedia as well as information posted on social networking services and content from Crunchbase, Amazon, YouTube and other popular sources. "Reblogging" content to other sites with trace linking to the original source is applied automatically to each post.

High-end services may provide more features, content and functionality for semantic content integration, but for publishers that don't have the time, money or project bandwidth for such solutions and that need to get more enriched content quickly Zemanta offers remarkable power in its free version - as well as the ability to upgrade to the premium version that enables publisher-specific sources to be integrated easily as well. This can be particularly important for a publisher that may have blogging or open-source CMS platforms that will not be so easily integrated into some of the high end semantic services. Zemanta allows these publishers to make rapid integration of content from their existing sources a very short project. In a world in which publishing platforms with 80 percent of what one would expect from a professional package now dominate the bulk of content being generated on the Web, Zemanta gives those platforms yet another "pretty-darn-good" asset that can help their content to compete effectively in online content markets. My thanks to Jim for being in the right place at the right time with a great tool for publishers of all sizes.

Alacra Pulse: More Signal, Less Noise from Web-based Company News and Analysis

2009-02-23T16:18:00.012-05:00

As the financial industry has writhed and wrinkled under the pressures of a wilting market for securities, financial content vendors have squirmed along with them, trying to define value propositions that will enable them to help both traditional clients and any and all possible new ones that they may be able to surface. One of the content companies positioned best to take advantage of these changes is Alacra, an up-and-coming aggregator of financial and business information that has spread beyond its roots in investment banking to appeal to a broader audience in finance and corporate circles. Alacra has a series of core premium research offerings with high functionality that major institutions can subscribe to as well as The Alacra Store that enables people to search for and purchase premium financial research and news sources on an a la carte basis. This allows Alacra to shift revenue streams rather nicely as clients become more or less oriented towards subscription services as the global economy goes through its cyclical paces.

One of the major problems in the current economic downturn, though, is that in many instances earlier sources of premium research are disappearing. As investment banks and other institutions have cut back on their research staffs, there are fewer people being paid to turn out premium research reports on institutions issuing securities and on market sectors. In some instances major institutions are passing on research coverage on major sectors such as the finance industry itself. Imagine that - banks refusing to analyze banks. Strange times, indeed, but that has become the economics of the securities industry. As more and more trading of securities has shifted to electronic trading systems, the shrinking profits from electronic trades have made it harder to justify the expense of offering clients detailed research and analysis.

This doesn't mean that quality research and opinion on financial markets has disappeared altogether, though. As in many forms of publishing much of the information that used to come from major banks and financial publishers through premium services can now be found in one form or another on the open Web. That's the good news, but the bad news is that it's not the easiest thing to filter out the good sources from the bad sources and to get it into a form that's meaningful for financially-oriented professionals. Barry Graubart, Vice President, Product Strategy & Business Development, calls this need to filter out lower-quality sources the "signal to noise ratio," a fair way to characterize the problem given the level of noisy and oftentimes inaccurate sources of financial information offered by some services on the Web.

Enter Alacra Pulse, a new "freemium" offering from Alacra that breaks new ground in organizing content freely available on the Web into a highly usable format for investors, an aggregation that focuses on content relating to several hundred large and medium companies from hundreds of sources on the Web. In some instances Alacra Pulse's sources are familiar names such as investment bank ABN Amro and Standard & Poor's Credit Research, sources that publish many market reports and alerts for free already. Other sources are much more niche-oriented and more likely to carry some of the Web's sometimes irreverent outlook on topics, but are carefully picked by Alacra for their quality and the demand for their quality by financial professionals.

For instance, Stockgeek.net might not be the first source that would come to an average person's mind as a reputable source of financial information and insight, but those in the know are aware of its opinions and rely on it and many other non-traditional sources of financial information to keep them informed. I have witnessed this myself many times in doing research for financial information companies. Many financial professionals take the time to look at key trusted online information sources that focus on their domain of expertise. These sources include many independent financial analysis firms, which use a level of free information on the Web to attract insitutions to premium services.

Alacra Pulse does a nice job of wrapping these sources up in a standardized format that makes it easy to get the best of independent thinking on investments available today. Alacra Pulse enables you to look at the latest on all topics from analysts, to drill down into research on specific companies or to browse through the research and insight offerings from specific sources. Links to articles and reports from sources are labeled with color-coded icons that identify the type of source - "sell side," "buy side," credit agencies and industry-specific experts - and are also complemented with links to premium sources in The Alacra Store for those who would like to pay a bit to dig further. Otherwise, you can click on a headline to view a story on its native Web site.

