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.

Labels: authors, books, conference, content, enterprise, events, First Research, information industry summit 2010, media, Publishing, SIIA, Social Media, speakers, Technology

What a year it's been.

Labels: AP, bing, Business Information, content, enterprise, Google, google wave, media, Microsoft, Murdoch, Social Media, Twitter, Windows 7

I had the pleasure to hear two presentations recently by executives from the American Institute of Physics, the first by AIP Executive Director and CEO Fred Dylla at the recent ALPSP International Conference in Oxford, UK. Fred's presentation was an eloquent evaluation of the past, present and future of the scholarly publishing industry, in which he noted that indexing of scholarly content could be traced back to at least the 11th century. As much as we see scholarly publishing in many ways through the lens of print-oriented technologies, in fact scholarly debates preceded the widespread use of print publishing, and will outlast print as those debates move into new media. I really appreciated Dylla's far-sighted view of the industry, as well as the very immediate and concrete steps that AIP is undertaking to transform its place in that industry.

Labels: aip, alpsp, ASIDIC, collexis, dylla, gunter, ingoldsby, physics, scholarly publishing, Social Media, uniphy

With many forecasts beginning to predict a bottom of sorts in the ad-supported content market, can an ad recovery be too far behind? It's a question that is probably harder to answer than ever, given the rise of social media tools as an increasingly important platform for marketing influence and insight. Yes, we're bound to see increases in ad spending as the economy improves, but while the ads were away, companies have been learning how to listen to their clients more effectively through public social media channels and their own online forums and customer support platforms to influence markets cost-effectively. One of the leaders in helping organizations to listen and to respond to their markets effectively is Lithium Technologies, which provides both community forum tools and social media monitoring tools that integrate with popular CRM platforms such as Salesforce.com. To some, tools such as Lithium may seem like stuff down in the bowels of product management efforts rather than marketing efforts. But in fact, it turns out that investments in social media gathering and monitoring are having measurable effects on marketing efforts.

As noted in a recent Lithium white paper, a Harvard business review study recorded a 56 percent increase in sales for an online auction site for people participating in the site's online community features. Similar results were seen at one Lithium customer, which reported $41 million dollars in increased sales from their online community members along with $8 million in reduced support costs. In other words, companies are learning that customers generating millions of page views on their own Web sites and social media portals learning from other customers and their own staffs are becoming powerful channels for revenue generation and brand management, as well as reducing support overhead. Of equal importance, though, is the ability of tools such as Lithium's "Social CRM" suite to monitor feedback and discussions in forums and social media outlets that can be channels to support staff and sales and marketing teams in ways that enable them to respond to market opportunties and threats expressed in social media even as they are emerging online.

Labels: advertising, CRM, economy, lithium technologies, sales and marketing, Social Media

About a year ago I had the opportunity to look at Viralheat, a media monitoring service that at the time was focused on real-time analysis of trends in online video services such as Hulu. Viralheat was good stuff and ahead of its time in many ways, though positioned as a high-end service aimed at a fairly narrow audience. It was interesting, then, to see recently the evolution of Viralheat into a more broadly based real-time trend monitoring service that covers a wide array of social media outlets and regularly updated Web sites and that can be yours to use for as little as $10 a month.

Labels: analytics, Social Media, video, viralheat, Web sites

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!

Labels: content, independence day, Publishing, Social Media, Thomas Jefferson, thomas paine

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

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

Hats off to Jim Fowler, who has to be one of the gutsiest startup CEOs out there. Taking on the heart of the business information industry with his Jigsaw collaborative community that collects business contact and company information is one thing: personally announcing the launch of their new Open Data Initiative in a YouTube video shot on some of the more funky streets of San Francisco is quite another. It sets the scene for a very interesting move into promoting the use of Jigsaw as a service that can enable people to get high-quality contact data by giving people free access to company information.

Jigsaw has built up a base of about 450,000 people who give and take business contact information and challenge one another's submissions via the Jigsaw portal. Think of Jigsaw as Wikipedia for business contacts with far better rules and to boot a premium content model. It's a "give-to-get" model that allows people to earn credits towards getting business contact information for free if they provide enough quality information themselves but which will also charge people to see contact information if they have maxed out their quota for free contact views. On the back end of this database Jigsaw has built a tidy little business selling the information collected via their portals to enterprises and other services that need up-to-date contact and company information in their internal databases and sales automation services.

It's a good business, but the hard part has been scaling the online community to the point where Jigsaw becomes a must-visit destination that will enable them to build up information beyond the 2 million businesses and 8 million contacts already tracked in their database. Making the basic company name and address information available for free - it comes along anyway on the business contact information that people input on Jigsaw - creates a powerful endorsement for membership in Jigsaw that's likely to push its positioning as a default destination for inputting business contact information. In doing so Jigsaw may have taken a huge step forward in accelerating the growth of their database, helped along by the many key sales automation platforms that are already positioned to use content from the Open Data Initiative.

Company information is available for free elsewhere online, of course, through services such as Hoover's, ECNext's Manta portal and Zoominfo, so to some degree Jigsaw's Open Data Initiative is playing catch-up with the online positioning of other business information services. However, with the Open Data Initiative Jigsaw is making this information available in bulk form as well. That's a huge step forward in neutralizing some of the power of other services that have been building their bread and butter on filtered company lists -and a strong incentive to make Jigsaw a default plan "B" feed for company information, if not their plan "A". Major business information services, please take note: those low margins on your list services just got a bit of a challenge.

What's most interesting about the Jigsaw Open Data Initiative is its potential to increase the likelihood that Jigsaw can become a more timely source of updates for accurate business contact information both from online sources and from the many enterprise services through which Jigsaw information can be consumed, and, in theory, updated. The opportunity to make desktop and mobile sales automation and email services input points for real-time business contact updates works already in a limited fashion for services like Plaxo, but with a more serious footprint in the love-to-update-those-contacts culture of today's mobile sales forces Jigsaw may have found the accelerator that they've been looking for as they've continued to refine their offerings.

In the meantime traditional business information providers continue to be challenged on all sides by nimble competitors such as Jigsaw who are willing to view their audience as knowledgeable participants in the gathering of business information. Enterprises still move cautiously towards these new services, but as they discover that interactivity with users enables them to get more accurate content more quickly there is a tipping point approaching rapidly beyond which the Dun & Bradstreets of the world must worry mightily about the ability of their organizations and their business models to survive. There is still a powerful marketplace for quality business information, but Jigsaw challenges traditional suppliers to consider how the real-time collection capabilities of today's publishing-enabled audiences can accelerate the value of those services rapidly.

Labels: Business Information, jigsaw, open data initiative, Social Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was a bit nonplused to read an article in ZDNet today about InsideView's newly launched SalesView platform that just didn't seem to "get" what business information services are all about - much less what they are now starting to accomplish within some of the leading sales force automation platforms. Kind of strange, given the power found in the particular application that InsideView has launched.

InsideView has dubbed the mapping of business contact relationships to filtered content from Web harvesting and premium content sources inside collaborative software as "socialprise," a good label that describes how business information is gaining value in key contexts through aggregation and value-add services.

SalesView accomplishes this with content from the Web, from social networking services such as LinkedIn and Facebook and, at premium levels, major subscription databases such as Hoover's, D&B, Jigsaw and Reuters. Similar in general concept to Dow Jones's new Generate acquisition but more oriented towards existing Sales Force Automation platforms, SalesView filters incoming content to determine if it represents actionable triggers in a sales and marketing relationship with existing and potential clients and partners and maps it to relationships harvested from personal networks from both online services and SFA services.

The headline in the ZDNet article asks, "SalesView from InsideView: feature or product?" Apparently they weren't too tied in to how different the mission of most SFA platform providers is compared to most business information providers today. The data that most companies load from their internal databases or third party service into a sales force automation platform is just a starting point for people trying to figure out what they should be concentrating on in their sales, business development and marketing efforts.

Think of SFA contact records as the file cards onto which much be attached the prioritization of these targets and the intelligence that can help people understand who's really ready to move on business today. SFA tools don't provide those kinds of capabilities at all. It takes rich content, filtered through tools that will tell a person who's likely to be in a place where a call would be productive, to tell someone whether it's worth using that contact information in the SFA tool. Yes, from a platform standpoint this may look like a "feature," but if it's a feature that drives the key activities needed to generate revenues, then what's really important, the content "feature" or the software "product"?

SalesView takes a different approach from Generate's G2 platform, focusing more on aggregating a wider potential array of sources and social networks into a number of popular SFA platforms, as opposed to G2's focus on its own standalone application and enterprise API. Both approaches have their advantages, but the SalesView platform is nice in that it offers people hooks into a number of the business information services that they're already probably using to manage business social networks and to acquire information about businesses - all filtered through their sales trigger analysis software.

Generate may have gone down the road further in terms of building its own high-quality company and person information from Web-harvested sources, but SalesView enables people to leverage their own personal networking content very effectively for those who are already making use of social media services, while still being able to leverage intelligence from both online sources and subscription databases very effectively. For those companies that fit this usage profile, it looks to be that SalesView can give them a very cost-effective leg up on integrated real-time business intelligence that can yield greatly enhanced productivity. Sure sounds like a content product to me.

Labels: Business Information, Business Intelligence, Dow Jones, Generate, insideview, Social Media, socialprise

The Marriott Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, Arizona has been the site of the Buying and Selling eContent conference for nine years, now, usually a most beautiful spot that lets your cares melt away so that you can focus on good people, good food, a bit of sun and great presentations. But Camelback was not its usual self this year, stuck in the middle of a major construction project that had the revitalized conference halls in good shape but much of the rest of the facility in turmoil. Rumor had it that Bill Marriott himself showed up over the weekend and flipped his lid when he found out how messed up and behind schedule the project hd become.

This turmoil seemed to reflect the unsettled nature of this year's Buying and Selling eContent conference, an event that brought together some very good speakers overall but which had some crashing lows to go along with its resounding highs. Attendance was off from last year's healthy showing but still had a good collection of both content vendors, technologists and institutional content buyers. Some of the presentations were downright brilliant and spot on: Y.S. Chi, Vice-Chair of Elsevier, gave a fantastic assessment of the content industry, underscoring his belief that the content industry was going to have to move towards providing experiences and not just content.

I had to smile at Y.S.' use of experience as a focus for content's value, having made experiences part of our definition of content five years ago: "Information and experiences created by individuals, institutions and technology to benefit audiences in venues that they value." I posted it on Wikipedia not long thereafter and there it remains in somewhat modified form (my thanks to Wikipedians who helped me to refine it). Y.S. demonstrated briefly what appeared to be a bog-standard MediaWiki platform that Elsevier is using to enable qualified medical practitioners to develop a medical knowledge base - an important step forward for Elsevier to compete with other scientific publishers experimenting with social media and one which I am sure will not be their last foray into social media as they begin to focus on building knowledge community experiences from the expertise available in their client base.

But this was counterbalanced by Andrew Keene, the self-professed "Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley" whose keynote rant on the "Cult of the Amateur" repeated his performance of vivisecting social media at the SIIA Information Industry Summit earlier this year. On Content Nation I go into this presentation in more detail, but the nut of his argument - or shtick, as the case may be - is that people creating social media are a bunch of monkeys typing on PCs who should step aside to let the established media be the professionals in charge of content creation and curation. I imagine that the doctors contributing to Elsevier's wiki project would take exception to that label - as would many professionals of significant insight who contribute to social media publications globally.

