I have been using Google Chrome as my Web browser for several months, now, after giving up on Microsoft Internet Explorer years ago and then suffering from Firefox's add-ons and crashes bogging down what little memory was left on my PC. The Chrome browser fires off separate processes for each window or tab that you open, making it easier to keep it humming along as a stable Web appliance. If one window or tab fouls up, you get a polite "aw, snap" message from Chrome and the rest of your browsing stays intact. That's the kind of simplicity and reliability that's sadly lacking from most other Web browsing software that tries to address too many technology agendas.

Labels: browser, Chrome, content, firefox, Google, Microsoft, operating system, OS, Trends, windows

Amongst other things that I was checking out during my book-writing sabbatical was Amazon's Kindle portable reading device, courtesy of the Westport Public Library's lending desk. I checked out the unit for a few days, which actually turned into about two weeks due to a bad cold that caught me unexpectedly, but it was long enough to appreciate the ins and outs of this increasingly popular device.

A Kindle starts up easily enough by sliding a slim switch on the back of the unit, though its being next to a switch that activates the unit's wireless networking capabilities makes this something a bit awkward to do by habit. You have to flip the Kindle unit over to make sure that you're hitting the right switch most time. There are a lot of little ergonomic issues like this in the Kindle, ideas that look good in the design phase that perhaps could have been better thought out in real life. The keyboard of a Kindle falls into that category also, being barely usable for hunting and pecking but with a slippery and ambiguous feel that makes it unthinkable to use it for more than a few must-do tasks.

Overall, though, many of the key features are remarkably easy to use. The unit boots up quickly and its basic page turning functions are remarkably intuitive, with large broad keys on each side of the unit for turning forward and backwards. A Kindle will boot up to where you were last looking at content, so it's not always necessary to bookmark where you were last reading - same when you return to a specific book. There is a small scroll wheel at the bottom of a thin channel that parallels the main screen: scroll the wheel and a kind-of cursor will move up and down next to the screen and allow you to select from pop-up menus or to click on links. I thought that this would be a really inconvenient interface but you get used to it fairly easily. I can see how its steadiness will be useful in bumpy environments like subway trains. So for basic functions and navigation control you can give it a "weird but usable" rating for the most part.

The eInk display was somewhat disappointing in that the background was rather grayish rather than whitish, which made many illustrations almost impossible to make out clearly and made it a little more difficult to use in dim light. But in spite of this the display was remarkably readable for text - especially when the font size was bumped up a bit. Whew - for those of us who rely on reading glasses or progressive lenses, this is a blessing. There are plenty of great books that I'd love to pore through that have bitsy little print that wears my eyes out very quickly. With a Kindle you don't get print fatigue or the fatigue of looking at a backit screen. With bumped-up font sizes there's not that much information on any given page but the ease of turning to a new page of content makes up for that mild inconvenience easily. I found that I really enjoyed reading materials on the Kindle once I got settled in for a good sit-down.

The early Kindle models now available do provide Web access, but except for a handful of Web sites well adapted to the unit it's largely an exercise in fumbling through awkwardly formatted content - and also a feature that led to the unit freezing twice. A push of a bent paper clip into the unit's reset hole got it back to good order, but this is not a unit meant to replace mobile units with more robust Web browsing capabilities. Still, for a quick sneak peek at the headlines, it beats going back to the PC sometimes. The wireless service was quite good at my home, so chances are it will perform reasonably well with its network connectivity turned on wherever broadband services perform well. However, leaving the wireless connection does drain the batteries far more quickly than normal local -only reading would. In reading-only mode the Kindle batteries last for many days of typical use.

It's certainly a unit that I would consider as a convenience for future book purchases, especially given Amazon's pricing that enables one to purchase both a printed book and a Kindle-compatible copy for one purchase price, or get a Kindle-only copy for an even steeper discount. But what of gift books - or, for that matter, the huge library of printed books already at my disposal? The huge gap in Kindle's market strategy is a lack of "hooks" to keep people attached to their existing libraries and to be able to move on to new books once their usefulness has run their course. There's no real concept of a "used" market for Kindle books, much less the ability to add significant value to them in a way that could be onpassed to others.

