Yes, there is a future for the content industry in media and enterprise markets, and the Software and Information Industry Association Content Division has been charting it for several years now at its Information Industry Summit events in New York City. This year's IIS is drawing more than 300 executives from leading content and technology companies, a good crowd in the middle of a dismal economy. No surprise, given the star-studded line-up of speakers that was assembled by the Content Division this year. You might say that these people are documenting a future that people have been talking about for many years and that finally arrived - a future in which the Web dominates the dialog on profits and products on a daily basis, even as high-value premium products punch through to define new opportunities for value in enterprise and media publishing. Key to that trend is the rise of technology companies that are driving change in major publishing organizations, which enable publishers to define new relationships with their clients. Are all of these publishers ready for this ever-present "future?" Let's see what these experts have to say. I will be posting on our events blog throughout the day and linking the posts to this entry. You may also find my conference Twitter messages (and retweets) here.
What can happen when you combine wireless broadband Web access with local wifi hotspots? A lot, when you come to think of it. Gizmos such as Novatel's "MiFi" unit that enable someone with mobile broadband access to set up their own local wireless "hot spot" have been out for several months, but the importance of these units is heating up with their connection to higher-powered broadband networks and the addition of features such as onboard data storage on SD cards. With more throughput and storage for data comes more ability to use these units to coordinate the bushel of devices that technophiles now travel with, helping them to synchronize communications with the world and with one another through one convenient hub. But it also presages a major shift in how homes, businesses and the world connect with one another for content.
Today most people have their mobile connectivity running in parallel with their home or office connectivity, including parallel networks for voice, video and data that cost a handsome sum for most people using them. Yet with one of these mobile network hub devices, it's easy to see how all but the most demanding uses for voice, data and video can funnel through a mobile broadband connection that can stay on our desktop or follow us on the go. Our smart phones, our eBook readers, our netbooks, our desktops, our in-home phones and our home entertainment devices can all be brought together on one seamless wifi-based communications medium.
This is likely to accelerate the move in voice communications away from traditional point-to-point circuit networks and towards an era in which voice communications are a feature of integrated voice, data and video services. It also means that we're more likely to overcome some of the global connectivity issues that exist for mobile devices: be it CDMA or GSM networks underlying mobile broadband connectivity, if you're near a hotspot of some origin, you should be able to get voice and data communications. Services such as Skype will certainly prosper in the process, but other services such as Google Voice, which help voice communications to get routed to any number of devices, are also likely to prosper as voice communications become more identity-centered rather than phone number-centered.
The bigger picture, though, is of a world in which inexpensive broadband hub devices can be placed easily in small communities and used to power local communications with both the outside world and with people within the community. Today we're seeing these devices powering personal communications, but I think that the larger potential is for devices that can connect communities with one another first and foremost with a minimum of technology. If you are living in a community in which each person cannot afford a mobile phone, that community may be able to afford collectively one connection to the outside world which is shared with a MiFi-like device that can make its connection available to the community in a reasonable scope, say a kilometer or so. People in that community could then use their mobile devices to communicate with one another and with the world, with very little ongoing cost to any one person beyond the initial cost of their own device. Most importantly, you could set up these local communications networks with or without direct connectivity to the outside world. You could have your own local Web of sorts, perhaps even with services such as Google Wave being used on a federated basis to facilitate content collection, communications and collaboration.
In turn, these individual communities could cooperate with other local communities to build "bottom-up" communications networks, developing regional communications systems that may be centered around local languages and dialects, connecting to more commonly used languages found in the "outside world" through a handful of communications access points. Every kilometer or so you could poke a solar-powered hub device into a convenient spot to keep the influence of a particular network growing. All of this would be developed on global communications standards, of course, enabling new ways to connect to the world over time, but regional communications would thrive, with or without help from the "outside world."