The thing of it is, though, is that there were more than a few people at the conference who were glad to side with Keene's point of view. Certainly there is a need for professional content creators and curators but overall we should be glad that so much additional value is being created through social media. If there was anything that I found to be particularly disappointing and disturbing at the conference it was the number of people who were not only invested in traditional content buying and selling models but who were on some levels downright hostile to emerging and highly valuable concepts such as social media. I was very pleased with the presenters in my own panel who tried to explain how Jigsaw, ECNext's Manta and the Near-Time social media platform were creating mission-critical business information, but for some reason their leading-edge efforts seemed to be greeted with some skepticism.

The low point for this "rear guard" action, though, was the Special Libraries Association-sponsored panel, in which Janice Lachance, CEO of the SLA , led a well-presented but utterly stale list of complaints about content vendors that could have been written from ten-year-old slide decks. I know Janice, and she's a wonderful person who has great insights, as do the people who presented: I expected far better. I think, though, that it's really not a matter of personalities or presentations but more a core factor with which SLA members need to wrestle.

Having come through many years of upheaval, in which more than a few SLA members have seen their careers shuffled from one part of their organizations to another, it seems that too often SLA members have been disconnected from much of the "experience"-oriented generation of content in their organizations that drives much of the value of content for their patrons. If they allow themselves to focus too much on licensing agreements their careers are going to be tied ever more more closely to their vendors, whose main revenues continue to come through licensing content. As long as there's content to license then they have a job, might be one argument, which tends to chain their organizations to ever-weakening vendor business models.

I don't think that this unfortunate symbiosis really has to be the full truth of the matter, and I know that for many progressive SLA members it is far from the truth. Certainly Bill Noorlander's panel on win/win relationships helped to show some shadowy outlines of more progressive thinking. But the vendor "dance" on licensing has been stalemated for far too long, a stalemate that's been dragging down both the vendors themselves as they drown in complex licensing deals that slow down and reduce sales and service, but as well their clients as they try to justify pricing schemes that seem to have little bearing on the ROI required by the line managers who need to justify content acquisition costs in their budgets.

Put simply, it's time to get the lawyers and the fiefdom-builders out of the way and to come up with a new and more highly automated regimen for content licensing that will meet the increasingly "just-in-time"demands of institutional content buyers. The manufacturing industry came up with computer protocols that helped to automate materials acquisition from suppliers nearly two decades ago: why has it taken the publishing industry so long to invest in similar techniques for enterprises? Perhaps increased competition from new sources of valuable content will stimulate their thinking. In the meantime I think that it falls upon the SLA to become far more visionary and to start participating in the development of standards for automated licensing already being developed commercially to help their institutions to use premium content far more cost-effectively as they adapt to the ROI requirements of institutions trying to survive in a real-time economy.

Stephen E. Arnold gave a well-polished and insightful presentation on the state of the search industry's place in the content game as old models for charging for content come up against the ability of search engines such as Google creating ever more sophisticated ways to aggregate and organize content. As Steve pointed out the enterprise search engine market is booming but failing to pull together all of the content resources that their clients need to create the most valuable and comprehensive content collections that their clients need. At one surveyed institution two thirds of users were dissatisfied with their search engines. Steve sees federated content services as one key solution to this problem, but in the broader picture with a new global audience for content growing up around devices such as mobile phones and an ever-wider array of publishing services from technology providers it's not clear that solving the role of search engines in their marketing is going to be that much of a solution for any content provider. There are far too many things in motion to which publishers simply haven't reacted.

I don't mean to short-change the other good panels that the conference had, which all provided some great examples of how best practices are being applied today for content, but I was not taking my usual by-the-blow notes in the middle of launching Content Nation, so some of my recollections are now sketchy. Suffice it to say that most presenters provided some good examples of how content value is being created more from value-add services such as better content organization. Collexis, for example, demonstrated powerful new ways in which content categorization can be used to discover people's expertise in highly specific areas that help to accelerate research in medical and research fields. I think that Collexis CMO Darrell Gunter's best example of this capability's power was when one scientist discovered something that he never knew - the fellow in the office next to him was working in the same area in a key line of research!

Mike Orren, President of Pegasus News, uses user-contributed content and networking to enable marketers to target offers that have a more than 60 percent response rate and zero opt-outs in some instances, driven by very careful matching of opportunities to audiences based on content analysis. And Cengage Gale demoed an online book club that helps people to drive book downloads and sales based on building communities of book enthusiasts.

But whatever the particular focus of the conference's presentations, the same theme seemed to pop up again and again: the increasing polarization of publishing inside and outside the enterprise based on the rise of social media. There are some publishers such as Karen Christensen's Berkshire Publishing Group that try to balance both very traditional forms of publishing while exploring the development innovative social media outlets. But for many publishers the need to balance traditional revenue streams while investing in social media technologies, which push their business model ever further away from their core expertise, is proving to be quite challenging.

Social media's rise seems to be just as challenging to content experts in enterprises, who see the rise of social media content uncurated by information professionals as a challenge that stretches their expertise that much further from being interfaces to licensed content providers. Jeff Cutler, now an independent consultant, pointed out in comments how the rapid rise of Answers.com's WikiAnswers online Q&A community is one example of how social media is creating powerful "social knowledge," aggregations of expertise that are increasingly competitive with traditional sources and likely to eclipse them in time. Steve Arnold pointed out how Google's Knol project, meant to assemble reference articles on key topics, is as much about creating definitive topic mapping from social media to empower its search engine as it s about attracting people to social media itself. Any way you look at it, the elephant in the room was Content Nation - the ability of millions of people to influence others through highly scalable online publishing.

Social media is more than just a generational divide: it's a cultural divide as well. While I might be a bit greyer than the average Twitterer, somehow I was one of those willing to cross the divide and to agree that social media has become the emerging center of publishing, much as the Web itself became that center several years ago prior to many publishers being willing to accept that fact. But unlike their initial transition to the Web, social media challenges both publishers and institutions to come up not only with new skills but entirely new inventories: you can adapt news, book, magazine and even audio and video content to the Web but there's nothing in most publishers' quivers that can be repackaged into social media.

Social media certainly helps to enhance the value of many publications and in many instances can create premium content to drive very valuable new content products and services. But in most instances what we're seeing is the rise of a new parallel content industry whose rise in a medium now familiar in some ways to most publishers has caught them yet again by surprise. The divides created by social media are far more profound in many ways than the divides created by the Web. Most people of an employable age have an email account, perhaps even a few. But there are few in senior positions in the publishing industry today who have a Facebook account or even seem to want to have one - while younger people may not even see an email account until they get their first job.

One familiar and vocal person at the conference tried to downplay social media as "nothing new." And she was right, of course: social media has been with us for thousands of years. But the scale of social media's influence creates a social divide that seems to be leaving many publishing experts flat-footed in their responses to the marketplace. That's a problem that future iterations of this conference will have to address more fundamentally. The events industry, the social knowledge industry, the technology industry and the media industry are merging in ways that are helping to create a new real-time knowledge economy that cannot be responded to easily by many.

I am hoping that the next iteration of this conference will bring back both some more healthy crowds and more of a focus on the value propositions that people are seeking in the content marketplace. From buyers, I hope to hear more about how they are creating value from content in their enterprises and what they need to do to achieve ROI from internal and external content. From sellers, I hope to hear more about how they are leaving old licensing models behind to find new ways to respond to the real-time needs of their marketplaces. And from the Information Today, Inc. staff I hope that we get a return to a commitment to the thoughtful assembly of topics and presentations that drive people to more provocative thinking about the future of the content industry. Let's hope that both Bill Marriott and conference attendees will return to Camelback next year to find both a familiar place and a place transformed by a new outlook on its mission.

Labels: 2008, buying and selling econtent, events, Licensing, sla, Social Media, Trends

Read/Write Web notes a hue and cry rising up from bloggers who are concerned about their content being appropriated by aggregation services such as Shyfter that take blog feeds and develop ad-based services using their content without bloggers' approval. Bloggers are apparently concerned that aggregation services are stripping off revenues from their ad-supported services. I suppose that there's more than one publisher chuckling on the sidelines of this affair as bloggers by the bucketful begin to discover an uncomfortable fact - if you decide to be a publisher via social media there's no magic spell that removes one from the problems that all publishers have. Commoditization, unfair use and redistribution of content without verifying a publisher's rights in a new context - these are common complaints in the publishing industry as a whole. This is, unfortunately, where many social media platform providers have fallen short.

Quick to create new features to embed content and to distribute it, many social media platforms have fallen short in their ability to help people monetize their content effectively. Yes, we've had contextual ads on blogs for years, but in essence contextual ads are telling bloggers and other social media creators using them that there's enough demand to sustain their publication on mass media ads. Unfortunately this is rarely the case - the supply of social media content is vastly greater than the demand for media-scaled ads and programs such as AdSense, while beneficial, will not pay huge dividends for most bloggers. It takes blogs with large, media-scaled audiences such as TechCrunch to sustain business with the existing advertising tools. The irony here is that as some social media properties have grown to such proportions they are recognizing that they really have the same problems as any other mass media-oriented property. Aggregation without licensing for commercial purposes draws off a blogger's revenues as much as it does a major newspaper's revenues. In Content Nation the problems of traditional publishers have become the problems of social media publishers, and vice versa.

Companies such as Newstex help bloggers to benefit from companies who want to play by copyright rules and license social media content, but in general there is little to be found in most standard weblogging packages that help a publisher to capitalize on the value of their content in contexts other than their native Web site. Some of the solution is better standard features for bloggers - technology such as Attributor can enable a publisher to track content usage more easily and relicensing services such as Copyright Clearance Center's RightsLink and iCopyright can help companies to manage content relicensing opportunities more effectively. And on Near-Time, the platform that we use for Content Nation, there is the capability to define subscription access to content, a "gated community" that sets a bar for both content access and creation as desired. These types of tools are the basic "block and tackle" for any online publisher today, whether in social media or mainstream media, to ensure that they understand who is using their content and making it easy to establish good commercial relationships with those valuing content to make money through content aggregation or reuse.

Unfortunately the technology for social media ads and licensing is really only addressing one part of extracting value from social media. Individuals such as myself build value for focused audiences that gets converted into marketable value other ways - through consulting engagements, through the sale of research and other services that we provide. Other people look for more broad social transactions, building a reputation and relationships that can be converted into personal or professional brand value on any number of conversational and tribal levels. Be it positioning yourself for your next job or promotion, fostering a willingness to participate in events and projects, giving or receiving endorsements or just being tapped into the things that you really love, social media creates value in ways that advertising and licensing don't begin to encompass.

What's really needed to help make social media more successful are better tools to extract value out of social relationships when one's content travels into contexts away from their own home base for their social media. For example, when my blog is picked up in a feed reader, I'd sure like it if there were an easier way for me to embed offers from other people in my social networks that were valuable to them as well as to me. Some of these might be monetizable, others more purely social, but it's the weak point for most ad networks - they assume that transactions have to be based on mass marketing rather than personal marketing. This is one of the reasons why marketing events, services and publications via Facebook is becoming increasingly popular - the groups and people who congregate there are explicitly opting in to relationship networks, making marketing on any level far more effective when done as a member of the community.

So my condolences to bloggers who are burning out as their dreams of big-media glory come face to face with the true nature of electronic content. If you came to glory because you were glad to have free distribution and never demanded any better of your social media platform providers, then shame on you. But as important as it is to have better tools for commercialization through aggregation and reuse it's more important to think about the basics of how to create value in social media.

