This year's International Consumer Electronics Show was awash in more tablets than a local pharmacy, with both actual models being shown and overarching buzz from Apple's anticipated iSlate tablet offering expected later this year. While many of the new tablet models were largely warmed-over versions of netbooks or smartbooks, some were oriented towards executives and (presumably) wealthy students who would be willing to pay close to a thousand dollars for a tablet that "acted" like a paper document. Two key models making their debut at CES in this column were the Hearst-sponsored Skiff newspaper and magazine reader and the Que document and e-book reader from Plastic Logic.
The Skiff initiative from Hearst is far more than a tablet gizmo, encompassing distribution on a number of platforms including smart/super phones, PCs and other devices on which their clients would presumably want to view content laid out in traditional print format - and pay presumably premium print prices for it. The reader itself has a display almost as large as a typical notebook PC, with wafer-thin construction, eInk-like resolution and touch-screen activation. The Que reader is a similarly "thin is in" device, but the content that it can manage is oriented towards both traditional media and enterprise document management. The idea behind both devices is that you can have the convenience of digital storage and display without the hassle of dealing with Web-oriented content formats.
The real rationale behind these initiatives, of course, is more of a regressive approach to content than a progressive approach. The Skiff screams at its audience, "Print formats are still relevant, darn it!" while the Que burbles out, "Web sites for collaboration? Nevah hoid of it." And in common to these devices both traditional publisher and enterprise document management business models hope to thrive by locking in support for bright and shiny new high-tech toys that amuse people enough to let them forget that they are paying not just for a pricey device but for outmoded ways of looking at content aggregation, integration and contextualization. The Web site for Skiff tells people first that it's a "publisher-friendly" device, meaning that publishers can obtain revenues from lock-in via proprietary formats while changing as little of its outlook on its revenue streams as possible.
I am hard-pressed to think of an army of executives who have to already juggle laptop PCs, smartphones and other gizmos who will find their world to be truly simplified by this emerging world of proprietary devices. There's little doubt that the tablet format for devices will begin to pick up steam this year, especially those that are touch-enabled devices that help to eliminate the need for physical keyboards. But much of the tablet buzz is smoke and mirrors for journalists, hiding the broader reality that most major publishers are faced with a world in which their revenue streams are drying up and unlikely to be propped up for very long by proprietary tablet plays. None of these devices seem to address the primary issue facing their operations: namely that the Web as a whole is far more interesting and engaging to its readers than any given publication.
Publishers do need to focus on quality editorial operations, to be sure, to ensure that they have a product that's worth the premium prices that they hope to extract on their tablet devices. But their real competition is not bloggers or online aggregators, but other Web formats. The ease with which video can be displayed both on PC and mobile devices and the rapidly accelerating integration of voice services into Web services is creating an environment in which an enormous amount of information is being created and shared with people around the world well before it ever gets into words. The prevalence of status posting services such as Facebook and Twitter make people aware of the first and best news coverage of an event to the point that follow-up reports are as redundant to the general public as they are to stock traders equipped with real-time news feeds.
Yes, the experience of print is engaging, and, often, seductive. But in an online world built around relationships, context and collaboration, investing heavily on keeping up the appearance of the seductiveness and power of print seems to make about as much sense as an 80 year-old investing in a fifteenth round of cosmetic surgery. Premium publishing models are important, but investing in outdated business models to drive premium revenues again and again is a non-starter. It will help to stem the tide of the Web no more than 3-D television or other diverting forms of repackaging. The movie "Avatar" succeeded not because of 3-D images but because it appealed to generations young and old who are moving into new forms of relationships with information and experiences via the Web, enveloped in them constantly to the point that publishing is becoming part of who they are, as I infer in Chapter 10 of Content Nation.
With this in mind, I think that the most important "tablets" are already in many people's pockets - Web-enabled smart/super phones that provide touch-activated access to content and applications that free people from heavy and expensive PCs. Most of these devices cost a fraction of the price of the premium tablet units being promoted for sale. When touch-sensitive tablet devices based on Google's open-source Chrome OS debut later this year, the need for price-sensitive access to full-display content will be underscored yet again. The publishing industry will never grow, much less survive, if it insists on locking its hopes into the most expensive delivery mechanisms available when cost-effective alternatives abound.
