Yes, there is a future for the content industry in media and enterprise markets, and the Software and Information Industry Association Content Division has been charting it for several years now at its Information Industry Summit events in New York City. This year's IIS is drawing more than 300 executives from leading content and technology companies, a good crowd in the middle of a dismal economy. No surprise, given the star-studded line-up of speakers that was assembled by the Content Division this year. You might say that these people are documenting a future that people have been talking about for many years and that finally arrived - a future in which the Web dominates the dialog on profits and products on a daily basis, even as high-value premium products punch through to define new opportunities for value in enterprise and media publishing. Key to that trend is the rise of technology companies that are driving change in major publishing organizations, which enable publishers to define new relationships with their clients. Are all of these publishers ready for this ever-present "future?" Let's see what these experts have to say. I will be posting on our events blog throughout the day and linking the posts to this entry. You may also find my conference Twitter messages (and retweets) here.
In the process of selling off several of its core B2B entertainment industry titles, Nielsen Business Media also announced the eminent closing of Editor & Publisher, the century-plus old trade publication that had chronicled the ins and outs of the news industry. At a time at which magazine closings seem to be about as regular as train stops on a commuter line, E&P's demise is not exceptional in many ways. Any number of trade publications are struggling to survive in an era in which online media enables unlimited competition for the attention of its readership and for its advertisers' and subscribers' cash. But there is something particularly poignant about E&P's shuttering. After all, if an industry which insists that the quality of its content will be its distinguishing factor cannot support the high-quality journalism covering itself, then how can they expect others to do likewise for their own interests?
There are few people who can scream about canaries in coal mines and get away with it for long, and I am no exception to that rule. If you haven't figured out that most publishers are caught between highly skilled staffs oriented towards traditional publishing platforms and new platforms that can't deliver them decent salaries with room for both management's profits and platform reinvestment, then you must have been clipping your bond coupons on a tropical island. But that doesn't mean that publications like Editor & Publisher have to die. What it does mean, though, is that in some ways the publishing industry is returning to its roots of scrappy, independent publishing that may do better without the overhead of large, corporate parents.
This doesn't mean that news publications will always do best as independent outlets, but it does mean that publishers that are mean, lean and more focused on their markets than on hitting the train back to comfortable suburban homes are going to do just fine. The good news is that Web infrastructure is perfectly suited to such operations, most especially when publishers listen to their audiences and engage them effectively. An interesting an ironic example of this positioning is the recent rebirth of Conde Nast's former Portfolio.com Web site by American City Business Journals as a portal oriented towards the owners of small and medium businesses. With a platform that is well designed to slice and dice content and functionality for any number of focused local and topic-oriented markets, ACBL's no-nonsense approach to publishing is far more emblematic of what will succeed moving forward in profitable B2B and consumer media than the high-gloss world of major media companies.
The caveat to this approach, though, is that the scrappy publishers must push themselves to the extreme to take advantage of highly affordable publishing technologies to outpace major media companies in having audiences adopt their brands on the platforms that they prefer. This is to some degree why blog-oriented publishers such as TechCrunch and The Huffington Post have survived and thrived in online media. Having been handed the equivalent of a guerrilla fighter's AK-47 automatic rifle in today's affordable social media publishing technologies and deploying the tactics and strategies that they enable, lean and agile online-first publications and their technology partners have carved away a good portion of the meat of publishing's profits.
It's not as if the major media companies can out-tech these smaller rivals easily, either. The expense and useful life of proprietary content technology development is rarely beneficial to a publisher today. There are some exceptions to this rule on the very high end of content markets such as in financial securities trading and other specialized professional functions, but in general it's source-agnostic content technologies that have defined today's most successful publishing platforms. For general media markets, publishers have tried again and again to gain the upper hand through sponsoring source-specific content technologies that simply don't deliver all of the information and experiences that people expect now through source-agnostic technologies.
It's what you might call a prolonged mourning for the mass-production printing press era, the ability to define a marketplace through a technology that only traditional publishers could afford and master easily. Sorry, that train left the station a long time ago. By ceding their technological superiority to others, publishers sealed their fate years ago. If Compuserve had knocked the socks off of the Web in its ability to amaze and delight content audiences, it would still be around today. Consortium services like Hulu are trying to regain some of that high ground of technology, but as long as they fail to leverage all of the content that people find to be valuable based on the artificial divide of "it isn't real content," they will always fall short of audiences who know "real" when they see it.
In short, I do think that the closing of Editor & Publisher is a small but significant landmark in the history of publishing. It marks the point in the publishing industry's history when it admitted that it no longer really cared about its traditional strengths. Print publishing and the editorial disciplines that drove it are now officially legacies that will inform the future, but no longer define it. There will continue to be print products indefinitely, and highly customized print products are likely to be a growing marketplace for some time. But when an industry will no longer buy coverage of its own traditional operations, then it's time to admit that a chapter in that industry's history has been finished. I wish the very best of luck to the staff of Editor & Publisher, they have put out quality journalism in the face of enormous industry change. I hope that we will see E&P resurface in the near future as a web-first publication, perhaps with a focus on the future rather than on the past.
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.
I've been making the rounds lately amongst many of the major enterprise publishers, and while there are some bright spots here and there in their outlook and aggressiveness in challenging markets, I am afraid that the challenges to their earnings in a tough economy are taking their toll on many of them. The good news is that aggressive cost-cutting has been able to hold up earnings at many enterprise publishers, including the recent earnings report by Thomson Reuters indicating that profits have doubled in the wake of their cost-cutting after the acquisition of Reuters. But at Thomson Reuters and many other enterprise publishers, including Reed Elsevier, the top line of revenue growth continues to look challenging for the next year or so at minimum. Traditional forms of enterprise investment in subscription information services are down, while investments in new and innovative approaches to information services are being metered out judiciously by major vendors in the midst of continuing cost control pressures.