While the more than 1.4 billion people already using the Web are certainly a significant marketplace, I do believe that much of the future power of Web-based communications will be found in the expansion of more "bottom-up" networks amongst the five-plus billion other people in communities that find themselves on a different economic and cultural playing field than the rest of the world. We talk sometimes about the "dark Web" of content unavailable to search engines on the Internet, but there's a far greater "dark Web" of knowledge and culture that's beyond the Web altogether. The "top-down" Web will penetrate this arena only so far, as it tends to be in the hands of people who have, in their own way, a great deal of autonomy, in part because of their economic isolation. But as the "bottom-up" Webs begin to meet the world of the Web as a whole, it will be exciting to see how both economic and culture opportunities for people on both sides of this divide develop.
Fortunately there are devices coming along that should help to accelerate this convergence. The One Laptop Per Child organization is targeting the release of a $75 device called XO-3 that is a bone-simple tablet equipped with wireless communications. As technology tends to push towards such visionary price points sometimes more rapidly than the pioneers, I think that it's safe to say that within a few years the convergence of such devices with localized broadband networking will enable communities around the world to join the Web age in ways that may surprise the rest of the world. So if you're looking for great new opportunities in content markets, I think that "going local" may take on a whole new range of meaning shortly. We'll keep you posted on these trends throughout 2010. Have a happy new year celebration and best wishes for a prosperous 2010!
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.
While Mark Logic is far from the only game in town for cross-platform publishing technologies, its recent Digital Publishing Summit at the Plaza Hotel in New York City was a huge down payment on establishing itself as a thought leader that could merge the best of East Coast and West Coast thinking in enterprise and media content markets. As one would expect with a vendor-sponsored conference, the day was filled with "friendlies" who use and support Mark Logic and its XML-based databases, APIs and content delivery services. But it if you had to pick friends, CEO Dave Kellogg and staff picked some friends who had excellent examples of how cross-platform and cross-source publishing is "the new normal" that is helping to drive value in the publishing industry. The trick is, though, is that this new normal is filled with some ironies that the content industry is still struggling to absorb.
With a packed ballroom listening on (nothing like "free" as the price of admission for networking in this economy), Dave Kellogg opened with a lively video, followed by Outsell's David Worlock pointing out that user-oriented networked services, not pre-conceived publications, are the key to this "revolution" in publishing services. Yet at the same time his slides showed a pyramid of value-add content services from simple published documents to "workbenches" that seemed to be quite standard in its pre-conceived product flow. Databases are indeed key components in today's publishing environment, but as exemplified by Mark Logic's technologies, the database is now - that is, whatever a user needs it to be in the moment. Both enterprise and media oriented publishers are discovering that publishing cultures centered around traditional databases, be they for traditional editorial content, business data or multimedia, are not agile enough to respond to the demands of their markets.
Richard Maggiotto, Founder, President & CEO of Zinio, highlighted similar ironies that print publishers face in confronting mobile markets. Zinio is moving beyond simple "page-flipping" technology for magazines on PCs and mobile devices to enable video-like animations of content, including ads, to draw magazine publishers into more appealing online presentations in their software. One demo that Richard flashed on the screen was for a $30,000 watch, paid for by a manufacturer that refused to produce Web ads. A beautiful ad, but the question becomes: how can you build a market based on a tiny sliver of people who are using iPhones but preferring magazine-like layouts of content? Building beautiful and engaging content is a plus for any audience, but no arbitrary container in today's online world is going to fence an audience in to your message for very long.
I had to take a phone call at this point, so I missed a good portion of a presentation by Chris Tse, Director of Information at BusinessWeek, who focused on their "BX" social media initiatives. Ironically, when I came back, Tse was explaining how social media content was harder to monetize than traditional editorial content, although he acknowledged that it would probably grow in its revenue impact over time. So even when you have good design, interactivity, repurposed content and social interaction, there's no guarantee that you'll have the systems in place to match revenue opportunities to your content - or have a sales force that knows how to sell it.
