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NEWS
ANALYSIS ARCHIVE |
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Date/Headlines/Author |
Summary |
| 26 December
2005 |
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Investing in
Users: 2006 Forecast Preview |
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Content crystal ball-gazers, rejoice: the best is yet to
come in 2006 as publishers and technology companies vie for
the hearts of publishing-savvy users looking for personal
and professional content. Shore sees investing in content
users for 2006 revolving around four trendy "Ps" shaping
content today: Packaging, platform,
premium and personalization. Watch the cash
flowing into these investment area quickly as both
established and new players in publishing get very, very
serious about who is going to be on top when realigning
business models settle down. You'll need real-time
tea leaves to keep up with the content deals in 2006, but
fear not - we'll be with you every step of the way. |
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| 16 December
2005 |
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New Tunes:
User-Generated Media Creates New Models for Quality and
Cooperation |
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As surely as the birth of jazz music was shunned by many
classically trained musicians the rise of user-generated
media has gained the scorn of many professional content
producers. But when you're using pretty much the same tools
as any professional producers in a medium that reaches the
world as easily as any one the differing qualities of
user-publishers should not be discounted too quickly.
User-generated media from individuals and institutions is
more than just a fad - it's the major publishing trend of
our times that has informed and modified how we approach
professional publishing forever. |
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| 7 December
2005 |
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Objects of
Desire: Finding the Right Content Platform Strategy Amidst
Changing Technologies |
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With patent spats in U.S. and Canadian courts threatening
to unplug Blackberry users from content on their objects of
desire it's a good time to consider how wise it is to be
chasing one hot content platform after another with content
licensing deals in hopes that publishers can keep in touch
with their users. The ideal digital content platform for
publishers is not the latest faddish gizmo but the digital
objects that they create to run on these hardware
platforms. Keeping content highly profitable in the midst
of disposable technology wars means thinking long and hard
about how you're really going to make money in the long run
on from content users using these devices. |
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| 28
November 2005 |
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The
Publisher's Dilemma: How to Build Shareholder Value and
Future Revenues? |
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Break out the pitchforks and the torches, the shareholders
are restless in the once-happy realm of publishing. While
the likes of Google and Yahoo gobble up capital chasing
extraordinary growth and healthy earnings, traditional
publishers are caught trying to please institutional
investors who may have very unrealistic expectations about
what it takes to transform older business models into 21st
century profits. But all is not lost for publishers that
are willing to learn how to sell their positioning to
investors with straight talk about both short-term and
long-term expectations. The time for gladhanding colleagues
on cushy buyouts is passing by as the time for true
publishing survivalists to take charge comes into focus. |
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| 21
November 2005 |
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Ground
Support: The Shifting Role of Print Publications in B2B
Media |
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Ah, print, the darling of trade publishers everywhere. It's
still a potent weapon in today's B2B marketing wars, but
with trade events and online publications soaring in their
revenue mixes today's B2B publishers are oftentimes
perplexed as to how to deal with the shifting strategic
role of print. Just as yesteryear's battleships and today's
aircraft carriers had to adapt their strengths to new types
of missions B2B print publications can find important roles
in today's business marketing mix - if they cede their
former glories to new types of strategic and tactical
roles. After all, how many things does an executive get in
the mail these days that they really want to open? |
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| 14
November 2005 |
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InfoCommerce 2005:
Connecting Quality Content with Today's Professionals |
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Database and directory publishers assembled at this year's
InfoCommerce 2005 conference to trade insights on how to
create quality content, an objective that is taking on new
meaning in an era of user-driven content products. Today's
content quality is as much about being able to respond to
client needs uniquely and responsively as it is about I.T.-driven
process controls. Users are in the driver's seat for
defining what really makes a content service successful, a
fact that forces publishers to reach out to their audiences
in new and sophisticated ways. Today's content quality may
be in the hands of the user, but it beats spending tons on
second-guessing their needs. |
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| 9
November 2005 |
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Amazon Jungle:
Book Purchasing Models Struggle in the Digital Objects Era |
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Who'd have thought that in the height of growth in online
content the sexiest thing out there would be...books? With
major announcement in recent weeks from Google, Yahoo,
Microsoft and now Amazon the stage is set for dramatic
efforts to digitize and commercialize book content. Yet
books have been digitized for online search, subscription
and enhanced functionality for sometime now by a number of
vendors focused on scientific and technical content. What
the new efforts lack so far are commercial models and
packaging that are clearly in the best interests of
publishers undertaking them. Time for some more careful and
creative thinking about what it means to offer digital
books for long-term commercial success. |
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| 31
October 2005 |
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Potato Heads:
Silicon Valley's Content Leaders Keep Basic Research a
Priority |
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Basic research is at the heart of many of the companies in
Silicon Valley that are driving the value in publishing
today. When the revenue and margin leaders in electronic
publishing are plunking down 10 percent of their budgets on
R&D it's hard to imagine how traditional publishers and
aggregators are going to wheel and deal their way to a
superior position against these competitors any time soon.
When robust R&D is at the heart of your company's culture,
innovations that surface as highly profitable products just
seem to follow naturally. It takes more than R&D types to
understand today's publishing environment, but if you're
not attracting the best and the brightest of them you've
got to wonder what tomorrow will bring to your bottom line. |
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| 24
October 2005 |
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Fair Game: German and American Book
Publishers Wrestle with Google Print |
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This year's Frankfurt Book Fair drew more than 250,000
people to the world's largest content event, but the
biggest event for books during the fair was the alignment
of camps in the fight over Google Print. American
publishers are suiting up for a fight on copyright issues,
while German publishers seem to be more wiling to let
Google be Google and to get on with building stronger
online presences for searching and consuming books. Given
the history of other recent wars on copying premium content
guess who's likely to be the richer of these two camps in a
few years' time? It's time for all publishers to embrace
fair use of book content for searching and to focus on how
they're going to make money in a search-enabled world. |
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| 17
October 2005 |
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WFIC 2005:
Financial Content Searches for New Profits in Open Markets |
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The
World Financial Information Conference (WFIC) gathers
every two years to contemplate the state of global
financial content markets, an exercise that this year
attracted some of the best minds in the business to the
conference's Rome venue. The big picture emerging from the
conference is that increasingly transparent markets for
securities trading are placing enormous pressure on
exchanges, vendors and institutions to find profitable
positions in highly regulated markets. Financial content
services that can drive the top line of profits as much as
bottom-line cost savings are desperately needed, but the
big ideas seem to be waiting in the wings for new players
to push them through. Texas Holdem, anyone? |
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| 10
October 2005 |
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Content 2.X: The
Clash Where Publishers, Technology Companies and Audiences
Meet |
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The excitement brewing around the recent Web 2.0 conference
is palpable in Silicon Valley as the literati and
glitterati of content technology cook up a heady batch of
concepts to attract new investment. But before intelligent
and savvy investors start writing out checks it would be
wise for them to consider just what kind of businesses
they're underwriting. There's a lot of power in the Web 2.0
framework, but it's a loose framework that doesn't define a
powerful and effective scope of business operations against
which to measure success and failure. Enter Content 2.X,
Shore's definition of the powerful and rapidly evolving
union of technology, publishing and audiences partnering
towards common goals. |
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| 3
October 2005 |
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Open
Sandbox: The Open Content Alliance Forges the Ultimate
Content Collection |
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If there's one thing that Yahoo! knows how to do it's
building effective partnerships with media players. The
announcement of the Yahoo!-sponsored Open Content Alliance
that aims to counter Google's library scanning efforts
underscores that it pays to play nicely with some of
today's leading content archivists. The OCA has openness,
voluntary participation by publishers and a global set of
participants on its side to help to accelerate its efforts.
But as powerful as its proposition may be there are many
consortia that have fallen by the wayside as others with
fewer vested interests to negotiate sped along. Google may
have a "sandbox bully" image to contend with at the moment
but there's nothing to say who's really going to build the
better sandcastle. |
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| 26
September 2005 |
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Science Fact:
The "Google Grid" of EPIC 2014 Takes Shape |
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As Google prepares to assemble and test a new content
distribution network the content industry is caught like a
deer in the headlights trying to figure out the
implications of this initiative. Is this the beginning of
the "Google Grid," that omnipresent publishing environment
foreseen in "EPIC 2014", the online sci-fi multimedia
presentation that emerged last fall? It could be that
and much more if Google succeeds in deploying a network
environment that creates a new world of highly localized
content monetization. Be prepared for publishing business
models to take yet another bumpy ride along the road of
change as the "there" of content moves ever further from
central control. |
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| 19
September 2005 |
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Authority
Figures: ASIDIC Uncorks a New Blend of Professional and
Personal Content |
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With new authoring tools such as weblogs and wikis
coalescing professional and personal content more
effectively than ever before, what's a professional content
producer to do? Embrace the best of them effectively,
according to panelists and attendees at this year's ASIDIC
Fall Meeting in Napa Valley. New ways of packaging
authoritative content are emerging that promise higher
margins and better branding for content companies.
