Somewhere in the world today a printing press operation is preparing to go dark. Mind you, it's not a universal phenomenon; in markets such as India, where a burgeoning middle class is hungry for news and not yet equipped with an abundance of electronic media sources, print media is actually growing. Scholarly publishers are still doing well their premium journals and custom print for B2B and consumer markets is thriving. But in many developed media markets print operations are struggling to stay alive, with 2010 expected to be a year in which newsstands begin to display significantly fewer titles. Barnes and Noble, with its Nook ebook reader, offers free wireless in their stores as a bundled part of the service, trying to encourage both browsers and coffee-drinkers to make more use of their "big box" stores real estate. It's a Web-eat-paper world, and the publishing industry is wearing newsprint shorts.
Yet the broader picture of print is that print publishing technology has never been more sophisticated, cost-effective and capable. Many of the same technologies that enable the Web also enable printing presses to deliver mass-customized printing runs, allowing wholesale book distributors such as Ingram to deliver profitable print runs for titles with as few as two ordered units. Mass print customization also allows ever more effective tailored marketing materials, allowing highly customized color post cards, brochures and other high-value communications tools at very competitive prices. In short, print rocks, if you do the right things with it.
The wrong thing to do with print is to expect to do the same thing again and again and expect different results. That is, as many will tell you, the definition of insanity. Unfortunately, this is the insanity that grips much of the B2B and consumer publishing industry. I paid a short visit to the recent Professional Scholarly Publishing 2010 conference in Washington, DC, though far less time than the event deserved. I was encouraged by the American Institute of Physics winning a PROSE award for their work to advance scholarly publishing through its Web-enabled services. Yet at the same time I was confronted by a surprisingly young attendee who had a hard time getting his head around the definition of publishing that I had used in my book Content Nation, which embraces social media as a key form of publishing. He saw this concept as "too broad" a definition of publishing. In spite of many advances in electronic publishing, many people at the heart of the publishing industry still see the traditional business model and functions of publishing as the "real" publishing industry. You can see this attitude in many of the efforts to adopt electronic publishing platforms that enable content to look more like print publications, as if waiting for the Web to give up its "defects" in failing to adapt to their ways of doing business.
Well, certainly the Web is still a relatively young form of publishing technology, in spite of its rapid advances. But it is not the Web that has failed publishing: it is publishing that has failed publishing. It's only as red ink has flowed liberally in the past couple of years that many publishers have made the hard decisions to adjust their staffing levels to the revenues that they can expect in a Web-first world. There are simply far too may substitute information sources available to the average person that can be discovered via search and social media tools to justify the dedicated brand approach to publishing that most publishers use as their fundamental business premise. If "a brand is what a brand does," then most publishing brands just don't do what Web publishing outlets such as Google and Bing do. If that "doing" doesn't align with the classic "dos" of publishing but still satisfies markets, that doesn't mean that it's not publishing.
This brings us back to print, where, in spite of the capabilities of mass print customization, most publishers insist on creating print artifacts on a mass scale that are in essence the same. Yes, you get some zip code-level tailoring of ads, sometimes, and perhaps some regional content, but it still isn't dawning on most publishers that the real opportunities in print are in creating highly customized artifacts on a massive scale. These are still seen by most publishers as "ancillary revenues," much as they saw Web operations as a little bit of gravy on top of the meat of their print revenues. But now that Web revenues have to sustain them more as their meat in many instances, most publishers have failed to position their print operations as highly targeted and highly profitable value-add operations, Instead, they continue to seek out ever-slimmer markets for mass-produced print content, either resigning themselves to smaller audiences or seeking out larger audiences with ever-slimmer slices of least-common-denominator content that offers little long-term brand value either as a product or as a service.
The answer to this problem can be seen in a now-familiar model: Google. Instead of trying to assemble a portal of perfectly curated content for specific audiences to consume over an indefinite period of time, Google decided to focus on search as a tool to curate content tailored to specific people's needs at specific moments. Each search result is a publication, with its own editorial rules, tailored ads and features. It happens to be a publication assembled from any number of sources, selected based on the editorial recommendations of people using content on the Web, via Google's ever-changing PageRank algorithms.
The question is, why haven't publishers awoken to the opportunities to take a Google-like approach to print? Just as the advantages of search technologies are largely wasted on relatively small collections of content, so are the advantages of today's mass-customizable printing technologies wasted on relatively small collections of content collected by a particular publishing house. The Web exists, and will, in all likelihood, never cease to exist as a medium that reduces distribution costs and speeds to near-zero levels.
This means that print as a platform must adapt to Web economics to deliver optimal results. To do this, print media must adopt a Google-like model of source-agnostic content aggregation tuned to the needs of tiny and/or individual audiences. In other words, just as search engines have enabled people to aggregate content from anywhere that meets their needs, so must print media operations if they are to return high value. Some service, somewhere, will enable people to print any collection of content from whatever source in whatever form suits them best in whatever quantity suits them best.
Some might say that copyright concerns stand in the way of such an approach, that this would be the equivalent of enabling anyone to print up content willy-nilly. Not so. What really stands in the way of this happening is an antiquated sense of "this is what publishing does." If publishing in the classic sense is getting value from copyrighted content, then simply tune that classic model more effectively to the available channels. In this instance, that tuning would require a more flexible approach to content licensing. Today, content licensing is still largely a person-to-person effort, requiring business development specialists or marketing managers, legal departments, and days, weeks or months of process time required to enable one publisher to use another publisher's content, be it in print or electronic form. But if today's printing technologies have the ability to assemble content with Google-like agnosticism and speed in a way that's tailored to very specific needs, then it is content licensing, not copyright, that stands in the way of more effective print revenues.
Thinking of both existing licensing technologies from organizations such as Copyright Clearance Center and iCopyright as well as emerging technologies from organizations such as Journalism Online, we are likely on the verge of a new convergence of licensing and printing technologies that can revolutionize what appears in print. This does not mean that print as a whole will surge back as a primary profit center, though. In the long run, the time that it takes to spool out pages of print will never be a match for the Web's ability to spin out tailored text and multimedia content sets instantly and effortlessly. But it does mean that the wide availability of custom printing technologies and the wide availability of people with professional printing skills figuring out what to do next in the aftermath of the current print apocalypse is likely to fuel the Google-like print revolution of mass-customized print content delivery no matter what. The main question is whether it will be Google taking on that challenge on a large scale or someone else.
The other key question, though, is whether publishers are going to balk at the notion of massively automated content licensing for tailored publications. Given history and publishers' attachment to the notion of their brands being what they want them to be rather than what their audiences want them to be, it's likely that many will balk at the idea. In that period of balking, it's likely that widely available substitute sources of printable content will work their way into these opportunities - leaving established publishers as also-rans yet again, though this time in their native medium.
Publishers failed to optimize their operations for Google-like content searching in time to take advantage of the in-the-moment opportunities available to them, in part because they were afraid that it was a technology that was in conflict with their publications' Web sites. The same sort of tensions seem to exist with customized printing and typical print editorial operations - and the same opportunities await publishers that tackle them proactively with aggressive automated content licensing strategies.
High-value purchasing and advertising opportunities await those publishers that begin to take highly customized printing opportunities more aggressively. Just as Web revenues looked like a puny investment early on, so does custom publishing look more like a sideline than a main line of revenue to many publishers. But in a world in which Google has become the center stage of most of the world's content access, it is imperative that publishers look more seriously at how their print publishing models are affected directly by the same potential for agnostic content aggregation - and leverage them as rapidly as possible for high-margin revenues.
My wife was bugging me before Christmas for a nice toy that I would like as a gift, so I thought that it couldn't hurt to get Barnes & Noble's new Nook ebook reader, which, at the time, was due for delivery before the holidays. With a hybrid eInk display for text and Android-driven touch interface for navigation combined with ePub-formatted documents, at least it would be a "walking the talk" gizmo that reflected how I saw what publishers should be doing with ebook distribution.
Unfortunately on Christmas day I got a nice new traveling case and screen protector, but only a placekeeper for the unit itself, which finally arrived the day that the Apple iPad was launched. Hmm, interesting timing. There's really no comparison, though, between the "whats" and the "whys" of an ebook reader like the Nook and a device like the iPad. The nook is all about simplifying and in some ways enhancing the process of relating to printed material, where the iPad is about the multi-sense world of Web media, with books a nice part of its capabilities but one not necessarily likely to appeal to many of its core Web-raised customers.