More importantly there is little ability to use a Kindle book to activate online content. For example, if I am reading a passage and would like to research a specific person or historical event mentioned in the book, there are no "hooks" to online content that would make that easy - nor any way to store that research with my Kindle book copy for future reference. It's still a fairly unimaginative approach to book marketing. This may reflect the generally conservative approach to book packaging and marketing that still grips many publishing houses, but this conservatism now competes with a demographic curve that is racing against the clock.

Like the music industry print publishers have locked in their future to proprietary technologies to protect existing business models, but in the process of doing so they may have sold away their futures. With an explosion of different kinds of portable devices reaching the marketplace today and the promise of an even more complex array of devices fitting people's lifestyles in the future, why on earth would an entire industry select a proprietary platform to develop their future revenues? In a few years I believe that we will look at experiments such as the iPod and the Kindle much as people today look back on proprietary electronic content services such as Compuserve or the original AOL and ask themselves, what were we thinking?

The future of book publishing will rest on more open publishing platforms that enable book content to move to the contexts and popular devices in which it's valued most far more effectively and that will enable others to add value around a given book independent of its initial publisher. Book publishers already are more aware that their best strengths lie in talent management, providing services that leverage as many aspects of an author's value as rapidly and as effectively as possible through the lifecycle of a given work of authorship. But expect that more nimble companies who see the ability to manage talented authors more effectively through a variety of publishing media to challenge traditional publishing houses over the next few years, especially those who are best able to leveral social media outlets to build and maintain loyal communities of readers and commenters. The Kindle is a nifty little device, but it's just a hint of where the future of book publishing could take us in the not too distant future.

Labels: amazon, books, eInk, fm publishing, kindle, review, Trends, usablity

If you go through Grand Central Terminal in New York and many other major transportation hubs you're likely to encounter the new immersive style of ad campaigns gaining popularity, with huge stick-on panels for one product following one after the other on walls, floors and any other surface that will get your attention. Grab the shuttle subway train to Times Square and you're likely to wind up in a car that's a head-to-toe ad for rum, athletic shoes or whatever other consumer experience that someone wants you to deep-fry in for a few moments. It appears as if such methods are making their way onto the Web as well, now.

Jason Calacanis Twittered about a new site called break.com, a new site specializing in little video clips, photos, games and such for those seeking some well-packaged time wasters and potential big bucks - up to USD 2K if your uploaded content makes it to their home page . Digg meets YouTube, if you will. The site itself is amusing enough, well-designed and sure to gain some attention, but the interesting thing that I found about it was that it has an ad for an upcoming movie wrapping itself entirely around the main content area on the site's home page. Immersive ads have made their way to the Web - courtesy of the high-res screens that are the typical norm now for most Web consumers. View the page in a smaller display and the sides clip off neatly, making for a big banner ad with a little noise on the side.

As much as this is about making more of an immersive experience online I think that it's also acknowledging another immersive medium that's beginning to get the attention of consumers: HDTV. Before we got our new hi-def set I rarely focused on the TV itself unless it was breaking news or a key sporting event. With HDTV, the quality of the picture is so much closer to the visual quality of the typical PC monitor that you actually wind up watching shows again - and sometimes the ads that go with them. The Break.com all-screen ad makes use of all of the screen real estate to get a message across, a large-scale distraction on a page that's all about distractions. Oddly enough, then, it fits right in - and helps to get through to consumers equipped with both HDTV and TiVo-like devices. I suspect that we'll probably see some back-channeling of this technique into HDTV channels as advertisers begin to realize that some shows have blank screen margins that can be exploited more effectively for their campaigns. Myself, I'd rather see Web content of my own selection in that space, but that's for another post.

Labels: advertising, break.com, Calacanis, Trends

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

Three years ago Dr. Shalini R. Urs, the Executive Director of the International School of Information Management at the University of Mysore, contacted me about speaking at the Infovision conference, a new event that was focusing on how leading content technologies and services are changing enterprise, media and personal publishing in India. At the time I had to say no to her generous request and likewise last year. But when her third request arrived earlier this year it was clear to me that the time to say yes had come. Long known for its support of global publishers through development and production services India is beginning to come into its own right as a major media powerhouse, becoming ever more adept at servicing both global and domestic markets with increasingly sophisticated content services.

The Infovision 2007 conference chaired by Dr. Shalini Urs certainly bore out my perception of India as a nation on the move. Peppered with leading thinkers from Google, Yahoo, Thomson and other international electronic publishers the conference was also thick with insight from domestic companies and universities who demonstrated that India is developing an assertive outlook on its ability to innovate, as well as to automate, in the delivery of leading content services. This was a world-class conference filled with world-class thinking.