Conference panelists demonstrated that although the best
solutions for profiting from blending personal and
professional content are far from in hand, those that are
pushing to embrace the blend are creating some of the most
potent value in content today. |
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| 12
September 2005 |
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Common Market:
The Power of Transactions Draws in Business Publishers |
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Reed Construction Data has dipped a toe into the surging
world of online ecommerce with a new relationship with
eBay, the world's largest public online marketplace for
goods. While the deal is fairly tame in its overall shape,
it's an indication of where business database and directory
publishers are going to need to head in the months ahead to
position their content effectively as eBay grows its
business-oriented services. Where transactions take place
is where content reaches one of its most valuable contexts,
a concept long exploited in financial markets but an idea
whose time appears to be dawning now in new Web-driven
markets. Business database and directory publishers need to
move quickly to consider how eBay and other online
marketplaces can help to position their content most
effectively in the transaction-driven workflow of today's
business content users. |
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| 6
September 2005 |
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The Big Blow: The New Pecking Order of
Content Looms Large in Katrina's Wake |
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Cataclysmic events such as Hurricane Katrina do not create
trends in content, but they do help to forge into harder
forms trends that were already forming. In the wake of this
natural and human disaster Web content has emerged as the
definitive focus for people needed both fast-breaking
general news and very personal news on events and locations
impacted by powerful events. Traditional outlets that once
leaned tentatively on user-generated media discovered that
combining personal content with their professional product
can point the way to both hard facts and a sense of
community that is impossible to replicate with just a
polished professional product. The raw, the cooked and the
cooking are all required to provide today's definitive
picture of unfolding events to the satisfaction of
sophisticated content users. |
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| 29
August 2005 |
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Copy Right:
LexisNexis, Copyright and the Search for Today's Most
"Useful Arts" |
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The LexisNexis announcement of its sophisticated and
powerful CopyGuard service is meant to send shivers down
the spines of copyright violators. But its ability to
compare works for suspicious similarities is more likely to
protect publishers from plagiarism problems with its own
staffs than to reap any revenues from content snatchers
caught in the act. The problems of copyright law have far
less to do with inadequate enforcement of outdated
regulations than they do with technology that makes copying
itself hard to avoid, much less control. Publishers need to
focus more on copyright enforcement that enables users to
get more value once they've received copies of content than
on trying to control the copying process itself. |
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| 22
August 2005 |
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The Little
Package that Could: eBooks and Their Friends Prepare for
the Limelight |
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Alas, the poor eBook has suffered quite an identify crisis
these past few years - in spite of the fact that their
sales growth continues to surge impressively. By some
reckonings electronic books will be outselling their
paper-bound counterparts as soon as 2010. But the key to
the future of electronic books lies not so much in getting
existing book formats into electronic packaging as in
creating new concepts for packaging content for portable
use that extend the concept of the book in new directions.
The good news is that the resulting packages offer premium
content providers significant revenue opportunities - if
they can learn how to create products that appeal to users
used to both text and interactive capabilities. |
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| 15
August 2005 |
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Return on
Context: Thomson Scientific to Measure Content's Contextual
Value |
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As publishers and content services wrestle with content
collection managers to prove out their slice of
institutional library budgets based on collection user
stats, Thomson Scientific is looking beyond traditional
stats to come up with measurements of how content gets used
and cited beyond the collection. While its forthcoming
Collection Development Manager may be fairly limited in
scope it's an important step towards helping collection
managers to understand the return on a content investment
in the context in which published content is most valued by
its users. Think of "return on context" as the new
measurement for weighing the total value of content to an
institution's intellectual capital - and start thinking how
you're going to be doing it some time soon. |
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| 8 August
2005 |
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Express
Yourself: Major Business Publishers Search for Winning
Online Brands |
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American Business Media's "B2B Meets..." events draw
top-drawer panelists to chat about key topics in the world
of business publishing. The most recent session was
supposed to be focused on the impact of weblogs and RSS on
business publishing, but much of the talk from the
blue-ribbon panelists was about how their editorial
operations are still focused on getting the basics of their
online brands right. The good news is that they are
succeeding in expressing their brands in many instances,
but it's with a recognition that they're used to creating a
product that's far different than what many born-on-the-Web
content brands are able to assemble. Seismic these changes
may be, but the shaking has hardly begun. |
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| 1 August
2005 |
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Now See Here:
Online Video Enters the Mainstream of Business Content
Services |
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Corporate video services supplying broadcast TV footage
used to be rather sleepy affairs, forwarding tapes and
transcripts well after broadcasts had aired. Today's
Web-oriented video environment is changing this snoozy
status quo rather rapidly, though. In addition to
consumer-oriented moves by Yahoo!, Google and others,
business-oriented Web services that can trigger awareness
of online broadcasts seconds after they hit the airwaves
are beginning to catch on in the marketplace. These
services offer invaluable strategic and tactical input to
corporate and governmental professionals, as well as a
nifty supplemental revenue stream for broadcast outlets now
able to reach behind-the-firewall online audiences. It's a
young marketplace that's developing far more rapidly than
many may imagine - a sure sign that more imagination may be
required to harness profits from it sooner rather than
later. |
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| 25 July
2005 |
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Extra Baggage: Older Content Companies
Weigh the Growing Earnings Gap |
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O, to be a content company without content ownership and
licensing issues. Then our financial reports would boast
the operating margins of companies like Google, which has
perfected ad revenue generation from just about everybody's
content quite effectively while owning or licensing hardly
a stitch of the stuff. Owning content can be great but when
you're competing for revenues and margins with monetizers
that can take or leave the ownership game rather casually
it can make you feel like you've been left holding the bag.
There's lots of hope yet for publishers and aggregators
working to sort out this equation to their satisfaction but
it will require traveling far lighter than many in the
content industry are used to. |
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| 18 July
2005 |
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Vanishing
Frontier: Online Premium Content Pioneers Adapt to a
Crowded Neighborhood |
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As the second decade of the Web unfolds pioneers in premium
Web content such as Amazon and Hoover's are adapting to
increased competition from a broadening array of online
premium sources. While still holding advantages as
well-regarded online brands, these content pioneers are
having to redefine the frontiers of premium content profits
on both their home turf and arenas more familiar to their
more established competition. There really isn't an "online
content market" but instead many opportunities to leverage
online and other channels for maximizing penetration of
business and consumer content markets. The
pioneers may yet cut some fresh new ground in the process
of responding to these challenges, but it's a race to do it
before the competition gets more imaginative. |
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| 11 July
2005 |
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The Solutions
Solution: Business Publishing Moves to Client-Centric
Content Systems |
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With VNU and other major publishers and aggregators
focusing on solutions providers for businesses, the art of
business publishing is taking a turn away from its roots of
title-centric publishing towards client-centric business
solutions. The channels through which business media
companies need to communicate with readers increasingly are
in the hands of businesses themselves, forcing media
companies to acquire a hand in defining the premium
contexts in which their content is demanded, viewed and
used by their clients. Not every business media company can
afford to become a full-range content solutions provider,
but every business media company needs a strategy for
adapting their products for maximum revenues in solutions
environments. |
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| 5 July
2005 |
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Pro/Am
Tournament: Colloquial Content Converges in Text, Audio and
Video |
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Today's Web portals abound with text, audio and video
content from both amateur and professional sources the
movement towards content convergence is taking on a grass
roots flavor that few in mainstream media companies would
have predicted a few years ago. Video broadcasters and
syndicators compete with homespun video from newspapers,
corporations, governments and
amateurs, even as podcasting opens up streams of audio
content from more sources than ever before. The mixture of
professional and amateur content keeps the convergence of
media sources increasingly in the hands of users equipped
with more than enough horsepower and storage to take them
all on. In this mix there are no safe niches, only
strategies that can get the right content into the hands of
the right audience. |
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| 27 June
2005 |
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Riding the
Long Tail: Libraries Confront the World of Infinite Content
Supply and Demand |
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Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine,
unleashed a global debate with an article last December on
"The Long Tail," the huge portion of content that's thought
to be of residual value to companies catering to mass
audiences but turning out to be both powerful and
profitable to a wide range of audiences. Companies like
Google and Amazon prove out this model every day on the
web, but so do corporate librarians who focus increasingly
on the bulk of content in their own organizations beyond
the reach of commercial services. The future for librarians
serving local communities can be found in looking at both
online and corporate models for tips as to how to manage
the content that matters most to highly contextual
audiences. |
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| 20 June
2005 |
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Where the Buys Are: Small and Medium
U.S. Businesses Step Up to Business Information |
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Shore's new survey of small and medium sized U.S.
businesses reveals aggressive spending on business
information that these businesses find to be highly
valuable. Not surprisingly much of it is now online
information, but it's not just purchased information that
powers these businesses to success. A combination of
original sources outside of subscription products and
carefully purchased premium content is the key to small and
medium businesses making the most of business information
without huge I.T. investments. There's lots of opportunity
in this changing mix of business information usage for
vendors that want to help these businesses to grow. |
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| 13 June
2005 |
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A Place for
Everything: Content Vendor Taxonomies Hook Clients to
Useful Structure |
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The recent debut of LexisNexis Taxonomy puts the business
content giant toe to toe with Factiva in the arena for
extending the organization of vendor content into
enterprise portals. It's a great play and will certainly
provide LexisNexis with some important traction in the
portal wars, but it's not going to stop clients in their
tracks. Taxonomies used to organize content from a client's
files alongside vendor content can easily organize other
content - including content from competitors' services.