The Nook definitely has a leg-up overall on its Amazon Kindle rival, in the sense that it combines both the sophistication of a touch interface with a very simple and enjoyable page-turning experience via its eInk interface. I had my doubts about this combination, but, while not perfect, it works out pretty nicely overall. You can swipe your finger across a row of book, newspaper and magazine titles like you would on a touch-screen phone interface, tap once and start digging in. A second or two after your text is displayed, the color touch interface powers down and you're enjoying crisp eInk text, which only improves its readability in bright daylight. That's a boon when on a beach or in a sunny train or plane seat where moving to a better spot is not an option.
The physical controls of the Nook are bone simple. An "on" button on the top of the unit, a bar between the eInk display and the color touch display that activates the touch screen, and page-turning buttons on either side of the screen. The page-turning buttons are just about perfect and a joy to use. Each page-turning button has a pinhole-sized protrusion in its middle, which makes it a no-eyes procedure to get your fingers in the right place, and no edges. It's a seamless case, so there's no place for dirt, dust or sand to get into the controls or to spoil the smooth look of the unit. Best of all, the buttons are repeated on either side - a huge plus for righty-lefty usability and for when you get in those wierd positions that feel great put that put your hands at odd angles.
Downloads of new and updated materials are smooth and effortless, with simple and well-designed procedures. It's a no-brainer to use for all of its basic functions. Searching the Barnes and Noble store is simple and easy via a touch keyboard, which overall is no worse than Kindle's weird Chiclet-style physical keyboard but has rather slow typing response and an early-release Android look and feel that leaves something to be desired compared to the Android-based Nexus One phone that hangs next to me most of the time. Barnes and Noble also provides its own content via "The Daily," a daily newsletter that includes a listing of your latest content downloads. You can accelerate download performance by powering up your Nook on your local wireless network, but it will drain your batteries fairly rapidly. Without a wireless LAN connection or a lot of use of the color display, your batteries can last for days, typically, since the eInk display is not powered once a page is displayed.
While I am certainly open to reading book content on powered displays, I really like this "off" nature of eInk. After a day of staring into backlit computer and phone displays, there's an "unplugged" aspect to the Nook that fits the nature of book reading nicely. Reading books is about sharing some "quality time" with the thoughts of another person. The simplicity of the Nook encourages me to tune out many of my typical daily electronic distractions and to focus on one relationship. Want Web browsing? Go to your PC or phone, please. The only other significant function of the Nook is its ability to play downloaded music, which is a nice complement to reading, if I am willing to tax the batteries a bit. Downloading tunes from a PC is easy via the Nook's standard USB cable, which doubles as the charging cord when plugged into a special AC converter. Economy of design and purpose is the theme with Nook, and overall it delivers on that theme well.
However, the Nook is far from perfect. The delay in getting this unit to market was doubtless getting some of the product development kinks out, some of which still shine through. The most glaring problem with the Nook is its overall performance. Loading large books for reading can take several seconds in many instances, and some large ebooks did not load at all (possibly due to being formatted an older proprietary format not compatible with Nook). Page-turning is quick and smooth enough and bookmarking functions simple enough, but the bookmarks themselves cannot be given easy-to-use human names; you're stuck with a geekish, URL-like name based on chapter numbers that is hard to understand. At times it seems that bookmarks were not being saved. The note-taking capability on the Nook is decent but nominal at best, not something that's likely to satisfy a real student or scribbler often. You can bump up font sizes in the eInk display, but there's only three settings overall for font sizes. An extra-large font setting would be nice for those days when your eyes have had far too much work. Combine these rough spots with the touch keyboard issues, and it's a fair bet that the Nook needs a newer version of Android ASAP to improve performance and a few interface tweaks to boot.
And while the online store interface is smooth and features millions of books from Google Books, Barnes and Noble's own ebook title offerings are still a little bit thin; you'll get most major titles, but don't expect too much peripheral content beyond Google's offerings. Some of the ecommerce for newspapers and magazines is still a little rough also. The online store, for example, lists The New York Times as a $13.99 subscription. For, what, a month? A year? It doesn't say. The subscription provides only a subset of NYT information, which is a bit annoying, but you get at least the highlighted stories that you're likely to want to spend time with in an "unplugged" mode on the Nook.
Finally there's the color touch display, which feels comfortable to use if you're used to touch-screen phones and is generally a pleasure to use, with easy-to-use menus and features that are well-designed overall. The main annoyance here, though, is that after a day of touching the screen of my Nexus One, it feels kind of awkward to look at content in the eInk display that's controlled in the touch display below it. A full-touch display such as in Plastic Logic's new Que document reader would be ideal, but I am not interested in hauling that much hardware around. A Nook slips comfortably into my parka pocket and is not hogging up any significant space on the coffee table next to my favorite reading chair. And again, since book-reading is about getting into the words more than fiddling with features, I am willing to live with the compromise.
I am not really sure that you can call the Nook clearly superior to the Amazon Kindle as a machine, but it's definitely a sleeker and more flexible unit overall with better design and more potential for improvement via its Android underpinnings, as well as more potential to get your content to play nicely in other ebook readers via its use of the ePub formatting standard. I was unable to test out the book-sharing feature yet with another Nook user, but this is certainly an important first that deserves at least a nod of appreciation for the many efforts that Barnes and Noble has put in to replicating some of the most important parts of the book-reading experience. Nook's titles are a little pricier than those found in the Kindle store, but that's a small price to pay for the ability to use content on other ePub-compatible readers. Lock-in to the Kindle system is the price to pay for it's cheaper titles, a price that I am not willing to pay.
And I suppose that's the point of the Nook at the end of the day. It's a great little reader that will allow one to prepare for any number of great new ebook-displaying products that will be coming out in the years ahead. With the Kindle, or, for that matter, materials on the iPad purchased via Apple's online store, you're likely to have a more restricted range of technology options moving forward. It's not clear that standalone ebook readers will be with us much longer, but for those wanting simple functionality in a rugged unit with great battery life that will be highly usable in any number of conditions that would be daunting to many advanced display units, the Nook offers a good reading experience and the ability to escape without hauling around a pound of books - or Jeff Bezos' business model hangups, either. That's good enough for me today, at least.
With the media industry salivating over Apple CEO Steve Jobs' announcement of the new iPad as if it were awaiting an injection of Viagra, you'd think that the machine would do everything except change a flat tire. Well, the hoopla is over, and the iPad is...a large iPhone, essentially. Nice, sexy, though functionally not really a breakthrough device compared to the impact that the original iPhone had on mobile markets. However, then the other shoes started to drop after the klieg lights on the announcement stage began to cool off a bit. The two key factors: price and e-book packaging.
First, the price. At $499, the iPad is coming out at a blow-away price point that will make its purchase an attractive and simple alternative for many people who would otherwise be considering a PC or Mac as their next step-up from a mobile phone - or a slightly more pricey unlocked Google Nexus One superphone. This matters in a big way to global markets, where billions of people who are experiencing Web content for the first time on mobile phones will be looking for their next step-up device for content consumption.
Keep your eyes open also for possible subsidies on this price point as mobile network-enabled versions of the iPad hit the market. Just as King Gillette figured out how to give away razor handles to sell disposable razor blades, Apple will find many ways to lower the cost of hardware acquisition to lock people into their software and ecommerce services. Since the iPad technology and apps are largely warmed-over iPhone components, one assumes that not much R&D was required to launch this model, so there must be a good amount of "wiggle room" in the iPad's pricing for such deals.
Its aggressive price point also pegs the iPad as a highly attractive alternative for educational markets, the original market that launched Apple's growth years ago as a scrappy alternative to then-crude PCs. Given the average college student's expenditures on textbooks, an iPad equipped with ebook versions of those texts that they can use for most other schoolwork along with their favorite entertainment will be a very appealing option. It's also a price point that pretty much resigns most existing ebook readers to also-ran status as cost-effective platforms for people on the go. What do you want at your train or airline seat as a light PC alternative, an ebook reader or something that can also play movies and help you get some emails done? Problem solved.
The other factor that is very appealing on the face of it is Apple's decision to deploy an iTunes-like eBook store with content formatted in the ePub open-standards ebook and emagazine format championed by the International Digital Publishing Forum for several years. Having an ebook reading software package that will, in theory, be compatible with content purchased from any ecommerce service using ePub-formatted content will be a great boost to ebook, enewspaper and emagazine sales. However, the caveat with Apple's use of ePub standards is that ePub leaves the door open for the optional use of proprietary DRM tools, such as those used in Apple's iTunes store and Barnes and Noble's online ebook outlet.
