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.

Labels: design, flipper, Google, News, project, publishers, techcr, thumbnails

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.

Labels: advertising, B2b media, comscore, consumers, display, enquiro, First Research, Google, media, opa, Social Media, Social Media Club

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.

Labels: Android, apple, bill gates, computers, electronics, Google, markets, Microsoft, mobile, smart phones, Steve Jobs, taipei

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?

Labels: amazon, Amazon Kindle, bookexpo america, books, eBooks, Google, marketing, publishers

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.

Labels: collaboration, content development, email, Google, I/O, text messaging, wave

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!

Labels: Amazon Kindle, books, brown bag, busines models, crovitz, events, Google, iPhone, journalism online, magazines, Monetization, newspapers, Oxford, profits, Publishing, settlement, SIIA, thomson reuters

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.

Labels: digital objects, Google, Monetization, rich snippets, search engines, Search Monkey, universal search, Wolfram Alpha, Yahoo

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.

Labels: B2b media, brill, crovitz, Google, hindery, Journalism, journalism online, Licensing, media, Monetization, News, Newspaper, royalties, search engines, subscription

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.

Labels: AP, associated press, Attributor, copyright, Eric Schmidt, Google, News, techcrunch, thomson reuters, tom glocer, Web search engine, Yahoo, YouTube

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.

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• Microsoft to start testing 'Kumo' search service (news.cnet.com)

Labels: All Things Digital, Google, Kara Swisher, Live Search, Microsoft, powerset, search, Web search engine

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.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Social Media Club NYC meets Content Nation Author John Blossom (socialmediaclub.org)

Labels: content nation, events, Flickr, Google, Google Maps, Publishing, Slovenia, Social Media Club, Yahoo, YouTube, Zemanta

Talk about a bad hair day for WSJ tech journalists.

When The Wall Street Journal ran an article today on a Google plan to add "edge caching" servers at key internet service provider facilities, this fairly common practice to accelerate content delivery to audiences via the Web was mangled into a political imbrollio. To wit, their lede:

The celebrated openness of the Internet -- network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic -- is quietly losing powerful defenders.

Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.

Google was quick to correct the WSJ's outlook, as noted on their public policy blog and in a subsequent AFP story. Their point:

Despite the hyperbolic tone and confused claims in Monday's Journal story, I want to be perfectly clear about one thing: Google remains strongly committed to the principle of net neutrality, and we will continue to work with policymakers in the years ahead to keep the Internet free and open.

Intellectual property guru and Net Neutrality proponent Lawrence Lessig noted that his take on Google and the political ramifications of this move were a bit off-key in the WSJ article as well:

The article is an indirect effort to gin up a drama about a drama about an alleged shift in Obama's policies about network neutrality. What's the evidence for the shift? That Google allegedly is negotiating for faster service on some network pipes. And that "prominent Internet scholars, some of whom have advised President-elect Barack Obama on technology issues, have softened their views on the subject."

Who are these "Internet scholars"? Me. ...I've not seen anything during the Obama campaign or from the transition to indicate it has shifted its view about network neutrality at all.

With more moving pieces than a Swiss watch in Washington right now, the current political environment surrounding Net Neutrality and other Web access issues during a transition in Washington's power brokers is bound to be subject to as much jockeying and bullying as possible. Today the U.S. Federal Communications Commission canceled a vote on making radio frequencies available that would provide free Internet access as a public utility, bowing to pressures from both industry advocates and politicians. There's a big push for open Web access, but plenty of pressure from all points of view keeping things comfortably in neutral for now.

Net Neutrality and related issues such as public Web wireless frequencies seem to boil down to one basic concept: Don't make audiences pay for artificial scarcity. Carriers are still free to sell "bigger pipes" and better overall service levels, but artificial cartels based on reserving audience-facing Internet bandwidth for private use will only create more challenges for publishers in the long run. If you want to have proof that this is so, just take a look at the balkanized state of mobile service carriers that lassoed content providers for many years into deals for distribution on their private networks. What publishers now confront are scattered and overpriced deals for growing but underperforming mobile markets, even as the carriers now reach for ad revenue shares to sweeten their take.

Proprietary mobile breakthroughs such as the iPhone and the Amazon's Kindle are great for publishers in many ways, but they represent a relatively small share of the potential marketplace for mobile content and ultimately just continue the myth that artificial network scarcity can benefit the publishing industry as a whole. All these devices do is lock publishers in to proprietary networks that are bound to make it harder to reach their audiences cost-effectively.

The truth is that the fastest-evolving, most cost-effective technology changes are best for publishers, making it imperative to enable an environment in which mobile and Web technology providers are not resting on proprietary laurels that hinder the development of Web and mobile markets for publishers. Without these breakthroughs, the audience reach that content producers need to make mobile networks a highly profitable distribution medium is not likely to materialize. Let's keep the future of publishing out of the hands of companies that still can't tell us whether to dial "1", an area code or nothing extra to make a phone call to the next town.
Net Neutrality will ensure that there is a cost-effective, rapidly evolving electronic distribution infrastructure that serves publishers best.

Labels: Dow Jones, Google, lessig, mobile, net neutrality

There now, that wasn't so hard, was it...?

Well, of course it took a long time, but at the end of the day most of the several years between Google's introduction of its book scanning program for out-of-copyright and out-of-print books and the recently announced settlement with the book industry for USD 125 million has been a matter of the book publishing industry deciding to name a reasonable price that would sync up with the realities of book publishing in an electronic marketplace. Since the book industry was barely interested in e-books and print-on-demand a few years ago, it's understandable that the magic number was not readily at hand back then. But now that eBooks are beginning to take off via Kindle and mobile phones via Amazon and other outlets and print-on-demand publishing is beginning to look more attractive as a business model the book industry has some real revenue and traffic data and a marketing plan that will benefit from Google and other partners pushing their out-of-print wares.

In many ways this enables the book industry to monetize fringe content far more effectively via Google partners such as Amazon, in essence validating the value of Chris Anderson's "long tail" theory for content that was sometimes discounted by book industry executives resistant to Google's scanning efforts. The settlement is really just a bulk licensing fee to make it easier to administer long-tail revenues, not too different than the industry royalties paid by radio stations. This sets up people to buy books in print and in e-reading devices like Amazon's Kindle based on Google Books "broadcasts" just as premium downloads and CDs are fed by online and broadcast radio revenues. With finding an audience for one's content the greatest challenges for all publishers Google Books has become a powerful browsing engine that maximizes the value of any title, new or old, for an audience that is just right for it.

With the new agreement Google becomes a premium destination as well: you will be able to browse full pages of scanned books covered by the agreement instead of snippets and opt to pay for the full online rights to the book via Google Books - or purchase them for your private online "bookshelf." On the surface this may look like a bad thing for Amazon and it's proprietary Kindle strategy, and certainly Amazon would love for their gizmo to get as much momentum as possible. But as successful as Kindle has been with many core book enthusiasts it hasn't escaped Amazon's attention in all likelihood that the mobile market is exploding and that they are going to lose market share for books in general if they cannot get their inventory onto as many mobile devices as possible.

Enter Google's new Android operating system, which will be able to power any number of mobile and handheld devices - including perhaps, Kindles. As Amazon's portal specialty is shopping support and fulfillment, in the long run Amazon is better off partnering with Google and other platform providers to make their inventory relevant in as many venues as possible. Amazon may also turn up a winner with the Google out-of-print deal for print-on-demand support. Already a growing number of titles at Amazon are produced on a print-on-demand basis anyway, so Google and help to power that capability as well.

So all in all this deal is likely to turn into a content industry love-fest over the next few years, a peace treaty that finally enables book publishers to leverage the vast power of Google's book scanning initiative, thus avoiding expensive or less powerful alternatives and enabling book marketers to accelerate their increasingly aggressive exploitation of online channels for their marketing efforts. I can't say that I didn't say several years ago that this would happen eventually, but for now let's all just be glad that there are better times ahead for book publishers who are learning how to exploit electronic content markets far more effectively.

Labels: agreement, amazon, books, ecommerce, Google, kindle, scanning

AP notes along with others the announcement that Google plans to extend its print archives scanning program to include the print archives of any newspaper that would like to participate in their program. This new effort builds upon Google's existing scanning efforts to capture books and other materials in the archives of major libraries. Early participants in the newspaper scanning program include Montreal, Quebec's Chronicle-Telegraph, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the St. Petersburg Times in Florida. Regional newspapers are struggling to find sources of revenue for their print assets what will offset plummeting print ad income, so the prospect of exposing their archives for revenues from Google's AdWords and to benefit from referral links to their subscription signup pages is found money for assets that are otherwise sound asleep in most library collections.

Unlike previous arrangements for newspaper archives, which were arranged based on access to subscription or pay-per-view databases or limited access to "snippets" of copyrighted content, the newspaper scanning program's direct parallels with the Google Books program means that people will be able to benefit both from the literal image of a newspaper as it existed at the time but also from text-based searching of those news sources. The differences in approaches are clear and somewhat startling when you compare the scan-based approach to other approaches. For example, a Google News search for "Man Walks on Moon" in the Google News 1969 archives, for example, yields dozens of pay-per-view articles on the topic, but eventually one can look at an ad-supported article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that captures not only the words but also the flavor of graphics, editorial cartoons and other features that were of importance in the era of the early space program, with key search terms highlighted in the scanned text image.

For larger media organizations this approach may not be as appealing as waiting for the "big fish" of pay-per-view and subscription database revenues, but for regional and local newspapers this is likely a very attractive alternative to microfiche collections which are expensive to create and will have relatively low-volume, one-time sales, versus the evergreen potential for revenues from online scanned archives. This alternative to microfiche and subscription databases also puts pressure on suppliers such as ProQuest and Cengage to justify the breadth of their archives as a key selling point. AdWords revenues will not be the answer for every publisher's need to monetize archives but it appears that Google has found another way to add value to hard-to-find content sources that challenges publishers to think more creatively about how they intend to add value to the delivery of their archived content.

Labels: adwords, archives, FAST Search and Transfer, Google, Monetization, newspapers, pay-per-view, scanning, subscription

The New York Stock Exchange has been careful through the years to keep feeds of trading data released to public media outlets hobbled with a fifteen-minute delay - in part to protect its revenues from financial institutions being charged for real-time data and in part to offer their member firms an information advantage that would help them have an upper hand with retail investors. But with most of NYSE's competitors being far more lax about releasing real-time trade reports and the definition of "real-time" having changed with powerful new low-latency trading systems for professional traders NYSE has re-evaluated its position on real-time trade reports for the public. Today NYSE Euronext launched its "Realtime Stock Prices" product for media, allowing unlimited distribution of real-time quotes to the public without tracking individual use. The product requires a distributor to pay an undisclosed bulk fee for the rights to public data distribution.

With NYSE's share of securities trading slipping and it's reputation as a market friendly to small investors slipping along with it real-time quotes from the public should have been a default position years ago, as we've argued oftentimes in ContentBlogger. Today's retail investors have more options than ever for making money in the markets, with NYSE's stumbling "blue chip" stocks being far from the most attractive alternatives for many. Forcing people to pay for real-time trade reports was only discouraging further participation in NYSE equities markets by retail investors - especially when other exchanges seeking market share were more than glad to use market data as a lure to new traders.

CNBC has long been a leader in public market data - I led the development and installation of their first delayed data system years ago for Quotron - so it's expected that they've opted to be on the edge of NYSE's release of this product. But the other announced client - Google - is one that was expected also but one that couldn't have come at a worse time for Yahoo. Real-time quotes from NYSE have been available from Yahoo at a premium for many years, so in a time when they have been trying to look plump to acquirers it's not surprising that they didn't opt to give up their NYSE quote revenues ("back door" real-time quotes from private electronic markets on Yahoo aren't strongly representative of the full market). So by default the go-ahead went to Google, whose Google Finance portal has become a very strong content offering. If nothing else the public knowledge that full NYSE real-time quotes are available at Google will provide some needed publicity for Google Finance at a time when Yahoo is slow to give up existing revenues.

I would hardly be alone in chastising NYSE for dragging their heels on releasing real-time quotes to the public, but it's sad that it has taken this long to get NYSE to make this move. It is, unfortunately, a familiar refrain in the content industry: major institution covets proprietary content revenues, squeezes them out for as long as possible while the markets move to find both acceptable substitutes and better ways of doing business. Publishing is in essence a very conservative business, so it's not surprising that NYSE would try to keep this formula going for so long. But in an era when the buyers of securities have and demand information at least as good as most selling institutions failing to serve the buy side in financial markets effectively is to ignore the fundamental shift in the content industry that empowers people with independent access to content from around the world. Your content may seem safe as a proprietary asset, but if it's not driving your clients' profits in its most valuable user-defined contexts it is far from a safe bet in today's content markets.

Labels: CNBC, financial information, Google, new york stock exchange, NYSE, stocks, Yahoo

The mobile phone world was a-twitter with word that Nokia has purchased mobile software maker Symbian and will make the core of its software an open source resource some time later this year via a new Symbian Foundation, with other open-source assets to follow. Engadget notes that the Symbian foundation will include many of the mobile industry's biggest names and will include technology donated from both Nokia and many others, including Motorola, Sony Ericsson and NTT DoCoM. Other members will include Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG, and, interestingly, AT&T, which has had great success as of late with the proprietary Apple iPhone platform.