Kent Anderson, Executive Director for Product Development at The New England Journal of Medicine, a leading Sci-Tech journals publisher, showed off a popular "diagnose the disease" quiz
that they had ported over from their Web site to the iPhone, and, through Mark Logic's infrastructure, easily retooled for Google's Android and other mobile platforms. The growth of the app's use on iPhone was quite extraordinary, paralleling the growth of overall iPhone use. But when Kent was quizzed about the impact on overall subscription revenues in the Q&A, he expressed some optimism for future, non-free applications in mobile markets but didn't offer any indication of how the app helps to boost core journal subscription revenues. Certainly highly functional mobile apps can help to build a publisher's brand value through higher engagement, but there needs to be a clear conversion strategy devised to ensure that the engagement actually converts that brand value into revenues efficiently. Repurposing content in and of itself doesn't ensure those conversions, though it can help to define a much larger addressable marketplace.
Shannon Holman, Director of Content Management for McGraw-Hill Higher Education and Lee Fife, VP of Publishing Solutions for Flatirons Solutions, put on an excellent demo of McGraw-Hill's Create online custom textbook creation application. Their development of Create was based on the assumption that they needed to empower their customers to design and customize their custom textbooks online, instead of relying on institutional sales forces. The Create application does an excellent job of fulfilling this mission, enabling its users to choose specific sections of books, insert personal course materials and papers and produce both PDFs and bound, custom-printed textbooks on demand with remarkable ease. This interactivity that allows clients to package content the way that they really need it packaged was probably the closest example of "the new normal" during the day's presentations. But even here, the very success of the Create application leaves McGraw-Hill's institutional salespeople scratching their heads somewhat. Better that in the long run, though, then becoming a captive of sales methods that may be out of date.
The final featured speaker of the day was Gordon Crovitz, former Publisher of The Wall Street Journal and a founder of Journalism Online, which is preparing to launch in 2010 an online content ecommerce service that will enable people to have one single sign-on for accessing premium content sources across the Web and mobile platforms. Crovitz outlined at a high level the range of use and pricing models that the Journalism Online platform will support, such as single-article micropayments, multi-article/time-based payments, bulk multi-publication subscriptions and print/online bundled subscriptions.
Interestingly, both the questions that came up from the audience afterwards and some discussion in the panel discussion following Crovitz' panel indicated that there was still a fair amount of resistance from some people in publishing to this concept - and not necessarily for the reasons that you might think. Some people were concerned about Journalism Online being a publisher-centric model, solving their own particular pricing problems but not necessarily solving problems for audiences. This is a reasonable point, one that highlights how publishers are to some degree still on a fishing expedition for successful online revenue models for premium online content that no technology alone can answer. Yet Crovitz emphasizes that premium's opportunities lie where people already believe in your content brand. In other words, premium plays well when you have a relationship with an audience that's already valued above the norm. You may, as Crovitz suggests, convert only a fraction of them, but if the relationship will support it, then demand it where the value suggests that it's worth it to them.
So what is "the new normal" in the era of repurposeable content? To put it succinctly, it's having content that's always ready to attain its highest value in audience-defined moments. Be it through search engines, self-published and self-packaged content, real-time collaboration or easily repurposed and relicensed data and editorial content, the companies that can chase those moments most effectively wins. Sometimes this means being able to aggregate content from any number of sources more rapidly and effectively than anyone else, based on your insights into audience demands. But often it means letting your content flow to where your audiences want to consume it and to be ready to know how to make money with it once it gets there. A multi-platform strategy for repurposed content is not simply slamming the same product into different packages.
Multi-platform publishing also requires the recognition that it's not about platforms at all - it's recognizing that your audience has to be the center of your publishing at all times - and to recognize that each platform and application may draw out a different audience persona from the same person. It's not enough to ask "What does your customer do ten minutes before and after they use your content." It's also necessary to ask your audiences, "who are you" in each platform environment. Your hardcore diagnostician may be all business on a PC, but be out for kicks or socialization on their iPhone - or vice versa. These types of variations only enhance the need for good content multipurposing infrastructure, even though that infrastructure will not guarantee that you'll be offering the content that they want most.