While a certain amount of down-time from investments in growth after cutbacks is understandable, I am increasingly concerned that many enterprise publishers may be ill-prepared to manage a comeback to healthy sales as the economic outlook begins to brighten. The challenges to their revenues are the result of their enterprise customers having to manage the same sort of economic shocks, a situation that has left many open questions as to how these enterprises will respond to the need for improved information services once they recognize their own need to re-invest in growth. Typically it's the individual business units in an enterprise that are the first to recognize the need for investing in more and better information services in a recovering marketplace, followed by a second wave of new cost controls that shift increased spending to more centralized information budgets. But with more enterprise workers using a wider variety of technologies to serve their own information needs, it's not clear that the second-wave bounce for information subscriptions will have much upside this time around.
This argues for a much more sophisticated understanding of how people in a variety of enterprise work roles see themselves as information purchasers today. Many of the questions that need to be answered about this more dispersed and complex map of potential buyers and purchase influencers are beyond the typical hypothesis-testing that traditional market research tends to focus on in preparation for a new product lifecycle. Simple, quantifiable answers to questions about markets are important when you are focused on a specific marketing goal. But as these deer-in-the-headlights clients start to wake up, being more certain about who to speak to in a sales situation for both product needs and budgets can mean the difference between making incremental changes to products that may be ill-positioned for this new market map of purchasers and knowing when to invest deeply and rapidly in new products and services to meet their needs.
The narrative research techniques that we're pioneering with our clients seem to be very well-devised for cutting through the chaos of changing markets and making sense of complex behaviors and motivations that influence people's quest for order and action. Being able to filter unbiased stories that people tell about key complex behaviors and activities such as content purchasing, use and budgeting enables you to understand both how different extremes of possible behaviors and attitudes relate to specific types of people in a sales situation, but also allows you to drill down to the specific stories that people are telling about those situations very specifically. The techniques also allow you to identify and explore "weak signals," outlying groupings of people who have similar overall attitudes but perhaps very different stories from one another that lead to those groupings. You can to explore the "forest" of complex human behaviors associated with enterprise content buying and use prior to testing out specific responses to those behaviors.
In other words, the best way to invest in testing out ideas for new products and services may be to have better objective observation of complex behaviors before you form specific ideas to test out in a deeper way. How do you do this cost-effectively when your own budget for research has gone "deer-in-the-headlights?" Well, we think that our New Rules of Engagement: Re-Tooling Information Sales and Marketing for the New Economy subscription study may be the key for many major enterprise publishers getting in touch with enterprise workers dealing with the shocks affecting their own organizations. Primary subscribers will bet insights into stories from hundreds of enterprise workers on key topics affecting their content purchasing and use and workshops that will help them to interpret research results and to apply them to their own organizations. With "New Rules" available for your 2010 planning sessions, you'll have a far better chance of trying out the right ideas for your markets more rapidly as the economy recovers.
I hope that you do give "New Rules" a look and to consider how your organization can benefit from understanding purchasing patterns for enterprise content in a whole new light. With revenue growth at a premium, we hope that this cost-effective investment in basic understanding of your markets -and the potential gaps that may exist in your own staff's understanding of them - will help to accelerate your revenue growth sooner rather than later.
While there's been enormous buzz about Kindle eBook readers from Amazon and, now, the new eBook platform offering from Barnes & Noble and an updated eBook reader from Sony, the broader truth is that eBooks represent just a sliver of the book industry as a whole and an even smaller portion of online attention. With USD 118 million in U.S. eBook sales last year versus USD 24.3 billion in overall book sales, electronic books have barely scratched the economic surface of publishing, in spite of all of the Silicon Valley bluster about their potential. Yet this isn't stopping major retailers and publishers from experimenting with eBook technologies again and again - and continuing to pull their punches when it comes to realizing the possibilities for books in electronic forms.
This doesn't mean that there aren't good efforts being applied to these improved stabs at eBooks. The new Barnes & Noble eBook store includes lots of state-of-the-art best practices, including easily downloaded reading software for PCs, Macs, Blackberries and iPhones, a decent offering of current commercial titles and access to free eBooks from the Google Books online archive, as well as a smattering of classics pre-loaded into their eBook reader. A forthcoming eBook reading unit from Plastic Logic will enable Barnes & Noble to have its own little toy for eBook enthusiasts, but wisely they didn't bother to wait for this hardware to show up before launching its attractive and easy-to-use store for existing electronic platforms. As they go to pains to point out in their online orientation materials, they want it make it as easy as possible for people to buy and download eBooks using whatever device people want to use to absorb their attention.
While it's good that Barnes & Noble is offering alternatives to eBooks and a very consumer-friendly approach to their promotion, the broader truth is that the book industry has gained very little from eBooks thus far in taking on their biggest competitive challenge: the Web. If, after more than a decade of Web access to books, the entire book industry can only garner USD 323 million worldwide from a medium that reaches more than 1.4 billion people around the world, one wonders how projections predicting USD 9 billion in eBook sales by 2013 can represent real growth and new markets as opposed to a more probable contraction of overall book revenues as book sales to dwindling audiences transfer to online destinations.