Clearly the impending launch of Google's open source Andriod mobile platform, delayed in launch until the fall but looming nevertheless, has forced the hand of mobile equipment providers and network operators to consider the potential impact of having their highly proprietary approaches to mobile technologies "googled" away to the demand for more common mobile standards for software to power more content services development. By creating a common core of technologies based on a company with which it's had a long-standing relationship Nokia gets to expand the value of their knowledge of the platform in a way that may transform their business model over time from one of manufacturing to one of enabling systems development. Given the demand for mobile services in developing nations this will enable companies like Nokia to have a hand in those markets without having to bear the full cost of either hardware or software development through the Foundation's partner network.

But more importantly for the content industry this puts at least as much pressure on providers Microsoft, Palm, Apple and Research in Motion to recognize that there is ever more pressure on proprietary operating system solutions to justify their ways. With speed wireless broadband network services opening up the Web to mobile devices the ability to deliver platform-specific content services will become icing on the cake for those who want new status toys but for the bread-and-butter corprorate worker or mobile entrepreneurs and family members it may take more than just a few proprietary services and a delightful interface to keep people locked into a proprietary platform. For content suppliers looking for new "choke points" via proprietary platforms the short-term news via suppliers like Microsoft, RIM and Apple looks good, but the picture over the horizon is likely to look vastly different in less than a year. Be it via the Symbian Foundation or Android platforms, publishers need to stop looking again and again for new ways to activate old business models via mobile platforms and look far more aggressively at how they will survive and thrive in a world enabled with open and universal access to Web-enabled content sources.

Labels: Android, AT+T, Google, mobile, nokia, open source, RIM

In what promises (for now) to be the end of the Silicon Valley soap opera known as the future of Yahoo, AP reports that Yahoo opted to seal a deal with Google for both the use of Google's ad network and enabling the interoperability of their instant messaging networks shortly after having announced the suspension of their attempt to revive talks with Microsoft on a potential acquisition deal. Yahoo shares tumbled immediately afterwards, leaving the long money on Yahoo holding a devalued stock but a deal that is likely to be one of the best ways forward for ensuring a reasonable future for Yahoo.

As noted two months ago in ContentBlogger, a deal with Google seemed to have been the best route for Yahoo all along, promising lots of new Yahoo page inventory for Google's more robust ad inventory and complementary media and technology profiles that were never as much at loggerheads as people made out some years ago. As for Icahn et al., while some may have been looking out for shareholders wanting short-term money out of what they had assumed was a cooked goose they never really seemed to have the goose's best interests in mind - or, for that matter, the best interests of Microsoft shareholders. After Yahoo would have been carved up it would be hard to believe that there would be a whole anything that would be greater than the sum of the parts.

As much as people tried to paint this as a Yahoo desperation deal clearly it was moreso a desperation deal by Microsoft to buy some time to build a broader position in online markets for its faltering ad network, with virtually no apparent upside for Yahoo properties. There was a lot of Ballmer bluster but underneath it all Microsoft was rolling the dice heavily for a very risky deal that had little solid strategy behind it beyond a temporary ad revenue boost from peeling away Yahoo ad accounts.

By contrast the deal consummated by Yahoo with Google is expected to pump in significant new ad revenues to Yahoo from Google's superior ad network, a total win-win any way you look at it. The deal is non-exclusive, so Yahoo can choose a plan "B" any time that it wants. In the meantime the other huge win-win is the promised interoperability of instant messaging networks. Google already has interoperability with AOL's still-popular messaging network, so the stage is set for the next major deal to whisper about - a Twitter acquisition that will provide a unified front end to the world of instant messaging.

With a generation of Web users coming of age focused on IM, Facebook and other platforms, email systems creaking with offensive and virus-laden spam have become a legacy messaging technology that wil die a slow and largely unprofitable death in much the same way that the telegraph lingered well past its prime. We use email because we have to - not because we want to. Focusing on accelerating the growth and usefulness of IM systems while leaving their email services to take their own paths is a smart move for both Google and Yahoo. A merger of Yahoo mail accounts to either Google or Microsoft's mail networks would have been a long, painful and largely unprofitable endeavor.

I felt all along that an independent Yahoo would be better for the content industry as a whole so I am glad that at least tonight we can go to sleep knowing that there will be a wider variety of good platforms through which to publish content than if the Yahoo deal with Microsoft had gone through. Jerry Yang's team still has a lot of challenges ahead of them but with an improving stable of user-friendly destination content properties and a progressive approach to supporting brand advertisers Yahoo promises to have a strong place alongside other major online portals for some time to come. At least I hope so - I really don't relish a deal war as ugly as this one any time soon.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo

The launch of the beta for Google Health
caught a bit of media ripple last week, but with the never-ending machinations between Microsoft and Yahoo I suspect that it got lost in the shuffle by some. That's probably just as well, given the hyping of last year's big health launches, some of which have gone on to greater glory and others of which are back at the drawing board. Revolution Health has been an enormously successful media launch, for example, closing in rapidly on well-established leader WebMD's visitor count in little more than a year, while Microsoft's heavy-handed HealthVault did a great job of collecting and touting major health care partners but also did an equally good job of scaring away people who felt uncertain how improving corporate productivity was in their personal best interests.

Google Health plies a middle ground of sorts between these two major efforts, focusing on relating expert content and online media to someone's personal medical history. Like other services Google enables the import of health information from a select list of hospitals and medical testing companies and can find information that relates to known symptoms as well as search for doctors in a given specialty in a particular location. As you can see in the expandable screen grab to the right it's a typically low-key approach from Google. It doesn't present itself terribly differently from any other Google application, explains the user benefits simply right up front and encourages one to explore its capabilities gently and incrementally well within a user's control.

In some ways Google has benefited from the relatively slow start to online medical records gathering by Microsoft, even if it's been a little snookered by Revolution Health's aggressive grab of media attention. An MIT Technology Review article makes it clear that Google is working
with its limited list of partners to understand what it will take to make people feel comfortable with entering and maintaining their health care information online. Terms and conditions make it clear to the user in the part that's appearing in the scrolling window that their information is theirs to control, so perhaps there's reason to hope. Starting with the approach that there's much to learn about what makes people comfortable with this particular kind of online personal data is probably a good approach, allowing Google to add features and content gradually.

In the meantime Google has also opened up its Google Apps APIs to developers, enabling anyone to use the highly scalable Google infrastructure to develop online applications that stand on their own or integrate with Google capabilities. WIth more that 150,000 developers already queued up to use the Google APIs we may be witnessing the beginning of the Google cloud beginning to subsume large portions of the online application development space. Combined with enhanced Andriod functionality for its mobile platform and the introduction of Google Gears, a desktop (and, presumably, mobile) client that will enable one to store data from the Web locally, it's clear that there's less and less space for Microsoft to lay claim to the personal content that's at the heart of its claim to personal computing. If the Web can lay claim as the primary repository for all of our content, with some items spun off to our local devices as needed, then Microsoft will continue to find itself positioned increasingly as a facilitator of appliance interfaces -a positioning underscored by Microsoft's announcement of a finger-friendly Windows 7 due to ship in...2010.

So on both the Google Health front and the Google Apps API front Google is continuing to position itself for prowess within the content cloud, building up relationships that will quietly unfold on a myriad of devices through a myriad of applications all developed on and stored in Google's powerful server and operating system infrastructure. It's not a media strategy by many people's estimates, much less an enterprise content strategy, but as these clouds begin to gather steam through the next few years prepare to be amazed yet again at the power of Google to keep focused on long-term objectives for delivering value through publishing that continue to amaze.

Labels: apis, cloud computing, Google, healthcare, HealthVault, revolution health, SaaS

As a company that has as its tagline "Where Content, Technology and People Meet" Shore can only applaud the SIIA's decision to combine sessions for software and content professionals at its annual West Coast conference into one event this year, now dubbed NetGain. Seeing companies like Salesforce.com and Deloitte Consulting in one set of rooms and companies like LexisNexis and Wolters Kluwer in another room at this conference always seemed like a huge lost opportunity, only the moreso as Software as a Service begins to transform the face of enterprise I.T. services and content providers move more towards workflow applications and content integration technologies to build their market value. At the same time services like Google have long demonstrated that a technology that provides highly valuable context for content can be a publishing platform unto itself. So in many ways the software industry and the content industry are chasing the same high-value market opportunities and need to recognize that they have to speak in the same forums together for enterprise markets as much as for media markets.

I did not live-blog this conference, in part to participate in the SIIA's experiment in using Twitter to cover the event (see LiveTwitter's events page and look for NetGain updates). Larry Schwartz, President of Newstex, LLC, provided a consolidated collection of people's Twitter messages here for those wanting a more blow-by-blow account of the proceedings. I also posted earlier a piece reviewing presentations by Salesforce.com and Google that underscored the importance of "cloud computing" in delivering enterprise content services.

On one level NetGain was such a perfectly natural blend of conference attendees from the SIIA Content and Software divisions that one wonders why this wasn't done earlier. This was underscored by the similar product themes brought out in the conference sessions. When software providers talked about "Software as a Service," what it really seems to say in many ways is that software companies are not succeeding as much as they used to simply by licensing their software as intellectual property and need to adopt licensing models more akin to those used for many years by enterprise subscription database services. When content providers talked about the importance of "workflow applications," What they seemed to be saying was that they cannot survive just on licensing intellectual property that gets commoditized unless it's put to work through really useful software services. Either way both software publishers and content publishers are chasing the same value proposition in the enterprise increasingly.

And for that matter, how different is "cloud computing" from the decades-old content services provided in the financial services industry by securities exchanges and companies like Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg? Certainly the Web has accelerated the development of client-server content services beyond any scale of earlier enterprise services but at the end of the day software and content services have been in a merging industry for a long time. Alacra, which won a CODiE award at NetGain for its ability to integrate content into enterprise workflows, has been working diligently for more than a decade on its powerful AlacraBook content integration services. Eventually trends catch up with long-established realities, I suppose.

The big difference today seems to be the influence of the one key ingredient that was somewhat under-represented at NetGain: social media services. Clay Shirky delivered his usual great speech about how social media services are revolutionizing publishing and ecommerce and there was a very good panel discussion lead by Dave McClure, but the increasing preponderance of social media publishing services both outside and inside major enterprises just didn't seem to register with most of the NetGain attendees. We're moving rapidly towards a predominant publishing environment in which the audience is seeking out and defining the value that it needs from content far more rapidly than traditional I.T. and publishing services are defining it.

This raises the question: what is the platform for today's and tomorrow's publishers? Certainly Salesforce.com and Google, along with other presenters, raised a compelling case for the applications programming interface, or API, being the platform of choice for the forseeable future. Being able to plug in content and functionality into one or more platforms via APIs enables people with both content and technology services to put their capabilities into the contexts that audiences value most very rapidly. Certainly the flourishing success of Facebook's APIs has helped to fuel its growth even as Google's OpenSocial API promises to bring content into social media contexts more universally. If a platform does not have the ability for content and functionality to grow through the efforts of third parties then it's going to be hard to fuel growth efficiently.

But the real platform of today and tomorrow is the community built around a platform. Bloomberg and Reuters proved this out years ago as their messaging and conversational dealing services enabled securities market traders to communicate with one another more efficiently and to contribute valuable content that resulted in the execution of securities trades. While much of the financial industry's technology and content services have shifted towards more automated functionality, the heart of what provides the firms using these services with a market advantage is the ability of people to collaborate in marketplaces through publishing. Today a new generation of business information services is emerging, highlighted at NetGain by Hoover's and ECNext, both of which are focusing on how to lock in content value through their audiences providing valuable content in the context of their platforms. A publishing community is a community that can become the heart of any platform's value. Looking at how Salesforce.com itself is moving towards integrating social media functionality this concept is hardly a secret.

There were also a lot of interesting exhibits by CODiE candidates at NetGain, which allowed people to get more "hands on" with their products before voting - sometimes literally. I especially enjoyed J.J. Keller's Safe.Sim truck driving simulator, which although it did not win in its CODiE category was both a very powerful training and evaluation tool as well as a "sleeper" software hit. With a little bit of repackaging and some consumer marketing know-how this could be a huge software hit. Truckers and truck fans around the nation and no doubt worldwide would jump at the opportunity to have a multi-player online version of this, complete with their own customizations. As for me, well, I guess I have a few things to learn about backing a semi into a loading dock.

In the paid exhibitors area I was especially impressed by a couple of offerings. Mzinga is an OEM social media community development service for both enterprise and consumer markets, enabling the collection and sharing of valuable content that builds value inside and outside the firewall. Well worth a look if you're considering stepping into social media more deeply. Vitrium Systems enables PDFs to be turned into intelligent content payloads that track audience behavior without requiring plug-ins or downloads and can also provide DRM for PDF content. For those still emphasizing print-formatted content this is an interesting play, especially for those interested in getting more play out if eBook content.

On the SIIA Previews agenda two later presentations stood out clearly. Watch Zuora, a company that promises to enable subscription models for practically everything, including content and technology to be sure but also just about any business model for any fungible product or service. Model-wise I think that they're on to something big and I plan to highlight them in future writings. It's a spinoff of ideas from Salesforce.com using telecommunications technology, Keep an eye on this one, it may take a while to take off but I think that it has the potential to hockey-stick.

Another strong Previews offering was SlideRocket, which combines powerful presentation tools, graphics development and community content to create a new way to develop and share presentations that can capture metrics on how people look at them. I think of it being to tools like PowerPoint and Photoshop and Flash what Salesforce.com and Facebook were to enterprise software and online publishing - services that defined their own categories as a new kind of publishing and in the process of doing so redefined several market segments at once by focusing on owning user content. I can't wait to get my hands on the beta.