If you're happy using iTunes on whatever platform you're using, then chances are Jeff Bezos over at Amazon just bought himself a huge headache after having alienated publishers with onerous revenue share agreements to get content in Amazon's proprietary Kindle format. I've said it often that the proprietary Kindle format was a dead end, but no more so than today. In a sense I wonder if the publishing industry went along with the proprietary Kindle early on as a ruff of sorts to keep the combination of Amazon, Google and open standards from running away with the entire premium content ballgame while they developed a more palatable alternative. That may be giving the people involved too much credit, but it's curious. Perhaps it's not too late to dust off some of those "GoogleZon" memes, after all.
Now that the book industry and other media producers have an alternative to Amazon's stranglehold on them, it will be interesting to see whether they will find themselves in a new Catch-22 situation. Have they run from Amazon's dominance only to discover that the grip of Apple's DRM on ePub-enabled content winds up being an even worse stranglehold in the long run? Time will tell, as will the details that unfold over the next few weeks regarding the iPad's compatibility with premium content purchased from non-Apple outlets. If it's easy-peasy to pull up content purchased elsewhere in ePub format on the iPad, then publishers will have done themselves a great favor. If they drank too much of Steve Jobs' Kool-Aid and allowed it to be hard to use other DRMed or non-DRMed content via Apple's ePub reader, then it will be a more-of-the same dilemma for publishers overall.
While the media industry seems ready to declare Steve Jobs the next David Sarnoff, their "homeboy" genius of content, technology and human insight, the overall reaction to the iPad by consumers so far seems to be warm but not necessarily hot. If you love Apple products already, then you're probably going to plunk down your five Franklins as soon as you can. If you're a person who's already equipped with a decent PC, an iPhone or Android-enabled mobile device, then you're probably saying, "Oh, a big iPhone, neat" - and then going back to surfing the Web. iPad as a gizmo is nifty, but it's not grown new capabilities that people haven't seen before in one form or another. If you're an enterprise I.T. manager, you're probably saying, "Oh, brother, another device to deal with, thank goodness it's basically just an iPhone" - which may simplify adoption at schools and universities especially.
And if you're a book or magazine publisher, then you're probably feeling pretty good at the moment - but then, perhaps, realizing that Jobs spent most of his demo showing how great it was that the iPad rendered Web pages and YouTube movies so well. Sorry, dear publishers, the Web is not going to disappear just because there's a handy new netbook that does DRM the way that you want it to. The iPad will definitely be a boost for print-formatted electronic content, but this is highly unlikely to address key revenue and cost issues that are ultimately the enemies of many publishers. By the time that iPads start coming out in March (and in April in mobile network-enabled configurations) , competitors will be that much further down the road towards their own cost-effective tablet and touchpad interfaces that are likely to be committed to open standards more aggressively.
Yes, this means that Google is still very much in the mix for premium content. Google's Chrome OS will be available in the next year, and rest assured that this next-generation computer operating system will have some deployments that will be remarkably iPad-like. Already its Android operating system is the basis for Barnes and Noble's Nook ebook reader being shipped in a few days, equipped with ePub-formatted content. Could this alliance form the basis for another end-run around Amazon for book and magazine publishers? It seems that not too long from now we will start thinking of Google and Apple the way that we used to think of television and radio networks, with Microsoft striving to get its own new-generation devices into the mix as well.
In the meantime, there are TiVos, Playstations, mobile phones, ereaders and a galaxy of other gizmos that will keep both the iPad and any other particular device from being a "magic bullet" that will solve the distribution problems of media companies definitively. All hail Jobs, today's knight in shining armor for a content industry still struggling with the realities of the Web some fifteen-plus years after the launch of HTML-based graphic browsing on the Internet. Then let's look at how many gray hairs some of us have gained since that time - and accept that the iPad is just another beautiful, functional tool from Apple that cannot stave off the effects of the Web indefinitely. Even with Viagra, you have to come down to life size eventually, after all.
I don't jump often at first-generation technology for most things, so it's no surprise that I waited a while to get a smart phone. But in a sense I have waited for the first generation of what was termed a "superphone" in today's announcement of the Google Nexus One, a Google Android-based mobile device built by HTC and sold directly by Google from its own online store. The Nexus One goes toe-to-toe with Apple's iPhone in many ways but it also begins to challenge the content industry to consider what today's proliferation of mobile devices means for their marketing strategies.
Unlike the Apple iPhone, you can choose to order a Nexus One "unlocked" from Google's online store, meaning that you can get it without having to be locked into any telephone company's contract or service plan. You can then, if you choose, get the voice and data plan of your choice with a technology-compatible vendor (T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon in the US, and most non-U.S. carriers) or, if you choose, just use WiFi and to get connectivity to data and Voice over IP services on the Web.
I ordered the "unlocked" version of the phone within a few minutes of the online store going live, a bone-simple process. I noted on the order page that Verizon will offer "locked" access for this phone soon, marketed under the "Droid" moniker it uses currently for Motorola's Android phone offering on Verizon. For the time being I have decided to use the Nexus One as a "data only" phone, using VoIP when I am in WiFi hotspots. This may allow me to use it as a replacement for my desk phone, since it's always in range of my local WiFi (let's see what happens when Google announces its integration of Gizmo5 VoIP services for Google Voice). I think of it like having Skype in "walkabout" mode with a trendy earpiece that has Web access. Once the service plans for data-only access to phone company networks have improved a bit and I can suss out what to do with my last remaining copper phone line, I'll think about which U.S. telco vendor will be best to choose to fill in the gaps for WiFi service.
If you look at most coverage maps for mobile data access and the ability of emerging networks to support both voice and high-speed data more reliably on a single network connection, why would I do otherwise for an advanced phone? If voice is moving towards being a service on consumer data networks, as it is already in most major enterprises, and voice services such as Skype and Gizmo5 are providing increasingly reliable VoIP phone-like connectivity almost anywhere, then I wonder whether it makes sense to lock into any traditional voice services for a superphone. I'd rather use a simple mobile phone as a voice backup service for those hard-to-reach spots that Google Voice can ring as needed and go superphone for voice on a good data-only network for the rest.
As voice becomes more integrated with Web applications and content services, the need for their integration is going to become more obvious fairly rapidly. One of the demos at the Nexus One press briefing was of dictating text messages and emails. It wasn't a particularly spectacular demo, and I am sure that less carefully tested examples may fare worse, but going to and from voice and text as a standard interface is more likely to make the combination of voice and data an essential factor in information services in the next few years. Since the Nexus One is pretty well positioned for the most advanced high-speed data networks rolling out over the next couple of years, I think that I am covered on that front for now.
As for the phone itself, I hate to say it, but technology changes so quickly these days that it's almost unimportant beyond a certain point whether it's a perfectly awesome phone or not. You can look at the Engadget review and judge for yourself, but overall it's as good as an iPhone but without two-finger touch software (which will come soon enough, since the hardware handles it, apparently) though trumping the current iPhone with a screaming 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Most importantly, though, it's built on an open platform developed by a company that believes in the Web as the real unifier of content services, not proprietary networks or platforms. With all of the tablets, readers and other gizmos coming out this year that will try to pretend that the Web isn't very important, it will be nice to have a mobile device that puts the Web experience for content first, with some neat-o applications in a spiffy, sleek package to boot. That'll do. For now.
iPhones rocked, Google shocked and social media was no longer mocked as publishers and technology companies flocked to online content business models;
Bing had a fling and even Windows 7 would sing as Kindle took wing, but proprietary platforms are no longer king;
Those in the cloud were quite proud of profits that wowed enterprise and media markets and vowed that all content would thrive in its shroud;
Enterprise vendors clung to tight margins and hung on to hopes of new profits among rescaled businesses flung across a changing world;
Twitter got the Web a-flitter about real-time chitter-chat, making news publishers bitter about the new heavy hitter;
Murdoch howled about profits fouled by search engines that prowled for news, while AP scowled at content reuses that tempted its members to throw in the towel;
Smart phones got fast and netbooks now cast a shadow over the last bits of old-school computing;
Save the best for last! It's Wave, the rave of brave trend-setters, promising an enclave that will repave the road to the Web's future;
Feel like you need a suture or two? Don't worry. The couture of content will change soon enough. The future is bright - for those who are tough.