Yet this move towards innovation comes against a backdrop of India's economic and demographic realities. Dr. F.C. Kohl, Vice Chairman of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), lead off the two day event with a recap of how India's exclusion from much of the industrial revolution creates urgency for its emerging transformation in the current information revolution. Sometimes referred to as the father of the Indian software industry, Dr. Kohl was quick to remind the conference-goers that India had only a handful of PCs - some estimates would place it at about 14 million - for its billion-plus population. In some ways this is good news, as the domestic marketplace has a tremendous upside, yet Dr. Kohl claimed that India lacked basic industrial infrastructure that would enable India to make low-cost PCs for themselves.

But just because PCs are a relative rarity in India does not mean that there is not an enormous penetration of electronic information services into the world's fourth largest economy. Go down the streets of Mumbai and one of the most common sights that you'll find is the local mobile phone dealer sandwiched in to any number of storefronts. According to the Indian government 90 percent of mobile phones in use in India are made domestically, with the total population of phones expected to soar to around 250 million by the end of this year, powered by the burgeoning wealth of India's rapidly expanding middle class. This is stimulating vigorous growth of domestic content services taking advantage of domestically produced mobile platforms - a strong combination.

The technological know-how to power these changes was highlighted in data on patent growth presented by Dr. Hsinchun Chen, the McClelland Professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Arizona. Dr. Chen's data showed India to be the world's fastest growing source of patents, much of it via foreign investors who hold those patents but through which the domestic Indian economy is certain to benefit from this nation's re-emergence as a major center of innovation.

Jayanta Chatterjee PhD, a Professor at the Industrial and Management Engineering Department of IIT Kanpur with deep experience in commercial IT services, highlighted at the conference how deeply this revolution in mobile services will penetrate - and how much that it's required. Professor Chatterjee noted that India needs to double its rate of agricultural production growth in the next five years to keep up with the demands of its population, a challenge and a time frame that makes it impossible to rely on literacy efforts alone to educate and inform the 900 million people in India who speak hundreds of native languages and dialects but not English.

Professor Chatterjee's hopes for these people is expressed through the Agropedia project, a repository of agricultural knowledge and know-how sponsored by IITK that uses farmer-created ontologies and insights to help people contribute and benefit from front-line experiences. Currently the Agropedia interface requires villagers to travel to computer-based koisks for access to its resources but IITK is moving to introduce a voice interface to Agropedia that could allow voice access and contributions via mobile phones. Instead of waiting for knowledge to be normalized into a standard printed language the voice-activated Agropedia will enable knowledge systems to be built upon the rich fabric of languages that make sense to the people most responsible for agricultural production in India. As Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research put it at the conference, we are moving to an era in which our identities are being built around the concept of "I share, therefore I am." While Arun Ramanujapuram, head of the Advanced Technology Group at Yahoo! Bangalore and other panelists pointed out the usual drumbeat of how Web 2.0 is being used in India for marketing and branding efforts the Agropedia project seems to be indicative of the kinds of publishing tools that are more likely to have a significant economic impact for this complex nation closer to is real economic roots.

I would be misleading you to say that the conference at the ITC Maratha focused only on such macroeconomic matters, for in fact there was a great deal of industry-leading insight at the very edge of he content industry throughout the Infovision 2007 conference. But the confluence of the leading edge of content and everyday Indian life informed many of the insights inevitably. For example Rohini Srihari, PhD, CEO of Janya, a U.S. company specializing in multi-language text analytics, highlighted the emerging importance of proximity-based mobile content applications as helping to drive the value of user-generated content. But she also noted that of the world's webloggers 39 percent were blogging in English, 31 percent in Japanese and 12 percent in Chinese. If most of those 300 million mobile phones in India are being used by non-English speakers then there's a large gap to fill in getting people creating social media content in native languages and dialects.