Mark Logic's Digital Publishing Summit probably raised more questions for publishers than it answered, but that's probably not a bad thing in a market in which publishers have very few clear-cut options for succeeding in content markets. It also left outside the doors of the ballroom the uncomfortable fact that many platforms are in use today that enable people to aggregate content on their own with minimal assistance from traditional publishers. You can have the best aggregation and monetization strategy in the world, but if your audiences are creating and aggregating more content than you can, then it's going to be an uphill battle for most any publisher. But within those constraints, Mark Logic is showing the way to a "new normal" for publishers in which matching any content to any audience demand is creating a much more flexible, responsive and audience-centric publishing industry.
I am at a customer site today as part of our team that is delivering the results of a project based our new narrative research techniques that we're using as the basis of our new subscription study, "New Rules of Engagement: Re-Tooling Information Sales and Marketing for the New Economy," sponsored by the Software and Information Industry Assoication and Special Libraries Association. Narrative research has evolved out of efforts to understand the often weak and ambiguous signals from global terrorist networks. Needless to say, you can't really do market research on terrorists, but we saw that this technique is an excellent way for our clients to analyze customers rapidly in an innovative way that fits with many of their most critical research needs.
As with terrorist networks, many publishers and technology companies are dealing with rapidly shifting client behaviors, with lots of asymmetrical behavior that's difficult to analyze using tradional research methods. In traditional research, one formulates a hypothesis to test using quantitative or qualitative research techniques. In quantative studies, for example, someone interviews subjects and then filters down the results into a cohesive picture. In quantitative research, a questionnaire asks specific questions that requires people to respond to specific possible responses. These are both good techniques if you want to filter out a lot of possible answers that may not be your focus. But as good as that can be, many of the opportunities and threats that our clients face lie beyond this type of pre-determined focus.
An analogy as to why this is important was used in our client presentation today. We asked the people in the room to look at a short video of six people passing basketballs to one another, three wearing white shirts and three wearing black shirts, and to count the number of times that the people with white shirts passed the ball to one another. There was some disagreement on how many times the white shirted people passed the ball, but surprisingly several people missed another key input - a person in a black gorilla suit walked in and out of the scene during the passing. In other words, our ability to filter and to concentrate on specific goal not only may not give us exact anwers but may also ignore or focus on interesting phenomena that could be potentially important or a actually just a distraction.
Narrative research addresses this key gap in human perceptions in interpreting information about markets by enabling people to tell and to code unbiased stories about how they use or make decisions relating to products and services and then have them passed through software that relates their responses to key themes. When patterns emerge from this process, research sponsors can then refer to the original, unbiased stories and find new ways to analyze them. Instead of being "locked in" to specific biases or ideas that formed the information, you can refer back to the original unbiased stories and find new ways to interpret them individually or in aggregate. When you get enough stories to draw statistically significant conclusions, the result is an extremely powerful database that can answer different questions again and again over time on a very cost-effective basis. If you add more stories over time to that database, the results can be even more powerful, as you can begin to track changes in perceptions that you would not have been able to detect if you had had to form a specific idea ahead of time for testing via traditional research.
The net result for "New Rules" subscribers will be a rich, reusable resource of hundreds of stories from executives and implementers in enterprises telling how they use and make decisions on obtaining information services that they use to perform their jobs. In today's volatile economy, being able to hear unbiased stories from these complex and shifting decision makers and to analyze them quickly and effectively can be a critical factor in responding to the many changes in organizations that are compelling new and accelerated approaches to buying and implementing enterprise information services. Combined with the on-site workshops what we will be conducting for the core research subscribers I expect that "New Rules" will be the core element of many company's strategy planning efforts this year. I encourage you to investigate our prospectus and to see if you're ready to take advantage of this ground-breaking approach to market research that can power the marketing of your information products and services.