So it was a great event, though I would hope that next year we get to see more participation both by more West Coast local firms and more major East Coast and overseas publishers. I would say that the only real disappointment that I had from the event was the rather quiet audience, which seemed in many instances to be of the opinion that while things were changing rapidly in the publishing and software industries the changes that many tout as revolutionary are not going to sweep away long-standing business models any time soon. There's more than a small grain of truth in that outlook, of course. Yet looking at the news industry, now reeling from the effects of having largely ignored the need to transform themselves radically in the face of a decade of online publishing, I think that it's safe to say that NetGain represented in many ways the admission that later is sooner than many may think.

Labels: 2008, events, Google, J.J. Keller, livetwitter, Mzinga, Salesforce.com, SIIA NetGain, SlideRocket, Twitter

At the SIIA NetGain conference in San Francisco George Hu, EVP of SalesForce.com Products and Marketing, gave both a great summary of their product philosophy and a demonstration of their Force.com integration with Google Apps. Nothing terribly new in all of this, but what struck me more strongly than ever was how both their philosophy and their product development parallels and integrates with Google. George mentioned conversations with Google CEO Eric Schmidt which indicate that they are aligned on far more than just the product level. It would be foolish of me to speculate on a potential acquisition of SFDC based on George's comments, but the more that SFDC develops as a market presence the more that it seems that it is repeating the Google business model for enterprise content services (also known as Software as a Service, or SaaS).

First and foremost, SFDC built a highly scalable architecture that would allow for multi-tenant hosting, a very geekish way of saying that they have a server farm that has common management of SFDC software for thousands of companies' protected data sets. This is not so different from Google's commitment to creating a highly scalable common search service for its online audience, instead of trying to use online search services as a way to sell software and hardware (does anyone remember AltaVista?). Making your services highly scalable as one of your primary proprietary advantages gives SFDC enormous power to become a defacto content services platform much in the same way that Google's power to crawl effectively gave it a key market advantage.

Instead of having to sell copies of this capability, like Google SFDC focuses on content services. Yes, we call them applications in many instances, but the net focus of these applications is to enable people to consume or publish content. Enterprise publishers talk about enabling workflows as a premium content service: there's no real difference between what SFDC is doing and what publishers are attempting, other than the desire of publishers to promote their own proprietary content. Add in SFDC's integration with Google Apps, including Gmail for email services, and you have an "80 percent solution" for enterprise workflows similar in scope and impact to Google's 80 percent solution for search. Yes, we still have many high-quality search engines for enterprises, just as there will continue to be many other high-value I.T. products in enterprises, but as a percentage of I.T. expenditures they are certain to dwindle as content services enabled via the Internet "cloud."

The similarity of Salesforce.com's marketing model was underscored by a presentation at NetGain from Google's Matthew Glotzbach, Product Management Director for Google Enterprise. Matthew highlighted in a simple graph how in enterprises the mediation of I.T. departments and other business functions in the purchasing of content and technology services from vendors is different from the consumer model, in which people can access and select services from any number of vendors without intermediation - creating more effective competition and, ultimately, coopetition between vendors. Security, data privacy are always touted as barriers to a transition to more consumer-like access to enterprise content but increasingly with the theft of laptop computers in airports, offices and just about anywhere it's not clear that a mobile-enabled workforce is going to be served well by anything but highly scaled cloud infrastructure.

Long story short, we are well on the way to the Google-ization of both enterprise content companies and enterprise I.T. companies by Salesforce.com in combination with Google, with Google Apps acting as the "glue" between the two parallel clouds. While there will always be other clouds out there for specialized purposes - you won't see low-latency securities trading networks on SFDC any time soon, for example - I think that what we're seeing is the content/applications cloud enabled by Salesforce.com as the emerging de facto environment for delivering content and technology services for much of today's corporate environment.
In the process of becoming that de facto platform, the ability of small and medium sized businesses to scale themselves rapidly and effectively will change the competitive landscape in business quite rapidly on a global basis. About the only real difference between Google's dominance and SFDC's probable dominance is that one did it on ad revenues and the other on subscription revenues. I.T. vendors and content vendors looking at the SaaS space need to move far more rapidly to build effective cloud-based products and services - and to recognize that a winning strategy includes owning the cloud sometimes and sometimes playing in other people's clouds. I hope that's not too cloudy to you, if it is, give a holler.

Labels: 2008, Google, Salesforce.com, SIIA NetGain

The announcement of Adhere Solution's partnership with MuseGlobal to launch the "All Access Connector," a federated content integration solution for the Google Search Appliance, is one of those situations where an event is both obvious and profound in its potential impact on the marketplace. As enterprises today face an explosion of internal and external content sources that they need to integrate to create insightful content services there is a huge gap that has arisen between what most content platforms can do to unify that information and what enterprises really need. This is particularly true in enterprise search, where many search services fail to provide access to all of the sources that a person typically needs to access.

Federated search solutions have been one route to address this problem, querying interfaces to multiple searchable sources and assembling the results "on the fly" to yield a combined search result. Instead of trying to shoehorn all of the needed information into a single database or search index federated search enables content to live wherever it has to and to come together when needed via multiple queries into integrated search results. Some do this better than others, and some have been at it for longer than others. MuseGlobal falls into both camps pretty handily, having been providing federated content solutions for more than a decade which has allowed them to hammer out an infrastructure that will pull together thousands of different types of content sources together via federated queries.

All well and good, but the question is, how do you make this sing in the eyes of enterprise users? MuseGlobal's support of Adhere Solutions, a company that includes Googlephile Steven Arnold's son Erik Arnold as a Director, points towards a very powerful possible answer to that question: the Google Search Appliance. While the GSA is a popular search tool in many major enterprises it's not been deemed the "go-to" search interface when it somes to getting all the right content from the right places all in one place in many instances. Federated content capabilities from MuseGlobal united with the GSA seem to fill that gap very handily. Capable of searching any number of search engines, internal and subscription databases and feeds as well as harvesting content via its own site crawlers, the MuseGlobal platform turns GSA into a clearing house for all of the content sources than an enterprise user might want - all delivered on the highly popular Google interface that provides access to Web content as well.

Combine this with both Google's programming interfaces for applications development and MuseGlobal's own extensive library of content integration tools and all of a sudden the GSA looks like a lot more beefy competitor for expanded use within the enterprise. And since the MuseGlobal library of source connectors includes many interfaces to subscription content services as well it's a platform that can put subscription database providers on a new footing with their users as well. All of a suddent the GSA looks less like a user-friendly also-ran and a lot more like a growing hub for enterprise and online content resources.

We hear lots of talk about workflow as the key solution that's going to enable value-add enterprise content services to build new revenues, but the ability to pull together a comprehensive set of sources that their customers' users really need to do the job is a slow and laborious process oftentimes for many subscription database providers to accomplish. At the same time enterprise portal providers are stymied oftentimes by users who refuse to use their solutions to any great degree because they're used to getting the answers they want from the search engines they rely upon as ther real "go-to" workflow solutions. The All Access Connector solution offered by Access Solutions and MuseGlobal offer both camps a lot to think about as they ponder how best to ensure that they are delivering the content that their users want in the applications that drive their productivity the most. The era of The New Aggregation's ability to deliver more content value from more content sources more rapidly than ever is upon us in full, indeed.

Labels: access solutions, enterprise, federated content, federated search, Google, museglobal, search

Yahoo joined the list of online companies reporting rosy quarterly earnings, with earnings stronger than anticipated and profits nearly tripling based in part on earnings from new Chinese acquisitions. In the meantime Valleywag notes that Amazon's 1Q sales were up 37 percent over last year's 1Q results and earnings up 29 percent. Meanwhile Google reported revenues up 42 percent over last year's 1Q and net income was up 31 pcercent, powered in large part by continuing strength in U.S. markets and rising strength in overseas operations.

For those who invested in the future of publishing and ecommerce, the payoff has been handsome indeed. For some the growth of Web services in overseas markets in which they invested heavily is a key factor but in the instance of Amazon it's a combination of people who have time and money to shop online and less of a motive given high gasoline prices to sally forth to the mall. In both of these instances there's the continuing emergence of self-service for goods and content. the tendency for people to what what they want where they want it and to favor those who are best at doing this. "Find a need and fill it" was the succinct definition of marketing given to me years ago, one that online services have done well indeed.

In the meantime over at the Web 2.0 conference there are the usual nods of the head towards Tim O'Reilly and other gurus of social media, but at least according to one report the conference is as revealing for its emerging political correctness as it is for a meaningful exchange of ideas. As now-traditional online properties come up rosy in earnings, is Silicon Valley getting bored with social media's long-term promise but short-term question marks? Perhaps so, given a toughening economy and a lack of fully effective monetization tools: just as the dot-com crash came before contextual ads made monetizing search and non-mainstream media profitable, we're sure to see a short-term fall-off in new social media investments as quick exits begin to seem less likely and the over-saturation of the market with publishing tools fragments opportunities for both marketers and publishers alike to reach scale effectively. This, too, is reminiscent of earlier dot-com days, when many publishers adopted a "wait and see" attitude - and eventually lost major market share and brand value.

What's likely to light up the charts over the next few months for new investments is "social knowledge," a loose label that combines the ability of analytics software and aggregation services to divine patterns from social media and online expert services such as WikiAnswers that build repositories of how-tos from topic experts. Whatever the particular play, being able to get more definitive insights from social media seems to be where the money is being spent.

Missing in this mix so far is a huge push by traditional publishers to counter these trends. Most social media investments by major publishers are still largely incremental, moving at a pace that's not likely to lead to strong offsetting revenues any time soon. For enterprise-oriented publishers this is probably not a major concern right away, as traditional publishing methods for scientific papers, while under great scrutiny, are not likely to hit a breaking point this year due to social media. But we're starting to see more signs of services such as content federation and software as a service creating new competitors for enterprise publishers that are going to be worrisome as service renewals begin to come up against budgets in any long-term economic slowdown. Toss in a slow start to developing social media services and we could be in a relatively brief period in which traditional database services have an opportunity to catch a new uptick in their value proposition.

This all adds up to a pattern that is clear and unmistakable: good content will find good markets, but building good brands for good content requires more new contexts than ever before. The biggest mistake that dot-com naysayers made was disputing the value of those "eyeballs" in the long run. Those fettered to quarterly returns may have felt differently about that in the short run, but once effective monetization and contextualization tools took off, the revenues and the profits followed surely. Monetizing contexts will continue to be a hot spot, and those with the tools to monetize them - not necessarily synonymous with those who own the content being contextualized - are going to do just fine for years to come. More to the point, social media is drawing us to a time when microcontexualization will increase the value of these types of venues for monetization, enabling higher-value transactions to be monetized more effectively than ever before.

So yes, it's a gloomy time for the global economy as a whole, especially for those services that depend on people walking through a doorway that might cost a fiver or so just to get there. Great for the carriage trade, but not so good for mass market sales. This will put more pressure on social media services to provide not just interesting chats but interesting opportunities to survive and thrive - as I am outlining in Content Nation. It may turn out that the greatest motivating factor for social media will be not Silicon Valley greed but worldwide need to build a more effective economy. Anyhow, congratulations around to all those who enjoyed glowing earnings reports, let's not forget that it was less then a decade ago when your revenues were mere blips on the corporate charts.

Labels: amazon, earnings, Google, Social Media, Web 2.0 Expo, Yahoo

In war it's said sometimes that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. If business deals are a form of warfare then we're seeing some interesting friendships in Silicon Valley these days. The Wall Street Journal covers an emerging wrinkle in the battle for Yahoo as they march closer to a deal to replace their ad network with ads from Google's more powerful stock of advertisers. WSJ speculates that this will make it harder for regulators to approve other acquisition offers from Microsoft and News Corporation to take over Yahoo - or at least slow down a potential re-upping of a bid from them. That may be the case, but it seems as if step by step Yahoo is navigating to a peaceful conclusion to its current woes - and forming a more healthy revenue picture that could help it to define a more comfortable independent future.

With the USD billion -plus boost it's likely to receive from Google's ad networks for ads displayed on its search pages and other page inventory and a potential pickup of already Google-friendly AOL, we're beginning to see the outlines of a duopoly to counterbalance the strong push of Microsoft and News Corp to dominate online media. In broad terms, think of Google as the search, video, database/API and ad backbone for the commercial Web and Yahoo as the media licensing, aggregation and community backbone. Each of these specific domains will overlap, of course, but in broad terms there's a symbiosis between them that offers each a path to revenue growth and the industry as a whole two distinct partners with two distinct strength sets.

This is probably the way that it should have been a while ago. I don't think that there was ever really a strong rivalry in many ways between Yahoo and Google on the product level. Each has always had their specific strengths, and probably both would have benefited greatly for earlier cooperation of this kind. Google was never going to "do media" as well as Yahoo and Yahoo was never going to "do technology" with quite the intensity and neutrality as Google. But between the two of them they both do online content very well indeed. And between the two of them they will have oodles of page inventory for ads to help them weather tougher economic times with fewer concerns - hopefully a key factor that can appeal to Yahoo shareholders being faced with choices.

More to the point, perhaps, such a duopoly would restore some natural balance to the Web that would enable marketers and publishers to understand who to deal with more effectively. There have been too many players with designs to be a "new number one," too much time wasted on kingmaking and not enough time spent on product development. It still leaves Microsoft plenty of room to focus on new and better platforms for content with mobile operators, auto manufacturers and appliance makers and to try to lock up entertainment deals for those platforms. News Corp may prove to be a stepchild in this situation for the moment, but with MySpace still chugging along healthily I doubt that it will be out of the game in any long-term sense.

