Scholarly publishing is faced with as broad an array of challenges as any other segment of the traditionally print-oriented publishing industry, with push-back from traditional sources of purchasing such as academic and corporate libraries, a dip in ad revenues as well as a rising array of potential online substitutes for sharing scholarly information. No small surprise, then, that Elsevier would be floating two new prototypes for presenting its scholarly journal content in online formats. presented in two possible combinations of enhanced content and navigation, the prototype articles provide features such as tabbed sections for different types of content, interactive illustrations, multimedia clips and user comments. ReadWriteWeb notes that in some ways the prototype online journal articles are more a collection of current best practices for organizing online content in a more sophisticated way, perhaps reminiscent of how "social media press releases" have been used to promote more efficient reuse of PR materials, and suggests that many of the features are moot since most scientific readers are going to read an entire article anyway.

Labels: academic, Best Practices, elsevier, findability, journals, navigation, Publishing, scitech

Well, along with launching a book, tweaking our Web site and keeping a business a going concern, why not redesign the blog? Hey, it's a living. ContentBlogger has had a couple of minor redesigns through the years, and more is slated for the future, but it seemed time to correct some key best practices no-nos and to add in the headlines that I've been broadcasting on Twitter.

Twitter was an especially key concern, as I had given up finally on doing headlines the hard way: looking at dozens of Web site bookmarks, compiling and categorizing the best of them in an HTML editor and then cutting and pasting them into a ContentBlogger post. Yuk. How did I do that for four years? Finally last year I started to pop out headlines with links and a touch of commentary in Twitter every now and then. It seemed to be promising and I got strong feedback from folks that they were really useful. The Twitter convention is to insert keywords preceded by a pound/hash mark ("#") into the 140-character messages to help people provide categorization, so I started adding some of the key categories in the content industry that Shore tracks and analyzes, with a few extra Shore-specific categories for promotional purposes. Best of all, Twitter's real-time orientation meant that I could pound out a few headlines, go back to other tasks, and then come back and do a few more. It made for a more newsworthy approach to content news.

OK, great, but how to integrate this into ContentBlogger? Pumping them into a consolidated blog post was one option, and I may yet do that at some point, but that would take away their timeliness. I also found that the headlines were a bit of a distraction to people visiting the blog: they concealed the meaty entries that were the real "bait" for visitors. So embedding a feed of headlines seemed to be the best solution. But how? Hash marks and little personal comments had to go to make the service more readable and professional, filtering of some sort was a must - and I knew already from experience that it's hard to beat Yahoo! Pipes for reliable and quickly developed feed filtering and processing. It took just a few minutes in Yahoo! Pipes to hack together a filter that translated the hash/tags in Twitter to meaningful phrases and to filter out messages that wouldn't fit on ContentBlogger. Fortunately, having built our newsletter filter using Pipes made this a cinch. Then the question was which service to use to embed the feed. I've looked at all sorts of services that do this, and most of them are kind of half-baked. Yahoo! Pipes' badged feed widget wasn't too much better than most, but it integrated nicely with our existing formatting styles so it seemed a small price to pay for unsolicited advertising. Sorry for the badge, I try to avoid them like the plague so that you can have an impartial service, but sometimes compromises are necessary. If there's something better for embedding feeds simply, let me know.

Finally, some style nits that have been bugging me for a long time. At long last I took a deep breath and switched the main text column to the left and the secondary column to the right. It's really the way to go for readability, and I regret having ever set it up the other way. Sometimes old code is just not fun to look at, especially when you have much better things to do. I added iGoogle and Google Reader to the feed bookmark list and replaced the old "XML" feed icon to the newer and more standard orange feed logo. The AddThis bookmarking graphic I changed to the "share" label from "bookmark," as this fits better all of the options availble on AddThis. Finally, a little sidebar promo for the Content Nation book was in order, and easily done.

I hope that you enjoy having headlines back on ContentBlogger, you'll get them in a more timely fashion if you subscribe directly to Twitter or the Yahoo! Pipes feed, but if you're not that type of person you can at least know that you can view the most recent headlines easily on the scrollable sidebar. In the meantime my Twitter friends can get the hottest commentary as quickly as possible while ContentBlogger afficionados still get the best of it. Next is getting them sorted into a weekly summary for ShoreLines. Doable, but still thinking about the value of this. Let me know your thoughts on these changes, not revolutionary, to be sure, but I think that it makes for a better reading experience.