It's nice to get close to your clients hooked to you via
taxonomies, but don't count on them keeping your database
pricing warm and snug forever. |
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| 6 June
2005 |
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Now Hear This:
Publishers Use Broadcasting Models to Widen Content's
Appeal |
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As publishers move to online content as a mainstay of
revenues, a surprising number of them are moving past
standard models of text delivery to delve into models that
borrow both content technologies and management models from
their broadcasting brethren. These experiments are no
longer limited to teens in pursuit of online thrills:
they're rapidly penetrating core news and business content
publishers' operations. It takes more than a title and a
good Web site to attract an audience into a loyal
relationship with a content producer. Audio podcasts,
interactive online "talk shows" and TV properties becoming
Web properties are but a few examples of the merging of
content production disciplines. Reaching audiences through
all of their senses and using all of their media-spawned
sensibilities is an essential consideration for business
and consumer publishers alike. |
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| 31 May
2005 |
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Lost in
Translation: Japan's Industries Consider the Integration of Enterprise Content |
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At a recent conference in Tokyo, Japan executives from
leading industries convened to hear about the latest and
greatest technologies and techniques for integrating
content within their enterprises. Some of these
capabilities are fairly new to Japanese industrial markets,
which have not advanced as far as U.S. industrial markets
in integrating internal and external content sources into
useful portals and applications for solving business
problems. As Japan and other nations consider how to
compete with countries that benefit from both globally
accepted languages and advanced content integration
capabilities it will be important for them to consider how
to leverage assets beyond their traditional I.T. strengths
to create strong content-centric cultures in their
organizations. |
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| 23 May
2005 |
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Gold Rush:
Heady Days for Enterprise Search as Institutional and
External Content Merge |
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This year's Enterprise Search Summit was a well-attended
and robust expression of just how vital and important
search functions have become for enterprises of every
scale. Maturing enterprise search solutions included
offerings from Google that are putting pressure on many
other search engine providers to provide more internal and
external content sources in a simple package with more
features that make answers easier to find. Any way you
measure it enterprise search has reached a new level of
maturity that places far more emphasis on performance and
results than experimentation and partial solutions. Users
are coming out winners in this gold rush, but a broader
array of sophisticated content sources and content
organization tools will keep those users clamoring for more
precious gold than ever before. |
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| 16 May
2005 |
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Radio Days: RSS
Gains Steam as the Content Broadcast Stream of Choice |
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While people associate the Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
site feed capability with weblogs, it's really a medium
unto itself that just happens to be populated with weblogs.
More to the point it's essentially a broadcast medium,
returning the Internet to its Ethernet technical roots and
promoting the ability to push content from anyplace to
anywhere via a common network "ether." Publishers are just
beginning to wrestle with this new broadcast medium in
earnest after amateurs showed the way, just as in the early
days of radio and the Web itself. What they're finding is a
medium that is far cruder than they may like but with far
more potential to become a powerful content delivery medium
than they may imagine. |
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| 9 May
2005 |
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Don't Rock the
Boat: The ABM Spring Meeting Highlights an Adapting
Industry |
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The Spring Meeting of American Business Media in Boca
Raton, Florida this year was a happy affair, with most in
attendance enjoying a respite from stormy years of change
and choppy revenues. But it's not just higher tides of ad
revenues that are carrying along business publishers to a
successful year. Business media outlets are progressing at
a healthy pace towards a revenue and earnings mix that
counts online outlets as a significant component of their
success. Navigating for success in this environment means
making sure that you have the right crew on board and a
course that can be adjusted rapidly as new online and
offline revenue opportunities present themselves.
Business publishers who can keep up this pace are going to
have some great years ahead of them. |
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| 2 May
2005 |
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Cleared for
Takeoff: Aggregators Large and Small Focus on Scale that
Matters |
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Just as Boeing and Airbus are vying for air supremacy with
different visions of how to give airlines the most value in
routing their passengers through the skies, publishers and
aggregators increasingly find themselves having to choose
between working with ever-larger forces of content
aggregation and more direct routes to very specific
audiences. Scale matters in today's aggregation, but as
much as large-scale search engines and aggregation services
are winning many markets with efficiently collected and
targeted content, more direct routes between publishers and
audiences are gaining in popularity. Choosing what scale
you want to play on is more important than ever before,
leaving less and less middle ground for publishers and
aggregators to have it both ways. |
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| 25
April 2005 |
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Howlers: New Automation and Human
Models Challenge Traditional Indexing |
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Professionals of many stripes came
together at the workshop on current and future
trends in indexing held by the National
Federation of Abstracting and Information Services (NFAIS)
in New York last week to get a handle on what's creating
value in indexing today. The session made clear that
publishers who have long relied on high-quality indexing to
bring in revenues are not having much fun in an environment
that increasingly favors the ad hoc over long
established content structure for bringing in profits. The
future of professional indexers may be smaller in terms of
their pre-automated past, but these same tools are also
providing new opportunities for both professional indexers
and their users - those "howlers" - to create more content
value. |
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| 18
April 2005 |
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Younger Days:
Buyers and Sellers of Content Adapt to New Content Value
Propositions |
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This year's Buying and Selling eContent conference in
Scottsdale, Arizona featured many established stars of the
content industry along with successful mavericks touting
community-driven content solutions. In the midst of this
equation were the institutional content buyers, equipped
with increasingly virtual library collections but many of
the all-too-real issues of content licensing that have been
their lament for years. Somewhere between the mavericks and
the established players is a powerful value proposition
taking form for premium content aimed at professionals that
emphasizes maximizing basic distribution to engage content
where its premium forms will take root. Content licensing
models based on obsolete distribution patterns may be
slowing down the growth of high-margin services that are
really valued by clients. Time to get the real content
buyers engaged in the conversation? |
|
|
|
| 11
April 2005 |
|
|
Benchmarks
for Success: Database Publishers Move to Grow Online
Revenues |
|
|
|
New research from Shore affiliate Russell Perkins on
database subscription pricing benchmarks reveals that
we've passed the point at which print publications can be
considered primary sources for the clients of database
publishers. The print subscription revenues from these
publications are sagging while online revenues are surging
ahead. This parallels the general movement in the content
industry towards having to recognize revenues from online
content as the primary driver for their businesses.
Building revenues and margins in an online environment can
be tricky and is oftentimes not the high-margin mass
business to which print-derived publishers have become
accustomed. Those wanting to maintain high margins in their
publishing businesses are going to have to tailor their
marketing plans for much more focused efforts. |
|
|
|
| 4 April
2005 |
|
|
Diamond Visions: Creating Content
Value from Existing Sources Gains Focus |
|
|
|
A
new research report from Shore Senior Analyst Patricia
Joseph focuses on creating new content value from sources
that were oftentimes right under a publisher's nose. With
search engines, text mining tools and other technologies
being rather unfussy about where they find content value to
exploit, traditional publishers and other companies in
search of healthier profits are learning to roll up their
sleeves and use creative thinking to provide value to both
existing clients and altogether new markets. Finding
diamonds in the rough is about a lot more than just
tweaking up existing sources with rich data. It's about
looking at content sourcing with wide-open eyes and looking
at the competitive landscape with a new sense of the
opportunities and the competitive forces at play. |
|
|
|
| 28 March
2005 |
|
|
The New "New News":
News Companies Wrestle with Online News Technologies |
|
|
|
In a wave of fast and furious change news organizations are
fighting back against search engines and independent
classified services with their own services and pointed
counterattacks against perceived IP infringements. AFP
takes a swing at Google News while Gannett, Knight Ridder
and the Tribune take a stake in new search engine Topix and
CitiExpress readies a Craigslist alternative - all in one
week. It's certainly a very spirited street fight, but one
wonders whether these are blows that will have any sort of
deep impact on a news industry that won't wait for major
publishers to catch up with new aggregation patterns. The
news industry was happy to try to catch up with the "New
News" promised ten years ago; are they really ready to do
battle with the "New 'New News?'" |
|
|
|
| 21 March
2005 |
|
|
Nothing
Personal: Personal Content Vendors Confront New Rules for
Success |
|
|
|
Congressional hearings, major retoolings of vendor policies
and concerns over long-avoided regulations hang heavy in
the air for personal content vendors these days. Was a
crisis of this kind avoidable? Probably so, given the lack
of focus that many personal content vendors had on how
their content was being used and the assumption that
possession was nine tenths of the law when it came to
relations with people profiled in their databases.