Labels: aggregation, Licensing, Social Media, weblogs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Jim Hirshfeld rang a few days ago to chat about his move back into the content business he BTWed that there was a neat session being held by the originators of the groundbreaking 1999 book The Cluetrain Manifesto to start a new conversation on the future of online content and its role in markets and society as a whole. The book rocked my world, and I've been babbling about markets as conversations ever since. After much of the USD 20 billion being pumped into the early online economy wound up in the bit bucket a lot of those early lessons in online content were derided by the media "experts," but nevertheless there were key concepts from Cluetrain and other ground-breaking thought leaders that are still the foundation of online publishing.

Doc Searls kicked off things with a chat about the early environment on the Web, when tools like the Pointcast screen saver were chewing up bandwidth in search of passice audiences, Cluetrain suggested to the world, "We are human beings - and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it."
The places in Silicon Valley where the "cluetrains" showed up every day but where there was never a delivery inspired Searls, Chris Locke and David Weinberger to pop out their ideas about the significance of online marketing when traditionalists in technology and media weren't - dare I say it - "getting it." The Wall Street Journal picked up on the online posts, a book deal followed and they've been collecting royalities ever since.

Ten years later, what's the significance of all this? I'll be posting item on Content Nation throughout the session and help you through the answers. Will post links here as things progress.

• The Cluetrain Manifesto's Doc Searls On the Web 2.0 Economy and Cluetrain 10 Years Later
• Cluetrain @ 10: How LEGO Toys Caught the Cluetrain by Listening to Adult Enthusiasts - Jake McKee, Ant's Eye View
• Cluetrain @ 10: Josh Bernoff, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research on The Groundswell Effect on Corporate Marketing
• Cluetrain @ 10: Peter Hirshberg Reflects

Labels: events cluetrain manifesto, Social Media

Major book pubishers have not been known in years past for their innovation in adapting to online audiences, but after years of investing modestly in the future of online content many print publishers are stepping up their efforts to capture a new generation of audiences who grew up with online content as a given. Elsevier is one major scientific publisher that seems to have picked up their pace of online innovation significantly as of late, Their announcement last week of 10 major reference works being made available online this year was trumped today by the announcement of a new Wiki-based platform that will enable practicing physicians to update evidence-based medical information online. In both instances Elsevier is betting that some titles will do best as online-only reference materials.

Having seen a major response to its making chapters of its Major Reference Works availableonline Elsevier is indicating that two reference titles - the Encyclopedia of Neuroscience and the second edition of Encyclopedia of Ocean Science - are to become
online-only references. Elsevier indicates that other reference titles will be available in print for some period of time, but clearly the trend is to move towards online access that's likely to move people into recurring revenues rather than chancing the publication of expensive reference materials. Knovel showed the way years ago to Sci-Tech publishers with its Knovel Library of online reference content, but now the major scientific publishers are beginning to see that electronic additions are going to become the core of their revenues moving forward it's not just a game for aggressive startups.

Today's announcement of WiserWiki underscores not only the awareness that Sci-Tech publishers have for the value of online reference but also how best to make use of social media technologies to make it valuable to specific audiences. WiserWiki is seeded with The Textbook of Primary Care Medicine, a reference book covering problems, conditions and diseases encountered in the practices of primary care physicians. No longer in print, what better way to keep this grass-roots information about the real world of medicine than to let the physicians encountering these phenomena to update it themselves? This is a great online product strategy, combining authoritative content from peer professionals as a core that can help to build an online community rapidly. Just as Wikipedia did not spring from thin air - it took more than 100,000 articles from an earlier project to get it going - Wikis built for specialized online communities will work best when there's a core of content to help people feel that they don't have to wait for their contributions to be part of something that has collective merit.

Print titles are going to be with us for quite some time to come, but as printing, shipping and stocking expenses fall prey to rising energy and raw materials prices the need for better margins with less risk is pushing book publishers of reference materials inexorably towards "digital native" audiences who have become used to search engines as primary tools for accessing reference content. Obviously other types of titles benefit from this move but for reference works the move is essential if publishers are to keep these products growing and profitable. In the end scientific publishers have much to gain from tranforming their business from one of delivering tomes to delivering content in higly valuable contexts that can drive scientific research and applications forward more rapidly.

Labels: books, elsevier, reference, Social Media, STM, Wikis

The buzz is increasing on a potential acquisition of the Plaxo contacts-oriented social networking service by Facebook, as noted by VentureBeat and others, and there are good reasons to think that this would be a good marriage if one can overlook the personality conflicts in the potential deal. Plaxo's new Pulse social networking service is going strong and helping to extend the value of its core contacts synchronization service, but ultimately Pulse is yet another social media login to maintain with features and functionality not terribly different from Facebook itself. At the same time Facebook is becoming an increasingly popular spot for professionals to congregate for networking of both a personal and professional nature, but it lacks gravitas for people trying to keep abreast of changes in people's professional profiles. Backing in Plaxo data and desktop synchronization capabilities into Facebook's infrastructure may offer an interesting marriage of capabilities that may give Facebook a more competitive posture with professionals as LinkedIn continues to gain mojo as a "social inbox" for the professional set.

Rumor squashers are quick to point out historical conflicts between management in these two companies that might squelch such a deal before it's out of the blocks. But with investors from Sequoia who have fingers in both LinkedIn and Plaxo perhaps there's reason to think that there's a priority being placed on getting Plaxo's potential up to speed as soon as possible in comparison to other assets in their portfolio. With reasonably healthy growth there's not an immediate need for Plaxo to pull the string on a deal just yet, but knowing that venture capital may be harder to come by for subsequent funding rounds in 2008 this might be a good point for Plaxo to exit into the hands of a player such as Facebook as it continues to attract professionals rapidly into its multi-faceted social networking portal. Expect an increasing round of high-profile deals for companies such as Plaxo as social media plays begin to consolidate to grow more effectively in a market that is scrambling for revenue-generating capabilities in a softening economy.

Labels: Business Information, Deals Partnerships and Sales, facebook, plaxo, Social Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I took the suggestion of my colleague Jeff Cutler and sat down to lunch recently with Collexis EVP and CMO Darrell Gunter to get a briefing on their progress in launching product platforms leveraging their core content technologies. I must admit that I approached the lunch with some skepticism. The knowledge management landscape is littered with startups that had great technology ideas but which never quite made it as independent companies. With this troubled environment in mind, what was it that Collexis could offer that would distinguish it quickly enough to be a successful David amongst content Goliaths?

Collexis' core competency is being able to apply its "secret sauce" of semantic processing and faceted navigation to more valuable forms of content than others and to develop unique ways to apply those semantic tools to real-life business problems. Where companies like Inxight had semantic engines trained to parse already commoditized forms of content such as news articles Collexis focuses its semantic processing capabilities on unstructured content generated by professionals such as medical researchers. The story could have ended right there like so many other companies in the KM "dead pool", but instead of settling for marketing a nifty content categorization tool Collexis has worked with its recently acquired platform partner Syynx to develop some very serious solutions for scientific, technical and medical clients that are strong indicators of how semantics and professional networks can combine to create powerful publishing solutions in high-value enterprise markets.

The most interesting of these emerging platforms is biomed experts.com, a portal being readied for launch by Collexis that combines Collexis' semantic capabilites with public research articles from PubMed to develop an extremely powerful expert network tool. Put in any relevant set of terms from the world of STM publishing and biomedexperts.com will return a cite-ranked list of relevant categories that can be navigated to find experts who publish research in that topic specialty. Choose any one of these experts (click on screen grab to right for more detail) and get an excellent analysis of their publishing patterns in this topic arena, including a publishing timeline and categoried publication cites organized by more than a dozen related topic areas, including disorders, anatomy, procedures, physiology and so on. If this person's work is of interest to you it's easy in biomedexperts.com to track this person's publications and to invite them into your personal network. Biomedexperts.com enables one to view patterns in research and relationships amongst researchers with other powerful analysis tools, including a nifty map representation of which locations are collaborating heavily with other worldwide locations on a topic as well as a startree-like representation of the strength of publishing ties between different authors.

While we've seen some navigation tools like this deployed on platforms such as Factiva's Search 2.0 research portal Collexis has taken sophisticated analysis of texts to a whole new level in placing the exploration of authors and their network of relationships at the core of biomedexperts.com's capabilities. Not only can one identify rapidly the strengths of an author's research with biomedexperts.com but one can also move rapidly to understand the social contexts in which that research is developed. When your next step in your own research is understanding not only who wrote what but who's in thick with whom in their research it can accelerate rapidly your own next steps.

While it's uncertain that biomedexperts.com will succeed in developing community around its platform any more effectively than other efforts such as Elsevier's 2Collab its focus on organizing both content and authors into meaningful patterns is a key advantage that could help Collexis accelerate its product development efforts in a number of very interesting directions - including other market verticals where professional expertise is expressed effectively through publishing. Collexis understands as well as any other content company out there today that content is as much about the people who create it as it is about documents and data and has developed tools that exploit that understanding very effectively.

This interesting marriage of social insight and insight into topic expertise is a valuable combination that we can expect to see in many major content platforms over the next few years. Collexis has a window of opportunity in which it can sling its very potent capabilities at Goliaths focusing on similar opportunities - or decide to collaborate with a wide range of Davids and Goliaths to help them succeed in keeping their value propositions from frittering away as social networking tools begin to replace document repositories as primary content discovery tools. Lock and load, Collexis, you're in the right place at the right time. Thanks for the sandwich!

Labels: biomed experts, collaboration, collexis, knowledge management, Social Media, tools

Rafael Sidi is pumped up about Elsevier's new 2collab social bookmarking service, which he describes as the product of "the young turks in Amsterdam," presumably product developers trying to encourage this major scientific publisher to engage the online world of collaborative content. As what sounds to be a countercultural "intrapreneur" initiative 2collab has a lot going for it. 2collab has all of the features that one would expect to find in a modern social bookmarking service - public and private groups, tagging, commenting, voting, easy bookmarking and a very attractive and highly usable design - combined with editable citation information stored with each bookmark (click on the screen grab above to get a flavor of the metadata). However, the citation data cannot be referenced via the 2collab search engine yet, a minor inconvenience in the short run but something that should be addressed once a significant body of content is aggregated via the service.

As to when that significant body will appear is anyone's guess at this point. In spite of a decent launch and prominent billing for the service on Elsevier's corporate portal there appear to be relatively few takers for the service so far. I was challenged to find any publicly posted articles with comments other than my own in five days' worth of posts and thus far today there have been nine public posts in all. To the product's credit the timestamping makes it very easy to figure this out, but in the meantime it's a reminder that the community is still in the process of forming around this product. Group participation doesn't fare much better, with public groups still very small and formed around topics mostly centered on online technology topics.

2collab has an excellent design and the development team is to be commended for a first-rate job in launching a highly credible platform right out of the box, but it's going to take more than features similar to established social media outlets to attract people already using those other platforms. Just as a simple example of the challenge that faces Elsevier, a topic like "congestive heart failure" returns 141 results on del.icio.us, accumulated over a long period of time, to be sure, but in the meantime indicating a ways to go for 2collab to attract active participation. As important as it is to get the technology right in social media it's equally important to get some core communities invested in the platform so that their examples of successful interactions can get other participants jazzed. Consider 2collab to be in serious need of jazzing at this point.

Can Elsevier manage to get some more mojo behind 2collab and develop it into a thriving social media community? In truth Elsevier and other scientific publishers are so far behind in embracing social media that it's going to be an uphill struggle for any of them to make significant progress in developing social media capabilities that are, admittedly, rather long-term investments for as-yet-uncertain future revenues. But one thing seems to be certain: whichever scientific publisher is able to finally crack the social media marketplace and develop a tool that becomes the "go-to" place for sharing and discussing scientific literature is going to win a big, big prize at the end of the day - regardless of how that prize scales to current revenue streams. Consider 2collab a modest bet by Elsevier on the future of social media as a publishing platform that is in need of doubling-down sooner rather than later to ensure a place at the emerging world of user-driven publishing markets.