L. Venkata Subramanian PhD of the IBM India Research Lab noted that the power of the collective wisdom found in weblogs was already so strong in Pakistan that blocking them was one of the first priorities of Pakistan's government during the recent state of emergency in that neighboring nation. He also reminded people of the "hole in the wall" experiment with a PC embedded in a wall available for public use in a poor New Delhi neighborhood several years ago. The most avid users were children aged 6 to 12, who learned how to collaborate with one another to surf the Web and to use software without any instruction. When asked how they liked using the computer, they said, "What's a computer?" In many ways the universality of microprocessors in our daily lives has many people asking that very same question in many venues. Humanity is learning a great deal from one another how to publish at least as fast as we are learning from experts. Teachers, mentors and innovators are still needed, but the innate ability and desire of people to communicate is the most potent power in publishing today.

It's hard to do justice to all of the great presentations and discussions at this conference but I would be remiss if I did not mention Noshir Contractor, PhD of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. His excellent keynote presentation highlighted many of the learnings he as attained from studying firms such as Proctor & Gamble trying to leverage knowledge networks in enterprise and media environments. Looking at publishers such as LinkedIn which are developing tools that are extending social networks into knowledge networks Dr. Contractor offered the term "cognitive knowledge networks" to describe this complex interplay found in peer-driven relationships that is driving many of today's most valuable insights in enterprise and media content markets. The cognitive power of these networks lies oftentimes in their diversity, as opinions that would otherwise be lost in "groupthink" get a fair audience that can help to change the direction of decision-making processes. This ability to focus more efficiently on the weaker or contrasting ties in one's network that can yield deeper insights. As applications that can mine physically proximate people come into play in the near future this concept of cognitive knowledge networks is certain to become a key cornerstone for those trying to maximize their value in publishing.

When you invest 14-plus hours each way in a coach plane seat you're hoping for good return on your investment; overall I must say that this was a conference that paid off handsomely for me. I was also glad to have a day to explore Mumbai itself beyond the posh comforts of the ITC Maratha and to get some street-level perspective on how India is absorbing the changes driven by its strengthening media resources. More on those adventures later. For now suffice it to say that so many of the key innovations that are driving publishing today combine the leading talents of India with those found in Western markets that it will become increasingly important for Western publishers to tune in to India's insights through venues such as the Infovision conference more frequently in the future.

Labels: bombay, events, india, infovision 2007, mumbai, Trends

When first I arrived on Wall Street many years ago at a major financial information company I was totally captivated by the notion of real-time news and information being at our fingertips every moment of the day. While other people lived through events in a seemingly second-hand world of news we were in on the cutting edge of events at all times. Reporters leaping over one another to cover these events in our newsroom was a given, and a thrill to watch as they shaped the news for leading investors worldwide.

But times change. Today what we used to consider elite real-time news is what most people on the Web expect to get as a matter of course, while traders in financial circles measure information timeliness that can give them a trading advantage via "hot news" in sub-millisecond timeframes. The Associated Press' CEO Tom Curley painted a picture of this evolving landscape for news in a recent address at the annual Knight-Bagehot Dinner in New York. In his address Curley was quick to chide "editors [who] need to stop pining for the old world and intensify the leading to the new" and to suggest that news organizations' "focus must be on becoming the very best at filling people’s 24-hour news needs." He also outlined how AP bureau offices would be staffed with more people dedicated to creating news rather than distributing it. Certainly moves such as these will help AP to generate quality news cost-effectively. But Curley fell short in his defining the scope of a number of key parameters that would help real changes to come about.

A key unrealistic expectation that Curley advanced is the role that distribution management plays in online content: "We have the power to control how our content flows on the Web. We must use that power if we’re to continue to be financially secure and independent enough to speak truth to power." It would be more accurate to say that publishers have the power to understand how their content flows on the Web. Yes, through proper packaging a publisher can employ business or legal measures to enforce some commercial arrangements over that flow in many instances, but the notion that a wire service or any other content distribution service has the ability to control distribution on the Web definitively is not only inaccurate but a folly for growing a business.

With the exception of high-end professional applications such as securities trading the ability to monetize news lies far less in its ability to be distributed and far more in its ability to be contextualized. "Hot news" without a hot context is just not hot - especially when the hot contexts far outweigh the relatively small handful of contexts that used to exist through distribution-oriented media outlets. With social media creating millions of highly personalized contexts for news it is to a publisher's advantage to maximize distribution in the most cost-effective manner to those contexts. The brand value is not in the "AP" logo next to the headline or lede but in the value that it provides in the moment. While copyright in those contexts is certainly worth defending if you make the brand less able to flow into the contexts in which news can be monetized most effectively you reduce the opportunity for revenues substantially.