Successful personal content companies today win when they
treat their products first and foremost as a personal
service that has both the opt-in and the control of the
people profiled. Technology helps to drive the scale, but a
people-first approach to personal content is the key. |
|
|
|
| 14 March
2005 |
|
|
Feelin' Groovy:
Microsoft Goes with Groove to Create Collaborative Content |
|
|
|
Ray Ozzie nursed the Lotus Notes collaborative software in
the 1990's from its infancy to widespread use and its
acquisition by IBM. Now Microsoft has purchased Groove
Networks, Ozzie's second shot at content collaboration with
a more peer-to-peer model of content publishing and
sharing. Premium publishers have oftentimes ignored file
sharing networks as legitimate marketing venues for their
wares, but with the Groove acquisition publishers have been
put on notice that user-controlled collaborative tools are
a key and increasingly crucial environment in which to
establish their value. When the users control who and what
gets shared across organizations, publishers had best
understand the value proposition of Groove rather quickly. |
|
|
|
| 7 March
2005 |
|
|
Entity Entropy:
Eliyon Changes the Equation for Personal Content Suppliers |
|
|
|
Eliyon is moving beyond the struggles of a scrappy startup
company to become a firm that has defined a strong niche
for personal content others were unwilling or unable to
exploit. By sticking to automated collection of personal
profiles extracted from Web pages, Eliyon has built over 24
million complete profiles of professionals, with much
information cached in its databases that's now disappeared
from the rapidly evolving Web. Add in the ability for
people profiled in their system to update their profiles
and for readers to suggest changes and you have both
powerful content and powerful editorial sources that
promise to make this a definitive online database of
personal information. We still "Google" people today, but
that's a noun-turned-verb that may change someday soon
under the influence of Eliyon. |
|
|
|
| 28
February 2005 |
|
|
Boundary Issues: Google's AutoLink
Feature Tests The Edge of Content Real Estate |
|
|
|
When Google launched a new AutoLink feature for its browser
toolbar, the new feature was inserting links automatically
into Web pages for maps, books and other key contextual
content. This encroachment on content didn't make some
folks very happy, so the feature has been retuned to not
intrude automatically. While it's understandable that
publishers would get unsettled by this effort to make Web
content more valuable at their expense, there's nothing to
stop us from congratulating Google on coming up with a new
method of creating monetizable value out of contextualizing
content. As today's Web content providers become more adept
at using software to contextualize its value new tools for
monetization like AutoLink are bound to flourish. |
|
|
|
| 21
February 2005 |
|
|
About Times: The
New York Times Broadens the Focus of its Portal Development |
|
|
|
The "whys" of the New York Times' acquisition of About.com
from its magazine-oriented parent Primedia were pegged by
our own Janice McCallum nearly two weeks ago in our weblog
as a good move for Primedia, which never seemed to know how
to get the most out of it. Much of the media twist on this
sale is less than complimentary to the Times, but there's
plenty of method in its purported madness. When you're
stuck between weblogs getting more attention on breaking
news and search engines becoming the "go to" place for
research, it helps to build a business model that looks
more like a general content portal such as Yahoo! than
yesterday's newspapers. There's no better time to expand
your business model than when others can't figure out what
their model is supposed to be. |
|
|
|
| 14
February 2005 |
|
|
Business
Valentine: LexisNexis and Factiva Up the Romance for
Business Content Users |
|
|
|
Hearts and flowers get delivered less often these days to
high-quality business database deliverers compared to those
who are getting the right content to the right people at
the right time, regardless of its source. Recent moves by
Factiva and LexisNexis to up their content quotients for
targeted audiences underscore the importance of developing
quality via solutions and unique on-the-fly sources for
audiences that aggregators can "own". Business
content aggregators are evolving into a new kind of content
supplier that can position itself effectively alongside
traditional publishers and surging institutional and
Web-based content collection capabilities. It takes a
lot of romancing to win an audience, but these major
aggregators are investing heavily to establish and maintain
long-term fidelity. |
|
|
|
| 7
February 2005 |
|
|
Leaving
Retrograde: The Vision Manifest at The SIIA Information
Industry Summit |
|
|
|
The SIIA Content Division has been working on a
vision of what the content industry was about in a Web era
for several years, now. Sometimes skeptical publishers
seemed to doubt that vision, but there was little in this
year's SIIA Information Industry Summit that left room for
doubt. The combination of content, technology and people
that has promised a new era of profitability and challenges
for publishers and aggregators is clearly upon us, with few
in attendance at this event wondering about the whether and
most intent on learning best practices for the "hows."
Branding, online ads and multimedia are three key factors
that drew focus at the conference that point to important
new best practices emerging. |
|
|
|
| 31
January 2005 |
|
|
Winning Ticker: Yahoo! Takes On
Financial Exchange Content - and Major Aggregators |
|
|
|
Yahoo's move to bypass financial market data vendors and to
source market data directly from exchange sources is more
than a move to increase the efficiency of content delivery
to consumer markets. It's also part of a wider strategy by
companies like Yahoo! to provide more originally sourced
content across the board - just as major institutions
increasingly bypass middle men to create greater content
value. For those professionally-oriented publishers and
aggregators hoping that this is just a media story, take a
look at the needs of your own institutional clients and
consider how technology-savvy companies like Yahoo! can
outscale many of your abilities to service your core
markets with original content. It's more than a ticker
that's ticking in this picture. |
|
|
|
| 24
January 2005 |
|
|
Ride the Wild
Surf: Dow Jones and Premium Publishers Try to Catch the
Online Ad Wave |
|
|
|
Today marks the official closing of the Dow Jones
acquisition of the MarketWatch investment portal, a move
that will give Dow Jones lots more pages in which to place
ad inventory in a surging marketplace for online
advertising. It's better to have a big board than a small
one when the surf gets tall and wild, but when you're
defining your wave as "real" content it's going to be hard
to capture all of the wave that's upon us.
Traditional publishers are scrambling to catch up with this
powerful new force in their marketing mix, adding weight to
the idea that there can indeed be too much of a good thing
if your competition gets a hold of it before you do. |
|
|
|
| 17
January 2005 |
|
|
Opportunity
Knocks: Is the Open Access Movement Meeting its Full
Potential? |
|
|
|
As the enthusiasm for open access publishing in academic
and scientific circles is starting to reach a fever pitch,
publishers such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) are
adding new journals and getting more support to subsidize
authors' contributions. This heady atmosphere is not
without clouds on the horizon, though. The headlong rush to
embrace open access publishing as a business model has
created an anti-profit zeal that may limit its
commercial success - a limitation that will give commercial
publishers plenty of time to think about how they want to
adopt their own business models to this new environment.