The key loser in this deal would seem to be not so much Microsoft as Microsoft's strategy of domination by selling intellectual property. Be it software or content, Microsoft's continuing focus on proprietary consumer goods and services is distinct in many ways from the more open and collaborative assembly of value found in many Web-oriented environments. This may work to Microsoft's advantage where they can provide new and powerful platforms for content, such as in their Sync line of automobile communications technologies, but with ownership of content being more at the mercy of companies that own contexts it tends to be a strategy that conflicts with successful online media. It's that conflict that seems to be at the heart of their failure to convince Yahoo that a marriage would be good. At its heart, after more than a decade of online development, Microsoft still doesn't "get" the Web in some fundamental ways - nor does it seem to want to.

I'd be very happy if this path towards collaborative independence for Yahoo works out the way that it's headed currently. None of the acquisition paths for Yahoo were looking very positive for either Yahoo or the industry as a whole, even if they would have been good portfolio matches for potential stockholders. Here's hoping that we can let this deal fracas die off so that we can get back to focusing on the growth of the Web's greatest strengths - great content and powerful contexts.

Labels: AOL, Deals Partnerships and Sales, Google, Microsoft, News Corp, Yahoo

One of the more interesting things about coming back to blogging after a short hiatus is that the Yahoo deal drama has only gotten worse. There's great coverage from many sources, including a good summary of recent analyst takes on paidContent.org, as well as a New York Times story now circulating that News Corp may combine with Microsoft to complete a deal for Yahoo, presumably to combine MySpace's social media strengths with MSN and Yahoo's strengths along with a combined ad network. The counterfoil to this is a possible deal to merge AOL into Yahoo.

Certainly an AOL/Yahoo merger would help Time Warner's plan to get out of the portal business and help Yahoo to grow market share significantly - and certainly working towards one set of user accounts, one messaging network and other combined infrastructure could become very valuable over time. But one wonders how much time and effort would be spent on merging plumbing on these two legacy platforms to get a unified portal business when they could have been focusing on the growth in traffic comes from social media products that operate largely via other platforms.

By contrast the Microsoft/NewsCorp/Yahoo combination may offer a lot more punch for a shareholder's money. Leveraging the power of MySpace, a still-powerful social media platform well-attuned to mass media markets with Yahoo's strength in content aggregation and user accounts and Microsoft's strength in software development, platform strength and ad network brokerage, all in one package, has a lot of interesting parts that could produce more value in the long run. AOL and Yahoo combined, for example, will do little to penetrate mobile markets more effectively. Yahoo, Microsoft and MySpace, by contrast, could make some interesting things happen in mobile between platforms, social media, user accounts and ecommerce.

This is all well and good, but why are we so fixated on this deal, anyway? It's not that it won't create some sea changes over time, but the strengths of a deal with Yahoo come largely from what the partners may offer in combination. Yahoo is big, still powerful - but for the most part in its lifecycle a cash cow with relatively low new product investment waiting to be turned into hamburger. The real issue is what this means in terms of exit plans for online content and technology companies, as pointed out by Fred Wilson over on A VC - that is, if a company with fairly obvious marketable attributes like Yahoo has a hard time cashing in, what does this mean to online plays in general? If there's no exit at the top, what does that say to other players?

Somehow a deal will be forged for Yahoo in the next few months if the company's staff doesn't implode before then from takeover stress. But in the meantime I honestly don't think that it's all that significant a deal to watch from the overall industry's standpoint. Big will get a bit bigger - and that combined entity will still look nothing like Google. I think that we're seeing that overall getting any bigger is not necessarily going to solve anything in online markets. Online publishing is still in its infancy, still requires an enormous amount of investor patience as new ideas face daunting risks and still will have periods of high uncertainty that don't lend themselves to quarterly reports, much less private shareholder reviews. In other words, while some people are still focusing on making larger dinosaurs the long money is still probably in making more and better mammals. Be patient, be foresightful - and don't get too caught up in the scuttlebutt.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, Google, MSN, MySpace, News Corp, Yahoo

TechCrunch notes along with others the possible bidding war brewing between Google and Microsoft to acquire social bookmarking service Digg, which sounds probable given the relentless march for each of these companies to build market share. I wonder whether the prices will really accelerate that much off of last year's earlier possible bids for Digg, though, given the soft ad economy and the stabilization of Digg's audience. Mind you I am sure that either Google or Microsoft would love to have 20 million monthly visitors but the real issue is how one of these majors can recover from the flattened prospects of a Facebook deal in a down economy.

With Facebook seeming more interested in improving their platform as of late than cashing in their chips perhaps to some degree both Google and Microsoft have been played off against one another by Facebook via their high asking price to keep either of them from getting stronger through another social media property acquisition. Certainly the stock buzz has been off of both of these properties since the Facebook deal went cold, so perhaps with quarterly earnings calls looming around the corner both Google and Microsoft are eager to have at least some social media story to tell.

Google's Orkut platform was always an also-ran in traffic and is suffering from declining traffic, in part perhaps due to losses to new local-market social media platforms in India and other regional markets, so it's about time for Google to pony up for a bona fide social media community. From the Microsoft side its ad deal with Digg would go away in all likelihood with a Google acquisition so a Microsoft deal would help to shore up momentum for its still-young ad network, but with only a tiny finger into social media via MSNBC.com's Newsvine property it has a lot of catching up to do as well

On balance, though, Google's needs would seem to make this deal a "must do" at this point to ensure that it can get some flesh-and-blood "wisdom of the crowds" that's been managed largely through their search algorithms to date. Search is still an important tool, but as the word "curate" begins to trip off more and more tongues this year Google needs to step up its ability to curate content with a human eye as well as through machine intelligence. While its audience doesnt' stretch down deeply into specialty topics Digg's ability to lend weight to what really interests people on the most popular topics for a younger audience that starts and ends their day with social media is an important factor for Google to address. Combine that with the potential to marry Google search algorithms with Digg's increasingly sophisticated curation of bookmarked articles a and there could be some very interesting news products in the offing.

The other factor that Google seems to need to address through such an acquisition is a cultural issue. Google's presence to the world is friendly oftentimes but not very conversational. A brand like Digg is by its very essence a conversational brand, one that creates most of its value through people interacting as a group. Google needs that more open approach to brand building in its DNA more deeply. It's good to at listening to geeks and getting a bit better at listening to real-world people, but folks in the Web 2.0 world like Kevin Rose who are just far more accessible can become effective bridges to that more open collaborative culture. Microsoft could certainly benefit in similar ways, but the cultural divide between most of the Web 2.0 world and the corporate culture of Microsoft would seem to be a pretty wide gap to fill in.

This could be just one more social media deal that goes sour after the earnings calls but somehow this one has a heft to it that may lead it to completion. The prices being bandied about are far less steep than Facebook's earlier numbers - USD 200 million or so - and as fine a job as Digg has done with refining its platform it's not clear that it can go much further as a standalone product. Social bookmarking is still an important social media capability, but the future probably belongs to those services which can blend generic platforms such as Digg with services that can use that technology to build enthusiast communities that may carry a publisher's brand or a product brand. We'll see where this goes but hopefully one of these players finally gets off the dime and starts embracing social media communities more fully in an open Web environment.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, Digg, Google, Microsoft, Social Media

What does it mean when a company announces disappointing earnings and has no strategic plan to move forward? It means that you've been shopping your company like crazy and you're waiting to see what comes out of it. It should come as no major surprise that Microsoft finally made an offer for Yahoo that it will in all likelihood not refuse - USD 44.6 billion to be exact, more than double Yahoo's closing shares value. With an expected 23 percent drop in earnings over Q406, Yahoo's ability to fund a better position in the marketplace in the face of a looming recession was dimming rapidly. Microsoft wisely waited to buy low.

Six months ago I poured cold water on such a merger, seeing News Corp as a far better partner in the long run. I still believe that a News Corp acquisition would have been a great exit for Yahoo in many ways, as the negatives in a Microsoft deal that I pointed out in that earlier post still stand. But at the end of the day this is a merger of necessity, not of opportunity. Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo can compete with Google effectively at this point, a factor that's only going to be exacerbated as Google's mobile strategy begins to unfold this year.

While one can crow about "the merger of content and technology" or some such meme and marvel at the combined online audiences that these two megaportal providers can offer advertisers through the powerful combination of Microsoft's ad-brokeraging system and Yahoo's own ad marketing services there's one key and overarching problem for both companies: they've been slow to bring hit products to the marketplace. Old media and old technology product cycles are not Web product cycles, and neither company has done well in figuring out how to build online hits as effectively as they know how to buy them. Google may not pop out perfectly conceived products and has product issues of its own, but they're constantly letting new things hit the fan to see what new markets they can open up while others spent time trying to build perfect products for old markets.

The big plus of the deal - there is now going to be only one dominant portal for established content brands and marketers looking to position their own brand advertising - is certainly important, but for an upcoming generation of Twitterers who see their own Facebook homepages or newsreaders as the portals that matter most to them it's not clear that this will be a great solution for either company as the new generation of content consumers gains pruchasing power. If you want corporate content and corporate advertising on corporate technology, one certainly knows where to go now. But in three to five years corporations eager to eliminate the "middle man" of media to manage their own market conversations directly may not see as much value in this union as they might today.

The potential feather in the cap for this deal could be the opening of mobile broadband. With a strong position already in mobile devices and now armed with tons of content and a great ad network Microsoft could stake out an early advantage in broadband mobile frequencies now being opened to all devices based on their existing momentum alone. The struggling Vista platform will continue to be refined for enterprise purposes but Microsoft's mobile Windows CE operating system may become instead the default Windows platform for Microsoft's media efforts as home entertainment shifts between mobile gizmos and HDTVs. This is likely to bring strong profits over the next few years and is a very viable strategy overall.

But in the meantime one wonders whether there will be enough focus to make this happen. Having just survived a failed marriage between Hollywood media culture and Silicon Valley culture Yahoo must now adopt to Redmond ways. Microsoft has been redefining its own culture and focus rapidly in postitive directions as the Ballmer period fades away, but the scale of this merger is going to require some major dust settling. All this as a looming recession slows down both enterprise and media markets cannot be helpful.

It's a "Brangelina" marriage that's bound to eat up media cycles, but at the end of the day the fame of these brands is not necessarily going to yield substance out of thin air. This will benefit Microsoft in the short run, to be sure, if it can get to the short run issues in time, but in the long run onie wonders whether two overripe old brands can make a fresh and effective new brand. Time will tell, but at least we can read about this openly now and watch it play out.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo

Certainly Google's announcement regarding its forthcoming Knol article writing service has caused quite a stir in and beyond Silicon Valley as The New York Times, Search Engine Land, Google Blogoscoped, GigaOM and many others try to have a go at scoping out Knol's significance.

In short, Knol will enable people to create encyclopedia-like articles on various topics which can be rated by their readers and have both in-article links to other sources on the Web and automatically generated links to related Knol content. Unlike Wikipedia, there's one author per article, but multiple authors can create articles on the same topic, creating a free-market effect as to who is the leading expert on the topic. Articles will be equipped with Google ads, revenues from which will be shared with the author.

This is quite different in many important aspects from Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia, which in addition to attributing authors only in the history trail on collaboratively edited articles also maintains an ad-free environment for their content. While there are more than passing similarities to Wikipedia in Knol's overall design, the system doesn't seem likely to yield similar results. Knol's emphasis on single authorship without editing means that any particular subject is going to gain popularity based on a particular person's outlook, which may be good one day and quite out of date the next.

So while Knol may help people to get a leg up on what leading experts think about a particular subject - and mind you, that might be great for consultants like us folks at Shore - it's at the mercy of the editing priorities of whomever is maintaining their articles. For fast-changing topics this means that it may take a little bit more work for a reader to figure out who's really at the top of their game on a particular topic - and who's off on holiday for a while. Wikipedia needs constant monitoring to keep powerful people and organizations from trying to add spin to their articles, but at least there's highly active editing of one reasonably definitive version of the facts on a given topic.

While the comparison to Wikipedia is inevitable I see this in many ways as much a play for a wider variety of reference portals. Certainly About.com's docent system has resulted in topic experts who have financial motivations to maintain reference topics well on a wide variety of subjects, and in many ways Knol seems to be aimed at providing more efficient ways for subject matter experts to compete with one another in ways that generate revenues more efficiently than About.com. Knol puts more of an onus on an individual author to keep their information up to date, as others could come up with fresher content first, providing a framework that will help them to focus on content while leaving usability, design and monetization concerns to other. As Google's OpenSocial initiative gains steam one can imagine a person's Knol pages as reference content that can travel with them throughout related social media sites.

This free-market approach to knowledge is intriguing but it highlights a major problem that Google faces. As more and more high-quality user-generated content comes online, many people are finding answers to their questions from leading experts in social media venues that are precluding the need to reference a search engine for answers. As it is, so many topic-oriented searches display Wikipedia articles as the definitive source that in some ways Google has become the default front end for Wikipedia lookups as much as an index of the Web in general, reducing overall ad engagement on Google search results pages - and, in time, fewer searches generated on Google. Fewer searches means less available inventory for Google ads - so keeping more people engaged in Google inventory of some kind becomes an increasingly important goal for Google. So as much as this is a very interesting and useful approach to knowledge development it's overshadowed by commercial considerations that may or may not result in knowledge that people really trust. Collaborative editing has its limits for generating quality reference content, but at some point one's own version of a topic needs to stand up to the challenge of other knowledgeable people.