There are many signs that the book industry is becoming more savvy about rethinking their role in publishing and beginning to think of themselves as being able to promote talented authors as assets in many media, but these are baby steps in the face of a Web that has already completely rethought how people can profit from expressing themselves to audiences. As nice as the Barnes and Noble eBook store may be, its level of education and assurance seems to be aimed at people who have very little confidence with using online content. One would think that book publishers would become far more aggressive in thinking about how to engage the most aggressive online content producers and users, capturing their energy and interests - and disposable income - more effectively. Certainly ensuring compatibility with iPhones and Blackberries are a step towards that audience, but the relatively inflexible eBook reader software that packages most eBook offerings on these platforms seems doomed to make books an afterthought rather than a primary focus of aggressive content users.
What publishers should do is to focus far more aggressively on packaging that will integrate book content into personal publishing lifestyles far more aggressively. APIs that facilitate applications development to extend eBook capabilities, collaborative reading, bookmarking, linking, user-generated content and other extensions into the real-time generation of content consumers and producers are essential developments to bring eBooks into the stream of attention that they really deserve. Serving audiences is the real objective of publishing - not generating units of production that may or may not deliver full value to a given audience. Creating services that keep people who are today's greatest content purchase influencers - digitally literate readers - in a position to recommend and amplify the value of a wide variety of book-oriented content and services will take far more than locked-down reading software that operates in a vacuum. These types of services are surfacing in the hands of innovative online companies, but as to where that leaves mainstream book publishers and retailers remains to be seen.
Scholarly publishing is faced with as broad an array of challenges as any other segment of the traditionally print-oriented publishing industry, with push-back from traditional sources of purchasing such as academic and corporate libraries, a dip in ad revenues as well as a rising array of potential online substitutes for sharing scholarly information. No small surprise, then, that Elsevier would be floating two new prototypes for presenting its scholarly journal content in online formats. presented in two possible combinations of enhanced content and navigation, the prototype articles provide features such as tabbed sections for different types of content, interactive illustrations, multimedia clips and user comments. ReadWriteWeb notes that in some ways the prototype online journal articles are more a collection of current best practices for organizing online content in a more sophisticated way, perhaps reminiscent of how "social media press releases" have been used to promote more efficient reuse of PR materials, and suggests that many of the features are moot since most scientific readers are going to read an entire article anyway.
There's some truth in RWW's observations, but the full measure of the Elsevier prototypes is greater than the scope of their media-oriented comments. In the race to come up with more effective scientific, technical and medical research, products and services, organizations using scholarly content from publishers such as Elsevier are seeking to find ways to integrate that content into people's workflows in ways that will accelerate their ability to obtain breakthrough insights. Segmentation of journal content into forms that are more easily repurposed for any number of software applications and online services is therefore an essential step. Services such as Knovel Library have been doing this as a post-production service for several years for scientific reference publishers, creating easily referenced charts, interactive graphs and other services that accelerate productivity in the SciTech workplace.
So as much as Elsevier's prototypes are important as presentations of journal content intended for accessing different aspects of a specific journal article, the prototypes also indicate more movement by Elsevier to provide "pre-shredded" content that can be easily repurposed for reading and insights that look for patterns across many articles. With that in mind, some of the obvious potential shortfalls of the experimental formats are somewhat forgiveable. For example, while comments appear in one of the prototypes (probably to make it easier for people to absorb two groups of possible and contrasting new features), the use of these possible formats to act as an anchor for ongoing broader discussion of a particular research topic appears to be fairly limited. That's probably fair game for add-on applications, developed either by Elsevier, their clients or third party suppliers.
I find the prototype formats to be useful and appealing, though I do agree with RWW that these represent in large part current online best practices. They are necessary changes, in all likelihood, for any scientific publisher to undertake these days. However, as many mainstream media organizations have discovered in their push to integrate content into more sophisticated rich online presentations, necessary changes do not always translate into changes sufficient to guarantee stable or improved revenues. These new formats are a strong indication that scientific publishers are grappling with the right issues as to how to improve their content for their audiences, but in and of themselves they may not change the debate on content value that they have with many of their current enterprise buyers in a fundamental way. What is more likely to happen is that they will enable additional value-add applications and services that will set the stage for enhanced value to their clients - and enhanced publishing revenues. Here's hoping that the experiment continues and moves in even more positive directions.
There have been any number of content aggregation services surfacing in recent years that have helped publishers to expand the richness of their Web sites. APIs, feeds and other tools are helping publishers to power up new online presences that offer new opportunities for ad revenues and audience building. But as the marketplace for news begins to revolve increasingly around passing topics, it becomes harder to use such tools to respond rapidly enough to revenue-generating opportunities. The "bogie" for this new model often mentioned is The Huffington Post, which has made an art of whipping up special sections of content and links from a wide variety of sources focused on headline-grabbing topics wrapped with its own layer of editorial content from bloggers. How do publishers respond to this model with their own instant feature sites?
Enter Daylife, a content aggregation service which is evolving past APIs and feeds to deliver through its Daylife Select service what you might call a HuffPost-in-a-box service that can enable publishers of all kinds to develop new and improved online content focused around specific topics rapidly. Using its own blend of semantic analysis and content serving technologies, Daylife can serve up text, photos and other multimedia content from a wide variety of sources or from a publisher's own content to create complete pages of topic-specific content very rapidly - complete with built-in ad inventory. What I find to be impressive about Daylife Select is that it is really a complete publication in its own right with great usability and appeal, as seen on its own site, but not just your typical autopiloted content technology. Content served up automatically can be managed by a non-technical staff to deliver a true editorial presence and can be supplemented by original content such as a publisher's own blogs though Daylife technology. Instead of waiting days or weeks to get APIs and other tools set up, Daylife Select can provide a tailored, branded and highly navigable topic-focused presence for many major themes within minutes.