Nobody has the corner on the market for publishing wisdom
these days. Thank goodness. |
|
|
|
| 10
January 2005 |
|
|
Market Magic:
The Financial Market Data Industry Tries to Tailor Itself
for Better Times |
|
|
|
O the tales of woe that have bled forth from financial
market data vendors these past several years. While the
worst of the damage seems to have passed, it leaves many
wondering what future this industry - now USD 7.11 in girth
according to
Shore's latest research - will be as the
financial marketplace continues to wrestle with lean and
competitive times. Wishing for an uptick in the markets is
not enough to stave off the bears at the door of most
market data vendors. It will take a fresh look at what
really makes a profit in today's financial content
marketplace to turn the tide - and some hard-nosed
decisions that some may be hesitant to make. |
|
|
|
| 3
January 2005 |
|
|
Models for
Success: 2005 Ushers in an Era of Major Shifts in Content
Business Models |
|
|
|
As the year 2005 rumbles into view the prospect is for a
time in which the rubble of old business models that began
to come tumbling down in 2004 is pushed aside to make room
for new business models that span old categories and define
highly profitable niches where profits were never imagined
before. Shore sees four key areas in which the
rapidly shifting action will unfold in creating and
expanding these new models: cooperation, commercialization,
containerization and consolidation. There's a model
for success for many as this year comes to fruition, but
success will go to those who are willing to align
themselves with revenues from new models as quickly as
possible. |
|
|
|
| 27
December 2004 |
|
|
Crystal Ball
Redux: Looking Back on Shore's 2004 Forecast - and Peeking
at 2005 |
|
|
|
Last year at this time Shore's crystal ball was bringing
into focus many trends in content that may have been hard
to believe for some - yet the ol' sphere seems to have had
a pretty good year of target practice. From the rise of the
Publishing Organization and The New Aggregation to the
monetization of Weblogs to the commercial success of DRM-managed
content, many of the trends forecast last year unfolded on
schedule, while some such as weblogs exploded with even
more vengeance than even we had anticipated.
Join us as we look back on the progress of our predictions
and take a gander at how these trends will fare next year. |
|
|
|
| 20
December 2004 |
|
|
Open Stacks:
Pondering the Value of Copyrighted Content in a World of
Online Archives |
|
|
|
Another week, another earth-shattering headline about the
machinations of Google. Or is it so earth-shattering?
Google's plan to scan materials without clear copyright in
major libraries is really just a continuation of their
original battle plan. What's more at question is how
publishers and aggregators have been asleep at the wheel in
thinking that copyright law would promise them growth - as
opposed to how it is protecting dwindling profits based on
old business models. Content value is exploding in
electronic form, much of it well beyond the purview of
traditional copyright protection. The effective use of
copyright is far from dead, but its users must adapt to an
era of getting to know its client base in far more
cooperative ways. |
|
|
|
| 13
December 2004 |
|
|
Patent
Medicine: Google Keeps Innovating to Keep on Maximizing
Content Value |
|
|
|
An ailing content industry is turning to technology
innovation more than ever to shake itself out of the
doldrums of declining revenues and wobbly business models.
But it's hard to keep up with the Googles of the world that
are out there patenting up a storm to lock in truly
innovative developments in content technologies aimed at
very human-scaled content value. Google's latest patent
filings hope to make it easier for paper content to find
value on the Web in highly innovative ways. Where were the
publishers and aggregators in this mix? Gnashing their
teeth while ignoring the need for fundamental innovations
that lead in forming content value. vContent is not always
an easy equation to balance, but without technology
innovation in the mix it doesn't add up to success. |
|
|
|
| 6 December 2004 |
|
|
Motley Crew: The EContent 100
Reflects the Diversity of a Changing World of Content |
|
|
|
This year's EContent 100 list of the companies that matter
most in digital content that is assembled by EContent
magazine includes Shore Communications Inc. and, oh yes,
some other folks that you may have heard of such as
Thomson, Google, IBM and the like. "And the like" is a
phrase that may be hard for some to grasp when they look at
the full breadth of companies receiving this honor, given
the diversity of their historic missions. But as the
digital content industry focuses on increasingly common
goals it's clear that the diversity that EContent
magazine has focused on since its inception is beginning to
coalesce into a new industry norm that puts the value of
content as perceived by its audiences at the fore as never
before. Diversity will remain this group's hallmark for
some time even as their goals become more common. |
|
|
|
| 29
November 2004 |
|
|
Blawgs and Order: American Lawyer Media Leverages Personal
Content for Profits |
|
|
|
American Lawyer Media recently launched its Law.com Blog
Network, a network of independent weblogs focusing on legal
topics that takes ads and links from Law.com and that get
covered in Law.com's own "blog of blogs". This symbiotic
relationship points to a new positioning for trade journals
and other publications that are trying to extend their
reach for advertisers that need not compromise their
current editorial efforts and that can extend their reach
into their core communities for both profits and
credibility. It's time for publishers and aggregators of
all kinds to recognize that weblogs and other personal
content are the vehicles that find highly monetizable
personal contexts more efficiently than any other content
today. |
|
|
|
| 22
November 2004 |
|
|
Instant Low
Fruit: How Corzen Builds Profitable Professional Content
from Web Mining |
|
|
|
As publishers squirm to find new ways to leverage value out
of long-established databases, a coterie of young companies
is harvesting new data from the Web and coming up with
highly targeted content products that are more about
publishing than they are about the leading-edge technology
that drives them. New York-based Corzen is one of this new
breed that has concentrated on statistical analyses of Web
sites used for job postings and for selling autos.
Inventing new kinds of content from the "thin air" of the
Web is an increasingly attractive business model for
companies with knowledge of specific sectors' needs and
access to highly affordable content development tools.
That's great for a small company like Corzen - and
something to think about for the bigger folks in the
electronic publishing world. |
|
|
|
| 15
November 2004 |
|
|
Let it Rain:
Reuters and Dow Jones Adapt to the User-Controlled Flow of
Content |
|
|
|
As Dow Jones makes away with its purchase of MarketWatch,
it's worth noting that competitor Reuters has been busy for
a while figuring out how to make good money with
ad-supported content on the open Web without a subscription
model. To profit in this environment takes an
understanding of how users are driving the content
monetization model more than ever before. But it's not just
ad-supported content providers that need to consider the
impact of this key deal. The issue of profiting from new
patterns of content flow is a universal issue for
publishers and distributors, one that has more than a few
solutions to consider. The key trick is to focus on
electronic content monetization as a destination feature
rather than a gating factor for delivery. |
|
|
|
| 8
November 2004 |
|
|
Me-Dia: Yahoo!
Explores the Meaning of Centrally Defined Media in a
User-Defined Medium |
|
|
|
As Yahoo! beefs up its management team with more muscle
from the world of mainstream media properties it's clear
that producing more unique content will be a key factor for
their future growth. Now that the search wars have
dissipated and made content licensing relatively moot, they
have little choice if they are to keep brand loyalty
strong. But as users of all kinds create and consume more
content in their own venues the value of creating content
without a specific "me" factor in it is becoming more
suspect. This is a concept that makes most content
executives uncomfortable - even though it's one of the keys
to success in The New Aggregation. |
|
|
|
| 1
November 2004 |
|
|
Objects of Desire: Publishing Digital
Objects Nears a Turning Point for Business Publishers |
|
|
|
As Adobe Systems Inc. and Yahoo! announce an alliance to
merge desktop search tools with Adobe's document packaging
capabilities the era of sophisticated digital objects as
destination content residing on our local hard drives is
arriving. Digital objects in the consumer realm are
becoming widely accepted, but they lag in the circles of
publishers serving professional markets. This is not likely
to be the case forever, especially as tools like Adobe
Acrobat make it increasingly easy to consume, personalize
and redistribute rights-protected content in valuable
forms. Many major business-oriented publishers were caught
flat-footed at the dawn of the Web era: who will have the
fallen arches as the era of digital objects emerges? |
|
|
|
| 25
October 2004 |
|
|
Open for Business: Why Open Access is
Good for Business and Science Publications |
|
|
|
Many B2B and STM publishers have been struggling to find
the right model for distributing their content as they
confront pressures that are pushing them towards opening
their databases to Web and enterprise search engines. These
publishers are seeking the right balance between maximizing
the reach and influence of their publications while
maintaining the ability to provide - and to be compensated
for - premium features for their core readers. If anyone
doubts if there are successful business models in an open
access environment, they need only look at Google, whose
share price has more than doubled since it went public. B2B
and STM publishers cannot be Googles, but they can leverage
the openness that user-empowering technologies provide to
create richer revenue models. |
|
|
|
| 18
October 2004 |
|
|
Deeply
Personal: OneSource Maximizes Data Mining to Power Sales
Insights |
|
|
|
Data mining has been around for some time now and is a
successful tool for major institutions seeking to find
deeper answers to complicated questions that impact their
operations. But as OneSource Information Services is
demonstrating with its new mining-powered services, the
answers that data mining can provide are increasingly
likely to come from raw and untamed sources as much as from
highly structured databases. This is providing new and
highly compelling value points for content publishers and
aggregators who are squeezed between commoditized content
collections and bruising battles for owning a user's
workflow. It requires mining a deep understanding of your
users' human needs, but once understood
it can turn most any pile of content into diamonds in the
rough. |
|
|
|
| 11
October 2004 |
|
|
Star Stories:
How Story Weblogs are Changing the Dynamics of Building
News Properties |
|
|
|
When hot news breaks, journalists can become stars
overnight. But when does the news itself become a star?