There have been any number of content aggregation services surfacing in recent years that have helped publishers to expand the richness of their Web sites. APIs, feeds and other tools are helping publishers to power up new online presences that offer new opportunities for ad revenues and audience building. But as the marketplace for news begins to revolve increasingly around passing topics, it becomes harder to use such tools to respond rapidly enough to revenue-generating opportunities. The "bogie" for this new model often mentioned is The Huffington Post, which has made an art of whipping up special sections of content and links from a wide variety of sources focused on headline-grabbing topics wrapped with its own layer of editorial content from bloggers. How do publishers respond to this model with their own instant feature sites?
Enter Daylife, a content aggregation service which is evolving past APIs and feeds to deliver through its Daylife Select service what you might call a HuffPost-in-a-box service that can enable publishers of all kinds to develop new and improved online content focused around specific topics rapidly. Using its own blend of semantic analysis and content serving technologies, Daylife can serve up text, photos and other multimedia content from a wide variety of sources or from a publisher's own content to create complete pages of topic-specific content very rapidly - complete with built-in ad inventory. What I find to be impressive about Daylife Select is that it is really a complete publication in its own right with great usability and appeal, as seen on its own site, but not just your typical autopiloted content technology. Content served up automatically can be managed by a non-technical staff to deliver a true editorial presence and can be supplemented by original content such as a publisher's own blogs though Daylife technology. Instead of waiting days or weeks to get APIs and other tools set up, Daylife Select can provide a tailored, branded and highly navigable topic-focused presence for many major themes within minutes.
Most importantly, although many major publishers are using Daylife technology to whip up valuable focused content, major consumer companies such as Kellogg's and Purina are also using Daylife to deliver focused content for their own clients. The idea of companies developing their own content to attract people in their marketing scope is nothing new, of course, but the ease with which this can be done through a service such as Daylife begins to point out how important it can be to enable publishers to be able to support marketers rapidly and effectively with content aggregated in whatever form their clients need with whatever overarching branding serves their needs best as effectively as possible.
To paraphrase Forrest Gump, "content is as content does"; that is, the content brands that are willing to work actively through tools such as Daylife to aggregate whatever content works best for their audiences and their marketing partners most effectively wins the publishing game. A simple concept, but one with which many publishers continue to struggle as they try to adapt traditional editorial methods to today's content aggregations tools that enable many editorial functions to fall into place automatically. Yes, a service like Daylife cannot replace all of the editorial value of a traditional newsroom and more robust editorial content development platforms, but when it can provide most of the robust functionality that people expect from an online publication today along with access to deep and high-quality content, it's time for publishers to think more actively about how they can use tools such as Daylife to enable their content to succeed in any number of topic-specific "instant portals" and other efficiently managed content presences far more actively.
In other words, why complain about HuffPost when you can succed with their model any number of times over in any number of content categories? It may not bring back the salad days of high-flying publishers, but this type of rapid and effective content aggregation may help publishers to deploy focused publications with content from a wide variety of sources far more cost-effectively - and in doing so make the best of their native editorial resources far more efficiently. I think that we're going to see more services like Daylife coming to light over the next few years, a trend that offers great promise for publishers if they can master it well.
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.
Google is now expanding its Chrome brand to include an emerging computer operating system that has been announced today on its official blog. ChromeOS will be an open-source operating sytem based on a Linux kernel that will be released on netbooks and other devices sometime in the next year or so. The goal of ChromeOS is fairly straightforward: turn netbooks into the "instant-on" Web appliances that phones, PCs and even Apple's Mac computers were never designed to be. Conceived of originally in the era of minicomputers and early microprocessors, PCs and Macs were always modeled on machines that were ultimately never meant to be consumer appliances. My PC today, overburdened with software that I rarely use, takes at least as long with a 1.7 gigahertz processor to start up as my original 66 megahertz home PC did more than sixteen years ago. That was fine when I used my PC for a lot of my work: today most of my work takes place on the Web.