What publishers should be focusing on is enabling their content for cross-platform distribution as effectively as possible, demanding premium price points where warranted based on the contextual value of their communities, features and services, not on the fleeting value of a handful of specific devices. If we are headed towards a world in which people will be able to wave an RFID-enabled phone at an item to purchase it, or similarly to execute a business agreement, then publishers need to jump off yesteryear's bandwagon and tool content to be valuable where organizations generating products and services will be thrusting their marketing investments. Gimmicky tablets will prevent this no more than Cinerama-produced films stemmed the rise of television in the 1950s and 1960s. So congratulations to the tablet producers for sucking money out of publishers who should be investing elsewhere. Hopefully next year's CES will see some more sensible solutions to content display and distribution that will be true boosts to publishers.
iPhones rocked, Google shocked and social media was no longer mocked as publishers and technology companies flocked to online content business models;
Bing had a fling and even Windows 7 would sing as Kindle took wing, but proprietary platforms are no longer king;
Those in the cloud were quite proud of profits that wowed enterprise and media markets and vowed that all content would thrive in its shroud;
Enterprise vendors clung to tight margins and hung on to hopes of new profits among rescaled businesses flung across a changing world;
Twitter got the Web a-flitter about real-time chitter-chat, making news publishers bitter about the new heavy hitter;
Murdoch howled about profits fouled by search engines that prowled for news, while AP scowled at content reuses that tempted its members to throw in the towel;
Smart phones got fast and netbooks now cast a shadow over the last bits of old-school computing;
Save the best for last! It's Wave, the rave of brave trend-setters, promising an enclave that will repave the road to the Web's future;
Feel like you need a suture or two? Don't worry. The couture of content will change soon enough. The future is bright - for those who are tough.
Everyone at Shore Communications wishes you a great holiday season and a fantastic 2010. Enjoy what is important, and let's build the future of content together next year! I hope that you enjoy the following year-end video.
In a typical game of chess, there are three distinct phases of play: the opening, in which a handful of chess pieces stake out strategic territory on the chessboard, the middle game, in which the positions of many pieces are used to jockey for control of the chessboard, and the endgame, in which the pieces are traded and moved rapidly into a reduced and final push for ultimate control of the board and the strategic goal of the game - capturing the king. It takes both logic and passion to excel at chess, but at the end of the day it's a well-executed plan that wins the day.
You might say that Google has been in the process of introducing its own endgame for online publishing, quietly moving dozens of initiatives into strategic positions which in and of themselves may seem inconsequential to the game as a whole - until its ultimate position begins to evolve rapidly. As in a chess endgame, Google's recent moves are swift, monumental in their impact and, potentially, decisive in determining the outcome of how content becomes valuable on the Web. Media critics like Ken Auletta have quipped that Google needs more "Kirks" and fewer "Spocks" to succeed, mistaking the crowded middle game of media posturing against Google for an ongoing battle, when in fact Google has been keeping its well-reasoned eye on the pieces that will be most important for the outcome of the game.
What's the king that needs to be captured in this endgame? The Moment. Media companies continue to churn out outdated moves such as media players serving up magazine-like renditions of their own content, thinking that quality that reflects the last game that they won is what will win the day. In the meantime, Google's intense concentration on processing power in cloud computing, Web-standardized applications and search dominance have revealed a strategy that is quickly eliminating viable moves for many B2B and consumer content and technology companies. After the September introduction of The Second Web via its Google Wave preview platform for real-time collaboration, Google has in recent days extended its dominance of The Moment via three new initiatives: expanded personalization of search results, real-time search results and voice, location and sight-activated mobile searches, including Google Goggles, a point-and-click camera-activated search feature.
Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has an excellent analysis of how Google's debut of personalized searching that doesn't require a Google login is introducing a "new normal" for its search environment, in which the content presented in search results will by default be different for different people based on their last 180 searches on Google. What is The Moment for these people? Where their interests have been most recently. Instead of waiting for editorial boards to decide what The Moment should be, Google is yet again trumping traditional editorial functions and allowing people's own behavior to have a seat at the editorial table automatically.