Everyone at Shore Communications wishes you a great holiday season and a fantastic 2010. Enjoy what is important, and let's build the future of content together next year! I hope that you enjoy the following year-end video.
In a typical game of chess, there are three distinct phases of play: the opening, in which a handful of chess pieces stake out strategic territory on the chessboard, the middle game, in which the positions of many pieces are used to jockey for control of the chessboard, and the endgame, in which the pieces are traded and moved rapidly into a reduced and final push for ultimate control of the board and the strategic goal of the game - capturing the king. It takes both logic and passion to excel at chess, but at the end of the day it's a well-executed plan that wins the day.
You might say that Google has been in the process of introducing its own endgame for online publishing, quietly moving dozens of initiatives into strategic positions which in and of themselves may seem inconsequential to the game as a whole - until its ultimate position begins to evolve rapidly. As in a chess endgame, Google's recent moves are swift, monumental in their impact and, potentially, decisive in determining the outcome of how content becomes valuable on the Web. Media critics like Ken Auletta have quipped that Google needs more "Kirks" and fewer "Spocks" to succeed, mistaking the crowded middle game of media posturing against Google for an ongoing battle, when in fact Google has been keeping its well-reasoned eye on the pieces that will be most important for the outcome of the game.
What's the king that needs to be captured in this endgame? The Moment. Media companies continue to churn out outdated moves such as media players serving up magazine-like renditions of their own content, thinking that quality that reflects the last game that they won is what will win the day. In the meantime, Google's intense concentration on processing power in cloud computing, Web-standardized applications and search dominance have revealed a strategy that is quickly eliminating viable moves for many B2B and consumer content and technology companies. After the September introduction of The Second Web via its Google Wave preview platform for real-time collaboration, Google has in recent days extended its dominance of The Moment via three new initiatives: expanded personalization of search results, real-time search results and voice, location and sight-activated mobile searches, including Google Goggles, a point-and-click camera-activated search feature.
Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has an excellent analysis of how Google's debut of personalized searching that doesn't require a Google login is introducing a "new normal" for its search environment, in which the content presented in search results will by default be different for different people based on their last 180 searches on Google. What is The Moment for these people? Where their interests have been most recently. Instead of waiting for editorial boards to decide what The Moment should be, Google is yet again trumping traditional editorial functions and allowing people's own behavior to have a seat at the editorial table automatically.
The introduction of content from real-time Web sources such as Twitter, Facebook and other status-oriented messaging services in Google search results extends The Moment into content sources that have split-second relevancy to online content seekers. Klipp Bodnar points out that this stream of tweets and postings means that B2B companies can no longer ignore real-time in favor of traditional SEO strategies if they're going to get people's attention. It's a broader scope than that, of course: nobody can afford to ignore real-time social media content generation now any more than a securities trader can ignore real-time stock tickers. All brands must enter the real-time conversation of The Moment to keep in touch with their markets and to define their markets.
Google's mobile search initiatives, introduced last week at the Computer History Museum, are perhaps the most profound in their potential impact, even if their ultimate powers are years away from being felt. Voice-activated and GPS-activated Web search is being perfected rapidly at Google and through other outlets, but the Google Goggles initiative, previewed in its development phases on MSNBC recently, brings a point-and-click element to The Moment that promises to give Google a real leg-up in mobile search markets. Using the camera in mobile phones, Goggles enables searches for information on things such as landmarks, stores, products and text simply by filling the camera's viewfinder with the item and clicking. Remember all of those fussy infra-red applications that were supposed to get us "beaming" business cards to one another? Now, just take a photo of someone's card and it will be uploaded into a contacts record. In just those few capabilities already targeted, whole content markets are about to develop as people capture content in The Moment.
And who will have all of the search data and metadata regarding all of these Moments? Yep. Yet again, Google is positioning itself to be the cloud-empowered master of what people are interested in right now, giving them the ability to bring people closer to their interests and passions simply by asking for them. And, yet again, by including as much content as possible in serving their customers, Google doesn't second-guess what people consider to be valuable in The Moment. If the stock and news tickers of the 20th century distributing content from central markets and publishers were the gold mines of Moments in that era, Google's absorption and distribution of content from anywhere to anywhere in The Moment has enabled it to enlarge its unique databases far more broadly and rapidly than any other publisher on earth. And, like a chess endgame, the speed with which other players are losing effective counter-moves against Google's strategic position in The Moment is only quickening.
No small wonder, then, that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is scrutinizing Google's acquisition of AdMob, a leading mobile ad network. Markets thrive when there are still a good number of pieces on the board to keep competition high. But perhaps it's time for the FTC and companies in the content industry to look beyond this rapidly emptying game board and to consider what the next round of content industry chess is going to look like. If The Moment is the new center of the publishing industry, how does content become most valuable in this context? The answer to this question is, in part, to acknowledge that the companies who collect the most input about the world most rapidly become the most knowledgeable about what is happening in The Moment.
It's a phenomenon that I call "the Sensor Society," a world in which our corporate awareness and memory becomes a valuable through common access in a way that reverses the "information is power" equation. Certainly having private information will continue to empower people and organizations in select circumstances, but for the average person or business having access to all information in the right context is becoming a more powerful resource for decision-making. To borrow a concept from my book Content Nation, some portion of the DNA of society is migrating into the Google-dominated cloud, with each of us feeding that part of our collective consciousness through our voices, our camera "eyes" and our fingers touching screens and keyboards. That may be a good thing for society as a whole, but it will be an enormous challenge for institutions who are not ready to accept that migration as a beneficial development.
What does this mean for publishers? It means good things for those that can manage to get their content into these personally defined Moments more effectively. But it also takes an acceptance that "the first draft of history" that many in the media business cherish as their mission is taking on a radically new form. Like the "playback" feature in Google Wave, everyone will have access to who did what where and when soon enough. The question is, who edited it the best? Google has staked its claim as the world's dominant editorial resource for displaying billions of histories a day, sweeping away front pages across the Web into a stream that assembles Moments that matter most to audiences.
We will spend time with content in any number of spaces thanks to this editorial resource, as we have on the Web for many years. But Google has accelerated the endgame radically in the past few months for those not tuned into The Moment. 2010 is going to be a year of momentous change in the content industry. Publishers that are tuned into The Moment will be in good shape to take on all of the inputs of The Sensor Society and to trigger astounding growth in cloud-based content markets. For those that aren't tuned in, well, you better get used to the idea that you're playing a two-dimensional game of chess against a 3-D chess master. Set up the chess pieces again, Spock. It's a whole new game.
When Google Scholar launched five years ago on the Web, its aggregation of freely available scientific literature and citations launched some sizable seismic activity in publishing circles. All of a sudden, content that had been aggregated only via expensive subscription database services was available for free and accessible as easily as any Web page. Five years later, Google Scholar has expanded to include most freely available academic research sources, as well as abstracts from subscription sources and public patent records and is an increasingly popular resource for researchers and students. However, major aggregators of scientific publications still remain successful, in large part because they continue to develop more sophisticated search and display applications and, well, because time has been on their side. Pressures from Open Access advocates who press for free access to scientific research and an increasing array of applications built using Google Scholar as a source have begun to open major cracks in the barriers to entry into scientific publishing markets, but the people in charge of enterprise purse strings did not use Google Scholar in their university days. So, in spite of budget cuts. the status quo remains largely intact for many scholarly publishers.
With this in mind, some reasonable skepticism is probably in order as Google announces the launch of a new Google Scholar service that makes full text legal opinions and legal citations available for case documents from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts. Public records are becoming more commonly available in general thanks to both Google and other publishers that see opportunities in generating value from public content, so this move should come as no major surprise to anyone. Yet this first major foray by Google into legal content is surprisingly strong - and may be the beneficiary of better timing than earlier Google Scholar product improvements. While legal publishers will rest soundly knowing that the search capabilities for legal documents in Google Scholar are limited to simple "white box" queries, they may not be so tranquil when they look at the results themselves. Documents are rich in links to legal references in the cited documents, a capability that has been for many years one of the key calling cards for legal databases.
Things get even more interesting when you look at the citations tab that is available for each located legal document. Google Scholar offers you brief, in-context snippets of how a case was cited in key documents, as well as comprehensive listings of citations in court documents and documents related contextually to the selected document. While that's far from the full capabilities that a LexisNexis or Thomson West offer to their professional clients, it's pretty much pointed at the core of their database offerings, nevertheless.