The New York Times understood this well enough when it lowered its subscription barrier to TimesSelect content and the Wall Street Journal appears headed towards more such exposure. Curley's suggestion of introducing tiered pricing for "hot" news versus hours-old news may have some value in this regard but if others are adept at making money without such a scheme it will be hard position to defend except at the highest end of enterprise markets. The general abandonment of 15-minute delayed pricing for stock tickers on television and the Web points towards an environment where the ability to monetize news on an exclusive basis has disappeared in large part from consumer media. It's about value relative to what else can be created in a medium, not just what you feel is valuable independent of that medium.

The fault lies not in the Web but in the reluctance of publishers to embrace monetization models beyond distribution control. "Speaking the truth to power" does indeed cost money, but it doesn't seem to ring true that this necessitates the primacy of one particular monetization model. AP has begun some experimentation with viral distribution via embedded content which is a hopeful sign for future efforts. But in an era in which the world edits its own front page and in doing so assigns value to news an organization creating news must adjust its expectations and acknowledge that speaking the truth to power also requires the active cooperation of those user-editors to make that truth relevant to power.

It's not just a matter of protecting copyright in a social media environment: it's a matter of being the master of monetizing social media through the inherent strengths of its contexts. Where value is created, monetization - and brand authority - follows. To insist that monetization and brand authority must be respected regardless of their relative value in new contexts leads inevitably to a degradation of both monetization and brand authority. Monetization isn't the real protection of quality news, it's really the creation of a defensible value proposition that protects quality news. The money - and the security to speak the truth confidently - comes from people valuing what you have to say in the most open marketplace of ideas available.

This is the inherent shift in publishing that continues to leave many in the industry not only at a fork in the road but well behind others who didn't even bother to look for the fork. It is, you might say, the difference in shifting an outlook from the East side of Manhattan to the West side versus shifting an outlook from the East coast to the West coast of the U.S. (or any other source of publishing innovation). Be a master of value in these new contexts, says the West coast, and the East coast time and again says, "Show me the money" - which sounds great and practical, except when the West coast comes up with so many new contexts that can make money that they are dumbfounded as to where to start to pick off what turns out to be sloppy seconds for monetization.

The solution to this problem lies in part in recognizing that the East coast crowd needs to be the master of monetizing contexts that the West coast creates, not the follower. Instead of sitting back on their heels and sending in a licensing team after the lawyers have roughed up a dot-com baddie established players in publishing need to think, "How can we be the next Google of content monetization? How can we be outrageously on the front lines of helping people make money from content that gets consumed the way that people want it? How can we create content packaging that is so compelling that it cannot help but to make money?" With an increasing stream of large media companies cutting deals for contextual ad networks you can see that they are starting to get a hint of what this is all about, but it's still mostly about putting up ads and not really about owning the most compelling value proposition that makes people want to advertise.

An example of this can be seen in the abandonment of print as a valuable medium. Curley suggests in his speech, "There’s still a place for appointment media -- a home-delivered newspaper on the porch each morning or an evening newscast while making dinner. But it is a smaller place. People, of course, want the news when they want it." While print's lack of exclusivity is hardly news, most publishers have been utterly uncreative in their approach to print as a highly valuable medium. Print is a medium for the most tactile and high-quality physical engagement with content: its value will be long-standing. An organization like AP has the ability to enable technologies that would allow consumers and enterprises to get highly customized print publications that would be highly affordable - and highly valuable to marketers. Instead, publishers crank out the same old proprietary content instead of putting the selection and the editing in the hands of their readers.

If this sounds as if I got up on the wrong side of the bed you may be right, but only because it is really frustrating at times to see how slowly major media companies adapt to these trends - frustration that is shared with many people working for those companies, I can assure you. There are scarce few that have had the courage to innovate with the fearlessness that's required to become a winner in the 21st century content world. AP may yet be one of those survivors under Curley's leadership as he strives to reinvent a culture that has much of which to be proud, but that equally needs to put aside that pride and acknowledge what the real goals must be for a news organization in the 20th century. AP's worldwide network of journalists and member organizations has an opportunity to reinvent the value of news around contexts rather than distribution, and many of the skills to make that so. But time is of the essence...