Google's assets, by contrast, are almost exclusively Web-based - as are the content assets of most individuals and an increasing number of institutions. Just as the Chrome browser strips out most non-essential functions to get people into Web standards-based functionality as cleanly as possible, so will ChromeOS support appliances that have Web access as their primary goal. The Google blog makes clear that desktop functionality in ChromeOS will be kept to a minimum with this in mind: just cut to the browser, thank you very much, you know where I'm going. ChromeOS may overlap somewhat with its Android operating system targeted at mobile phones with this goal in mind, but as the takeup on Android in the netbook world has only begun - and as mobile voice communications are migrating increasingly into the Web itself - any conflict between choosing ChromeOS and Android in the netbook market is likely to be minimal. What's more likely is that Android will be to ChromeOS as Windows Mobile is to PC-based versions of Windows, except that ChromeOS will not target enterprise-strength desktops and servers. Why bother, when Google specializes in platform-neutral access to all of the content on those platforms?
With that in mind, some of the hysteria in today's split-second reactions in the media to this announcement are a little hyperbolic. I doubt that there will be a "nuclear winter for Microsoft" as a result of the ChromeOS announcement. Enterprises will continue to need heavy-duty information appliances to address a wide variety of publishing needs, while at-home gamers and entertainment buffs will continue to want the maximum hardware and software available to maximize their experiences. It's unlikely that ChromeOS will beat any significant paths into these markets any time soon, though its promises of virus-free operation may inspire some crossovers. Instead, Google will more likely use ChromeOS-based appliances to expand the global footprint of people able to access the Web cost-effectively and reliably in as many ways as possible. In other words, the five billion or so people who have yet to access the Web can help Google to redefine the pie from which it draws market share for its content and technology services, just as it redefined the advertising pie with its AdWords contextual search ads and the aggregation pie with its many content services.
With most content being maintained already in the cloud of Web storage and services, Google ChromeOS is a reminder that after all these years the fundamental story about what is changing human communications remains the Web itself. The appliances that make Web access possible will be made more efficient via ChromeOS but it's the content and communications which they access which will continue to drive the changes in the world prompted by more universal electronic publishing and content consumption. With emerging tools such as Google's Wave messaging environment beginning to redefine how people communicate collaboratively via voice, text and images, it's likely that ChromeOS will be a middle-of-the-road technology strategy that will, in the long run, create an environment in which PCs and mobile phones as we have known them are pushed to the sidelines to cater to increasingly legacy-bound markets while ChromeOS defines the new "just-right" level of technology for most on-the-go and in-lap-at-home content use. Others such as Microsoft and Apple are starting to aim for that "just-right" Web niche as well, of course, so the pie will have more than one slice out of it. So yes, let's pay attention to ChromeOS, recognize its significance to the long-term future of content platforms - and then let's get back to being as serious about the Web as possible.
As people in the U.S. and get ready for the holiday weekend, I hope that you have a chance to enjoy friends and family and to celebrate the role that content has played in making our world a better place. Below is a video capturing my relfections on the role that social media played in events in our nation more than two hundred years ago that still ring true today. Have a great holiday!
The Special Libraries Association convened its annual conference in Washington, DC recently, an event which had reassuring energy and solid attendance. SLA President Janice LaChance observed that attendance was up at this year's event compared to last year's conference in Seattle, Washington, an indication that lean times may not get people to remote locations but convenient locations are worth at least a day or two of investment for this key enterprise content community. I put together a summary video for your enjoyment below and more comments below the video that expand on some of the items featured in the video.
While many of the changes in the enterprise content industry on display at the SLA conference were evolutionary in nature, the thing that struck me most about this year's event is how much enterprise content brands are being absorbed by the focus on workflow-oriented products and services. Yes, subscription database services such as Dialog, now a ProQuest property, are still popular in their own right with enterprise information professionals, but as a brand the Dialog name no longer represents the goals of many of its subscribers. Instead, enterprise content services providers are focused intently on discerning which market segments they can serve most effectively and profitably with highly tailored services.