Labels: Best Practices, books, content nation, Feeds, integration, Twitter, weblogs

Steven Arnold writes a thoughtful post on his Beyond Search blog about the inadequacy of traditional databases and search engines to deal with organizing and delivering content when the Web and many private content collections measure in petabytes and exabytes of information. Steve hints at a "next generation" database management system that can start to leapfrog over these problems, but the greater question is perhaps unasked in his article. Namely, as the problems that people need to solve with content technologies become increasingly complex and increasingly fleeting, why is it that we really need permanent unified databases to solve those problems? There is an important need for data normalization, but if normalization can be achieved "on the fly," as leading content federation services can provide, do people need a database or instead data objects that solve specific problems in the moment?

When data normalization was associated with creating massive databases that would be used for repeated functions such as payroll management or publishing functions such as newspapers or directories permanently structured databases made a lot of sense. But as market advantages gained through content publishing fall increasingly to those who can mine unstructured content, aggregate content from disparate sources and enable people normally confined to consuming content to create it and organize it, the traditional database is being relegated to one of many silos from which advanced content services can develop on-demand content solutions. Search engines, which rely on databases that can be queried in a standard format to provide standard answers, are beginning to fall into this same role of specialized answer tools. If you look at the typical search results page today from major providers you're looking at federated content from multiple sources, logically related to a greater whole but residing in separate storage environments and coming together in the moment as the answer to a specific question or need.

In short, what we have called a database is no longer a storage and indexing device. Rather, the database is now, the content sets that we assemble in a given moment to solve the moment's problem. Its structure is consistent thanks to XML standards, data dictionaries and data mining normalization tools, it can be stored as needed for time series analysis or corporate compliance, it can be shared with others to develop collaboration services or new forms of content and analysis. But in the next moment our needs may shift, sources may change structure or become unavailable or be replaced by different sources.

Market advantages tend to flow from institutions who can take advantage of content most effectively, and in the markets we can see how this concept already impacts business in a large way. In financial markets profits are shifting from public securities exchanges, whose transactions are built around highly normalized databases and data formats, to private transactions on highly complex financial instruments, whose underlying complex calculations on financial risk and return may apply to only a single transaction at a time. There is structure in such transactions, yes, and lots of normalized data, but the uniqueness of the content's structure at the moment that a deal is executed is far more important than its standard components.

Search engine providers such as Google understand this paradox explicitly and work hard to provide value-add interfaces that enable people to use search engine content as one of many feeds that can power "mashup" consumer and enterprise content applications. The Google search engine may be one of the world's largest databases but if other content in a form that's more usable in a specific context can come along and complement it in the moment, it becomes rather moot beyond a certain point whether or not it's in Google's index or another index. This federated approach to content value becomes at least as important as the quality of the individual sources. In a "the database is now" world, quality is as quality does - and it may mean something else a moment from now.

The implications of this concept for content publishers is enormous. Long used to building their standardized databases, the long-promised New Aggregation is on the verge of becoming the value leader for both enterprise and media publishers. Through the on-demand federation of content sources into aggregated content solutions the uniqueness of insights for small audiences is becoming a much more important method for creating value in aggregation than the pervasiveness of standardized insights.

Make no mistake, we'll be using today's search engines and databases for a long time as building blocks for federated content services, but we'll be less fixated on owning databases and more focused on owning the contexts in which they provide solutions. This is likely to change the pricing structure of content aggregation services significantly and to force traditional publishers into becoming on-the-fly aggregation services pulling in content agnostically from many sources that may not be under their direct control for more than a few moments. Subscription databases will yield, sometimes gradually and sometimes very rapidly, to subscription contexts, services that can assemble content from anywhere consistently and reliably for workflow and lifestyle applications. Yesterday's email inbox is becoming today's content inbox via feeds and social media: tomorrow's federated inboxes will be even more rich and complex through databases that live in the moment.

Social media and enterprise content federation services have already pressed many of these changes forward, but expect 2008 to be the year in which more than one company will begin to recognize the value of databases in the moment. The database is now - and so is the opportunity for publishers and enterprises to move beyond isolated content solutions.