The introduction of content from real-time Web sources such as Twitter, Facebook and other status-oriented messaging services in Google search results extends The Moment into content sources that have split-second relevancy to online content seekers. Klipp Bodnar points out that this stream of tweets and postings means that B2B companies can no longer ignore real-time in favor of traditional SEO strategies if they're going to get people's attention. It's a broader scope than that, of course: nobody can afford to ignore real-time social media content generation now any more than a securities trader can ignore real-time stock tickers. All brands must enter the real-time conversation of The Moment to keep in touch with their markets and to define their markets.
Google's mobile search initiatives, introduced last week at the Computer History Museum, are perhaps the most profound in their potential impact, even if their ultimate powers are years away from being felt. Voice-activated and GPS-activated Web search is being perfected rapidly at Google and through other outlets, but the Google Goggles initiative, previewed in its development phases on MSNBC recently, brings a point-and-click element to The Moment that promises to give Google a real leg-up in mobile search markets. Using the camera in mobile phones, Goggles enables searches for information on things such as landmarks, stores, products and text simply by filling the camera's viewfinder with the item and clicking. Remember all of those fussy infra-red applications that were supposed to get us "beaming" business cards to one another? Now, just take a photo of someone's card and it will be uploaded into a contacts record. In just those few capabilities already targeted, whole content markets are about to develop as people capture content in The Moment.
And who will have all of the search data and metadata regarding all of these Moments? Yep. Yet again, Google is positioning itself to be the cloud-empowered master of what people are interested in right now, giving them the ability to bring people closer to their interests and passions simply by asking for them. And, yet again, by including as much content as possible in serving their customers, Google doesn't second-guess what people consider to be valuable in The Moment. If the stock and news tickers of the 20th century distributing content from central markets and publishers were the gold mines of Moments in that era, Google's absorption and distribution of content from anywhere to anywhere in The Moment has enabled it to enlarge its unique databases far more broadly and rapidly than any other publisher on earth. And, like a chess endgame, the speed with which other players are losing effective counter-moves against Google's strategic position in The Moment is only quickening.
No small wonder, then, that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is scrutinizing Google's acquisition of AdMob, a leading mobile ad network. Markets thrive when there are still a good number of pieces on the board to keep competition high. But perhaps it's time for the FTC and companies in the content industry to look beyond this rapidly emptying game board and to consider what the next round of content industry chess is going to look like. If The Moment is the new center of the publishing industry, how does content become most valuable in this context? The answer to this question is, in part, to acknowledge that the companies who collect the most input about the world most rapidly become the most knowledgeable about what is happening in The Moment.
It's a phenomenon that I call "the Sensor Society," a world in which our corporate awareness and memory becomes a valuable through common access in a way that reverses the "information is power" equation. Certainly having private information will continue to empower people and organizations in select circumstances, but for the average person or business having access to all information in the right context is becoming a more powerful resource for decision-making. To borrow a concept from my book Content Nation, some portion of the DNA of society is migrating into the Google-dominated cloud, with each of us feeding that part of our collective consciousness through our voices, our camera "eyes" and our fingers touching screens and keyboards. That may be a good thing for society as a whole, but it will be an enormous challenge for institutions who are not ready to accept that migration as a beneficial development.
What does this mean for publishers? It means good things for those that can manage to get their content into these personally defined Moments more effectively. But it also takes an acceptance that "the first draft of history" that many in the media business cherish as their mission is taking on a radically new form. Like the "playback" feature in Google Wave, everyone will have access to who did what where and when soon enough. The question is, who edited it the best? Google has staked its claim as the world's dominant editorial resource for displaying billions of histories a day, sweeping away front pages across the Web into a stream that assembles Moments that matter most to audiences.