The Above the Law blog has a good summary of analysis and reactions from both legal experts and publishers, but I think that the most salient point comes from Social Media Law Student, which points out that this freely available information is likely to become a "go-to" content source for students who may not have ready access to subscription-based content sources. Looking at the offerings coming to market from Lexis.com, though, which I walked through recently as a part of my SIIA CODiE judging for Best Aggregation Service, it's not as if LexisNexis isn't aware of this "digital native" culture gap, as they try to index both public documents and freely available Web content to make it more accessible to legal students and professionals.
The threat that Google Scholar's new legal content represents to established publishers, though, is the exposure of a huge body of public documents to applications builders and content services. Much as Google Books' scanned out-of-print library holdings have created a resource for ebook platforms from the likes of Sony and Barnes and Noble, this new initiative from Google opens up more cost-effective competition for legal services publishers who may want to attack legal markets from new and innovative angles using Google Scholar as a resource. Some of the innovators may be startup companies in the mold of Collexis, which leveraged publicly available scientific content to showcase their innovative content discovery tools. Others may be business information competitors in adjacent markets, who may see a way to pick off some of the "low-lying fruit" using core legal content maintained by Google.
None of these really add up to a significant challenge to either LexisNexis or Thomson West in the short run, but they will tend to hold down their margins as they lose some market share and lose leverage at the negotiating table at contract renewal time. What this does add up to, though, is a strong case to have professional-grade legal information services more integrated into a far wider array of business information sources to support enterprise decision-making on many levels. If digital natives will have increased access to well-integrated legal content, the high end of legal information markets will need more unique content and integration across a fuller range of business information sources to justify premium prices.
As I mentioned earlier on ContentBlogger, I do think that Reed Elsevier would be smart to consider selling LexisNexis at this time in anticipation of this likely consolidation - or, alternatively, expand its business information holdings to build a broader base of services for LexisNexis. I think that the former is more feasible than the latter given current market conditions, and would enable Reed Elsevier to cash in on the still-formidable value of LexisNexis before it begins to lose significant market growth potential. Thomson was able to spin off its print assets near the peak of their value before print publishing markets ran aground, a trick that Reed Elsevier was not as fortunate in managing in the sale of its Reed Business Information publishing assets. Google's new legal offerings are not a death knell for premium legal information services, but they are a canary in the coal mine for database services based on public legal records. We'll be watching this space carefully in the months ahead.
It seems as if there's hardly a week that goes by lately without some major announcement from Google, Microsoft and other technology providers that has major repercussions for the content industry. In the past week, we've had not just a major announcement but a major rumor surfacing anew that has me thinking about how Google's strength as a marketing organization is in defining new markets that others are often unwilling to develop. In other words, where many publishers and technology companies focus on gaining slices of the same old market share pie, Google seems to be becoming the leader in defining whole new kinds of content markets to bake.
On the product announcement front, Google used the unveiling of its Chrome OS operating system as an open source platform to give a quick demo of its still-developing features (video). As I highlighted in ContentBlogger in July, Chrome OS, targeted for release next year, will be a computer operating system expressly for devices such as netbooks that use mostly Web-oriented content and applications. The result is a machine that can operate with minimal local data storage and that can boot up to a login prompt in seven seconds and get on the Web in just a few seconds more. So in less time than it takes the typical mobile phone to get ready you can access Web content and applications easily.
The Chrome OS interface is no real surprise to those already using Google's Chrome browser to look at the Web - it is, in essence, the same. There is a permanent "tab" open to allow one to start applications, which operate in tabs much the same as Web pages do currently in the Chrome browser, or you can have the applications pop up from the bottom of the display as "panels." Web links can activate apps as well, such as in the above display, which shows a music clip on MySpace playing after clicking a link on a Google search results page. The demo also showed how data in the Chrome OS "cloud" from any tabbed window can be pulled into Google Docs for more sophisticated manipulation and how games and ebooks from Google Books can be viewed easily and stay as persistent content in a given tab or as full-screen applications.
People expecting the "wow" factor that Microsoft or Apple has tried to engineer into its most current operating systems are likely to be underwhelmed by Chrome OS, a non "wow" factor that was echoed in a recent poll that I conducted in Google Wave. In the poll, only a plurality of people felt that Chrome OS would have a major impact on computing in two to three years. After all, who is going to get excited about an operating system that looks and acts just like today's browsers? I think, though, that this is where the pies come in. With only about a fifth of the world's population having access to the Web, Chrome OS as an open operating system is perfectly positioned to help the other five billion people who do not have Web access to build content in the clouds very cost-effectively. Most of these people will never see a PC in their lives and will find a Chrome OS device to be perfectly adequate. Of the 1.4 billion people who have access to the Web already, most of their time is spent on the Web anyway. That leaves Apple Macs and devices using Microsoft Windows 7 to go after the relatively affluent and sophisticated markets that have a lot of sophisticated gizmos in their homes and enterprises, a significant market, to be sure, but one in which the need for content outside of the cloud will be a diminishing factor. All of a sudden Chrome OS has the ability to make the entire PC-based marketplace look like a niche market.
Underscoring this positioning of an expanded global cloud as an expanded marketplace pie is the recent repackaging of the "Google Phone" rumor by TechCrunch. If Michael Arrington's latest "confirmed, super-high confidence information" is to be believed, Google is going to start advertising a Google-branded mobile phone device in January that will be built by an OEM hardware partner to Google's own specifications. In the short run, one assumes that this will be an "apples-to-apples" competitor for Apple's iPhone, supporting applications and Voice over IP telephony in a way that is less compromised than Google Android implementations found on smart phones released so far. But with heavy investments in Google's Android operating system by handset manufacturers such as Samsung, HTC and Motorola and a still-fragmented U.S. mobile market to navigate, it's doubtful that such a "Google Phone" is going to make enormous headway in developed markets any time soon based on just these features.
Instead, the more likely play for Google's potential phone device is a new market altogether: ad-supported mobile VoIP telephone and Web access. In other words, in the middle of a global recession and with a huge number of people who have yet to touch either a mobile phone or the Web, what better price point for a mobile phone service could you have than "free?" The features of Google Voice already await people needing voicemail and phone call redirection, so people falling off of telephone calling plans as the economy continues to tighten may see access to phone calls through ad-supported broadband and Web "hot spots" to be a "good enough" telephony and Web combination while they await funds to get more high-powered services from major telephone carriers. For those who could never afford or deal with mobile Web access, the Google Phone may offer a simple and affordable way into mobile communications that would be a stepping stone to a Chrome OS-powered netbook device.
All of this in the short term is likely to be fairly underwhelming stuff for people looking for the "what's in it for me for better results this quarter" solution to all of their content market problems. But in a sense that's the exact point. Google is one of the few companies in the content and technology industry that has been investing very patiently in long-term market development goals that will broaden their potential revenue base by huge magnitudes. Others have been innovators, to be sure, and profitable in their own right. But by plodding away at technologies and content services such as Chrome OS, Android, Google Apps, Google Wave and Google Voice, and by continuing to refine existing services such as its search engine, ad networks and YouTube videos, Google learns how to build a larger market in which they can satisfy at least 80 percent of its daily needs.
As Google expands into developing nations and "digital natives" markets more rapidly than many of its competitors, the slice of the "old" 20 percent that can be satisfied by more specialized technologies will continue to look smaller and less powerful as a content market play. With everything to gain and little to lose, Google's greatest barrier to competitive forces is the unwillingness of its competitors to risk everything to play on the same ground. The sophisticates who follow the content industry will continue to be underwhelmed by many Google products and services - until they recognize that in large part it is becoming the content industry as we will know it.
I have to chuckle a bit at the recent Poynter Online email interview with Wikimedia Foundation's Jimmy Wales, in which he discusses an internal memo gleaned from Associated Press (PDF) by Nieman Journalism Lab. The AP memo, entitled "Protect, Point, Pay - An Associated Press Plan for Reclaiming News Content Online," covers a lot of ground already familiar to those following AP's efforts to put in premium packaging for news content. However, in addition to conjuring up long-standing concerns about Google and other major search engines as competitive forces, the memo also highlights AP's concern about the millions of topic-oriented pages in Wikipedia that are capturing traffic when people search for breaking news. At last the light bulb begins to go off in some minds that perhaps the issue is not so much search engines but that search engines are directing people towards the most popular destinations for specific topics. Hmm, perhaps this might have something to do with...the quality of the content that they find there?