Most importantly, although many major publishers are using Daylife technology to whip up valuable focused content, major consumer companies such as Kellogg's and Purina are also using Daylife to deliver focused content for their own clients. The idea of companies developing their own content to attract people in their marketing scope is nothing new, of course, but the ease with which this can be done through a service such as Daylife begins to point out how important it can be to enable publishers to be able to support marketers rapidly and effectively with content aggregated in whatever form their clients need with whatever overarching branding serves their needs best as effectively as possible.
To paraphrase Forrest Gump, "content is as content does"; that is, the content brands that are willing to work actively through tools such as Daylife to aggregate whatever content works best for their audiences and their marketing partners most effectively wins the publishing game. A simple concept, but one with which many publishers continue to struggle as they try to adapt traditional editorial methods to today's content aggregations tools that enable many editorial functions to fall into place automatically. Yes, a service like Daylife cannot replace all of the editorial value of a traditional newsroom and more robust editorial content development platforms, but when it can provide most of the robust functionality that people expect from an online publication today along with access to deep and high-quality content, it's time for publishers to think more actively about how they can use tools such as Daylife to enable their content to succeed in any number of topic-specific "instant portals" and other efficiently managed content presences far more actively.
In other words, why complain about HuffPost when you can succed with their model any number of times over in any number of content categories? It may not bring back the salad days of high-flying publishers, but this type of rapid and effective content aggregation may help publishers to deploy focused publications with content from a wide variety of sources far more cost-effectively - and in doing so make the best of their native editorial resources far more efficiently. I think that we're going to see more services like Daylife coming to light over the next few years, a trend that offers great promise for publishers if they can master it well.
As people in the U.S. and get ready for the holiday weekend, I hope that you have a chance to enjoy friends and family and to celebrate the role that content has played in making our world a better place. Below is a video capturing my relfections on the role that social media played in events in our nation more than two hundred years ago that still ring true today. Have a great holiday!
I've had the privilege to have moderated many great SIIA panels over the years, but the 24 June Brown Bag Lunch mid-day event at the McGraw Hill building in New York City (online video available) certainly ranks among the most important topics that I've had the opportunity to moderate with some excellent panelists who will stimulate your thinking on how best to monetize content on today's hot distribution platforms. Please register soon, the last Brown Bag Lunch event was a sellout both in-person and online. If you have suggestions for questions that the panel should address, please add them as comments to this post. A panel summary and a list of our truly distinguished panelists follows. See you there!
Google, Kindle, iPhone: How to Leverage Hot Content Delivery Platforms for Profits
Today's publishers are finding both great opportunities and great challenges in using leading-edge technology platforms to deliver revenues for their premium content sources. iPhones, Kindle e-book readers and Google Books and search services are being adopted by both consumers and enterprises to access premium content at a pace that challenges publishers to come up with effective pricing and marketing strategies. Key questions that arise include:
• What are going to be the most successful business models on these platforms for news and information, books and magazines - and what are the up-and-coming platforms that will challenge publishers to keep those business models working? • In locking down deals and settlements for content distribution on these platforms, who are the winners and losers? • How does the availability of premium content on these platforms change how publishers manage the value of their brands? • What will be the emerging role of the open Web in an environment that is seeing more proprietary content distribution technologies emerging?
A panel of leaders from the worlds of media, enterprise and academic publishing and intellectual property management will explore how news, books and other intellectual property from publishers can best take advantage of emerging technologies to generate revenues from premium content in mobile and online markets and on the open Web - and how these platforms are likely to affect how content creators view the role of publishers in delivering them value for their efforts.
Panelists: Alisa Bowen, Senior Vice President, Head of Consumer Publishing, Thomson Reuters Gordon Crovitz, Co-Founder, Journalism Online Chris Kenneally, Director of Author Relations, Copyright Clearance Center
The landscape of Europe is dotted with the ruins of hundreds of castles and city walls dating from the Medieval era of feudal rule, when local kings, dukes and other land-owners defended their claims to farms and forests through their ability to repel invaders from behind their castles' walls. Castle defenses worked reasonably well for several centuries, but eventually the use of castles as power bases became obsolete. Was it improved war technology that made castles charming antiquities? To some degree, perhaps, but the larger force that made castles irrelevant was the rise of a new way to store and protect wealth: banking. Once the rise of wealthy merchants made the marketplaces of towns and cities the real battlefields for proving out power, castles protecting farmlands became far less important for securing power than having an economic system that could enable efficient trade. Yet those old castles still stand, and, darn, they do look rather nifty even today.
Fast-forward to 2009, as Amazon introduces its Kindle DX, the latest iteration of their wireless ebook reader that offers a larger screen with eInk technology. Just as those kings and dukes were thrilled to build ever-larger battlements against their enemies, publishers are flocking to the Kindle as the wonder machine of choice, now with a screen size that lends itself to larger materials such as magazines and newspaper articles. With a USD489 price tag, the Kindle DX is hardly an economy model digital device; in fact, many new netbooks with similar screen sizes go for hundreds less and offer color displays with Web and PC functionality. But as the copy from the Amazon catalog page reminds us, this new Kindle is slim, "Just over 1/3 of an inch, as thin as most magazines." Why even compare a Kindle to a netbook when it offers such obvious advantages and comforts to print readers? And if the price is a little to steep for some people, a few of them may be able to rejoice (a little): some major newspapers such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Boston Globeare offering a discount off of a USD400-plus annual subscription to their papers via the new Kindle - if you live beyond the delivery range of their paper editions. This new-fangled technology does allow some miraculous breakthroughs, doesn't it?