With an anonymous story weblog such as isbushwired.com the
emphasis in news weblogs has moved away from sophomoric
tweaks to accumulating and reporting the facts as they
unfold. It's an emerging trend in online journalism that
has far-ranging implications for both news organizations
and the institutions that rely on news sources to give them
an advantage in the marketplace. Weblogs are the primary
vehicle for this trend, but there are many other players
who stand to benefit from it - and who must consider it
carefully in developing their own content services. |
|
|
|
| 4
October 2004 |
|
|
Showing
the Way: InfoCommerce 2004 Points Database and Directory
Publishers to the Future |
|
|
|
This year's
InfoCommerce 2004 conference database and directory
publishers demonstrated a wide and compelling array of
success stories in applying both human and technology
factors to their evolving success stories. The emphasis was
on adding more value to content in more human contexts, in
some instance meaning better interfaces and workflow
design, in other instances better data design and
management, but in all instances with an emphasis on
maintaining relationships with audiences who are
increasingly both sophisticated consumers and publishers
who can contribute to the value of online content services.
While getting human contexts right is still a challenge to
many, the models of excellence offered at this conference
point out some clear paths to future successes. |
|
|
|
| 27
September 2004 |
|
|
Middle Men:
How Mark Logic is Redefining the Role of XML in Content
Aggregation |
|
|
|
With the eXtensible Markup Language gaining steam as a
method for getting content to and fro in an easy-to-use
format, more organizations turn to XML as a solution for
driving down content delivery cost and complexity. Easier
said that done in many instances, especially when it comes
to getting search engines to hum across a wide variety of
sources. But Mark Logic has drawn together XML-based
content normalization, search and delivery capabilities in
an open and flexible framework that makes the prospect of a
universal enterprise Web environment based on XML standards
far easier to consider for both enterprises and the premium
content suppliers that support them. It might not be the
sunniest news for content suppliers who had hoped to
maintain proprietary advantages in the face of XML, but
it's news worth watching carefully. |
|
|
|
| 20
September 2004 |
|
|
New Tune:
ContextWeb Sets out to R.O.C.K.* the Contextual Advertising
World |
|
|
|
Online contextual advertising is commonly associated with
Google’s AdSense and Yahoo!/Overture ContentMatch programs
that are open to anyone who submits the required materials,
agrees to the terms and conditions, and enters their bids
in the auction-based system. However, the success of online
advertising has attracted the major players—both
advertisers and publishers—into the contextual advertising
realm. These players have a different risk/return profile,
but they are willing to pay real money to reach highly
targeted prospects. Is there an advertising technology and
services company that can deliver the level of accuracy in
contextual matching that the professional publishers and
top advertisers require? With some new venture funding,
ContextWeb is setting out to prove that they have the right
formula. |
|
|
|
| 13
September 2004 |
|
|
Enter the Virtual Aggregator: Network
Subscriptions Opens a New Door on Premium Content |
|
|
|
In The New Aggregation
the winners are those companies that can pick out specific
attributes of the content aggregation business model and
make them work with excellence. For
Network Subscriptions this means aggregating subscriptions
to premium content on the Web without bothering to use a
separate database. This model works very well for
individual professionals used to finding things on their
favorite search engines - and may yet work well for
institutions yearning for a better way to pay for and
access premium content. More content and more clients as
soon as possible will be the key to success for the
pioneers of this model, but the model itself is likely here
to stay. |
|
|
|
| 7
September 2004 |
|
|
Cashing Cows: Aggregators Face
Changing Business Models for Premium Content Services |
|
|
|
There's nothing wrong with having a cash cow, but many
content aggregators seem to have a difficult time figuring
out when and how to put theirs out to pasture to make room
for future revenue growth. In a
new research paper entitled
The New Aggregation: Models for Success in Creating Content
Value
we lay out the reasons why today's aggregation models are
falling down so often and how content aggregators can
thrive by being more selective about which aspects of
content aggregation they choose to nurture. The result may
not always be a comfortable or familiar business, but it's
a result more likely to thrive than today's content
aggregation business models. |
|
|
|
| 30
August 2004 |
|
|
(Re)launch Pad: Rocketinfo and the
Shifting Focus of Content Technology Companies |
|
|
|
The newly renamed
Rocketinfo, Inc. is a revitalized content technology
company emblematic of so many similar tech-born efforts
that are discovering the beauties of content focusing on
specific market sector and user requirements. They're not
abandoning their techie roots but leveraging them
effectively to create content solutions that span the gap
between pure I.T. solutions and lagging publishers and
aggregators with increasing effectiveness. There are worse
fates than to succeed by focusing on what people need most
with what you do best - and worse ways to create a
profitable company that can stand on its own or fit nicely
into the folds of a major market sector suitor. |
|
|
|
| 23
August 2004 |
|
|
Search for
Tomorrow: Specialized Web Search Engines Point to
Content's Profits |
|
|
|
When
The New York Times op/ed section carries a piece
focusing on the dominance of major search engines, you know
that the time has come for a reality check. While major
search engines indeed have changed the face of what's
considered valuable content, search technology as a whole
is empowering many more suppliers to bring the power of
search to far more focused needs and interests in ways that
highlight content that the majors leave behind. From
enterprise search engines reaching out for Web content to
innovative industry suppliers like the Thomas Industrial
Network, content's voice is growing through a wide variety
of search suppliers that promise greater profits supplying
audiences with very specific needs and interests. |
|
|
|
| 16
August 2004 |
|
|
Media Masala:
How Offshoring News Production will Change the Publishing
Marketplace |
|
|
|
Reuters appears to be moving forward with plans to move
some of its editorial operations to its Indian offices, in
spite of increasingly vocal opposition from its unionized
journalists. With reduced margins in the news business
widespread the lure of offshoring appears to be an
irresistible option for major news organizations, even as
they try to navigate the most delicate issues of how local
news teams will fare in the years ahead. It's bound to be a
painful transition for some but in the end it's likely to
allow news publishers to transform the craft of journalism
into something far more dynamic and influential than found
in today's news operations. |
|
|
|
| 9 August
2004 |
|
|
Dark
Continent: How Factiva's Fairfax Exclusive Signals
Sharpened Competition for Aggregation |
|
|
|
In the stroke of a pen a huge swath of Australia's premium
content has disappeared behind the firewall of Factiva's
exclusive distribution agreement with John Fairfax Holdings
Limited - a coup for the child of Dow Jones and Reuters and
a major blow to competitors such as LexisNexis and Thomson
Dialog. A continent-wide deal such as this is bound to have
major ramifications, but don't mistake exclusives as the
villain in this unfolding drama. The true culprit is a way
of doing business that in large part doesn't work anymore,
forcing Factiva and others to consider more focused
competitive tactics that mask the need for deeper changes
to the manner in which aggregators provide value. Expect
retaliatory exclusives to increase in the months ahead, but
look also for players with more visionary outlooks on
enabling premium content value to make significant strides. |
|
|
|
| 2 August
2004 |
|
|
Screen Door:
How Growing Support for Open Access Journals Challenges
Content Markets |
|
|
|
On two continents legislators in recent weeks have decided
that the benefits of publishers and aggregators taking
substantial profits for distributing publicly financed
scientific research no longer outweigh the costs to the
individuals and institutions funding that research. First
in the U.S. House of Representatives and then in the U.K.'s
Parliament, the proposals for opening up public research to
free access have already spurred Oxford Press to join the
open access journal bandwagon. Aggregators will hem and haw
and lobby all they want, but the fundamental question of
their value has been broached in ways that their clients
are not likely to let them forget. It's time for
aggregators and publishers of scientific content to
make major decisions about their futures - before the
screen door hits them on the way out of the picture. |
|
|
|
| 26 July
2004 |
|
|
The Joy of DOI:
Publishers Start to Get Serious About Persistent Online
Content |
|
|
|
The Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
System that allows commercial publishers to provide
persistent links and metadata for published online content
is starting to gain some steam in recent weeks as
commercial publishers begin to focus on how to adapt this
scheme to more of their product lines. DOI promises to
offer a world in which content not only doesn't disappear
but also can provide a changing array of services when
users go looking for these persistent identifiers. Great
tools, but what will it take to get DOIs rolling along for
a broader array of content? Opportunities abound, but the
exploitation of them remains stuck in the limited focus of
DOI efforts to date. |
|
|
|
| 19 July
2004 |
|
|
Weed Feed: How Models for Success in
Premium Content are Blending Old and New Concepts |
|
|
|
With many sources of content revenue at a crossroads some
content providers are putting the brakes on free access and
throwing up registration or purchase barriers to usage -
even when these methods seem to be out of step with how
people are using and distributing content. As evidenced by
Weed,
a rights-management scheme that helps to monetize music
content with the cooperation of individuals, there's a lot
of room for blending in old models of usage with new
technology capabilities without alienating new audiences
eager to access quality content. You need not give up
established channels to go to blending - just think
creatively about how people really use content today. |
|
|
|
| 12 July
2004 |
|
|
Merchandizing
Content: How Endeca Applies eCommerce Lessons to Enterprise
Content |
|
|
|
Contextualizing catalog content has been a key factor for
success in online stores, a capability that
Endeca has refined to
a "T" and now uses to focus on getting the most out of
enterprise content. Instead of perusing toys or wine