There are many different ways that Knol could evolve out before it launches, but the key factor would seem to be to provide people with a way to aggregate knowledge effectively. As much as one individual's view of a topic can be useful collaborative editing offers the most certain way to gain insights that are going to provide people with the deepest insight into a given topic. There's still room in such a system to reward individuals - one can imagine a system like Wikinvest in which a collaborative neutral article could be supplemented by opinionated personal articles - but first and foremost one hopes that Google will see that the best system will be one that serves the truth before it serves the bottom line. Knol holds out great promise as a platform that can help individuals to create useful reference content, but it may wind up having to serve too many competing interests to gain much of an impact on the marketplace.

Labels: advertising, collaboration, Google, knol, reference, Social Media, Wikipedia

Google may not always be great at creating products, but they sure do know how to create markets. In introducing its new Android open-source mobile phone platform via the Open Handset Alliance, Google has opened the gates for any and all software developers to develop new applications that can take advantage of Android's capabilities - already impressive in demo form.

This could catapult Andriod into a competitive position with Microsoft and Apple in relatively short time frame for mobile platforms if ambitious developers take up Google's challenge - and Google is making it easier for them to consider that challenge with USD 10 million in prize money for them to consider. The question is, though, will mobile carriers intent on maintaining proprietary control over their platforms to control services be willing to take on such an open platform?

According to Engadget the likely candidate for early adoption of Android for mobile devices in the U.S. is Sprint, which is the American telecoms carrier most aggressive in building out high-bandwidth, long-distance WiMax mobile Intenet infrastructure that could bring the mobile Web to the masses. Engadget speculates that perhaps Google would acquire Sprint to help accelerate WiMax growth, services fueled by Google mobile advertising revenues that might make mobile more affordable or, perhaps, free. Nice thinking, but with so many different communications technologies in play, including the impending action of soon-to-be-former analog television frequencies in the U.S. it's far more likely that Google will be looking towards an alliance with Sprint that would still leave the door open for Android via other carriers.

In the meantime Sprint has much to gain in working aggressively with Google. Slow to the mobile services dance as it grew incompatible network scale via its Nextel acquisition, Sprint needs an edge to catch up with rivals well entrenched with iPhones, Blackberries and other intelligent handsets. In doing so Sprint may be able to catch the next wave of mobile communications focused on both full-screen Web services and advanced messaging capabilities that can leverage WiMax efficiently while other technologies fall into place for even more mobile Web access.

The Zune-sized touch-screen demo unit with a Blackberry-like keyboard that Google's Sergey Brin used to show off Android certainly underscores that Android has the potential to develop features that can run with the current mobile big dogs very quickly - and begin to create a price war between Android-equipped units and currently pricey iPhones and Blackberries that might be just the trick to unlock the chicken-egg equation that seems to have slowed the growth of mobile Web services.

This is a long way of saying that we should expect Android to open up highly affordable Web access via mobile units far more quickly than other platforms are likely to do via telecommunication partners seeking to maintain status quo services pricing. While high-end content services will certainly find a home on Android it's the prospect of reaching people for whom a mobile phone is a necessity and high-speed Internet access via a PC a luxury that content producers and advertisers should consider most important in this rollout of content technologies.

The Web is about to get that much more powerful and affordable via Android-enabled devices and networks - and that much more important to marketers seeking audiences with limited attention spans. Pop in Google's OpenSocial initiative for social media services on top of an Android-enabled device and you have a thoroughly compelling platform for content development that other platform providers are going to be hard-pressed to match soon. Google's definitely in catch-up mode in mobile services but it looks like through Android they might be catching a big break at last.

Labels: Android, broadband wireless, Google, Microsoft, mobile, Sprint, WiMax

(NOTE: See the ShoreViews Video on this topic below in this post.)

At the recent Future of Business Media conference one of the key trends outlined by the speakers was that B2B media knows that social media is an important trend but that they are very reluctant to engage with social media tools. Most mainstream consumer publishers are about as far along, if truth be told, but it's of crucial importance that they wake up and see the opportunities in social media before others begin to skim off the best revenue opportunities.

One of the best examples of that can be seen in the recent launch of Facebook's advertising features, which are unlike most other tools used for marketers trying to reach audiences. Instead of just throwing up banner ads or typical CPM-oriented ad networks, Facebook is leveraging the power of their own social network to make companies, products and brands a real part of the Facebook community on a peer basis. The new Facebook marketing capabilities consist of two key components: SocialAds, which enables advertisers to get messages into the feed of Facebook activity appearing on member home pages, and Facebook pages for companies and products.

The SocialAds implementation on one level is not too different from any other ad feed that might appear in a weblog's RSS feed but with much more powerful capabilities based on member profiles and activity. An advertiser can target members on Facebook based on their personal profiles, including interests that match up with keywords, targeting both very small communities and very large communities based on those parameters. While keyword selections are fixed, as opposed to being able to define one's own, this still allows a fairly fine degree of targteting.

But the kicker in SocialAds is in the ability to link an ad to a member's reported activities on Facebook. So, for example, if a member visited a particular restaurant a graphic with a sponsored link to that restaurant could appear as a part of that member's post. Since there was probably a positive reason that the member mentioned this restaurant this then provides a very powerful personal endorsement to the advertiser, linking word-of-mouth directly to advertising. This is something very new and extremely powerful in advertising, a development that is potentially as revolutionary as Google's AdWords sponsored links were several years ago.

The introduction of Facebook pages for companies, products and brands is a more subtle features but equally important in its ability to support social media marketing. There are already more than 100,000 commercially-oriented Facebook pages for companies (our company page here) and their power is that they are so much like any other member's page. You can post company or product profiles, videos, links or any other type of content that you think is relevant, but the real value is that members can declare themselves "fans" of your commercial page - a high level of endorsement that enables a brand or product to become in effect a peer member of one's social network.

This is a positioning for marketing and messaging that for the first time really enables marketers to act in conversations within a social community as true peers. Certainly Second Life has shown the way on these types of capaiblities with its ability to allow brands to show of their stuff in virtual reality, but in Facebook's community it's less about glitz and more about rubbing shoulders with bona fide human beings rather than users wrapped in fanciful avatars with who knows what real persona behind them strolling into an online shopping mall. In Facebook pages a brand is less about exhibitionism than it is about engaging customers on a very personal basis.

Not all is sweetness and light in this new marketing environment - why is a sponsored link to ESPN's Pontiac-sponsored online site appearing in my news feed? A little TOO broad targeting, perhaps - but with futher refinements by Facebook and further refinements by Facebook members to indicate the kind of commercial messages they feel comfortable receiving the more powerful this kind of environment will become. It's perhaps a sneak preview of the kind of marketing environment that Google's OpenSocial may be able to make available to companies wanting to extend their message into a wide variety of media platforms that want to take advantage of the power of social media applications.

In the midst of a very busy week of product announcements bookmark Facebook's new marketing capabilities as one that you're going to the talking about - and thinking about - for a long, long time. This is just the beginning of a new era in conversational marketing that will change forever how goods and services enter the conversation of the marketplace.

For a visual run-through of how this all works take a peek at the following ShoreViews Video:

Labels: advertising, facebook, Google, marketing, openSocial, Social Media, SocialAds

UPDATE: Google's launch of the codenamed "Maka-Maka" project will take place Thursday, details at TechCrunch.] With Silicon Valley sprouting more Hawaiian-esque words for social media products than a Trader Vic's menu it's only appropriate that Google should be betting large on a social media with a new project code-named Maka-Maka. As detailed by TechCrunch Maka-Maka is an effort to bring social media capabilities and other Google content applications to any Web platform and application rather than trying to create just another standalone portal. To some degree this may seem like sloppy seconds after having lost a bidding war for Facebook to Microsoft, especially as Google's own Orkut social media portal has barely dented U.S. markets. But there may be some strengths to Google's methods if they can get them rolled out in a timely fashion.

The general Maka-Maka concept is to use social media as the principle platform from which one accesses other Google applications and which in turn can be embedded on other media platforms, in essence turning any Google application or other application into a social media-enabled application, complete with Google's own library of widgets already enabled through the iGoogle personalized interface. Add in Google's contextual ad capabilities and there's the potential for a new type of universal distribted platform for consuming content that puts social contexts at its focal point. Instead of locking people into a particular portal Google provides a trusted login, core functionality and the ability to embed a common framework for conversational content anywhere.

Then again, it could turn out to be what it seems to be at first glance: an after-the-fact attempt to pull together on a patchwork basis a very disparate group of Google applications that were never constructed with social media in mind. Facebook has its own ideas for a social media operating system as well, mind you, but at least it would start with a viable community built around bona-fide relationships at the center of its capabilities rather than having to wish that network into being.

But there's one key aspect to Google's gambit that may help it to propel its plans for Maka-Maka forward more quickly than may be envisioned at first: mobile markets. With a strong mobile platform about to be launched and powerful content and applications built off of Google Maps that are naturals for social networking there's every reason to think that Maka-Maka may be first and foremost the gateway into mobile social media that can bridge together voice conversations, messaging, email ecommerce and user-generated content far more rapidly than any other mobile provider. With Facebook under Microsoft's wing there's going to be an already established mobile platform on which Facebook's network of users could be deployed rapidly, so this is going to be a race with many dimensions - many of which could just as easily favor Microsoft's increasingly savvy online strategy.

Much of this will become more clear over the next few weeks as Google reveals more about both its mobile capabilities as well as its social media plans, but expect the initial announcements about Maka-Maka to be underwhelming until Google's mobile plans become more explicit. Once those kick in Maka-Maka may just turn out to be a very interesting way for the world to carry on its conversations in more online and mobile venues than any other provider - if it can finally manage to draw a critical mass of audience share for its social media efforts. Google's efforts to date don't augur well for that likelihood, but as Google seeks to open up mobile markets to more universal and cross-network access it may yet get the upper hand on truly universal social media.

Labels: facebook, Google, maka-maka, mobile, Social Media

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

I have enjoyed using the Compete.com traffic analysis service, which provides some useful data to compare Web site traffic performance more accurately and finely than the oft-bashed Alexa statistics. While Compete offers a more limited range of sites for analysis and only a year's worth of data to mull through it's able to track real visitors, audience engagement and growth with more meaningful data. On the Compete blog recently was a post that looked at how major search engines are performing in comparison to one another for both traffic and performance. While Google leads Yahoo and Microsoft with 67 percent of market share, the Compete stats claim that Yahoo comes out on top in terms of search fulfillment - the percentage of searches that actually result in someone clicking on a link in a search results page. Compete claims that Yahoo's search fulfillment rate is 75 percent, compared with Google's 64 percent and Microsoft's 61 percent.

Does this mean that Yahoo's search results are more "clickable" than Yahoo's? Maybe so, but it's a rather ambiguous claim to make. One has to assume that with only 20 percent of people using Yahoo for searching to start with that a minority find its search results to be more useful than Google's. So for that minority they seem to use them more effectively. Overall, Yahoo searches are more optimized for people in a purchasing mode than Google search results, which tend to be optimized more for people seeing general information. With this in mind it could be that Yahoo tends to lead shoppers somewhat more specifically to product information that they're seeking - a factor that's likely to attract the brand advertisers that are at the core of Yahoo's marketing strategy.

Yahoo search benefits from doing fewer things better for fewer people, but Compete also shows that Yahoo as a whole performs far better than Google in the total attention that it gets from audiences:



While Yahoo's strong destination content helps to bolster its attention ratings it's losing ground to Microsoft in total page views as Microsoft bolsters its Live.com search engine:



In the middle of this is Google, still the overall search leader but beginning to stagnate as a destination as other search-oriented sites bolster content that transforms search portals more into destination content sites. Google has these abilities also but focuses more on solving a broader array of requirements for a broader search audience. Google also has more partners using its search technology as well as mashups and other API-based services so to some degree the Compete statistics are not revealing the full strength of Google's market presence. Google's growth as a destination search engine may have slowed, but its presence as a technology platform that influences where and how people find content in valuable contexts is growing in highly profitable directions.

All of this should serve to remind us that there is no longer one clear answer to how to create marketable value through search. You can focus on becoming more portal-like, you can focus on being more embeddable, you can focus more on a specific function such as ecommerce or you can focus on a range of functions - but regardless of the focus it's no longer a matter of just having great ranking algorithms or great server farms. Search has become just one of many tools for contextualizing Web content effectively on demand, one that will continue to grow in importance but just one tool in an arsenal of methods to be used for more effective audience engagement.

Labels: Compete.com, Google, Microsoft, search, Yahoo

The Times Online notes along with the rest of the world Google's funding and sponsorship of the Lunar X PRIZE, a new effort by the X PRIZE Foundation to promote the private exploration of the moon. Having already spurred Scaled Composite's first manned private space flight that lead to to Richard Branson's budding Virgin Galactic space tourism enterprise, the Lunar X PRIZE promises to get entrepreneurs to lift their horizons away from the planet altogether for the very first time in human history - with Google's brand in tow.

This is the sort of brand and market development that continues to put Google head and shoulders above any other publishing enterprise for vision and return on investment. The total risk is USD 30 million, about a day's worth of Google revenues, with virtually no downside. The X PRIZE brand already has a hugely positive market presence and the actual space missions to the lunar surface are unmanned, so at worst someone else's hardware may go haywire on a dare. No wonder Google's own Boeing 767 gets landing rights at the Ames NASA center down the road from their HQ these days.