It's not as if the Kindle does not have its own unique virtues - or its own promising revenue streams. Sales of smaller Kindle units have been brisk, and the affluent older people buying them online are also fueling skyrocketing ebook sales. Silicon Alley Insider notes that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos brought a stunning statistic to light during the Kindle DX intro show: when Kindle-formatted books are available on Amazon, about 35 percent of those books' sales are now through Kindle editions. There was no breakout as to how many buy a print edition as well, but the chart behind Bezos at the intro showed this percentage hockey-sticking from only 14 percent in February of this year. Based on my own experience with getting my Content Nation book into a Kindle edition, much of this growth is actually publisher-driven: titles are being pushed into Kindle format as quickly as Amazon can handle the conversions and postings. In a year in which print book sales are sluggish, the reduced price of Kindle-edition books offers publishers a discount-bin pricing strategy with zero inventory or print-on-demand cost exposure.
In other words, in a year in which the slowly-moving denizens of print are trying to salvage some semblance of sensible quarterly earnings, the ability to charge a premium for access to content on electronic platforms - or any platform, for that matter - has to be a strong plus. Yet in doing so many of these publishers continue to invest minimally in developing a more competitive stance in the more competitive markets of online publishing that are able to reach younger and broader audiences far more effectively than Kindles. Kindle is attractive to newspapers and magazines as a platform that can be used to appeal to older and more affluent audiences who are the targets of their advertisers, a fact that fuels hopes that a larger Kindle will enable them to sell display ads at good rates for this elite group. Yet where will tomorrow's older and more affluent audiences be congregating? Kindle, we hardly knew ye.
Kindle is an important content delivery platform that has enabled the book industry to begin its slow transition to the online era and that has offered a shelter for premium content sales in the face of an online content industry that largely baffles most publishers. Yet for the most part it is a transitional proprietary platform, much as Prodigy, Compuserve and America Online were proprietary transitional services for premium online content prior to the emergence of the Web as a dominant content delivery network. Publishers are welcome to continue to build short-term profits on Kindle as part of their transition away from the printed versions of their content, but the rush to Kindle at this very late stage in the online game is ultimately yet another indication that many publishers are ill-prepared to compete in the Web world of highly distributed content production and aggregation.
If there were a commitment by publishers to use some significant portion of their revenues from Kindle sales to invest in making a more effective transition to Web revenues, then perhaps there would be reason to think that Kindle will represent an effective transitional strategy. But with a soft economy making profits in publishing more elusive, it's more likely to turn into a strategy that yet again kicks key decisions about Web strategies down the road. In the meantime billions of people around the world are going to be equipped with very affordable netbooks over the next few years - many of them being about as slim as a magazine, no doubt.
My book royalty checks say "Thank you" to Kindle for the time being, but underinvestment in advanced Web strategies is making publishing via traditionally print-oriented publishers an increasingly unattractive option for authors trying to reach both mass audiences and affluent audiences. The skyscrapers that house major media companies will stand for many years, no doubt, just as Europe's feudal castles still stand today. But unless those companies start to gear themselves for the reality of a market-driven content economy, instead of a property-driven content economy, we may see those glass buildings as tourist attractions displaying the hubris of a bygone era sooner than one may imagine.
With newspapers and magazines folding virtually every week now in the face of a global economic crisis Clay Shirky is comparing the scope of change being experienced by the rise of online publishing's challenge to newspapers to the tumultuous change sparked by the rise of printing presses nearly five hundred years ago. From my perspective I think that the scope is actually far broader than that. As I outline in the Content Nation book, the scope of change fomented by the rise of online publishing is likely historical on an even broader scale, a scale perhaps never seen since the rise of centralized publishing by the world's first recorded civilizations thousands of years ago.
Whatever the ultimate breadth of the challenges facing traditional publishers, one thing is for certain: timidity in addressing the challenges presented by online publishing has not served them well. This timidity reflects not just in the online portals offered by most traditional media companies but as well in their print strategies. You'd think that some of the lessons learned from online publishing would have worked their way into print offerings a long time ago. Yet more than two years after Wired Magazine offered its users the ability to put their own photo on a customized cover of their magazine (part of a promotion by Xerox), the mass customization of print remains largely a novelty in the eyes of most mass media publishers. But there are glimmers of hopeful signs that publishers may be getting ready to push further on into print customization.
One recent sign of hope for mass customization is a new offering from Time, Inc.'s consumer media group called MINE, a service that allows people to build their own custom magazines from articles found in eight of their leading consumer publications. The actual customization seems to be quite limited at this point - you may specify your address, your age, up to five Time-owned magazines that you'd like to have content from and provide answers to four questions that indicate your presumed tastes (Like sushi or pizza? Sing in the shower? Would you like to learn juggling or celebrity impersonation? Would you like to have dinner with Leonardo da Vinci or Socrates?). From these choices Time will pop out articles tailored to your profile in five issues of your MINE magazine print or digital form, all for free (Lexus appears to be the major sponsor for this effort).
On the scale of today's print offerings this is a fairly bold experiment, enabling Time brands normally built up separately through their various flagship publications to comingle in a common publication. It echoes in some ways the use of The Wall Street Journal's branded business content in some local newspaper editions, but with a level of customization not seen heretofore the editorial side of a magazine cover. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki notes tongue in cheek in a recent Twitter message that perhaps it's even a copy of his Alltop's "online magazine rack" of popular topics concept. While I wouldn't discount that self-flattering comparison of Guy's entirely, I think that it's far more likely that Time has finally started to consider a broader range of lessons from online publications - albeit a bit late in the game - and how they may apply to their traditional strengths as direct marketing mavens.