bottles the enterprise user finds Endeca's Guided
Navigation a very valuable tool that allows content
browsing from multiple facets - and finding lots of useful
contextual content in the process. Content providers of all
kinds need to think carefully about how merchandizing
concepts that have been so valuable in ecommerce can pump
up content usage by users who value ecommerce methods in
their daily lives. |
|
|
|
| 6 July
2004 |
|
|
Up the Gap: How Enterprises are Leading the Way Towards DRM
for Premium Content |
|
|
|
Digital Rights Management (DRM) has been engaged
aggressively not only by consumer media companies but
increasingly by the enterprises who have lots of content to
keep tabs on for to their own managers and for regulators
keeping an eye on monitoring corporate operations. About
the only ones not playing the DRM game aggressively at this
point are the premium content providers servicing
enterprises. They may have their reasons and there are
plenty of pieces still falling in to place with DRM, but
it's no longer a capability that premium publishers can
afford to avoid. Expect companies that are willing to
embrace DRM aggressively for premium professional content
to come out ahead in today's solutions-oriented
vContent
environment. |
|
|
|
| 28 June
2004 |
|
|
More than Moore:
How Hardware Has Opened the Door to a New Era in Personal
Content |
|
|
|
Today's PC is a pretty darn reliable appliance with tons of
processing power and oodles of storage that's being eaten
up by only the most aggressive gamers and downloaders. For
everyone else the PC is beginning to resemble a marvelously
oversized parking lot, waiting for content to show up
that's just not being produced in enough quantity for
personal use by enterprises and publishers. That's likely
to change as tools and marketing methods begin to fill the
void left by comparatively sparing office automation and
enterprise software. Will content producers take advantage
of the increasing power of personal computing or continue
to live in a server-centric world? There are fears that go
along with the opportunities, but one thing's for sure -
the hardware's not going away. |
|
|
|
| 21 June
2004 |
|
|
Intelligent Intelligence: How Search Technology is Creating
New Market Intelligence Content |
|
|
|
Market intelligence used to be all about focus groups,
phone banks and sifting through field reports from
salespeople. Now with tools from companies such as FAST
Search & Transfer, Moreover in partnership with Biz360 and
Factiva getting the pulse of human insight and sentiment is
becoming a much more scientific and efficient endeavor. In
the process of creating systems that generate "intelligent
intelligence", though, a new class of content is being
created that owes little to established publishers and
everything to a new generation of technology that's
extracting human value instead of just data from
unstructured sources. It's not as relaxing as chatting
around the water cooler but it sure is more rewarding. |
|
|
|
| 14 June
2004 |
|
|
Getting the
Message: How Instant Messaging is Setting the Table for
High-Value Content |
|
|
|
Long a tool and toy for the general public, instant
messaging (IM) is getting very serious these days in
business circles as compliance requirements and other
regulatory issues have put the clamp on retaining and
tracking IM's use throughout institutions. The good news is
that this more serious management of IM content and
security has resulted in a robust and powerful content
channel that's only begun to be exploited by by both
institutions and business content providers. While
financial firms have had the jump on IM for a while, expect
instant messaging to unfold in the months ahead as a major
opportunity for creating value for content in very personal
and focused contexts that add to the bottom line. |
|
|
|
| 7 June
2004 |
|
|
Summer Rally:
How Independent Research Providers are Transforming
Financial Markets |
|
|
|
"What hath Spitzer wrought?" may be a common question on
the lips of people this summer as the effects of the major
U.S.
settlement against investment banks accused of
manipulating stock research begins to go into effect. With
ten major I-banks required to buy large quantities of
research from independent suppliers and their own pricey
researchers pinned behind "Chinese walls" of legal
compliance requirements, these major financial institutions
are facing an environment that is calling the very
foundations of their profitability into question. The very
thing that brought them to power - electronic content - may
wind up being the force that becomes their undoing, with
independent research providers a key lynchpin of the
unfolding process. |
|
|
|
| 31 May
2004 |
|
|
Folk Tunes: How the Music Industry May Provide a Model for
Developing Commercial Weblogs |
|
|
|
A spate of news flashes from
USC Annenberg OJR,
The New York Times and
Reuters are highlighting the
power of weblogs as both an expressive medium as well as a
body of commentary that has become a potent force for
shaping mainstream journalism and corporate operations.
What's missing is a viable business model for monetizing
weblogs effectively beyond their current status as folk art
in the raw. Using old channels of distribution for text
content is not likely to harness the full commercial
potential of weblogs, though. For the answer to tomorrow's
weblog monetization, take a stroll down to your local night
club and check out today's star "DJs" laying down the
mixes. Will tomorrow's lead editors of weblogs be "BJs"? |
|
|
|
| 24 May
2004 |
|
|
Street Level: How Factiva Fashions
Itself for an Era of Rowdy and Robust vContent |
|
|
|
A recent conversation with
Factiva
CEO Clare Hart demonstrated the strength of her
efforts to bring this child of Dow Jones
and Reuters from its birth five years ago towards a
promising adolescence. From single-line queries tuned to
user profiles to portal integration and to its ingenious
Insight Reputation Management system that gleans powerful
intelligence from scraps of "street" content such as
weblogs and user groups, Factiva is pushing hard on many
fronts to create highly effective
vContent solutions. But with open Web search engines
and other venues helping publishers to prove their value
head-to-head against "street" content, how much time
do aggregators like Factiva have to leverage their vContent
skills? |
|
|
|
| 18 May
2004 |
|
|
Search and the
Enterprise: Making Content Work Behind the Firewall - and
Beyond |
|
|
|
Information Today, Inc.'s Enterprise Search Summit is a
new forum for pulling together the rapidly evolving world
of enterprise search from the perspective of both
technologists and information professionals pulling
together content from behind the firewall and from beyond
the enterprise. It was a huge hit, well-attended and
stocked with expertise and insights from today's leading
suppliers and implementers. Key take-away: enterprise
search technologies are maturing rapidly, but so are the
outlooks of the professionals using search tools to provide
content value in today's institutions. The combination of
these two factors promises to provide a lot of value to
institutions over the next couple of years. |
|
|
|
| 10 May
2004 |
|
|
Search and
the Library: Managing the Changing Face of Today's Content
Collections |
|
|
|
As an
article in Library Journal highlights the cultural
shift of content users shaped by Web content technologies
away from library-driven content access sciences, search
engines are cruising the open Web and institutional content
collections with only modest deference to the information
professionals' traditional capabilities. Now that search
engines have permanently changed the way in which content
is accessed and used, both libraries and their content
suppliers are scrambling for rationales that support the
value of their collections. The ultimate solution to their
woes may be to abandon the idea of collections as the
foundation for their being and to concentrate on those
aspects of providing content value that matter most to
their common audiences. |
|
|
|
| 3 May
2004 |
|
|
Desert Visions:
Topics of Discussion for Next Year's Buying and Selling
eContent Conference |
|
|
|
This year's edition of the
Buying and
Selling eContent Conference from
Information Today, Inc. featured numerous panels and
discussions (covered extensively in our
weblogs) which demonstrated that the best practices of
publishers, distributors and their institutional clients
are beginning to catch up with an era of content
increasingly oriented towards the success of Web-literate
individuals. But those same savvy individuals generally
don't wait for these established players to learn the next
big lesson in content value anymore. Who will be
providing next year's big messages to the assembled content
hot shots? Chances are there will be some new faces in the
mix - with new models for success in creating value from
premium, institutional and individual content. |
|
|
|
| 26 April
2004 |
|
|
Lemon Trees:
How Content Quality Needs to be Repositioned in an Era of
New Technologies |
|
|
|
Just as U.S. auto manufacturers drifted from the models
that brought them marketing success until the industry
almost died in the 1980's, today's publishers and
aggregators seem to be intent on ignoring many of the key
needs for content quality that are the keys to their brand
value - and long-term profitability. Focusing on improving
existing production processes in publishing and
distribution obscures the need to look at how content
markets perceive content value in a changing landscape of
creation and delivery technologies. From portals to search
engines to eBooks and weblogs, content quality needs to
exploit and adapt to the market's perception of what's
valuable - regardless of how it's produced today. |
|
|
|
| 19 April
2004 |
|
|
Convergence Conundrum: Will XML Standards Increase or
Decrease Content Value? |
|
|
|
At the SIIA's recent Issue Brief session
on "The
Convergence of Market Data and Information Publishing"
a broad array of financial content and technology experts
made it clear that XML standards are reshaping not only
content delivery but how companies need to distinguish
themselves in creating content value in major markets such
as finance. It seems that XML's ultimate impact is not in
commoditizing content but in forcing providers in the value
chain to concentrate on what really makes a difference in
the eyes of people who need to make money by using their
content products and services. For those who can attune
their operations via XML to the needs of a marketplace that
is real-time in changing its focus and requirements, the
rewards will be great. |
|
|
|
| 12 April
2004 |
|
|
Content
Nation: Google's Gmail Privacy Concerns vs. Visionary
Content Value |
|
|
|
In danger sometimes we find answers to our problems in
places that we would least expect to find safety. The
controversial terms
and conditions of use associated with Google's new Beta
Gmail
email service seem to be very threatening to many concerned
about the privacy of personal content. But in a world in
which dangerous and noxious emails turn up in even
corporate inboxes with alarming regularity, what's wrong
with trying to control the context of personal content?