The AP memo points out that Wikipedia articles are rich with links and structured content that drive people to other trusted information sources, a concept that the memo suggests could be adopted by the AP for its own content. As Wales points out wryly, though, "Creating authoritative canonical pages based on the latest from the AP sounds like a good idea they should have implemented years ago." In other words, after more than five years of Wikipedia building both its content and its brand as a "go-to" source for freshly updated topic-oriented content that dominates search engine results, it dawns on some folks in the news business that perhaps there's a business model in there somewhere. Layer in the growth of online portals that are aggregating links to top topics content more effectively, and one wonders just what people are going to be willing to pay for those carefully designed hNews objects that AP is hoping to use to "reclaim" the news business.
The answer to that wondering seems to come in part from a recent study on consumer attitudes towards premium news content by the Boston Group highlighted in The New York Times. The study indicates that fewer than half in the U.S. are willing to pay for news content online and that of those who would be willing to pay the preferred tariff weighs in at about $3 a month. This seems to line up with long-time assertions by Journalism Online's Gordon Crovitz, who claims that premium news sites can expect to be able to charge for about ten percent of their online content. I've noted oftentimes that a system for managing access to paid content is long overdue, but news organizations should take a hint from the payments being extracted from iPhone apps and recognize that online markets reward functionality and community input that meets personal needs more than it does deathless prose and a good network of inside contacts.
A topic-oriented Web site for news content sponsored by AP would be a good idea, but one wonders whether AP or any other news organization is up to the task of building both the content and the brand necessary to contend in search engine wars for their audience's attention. At the same time, AP's emphasis on "protective" content packaging as a means to establish fair licensing of AP content seems to miss the real revenue opportunity available to AP and other news organizations. When a publishing-enabled global audience is your most effective distribution mechanism, a strategy of "joint supplier negotiation" suggested by the AP memo is not likely to succeed.
What is needed for AP and other professional news organizations to succeed in online content licensing is a system that encourages the distribution of their content through the most efficient and popular channels available at any given moment. Instead of fighting your audience, empower and encourage your audiences to be distributors of your content - and help them to profit from it as well. Highly automated content licensing with a billing mechanism akin to mobile phone usage units - and that can help individuals to profit from AP content when it's appropriate - is the key to this concept, and should be the cornerstone of AP's premium content strategy.
With such a scheme in place, AP's members can focus on beating the competition at their own game by becoming the most effective agnostic aggregators of news content in any given market. Yes, news organizations will continue to staff up with their own editorial resources, but the news of today - and tomorrow - needs to collect the best content from whatever source that it comes from more effectively than the competition. You can have some exclusive content, to be sure, but exclusivity alone cannot power success.
This can be seen clearly in how information providers in the financial industry are required to aggregate content from as many different sources as possible to help information-hungry decision makers. Over time you may develop unique assets, but the fundamental game is giving people what they want, where they want it, when they want it. If you yell at your markets for wanting to play a different game, don't be surprised by the blank stares that you get before they go to pay attention to people who listen more effectively.
I do hope for the sake of professional news producers that AP does come up with an effective content distribution strategy, and there are some hopeful outlines in the AP memo to that effect. But the largest thing that needs to change in the AP strategy is their attitude, which still treats the Web as an object of fear and scorn. More than 1.4 billion people around the world seem to feel otherwise about electronic content, people who both consume and contribute value to the news gathering and distribution process. It's time for the AP to recognize that their mission needs to embrace those 1.4 billion people more effectively if they are to value their brand and their content enough to consider seriously the prospect of regular payments for it.
As exciting as Amazon's Kindle has been for many early adopters of content technologies, its screaming limitations and awkward business model have been threats all along to its long-term success. But as long as really viable alternatives were not available, few people seemed to focus on the potential for Amazon to be painted into an uncomfortable box. With the nearing launch of the Nook device from book retailer Barnes & Noble, that time of unchallenged supremacy for the Kindle seems to be drawing to a close.
As much as Kindle has been hailed as a breakthrough for eBooks, I do think that Nook will be a far greater breakthrough for the average book reader and for book publishers and retailers. The Kindle was a nifty piece of breakthrough technology, but it did little to improve the lot of publishers looking at dwindling margins and nothing to help book retailers who are able to shoot cannons through their stores oftentimes without hitting a customer. Nook is well thought-out through and through from a technology standpoint, a customer standpoint and a retailing standpoint.
First, the gizmo itself, which will be available for sale in a few weeks. It uses eInk display technology for the book content, as does Kindle, and it can download books via wireless connections like its Amazon brethren. It has access to millions of books, a convenient online store, and tons of storage and battery life. But this is where the stories of these two devices begin to diverge. Where the Kindle is a completely proprietary platform, the Nook is based on Google's up-and-coming Android operating system for mobile devices, which ties it in immediately with dozens of other Android-enabled devices hitting the marketplace this fall and next year. Barnes and Noble sees clearly that proprietary devices are not going to be a viable barrier to entry when devices based on open source software and Web standards are setting the pace for electronic content access. Using Android enables the Nook to have a slick touch-sensitive color display in addition to the eInk text display that allows for book covers and other attractive graphics to be displayed. Instead of waiting for eInk to solve the color display problem, this is a simple and useful solution that opens up the Nook to other Web functionality and slicker feature navigation more effectively.
Behind the hardware and software is wireless connectivity both for wifi hot spots and for broadband wireless Web networks, a two-fer combination that bests Amazon broadband-only access but also opens up interesting possibilities for retailers. Nook owners who are visiting Barnes & Noble stores will be able to read books via Nook in their stores for free. What a great way to attract people to their retail outlets - and, eventually, what a great way to transition to site-licensing free content access on a subscription basis via affiliates such as high-end coffee shops, university and community libraries and so on once print-on-demand services can be packaged by Barnes and Noble more effectively. Having the right physical context for content remains a winning strategy for content packaging, and Nook's marketing strategy promises to get the 'where" of content right.
Nook also gets many of the "hows" of book content right. Purchasers of eBooks can use Nook to share a book with other people for up to fourteen days and will be able to mark them up with personal notes. Lending can be enabled across both the Nook itself and other portable devices enabled for ePub-formatted eBooks. This also opens up Nooks for library books using the ePub format, in addition to PDF-formatted eBooks that are popular on the Web - and not supported at this time by Kindles. The combination of these features finally offers readers the kind of usability for eBooks that they have been used to having as print readers in an electronic format. Instead of making the hardware and software artificial barriers to a full experience, Barnes and Noble has embraced the experience - and, in the process, has enabled the Nook to be a much more "must-have" place to consume and share content.
Finally, the Nook comes in at a comfy $259 price, twenty dollars less than the current price for the original-size Kindle while offering a display as large as the Kindle2 model. For a fully wireless-enabled device, this will give the Nook a strong advantage going into the holiday season in a lean year - and strong traffic in both their online outlets and retail stores. And while I can't vouch for the hands-on experience, the look of the unit promises to be at least as rewarding as the Kindle. Lacking a physical keyboard, one assumes that the Nook will make use of the Android software-managed touch keyboard capabilities, which, while not an ideal interface, cannot be worse than the amazingly awkward keyboard on Kindles.
So let's see. Great interface, great physical package, great rights management, standardized electronic format, use and share content the way book readers like to, good reasons to visit their retail outlets, go-anywhere networking, Android compatibility - yep, I'd say that Barnes and Noble has just leaped into the center of the new-hotness race for electronic content consumption. I think that it's safe to say that Barnes and Noble is poised to become a major player in electronic book retailing with a device and a marketing strategy that is likely to heat up the book services race to a raging boil. But don't count out Amazon yet - especially with their recent efforts to re-invent the business of local retail delivery. Local contexts is where the money is in content delivery, and both Amazon and Barnes and Noble will have a shot at new approaches to local markets in the years ahead. As for me, well, if a Nook showed up in my holiday stocking, I won't be thinking that it resembles a lump of coal.