The truth is that Time has been customizing both editorial and ad copy for years based on zip codes and other key demographic groupings. It may not be apparent to the typical person flipping through Sports Illustrated or whatever, but oftentimes they're highly tailored publications. With the technology in place already to do this type of customization on a per-title basis, it's a relatively small step to stage content on a more granular level from multiple titles into MINE issues. So in most respects MINE is an evolutionary step towards enabling multi-branded content in one delivery package. In a way MINE is akin to a "my [name of portal]" type of customization that has been part of online offerings for more than a decade - not only just evolutionary from a print perspective but old, old news from an online perspective.
So while MINE is a positive development, why is it that it is taking traditional publishers so long to develop business models that make more efficient use of print technology as a content delivery system? I for one don't believe that print is at all a dead medium: it's just a horribly neglected medium that has been allowed to die in the hands of very inefficient business models as all of the publishing efficiencies flow to online venues. Reprint services demonstrate every day that print can be a highly effective and profitable targeted communications medium. Yet most publishers derive single percentage digits of their revenues from custom printing. Hmm, tiny slivers of highly profitable printing versus huge swaths of increasingly unprofitable printing...what's wrong with this picture?
It's great that Time is trying out the market for custom aggregations of its own content, but let's he honest - publishers need to be far, far more aggressive in packaging their content in personalized publications tailored for individuals. Unfortunately for some publishers, the greatest opportunities in custom printing lie with those who are willing to let other business models drive the aggregation technologies that make that possible. Some of those business models may yet wind up in the hands of major publishers, but it's far more likely that after years of whining and wrestling, newspaper and magazine publishers will finally surrender to the notion that enabling their content to be licensed through whatever print or print-like electronic vehicle services their audience most effectively is going to be the most profitable and effective way for their print-formatted content to gain exposure. Applying the lessons of the Web to print must be a priority for print publications to survive and to thrive.
While I agree with Clay Shirky that the triviality of making electronic copies of content has changed the economics of the publishing business fundamentally, until some electronic medium has the simplicity, ease and readability of print publications there will be a highly exploitable market for print. In many instances people love to curl up in a time of relaxation to catch up with a print publication, oftentimes on a weekend or during travel. It's a luxury to spend time reading "unplugged" content - a luxury that will only be spent on a handful of print publications. Why not enable people to put whatever content will be of interest to them into that luxury experience? Branded portals for publishers are becoming less and less of a driver for building online revenues: why shouldn't publishers become more aggressive in putting their audiences in the driver's seat for aggregating the content that's of interest to them in print as well?
So kudos for Time testing the waters for their MINE publication, but I do hope that major publishers will finally begin to see the light and start enabling the printing of massively customized print and print-formatted publications that aggregate content from whatever sources interest their audiences the most. The result will be far higher ad rates, far higher returns on investment and a much more healthy print publishing business in the long run. Let's stop allowing printing presses to go dark in major cities just because the one publishing company running them cannot build a business model to support them. Let those printing presses role with whatever content will command the highest interest from audiences from whatever sources produce it, and the money will follow with due haste.
A fundamental problem that the publishing industry faces in getting revenues from online content is that most of the value that can be created from their content lies beyond their own Web sites and portals. With billions of Web publications vying to get people's attention and a relative handful of professionally produced publications to compete for that attention it's no small wonder many media executives are humming the now-familiar "content in context" meme as they ponder how to make use of the Web's ocean of content to promote their own wares. The sad truth, though, is that most publishers are ill-equipped to get any money from their content beyond their own online publications. Most media organizations have tiny content licensing business development teams that typically trudge through protracted deals with a handful of publishing partners, leaving the lion's share of potential revenues from partners on the table.
Attributor Corporation has been hot on the trail of how to close the gap between potential revenues from content used across the Web and and the ability to extract those revenues. The Attributor system works by listening to feeds of content from participating publishers. Attributor captures what they've published and then compares it to content that's been published on the Web. When Attributor finds content that's a full or partial match it compiles content usage reports for clients who can then can use automated tools from Attributor or their own methods to pursue the reuse of their content from a business and legal perspective.
How big is the opportunity for monetizing reused content? Recently Attributor shared with me some research based on content from prominent publishers' Web sites fed into its system along with Compete.com usage data that surfaced some profound statistics. The key thought-provoker emerging from this research is that the audience for people viewing content on sites that were not active syndication or licensing partners was more than five times larger than the audience on the publishers' own sites. Almost half of these largely "passive syndicators" were copying 90 percent or more of the content from publishers' articles and more than 70 percent of the copied articles were using at least half of the available content from articles. Before the publishers reading this post slip on their hair shirts and moan in protest, please consider this first: what publisher wouldn't want to have a 5X increase in potentially monetizable content inventory with no additional overhead?
The research also indicated that two-thirds of the sites using content from these leading publishers were providing links back to the publisher's sites, indicating that they were at least nominally cooperative in building traffic to their sites. Armed with data from Attributor, publishers can pursue on a more highly automated basis Web sites that use their content and turn passive syndicators into active publishing partners - and in the process of doing so shift the balance of traffic back into sites that will feed revenues to the publisher. Attributor projects that using their technologies could help to reduce non-cooperative passive syndicators significantly, potentially doubling traffic captured at publishers' own sites and nearly tripling the traffic visiting cooperative syndication partners. No doubt it would also help content reusers pressing the boundaries of fair use policy to understand what individual publishers considered to be fair use more quickly and effectively.