Labels: AP Tom Curley, Monetization, News, Trends

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

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

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

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

Labels: Google, marketing, Trends, X PRIZE

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

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

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

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

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

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

CNET News covers the first major ratings results from its revised audience ratings methodology at comScore's Media Metrix unit and the results are not altogether rosy for major portal providers. According to CNET under ComScore's new qSearch 2.0, Yahoo lost market share from a year ago and is now at 23.5 percent for July, while Google gained share, reaching 55.2 percent market share. The New York Times notes also a fall in Forbes.com's audience measurement from 15.3 million in its original February data to a revised figure of 13.2 million.

One of the key factors aiding Google in the new measurement system is comScore's inclusion of search queries initiated via Google's infrastructure through search partners, as well as queries into "universal search" categories such as news or images from a search engine's home page initiated off of an initial query.

All of this builds audience share, which despite protests from other portal providers about quality audiences is still a major factor. The difference now, though, is that ratings companies are recognizing that in a world of embedded content, OEM relationships and mashups the "here" of content is less about who comes to your site and more about how your content gets in front of audiences in many venues. Jeff Jarvis notes in a "portals are past" rant that it doesn't matter if you get 10,000 impressions on a site with an audience of 100 million impressions or from multiple sites with smaller audiences, which is somewhat to the point but misleading.

With advertisers focusing increasingly on conversational marketing and contextual ad placement the new audience metrics are rewarding publishers whose content can engage those audiences in as many finely defined contexts as possible. The issue is less the total size of a portal's audience and more the ability of a portal to define the right audiences for advertisers. It isn't so much a matter of "big is bad and small is good" as it is getting the right context for your audience no matter where they congregate.

This is where Google has done itself an enormous favor over the past several years in encouraging the use of its content via mashups, Google Co-Op and other tools that make it easy for both professionals and amateurs to use Google content in so many different contexts.
There is a lot to be said for the strategies of portals such as Yahoo! and Ask.com to engage audiences more deeply at their own destination sites to build quality audience engagement but they have lagged behind Google in defining unique contexts for content beyond their portals that may be less heavily branded but of equal value to advertisers. At publisher sites such as Forbes.com the problems are not so different, with a preponderance of traditionally syndicated content building up clicks but failing to produce enough unique content that can make a dent through their own syndication strategies to take advantage of new audience metrics.

In all of these instances Google gained an advantage by focusing on syndicating context rather than content, avoiding the expenses and lethargic pace of traditional content licensing deals in favor of making it easy for people to find anyone's content in the right context and to build additional and unique content around it. This can happen on large portals or small portals - it matters not to Google, as long as it keeps growing.

We've long held that portal strategies were topping out, so none of this comes as a terrible surprise, but it's interesting to see how advertisers in search of meaningful metrics are now one of the key drivers that are showing the way to online publishers who may have doubted the value of Google's strategies to advertisers. Traditional portals will continue to be important as branding mechanisms for content producers and marketers but the highly portable value of context is beginning to to carve away at the bottom line of portal producers.

Labels: audience measurement, embedding, mashups, portals, search, Trends

These are not the salad days for many Digital Rights Management providers, with major music producers such as Universal eschewing proprietary copy protection in an effort to blunt efforts by Apple and others to control music distribution and pricing. But just because you are enabling open copying doesn't mean that you have to give up on copyright. PC World covers a new digital watermarking technology from Activated Content that enables music producers to track copying of music via standard audio file formats. The technology in Activated's watermarking algorithms is very powerful, but because it does not prevent access to the music itself there's very little motivation for the average music consumer to crack the code. This is very much along the lines of what we've been encouraging for some time, analogous in some ways to what Attributor is doing with hypertext-based digital content.

The key to success in digital content distribution in an era that values the context that content finds itself in as much as the content itself is to not use access control as a mechanism for copyright enforcement. For those such as movie producers who have not yet come up with effective contextual monetization models DRM will be with us for quite some time, though, as evidenced by the prevalence of Blu-ray format DVD discs driving HD video sales. When your focus is more on an uninterrupted performance with a high-level technology component DRM may still be able to carry the freight. But as contextual advertising makes its way into video distribution as well (pre-rolls as in move theatres today) we may begin to see some loosening of DRM for video also, especially as it will find itself competing more with increasingly ad-driven game content for audience attention. All content producers concerned about copyright in an era that increasingly values user-initiated content distribution need to consider how watermarking technologies may be able to help further revenue streams beyond their traditional models.