You are reading a blog post that started as a comment. That in and of itself is hardly unusual for people who decide to leave detailed comments on one blog and then expand on them in their own blog, but the way that I did it was through Google Sidewiki, a new feature of the Google Toolbar that is used commonly in the Firefox Web browser. Once installed, an icon on the Toolbar enables you to enter a comment-like bit of information relating to a blog entry or other Web page that you're viewing, either about the whole page or a section of text. Once you've had your say, your text (and it's only text, no links, images or other enhanced items are allowed) can be saved in Sidewiki and at the same time get pushed to an entry in one of your Blogger weblogs (finally, a small side-benefit for using Blogger). You can also easily share a comment with someone via email, Twitter or Facebook.
Tools like Sidebar have been in use for many years, but none of them have found that much of an audience. One of the reasons seems to be that comment editing systems that float on the side of a page tend not to draw your attention as you scroll down it. Sidebar may suffer this same fate in the short run, though its ability to be relevant throughout a page and contexutal to very specific parts of the page makes it an interesting companion tool that may escape similar disinterest given to other annotation tools. Its presence only in Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers also seems to limit the potential community of users, though versions for Chrome and other browsers such as Safari are likely soon. What is likely to save Sidebar from lack of interest is the fact that it's well, a Google tool, of course. Google has lacked a reasonable entry point into social media communities for some time outside of lackluster experiments such as Orkut. The voting, abuse control and integrated features that make it easy to share Sidebar content in lifestreaming services are ways for Google to play its strongest emphasis - putting all of the Web in context - alongside the strengths of other social media services. So, while it's still kind of an iffy play, it does offer some solid thinking
that may accelerate Google as a destination for valuable comment content extended out to all of the Web alongside its own Blogger blogs.
One angle where you can see how this can take on a new angle for building Google's destination content is in a feature that doesn't get much attention at first. After a bit of use I noticed a link in Sidewiki that says "view my Google profile." When you click on this link , you discover that your Google Profile page now has a tab that displays your Sidewiki comments along with links to the content that you were commenting on. This is an interesting feature, enabling Sidewiki content to act as a seeding mechanism for a Facebook-like stream of links and information. In typical Google fashion this is a subtle tool that builds content in places that you may not expect, integrating it both into the experience of visiting a Web site and visiting a friend's Google profile. This cries out for a widget-oriented implementation that can enable Sidewiki to integrate more closely with destination content as Facebook Connect enables through sites like the Huffington Post.
All of this points to the elephant not yet in the room but waiting in the hallway: Google Wave. It's clear that Sidewiki and its integration with Google Profiles is custom-tucked for Wave technology, which would enable highly sophisticated real-time content sharing with trusted peers. That's a relatively long-term strategy, though, leaving lots of room for other comment sharing tools to gain market momentum. Sidewiki is yet another interesting piece of the Google puzzle, a puzzle that encompasses so may individual little pieces popping out of the Googleplex one at a time that it's hard to appreciate at times what it is that Google is trying to do. Perhaps that's the way that they want it - a charging elephant might be a little more alarming to people. But in the meantime, a lot of people have a hard time seeing even pieces of Google's social media strategy making sense.
I found Michael Arrington's comments on the new Google Sidewiki feature to be an oddly neutral and superficial analysis, albeit with a bit of inside scoop. While this, like many other Google projects, may not seem like much at first, it has the potential for major impact. First, it comes at a time when comment spam is becoming a major problem. Technologies such as "captcha" character graphics that weed out automated comment spam are failing, as spammers are hiring people who work cheap enough to defeat these mechanisms cost-effectively with manual entry of spam. The Digg-like voting and ranking will help to push such garbage to the bottom of the comment pile.
Secondly, comments are becoming a major source of content unto themselves, as seen in platforms such as Facebook and Friendfeed. Sidewiki is an ingenious play to get that kind of community content embedded almost anywhere, while at the same time enabling the community to develop a personality of its own. This is a unique kind of platform play that defines a "between the raindrops" approach to these competitors.
This all points to one key factor - most technology platforms have done very little to improve the value of comments or to address long-standing technical issues. They're not a sexy tech feature by most techie standards, so the glory goes elsewhere. Google sees them as a major opportunity, and may have a major play as a result. I feel somewhat uncomfortable about the disintermediation factors, but the ability to post a comment as a blog entry on your Blogger weblog (finally a reward for having stuck with it!) enables you to shift the conversation to focus on your own content fairly handily. Key weakness in this feature: you can't post links or graphics in your Sidewiki content, so your entries won't be very rich. I am sure that this will be addressed in time, perhaps as a part of Wave technology being introduced.
At the end of the day, if it makes your core content more valuable and it's better technology than what you can get yourself, it's probably a good thing. I welcome better comment solutions that can compete with this, but right now we all need a little relief from comment fatigue - especially if you're trying to keep the spammers away.
On-demand book publishing has been a quiet reality behind the scenes for several years, now, with outlets such as Amazon and a handful of major universities and bookstores generating some books on an on-demand basis rather than shelving inventory. On the retail side of the equation, however, on-demand publishing is almost a total cypher, in spite of technologies such as the Espresso Book Machine from from On-Demand Books. The EBM carries a still-hefty price tag and has kind of funky marketing (does anyone really name products with acronyms any more?), but nevertheless represents a great opportunity for many new business models to surface around print media. Yet most publishers have failed to commit any significant resources to delivering their titles to consumer-demanded printing.
A new alliance between Google and On-Demand Books, though, may help to prime the on-demand business model with an abundance of content. Google has agreed grant On-Demand Books access to 2 million public-domain book titles available via its Google Books service. According to eWeek, Google is suggesting an $8 price tag for these on-demand books, with $1 of the proceeds going to On-Demand Books and $1 to Google, which intends to donate its proceeds to charities. While there are already about 1.6 million titles available via Espresso machines, the highly affordable price tag for public-domain books and the online cachet of Google Books (not to mention millions more waiting in the wings for a settlement of Google's rights to out-of-print copyrighted works) may be a priming of the pipeline for wider distribution of on-demand books.
When computerized laser printers first came to the marketplace, they were huge, hunkering machines found in major computer centers that had to handle high-volume printing. Today, of course, anyone can park a high-quality, high-speed color laser printer in their home for a few hundred dollars. The Espresso Book Machine seems to be caught between these two extremes, affordable enough that some larger retail outlets are willing to give it a try but not built in enough volume that your average neighborhood coffee shop, print shop or book store could afford to pop one in the corner somewhere for on-demand books. With the Google Books deal, highly affordable printed books from a wealth of titles may help to push the volume of on-demand printing at the consumer outlet level to the point that more affordable versions of EBM technology could be deployed.
This may be just what Google has in mind, as it yet again takes content that most publishers considered unmonetizable and seeks ways to make money with it. A buck a book for high-quality free content that costs almost nothing to store online is not a bad deal. Add in Google's expanding footprint in eBooks via deals with retailers and ePub-compatible reading device makers and the unmonetizable starts to look like a pretty good deal. In this era in which many publishers are still focused largely on incremental gains for their cash cows, it's nice to see Google and On-Demand Books turning cow flops into blue sky markets that may transform on-demand books into a lush pasture for new profits.
With a webinar for MIT coming up at the end of September, I finally accepted that my aging laptop was overdue for an upgrade to keep up with the increasing need to be video-literate online. In the process of ordering up my new unit, I had an opportunity to order a nearly-free netbook along with my new Dell Latitude. Looked interesting for a moment, but I decided to pass and to wait it out a while longer for something with a little more power and battery life. That something is not just an idle dream: smartbooks are coming to town in a few months, and they promise to do for mobile computing what PCs did for desktop computing in the 1990s.
A smartbook is in essence a small laptop optimized to use a new generation of CPU chips such as Qualcomm's Snapdragon and Nvidia's Tegra that offer days of battery life and high-quality performance for video, Web browsing and online office applications. Combined with operating systems such as Windows CE and Google's forthcoming Chrome OS, smartbooks - and smart phones based on the same chips - are poised to eclipse inexpensive (and not very powerful) netbooks as do-everything mobile devices for people who are content to do most everything computer-oriented via the Web. Given the billions of people who have yet to use PCs on a regular basis and the increased demand for on-the-go lifestyles that rarely settle down to a desktop unit anymore, inexpensive smartbooks are likely to take off in a big way over the next few years.
That's not all bad news for some of the incumbent interests. Microsoft is well positioned with both its CE operating system and a wealth of improving online Web-based office productivity tools to take full advantage of the capabilities of smartbooks. While this means that some of its legacy desktop software may go by the wayside in the process, it's likely that the online versions of these favorites will be powerful enough to satisfy the lion's share of people who use them. This spells sorely needed growth for Microsoft, even as it comes to terms with the positioning of Google as a more direct competitor in this space via its Chrome OS operating system being launched next year. Smartbooks are also good news for most books publishers and video producers, as they are big enough and powerful enough to support their needs for better on-the-go display systems.