In the instance of Wolters Kluwer, for example, this means providing a natural language interface for clinical practicioners in medicine such as nurses that will enable them to find answers to practical questions from Wolters Kluwer medical information resources.For Thomson Reuters, products such as Business Citator blend financial, legal and public information sources into a tool that can accelerate the productivity of professionals conducting due diligence efforts on business acquisitions and partnerships. For Dow Jones' Factiva unit, it's focusing on highly tailored software solutions for sales, market analytics and competitive intelligence.
These companies have been focusing on these more tailored market opportunities for quite some time, but it's clear from this year's SLA event that the lion's share of their revenues from traditional database services are diminishing in importance rapidly as these more tailored approaches to content solutions gain more favor on the end-user desktops of enterprises. As always, this leaves the role of enterprise information professionals in some flux, as reflected in a conference program that highlighted the application of infopro skills to competitive intelligence as well as more traditional information management topics.
The influx of more tailored solutions from enterprise content vendors also means that more general content access tools are gaining a broader foothold in the development of enterprise portals. Access Innovations, for example, was showing off their new alliance with Perfect Search, which enables them to combine their indexing and categorization technologies with a platform that can create tailored search solutions for both enterprises and content vendors that provide enhanced content navigation features as well as high-performance searching. So even as many enterprise content vendors are trying to integrate enterprise content into their own products, many enterprises are looking at the problem from the other side and looking at new ways to integrate external content into their own workflow services. Sometimes these types of vendors come out on top, sometimes the information vendors, and sometimes OEM partnerships allow both to win, but whoever wins in the end the competition for solving enterprise workflow issues continues to intensify.
The SLA is to be commended for shepherding an organization of highly talented professionals facing challenging times into supporting what continues to be a first-class event. While the ranks of traditional corporate infopros have thinned in recent years, the need for people with their skills is still strong, even as those skills get repurposed often for more specific functions in the enterprise. As infopros become more adept at interpreting the needs for specific applications that address people's information demands and technologies become more easily configured to respond to those insights I expect that we're at the beginning of a new era for information professionals that will see them becoming new types of "gurus" for on-demand information services. When the world is your library, it will certainly take someone special to do that.
In my recent trip to San Francisco to speak about Content Nation I headed down U.S. Highway 101 from San Francisco with Shore's John Buckman to a string of appointments that moved towards the bottom of San Francisco Bay in Santa Clara and worked up 101 towards San Francisco again. As you may know this stretch of Highway 101 is the main artery of the bay area's tech industry, dotted with office parks that house many familiar tech brand names. I think of it also sometimes as a horizontal shopping mall for the content industry, with many of the companies that are driving the new value propositions for publishing flanking this highway as much as the hardware and software vendors that drove "big iron" used to dominate its multi-lane landscape.
At the end of our day's appointments, Rand Schulman, Chief Marketing Officer for InsideView, offered us an excellent dinner in the hills of San Francisco's residential neighborhoods during which he noted that there was another angle to Highway 101's linear relationship to content and technology. Rand observed that the bottom end of the bay was historically home to many of the companies that specialized in the lower-level aspects of the information industry such as hardware and operating systems, and that as one drove up the bay on 101 towards San Francisco you passed by the headquarters of companies that moved further up the technology "stack" towards the media-centric companies in and close to San Francisco itself. While it's easy enough to find exceptions to this rule, in broad concept it makes strong sense. If you're working for company "A" and decide to strike out on your own or to join another company, chances are you're going to choose a spot that has people who have sets and professional interests similar to your own. You see this also in the general design of places such as New York City, which traditionally had warehouses for raw materials lining the streets next to the cargo docks along the Hudson River, with the next tier of blocks dedicated to functions such as garment fabrication and the next tier of blocks inward from the river dedicated to the stores selling those garments.