Labels: Best Practices, content federation, search, steven arnold

It's no secret that just about every pore of the Web that can be filled with bogus links and endorsements has already been equipped with astroturf content, stuff that's meant to seem like it's been posted by "just plain ol' folks" but which has been generated in fact by public relations firms or corporate hirelings. Astroturfing has long been associated with politicians and major PR firms trying to build the appearance of grass roots sentiment for products and people, but increasingly it's becoming a rallying cry for the censure of online publishers who are trying to build up traffic and revenues.

A spate of recent blog posts, for example, highlighted alleged astroturfing and social spamming by Shelfari, an online book discussion community. Posts on Gawker, O'Reilly Radar , competitor LibraryThing, Book Patrol and others detail how a Shelfari intern was pumping out synthetic kudos on blog comments and how a feature that enabled members to invite friends to Shelfari was rather ambitious in its use of their address books (you wanted to invite everyone, right?). Shelfari apologized for the astroturf comments on the Book Patrol blog and has announced a quick redesign of their signup process - as well as additional staff to help them with this and other growing pains.

It's not easy being an up-and-comer against established players, so perhaps a little benign neglect on Shelfari's part can be excused in passing. But if your product's whole rationale is to be a leading social media gathering place you'd think that you'd be extra-careful to make sure that you were playing by the unwritten law of social media: thou shalt not abuse personal trust for the sake of of commerce or ulterior motives. The "why" of this maxim is clear when you look at research from Faves.com, which indicates that at least weekly visits to social media sites jump to 90 percent when someone has at least moderate trust for a site's members, compared to about 34 percent for people with less trust. The formula for social media demands trustworthy intentions in order to scale effectively for advertisers.

While social media's growth is impressive the continuing challenge for social media outlets is to rein in the temptation to build traffic volume via less-than-genuine social contributions. It's not too different than the ongoing battles that search engines face with "link farms" that some publishes have used to simulate interest in content to play with page ranking algorithms, except that with these social media ploys the deception is much more direct in its abuse of people's personal endorsement power. In some ways what we're seeing is a generation of Web developers who have been trained on building "clicks" needing to adjust to a social media personal networking environment in which the power of personal endorsement amongst trusted peers carries a weight that is built one relationship at a time. Facebook's new ad and marketing services begin to rectify this trend somewhat by making it easier for commercial relationships to be defined in social networking environments in a way that honors the value of one's personal network while also honoring the value of commercial content and relationships.

Maintaining the boundaries of personal and commercial online relationships effectively is still a new science and art form. The good news is that social media has enormous power to build public relations, but the bad news is that people still think that good PR in social media is based on manipulation rather than constructive and authentic relationship building. While traditional PR by third-party firms will continue to thrive via mass media and single-voiced social media outlets such as weblogs, in social media outlets that rely on networks and conversations are going to require a different kind of PR investment - an investment based on authenticity and real relationships. There are different kinds of knobs to twist in social media to create amplification; hopefully traditional PR firms can learn how to do this more effectively as new firms learn how to master the art of social media PR.

Labels: Astroturf, Best Practices, public relations, Shelfari, Social Media, Tim O'Reilly

As Google tries to trumpet its new YouTube system for identifying copyrighted video materials you'd think that they would be getting some slaps on the back from commercial video producers. Instead Google's YouTube initiative, which was eagerly awaited only a few months ago, constitutes in the minds of many media companies only a partial and proprietary solution to the question of how to manage copyrighted materials in social media outlets. Google itself recognizes this when it notes in its description of its new service:

No matter how accurate the tools get, it is important to remember that no technology can tell legal from infringing material without the cooperation of the content owners themselves. This means that copyright holders who want to use and help us refine our Video ID system will be providing the necessary information to help us recognize their work. We aim to make that process as convenient as possible.

So how best to handle managing copyrighted materials across social media environments? Several media and technology companies have joined together to define "User-Generated Content Principles," an online document that provides a general framework of requirements for managing copyrighted materials in social media services. Although not a binding legal document the language of UGCP is clearly legally oriented, with the typical onerous one-sided expectations that any corporate legal team is likely to insert in terms of unconditional legal surrender. Moreover, if one tries to abide by this framework a social media service provider must consider the following claim in the UGCP:

Copyright Owners should not assert that adherence to these Principles, including efforts by UGC Services to locate or remove infringing content as provided by these Principles, or to replace content following receipt of an effective counter notification as provided in the Copyright Act, support disqualification from any limitation on direct or indirect liability relating to material online under the Copyright Act or substantively similar statutes of any applicable jurisdiction outside the United States.