Labels: 2collab, collaboration, elsevier, Social Media, STM

A reminder that I will be chairing a great panel this Wednesday, 5 December on how users acting as editors via social media platforms are creating excellent content and establishing the best practices that will be guiding user-guided publishing for years to come. We have a strong attendance list already as I am told by the SIIA, so sign up soon for in-person or online participation. Late-breaking news: Bruce Smith, Chief Strategic Officer at Answers.com, will be joining the panel to give insights as to how their contributors on WikiAnswers are creating excellent reference content. Join us at the McGraw-Hill building at noon on Wednesday for a great session with Wikipedia, Newsvine, Answers.com and Wikinvest!

Labels: brown bag, events, Newsvine, SIIA, Social Media, Wikianswers, wikinvest, Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

As could be expected there is a lot of strong reaction to Facebook's new SocialAds program, ranging from the interested to the irritated in some instances but also pointing towards legal concerns in other instances. As noted in PC World a law professor at the University of Minnesota pointed out that Facebook might be in violation of privacy statues in several states - including New York and California.
At issue is SocialAd's appropriating the name or likeness of a person for commercial purposes without explicit consent in their terms and conditions for such uses. It's an important and compelling angle to the new system that probably should have been thought through more carefully by Facebook, but also one which points to further refinements that might increase the potential value of the innovative contextual ad program.

The lack of a voluntary opt-in for SocialAds is certainly a potential legal concern but more importantly it does not allow advertisers to take full advantage of the power of personal endorsement. By linking ads to user posts without explicit permission the ad is only loosely associated with a person's personal endorsement of a product or service - one assumes that there's a positive impression of a product or service if someone bothers to mention it in their Facebook posts but the strength of that endorsement is not easily understood by someone viewing the ad. Is it a like, a love, or relative indifference? If I went to that restaurant that I mentioned in the post, was the food really good or was I just name-dropping to impress my friends and colleagues - and did I actually pick up the check?

A potential solution to this dilemma is seen in the other new ad feature on Facebook - pages for products and brands. Individuals can declare themselves "fans" of commercial entities with Facebook pages, a feature that seems to have been used mostly by a company's employees so far but that could expand in time to include real fan bases. This sort of passionate and loyal grass roots backing is what author Kevin Roberts refers to as "lovemarks," endorsements that have legs far longer than even superstars such as Michael Jordan backing the brand of basketball shoes for millions of dollars. Lovemarks get their endorsements for free - and with a little tweaking Facebook's SocialAds could be adjusted to tie "fan" endorsements to SocialAds placement to ensure that their presence in a fan's posts represented true enthusiasm for an advertiser's brand.

What has gone begging in this equation so far, though, is an obvious opportunity: if personal endorsements from sports superstars who aren't necessarily passionate about a product can command millions, why shouldn't the personal endorsements of Facebook members via SocialAds for benefit the person giving that implied or explicit endorsement more directly - and be under their control more directly? For example, if I am a person who's very influential in my online community or in a real-world community shouldn't SocialAds be able to reward me financially for their endorsement - or to enable them to funnel funds paid by an advertiser to place a SocialAds ad to their favorite charity or cause?

While such a mechanism alone would not address the potential legal exposures for the SocialAds program it may provide the incentive for people to participate proactively - and, in doing so, accept the legalisms that would apply to their use of personal endorsement. There are some potential complexities in such a system - would a member set a minimum bid for their endorsement rights or would this be determined algorithmically, or both? - I think that this is the likely direction in which systems such as SocialAds are likely to head. If being rewarded for endorsements works for sports superstars and other notable figures in mass media, why shouldn't it work in more highly focused social media as well? It's an interesting issue that is likely to unfold in a bigger way over the next several months.

Labels: advertising, endorsement, facebook, Social Media, SocialAds

You have to hand it to Yahoo: there is a lot of pressure on them from pundits and analysts to come up with something that would put them in the game with major social networking portals. But while still incubating their Mash social media platform they've come up with a product that says in effect that they know that they have a long ways to go. As such the introduction of Kickstart by Yahoo needs to be looked at through kinder, gentler eyes than might otherwise be the case. Instead of rushing a "we're everything to everyone" portal to market that would be sure to be met with disappointment Yahoo has gone to war with the platform that they've got and has chosen specific battlegrounds as a starting point.

The specific focus of Kickstart is young adults making the transition from college into professional lives. This is a gap that may be more theoretical than real given the strength of services such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Classmates.com in covering alumni relationships, but by focusing specifically on young adults making a transition Yahoo may have an opportunity to catch a toehold of acceptance with these people just at they're considering how to move out of campus mode into corporate mode. Sounds good on the surface, but this may be a case where traditional marketing analysis will leave Yahoo several yards short of their goal. Many of today's college-age generation see a strong blend between personal lives and careers that carries over well into their twenties - the odyssey years, some have termed them. The "prosumer" concept is something very comfortable to this generation, so sharing photos and videos is not necessarily something that conflicts in their minds with professionalism. The division between the Mash project and Kickstart seems like it's aiming at a gap that their audience may not perceive.

At the same time, though, there may be a few young adults who look at their Facebook profiles and say to themselves, oops, I did it again. The danger in mixing consumer and professional outlooks is that it takes a fair amount of maturity to show that you know how to balance these lives effectively. So Kickstart may be named as such to suggest the notion of "fresh start" to those young adults who didn't make the best use of social media to put their most adult foot forward. But at the end of the day it's far more likely that a service like Facebook can help these young adults to maintain meaningful relationships that can include their professional personnae than a service like Kickstart can loosen up and make networking seem to be a little more fun. From this perspective the dead-serious LinkedIn network seems like a more likely target for Kickstart than Facebook, creating a new generation of highly professional networkers that can make the most of people in their networks with great skillsets.

At the end of the day it's not Yahoo that's broken in designing products such as Kickstart but an information industry as a whole that focuses on databases more than the audiences that they serve. Social media is far less about what is stored on a server and far more about what happens in the browsers and mobile phones that connect peers to one another. Social media can yield highly valuable data and demographics for licensing and advertising support but as demonstrated in Facebook's new socially contextual ad and marketing program the premium value in social media is in the contexts that databases can generate on the fly based on interests and activities. Facebook may yet be trumped by a maturing brand out of a Yahoo that can manage some of the details of one's life with more professional panache but by separating the content experience from the networking experience Yahoo seems to have missed out on developing a platform that will create the most rich environment for both advertisers and content licensors.

Hopefully Kickstart can get some quick yardage for Yahoo to consider its next move in social media but in the meantime the rest of the teams are moving to a more sophisticated playing field altogether. Whatever way you slice it Kickstart is trying to define a niche product, in effect ceding the ground already seized by other social networks. With the introduction of Google's OpenSocial the Yahoo crew is becoming that much more isolated from the greater social media environment, becoming increasingly an island for copyrighted content and traditional brands that are powerful in their own right but missing out on many of the contexts in which they can find their greatest value. There's money in that model, but not necessarily money that has a future.

Labels: facebook, kickstart, Social Media, Yahoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's face it, for an enormous company Microsoft is not lining up many hits today. Its Vista operating system has had tepid reception at best, the EU has brought it to its knees on monopolistic practices, its Zune portable is praying for a second life this holiday season and the Xbox's shaky quality record makes a win for the new Halo 3 game a must to be kept in contention with competitive platforms. Ouch. But with oodles of cash and a well-focused online advertising strategy Microsoft is gearing up to exploit the gaps in Google's game plan that will give it a leg up in online content markets.

One of Google's key gaps to date has been social networking. While its Orkut platform has been successful in Brazil and certain other countries and rumblings of a greater social networking plan for Google grow larger, it's Facebook that's attracting both college-age folks and seasoned professionals who are willing to hang their hats up online on Facebook's increasingly robust social media platform. As noted by The New York Times and others, then, Microsoft's USD 240 million investment for a mere 1.6 percent of Facebook ownership is a significant win for Facebook and an opportunity for Microsoft to regain some sorely needed lost ground. The transaction scales Facebook's ultimate market value to a breathtaking but highly speculative USD 15 billion, making Rupert Murdoch's USD 583 million investment in MySpace seem like a bargain basement transaction in retrospect.

The New York Times article notes that the initial investment will secure Microsoft a platform for its ad network's growth, which is certainly a key component of making sure that it can leverage the highly valuable contexts available in social media. With the high level of personal endorsement and interaction available in Facebook Microsoft advertisers will be very pleased to find an alternative to search engine results and typical media outlets through which to build relationships with their markets. But the real underlying move by Microsoft is to have a dibs on Facebook's evolving social media-oriented computer operating system environment, a must-have for Microsoft in light of Google's evolving plans to have a Web-oriented OS of its own that will help drive its social media plans.

With more people than ever using the Web as their primary repository for both personal content and their own publishing endeavors Microsoft is at a dangerous juncture in its evolution, perhaps even more dangerous than when Netscape's browser began to threaten the supremacy of Microsoft's PC platform as a staging ground for content applications. Facebook has demonstrated with its rapidly growing array of embeddable applications that whole classes of content infrastructre that are at the heart of Microsoft's long-term cash flow may be rendered moot by social media environments such as Facebook's that enable people to build and share highly personalized portals with no or limited technical expertise. Applications such as its Business 3.0 module enable B2B communication that may provide a new way for businesses to develop 1-to-1 relationships via Facebook in ways that will make today's B2B advertising and supply chain management seem very ill targeted over time. All in all, Microsoft needs to get a revenue stream from social media badly - far moreso than either Google or Yahoo.

Will Facebook wind up being the dominant social media platform for both personal and business personal publishing? Once people set up shop in a social media environment there's a certain entropy that sets in which is likely to discourage any radical shifts: you want to keep your "peeps" around you as much as possible, and Facebook offers an increasingly compelling environment to enable open publishing and content integration. Most importantly unlike some other social media environments Facebook is designed for people's true identity as opposed to any number of avatars or pseudonyms that they may use in other social media environments. The emphaisis in Facebook is on knowing who you know, not gaming them for PR or other ulterior motives. This makes environments such as Facebook and LinkedIn that enable people to present their real selves the hottest marketing environments available in social media. By contrast, what's the value of selling to someone wearing green wings and fishnet stockings in Second Life? Good for a quick buck, but not relationship selling by any degree.

Realistically Facebook is by far the greater winner in this deal, having established an awesome figure for its market value and strong leverage for any other subsequent deals to help it gain market momentum. It's perhaps not as one-sided as the deal that Bill Gates cut with IBM to get rights to sell Mircosoft's PC operating systems on other platforms, but it's about equally clear who's behind the curve and who is able to help them get back in the game. And like that earlier deal this may be a sign that Microsoft is waning in its ability to influence electronic publishing effectively. But with an advertising strategy that is well-adapted to playing on multiple platforms to service multiple ad networks the Facebook deal is as good a shot a any that Microsoft is likely to have to use social media as a leverage point for future revenues. Don't expect miracles from either partner as a result of this alliance, but to expect their competitors to sweat it a little harder to get a foot in the door of compelling online communities.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, facebook, media, Microsoft, Social Media, Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New York Times covers some of the recent surges in Silicon Valley startups getting massive amounts of funding and, in some instances, handsome rewards for private investors backing online content plays. RightMedia's acquisition by Yahoo for a cool USD 850 million and microscopic startup Ning's USD 214 million valuation on USD 44 million of private equity investment are just some of the highlights in today's parade of bets by investors who seem to have the pocketbooks of major media companies at their disposal on a regular basis.