It's also an indication of the breadth and seemingly perpetual audacity of Google's market vision for publishing. Google may not always be the best developer of publishing products, but their ability to conceive of new markets and new ways of looking at existing markets allows them a great deal of leeway in reaping new rewards where others aren't even thinking of looking for revenues. The metaphor of a mission to the moon captures the Gooogle ethos perfectly: yes, we could stay in low earth orbit forever with online publishing waiting for others to catch up, but it's time to start pushing out the frontiers yet again. Google may get only 80 percent of their investments right, but when you open all-new territories for marketing again and again you can live with 80 percent in the long run.

Labels: Google, marketing, Trends, X PRIZE

CNET News reports in the past tense on the net neutrality movement, the effort by a coalition of online publishers and technology companies to keep U.S. telecommunications companies from charging different rates for Internet access based on arrangements with content partners. CNET notes that in the wake of last year's successes in stalling changes to current policies and new focus on carving up the 700 MHz radio spectrum for wireless broadband access the movement has become fragmented. The original "It's Our Net" group has reformed as the Open Internet Coalition, trimmed down from 148 to 74 members, with major technology and portal players such as Microsoft and Yahoo out of the picture. Notably Apple was never a part of this coalition, a fact underscored by its interests in acting as a "toll gate" of its own sort as it uses its iPod and iPhone proprietary platforms to pressure media companies into price cuts for premium content.

All of this could be relatively moot except that while legislators and companies may be focused on other things the communications companies who have so much at stake have certainly not forgotten their original goals in opposing net neutrality. In a parting gift to communications companies outgoing U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales filed an ex parte filing (PDF) with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission suggesting that net neutrality regulations were not necessary to ensure open competition. The absence of Yahoo and Microsoft from the coalition and their advancing plans to develop premium content services may also imply that they see themselves becoming more like Apple and being able to dictate content pricing and licensing terms to a broader array of content providers through alliances with communications companies.

In the bigger picture, then, the fight for neutral access to publications over public infrastructure
is far from over and in fact widening with the 700 MHz spectrum also in play. In all of this traditional publishers have been largely in the background, with no apparent major role in the lobbying efforts. This seems to be wishful thinking at best, akin to the efforts of publishers to ignore the Web in its early days, but now only worse since such a large percentage of their growth depends on it. The New York Times reported dwindling revenues from their ever-smaller print editions yet a 28 percent increase in online revenues, to cite one example of robust online revenue growth. If there were a chance that newsprint or mailing costs would go up publishers would be all over it: why do they ignore potential regulations that may have a huge impact on the profit margins of their most promising new source of revenues?

In the meantime the opting out of Microsoft and Yahoo from the net neutrality movement and the non-participation of Apple points towards what many publishers hope: that a handful of major portals can help along with communications providers to re-create the cable television model and create a brand advertising Nirvana where consumers behave as they ought to and pay for premium access. Yet with user-generated content and search engines providing more context for content than ever before it's not clear why consumers will be persuaded easily to opt for being charged premium prices for access to specific sources when flat-rate access has been such a successful way for them to determine for themselves what's worthwhile content.

In largely ignoring the net neutrality debate publishers' hopes for controlled access are more likely to fall prey to communications companies and portals who will take higher percentages of their revenues from their online content through access channels that are not optimized for audience growth and that will give them less autonomy on pricing. The open Web may be a bit more of a wild and wooly place for some publishers but for those that have embraced it most efficiently it has been the most promising revenue and profit driver in an era where many channels are becoming far leaner and meaner. It's time for publishers to think about what's really in their best long-term interests and to begin to embrace net neutrality as an essential component for both audience and margin growth.

Labels: apple, Congress, FCC, Google, Justice Department, Microsoft, net neutrality, publishers, Trends, U.S., Yahoo

Reuters covers the licensing of content by Google from four major wire services, including Britain's Press Association, Canadian Press, Agence France-Presse and the U.S.-based Associated Press. On one level this is a very typical licensing deal equivalent to those inked by other major portals such as Yahoo, MSN and other outlets - and in fact Google had licensed rights to these content sources earlier in some instances but had not hosted their content. But the deal takes on a far different dimension given that it's with the leading Web search engine - one whose ability to deliver advertising revenues to portals using wire services is an important driver for traffic.

While Google ranking algorithms will take into account the appearance of wire content in other sites the links from Google searches and portal pages will lead to Google itself - helping its own ratings and, presumably, for its own ad revenues eventually. The AP story claims that this will have a major impact on AP member sites using their content but at least one commenter on Poynter Online claims that "For the vast majority of newspaper.coms I know, wire story traffic is not a big factor, and revenues from AP pages barely, if at all,... For the vast majority of newspaper.coms I know, wire story traffic is not a big factor, and revenues from AP pages barely, if at all, cover the cost AP charges us for its CustomWire service." That may be true, but it's bound to hit those sites' overall traffic counts and referrals to other pages in their sites from wire content.

While newspaper sites will certainly feel some pinch from this move, the far larger losers in this deal will be the major portals such as Yahoo that rely on wire content for a significant portion of their news traffic and search engine referrals. With Google now playing by the same rules their relative lack of original news is bound to be yet another chink in their armor in the battle for ratings and advertising supremacy. At the same time wire services are looking at the diminishing fortunes of traditional news outlets such as newspapers and broadcast services and recognizing that they need to move more aggressively to build their brands online. In this sense Reuters has pointed the way for these wire services with its increasingly selective use of online syndication partners.

The biggest winner in this mix are the original news producers who are looking for stronger marketing of their content. From this perspective member-driven wire services such as AP are going to find themselves in a more advantageous situation as they continue to make it easier for their members to market unique content filed with AP into major outlets without having to hassle licensing deals. At the same time, though, these traditional news producers must become more adept at marketing their unique content directly via search engines, portals and social media services if they are going to continue to build the audience metrics that advertisers expect. Google's move places even more pressure on local news producers to come up with more viable strategies to engage their audiences in the contexts that they value most - and more opportunities for wire services to act as channels for those strategies.

Labels: AP, CP, Deals Partnerships and Sales, Google, News

Mashable notes along with a number of other sources the testing of what's labeled a comments feature for Google News. In a sample Google News query (link will not age well) on a new drug for treating AIDS you can see a comment posted by a doctor specializing in AIDS treatment. Clicking on the comment yields a detailed entry by this person. Mashable indicates that people can submit verifiable emails to Google that relate to a person or entity mentioned in an article to comment on it, though based on this sample query it would appear that it is not just people directly associated with a company or product that can comment. Note also that if you click on a detailed entry you get a number of news stories that relate to the topic covered in this person's comment.

This is obviously not a full-blown comments feature but rather an attempt to draw in original content from experts who can provide insight into topics relating to specific news stories. With the editorial verification and filtering provided by Google it becomes in effect a "letters to the editor" feature for Google News that attaches these expert insights of relatively unlimited length to a wide variety of sources on a topic, giving Google News a unique editorial depth that no one publication will be able to provide.

Most news sites tread on providing user comments very lightly, especially in the aftermath of the failed LA Times' experiment with crowdsourced op-ed pieces and The New York Times' exorcising of user comment boards, but in doing so they threw out the baby with the bath water in many important ways. In the search for increasing user engagement Google has enabled its news users to use its news service as a master source of expert-driven editorial content, even as most news organizations work to reduce unique content from users relating to their own editorial operations. It precludes such experts from having to rely on maintaining their own weblogs or in engaging in the fray of a specific social media service in which their comments may be lost or drowned out all too easily. Kudos to the Google News team for recognizing the opportunity to put news content into perspective with its own unique content - and to pave the way for a new way of looking at how one collects expert insights on both leading and specialized news topics.

Labels: editorial, expert systems, Google, News, Social Media

Google has been pushing its search appliances, email and online application services to enterprises for quite some time, but it's inability to speak the same language as I.T. managers on issues such as security has slowed their progress significantly. Consider their recent acquisition of Postini a major investment in overcoming their I.T. gap and providing new inroads for Google's ASP-oriented content and office automation services. Postini specializes in managing security for external communications such as email, messaging and Web site access with services that are compliance officer-friendly and that are totally outsourced.

Investors Business Daily notes that this places Google in competition with other security services providers such as McAfee and Symantec, but it's really a strong swipe at both Microsoft and as well at Software-as-a-Service providers such as Salesforce.com who are making quick inroads with ASP-based content and automation services in the enterprise sector. With its extensive range of APIs Google can now sew together a wide range of content integration capabilities - including embedded services and database services. With more and more content-oriented capabilities being outsourced by major corporations Google finds itself acquiring more and more basic building blocks to become a future "must-have" technology for enterprises of all sizes. But at this point that's still a future at best - beyond search Google has yet to come up with a killer platform that will be hard for major corporations to resist. Still, it will make it that much harder for competitors like Factiva to dominate in this space as Google becomes more of a go-to source for content and communications behind the firewall.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, enterprise, Google, postini

There's quite a bit of buzz out there about Neilsen/NetRatings deciding to remove page views from its Web site traffic measurement rankings. ComputerWorld notes along with others that technologies which enable the embedding of content such as AJAX make it harder to determine what people are really looking at: the page that someone is visiting or the widgets embedded in that page. Therefore Neilsen is preferring to gauge the total time that a visitor engages a site rather than how many pages that they're looking at in a site. Forbes notes that other site measurement services are not giving up on page views just yet, and that regardless of what this may or may not mean the Neilsen/NetRatings methodology is still a "black box" unavailable for auditor scrutiny.

Neilsen has an important point about AJAX technologies making page views that much harder to substantiate as important measurement metrics, but there are other factors at play here as well. The key point that Neilsen seems to be driving towards are measurements that will be meaningful to brand advertisers used to time-based measurements via television and radio. Page views just don't compute with many of these advertisers, and perhaps rightfully so. In the highly transitory world of page views there's hardly enough engagement to provide the level of content endorsement that brand advertisters seek when paying premium rates. So for advertisers seeking "mouse potatoes" who are deeply engaged in a particular site visit time can be a particularly important metric.

The other side of this, though, is that this type of behavior tends to favor social media sites, where there is not only a mix of AJAX-embedded content but as well deep streams of comments, bookmarks and other linked content that gets users working the scroll wheel on their mouses a lot harder these days. Oftentimes the hottest content on a social media site may have dozens of weblog entries in a single page or hundreds of comments: it can take several minutes of focused reading before someone may be ready to move from one page in a social media site to another. So oftentimes total page views in social media may be comparatively low while total time engagement may be comparatively high.

None of is likely to be sweet news to search engines such as Google, where people flit through highly transitory content on their way to destination sites where they dwell over in-depth content. Contextual ads are very potent in these type of page-view environments, though - ads that are not necessarily of interest to the brand advertisers that Neilsen hopes to serve. On the other side of the coin Google's YouTube portal should be a prime beneficiary of such measurements, enabling new revenue streams for video content from brand advertisers who were never quite sold on search engine page views. There are many other details to audience measurement that Neilsen and others must take into account when coming up with meaningful representations of online behavior, but given Neilsen's desire to maintain effective relationships with media companies and advertisers putting an increasing amount of brand advertising on the Web focusing on the time people spend on a site is a strong move towards supporting destination Web site content - and towards providing social media sites with a well-deserved revenue boost.

Labels: audience measurement, Google, neilsen, netratings, Social Media, Trends

What the Nielsen/NetRatings change really means, Postini's impact on enterprise Google sales, new Google social media search and initial thoughts about the new Flock release.

Labels: flock, Google, neilsen, netratings, postini, shoreviews, Social Media, video

Google has been playing at the edges of the healthcare industry from a number of angles, with scholarly content, Google Co-op-indexed reference content and a nascent Google Health initiative under the tutelage of Architect Adam Bosworth. The Google Blog announced a new advisory group of healthcare industry heavies that seems to indicate that whatever is on the drawing board at Google is likely to have very broad and deep impact. In addition to the COO of the American Medical Association the advisory group includes major players from research, hospitals, government, foundations and general media. Very notably absent from the group, though, are major publishers of medical research.

This would seem to indicate that a fair amount of Google's focus on healthcare is going to be from a consumer standpoint, but there's another way of looking at this as well. Google is assembling the parties who have the most invested in successful outcomes from the most efficient collection and distribution of medical information possible. In other words, Google is looking at healthcare from the broadest systemic perspective possible - and may as a result be focusing in on new ways to assemble, integrate and deliver medical information and collaboration on a global basis that scholarly publishers are nowhere near ready or able to enable. With enormous inefficiencies in both services delivery and information distribution the medical industry is in a position not unlike the financial industry prior to the introduction of efficient electronic trading information services. This would seem to parallel the highly profitable approaches that Google has taken to other information problems such as advertising that were too caught up in older publishing models for traditional media companies to make the strides that Google made with contextual advertising.

While initial offerings may tend towards modest consumer-oriented efforts on a scale of Revolution Health I sense from what I've been taking in lately that this initiative will challenge the medical content industry even more than the news industry has been challenged by Google's moves into indexing their content. Keep a close eye on both the consumer side of this equation as well as moves into making research, medical insurance and other data more accessible than ever before - with our without traditional medical publishers.

Labels: Google, healthcare, scholarly publishing, Trends

Read/Write Web notes the following comments by Tapan Bhat, Yahoo's vice president of Front Doors, at the recent NextWeb conference in Amsterdam. Tapan told attendees that search would not dominate the web in the future:

"The future of the web is about personalization. Where search was dominant, now the web is about 'me.' It's about weaving the web together in a way that is smart and personalized for the user."