Labels: copyright, DRM, Trends, watermarking

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

As noted earlier in ShoreViews Video there are two interesting reports that came out this week which paint a picture of online marketing increasingly dependent on content. The first item that caught my attention was an article from MediaPost, which references a research report from Yahoo and ChannelForce on online content's influence on consumer purchasing. According to the report seventy-five percent of consumers who researched their purchases before visiting a retail outlet used the Internet as their primary research source. The leading online resources were retail Web sites (73 percent), manufacturer websites (68 percent) and search engines (49 percent). Encouraging for search engines was data indicating that purchasers who use search engines tend to purchase more than consumers who don't use search engines - up to ten percent more for electronics such as digital cameras.

But there's an important wrinkle in this research process pointed out by data from a recent MarketingSherpa study of online purchasing. When the retail outlet is an online ecommerce site consumers are waiting longer than ever to make an online purchase. Where in a 2005 study there was typically a 19-hour delay between an initial visit to an ecommerce site in this year's study the lag between initial click and purchasing is up to more than 34 hours. Why the increased delay? Anne Holland at MarketingSherpa cites more research and comparison shopping being done, a view that seems to correlate with the Yahoo/ChannelForce study.

It's good news for content producers that there is more online digging than ever before, but what kind of content should buyers be dawdling over before heading out the door to the store or clicking on that shopping cart? Mike Moran at Web Pro News has some key points of advice on the Yahoo/Channel Force report:

Too often, marketers shy away from providing the most attention-getting and persuasive information. Do you have information on your site about the problems that your product solves? Not just specifications and fancy features, but real problems? Do you tell stories of how these problems were solved for real customers with your product?

Certainly the story-telling part of online content is an important part of a robust publishing strategy. As outlined by David Meerman Scott in his book on The New Rules of Marketing and PR sellers have to think more like publishers - both on their site and through public relations channels that let people encounter stories about their products through weblogs, press releases and other search-friendly channels. But the other side of the story-telling equation is to make sure that your stories are being told by your customers through social media. Though not spelled out explicitly in this research it's a fair bet that some of the extra time being spent by buyers at retail sites such as Amazon and Buy.com is in poring through user-generated product reviews - and generating their own questions and comments that take a while to get answers.

While brand advertising in traditional media outlets is still important to building sales this research argues for more highly targeted advertising techniques that focus more intently on reaching people when they are more deeply engaged in their product research efforts. Focusing ads more explicitly on social media sites and to complement consumer and expert reviews is certainly one part of the lesson to be learned from this research, as is an acceptance of the importance of reaching buyer-researchers when they are in search mode. But the other side of the equation is to think about what kind of content that you're using in your online ad campaigns and marketing channels. The research argues strongly for an approach that emphasizes widgets embedded with facts, product comparisons, customer stories and other decision support materials more than sassy messaging. This is not as easy to fathom out sometimes as your typical online ad run but it's essential to the process of transforming increasingly conversational shoppers into committed - and higher value - purchasers.

Labels: channelforce, ecommerce, marketingsherpa, Research, Trends

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

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

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

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

Labels: Google, healthcare, scholarly publishing, Trends

Kudos to David Pogue at The New York Times for a great review of the new iPhone from Apple. David's general view is that the appliance lives up to its hype, but he points out a number of key shortcomings, such as inferior text input (keys appears on the flat glass display), downright awkward phone call initiation, the need to ship it back to Apple after a year or so to get the battery replaced (a la iPod) and inferior network performance from AT&T. But while the iPhone may turn out to be the worst of both worlds for people already attuned to sophisticated mobile devices such as Blackberries (no coincidence that the splash ad for this article was for their new sleek model) the key to the iPhone's appeal centers around its ability to be a content-serving device like no other. GPS-keyed maps make the device a traveler's godsend for navigating unfamiliar territories and coming up with nearby services. The intuitive interface enables a user to shift to Web content seamlessly in a full-featured browser that comes with a very affordable (USD 20/month) internet access plan that may yet knock the legs out from underneath many an online content deal.

Ah, but with limitations there, as well. Flash and Java are not enabled in the browser, so the tons 0f online video and animated content available online is out of bounds. Of course there's video and audio from the iTunes store, which is most probably the point: after years of platform ju-jitsu from Microsoft to frustrate publishers it's Apple's turn to make it that much harder to come up with a platform-independent distribution strategy. But common file formats such as PDF, Word and Excel are accessible via iPhone so it will at least be useful for serious reading to some degree. And unless you're in an AT&T wireless hotspot broadband performance isn't going to be an option in most instances.