One of the key features of Alacra Pulse is the ability to leave comments on a featured story. In just the few days since its debut Alacra Pulse seems to be drawing quite a few comments already, helping to enrich the site for both its visitors and advertisers looking for a little extra "stickiness" for their ads. The presentation of the Alacra Pulse ad-based portal is similar to other Alacra products, offering a simple, clean look and generally easy-to-use features and ads that are not too intrusive. For those that need more tools, the premium version offers alerts filtering and email notifications as well.

Financial information for professional investors tends these days to fall into either the ultra-staid realm of subscription database services or the wild and wooly world of online services that speak frankly about investments. Alacra Pulse does an excellent job of aggregating the best of online services into a format that professionals - and those who pay for their financial information services - should feel comfortable using and supporting. In that sense Alacra Pulse is a good calling card for investment-oriented professionals who can learn about the Alacra brand from this new product and feel comfortable graduating from it into more premium offerings.

In the meantime hundreds of companies that have been losing valuable coverage from industry analysts at major investment banks can begin to reap the rewards of a service that begins to give their securities issues a chance of getting consistent high-quality free coverage aggregated in a convenient format for their investors. At a time when everyone in the investment community is struggling to come up with answers to getting investor confidence rolling again, Alacra Pulse is a well-timed offering with a great signal-to-noise ratio that may help the markets to get a pulse again.

Micropayment Flap: Beyond the Rhetoric to the Real Issues

2009-02-12T17:15:00.009-05:00

As you may recall David Carr triggered a firestorm of discussion in the media industry about micropayments with his 11 January column in The New York Times when he suggested that newspaper publishers should think about how Apple's iTunes platform does quite handily charging consumers for by-the-song access to music. I blogged on this and other aspects of the business model quandary a couple of days later and mentioned micropayments as one innovative avenue for publishers to explore. It would be hubris for me to say that I triggered the ensuing firestorm of discussion on micropayments, but certainly the "M word" has been buzzing around quite a bit these days.

The crescendo on micropayments was marked by former Slate online magazine editor Michael Kinsley's op/ed piece in The New York Times a few days ago in which he lambasted the idea of micropayments. Kinsley notes rightly as have others that the prime thing that keeps people from paying for content from traditional brand sources is the availability of free/ad-supported sources of content from new online sources that are oftentimes perfectly acceptable alternatives. There's no doubt that Kinsley's early abandoned experiment with online subscriptions was a bellweather for the content industry (my now-rusting Slate umbrella from my own subscription now shelters me on the way to the end of my driveway for newspapers and mail), so his negativity certainly speaks from experience. However, Kinsley's slap against micropayments seems to miss the mark. He notes:

Micropayment advocates imagine extracting as much as $2 a month from readers. The Times sells just over a million daily papers. If every one of those million buyers went online and paid $2 a month, that would be $24 million a year. Even with the economic crisis, paper and digital advertising in The Times brought in about $1 billion last year. Circulation brought in $668 million. Two bucks per reader per month is not going to save newspapers.

Well, yes, micropayments of that scale are certainly not going to preserve major media companies as they've existed for the past century or so. But Kinsley's math is based on newsprint daily circulation. Looking at the New York Times' online monthy unique visitors - estimated by Compete.com to be at about 16 million in January - the same math would come up with a rather tidy $384 million annual revenue for The New York Times from online micropayments. Given that such revenue would not have to support the lumbering NYTimes printing presses over in the borough of Queens, that would also be a pretty tidy profit, as well, probably close to the net income from newspaper circulation.

I don't think that micropayments are the only answer to online media's problems, nor is any one particular business model going to produce a "magic bullet" revenue stream in all likelihood. As Walter Isaacson noted in his recent Time magazine article on how to save newspapers:

Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new business model relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens — as countless publishers have seen happen as a result of the recession — the stool can't possibly stand.