Well, yes and no, Tapan. Yahoo's personalization plays are exploiting the trend towards audiences aggregating their own content from various sources, including feeds, widgets, bookmarking services and other social media tools. User-defined aggregation plays a key role in defining where and how people look for and find content. But where is most of that content coming from? Search engines power many of the mashup and widget-oriented aggregation plays that are touted as the leading edge of social media. Be it through Google or more enterprise- and media-oriented services such as MuseGlobal, Mark Logic, Nstein or Really Strategies search services are evolving into the back ends for value-add content services that place valuable content in customized contexts well beyond traditional search results. So there's no escaping the importance of search and its ability to return the most relevant and useful content.

Where Tapan may have a point is that people aren't really looking towards new search engines to solve their problems. paidContent.org noted the arrival of Ask3D, a refreshed version of the Ask.com interface that, well, looks pretty much like the old interface but a little prettier. Ask.com is a good search engine, but I think that the personalization movement is a little bit off target. It's not so much about "let me personalize my search results" as it is "tell me what I want to know." If user-defined personalization accomplishes this, great, but Google's emphasis on anticipating what users need on a more personalized basis is probably closer to what will succeed for the 80-percent crowd. As noted by Information Today the new "Universal Search" interface does a lot to customize search results to a specific context automatically, a concept that Google will expand upon as it integrates content from its wide array of search-based services even further over the past several months. For the 20 percent or less who will demand more control and features sooner there's now Google Experimental, which includes early-stage features that may make their way into the Universal toolkit soon enough.

So is search really "done" at this point? As the hottest problem to solve perhaps search is indeed past its peak, even though search engines will still continue to be refined. But the new generation of content services have search at their core and will add in feeds, Web mining and other capabilities to aggregate content on the fly far more effectively than information services have done to date. We all applaud Factiva's new integration of audio and video content into its search capability, for example, but the real proof of the pudding will be the applications that Factiva's clients choose to build off of such content. Consider search at this point the ad hoc database building tool of choice for millions of users that is only beginning to be used to its fullest extent to create highly valuable content services.

Labels: Ask..com, Google, NextWeb, personalization, search, Social Media, Technology, Trends, Yahoo

The native language of Hawaii has given us words like "aloha" that have slipped into general use as well as more other terms like "wiki" that have been appropriated for new uses. Add to that list of appropriations the Hawaiian word "mahalo," which means "Thank you" in everyday conversations and now refers also to Mahalo, the new user-driven search portal under development by Jason Calacanis. "Mahalo's goal is to hand-write the top 10,000 search terms," goes the boilerplate on its page templates, an objective that's being lead by ex-Anchors from Netscape and like-skilled guides. Visitors to Mahalo can suggest links for inclusion in the service. How does this all work? As an alpha-level product you have to give Jason some slack but in truth it's not something that you're going to figure out as a user in a few seconds. Thank goodness for the FAQ.

On one level Mahalo is quite simple: type in a search term, get either a page of information and links that's been largely edited by a Mahalo guide or something that's been generated automatically for terms that they haven't populated as of yet. Being day two there are lots more pages that are misses than hits, but a listing of the top 20 searches appears on each search results page to give Mahalo visitors a sense of who's looking at what. You can also enter questions in a natural language style, which will provide results that look a bit like an amateur's version of Answers.com (partnership, anyone?). An example of a topic page more fully populated by Mahalo guides is Apple, which lists a "Mahalo Top 7" links for the term, disambiguation (Did you mean: "Apple, the fruit? Apple, the Beatles' record label?"), financial information, products, news, blogs and fansites, information and reviews, upgrades and support, photos and videos, competitors, and "culture". Items that Mahalo guides really dig get a little icon. In theory users can make comments on Mahalo pages, but in my short tour I haven't seen any yet.

Well, this is certainly...innovative. Or utterly derivative, depending on your point of view. I know from personal experience that there is one huge brain between Jason's ears and it seems as if every idea he ever had or absorbed about the content industry exploded all at once from his noggin onto the pages of Mahalo. From one angle what we have here is About.com with user input: docents put together some light content that surrounds links. Okay,we know that works. Kind of. From another angle we have a dot-com era version of Hoovers, a light assemblage of business and product info to guide the initially curious. Interesting, but who is this aimed at? From yet another angle we have Wikipedia, a catch-all encyclopedia format that tries to catch a wide variety of facets about a given topic. Digg and other social bookmarking services enter into the picture with Mahalo Top 7 bookmarks, but there's not a strong sense of how useful the first seven results will be: social bookmarking services don't rank relevance all that well. And of course there's the analogy to Answers.com, one-stop answers to questions from the best sources available. Except we really have to trust someone called a "guide" as to his or her judgment on sources.

Finally, there's the question of when I will know when to go to Mahalo. Will it be when I have a question that's one of the top 10,000 search terms? Oooh, is what I want to find maybe number 15,000? I dunno. Try "most popular," Jason, people will be able to get their heads around that more easily. Do I go there to get the latest news? Hmm, they have news feeds from Fox and other partners but but why would I get them here rather than other places - and why aren't the guides lending a hand with filtering and updating the news? While Wikipedia may be in the hands of "those darn users" I have a fairly high level of confidence that information on almost any popular topic will be updated within minutes, if not seconds, of something happening in the real world across a huge array of topics. I also know that Google will insert hot news at the top of my search results and that user-generated sites will help me to find the really cool news pretty quickly. I don't know how true that's going to be of any well-intended editorial staff covering tens of thousands of topics every day - even with help from users. Will I go there for shopping? Probably not, services like eBay and Google will scrape together the information that I need more effectively. Will I go there for reference information? Maybe, but with such a generic approach to content organization I'd probably prefer to type in a term on Google and branch off to Wikipedia, Answers.com, Hoovers or other key sources that it finds so easily. Will I go there to browse their taxonomy? Probably not, I've gotten too used to getting information on any topic level with one phrase and a click.

So, when DO I go to Mahalo? That's something that Jason needs to work on a little more. There are a lot of very interesting individual features and there's definitely a need out there for something between algorithmic search engines and the chaos of social bookmarking, but I am wondering whether this is more about a product vision or more about what to do with all of those ex-Netscapers who were inspired by Jason. If it's more the latter then it's not clear that a fairly limited and relatively anonymous editorial staff is going to have the horsepower or the respect within a given topic arena to build relevance creds. It gives Jason the control over writers that he desires, but in specific topic domains it may take more editorial talent to pull this off than he can afford.

There are so many ideas forming at once in Mahalo that it's far too early to write it off as a mish-mosh of interesting concepts - especially since people are growing tired of the "gaming" of search results. Calacanis could put initial feedback to good use, form more useful partnerships and come up with a tool that really stands out for an increasingly sophisticated online audience. But at this point my bet's against it. With Google's "Universal Search" capabilities beginning to phase in and more pure user-generated content plays becoming more disciplined and deep it's not clear that the features in Mahalo will ever mature to the point where they'll gel into a useful product in comparison to more established search and reference plays. At the same time there's far too little a sense of online community in Mahalo to make people passionate about online content feel that this product is really "theirs" in any strong way. In between these approaches there's probably room for a product that combines the best of search, editorial skills and user input to create marketable context for popular topics. But for now I don't think that people will be saying "thank you" to Mahala for its attempts at filling that need.

Labels: Business Information, Calacanis, Google, Mahalo, Netscape, reference, search, Social Media, Technology, Trends

On one level the news from WaPo and others that Salesforce.com is discussing an alliance with Google to integrate Google's office applications, messaging and other key components into their offerings has to be welcomed at business information providers' offices. Many business information services companies are already taking advantage of Salesforce.com's AppExchange service to integrate their content and functional capabilities into SF.com's increasingly popular sales and marketing platform, so SF.com's success will help to enhance their successes as well through on-demand content services sales. But this development must be absorbed along with the announcement of SF.com's launch of a venture funding network to accelerate the development of business information services through their platform. Put the two of these together and you can see a perfect storm brewing for business information providers that have assumed that their investments in enterprise software to drive content sales will flourish indefinitely.

Why be worried about SF.com and Google? The key factor is that bit by bit the enterprise's information base is being absorbed into proprietary Web databases. That's likely to turn out to be a good thing for many enterprises trying to compete in a cost-conscious global environment: the "pretty good" infrastructure of SF.com is increasingly more than just adequate to perform crucial tasks, especially when extended by third party services through SF.com's AppExchange services. Add in the "pretty good" Google office automation services and you can envision a day not too far down the road when many enterprise users will be using the combination of Google and SF.com services for 80 percent or more of their day-to-day business information generation and use. Throw in Google's Web and enterprise search services along with their robust and open development APIs and you can imagine more than a few of those SF.com venture dollars funding business information solutions that will make solutions like Factiva's SalesWorks look fairly limp by comparison.

While a stronger SF.com is in the interest of business information providers who want fast inroads into sales, marketing and management teams in enterprises this ally is beginning to recognize the gravitas that its platform-independent approach to business solutions has to provide leverage over these same vendors. As publishers thirsty for new revenue channels open up more to enabling access to premium content through Google search interfaces the combination of SF.com and Google could spell trouble for traditional licensed database services over the next few years. If SF.com and Google own the development and marketing environment and publishers no longer require traditional subscription services to leverage their content into enterprise applications then it is going to be a far more competitive environment for business information services providers who count on aggregated subscription services for their revenues.

There will be more good news than bad news for a while out of this impending alliance but business information services will be well-advised to sharpen up their strategies as to how to preserve and accelerate revenues through this alliance. Nimble competitors are likely to do quite well if they adjust quickly - but odds are strong that more than a few business information providers will stumble along the way.

Labels: Business Information, Deals Partnerships and Sales, Google, Salesforce.com, Trends

On one level Google's announcement of the impending unveiling of a new search interface that unifies many of its key content assets is just a catchy filler for its analyst briefings: since when does improved navigation make for real headlines? But when you delve into the details Google's "Universal Search" is going to reset the bar of audience expectations for content search services yet again. In a nutshell, Google is working on new technology that will intuit when content from the dozens of Google properties - Scholar, News, Book Search, YouTube, you name it - is appropriate to a given query and assemble results in a combined search results display. Yes, it's federated search, but with relevance capabilities that promise to make results far more useful than ever before. In addition to information and media that will make its way into the main search results the navigation options that are displayed in a search results page will change according to the search terms. For example, searches for information about programming languages will display links to Google Code, Google Groups, Google Books and other sources that may have relevant
content. Hello, faceted navigation.

This level of integration of content from Web pages, news sources, video, books and other sources such as public records and Google Base content will be challenge enough for open Web content vendors. But think also of the impact as both Web search results and results integrated with enterprise content via the Google Search Appliance make their way into the corporate realm. For nearly a decade business information services such as LexisNexis, Factiva, Hoover's and OneSource have seen responding gingerly to user expectations set by Google searches: what happens when those expectations now include by default sources such as video, books, public records, data and other rich content that can solve business problems? Add Google's APIs into the mix along with some clever developers and publishers eager to reach business audiences in more profitable arrangements and business information services must ponder again what to do with Google's increasingly universal content aggregation capabilities.

To some degree all subscription business information services rely on inertia in their market segments to power their sales: if your customer had a content budget last year chances are they're going to have it next year as well. And certainly sector-specific and role-specific premium content services will continue to warrant strong ROI arguments for many vendors. But as more and more content types are made available via Google in a neatly integrated form via a largely free-to-users business model the aggregation model for business information will be challenged by a far wider array of content sources than most will be ready to integrate as cost-effectively as Google. Expect these changes to be subtle at first, then increasingly obvious, then completely evident about the time that it's too late for traditional licensors to react effectively. Kind of like what's happened with everything else Google has done.

Labels: Business Information, Google, products, Trends, universal search

The wires are ablaze with takeover rumors, the leading buzz being about an offer from Thomson to acquire Reuters. Reports put NewsCorp in the race as well, but this sounds like a tepid
"Plan B" as a backup to Murdoch's intents with Dow Jones. The matches in a Thomson-Reuters merger are fairly obvious - Thomson gets Reuters' low-latency content delivery and automated trading platforms for the investment bankers that they've been unable to woo in quantity as well as online ad revenues from Reuters' media offerings, Reuters gets fingers into the securities industry "buy side" and retail operations - but I wonder whether EC regulators are going to feel comfortable with such a dominant combination. On a global basis that would leave Thomson and Bloomberg as the only really viable content alternatives for supporting large-scale securities trading operations.

Then again, perhaps that's all we need these days: the content that's driving securities transactions increasingly comes from sources outside of traditional vendor databases, leaving enterprise-oriented content vendors to perfect data plumbing and desktop tools. In a rapidly consolidating global securities marketplace two may be the magic number for the years ahead. With plenty of cash on hand for just such a takeover Thomson is in an excellent position to tuck away a revitalized but still-fragile Reuters team.

Two may also turn out to be the magic number in online content as Microsoft and Yahoo reopen talks to figure out a better fit. The Wall Street Journal reports that the shelved discussions have been brushed off in light of Google's now-leading Web presence. Yet again, this may be a merger or alliance of necessity. It would cede that Yahoo has largely missed the boat on enterprise content while Microsoft has stumbled with consumer content, even as Google has forged highly profitable paths into both arenas.