I think of the iPhone as a very portable Microsoft Surface - an appliance that is ahead of many technologies' ability to sustain a very compelling product vision but that nevertheless gets people jazzed about the possibilities of a new way of looking at computing. Unlike Microsoft's table-bound Surface, though, the iPhone is perfect for a younger, mobile generation not interested in plunking down thousands of dollars for a major piece of...furniture? But iPhone's most important impact on the content marketplace is likely to be its ability to create demand for broadband wireless on a mass scale, demand that's likely to fire up competition from other wireless carriers to deliver both more coverage and more effectively enabled interfaces to the Web. AT&T wins this round for Web access, but what will happen when Verizon enables YouTube access? Consider this iPhone debut the launch of the real mobile Web - with some frenetic developments yet to come.

Labels: iPhone, mobile, Technology, Trends

O'Reilly Radar covers the recent shift of Nature magazine's publishing policies to enable access to scientific research and data prior to it being approved for final publication by the prestigious scientific journal. Pre-published content will appear on the ad-supported portal Nature Precedings, along with unpublished manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and other scientific documents. Submissions are screened by Nature's professional curation team for relevance and quality, but are not subjected to peer review. The Precedings portal enables registrants to comment on posted materials and to upload their own materials for screening. While there is no promised path to any posted materials becoming an approved juried publication the implication is that exposure may help that process - as on the competitive PLoS ONE portal.

In truth PLoS ONE is a much more sophisticated offering overall, providing much easier digestion, notation and discussion of posted documents. Where Nature Precedings presents core content mostly in Word and PDF documents, PLoS ONE converts content into native HTML for easier online consumption and with dynamic footnote references, as well as the ability to order content in printed format. PLoS One also provides "chunked" content such as graphs and tables to help people zoom in on results more effectively. But still, in fairness to Nature the Precedings is an enormous step forward for a traditional scholarly publisher, one which, when combined with Nature's exciting main portal, is bound to make it a far more attractive online community.

The advent of the Precedings portal underscores the dwindling importance of final publication for scientific content in particular but also the increasing recognition amongst all publishers that traditional concepts of media need to adjust more rapidly to online publishing. Prior to a publication being finalized it becomes a magnet for social media, gaining audience and unique interactions that are difficult to find elsewhere - perfect for building portal traffic. Once it is declared "a publication," the reverse is true - it becomes far more important for the finalized content to travel into as many other contexts as possible to find new value. Once content is fixed in its attributes it becomes media, a commodity stripped of community and immediately in need of finding new communities and individuals to appreciate it.

This points out both the strength and the weakness of social media: it can build up loyal audiences, but unlike traditional media social media is not easily syndicated - you can't "clone" a community, whereas traditional media is all about effective cloning through syndication and mass distribution. In this sense one can see from this model where the transition from social media to traditional media is more than just waving an "approved" wand: one's whole business model for a publication has the potential of changing rapidly once it passes through that status change.

While it's still very early days for the Nature Precedings portal already it's attracted a good amount of content across a wide range of categories, holding out the promise that it will become a destination of choice for scientific researchers. But as promising and aggressive as this move is the Nature team still has catch-up work to do to get this portal up to PLoS ONE standards of usability and reusability. One hopes that in time the portal can become a more active gateway to peer review and not turn into a dumping ground for various papers and ideas. The promise is there for such development; here's hoping that such developments come sooner rather than later.

UPDATE - To clarify, the Nature Precedings portal allows content to be published by its members without the fees associated with PLoS ONE and in general content on PLoS ONE is meant to be at least on a potential track for juried approval as a publication. But still, PLoS ONE winds up having more features that make it a highly usable destination for collaboration, whilst Nature Precedings is more like a download center with some comments on the side. It would seem that the Precedings offering would benefit from some of the PLoS ONE usability and community features. Bear in mind also that some precedings posts are near-finished papers as well; the difference in business models should not detract from the wide range of content that's coming on so far. In truth it's so early in the life of Precedings it's probably too early to judge it too much one way or another what it's likely to hold based on limited postings to date.

Labels: Nature, scholarly publishing, Trends