It's easy to see why many are saying that the bubble fever of the dot-com era is beginning to surge again, and in some ways the bubble doubters have a lot of credible evidence that points to many more losers than winners in the push to come up with valuable contexts for content. First and foremost is the inventory problem: with social media helping to multiply the outlets available for advertising at a nearly Malthusian rate there is way too much available inventory for advertisers trying to tap into online audiences. Just as advertising was supposed to float every business plan in 2000 regardless of the available demand there's sure to be a shakeout as reality begins to catch up with the inventory issue. Also having a familiar feel is the availability of interesting but all-too-similar technology plays that have little chance at building audiences at a rate that could justify reasonable returns. How many it's-like-Facebook-with-Skype-and-who-knows-what-else ideas can the marketplace absorb? The pocketbooks of major media companies, the presumed exit points for most of these plays, are not going to support these types of tools endlessly.

But there are some major differences this time around that might help to make more of today's bubbles a little longer lasting:

• Contextual advertising. While there's an abundance of inventory generated in part by social media there is not an abundance of specific audiences for specific goods and services. The dot-com bubble burst largely before contextual advertising had begun to take off to enable a different kind of economics for the long tail of content that can benefit from high-margin goods and services that match up with niche interests. While contextual ads still place a lot of pressure on online publishers to come up with the goods that attract the best ads, their ability to service lucrative niche markets very cost-effectively will make the landing for many online publishers a little softer as the economy cools off.
  
• Finite mainstream media. Even as social media has expanded rapidly the ability of mainstream media companies to create inventory has not changed significantly over the past seven years. While content management, mining and other production tools have enabled publishers to develop more engaging content, with the exception of video there's not a lot more out there. In fact, with cutbacks, consolidations and increased competition from social media outlets one could say that there's less mainstream text inventory online than ever to absorb the advertising budgets of major corporations that crave their content. What has increased, though, are the syndication efforts of publishers to get their content out into new contexts via embedded content services such as Voxant, user feeds and via new mobile platform partners. The need for more usable inventory will keep demand for new content sources high - and multiples relatively lofty - until overall advertising demand softens.
• The creativity factor. While media companies on both the consumer and enterprise side of the content business are great at managing tightly defined content products they have proven time and again that the corporate cultures that thrive off of control-oriented values are very poor at coming up with new ideas for online content products that thrive on today's softer concepts of value created through collaboration and contextualization. Many so-so ideas will still come and go in Silicon Valley but as a whole the price that media companies are paying for failing to re-invent their own cultures to encourage more risk-taking with new ventures will be regular trips down Highway 101 to fill their needs for innovation with maturing venture-backed companies. You'd think that after seven years it would be different, but we're probably at least five years away from media companies having made enough of a transition into more innovative internal cultures to make those trips less frequent for those who survive the shift.
• The impending return of premium content. While advertising gains the spotlight in most business plans the push of services such as Near-Time to build profits from private communities of social media and the repositioning of print magazines as community-building tools are increasing the promise of online publishers to build new streams of revenue from relatively small amounts of content. People are also willing to paystill for events - and more content is likely to be positioned as premium event content online in ways that will complement ad-supported channels rather than conflict with them. Look for a broadening array of business models that include new premium elements that could soften the downturn of ad cycles.
  

Mind you there are just about as many technologists as there ever were with the ability to code and not a clue as to how to be real publishers who will keep the winds of blarney blowing up from the Bay as fresh as ever. Fools will come and fools will go, but as a whole the frontiers of online publishing are still raw enough to warrant independent investments along the scale of today's efforts for several years to come. Probably the biggest factor for determining how healthy that growth curve stays is the ability to get more people more access to electronic content. We're at the beginning of a growth gap in which mobile access to Web content is hobbled by poor network access and costly access plans while land-based access is stalling in U.S. markets.

At the same time high-speed access in overseas markets is exploding, creating more opportunities for new non-U.S. players to carve their own segments out of the global content pie very rapidly. The sooner that publishers can recognize that there's more to be gained globally by pushing more open online publishing models the more opportunities they will have to get their fair share of global online markets. With contextual content and advertising breaking down traditional boundaries for monetization publishers need to think more aggressively as to how to profit from content that knows no borders.

With so much of today's content under development being funded privately it's hard for any exit to the doorways to get a stampede effect going in the same way that IPO-oriented investments in the dot-com era got out of hand. But until mainstream investments begin to offer more attractive returns there is likely to be a steady stream of private investors willing to dabble a bit of their fortunes in potentially high-yield content plays that will put them in an even richer gravy train. As many of these people have already made at least one round of successful investments there's always the chance that smart money can follow smart money indefinitely. Then again, most of us are only as smart as our last good decision. Perhaps Mr. Darwin will be taking on Lord Malthus' math sooner than we think.

Labels: bubble, media, Social Media, Technology, Trends

Given that LinkedIn's professional social network content has been available through SalesForce.com's AppExchange service for nearly six months is it really a big deal that there's now a Facebook interface as well? As seen in Programmable Web's flash demo it's a fairly rudimentary integration: if you add a contact you can select their Facebook profile for inclusion in your SFDC desktop and use many of Facebook's functions and applications to communicate with people in their social networks. That's hardly rocket science but it's an excellent indication of the strengths that can be gained from using a social networking content service as a drop-in module in a software-as-a-service desktop environment.

Most importantly, though, it's an indication of how quickly two content services can benefit from one another's mutual presence in SaaS very rapidly with virtually no integration requirements. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel with social networking SalesForce.com enables its clients to tap into the networks that matter most to their sales efforts. With Facebook's more multi-dimensional view of people's personal and professional lives it's possible that sales professionals will get a different kind of introduction than one might get from a LinkedIn referral. LinkedIn provides excellent professionally-oriented networking tools but there's something about telling someone, "Hey, I saw your profile on Facebook, I see that you're into sailing" that's a little more personal and conversational. Moreover it's a window through Facebook's programming interface into functionality that they have on their own platform that in essence gives one embedded applications within an application that's embedded in a SaaS platform. That's powerful content integration that can work to extend the value of both the hosting platform and the embedded platform as valuable contexts for content very rapidly.

While Facebook is having its ups and downs in terms of traffic, personal content exposure issues and integration complaints the growth of its use in professional circles over the past several months has been extraordinary. Although it's mostly a few brave people that venture beyond the basics of Facebooking, professionals are becoming much more used to the idea that their professional lives count increasingly on their ability to project their value and depth as a multi-dimensional person, rather than just a set of skills that can be marketed as useful but disposable labor. The old adage "it's not what you know but who you know" is taking on a new twist as online networking creates a new hook into effective business relationships.

At the same time most business information companies are standing still in comparison to companies like Salesforce.com and Facebook when it comes to encouraging on-the-fly content integration with their products. With a strong focus on traditional integration of content into structured databases the opportunity to provide a looser level of integration into a workflow-centric platform. There are strong opportunities for such integration in major market verticals, so expect this to happen over time. But with Salesforce.com pushing its Force.com initiative to provide "platforms as a service" for various corporate functions the time to move on such initiatives is now, not later. We may not be seeing Facebook as a networking tool on Bloombergs any time soon but there are plenty of markets where such rapid content integrations will benefit companies trying to put content in the most valuable context possible.

Labels: Business Information, facebook, integration, mashups, SaaS, Salesforce.com, Social Media

When Seattle-based Newsvine launched in Beta form last January we documented its promise enthusiastically and kept a close eye on it. Not surprisingly so did a number of hot prospects for financing a profitable exit, including MSNBC, which Newsvine has announced in its own story as its new owner. No details are available at this time about the size of the deal or how Newsvine will be integrated into MSNBC.com, but MSNBC News' estimate of USD 75 million seems about right given Newsvine's position in the social news marketplace and there are promises by MSNBC to keep Newsvine an independent entity for now.

It's a pretty good first acquisition for MSNBC.com, which is a humdrum online news portal that trails major outlets for cable news such as CNN.com and Foxnews.com by significant margins and seems to be caught in a major identity crisis. Unlike the online portals for CNN and Fox News, MSNBC.com is obliged to promote the broadcast NBC news properties more than the MSNBC cable unit, drawing away precious attention span to TV shows that have little to do with core online audience demographics. Add in an alliance with Newsweek magazine for feature content and the marketing muddle for the MSNBC.com brand gets no more clear.

Newsvine itself is not a traffic leader in overall visits amongst social news outlets and struggles to build momentum behind an intensely loyal core of news, opinion and bookmark contributors. But unlike other social news outlets Newsvine features a maturing mix of original content along with links to external news stories, a combination that will help MSNBC.com to build inventories of unique destination content and a network of popular online personalities that could be leveraged via MSNBC's cable outlet to build visibility for the community. Newsvine has had a few minor but noteworthy news scoops of its own - a member on the scene of the Virginia Tech shootings broke the initial details of the event - but the strength of the community tends to be a core of contributors who opine on and spin key topics in politics, religion, world events and popular culture. With a reasonable mix of views across the spectrum and the ability for talented writers to expand on their thoughts in their own pieces Newsvine offers a rich mix of content that's sure to complement any mainstream news outlet's offerings if managed effectively.

What Newsvine gets most out of this deal is a parent who's willing to put a little more muscle behind an organization that's been challenged to keep up with itself. With only a staff of six and an editorial policy that requires regular and timely monitoring and intervention by senior Newsvine staff to keep controversial content and comments from spinning out of control Newsvine suffers from the typical startup myopia that keeps it from looking at larger prizes at its disposal. Newsvine's features generally do a good job of promoting engaging content to the attention of its members and its social networking features were well ahead of other social news outlets but its up-only voting system tends to promote content that echoes much of the same controversy-for-controversy's-sake content that one finds in major media outlets. Ironically this may turn out to be a plus when you have a cable news outlet that focuses on much the same sort of stories.

Most major news outlets have been extremely hesitant to embrace social media too closely, a factor that has benefited portals such as Newsvine along the way: when The New York Times closed down its online comments features a few months back Newsvine picked up a good chunk of NYT commenters. With the acquisition of Newsvine established news media outlets may be beginning to recognize that this uneasy balance between social media and their own news is tipping away from their operations, creating loyalties tied to online communities creating and discussiong news that is likely in time to eclipse loyalties to news brands tied to established media channels. It's hardly a one-for-one swapout at this point in time, so the initial decision of MSNBC to keep the Newsvine brand alive as an independent unit is a wise move for now, especially given the typical sensitivities in online communities to being "sold out."

But as audiences empowered as newshounds create and discover a widening range of content their ability to build quality inventory and insights rapidly will eventually find more of today's journalists and commentators becoming professional members of online communities like Newsvine. Social news communities are accelerating in their ability to get their articles good placement in search engine results, a factor that certainly contributed to The New York Times' decision to open up its prime columnists' content to get our from behind their subscription firewall and into the mix of these communities. This transition is still fairly gradual and generational, but essential for ensuring future revenues amongst news audiences becoming used to having their peers help them select what's newsworthy - and worth their attention.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, Digg, MSNBC, New York Times, News, Newsvine, Social Media

CNET interviews Jaideep Singh, the CEO and Co-Founder of the newly launched personal profile search engine Spock, and reveals insights into what is perhaps the hottest online content product launch this year. The Spock team has already assembled about 100 million tagged personal profiles of both living and historical people, including high profile people from the past like Diana, Princess of Wales and somewhat more mundane people from today like, well, me. Spock has carved out a very clever niche for itself, providing bone-simple search and navigation features like Google, personal profiling and networking as found in social media services such as LinkedIn and Facebook, content tagging, bookmarking and voting features like Digg and del.icio.us and content embedding features like PhotoBucket that enable a Spock profile to appear on Web pages beyond Spock.