As in the securities marketplace for Thomson and Reuters the potential for a Microsoft-Yahoo alignment is as much about global competition as it is with any U.S.-oriented concerns. Asian and European markets are tipping Google's way in comparison to Yahoo and Microsoft, a trend that may be accelerated by Google's office automation tools that would allow developing nations just starting to come online to avoid the dominance of Microsoft Office tools as a prerequisite for playing in the digital economy. It's not clear that a Yahoo-Microsoft merger would help either party in developing markets but it may be powerful enough to act as a brake of sorts on further Google dealmaking and advertising alliances in developed markets.

In both of these potential deals, as well as in the potential acquisition of Dow Jones by NewsCorp, is the looming presence of gigantism in publishing that seems somehow unable to counteract the emerging trend of micropublishing. Huge collections of copyrighted content and patented technologies don't seem to be able to make a dent in the explosion of content developed by and for peers who are able to collaborate effectively with relatively little help from media giants. If there's anything to be said for any of these potential deals to deal with micropublishing it would be to acknowledge that Yahoo has been good at attracting user content while Microsoft has an improving stable of collaboration tools. On the enterprise side Reuters has decades of experience in enabling market conversations and promises to do moreso with emerging social media technologies.

But in both of these instances it may very well be the case that the distraction of merger politics would decelerate rather than accelerate these crucial efforts, leaving these companies further behind in the race to capture value from social media. The time may be right for these potential super-mergers and the resulting balance sheets are likely to look pretty healthy at the end of the day, but gigantism may prove to be a very temporary stop-gap measure in efforts to counteract changes in publishing that seem to favor small and medium publishing efforts that grow organically from open source tools and Web-based communications standards. Which bring us back, as always, to Google, which is glad to sell people valuable contexts for monetizing all of this content in whatever medium is of interest to marketers. I'll avoid the usual dinosaur-versus-mammal metaphor and just say that in a rapidly changing publishing ecology we're better off chasing the mammoth of contextual content value than focusing on building city-states of traditional publications that rely on a vanishing economy based on the value of copyrighted content.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, Google, Microsoft, Reuters, Thomson, Yahoo

BusinessWeek provides an excellent analysis of recent deals and acquisitions by Google, deals which are resulting in complaints from Microsoft to regulators about potential anti-trust violations as well as similar concerns about market dominance from NETCompetition.org. BW dismisses concerns about anti-trust violations in the Doubleclick deal by pointing out that their main focus is not on ad auctions: at least for now there will be no auctioning off of Google ads on the Doubleclick network. As the article notes, "Even with a Google-owned DoubleClick, publishers can still sell their display ads themselves and set the prices however they want." But the concerns about dominance are underscored by Google's announced deal with U.S. radio giant ClearChannel to sell 30-second ad spots on their radio stations via their dMarc radio advertising platform.

Well, first let's put aside the somewhat unfortunate claims of anti-trust violations from a company that owns more than 90 percent of PC operating systems and word processing software worldwide and focus on the real question: is Google creating unfair business practices? This can get gray pretty quickly but overall I think that the answer is no. The opportunity to build or buy infrastructure that makes the most out of contexts in Web content has been around for more than a decade. Where most companies opted to focus on traditionally marketed intellectual property Google has been the only leading company to focus almost exclusively from its beginnings on creating and owning contexts for content. While Yahoo is excelling in amassing content from both users and publishers it dropped the ball on search technologies many times and is only now beginning to mount a serious challenge to Google's ad technologies and partnerships. Microsoft has had extremely ample time to develop competitive challenges to Google but has chosen instead to develop a very split strategy that tries to placate status quo-sensitive enterprises and publishers while also trying to develop improving but underdeveloped search and ad technologies.

So to my ears I hear some people saying, "Hey, that's not fair, Google figured out what the leading value proposition for online content would be for the next few decades before we did." Is Google aggressive? You bet. Does some of the "don't be evil" charm wear a little thin at times these days? Certainly. Dominance can easily turn into unfair practices, so it would not be right to give Google a complete clean bill of health for all time in their acquisition plans. But for the most part the ball is in the courts of Google's competitors to build a better mousetrap. And that's the way that it should be, we're told.

Labels: advertising, aggregation, Deals Partnerships and Sales, Doubleclick, Google

Leave it to Google to come up with some ideas which make for good April Fool's jokes - but that carry a grain of...something. Google TiSP is a nifty kit that you can use to tune in broadband wireless services from your nearby water closet - yes, your toilet. A send-up of Google's oft-rumored plans for new networks via everything from broadband wireless to electrical utility lines, it is reminiscent of the tongue-in-cheek whiteboard snapshots from the Googleplex circulated now and again online. The other 1 April send-up is Google Paper, a handy service that lets you get crates of email printouts with which to paper your home - complete with "relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints in red, bold, 36 pt Helvetica," as well as glossy photo prints for graphics files. As far as environmental consciousness, "Gmail Paper is made out of 96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum, and thus, actually helps the environment. For every Gmail Paper we produce, the environment gets incrementally healthier."

Good fun, of course, but one wonders whether these are altogether just pranks or handy smoke screens for tossing curious people off the scent of related projects a little more connected to the reality-based community. With a highly fragmented U.S. marketplace a Google broadband wireless service would be problematic but that's not to say that Google may not be willing to be a networking pioneer elsewhere in the world. At the same time Google's numerous initiatives to provide advertising in traditional media outlets would not make an ad-supported custom print service in the next few years far-fetched. Take a look at these send-ups to get a good chuckle but keep a keen nose about as the scent of these little jokes begins to wear off a bit. As Google extends its services to include office automation, ecommerce services and, perhaps, its own computer operating system, stranger things could happen.

Labels: Google, Technology, Trends

paidContent.org has a good summary of the meat of Viacom's new lawsuit against Google claiming that the thousands of video clips being posted to Google's YouTube service are violating the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act. A good analysis by CNET of exactly what in the DMCA is germane in this suit points out that the thin ice that Google is treading upon is the alleged encouraging of mass infringement of copyright - in spite of very specific statements in its terms and conditions to the contrary. Financial analyst Henry Blodget notes in his blog that most of this is about heavy-handed deal-making and the ultimate failure of Google to come to terms with Viacom in recent discussions over content use and licensing.

While the legal precedents are not strongly in favor of Viacom's view of this suit there are some important twists to consider. Though there is no user-driven revenue model for Google via YouTube as of yet it could be argued that Google is engaging in trade practices similar to what supermarkets have used oftentimes to penetrate new markets. In years past a chain wanting to dominate a given market would lower to cost of its goods to the point of losing money in that market's stores to force competitors to lose business - and eventually fold. Viacom's claim is in essence that Google set up a store and stocked stolen goods similar to their competitors and made them available at deep discounts - say, in this instance, for free. If this can be argued successfully in the courtroom Viacom has a leg to stand on.

But this argument falls apart from a few angles. First, it's a little ironic that Viacom is claiming in a USD 1 billion suit that Google is using DMCA-sanctioned "takedown" of copyrighted content is a heavy-handed tool to buy them time in negotiating licensing deals. Other media companies have managed to come to commercial terms with Google for the use of copyrighted content on YouTube: what makes Google more "evil" in its relationships with Viacom? These precedent deals for YouTube usage can be used effectively in a suit as examples that Google does indeed want to license copyrighted content lawfully.

Equally important is the question of whether Viacom has demonstrated that it has in fact tried to protect the value of its copyrighted content from duplication. If video clips are as easily "borrowed" by audiences as apples from an unattended fruit stand then the "stolen markets" issue is not easily argued - willful neglect could be argued fairly easily by the Google side. Had these clips been behind a firewall or in a DRM wrapper that Google had cracked directly, the DMCA angle on this suit would hold much more water. As it is, Viacom has no effective technology that prevents audiences from "borrowing" its online content.

The real cloud hanging over this suit, though, is the pending legislation in the U.S. Congress to revise the DMCA to allow for more generous terms of use for copyrighted content by individuals. Viacom could in theory win its courtroom battle but find itself losing the war as new laws are passed making the laws far more in line with current practice via YouTube and other social media portals. It is this pending legislation as much as any real licensing issues that are probably behind Viacom's move to sue Google. After all, if you're going to have Congressional hearings on fair use as a part of that legislation, Viacom testifying to Congress as a major suit-bringer has a more serious heft to it.

All of this boils down to one key factor: Viacom and many other media companies have given little or no thought as to how to make content automatically monetizable through social media services such as YouTube. Yes, Viacom, your copyright has been abused by some posters on YouTube, and yes, you shouldn't have to ask Google after the fact for documentation showing where content was in fact being abused, but why are companies like Viacom failing to implement tools and policies to help monetize their content more effectively? Consider Viacom's suit perhaps the last loud "bang" of anti-Google legal maneuvers - due in large part to Google's having anticipated the needs of video producers far more effectively than any other major content outlet. The case could break the other way but for today I'd bet on Google continuing its push towards video posting as it awaits reasonable action being taken by courts to validate its thinking about what makes a successful content play in today's New Aggregation.

Labels: DMCA, Google, legal, Trends, Viacom

CBC News reports along with many others on recent comments by Microsoft general counsel Thomas C. Rubin, an associate general counsel at the annual meeting of the Association of American Publishers in New York. Key quote: "Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the backs of other people's content, are raking in billions through advertising revenue." This is, of course, just the kind of sabre rattling that the AAP membership wants to hear, so they got their money's worth from Microsoft's more publisher-friendly approach. Google seems to want to keep out of direct confrontation on this issue as much as possible: offered the chance to send a representative to this week's ASIDIC 2007 Spring Meeting to talk about how to position premium content in search engines Microsoft picked up the challenge to speak to this publisher-friendly audience but Google declined.

Rubin's "red meat" speech grabbed plenty of headlines but it did little to advance any new concepts in the debate as to how publishers should approach copyright in a search-oriented online distribution environment. As a major holder of copyrighted intellectual property themselves Microsoft gains strong allies with publishers at their side in arguing for upholding strong commitments to eliminating any threats to existing business models leveraging highly protected intellectual property.

While wanting to play to a partisan crowd is an understandable temptation the characterization of Google as the copyright bad guy is oversimplified. Google's real challenge to publishers is not around copyright, which it claims it protects carefully, but rather centered on U.S. fair use policies for copyrighted content. Google has been walking a line in exposing "snippets" of copyrighted content that they claim are in line with fair use doctrines in U.S. copyright law. Their aim, they say, is to protect the right of people to know what original works of authorship are available for their use, not to duplicate those works of authorship for consumption. Immense productivity gains - and significant increases in revenues going to many publishers - stem from search engines such as Google exposing copyrighted content via fair use guidelines.

By contrast Microsoft and other publishing partners have been hard at work developing technologies designed to protect copyrighted content without fair use capabilities built into their designs. The results so far are not working well, as admitted even by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. Typical DRM packages ignore fair use rights under copyright and hence circumvent the real purpose of copyright: to ensure that society is serviced by innovative ideas that will reward both those receiving those ideas and those creating those ideas.

As the U.S. Congress considers a bill introduced by representatives Rick Boucher (D-VA) and John Doolittle (R-CA) to make some nominal concessions in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act on copying content for personal, non-profit and journalistic uses there is a glimmer of hope that technologists will recognize the fundamental importance of fair use and move away from attempts to choke it off. All this can do is to stifle innovation - and hence create a less productive society that has fewer people able to afford proprietary intellectual property. Let's hope that Rubin's remarks are just the echoes of an outlook from a fear-based approach to new outlets for intellectual property and that innovators continue to respect both copyright and fair use as means to progress a profitable and effective publishing industry.

Labels: ASIDIC, copyright, fair use, Google, Legislation, Microsoft, Trends

In some ways it seems preposterous to be laying low the number one global destination Web site but that hasn't stopped Seeking Alpha's Eric Jackson from delivering a scathing review of Yahoo's financial performance in light of Yahoo's stock price sinking 7% for the past 2 years, compared to Google’s 151% increase. Jackson trashes just about every major Yahoo media initiative and lost deal-making opportunity in recent memory - not to mention CEO Terry Semel's half-billion=plus U.S. dollar compensation package over the past four years. Notably Jackson calls not just for the ouster of Semel but as well for the exit of six others from Yahoo's boardroom and steeper investments in R&D.

In other words Yahoo has become just another top-heavy media company trying to focus on old world dealmaking and brand advertising plays while Google creates infinite reserves of user-tailored page inventory from its search results pages and embedded ads on any Web page that wants to host them. It's not an entirely fair characterization of Yahoo, given some of its good moves as of late into social media, but it's fair enough as a reflection of how many traditional media companies have failed to put their money where the growth is. Put simply, acquiring and generating traditional content is not generating the needed page views to justify the investments that Yahoo has made in recent years leading to an overall decline in site traffic. It's going to be hard for Yahoo to make the kind of radical moves that Jackson suggests, but shareholders will be pushing them in that direction soon enough.

The hardest part of this shakeup will be that Yahoo's outlook on online media has been a major force in propping up many other media companies' hopes for being able to build traditional models for brand ad-supported content online - and in the process provide those with skills attached to those traditional methods and channels a comfortable career migration path. Ousting Semel and complicit board members is as much a slap in the face of the broader hopes of traditional media companies as much as it is for anyone at Yahoo in particular. Yahoo's significant traffic and membership assets are not going to disappear overnight, but the fundamental failure of Yahoo to fund growth in directions that build valuable user-defined contexts does not augur much for other media-centric portal plays. Here's hoping that the changes come in time to save many of Yahoo's best assets from becoming under-invested properties in a too-little-too-late belt-tightening exercise.

Labels: advertising, aggregation, earnings, Google, Seeking Alpha, Trends, Yahoo