Attributor sees its data gathering and analysis tools as a key to unlocking significant new online revenues for publishers. It sees at least two basic options that publishers using its data can undertake to establish revenue streams rapidly. Option one: Attributor helps publishers reclaim their fair share of ad revenues from ads served up by existing ad networks on sites using their content. This could in theory help for managing both active and passive syndication partners. Option two: enable Attributor to funnel ads from existing networks and publishers' own direct ad sales to syndication partners. Obviously there are other steps that publishers could take based on Attributor data, but either of these options suggested by Attributor help both to reclaim ad revenues for legitimate publishers and syndicators efficiently and to reduce the revenues fed out by ad networks to non-legitimate syndicators.
To make it easier for publishers large and small to get an idea of the potential for Attributor to help them monetize content they have launched FairShare, a no-fee service that enables people to get data on sites using their content from Attributor analytics provided in an RSS feed. FairShare will pump out stats on individual articles and how they've been reused on specific Web sites, including data on what percentage of an article has been used, whether the reuser is using ads on the page on which it appears and whethe there are linkbacks to their original content. As an option FairShare makes it easier for people using Creative Commons licensing to map their license terms to the patterns of use found in Attributor's Web site analysis. Although launched just a few days ago FairShare is already tracking more than 150,000 articles and has found more than 3.3 million shared copies of content. As seen in the example to the right, FairShare is finding sites that use just fair use snippets of ContentBlogger's content as well as sites that seem to take more than their fair share. If ContentBlogger were ad-supported and Attributor were funneling this data to the ad networks that support content clippers I could be seeing some automatic revenues from these sites. A nice thought in a slow ad economy, no?
Attributor technology has been launched recently as an underpinning for FreeWheel, a service that enables videos from YouTube and other outlets that are embedded on other Web sites to be served up with the ads that benefit the original video publisher the most. FreeWheel calls this concept "Monetization Rights Management," as opposed to the Digital Rights Management packaging that tries to keep others from distributing content themselves. FreeWheel notes - quite rightly, I believe - that legitimate viral distribution of content needs to be encouraged so that content can find its most valuable contexts. Once content is in a valuable context it can be monetized with ads and other marketing mechanisms that benefit both the creator of the content and the publisher that found a valuable context for their content.
As major publishers mull over the capabilities of Attributor technologies, hopefully they begin to see that it offers a key solution to the dilemmas of how to make money on content in an era in which controlling distribution is not only less feasible but also less desirable. To borrow from the language of my book Content Nation, the world is now a nation of publishers, a nation whose value cannot be ignored by traditional publishers as a source of monetizable contexts. Since most non-subscription Web content relies on search engines to maximize their ad revenues, Attributor's search-based technologies can enable publishers to understand who's using their content with the same tools that those publishers use to drive monetizable traffic to their sites. Using Attributor data and tools can enable a highly automated and efficient approach to revenue generation from viral distribution that would eliminate friction with those outlets that use a publisher's content fairly and that can allow publishers to keep on top of "bad apples" on a daily basis.
As major publishers such as The New York Times and The Guardian begin to set their content loose via sophisticated programming interfaces the Attributor concepts of using searching and content identification to establish commercial relationships automatically with publishers using their content can open up an era in which reused content is creating higher value and revenues rapidly for publishers with lower audience acquisition costs. With revenue acquistion schemes such as Attributor in place publishers can concentrate more on making their content as useful and as accurate as possible - and leave the inventiveness of where it's going to be most useful to the world at large.
Certainly publishers will continue to compete to make their own publications a destination of choice, but with only thousands of traditional publishers and billions of self-empowered Web and mobile publishers the time has come to use technology to harvest the value of content in as many publishing contexts as posssible as efficiently as possible. Most especially in the news industry, where getting people's attention in fleeting moments is increasingly difficult, the ability to harvest revenues from content reuse and linking more automatically is an absolute necessity.
This need to chase the contexts of content use in order to make money in online media does not mean that copyright is a dead concept. Far from it: copyright ensures that the creators of original works of authorship have the ability to claim ownership of the intellectual property that is rightfully theirs, especially when it is used in contexts where its use is harder to verify, such as in enterprises and in private communications such as emails, photocopying and reprints. But it's important to remember that the concepts of copyright were introduced into law when publishing was still a relatively fledgling industry, with few commercial outlets available and with the need to support getting information and ideas out to the public via a still-young technology a crying necessity. The "printing press" of today is not any particular Web site or service but the Web as a whole: every person has the potential to play a role in the mechanism of publishing. As such, copy rights, while still relevant, have become less important than context rights - the ability to say how participants in a global peer publishing and aggregation process should recognize the value of a creative work. Nearly three years ago I introduced this concept at a presentation at BookExpo in Washington, DC, using the above square logo as a symbol for context rights.
Today in the work of Attributor we see the beginnings of the effective monetization of context rights taking form. I am hopeful that publishers will finally begin to see the outlines of how to use technologies such as Attributor to forge more effective relationships with the global publishing mechanism of Content Nation to benefit the creative forces behind their content and to create new ways to define the value of their brands. It's a far different methodology than most publishers are used to, but in a world in which the fundamental nature of publishing has changed far more radically than most traditional publishers have dared to acknowledge, it is time for publishers to embrace context rights and to define their value propositions more effectively in a world whose very survival may depend upon the power of ubiquitous publishing to solve problems facing humanity rapidly.
(Full disclosure statement: I really have nothing to disclose, I have had no past or present commercial relationship with Attributor. I just believe that they are pursuing one of the most effective routes to content monetization available today and I hope that publishers pay close attention to their efforts.)