There are all too many instances of features checklists like the above that could result in tragically bad content services but that's not the case with Spock. Through its system of content tagging and linking Spock winds up being a very powerful tool to research people who might have something to say on a given topic or to find out people who may have a connection to someone who you need to research. For example if you try a Spock search on "global warming" you get to no one's surprise a Spock profile of Al Gore as your first entry, but it's followed closely by Bill Clinton's profile (listed as "global warming advocate" [sic] as well as having a relationship link to Al Gore) and then by profiles of numerous global warming skeptics, including Rush Limbaugh. These are interesting and highly relevant search results that Google, as good as it may be from its own perspective, simply cannot duplicate.

Anyone can tag a person's profile returned on Spock with additional keywords that may be relevant to the person or add a vote for an existing tag. This is an exciting combination of content categorization and user feedback that provides the ability to create more relevance for a given person's relationship to a tagged topic without having to rely on evaluating external content sources. However Spock does quite a bit of external content evaluation as well, using patented algorithms to determine relevance, personal links and profile information. This information may be verified and edited by a person logging in to the Spock service and claiming their profile, much as in the Zoominfo online directory of professionals. In building a profile one can add links to existing personal profiles on social media services or links to relevant Web pages. Others may add links to your profile as well and vote on them, so there is a social media aspect to profile building also.

There's very little redundant information in Spock, it's mostly links to relevant information found elsewhere, as with other search engines. But the social media features, profile links, user tagging, bookmarking and personal profile validation features combine with straight search capabilities to create a truly unique experience with very useful information. Given that people have been "Googling" people for a long time you'd think that a major search engine like Google would have come up with Spock-like features to add value to personal searching, but Spock found that need and has filled it very nicely. While it may lack some of the strong business oriented capabilities of finding professionals via services such as LinkedIn, Jigsaw or Zoominfo the Spock method seems to try to be a Switzerland of sorts for social media profiles: have as many as you want wherever you want them and Spock will use them as useful input for building yourself an all-encompassing profile and content directory on their own service.

The mixture of both solid results and fun exploration is sure to make Spock a very popular and useful service for people in both personal and professional roles, a factor that is likely to encourage people to build and maintain a high profile via Spock's search services. Spock helps to fill in the area between purely automated searches that fail to incorporate personal wisdom on both people an topics and does so in novel ways that challenge both conventional search engines and more traditional directory services to consider how people can be exposed most effectively to audiences searching for both information about people and both personal and professional relationships with people. It's still early days for Spock, of course - performance is so-so at times and there are still some bugs to be found in basic features such as profile claiming - but as a tool to probe into people within the framework of key topics expect Spock to become a trend-setter for some time to come.

Labels: facebook, LinkedIn, search, Social Media, Spock, Trends

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

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

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

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

While the New York Post's report on a possible move by The New York Times to sunset its premium TimesSelect online service is still in the rumor mill, the plateauing and gentle decline of Web-only subscribers to the package underscores that general news content is not a likely candidate for online subscriptions. When TimesSelect came out a couple of years back, we noted:

The Times Select model provides temporary bolstering of online and print revenues squeezed from those who need their Op/Ed "fix" of established columnists, but in the long run it isolates these columnists from the media mix that's driving much of the value of online news content today.

This seems to be exactly what has happened. While some NYT columnists behind the TimesSelect firewall still have some influence outside of traditional media channels the deafening growth of social media has drowned out many of their voices - and has helped to amplify the strength of new online opinion-makers. In the meantime the NYTimes has slipped in its overall online rank and reach, emphasizing the need to be able to expose more page inventory to search engines and social media for ad monetization. Once conceived of as the cream of their online content TimesSelect has become more like a pricey version of Slate, an online general-interest news magazine which long ago abandoned premium pricing to capture online market share.

While specialty publications like The Wall Street Journal have enough focus and demographic cachet to benefit still from a premium pricing strategy the huge projected growth for online ad spending argues strongly for traditional news organizations with far broader reader demographics becoming far more efficient in exposing both current and archived general news content online as aggressively as possible. As pointed out by Read/Write Web, though, much of the growth in online ads will go to social media sites which do very well with highly targeted contextual ad buys from Google's AdSense and other contextual ad services.

In other words if the readership is going online and online advertising is becoming far less about broadly based selling and far more about selling in microcontexts then the future of news organizations like The New York Times is to get their content into those microcontexts as efficiently as possible. This may still leave room for some premium components, but it's likely to be a set of components built around social networking. Rather than viewing social networking as a dangerous marketing environment, many context-driven marketers are learning how to exploit social media fairly effectively. While major brand advertisers are still nervous about committing their brands to social media it's where the eyeballs are - and it's where news has to prove itself as being able to provide an effective context for marketing.

It's likely that there will be some residual TimesSelect premium package for some time, perhaps built up around a new type of social media experience that allows for more conversational interaction with the news and editorial staff, but the bulk of TimesSelect content is likely to be put out to general ad exposure by year's end. While this may not slow the decay in online readership at "premium" news publications such as the NY Times it will be likely to provide short-term ad revenues more quickly to help fill the gap left by rapidly declining print revenues. So think of the potential fading away of TimesSelect from the NYT perspective as more of a stopgap measure that acknowledges well-established changes in the online ad marketplace.

Unless newspapers can define truly elite communities that will benefit from premium subscriptions there's little reason to think that the failure of the TimesSelect experiment should spell out anything less than the official death of the online premium model for general interest publications. The long-standing relationships between editorial operations and audiences have changed fundamentally but traditional news organizations have moved at the most ponderous of paces away from being isolated teams of experts to acknowledge and adapt to the new conversational world of news-making. Here's hoping that The New York Times can now focus on engaging their audiences more effectively in the contexts that matter most to them.

Labels: advertising, New York Times, Social Media, TimesSelect

Though its reach is relatively small in comparison to the leaders in social bookmarking, the Newsvine portal remains one of the more successful news-oriented social media sites on the Web. Unlike Digg and del.icio.us, which focus largely on social bookmarking for technology and entertainment, Newsviners provide both bookmarks to online content that draws discussion from members as well as original content authored by Newsvine members and smatterings of mainstream news sources such as AP and The New York Times. The mix of user-generated content and mainstream media makes for a lively mix of discussions on politics, religion and other hot-button issues that drive users to vie for top community rankings and their own modest ad revenues. But though the Newsvine community remains vibrant, it has not had a serious growth spurt in over a year. How does a social media property grow beyond a relatively small group of rowdy enthusiasts?

Newsvine is hoping that the answer may lie in nailing some hot scoops dug out by its citizen journalists. In the wake of so-called "D.C. Madam" Deborah Jeane Palfrey's release of telephone records leading Newsvine denizens are hoping to score a big news story of their own by combing through the phone records to see if they can identify well-known political figures who may have been caught up in affairs via Palfrey's escort service. To facilitate this effort Newsvine and some of its most active members have set up some software to enable Newsvine members to do their own sleuthing through Palfrey's phone records in cooperation with their peers. While there are no tangible results yet from this crowdsourced research, the energy level is running high amongst these budding investigative journalists.

Although turning up some high-profile names may gain Newsvine some temporary traction, it's far from clear that this is the type of exercise that will put citizen journalism on the map in any significant way. Leading webloggers have been uncovering major stories for years - stories which are ignored oftentimes by mainstream media outlets or co-opted later on as their own "scoops." The focus of this effort - a Washington sex scandal - tends to play into this trend, as it's the type of work already being done no doubt at a feverish rate by every major news organization in the world in search of a hyped and hot story. Crowdsourcing and some quick coding have enabled some "boots on the ground" via Newsvine and a very interesting precedent for future user-keyed research efforts, but those hoping to gain fame and fortune from uncovering the next "Deep Throat" are likely to find asterisks next to their scoops rather than Pulitzer Prizes on their bookshelves.

The key rub in this push towards citizen journalism is that in trying to go after mass media-scaled stories with a mass media journalism techniques Newsvine is in large part just echoing the existing strengths and weaknesses of today's journalism. While there may be some hypocrisy exposed through these efforts that people should know about it's ultimately the same sort of focus on least-common-denominator interests - who's having sex with whom - that drive many of today's journalists obsessed more with fame, fortune and elbow-rubbing than with reporting on the truth regardless of its sensational value. Where citizen journalism seems to shine most brightly is when self-motivated content producers remain true to their values as individuals and to the important relationships that they want to maintain outside of the context of journalism. Quality citizen journalism seems to grow out of the quality of relationships that generate interesting content as much as out of any inherent journalistic skills used by a content producer.

I think that this is one reason why social media portals such as Facebook are growing steadily - they provide first and foremost a place where people can be themselves in all their personal dimensions. This tends to build relationships based on real-world trust more than the ginned-up popularity of of online relationships with people who hide behind pseudonyms. In turn this is likely to assist in developing more in-depth content close to individuals' interests and expertise that will reinforce relationships in their online community more effectively. Portals that focus more on media before relationships do not seem to have as much growth these days. No surprise there, really - there are already far too many mainstream media outlets chasing the tall end of the interest curve.

Relationships are the truly unique experiences around which content gains its greatest value, content which may look dull in its "long tail" focus but which in sum is far more valuable than the fleeting bits of fluff that pass themselves off as serious journalism these days far too often. This is the real direction towards which citizen journalism is most likely to head - people with substantial "real world" relationships sharing important information with one another which becomes contextualized to broader audiences when it's valuable to do so but in ways that are less exploitative than the typical journalist-source relationships. The need for serious and professional journalism will continue for many years, with citizen journalists providing many capable recruits, but the real future of citizen journalism is one in which people sharing content are more concerned about being citizens than journalists.

Labels: citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, DC Madam, facebook, Newsvine, Social Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will social media grow to be a $4.3 billion dollar industry on just ads alone? We examine the role of premium content in social media growth. Also, some thoughts on Open Access as a growing trend for scholarly research and bridging the gap between peer-reviewed publications and Nature's Precedings portal.

Labels: Nature, Near-Time, precedings, revenues, shoreviews, Social Media, video

Happy Independence Day! While most Americans are unplugged today tending to barbecues, baseball games or frolicking down at the beach we thought that we'd offer everyone our view of how social media played a pivotal role in the events that lead up to the historic signing of the Declaration of Independence. Here's an entertaining - and short - photoessay in tribute to those pioneers of publishing. Transcript follows the clip.



It’s Independence Day in the Unites States of America, a time when people of all walks of life get together to celebrate our nation. In most ways we celebrate America as it is today, a unified nation more than two hundred years old.

But it’s also a day when we remember how America used to be on the day of its birth. Who was America on that day? We were people of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Georgia – people who lived along a thousand miles of coast , plains and mountains, each with their own idea of what America was and what it should become.

Where was that common idea that we call America formed?

Was it in the bitter snows of Valley Forge?

Was it on the battlefields of Guilford Courthouse, Cowpens or Bennington?

The War of Independence was necessary to create an independent nation, but there was one real factor above all that created a unified vision of what America would become:

Content.

Out of the printing presses of colonial America poured pamphlets expressing a new vision of politics and democracy that spread throughout the land. The pamphlets were read aloud and discussed in taverns across the colonies, creating a new common consciousness about this new nation in the making. The discussions lead to convictions, convictions lead to action – and action lead us to new discussions, new content – and a new nation.

In our great new era in which so many people are blessed with the freedom to express themselves through publishing, please take a moment today to remember the social media pioneers who dared to express bold thoughts to people – people who would join to become a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the freedom of expression that has ignited a global revolution in content.

Have a great Independence Day, wherever you are.