We will spend time with content in any number of spaces thanks to this editorial resource, as we have on the Web for many years. But Google has accelerated the endgame radically in the past few months for those not tuned into The Moment. 2010 is going to be a year of momentous change in the content industry. Publishers that are tuned into The Moment will be in good shape to take on all of the inputs of The Sensor Society and to trigger astounding growth in cloud-based content markets. For those that aren't tuned in, well, you better get used to the idea that you're playing a two-dimensional game of chess against a 3-D chess master. Set up the chess pieces again, Spock. It's a whole new game.
Well, along with launching a book, tweaking our Web site and keeping a business a going concern, why not redesign the blog? Hey, it's a living. ContentBlogger has had a couple of minor redesigns through the years, and more is slated for the future, but it seemed time to correct some key best practices no-nos and to add in the headlines that I've been broadcasting on Twitter.
Twitter was an especially key concern, as I had given up finally on doing headlines the hard way: looking at dozens of Web site bookmarks, compiling and categorizing the best of them in an HTML editor and then cutting and pasting them into a ContentBlogger post. Yuk. How did I do that for four years? Finally last year I started to pop out headlines with links and a touch of commentary in Twitter every now and then. It seemed to be promising and I got strong feedback from folks that they were really useful. The Twitter convention is to insert keywords preceded by a pound/hash mark ("#") into the 140-character messages to help people provide categorization, so I started adding some of the key categories in the content industry that Shore tracks and analyzes, with a few extra Shore-specific categories for promotional purposes. Best of all, Twitter's real-time orientation meant that I could pound out a few headlines, go back to other tasks, and then come back and do a few more. It made for a more newsworthy approach to content news.
OK, great, but how to integrate this into ContentBlogger? Pumping them into a consolidated blog post was one option, and I may yet do that at some point, but that would take away their timeliness. I also found that the headlines were a bit of a distraction to people visiting the blog: they concealed the meaty entries that were the real "bait" for visitors. So embedding a feed of headlines seemed to be the best solution. But how? Hash marks and little personal comments had to go to make the service more readable and professional, filtering of some sort was a must - and I knew already from experience that it's hard to beat Yahoo! Pipes for reliable and quickly developed feed filtering and processing. It took just a few minutes in Yahoo! Pipes to hack together a filter that translated the hash/tags in Twitter to meaningful phrases and to filter out messages that wouldn't fit on ContentBlogger. Fortunately, having built our newsletter filter using Pipes made this a cinch. Then the question was which service to use to embed the feed. I've looked at all sorts of services that do this, and most of them are kind of half-baked. Yahoo! Pipes' badged feed widget wasn't too much better than most, but it integrated nicely with our existing formatting styles so it seemed a small price to pay for unsolicited advertising. Sorry for the badge, I try to avoid them like the plague so that you can have an impartial service, but sometimes compromises are necessary. If there's something better for embedding feeds simply, let me know.
Finally, some style nits that have been bugging me for a long time. At long last I took a deep breath and switched the main text column to the left and the secondary column to the right. It's really the way to go for readability, and I regret having ever set it up the other way. Sometimes old code is just not fun to look at, especially when you have much better things to do. I added iGoogle and Google Reader to the feed bookmark list and replaced the old "XML" feed icon to the newer and more standard orange feed logo. The AddThis bookmarking graphic I changed to the "share" label from "bookmark," as this fits better all of the options availble on AddThis. Finally, a little sidebar promo for the Content Nation book was in order, and easily done.
I hope that you enjoy having headlines back on ContentBlogger, you'll get them in a more timely fashion if you subscribe directly to Twitter or the Yahoo! Pipes feed, but if you're not that type of person you can at least know that you can view the most recent headlines easily on the scrollable sidebar. In the meantime my Twitter friends can get the hottest commentary as quickly as possible while ContentBlogger afficionados still get the best of it. Next is getting them sorted into a weekly summary for ShoreLines. Doable, but still thinking about the value of this. Let me know your thoughts on these changes, not revolutionary, to be sure, but I think that it makes for a better reading experience.