Will smartbooks be the spark that catches fire in many unwired parts of the world to open up the Web to billions of people who have yet to experience it? Many mobile phones equipped with these improved chips are more likely to be key in the Web's further expansion, but smartbooks are definitely a very important step forward in making Web access an instant-on service that will make browsing a more universal tool in more venues than ever before. Yes, mobile apps will still be important, but will face far stiffer competition from cloud-based content services that work perfectly fine in smartbooks and a new generation of smart phones that will service people more effectively overall. So I'll wait a few months before picking up a smartbook, but by then, with 4G networks starting to roll out, I am sure that it will be well worth the wait.
In my Wall Street days, one of the first uses for real-time information feeds into PCs devised by investment banks was to pump them into spreadsheets, which would in turn calculate information that could be republished out to the investment community. It was a very cost-effective way to accomplish a key publishing function without having to rely on armies of programmers to set up these relatively simple functions that a spreadsheet could handle fairly easily.
Fast-forward to today, an era in which cloud computing is beginning to absorb both spreadsheet software and much of the content that can be consumed by software. It should come as no surprise then, that Google's recently launched Google Apps Script capabilities are providing publishing abilities that connect Google Apps spreadsheets to the Web in much the same way that investment banks were using them for business processes many years ago. You can now use script programming in Google's spreadsheets to trigger well-formatted emails to contacts, or to feed Web services - say, Salesforce.com, to pick one possible example. More to the point, though, some of the pre-defined scripts include formulas for converting local currencies into foreign currencies and business logic. Hmm, this is not just for casual marketing campaigns, is it.
It would be a far, far jump to say that Google Apps Script is in any sort of position to take on the sophisticated trading environments of investment banks, and, to be truthful, that's probably just as well. But it does point out how easy it has become to use the Web to be a self-programming publishing environment that can support many core business functions with event-driven automated information feeds. As more and more business logic works its way into cloud-driven programming environments, we can expect that both enterprises and enterprise publishers will be adopting these environments as cost-effective ways to deliver more valuable workflow services. Foreign currency trading via Google? Well, those early spreadsheets looked pretty crude at first, also. Watch this space carefully, enterprise publishers, there's more to come.
I had an interesting exchange on Twitter today with Rafat Ali, founder of paidContent.org and a person who I respect and admire greatly for his insights into the content industry (not to mention for having blown the socks off of many a trade pub over the past several years). Rafat had pointed out in a post on paidContent that The New York Times had started to use barrier ads on their iPhone applications, something that he found to be very intrusive. I couldn't agree more on this point; most media companies view mobile applications as little more than Compuserve-like kiosks from which they can serve slightly jazzed-up versions of their Web page content. With that in mind, it shouldn't surprise us that the NYT or any other media company will be intent on carrying over its ad strategies to these walled gardens.
As a follow-up, though, Rafat pointed me towards a good post on pC's mocoNews site that outlined the case for Apple's approach to mobile apps versus Google's more Web-centric approach. Tricia Duryee points out in this article that Apple had considered emphasizing the browser as the focus of delivering content on the iPhone, but then shifted to its App Store as a preferred method for getting people excited about the potential of mobile devices for delivering useful content and services. As she notes:
[T]he biggest problem facing Google will not be convincing developers, but consumers. Apple’s steroid-enhanced marketing machine has drilled into the public thinking that “there’s an app for that,” not that there’s a URL. Clearly after logging 1.5 billion downloads within a year, Apple is on to something and vigorously training the mobile users of tomorrow.
Sorry, Tricia, but I have to smile at that one. While Apple rolled out a very savvy strategy for the iPhone given its market position as a high-end product oriented towards proprietary intellectual property, I think that it's worth noting that a lot more than 1.5 billion Web pages, many of them with embedded applications, are downloaded every day on the Web. The iPhone's app strategy has certainly made mobile technology platforms far more usable and understandable for its early adopters, much as early premium online information services such as Compuserve and the original AOL made the still-crude world of networked information delivery more palatable. Similarly, early PCs benefited from a galaxy of packaged software that used to line the shelves at local stores, providing "user-friendly interfaces" that made still-crude PC technology more palatable.
But today the walled-garden services of Compuserve and AOL are distant memories, and packaged software for PCs is almost non-existent in most local stores, except for a few have-to-buy items like Microsoft Office software (about the most expensive items to be found on any of the shelves at our local Staples office supply store), accounting systems and tax preparation tools. Why? Because for the most part these products and services were attached to more mature technologies that no longer required packaged IP to help people get to the good stuff. In the instance of software, many of the functions that used to require packaged software are now available via cloud computing services, including tax preparation, bookkeeping, spreadsheets and word processing. In the instance of services like Compuserve, it also became a matter of scale: 65,000 or so iPhone apps sounds like a lot of services, but good luck finding any of them once you begin to scale up to more broad markets. Walled gardens are great when you have a cozy crowd, but most people's interests won't be content to stay in them very long when a good search engine can help them to find the next movable feast easily.
This isn't to say that there is not a valuable place for mobile applications in the mix of marketing strategies for publishers and technology companies. Good functionality with good content being fed into it is a winning combination on any platform. But if we were to speed up the clock and have this discussion a year from now, I don't think that people will be waxing as sanguine about the App Store as they are today - and not just because of Google's Android mobile platform hitting the scene. Real applications, as opposed to the lightly gussied-up browser substitutes that most publishers toss up as mobile applications, take time and thoughtfulness to develop and to roll out carefully.
Yes, a Safari browser is a somewhat different platform than a Chrome browser, and so on, but it's not very realistic to compare the relatively minor differences in how these packages handle largely open Web standards such as HTML compared to the larger, glaring differences between iPhones, Palms, Blackberries and Android phones. Mobile applications will be useful, but there is no practical way to expect publishers to deal cost-effectively with this broad array of approaches simply to get their content to and fro. No amount of seductive ads by Apple or any other platform manufacturer is going to be able to conceal this basic fact, it would seem.
The truth is, of course, that many Web pages are in fact driven by very sophisticated applications already, a fact that will be only accelerated by the emergence of HTML 5, which does more to merge programming functionality into the Web environment than previous versions of the basic code for Web pages. The architecture of today's Google Chrome browser hints at where this is really taking us. When you have more than one page open in a Chrome browser, each tabbed page is its own separate program process on your computer. If one tabbed page has a problem, it can stop functioning without affecting the other opened pages. In other words, Chrome as a browser is actually a multi-process program execution environment.
To put it another way, it really doesn't matter whether you're running a Web page or an application, as long as you can get to it easily in a standardized access environment. Why bother with a page of apps and a separate set of Web page bookmarks when you can have one unified environment where you can access whatever is important to you? Once you have that kind of environment, people will want to have billions of choices filtered by a good search engine or recommendation service rather than a few thousand apps that have to be "mother-may-I"ed through Apple before they can be accessed.
The iPhone App Store has been a very clever and useful marketing mechanism that has allowed Apple to make its platform more palatable and useful in a highly controlled way that's appropriate for any emerging technology. Let's face it, the mobile Web is still a work in progress, making the more sophisticated displays of some mobile apps far more appealing than dealing with the almost-good mobile Web functionality that's available on most platforms today. But given the already mature nature of the Web that's awaiting better browsing via Chrome and other platforms that will not intentionally cripple Web functionality to make more proprietary approaches more palatable to consumers, it's not likely that this artificial Compuserve-like era of iPhone applications can be expected to dominate the mobile content landscape very long.
iPhone apps will endure and even prosper for quite some time, to be sure, just as those early online services such as Compuserve managed to endure for several years after the emergence of the Web. But it won't take long for most content consumers to realize the difference between a transitional technology designed to bolster the margins of publishers and a more satisfying technology that connects them more effectively with the world at large. As long as companies like Apple can create new frontiers of technology that entertain and delight high-end mobile content users, we'll be hearing, "Yeah, there's an app for that" for quite some time. But if history is any guide to the future, it's not likely that any one company will be able to keep that phrase rolling off of their clients' lips when more powerful substitutes are available that intrigue more people more easily. Yeah, there's a Web for that, all right.