Labels: independence day, shoreviews, Social Media, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, video

Our take on a brewing counter-offer for Dow Jones, thoughts on how Wikipedia's Current Events editing challenges news organizations to take a more objective view and ECNext's Manta uses social media concepts to update business profiles online.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, Dow Jones, ECNext, Manta, shoreviews, Social Media, video, Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

In browsing through YouTube today I was thinking about the importance of the musicologist and folklorist Alan Lomax in bringing obscure American folk music to mainstream media outlets. Through Lomax's recordings in the mid-20th century we gained access to pivotal and influential artists such as Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Woody Guthrie and other performers who have become icons of American culture. Their songs have been "mashed" (covered) countless times by popular artists, creating a legacy of profitable operations for music publishers everywhere. Lomax' subjects were far from slick: some were in or just out of prisons, sitting on tin shack porches in the backwaters of the deep South, up in the mountains of Appalachia - it would be fair to call most of them "nobodies" by the standards of any day.

Today I can turn to YouTube and get a catalog of folk performances with breadth that far outstrips anything that Lomax was able to acquire through his years of sojourns. The average teen humming a song on the edge of her bed in front of a webcam is not likely to become a new Jelly Roll Morton, much less a Sade, but voices such as this have restored the concept of folk art being something that anyone can create for anybody. Which of these performances is worth watching? The new Lomaxes of the world are us, the audience, providing accolades through our use and ranking of their content. Mainstream content being transformed in this environment through mashing is the equivalent of a seamstress cutting up scraps from a designer dress to make a beautiful quilt - it returns the content to its roots as a resource for new folk communication.

When one goes into a major city you're surrounded oftentimes by street performers of various kinds, usually average at best but often enough inspiring in both their content and in the context in which they've chosen to perform. YouTube makes everyone's home a street corner, re-integrating our modern American culture that has been decimated by the automobile cult with its look-alike shopping strips that discourage folk activities in favor of consuming finished goods. Finished and packaged content still matters in a very important way, but I think that we're only at the very leading edge of understanding how profoundly human communications have been affected by services such as YouTube. The emerging dominant culture of the 21st century will be unplugged and unmediated folk culture, free to be free or commercial or whatever it desires to be in the moment. What Lomax exposed through 20th century technology YouTube will unite through the 21st century's direct communications between folk artists and their audiences.

Labels: Alan Lomax, Social Media, Trends, YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An old Wall Street trueism goes "Buy on the rumor, sell on the fact." There is lots of carefully culled research and data that goes into executing deals but a lot of business still hinges on front-line ears to the ground sifting through possibly true events. No surprise, then, that a new online play is focusing on the entertainment of culling out rumors. TechCrunch reports on Truemors, Valley startup maven Guy Kawasaki's new play that allows people to phone in or post rumors anonymously and to have site visitors to Truemors rate the rumor, spread it, tag it, link to it or comment on it. While Truemors has some posts that are tagged as business, most of the content in this still-early-days play focus on the usual media figures and fixations - celebs, tech toys and other titillating buzz. There is one post on the rumors of Microsoft acquiring Yahoo that were circulating last week, but with a relatively small community there is not real discussion or details that surfaced.

It's an interesting play, and one that's likely to gain a certain amount of momentum, but at the end of the day there's a distinct odor on the methodology that's not likely to give this much long-term momentum. Most worrisome is the voting system combined with anonymity: it's all too easy for someone to post a red herring and to have malicious cronies pump up the votes to give a rumor unwarranted legs. The fun of debunking rumors will attract some people, but it's a negative premise that is not likely to build market share against services like Yahoo! Answers that help people to develop authority in a more trusted community environment. A better play would be to use mining technologies to go through weblogs, message boards and other community content sources to see what's buzzing strongest before it's confirmed by mainstream media sources and to use these seeds to move a ratings process. At least then one would have the ability to evaluate the strength of a contributor's following amongst their peers in a community before moving it on to a rumor board.

Kawasaki finds himself oftentimes in the middle of highly buzzy trends so expect that there will be more services of this kind this year trying to sift out truth from "truthiness" - and that Truemors will become a tool more likely to feed the truthiness side of the equation. With so much raw information hitting weblogs and social networking services before it's packaged via traditional journalism the need to make sense of this raw input more efficiently is certainly pressing, but peers who come to trust both one another and the sources of rumors are likely to form the foundation of what will motivate people to move from being entertained by rumors to taking action.

Labels: Guy Kawasaki, Social Media, Trends, Truemors

Social media is booming, but is all of the activity surrounding its growth a precursor to a dot-com-like bubble burst? While in some ways investors may overextend themselves on the social media trend as much as any other social media is growing to become a trend that is based on countless tiny bubbles rather than the huge risk-takers that we're used to seeing in the media limelight. At is core social media is about human communications returning to normal levels of discourse that may have been forgotten in the push to cash in on electronic content - and that will require more sophisticated monetization models than those being pursued by most media companies.

Click here to read the full News Analysis

Labels: econSM, News Analysis, Social Media, Web 2.0 Expo

The EconSM event is living up expectations for a great networking environment, including bumping into a new company called Edgeio, which provides classified ad systems on a white label basis for publishers of all kinds. The concept behind Edgeio is fairly simple but compelling: use their technology to build up easy-to-track classified ads from individuals and get them placed contextually in appropriate content. You can use just the technology to build your own ad service or syndicate in content from publishing partners using Edgeio. The publishers are in complete control of how ads are priced (or not) with Edgeio taking a percentage of revenues, typically 20 percent. This has good use for publishers in general, but it appears to be especially well positioned for social media, especially Wiki-based microcommunities. As communities grow they can spawn of new microcommunities that can use Edgeio to exchange ads with the parent community and to draw in other highly related communities. There's a lot of talk about scalability in online advertising and marketing at EconSM today but not much talk yet about how classifieds are the perfect one-to-one marketing medium for social media. Expect tools like this to thrive for highly targeted social media content - and to form the base for tools that help higher-powered marketers to reach customers on a one-to-one basis.

Labels: advertising, business models, econSM, media, Social Media, Technology, Trends

Bumping into Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson at the pre-event EconSM mixer tonight was a real pleasure - especially since Newsvine has just launched its new "Evergreen" release, which includes a smorgasbord of new features and sources. Mike was pumped up about the modular design of the new Newsvine front page that allows a user to add and content modules in a drag-and-drop design - including modules that allow one to aggregate headline RSS feeds from major news suppliers such as The New York Times, the Washington Post. Local news and weather get their fair exposure as well. But to me the best things about this redesign are the simple and obvious ones that help to highlight the increasingly powerful contributions from Newsviners themselves. The listing of AP headlines in the upper right corner of the home page are now replaced by an enhanced display of the top news story seeds (bookmarks) from Newsvine contributors, followed by a real-time feed of stories with new seeds and comments. The top AP story is still featured in the middle column but with robust contributions from its members Newsvine can afford to highlight their efforts as a default mode.

There are merits in each of the the social media news services available today but Newsvine seems to be excelling in developing a community of contributors who are more than just bookmarkers and commenters. Newsvine creates a good share of its own original content, including breaking news from contributor "Killfile" on the recent Virginia Tech shootings. As highlighted in our new research paper on social media best practices Newsvine maintains a "Code of Honor" for its members that its lead contributors are intent on using to encourage quality content. The contributions may vary quite a bit in quality nevertheless but an environment that encourages quality more than specific outlooks is a crucial factor in attracting contributors who can find and create content worth reading and discussing. With the Evergreen features Newsvine is allowing its leaders to be seen as leaders more emphatically - and increasingly they're up to the task. Add in Evergreen's ability to blend in mainstream news and information from popular and local sources and it gets that much easier to stick around and catch the real-time news buzz that Newsvine is perfecting one post at a time.

It's a highly competitive field out there for social media news services, especially as major portals such as Yahoo and MySpace become more proficient in blending in news contributions from users, so Newsvine's future is hardly guaranteed any more than any other emerging service. But if you're looking for an example of a social media news portal that gets an awful lot of things right you could do far worse than to use Newsvine as your template for success.

Labels: Newsvine, Social Media, Trends

Forbes.com has announced a new feature for its business news and information Web site called Corporate Org Chart Wiki, a tool that allows anyone to add their views of who reports to whom in the corporate world. The use of the term "Wiki" is a bit of a misnomer here, as the interface bears little resemblance to a traditional user-generated Wiki database, but in concept it's not too distant a relative. Anyone can create or edit an org chart using a drag-and-drop graphical interface to define reporting relationships and to add additional bio information in a sidebar area. Well, at least that's the concept. In trying the tool out on some execs at the Ford Motor Company the drag and drop function worked in a very herky-jerky sort of way and a tool that would supposedly let one roam across a chart larger than the display window didn't seem to operate at all. There's some good thought given to the design of this feature but "Beta" might be a generous description of its capabilities at this point.

More importantly there's no real interactivity with this information and other information on the site: it's a standalone feature that doesn't have any community content built around the org chart function. In concept everyone would love to have a "real-time org chart" built up from people's direct knowledge of an organization but in reality there has to be a sense of ownership for that content as much as in any other social media product. Without even a login ID or some sort of online "handle" to provide attribution on edits most business people would be loath to trust information of this kind for any serious kind of use.

There is tremendous potential for business information built in a social media environment, as evidenced by companies such as Jigsaw and LinkedIn, but it takes more than some tech tools and a label to create successful content services from social media. It takes first and foremost an environment in which a community of editors builds a reputation for reliable contributions. Forbes Corporate Org Chart Wiki is an interesting concept but I suspect that it will take someone who is more willing to take the concept beyond a half-hearted add-in to a media site and into the core of a more enterprise-oriented business information service to make this concept take off. In the meantime it's a tool worth doodling with for a few minutes to get some ideas as to how to take this concept to the next step.

Labels: Forbes, Social Media, Trends

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

Click here for report details and purchasing

Labels: Best Practices, Research, Social Media

The Social Media Club is a growing network of social media enthusiasts from many different walks of life, including both the commercially-oriented online crowd as well as academics focusing on media studies. I was invited to speak on a panel for their April Boston area meeting a couple of months ago and so I found myself braving cats-and-dogs rain to join the group in Dedham, Massachussets last night along with other hardy New Englanders. The panel consisted of myself, Judith Perrolle of Northeastern University and Douglas Quintal of Emerson College considering the question of whether the bomb scare in Boston earlier this year triggered by a promotion for the Cartoon Network may have implications for social media.

The short answer was: not really. This was a stunt by a mainstream media company that was using well-established "guerrilla marketing" techniques across the nation to put out a message on portable electronic displays - which in Boston were placed near and under key infrastructure points. Someone implied that perhaps backhandedly the promoters knew that this might get a rise out of the authorities - or that perhaps they even brought it to their attention. Who knows. The bottom line is that the City of Boston was not consulted, and in general good citizens try to keep the protectors of community interests in the loop. By contrast, social media is all about sharing communal interests and self-policing of boundaries of conduct by community members.
In a sense social media is the exact opposite of guerilla marketing: since individuals already have access to powerful tools to create and contextualize content mainstream marketers come to their content to get into the communal flow of things. I think that Judith Perrolle hit the nail on the head when she characterized the ill-fated Cartoon Network campaign as "solid-state spam."

But on the other side of the incident are the younger people who looked at the reaction in Boston and said "They don't get it." That's certainly valid from the perspective of the younger target audience for the Cartoon Network - we all know that if your parents get something it must not be "cool" - but it's also a sign of people who have come to accept that commercial messages can appear anywhere. Social media tends to extend this concept by its ability to make it easy for webloggers and other personal publishers to embed ads on their sites as well as content from other sites. For younger people this is kind of an extension to the logo-laden clothing and accessories that are pervasive in our culture: they "wear"brands on their content the way that they do going to school. So to them seeing the Cartoon Network or any other brand in a public space is not that big a deal. Social media, though, is not really the cause of this, just an extension of a pre-existing branded culture.