Rand's model is particularly telling in relation to the content industry when you look at what happens in the middle stretch of Silicon Valley along 101. You have companies such as Google in or near Mountain View, rather on the southern-middle end of 101, that perhaps seemed to some like low-level technology plays when they were first launched that today have an enormous influence over the content industry as a whole. When Google's executives say again and again "We're not a content company" it is perhaps as much an affirmation of their south-Bay roots and culture deep in the technology stack as much as anything else. To some degree "content" to these folks means "those people at the top of the Bay." Looking at Oracle's recent acquisition of Sun Microsystems, it makes perfect sense that a company in Redwood Shores, much further up the bay from Sunnyvale, would be far more in tune with the need to move more towards serving up content solutions rather than just hardware and systems software?
In the dead center of this stretch in San Mateo you find the headquarters of Mark Logic, a company specializing in XML server technologies that enable publishers and enterprises to create content services from multiple content sources. At our meeting with the team of Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg we heard how Mark Logic is enjoying prosperous times, in part because they've honed much of their infrastructure for delivering their services to a highly operable and scalable level and in part because they're looking up the highway, you might say, towards opportunities that service the content end of Silicon Valley more effectively. In a sense much of the center of gravity in the content industry is heading towards such technology companies that used to be thought of as "middleware," rather industrious but supposedly dull bits of this and that that helped to glue diverse information systems together. With source-agnostic content aggregation the focus of much of the value in the content industry these days, you can hardly call companies like Mark Logic dull, much less similarly focused companies such as Google, MuseGlobal and Really Strategies.
Then at the top end of the valley you have companies like Rand Schulman's InsideView, which specializes in providing value-add context to content from multiple sources for sales force automation platforms. InsideView's "secret sauce" is its ability to parse content from both traditional and social media sources through semantic filters which identify events that are likely to be triggers for specific kinds of sales and marketing activity. That description may not sound like a traditional "top of the stack" publishing company, but in fact that's where the top end of value is in the content industry these days - not in delivering content from a single source but in adding value to content regardless of its source. So what better place to find InsideView than in the hills of San Fran itself?
Based on this new "stack" for the content industry I have to say that I was a bit confused when John Battelle noted in a recent blog that Google was going to "act like a publisher" because it may be in the process of matching display ads with news content from premium sources in its news offering. Truth be told, in the new content stack Google's been thinking - and acting - like a publisher all along. If the middle of the technology industry's stack is driving much of the value in today's publishing, then Google's contextual ad-matching capabilities are a perfect match for placing ads against the highest point in the content value chain. This is why we're seeing many major media companies such as Time, Inc. becoming more aggressive in marketing their own contextual ad matching networks - and why Battelle himself continues to operate his own Federated Media contextual ad network.
Battelle notes in his blog post "Supply means branding, and branding happens in the magical world of publishing." Well, John, the magic means something different these days - a fact that many marketers are still having a hard time grasping. The magic happens wherever people find good content, a concept that's no longer restricted to a narrow group of denizens on the top of the old content "stack." Any good content produced or contexualized by anyone can have value - either for advertisements, subscriptions or high-value enterprise services. Traders at investment banks figured this out years ago when they started parking themselves in front of computer screens connected to hundreds of information sources from around the world. That same style of content value now reaches well over a billion people in the world today. The supply that people need is the most valuable contexts for good content, not just the content itself.
There are any number of reasons why the traditional publishing industry is struggling these days, but certainly one has to look at the "stack" concept carefully to realize that the enormous technology changes over the past decade-plus of Web development rewrote what publishers assumed was their value points in the traditional publishing stack. Some still struggle valiantly to redefine technologies that will set everthing "aright" again, but who's to say that it was really right in the first place? Technology changes, and with those changes value propositions change inevitably. Here's three cheers for any and all companies who can figure out how to deliver value in the content industry - on whatever street or highway may lead to them.
Currently I am working on Chapter 6 of Content Nation, which focuses on the impact of social media on politics. It seems only appropriate to be doing this on our nation's Independence Day. Below I share you a video that celebrates how content was such an important part of the story of that fabled day in 1776. For those of you celebrating today, have a great day!
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