Clearly most publishers have relied on multiple business models and revenue streams to build strong businesses, including Time magazine's own powerful direct marketing capabilities, as noted by Susan Mernit at The Huffington Post. There's no solid reason to think that micropayments couldn't develop into one important revenue stream that could benefit both traditional media organizations as well as the millions of independent publishers whose content has become popular online. Unfortunately micropayments remain a neglected alternative with a reputation that's been scarred by poorly planned early micropayment experiments in the early days of the Web. What's most discouraging is that there are plenty of successful models that are analagous to online micropayments that work very well for content and communications revenues. A few familiar analogies to micropayments:

The phone bill model. You might say that telecommunications companies introduced the first micropayment model with their ability to charge by the minute for phone calls that were billed to clients on a monthly basis. It has worked for decades and has included both fixed payments for base-rate services and add-on payments for value-add services. Thinking of news as a communication rather than as a thing may help publishers to reconsider just what it is that they're trying to get people to support.
The music royalty model. The music industry certainly has its challenges these days, but certain aspects of music monetization are still fairly intact and operable - including the royalty payment scheme that's used to disperse payments to music publishers and artists when songs are played on broadcast outlets. Monitoring the use of news content can provide similar mechanisms.
The newsstand model. One of the most obvious payment models that's been around for years is the newsstand model. After years of plunking down quarters for newspapers on the way to catch a train to or from New York, it's hard for me to accept that some people cannot fathom the idea of small payments for news content when it's in the right place at the right time.
The tips model. You see it all the time on streets and in public spaces: street musicians plunking, bowing or blowing away with a tray to collect tips from passers-by. Public broadcast outlets in the U.S. as well as many online news Web sites have been using the tips model to receive donations from people who appreciate their content creation efforts. Micropayments could be as simple as enabling a per-item tip jar infrastructure.

Any and all of these are possible approaches to micropayment-supported media that are both relatively simple to implement from a technology perspective and that offer possible paths to value-add revenues. A micropayment system may tick along in the background on some metered system at lower rates than newsstand fees without a per-use transaction, but an obvious advantage of such a system is that it could easily trigger a per-issue payment for someone who want to browse through more than one or two hit-and-run articles - which could also be billed in the background.

Why hasn't such a system been built to date? Certainly highly competitive rivals in the content industry have managed time and again to try to turn micropayment systems into a proprietary choke point that can give them an advantage in the marketplace; in the process of doing so they choke off the potential for the industry as a whole to grow through micropayment. Nobody down at Grand Central Terminal is trying to install cash registers at newsstands that can be used for only certain newspapers or magazines: why would it benefit the industry to do so for electronic content?

Similarly, for all of the praise that's been lavished on premium downloads on iPhones, the iPhone represents a relatively small sliver of the mobile markeplace where music could be sold. The model appeals to music publishers because it has that good old "choke point" feel to it, but the truth is that the iPhone's highly proprietary approach to content ecommerce only underscores how poorly music publishers fared in coming up with a technology-neutral micropayment solution.

I do believe that many new successful models for generating revenue for content suppliers are on the verge of being introduced. The bad news for many publishers is that probably established major media companies are not the ones that will create them or implement them first. It's far more likely that the chokehold-averse, technology-neutral community that generates social media and other new forms of publishing will recognize that there are benefits to be gained by collaborating on payment systems that can benefit their community as a whole - with our without established publishers benefiting from them. One can see this to some degree already in the book publishing industry, where innovative online outlets such as Lulu.com have been aggressive in pushing value-add print-on-demand sources of revenues while traditional book publishers continue to focus on mass production of print titles.

The sad truth about most media companies is that if their existing sales and marketing forces aren't going to benefit from a new revenue stream it's fairly difficult to get it accepted by their organizations. Thus the anxiety about exploring micropayments may have as much to do with an executive's career comfort level as it does with any strategic business factors. The flap about micropayments is really not about micropayments themselves as much as it is about a mindset in most media organizations that has yet to grasp how to do business the Web way. Search engine optimization is a small step forward in that understanding, but it's really only about optimizing one revenue model and not much at all about confronting the real nature of how to broaden the revenue base for content on the Web.

Micropayments are coming and they will provide billions more in content revenues online eventually, but by the time that traditional publishers get around to adapting them the millions of publishers using social media publishing tools to take advantage of them may leave them a fairly meager slice of the revenue pie to share. If media companies can stop trying to build artificial chokeholds and focus more on enabling content commerce the way that the Web really works, perhaps there will be hope yet for them to close the revenue gap between online operations and their traditional operations. In the meantime, brace yourself for micropayments - they're coming anyway.