As a company that has as its tagline "Where Content, Technology and People Meet" Shore can only applaud the SIIA's decision to combine sessions for software and content professionals at its annual West Coast conference into one event this year, now dubbed NetGain. Seeing companies like Salesforce.com and Deloitte Consulting in one set of rooms and companies like LexisNexis and Wolters Kluwer in another room at this conference always seemed like a huge lost opportunity, only the moreso as Software as a Service begins to transform the face of enterprise I.T. services and content providers move more towards workflow applications and content integration technologies to build their market value. At the same time services like Google have long demonstrated that a technology that provides highly valuable context for content can be a publishing platform unto itself. So in many ways the software industry and the content industry are chasing the same high-value market opportunities and need to recognize that they have to speak in the same forums together for enterprise markets as much as for media markets.
On one level NetGain was such a perfectly natural blend of conference attendees from the SIIA Content and Software divisions that one wonders why this wasn't done earlier. This was underscored by the similar product themes brought out in the conference sessions. When software providers talked about "Software as a Service," what it really seems to say in many ways is that software companies are not succeeding as much as they used to simply by licensing their software as intellectual property and need to adopt licensing models more akin to those used for many years by enterprise subscription database services. When content providers talked about the importance of "workflow applications," What they seemed to be saying was that they cannot survive just on licensing intellectual property that gets commoditized unless it's put to work through really useful software services. Either way both software publishers and content publishers are chasing the same value proposition in the enterprise increasingly.
And for that matter, how different is "cloud computing" from the decades-old content services provided in the financial services industry by securities exchanges and companies like Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg? Certainly the Web has accelerated the development of client-server content services beyond any scale of earlier enterprise services but at the end of the day software and content services have been in a merging industry for a long time. Alacra, which won a CODiE award at NetGain for its ability to integrate content into enterprise workflows, has been working diligently for more than a decade on its powerful AlacraBook content integration services. Eventually trends catch up with long-established realities, I suppose.
The big difference today seems to be the influence of the one key ingredient that was somewhat under-represented at NetGain: social media services. Clay Shirky delivered his usual great speech about how social media services are revolutionizing publishing and ecommerce and there was a very good panel discussion lead by Dave McClure, but the increasing preponderance of social media publishing services both outside and inside major enterprises just didn't seem to register with most of the NetGain attendees. We're moving rapidly towards a predominant publishing environment in which the audience is seeking out and defining the value that it needs from content far more rapidly than traditional I.T. and publishing services are defining it.
This raises the question: what is the platform for today's and tomorrow's publishers? Certainly Salesforce.com and Google, along with other presenters, raised a compelling case for the applications programming interface, or API, being the platform of choice for the forseeable future. Being able to plug in content and functionality into one or more platforms via APIs enables people with both content and technology services to put their capabilities into the contexts that audiences value most very rapidly. Certainly the flourishing success of Facebook's APIs has helped to fuel its growth even as Google's OpenSocial API promises to bring content into social media contexts more universally. If a platform does not have the ability for content and functionality to grow through the efforts of third parties then it's going to be hard to fuel growth efficiently.
But the real platform of today and tomorrow is the community built around a platform. Bloomberg and Reuters proved this out years ago as their messaging and conversational dealing services enabled securities market traders to communicate with one another more efficiently and to contribute valuable content that resulted in the execution of securities trades. While much of the financial industry's technology and content services have shifted towards more automated functionality, the heart of what provides the firms using these services with a market advantage is the ability of people to collaborate in marketplaces through publishing. Today a new generation of business information services is emerging, highlighted at NetGain by Hoover's and ECNext, both of which are focusing on how to lock in content value through their audiences providing valuable content in the context of their platforms. A publishing community is a community that can become the heart of any platform's value. Looking at how Salesforce.com itself is moving towards integrating social media functionality this concept is hardly a secret.
There were also a lot of interesting exhibits by CODiE candidates at NetGain, which allowed people to get more "hands on" with their products before voting - sometimes literally. I especially enjoyed J.J. Keller's Safe.Sim truck driving simulator, which although it did not win in its CODiE category was both a very powerful training and evaluation tool as well as a "sleeper" software hit. With a little bit of repackaging and some consumer marketing know-how this could be a huge software hit. Truckers and truck fans around the nation and no doubt worldwide would jump at the opportunity to have a multi-player online version of this, complete with their own customizations. As for me, well, I guess I have a few things to learn about backing a semi into a loading dock.