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberger and other prominent lights are weighing in on the launch of an application on Apple's iPhone that enables reading e-books compatible with Amazon's Kindle mobile device, with many analysts cooing about this as a huge event. There's no doubt that Kindle e-books have everthing to gain from leapfrogging out of a pond of half a million Kindle devices into a lake of thirteen million-plus iPhone owners (just in time for "Content Nation," which is now available on Kindle). Better yet, since the Kindle application does not tie down Amazon to any exclusive marketing deal with Apple, the doorway is open for Amazon to march onto Nokias, Blackberries and phones equipped with Google's Andriod application. As people owning Kindle-compatible book titles move from one mobile device to another, the Kindle Store on the Web will make it possible for them to use their e-book on any equipped device, "closing" their book on one gizmo and being able to "open" it on another one at the same spot. Think of it as an iTunes for books that's not tied down to any particular player. Not much to complain about here at first glance: it's the creation of the first true mass market platform for electronic books from major publishers. Kudos to Amazon and to the publishers that are playing with them to advance Kindle sales.
But let's look past the first glance and get to what this really means for book publishing. The good news is that Kindle books can now reach the relatively affluent and educated audience that has enough money to buy iPhones - many of whom may have the money for both an iPhone and a Kindle reader but not necessarily the desire to lug around two book-reading gizmos all of the time. Now e-books get to take a major step towards the "nearly everywhere" profile that Web content has on both Internet and mobile-based devices. The bad news, though, is that the book industry, already beholden to Amazon almost as much as music companies are beholden to iTunes for electronic sales, appears to be repeating the mistakes that are likely to prevent their revenues from growing quickly enough to sustain their business models. Put simply, book publishers have turned over the keys to their electronic printing presses to Jeff Bezos and said, "Knock yourself out, you know what to do more than we do." E-books will progress only as quickly as it suits Amazon - and on only those platforms that suit them.
A benevolent monopoly of this kind for electronic book distribution might be beneficial for publishers if it had global reach, but those 13 million iPhones represent only about half of the greater New York City metropolitan market. A good chunk, to be sure, but a far step away from, say, the 1.6 billion people using the Web or the billions of mobile phone users around the world. And even within that universe of 13 million iPhone users, a fair amount of those people fall into the category of folks who Steve Jobs believed would never really read much of anything. In the meantime the audience for books continues to get grayer and grayer. To put it another way, I don't see all that many people in book stores toting around iPhones. The Kindle packaging for iPhone solves a key licensing and distribution problem for book publishers that's likely to improve their profits in the short term, but it does not come even close to building marketable exposure for books on a scale that is likely to draw attention away from other forms of electronic content.
This brings us back to those music publishing companies which had such high hopes for the DRM-enabled iPhone agreements that they signed only a few years ago. This "magic bullet" seemed great at the time - and it certainly has been great for Apple's profits. But it did little to slow the rapid erosion of profits from music sales at most of the major music publishers. Put simply, the insistence on having packaging that seemed to protect their existing business models only delayed the point at which music publishers had to face that their models were going to miss the lion's share of revenues that could be generated online from music. What they saw in the Web was the world's largest music store. What they should have seen was the world's largest theatre and radio station rolled into one.
Book publishers in general don't suffer from the electronic piracy problems that plagued the music industry, so no doubt it seemed like a logical step to move into rights-protected distribution that enabled book publishers to manage industry metrics in much the same way that they have managed metics on print book sales. But in focusing on protecting their existing business model, like the music industry the book industry is largely delaying the more troubling question of how they can make the most money possible from the global audience of billions who engage the Web and mobile devices daily.
Kindle book packaging is useful for traditional reading, but how, for example, can it facilitate even the most basic collaborative use of books? Basic uses of books such as discusions via book clubs, classroom discussion, fair-use excerpting, note-sharing and other value-add services are nowhere near the surface of the stack of potential Kindle developments. Beyond replicating basic uses of print books there is little if any thought given as to how multimedia can be integrated into Kindle books effectively. For example, the online version of the "Content Nation" book has about a dozen video clips embedded in the text. Even still photos of most of these clips did not make their way into the print edition because of traditional print publishing standards. Yet these same clips would be great to have in an electronic, Web-enabled version of the book.
While it's possible that an aggressive roll-out of Kindle readers on most major mobile devices could help to stave off some of the worst problems that are looming for book publishers, the truth is that they are years behind in developing the real opportunities for books in electronic format. Book publishers are facing the same revenue gaps that confront music, newspaper and magazine publishers that waited far too long to build robust online revenue models that could sustain them as their traditional revenue sources moved into legacy status. In the meantime the Google e-books initiative that builds on their book-scanning initiative promises to put millions of book titles on electronic devices that are no longer controlled by book publishers. In other words, Kindle may just turn out to be the "eight track tape" solution for books - a technology that seemed to be extremely popular at first with the public for listening to tape-recorded music but that turned out to be a dead end for early adapters when more flexible and higher-quality technologies came along.
Every time publishers resist the fundamental dynamics of the Web, they usually come to regret it. Traditional book publishers still have an opportunity to redefine their future independent of the Kindle, but it's more likely that the explosion of alternative online book publishing services will begin to overtake Kindle-based books over the next few years as sources of content that are more flexible, more shareable and more attuned to the needs of new generations of readers to whom the term "cracking the books" is largely a metaphor. Traditional books and book publishers will live on, and Kindle will help them to live on for many years to come. But in the meantime a new book industry is being defined that will be the true future of books - with or without Kindles.
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.
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