In other words, even if you do everything that we ask you to, don't expect that copyright holders still won't give you a hard time. There's comfort for you.

The main rub in the UGCP document is that while it is broad enough to provide a general requirements framework to develop more universal copyright management services it does nothing to ensure that copyright holders will provide any significant standardization of copyright identification technology, filtering processes and reference materials referenced in the document. In essence it suggests to social media sites that they must be ready to institute whatever technologies that any number of publishers find to be acceptable to their needs. Given that Microsoft is one of the technology companies that has signed on to the UGCP one can imagine that there may be some proprietary interests in play on this front.

The UCGP document does cite some good best practices for managing copyrighted content in a social media environment, but it's far from clear that it brings the content industry any closer to a significant agreement on how copyright should be managed in online materials. Even as Google gets slammed by some for rushing to get some sort of filtering and identification system in place on a rapid basis we are no closer to copyright holders agreeing to a common framework for them taking on some reasonable portion of the burden of implementing tools that will make the universal identification, filtering and referencing of copyrighted materials simple and reasonable to manage.

To some degree the rise of digital watermarking and identification schemes that eliminate onerous DRM packaging are pointing towards a more workable solution. Being able to allow publishers to identify their content using reports from social media sites and their own scanning tools can help them to determine when the reuse of copyrighted materials is worth pursuing as a legal matter or as a business development opportunity. But until these technologies are implemented more broadly it's unrealistic to expect social media outlets to respond aggressively with their own solutions if the see Google getting slammed by UGCP members for its efforts. We seem to be creeping towards open solutions that will enable publishers to get around the copyright conundrum without huge proprietary investments but don't expect the pace to pick up until some publishers have proven how to do it cheap, simply and in a way that won't be irksome to the creative talents that are driving online content value.

Labels: Best Practices, copyright, Google, Social Media, YouTube

What makes social media work in today's online publishing? What are the best practices for social media? To answer these questions Shore conducted an analysis of leading and emerging Web sites that use social media as a key attribute in their offerings. We looked at not just the trendy online consumer portals but as well key offerings in business media and older services that have made good use of social media to establish the value of their publications. This report outlines key best practices for social media publishing, as developed through an analysis of nine leading Web sites that incorporate social media offerings. The report provides detailed profiles of social media features found in ALM Legal Weblogs, Amazon.com, Flickr, ITtoolbox, LinkedIn, Newsvine, VerdictSearch, Wikipedia and Zagat, as well as sixteen key best practices recommendations for social media site development, further summarized into a two-page checklist for reviewing your own product plans.

Click here for report details and purchasing

Labels: Best Practices, Research, Social Media

Tim O'Reilly's recent call for a blogger code of ethics has been picked up in a number of mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times, which notes O'Reilly's collaboration with Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales to define minimum standards for editorial restraints in social media. The standards are a cross-breeding of typical journalism standards for such as respecting copyright, confidentiality and privacy as well as trying to apply minimal standards of editorial quality to comments left on weblogs and other social media outlets. Judging by some of the recent edits in the Wikia site on which the standards are being developed not everyone seems to be agreeing with their general thrust: some re-edits of the section on anonymous comments, for example, rejiggered the section that originally discouraged anonymous comments to read "We encourage anonymous comments. We allow commenters to identify themselves with an alias, rather than being anonymous, but discourage it as vain. We prefer that whistleblowers be shot on sight. "

The guild-like suggestions being put forth are probably a constructive step in the right direction to allow social media participants to provide some reasonable level of self-policing and monitoring of contributions, but in fact these kinds of standards have been in place for quite some time at many major social media outlets. Newsvine, for example, has a "code of honor" that its members try to adhere to as they build articles and discussions around bookmarked news articles and original contributions. Standards for ethical behavior accepted by its contributors are essential to the success of any social media property.

But one wonders how effectively these standards can be enforced from outside of individual communities. Will there be a ratings agency or "seal of approval" implemented that will provide both a carrot and a stick to encourage compliance with such standards? And even if such an enforcement capability were to exist, is there really a need for external judgment for social media properties? The ability for users to filter comments from unwanted contributors and to rate content may prove to be sufficient for individual communities to set their own standards for acceptable behavior and contribution quality without resorting to external arbitrary standards.