In the paid exhibitors area I was especially impressed by a couple of offerings. Mzinga is an OEM social media community development service for both enterprise and consumer markets, enabling the collection and sharing of valuable content that builds value inside and outside the firewall. Well worth a look if you're considering stepping into social media more deeply. Vitrium Systems enables PDFs to be turned into intelligent content payloads that track audience behavior without requiring plug-ins or downloads and can also provide DRM for PDF content. For those still emphasizing print-formatted content this is an interesting play, especially for those interested in getting more play out if eBook content.
On the SIIA Previews agenda two later presentations stood out clearly. Watch Zuora, a company that promises to enable subscription models for practically everything, including content and technology to be sure but also just about any business model for any fungible product or service. Model-wise I think that they're on to something big and I plan to highlight them in future writings. It's a spinoff of ideas from Salesforce.com using telecommunications technology, Keep an eye on this one, it may take a while to take off but I think that it has the potential to hockey-stick.
Another strong Previews offering was SlideRocket, which combines powerful presentation tools, graphics development and community content to create a new way to develop and share presentations that can capture metrics on how people look at them. I think of it being to tools like PowerPoint and Photoshop and Flash what Salesforce.com and Facebook were to enterprise software and online publishing - services that defined their own categories as a new kind of publishing and in the process of doing so redefined several market segments at once by focusing on owning user content. I can't wait to get my hands on the beta.
So it was a great event, though I would hope that next year we get to see more participation both by more West Coast local firms and more major East Coast and overseas publishers. I would say that the only real disappointment that I had from the event was the rather quiet audience, which seemed in many instances to be of the opinion that while things were changing rapidly in the publishing and software industries the changes that many tout as revolutionary are not going to sweep away long-standing business models any time soon. There's more than a small grain of truth in that outlook, of course. Yet looking at the news industry, now reeling from the effects of having largely ignored the need to transform themselves radically in the face of a decade of online publishing, I think that it's safe to say that NetGain represented in many ways the admission that later is sooner than many may think.
Is Twittergramming the future of citizen news gathering? Robert Scoble is bullish on it. Also, a take on Read/Write Web's view of the past and future of the Web.
I was prone to thinking that Twitter was "yet another social media login" that would fast become another time-waster, but the buzz is becoming rather deafening so I finally broke down and set up an account. Twitter is basically a SMS-compatible messaging tool that allows one to broadcast text messages to networks of selected friends and, by default, the world. A Twitter profile allows one to get messages on any popular instant messaging service as well as on a mobile phone or online via a Web site, an embedded widget or an RSS feed. This uber-framework allows people to catch their network of contacts wherever they may be - and to shoot them little live observations.
Twitter messages can pack a fair amount of insight into a short space so some have begun to look at it as a "microblogging" service. As with blogs the medium is only as good as the message: do people really want to know every little twist of your day? Or, on the other hand, you can get over-enthusiastic about the medium and let go on a topic that gets broadcast a little too soon for its own good - as Steve Rubel noted recently. From this standpoint Twitter is more than a messaging service - it's a publishing medium that allows people to reach both micro-communities and the world as a whole. For people on the go who are shifting constantly between mobile devices and computer keyboards Twitter allows micropublishers to keep up with their social network more efficiently than either platform alone could manage.
Probably the most compelling aspect of Twitter from a publishing standpoint is its ability to onpass key URLs very quickly to people on the go. The next logical step would be to use Twitter as a service that will pop up content automatically for connected friends to share simultaneously via a browser. Instead of just social bookmarking we would then have social viewing - like having sixty people in the living room all playing with the TV remote at the same time. Twitter has its moment in the sun for now but if it cannot keep up the pace of development to stay abreast of people who want to share more than just little text messages effectively it may see its time come and go fairly rapidly. In the meantime, though, it's a convenient way to let people when you're off to the airport, down to the store for a jug of milk, sealing a deal or snapping up an award. Getting ahead of the real-time content curve will be all that more difficult as a result.