But as social media matures I believe that people will become more sensitized to how they are using their personal brands cultivated via their social media persona to endorse other brands in personal and public spaces. Kids - and many adults - are beginning to understand more clearly when people are using advertising to support a personal and community function without prejudice and when the advertising is tainting a person's online persona. Doug Quintal pointed to research of 2,500 young people which indicates that the stereotype of social media enthusiasts as loners/losers does not pan out statistically: their use of social media is pervasive, with the proportion of loner/loser personalities in virtual spaces being about the same as in the real world. So as social media becomes more pervasive marketers are going to have to be increasingly sensitive as to how to present messages more authentically as participants in social media communities rather than as mere commercial wallpaper. Authenticity counts in social media more than artificial "underground" marketing.

This was a fun group that stimulated a lot of thought-provoking discussion about social media and its impact on how we are communicating with one another. I may have second thoughts about taking another long slog through pouring rain to get to the Boston meetings but I look forward to other Social Media Club events in the future.

Labels: Boston, events, Social Media, Social Media Club

Om Malik notes along with many of the technology media digerati the recent expulsion of image hosting site PhotoBucket's content sharing widgets from the MySpace social media portal. The grievous charge against PhotoBucket? Ads. Along with content from the widget embedded in a MySpace page the viewer would get a PhotoBucket-provided ad. So in a twinkle of an eye PhotoBucket loses a distribution partner for its social media content. Mind you there's some pretty sad irony here in that MySpace gets content free from its millions of users and ad-free partners to generate ad revenue with near-zero editorial expense. It would seem only fair that MySpace recognize that others who are contributing to their revenue successes need to be compensated also.

The rub in this equation is revenue sharing. Unlike ad-supported mashups like TheNewsRoom.com, which shares its ad revenue with distribution partners, PhotoBucket somehow didn't think it proper to compensate MySpace for the "rental" of their context to display its revenue-generating content. If they were a little more savvy PhotoBucket would have approached MySpace ahead of time and proposed a revenue split based on MySpace-embedded ad revenues. If they were more than a little savvy PhotoBucket would have set up a system similar to TheNewsRoom that allows distribution partners to set up a self-service license for ad-supported content. In either case both MySpace and PhotoBucket have shot themselves in the foot by eliminating a popular content feature that was adding value to audiences in MySpace.

We've been talking for several years about how contextualizing content and not just ads would become the next great online revenue opportunity, so the storm of widgets invading social media properties should come as not surprise. But in an era of user-defined aggregation there needs to be a more automated regimen for determining when and how revenue-generating content can play alongside other commercially-supported content. With users constantly defining new contexts in which to share widgets and other embeddable content forms neither the services providing venues for those widgets nor the distributors of the content can afford to waste time in traditional licensing negotiations. The value of the contexts is far too fleeting to make them pay off effectively in many instances.

Content producers using widgets for distribution also need to think more carefully about how to structure their offerings for partners with different commercial outlooks. Some content could be made available through free-only partners and additional content for those willing to allow ad-supported or fee-based revenue sharing. Whatever the regimen content producers taking advantage of social media tools to embed their content in various contexts need to remember that advertising is all about selling contexts, not content. When a widget or other social media tool is embedded in another site the value of the context requires both the content provider and the site provider to recognize that the value of the context created by these tools is the sum of both parts.

As more and more users embed content in platforms of their choice media companies need to acknowledge that portals are not always going to be the play that gives them the best promise for contextualizing their content. We need to get to a point where we could have a MySpace widget that also embedded a PhotoBucket widget where a user wanted it. This is the new form of aggregation that will be most likely to pay off for publisher in the long run. All the world's a TiVo, so get your content ready for it to reside wherever it needs to - and to partner with whomever is there who has a right to share in the profits.

Labels: Monetization, MySpace, PhotoBucket, Social Media, Trends

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the wilds of Scottsdale, Arizona back to the right coast via the redeye brings me to ABM's Digital Velocity event, drawing more than 230 people to learn the best practices for accelerating digital revenue growth in B2B media. The room is totally packed. Full disclosure: Shore is a member of the ABM Digital Media Council, so I have my bias as to the quality of this program, having served on the program planning committee. I think that the committee worked very hard to put together a very meaty event, and the level of attendance seems to reflect its anticipated value. I am not going to live-blog every panel, but I will be posting through the event in our events weblog and posting links here.

Keynote - Dr. Jim Taylor, Harrison Group
Organize for Tomorrow's Success
Empower your Workforce for the New Digital Landscape
Lunch Break with the Vendors
Venture Capital and the New Valuation Paradigms
Editorial/Content Strategies in a User-Generated World
Implementing a Web Content Management System
The Business of Working with IT
Best Practices to Web-Based Media Kits
Critical Role of Audience Development
The New Metrics That Run Your Business
Buying and Selling in the Digital World

Labels: ABM, Business Information, Digital Velocity, events, media, Social Media

Networking via online publishing communities is a great concept, but in very popular sites like MySpace sometimes it feels a little too public for its own good - a little like having a party in a public restroom. It's doable, but is it wise? Yet being able to choose your own crowds and conversations has great appeal, especially when there are multiple tools available with which to do so. The new social media portal Ning picks up where others have left off and creates an environment in which anyone can create their own private social media network. As with walk-up-and-publish tools like Blogger, TypePad and pbwiki Ning enables anyone to create a privately branded social network into which one can invite others to publish content such as weblog entries, videos, photos, forum discussions and live chats.

Each Ning community has its own levels of creator-defined security, so the community can be private or public or tailored to respond to a mass market of contributors or just a few select contributors. As with the Near-Time network of privately maintained weblogs, wikis and file sharing communities Ning provides a common login and top-level navigation that allows one to define and join multiple communities without having to re-enter information. This creates both a top layer of commonality and overview without giving up the unique flavor of each individual group. Features are fairly robust and very easy to use, although lacking Near-Time's Wikis, premium subscription capabilities and more professional-oriented features such as calendaring, task management and file storage.

I think that we're going to see products like Ning and Near-Time become highly successful this year in much the same way that Blogger and TypePad soared in popularity as weblogging became a popular pursuit. There is also that chicken-and-egg factor that well-designed tools can engender: will people's interest in social media beyond weblogs explode once tools that combine various social media features begin to make it easier for groups of people to express themselves to one another more effectively in private and public settings? I think so. The 57 million or so weblogs that Technorati reports being out there on the Web are just the tip of the social media iceberg. Toss in everyone that's posted a MySpace, Facebook or Orkut profile along with the explosion of Wikis and the growth social media encompasses far more rapidly expanding demographics.

In the meantime most publishers are just beginning to get comfortable with the idea that weblogs are an acceptable publishing tool for serious content. As more and more social media outlets make it easy to create highly targeted public and private audiences via professional-grade content technologies more and more page inventory that is outside the reach of their potential advertisers and subscribers is being generated. The good news is that there's nothing to stop a smart publisher from grabbing their own space in this growing mix of content technology platforms for social media - or to make a smart acquisition. Ning is still in its very early days, as are many other more sophisticated self-service publishing technologies, but expect it to begin to make waves as digital natives tire of the same-old same-old from large-scale communities and Johnny-one-note technologies and begin to define communities that are both more under their control and more interesting to their members.

Labels: Near-Time, Ning, pbwiki, Social Media, Trends

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

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

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

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

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

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

Information World Review recaps the recently signed declaration of major scientific, technical and medical journal publishers regarding pending E.U. legislation pushing to move towards free and open access to scholarly research after a limited time of private publications. The "Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing" has been gaining signatories over the past few weeks from major publishing houses and academic institutions. The ten-point document is a carefully crafted list of statements that attempts to justify the value of current publishing models to the scholarly community and institutions consuming their research. The statements range from the relatively innocuous - "The mission of publishers is to maximise the dissemination of knowledge through economically self-sustaining business models" - to the provocative: "Open deposit of accepted manuscripts risks destabilising subscription revenues and undermining peer review."

In sum the intent of the declaration is to counter the movement towards government-mandated open access to papers deposited in publicly accessible online repositories. There are some compromises in the points designed to whittle away some who may be looking for ways to find some room for compromise - "Raw research data should be made freely available to all researchers" - but in sum the declaration is a statement that says, in effect, that scholarly publishers and the peer review process that supports their publishing processes work just fine and should not be challenged significantly. This is not unexpected, but it is disappointing nevertheless.

Scholarly publishers have recognized rightly that their trade is at a major crossroads given the pending E.U. legislation. Pushing forward with government-mandated open access without clear methods to support peer review processes required to generate that research may indeed pose a hazard to the integrity of academic research. But in truth this will be the case regardless of whether the E.U. open access initiative is passed or not. Existing publishing models for scholarly research may be sustainable indefinitely, but the open access movement has created already an important beachhead in the marketplace that questions not just the profit motive but the exiting peer review process. In essence the publishers are saying, "Let's keep our current inefficiencies because this is the only way that we can guarantee monies to sustain peer reviewing of papers." Yet as the demand for print journals diminishes and as more interactive peer review processes unfold through the open access initiative the necessity of high-priced journals pricing to maintain existing peer review methods is likely to be challenged strongly in the open marketplace.

Scholarly publishers are so tied to their existing revenue models that they fail to see even greater opportunities for profits in the processes that lead up to final publication. Although access to finalized juried publications is important, it's more important overall to researchers wishing to stay on the edge of important scholarly work to be a part of the discussions and modifications that lead up to the finalization of a paper. The peer review process as it exists today exposes new ideas to too narrow an audience for critique and enhancement prior to final publication. Instead of using today's print-based inefficiencies as the basis for journal pricing publishers should consider developing access to pre-publication materials through community-based online publishing as the basis for premium pricing. This will ensure better input from topic-oriented communities and relieve both publishers and governmental agencies from the need to focus on protecting copyright of finalized materials as the basis for scholarly publishing profits.

In an era in which Wikis, weblogs and other social media are demonstrating the ability of community publishing to be monetized effectively content producers of all kinds need to adjust to the idea that controlling copies of content is not as important as managing the communities that generate it and consume it. Copyright still has an important place in publishing but increasingly it will revert to a secondary role as licensing access to private communities whose communications are at least as valuable as finished works of authorship gains center stage. In the marketplace of ideas, people will gravitate towards being in on the key conversations far more than they will the minutes of those conversations. By focusing too intently on the threat to existing monetization models scholarly publishers are likely to be bypassed as other well-funded efforts move past the copyright model and towards more dynamic ways to generate value from scholarly publishing. The Brussels Declaration will to little if anything to change these realities.

Labels: Brussels Declaration, copyright, open access, scholarly publishing, Social Media, STM

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

Click here to read the full News Analysis

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

Why do so many news and entertainment clips show up on services such as YouTube? Well, in part because many content producers make it so doggone hard to extract content through legitimate channels. Voxant is aiming to change that by leveraging users as distribution agents for legitimately licensed news and entertainment content from traditional outlets. The latest announced partner is McClatchy-Tribune Information Services, which will provide news stories, photos and graphics via Voxant's TheNewsRoom portal. TheNewsRoom allows one to search news text, audio, video and graphics by major categories or search terms and then to extract code for embedding the content into a Web page. The embedded object (example below) includes a "Mash" button that will allow others to copy the embedding code. The content is ad-supported, with a portion of revenues from ads going to the person registered with Voxant for initiating mashups.