A fundamental tension seems to be arising between "serious" social media and citizen journalists who say pretty much what they want to say. As more webloggers try to generate sustainable revenues and to attract financing there's a natural tendency to want to demonstrate that advertisers and investors can expect to find certain levels of civility that will make them feel comfortable about backing social media. But that's not necessarily going to give them the audiences that they're seeking. EarlyStageVC points out that some weblogs such as GigaOM and TechCrunch that have pushed hard to become "respectable" outlets for journalism have seen rapidly declining audiences in recent months.

In trying to productize weblogs there appears to be a threshold past which audiences sense that the content is being over-orchestrated. Let's bring higher standards to social media, but if markets are indeed conversations then one has to accept that an honest dialogue is sometimes going to push up against some iffy thresholds of expression from some of the players in those markets. The primary power for editorial control should be in the communities who consume the content to express their perceptions of quality. Give people the right technology to express their perceptions and most webloggers are going to get the hint fairly quickly. There may be things to be said for peer pressure after all...

Labels: Best Practices, Social Media, Tim O'Reilly, Trends

As scholarly publishers drag their feet in responding to Open Access challenges to their business model, the Washington Post notes an effort by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to introduce open Web peer review for patent applications using technologies similar to those used on popular social media Web sites. The online system now under development will allow the public to post comments on patent applications and to have those comments rated by their peers, much in the way that social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.icio.ius and Newsvine allow users to chime in on posted comments. Detailed profiles required for comment posters is hoped to dissuade bogus comments from infiltrating the system, though the potential for this is nevertheless acknowledged by the USPTO.

With USPTO officials overwhelmed with an onslaught of new patent applications - 4,000 examiners processed 332,000 applications last year - online peer review methods are a key initiative to help the agency to judge the worthiness of patent applications more efficiently. First up will be tech companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, with an open call for other participants. While scholarly researchers are likely to continue to use peer-reviewed publications from publishers as the principal gateway to vetting their ideas amongst peers the USPTO initiative offers an exciting alternative to traditional peer review methods for serious sci-tech innovations.

No peer review model is perfect, but online content and ecommerce services have accumulated extensive experience in what types of peer review methods are valuable and reliable. The key to moving scholarly publishing forward into more profitable and efficient methods will revolve around innovative approaches to peer review similar in general concept to the USPTO initiative. The key problem with scholarly peer review today is that there are too few peers willing and able to review too much potentially publishable content within the constraints of the existing system. While this does provide a certain degree of quality control, the pressures to publish journals on fixed schedules are in some ways more likely to push questionable research into print using today's peer review methods as methods that don't rely on the production limitations of print services. They don't call it "publish or perish" for nothing, after all.

A more open approach to scholarly peer review similar in concept to the USPTO initiative may have the potential to loosen review bottlenecks while maintaining the quality of the peer review process. The price to pay for this innovation is that such a system would begin to expose who in a scholarly community was really respected by their peers and leading publishers. As in other arenas of publishing the "brand name" institutions associated with quality research may find both their research papers and their scholars not receiving what they may feel is deserved recognition from a system that allows reviewers to express their preferences more openly and honestly than via the more closed process of today's journal-managed peer review processes.

But at the end of the day more open approaches to peer review are going to be necessary to gain the confidence of both scholarly researchers and the markets that they serve. The current PLoS One is a hopeful step in this direction, but the USPTO initiative offers scale that may prove out to scholarly publishers the importance of enabling a more open approach to peer review as a competitive necessity. While not every scientific discovery is likely to be backed up by the USPTO review methodology alone, it may create enough competitive force in the marketplace to jar scholarly publishers loose from their moorings and to consider how the broader marketplace for innovations will seek to have discoveries confirmed as valid in the eyes of their peers. We'll see how this unfolds, but for now consider this a major shift in the peer review process of technologies that's likely to ripple long and hard into scholarly publishing.

Labels: Best Practices, intellectual property, patents, peer review, scholarly publishing, Social Media

While social media has become the hot trend in publishing many of the properties generating social media content are not attracting headline experts into their frays. Gather.com is addressing this by seeding leading figures from book publishing, music, heath and finance to post content and field comments on a peer basis with other Gather members. Getting experts to act as community members should not be too unfamiliar to publishers already used to organizing conferences but using experts effectively in social media outlets may require them to lay aside some preconceived notions about how experts support their publishing requirements.

Click here to read the full News Analysis

Labels: Best Practices, Gather, Near-Time, News Analysis, Social Media