Gmail may be just the experiment we need to design a strong
content nation that can both protect and serve its
citizenry. |
|
|
|
| 5 April
2004 |
|
|
The Bookcase
and the Laptop: Monetizing Content in the Post-Industrial
Era |
|
|
|
With manufacturing comes excess and with excess comes
economics, telling us how to save ourselves from our all
too human tendency to reproduce things like crazy. But now
that the computer has introduced the ultimate manufacturing
machine, how can the content industry survive based on the
economics of finite supply and demand? Sources as diverse
as Reason
Magazine,
the artist formerly known as Prince and
OneSource point the way towards a post-industrial model
for building premium content value that moves away from
mass production and towards creating ever-larger presences
of unique information and experiences. |
|
|
|
| 29 March
2004 |
|
|
Monetizing
Context: How Wal-Mart, P&G and Ford Leverage Captive
Content |
|
|
|
With Wal-Mart, Proctor & Gamble and Ford providing recent
examples of how it's paying off for companies to provide
their own private contexts for content in print and online,
mass media publishers are finding themselves under the gun
to hang on to desirable shelf space and Web clicks. But
it's not just consumer publications that are feeling the
pressure to compete with today's institutions equipped with
powerful and affordable publishing tools - trade
publications and other professional publishers are feeling
the heat as well. Getting content to do things for readers
that pay off more directly to sponsors is one key element
in providing more value in contextual content. |
|
|
|
| 22 March
2004 |
|
|
Open
Season: Kluwer's Open Access Experiment Tests New
Distribution Models |
|
|
|
Publishers of pricey scholarly journals have hemmed and
hawed for some time now as open access journals have sprung
up to offer peer-reviewed research papers for free to all
comers. But as a recent article in
Azom
pointed out,
Kluwer Academic Publishers is trying a brief experiment
on free access to some of its major online imprints that
could be the beginning of change in the traditional
journals marketplace. The experiment may be small, but the
consequences are potentially huge for both publishers and
the aggregators who rely on their premium wares for their
own revenues. Open access is beginning to open up all kinds
of new opportunities and questions - with answers still
trailing behind |
|
|
|
| 15 March
2004 |
|
|
The Quiet Revolution: How Public and
STM Libraries are Powering eBooks Growth |
|
|
|
The
Open
eBooks Forum's conference on
eBooks in
the Public Library this week highlights the quiet but
significant strides that eBooks library systems are making
in institutional content markets. These lending systems are
using digital rights management (DRM) capabilities to
enforce lending and usage rules in very sophisticated ways,
driven by the need to accommodate a wide variety of usage
models supported in traditional libraries that must have
electronic equivalents. Turns out that these adaptations
may be just the thing to help power significant changes to
how publishers' content is sold - both for books and for
other kinds of premium content. It's early days still for
eBooks, but their day may be upon us from many angles very
soon. |
|
|
|
| 8 March
2004 |
|
|
The New News:
How The New York Times Points Towards Tomorrow's Content |
|
|
|
Under Martin Nisenholtz
The New
York Times has assembled an impressive array of online
services uniting its core editorial strengths with a wide
array of third party content and features to create a
leading example of a news organization transforming itself
for today's online realities. But what about tomorrow's
realities? Nisenholtz has the vision and the resources to
take the Times into the future, but in a market in which a
news portal has to try very hard to be something much more
than just news and when the nature of news production
itself is changing, the ultimate winners in this battle may
not be a news company as we know them today. |
|
|
|
| 1 March
2004 |
|
|
Games Without
Frontiers: Creating Content Value in the Smart Card Era |
|
|
|
Smart card technology, long used in corporations and
banking applications to provide identity tokens, is going
to become a mainstream form of securing the identity of
users if Bill Gates has any say. At a
conference sponsored by RSA Security, Inc. Gates
said that passwords are going away as a result of smart
cards, helped in no small part by Microsoft's own efforts.
Combined with looming digital rights management
technologies, we are entering an era in which it will be
easier than ever to authenticate access to premium content
without the infrastructure provided by traditional
aggregators. This may prove to be an opportunity as much as
a threat to today's aggregators, but only if they pick
their battles carefully in this emerging technology
landscape. |
|
|
|
| 23
February 2004 |
|
|
Search Me:
How the Escalating Search Wars Will Benefit Content Markets |
|
|
|
As Web juggernauts Yahoo! and Google officially begin their
hostilities in the battle for search supremacy, it is far
from clear whether either of these two forces are going to
emerge triumphant. Yahoo! brings deeper pockets and
corporate business savvy into the ring, but Google has gone
very far on keeping its weight down and concentrating on
the essentials of vContent
that have pushed it into its current advantageous position.
The clear winner in this fight will be the people who
desperately need more efficient content contextualization
services to make sense of the billions of Web pages and
services available today. The losers? Publishers and
aggregators that never took the fight very seriously. |
|
|
|
| 16
February 2004 |
|
|
Playing for
Keeps: How KeepMedia Keeps Tuning a Plan for Personalized
Content |
|
|
|
After a very low-key debut last fall
KeepMedia,
the brainchild of Louis Borders, continues to see
improvements in its content serving capabilities
and a broadening of its off-newsstands magazine and journal
sources and news wire content. A recent conversation with KeepMedia CEO Doug Herrington revealed that by
concentrating on researcher-friendly features at very
accessible consumer prices, KeepMedia is building a way of
doing business with premium content that could become very
compelling over time. But in the race to create a
user-friendly environment for premium content that can
compete with open Web sources, KeepMedia's worst enemy may
be the pace at which its publishing partners are willing to
move towards the economic realities of online content. |
|
|
|
| 9
February 2004 |
|
|
Building Brands: The Human Art of
Branding Meets Today's Content Users |
|
|
|
According to BrandChannel.com's "Reader's
Choice Brand of the Year" award, Google is the number
one brand in the consumer's eye these days, with nary a
traditional content company in sight. Brand value is one of
the most important assets that a company can have, and yet
in their focus on protecting intellectual property rights
many content companies have taken their eye off of brand
value as based on something more important: the perceptions
of their clients. In a world where new mountains of
content are being invented every day, trying to
defend your mineral rights for those mounds doesn't sound
like a growth strategy for most content brands. Tuning in
to what people perceive as valuable brands in general these
days may be very useful for content companies to consider
when plotting out their futures. |
|
|
|
| 2
February 2004 |
|
|
Identity Crisis:
Vendors at the
Intersection of Content, Technology and People |
|
|
|
In the midst of a raw and blustery New York City winter,
the leaders of the content industry convened at the
SIIA Executive Summit to consider the opportunities that
lie ahead for creating content value in a changing
marketplace. The outlook was mixed at best and complicated
by the domineering presence of technology changes that
continue to make many content companies followers rather
than leaders in defining content value. To gain that
leadership means leaving behind old identities and
labels and adopting identities that flow with the
increasingly dynamic manner in which technology creates
highly valued content today. |
|
|
|
| 26
January 2004 |
|
|
Connecting Content:
The Potential of Social Networks for Content Marketing |
|
|
|
With the debut of
Orkut, a
new social networking tool sponsored by Google, the
market for closing the "six degrees of separation" between
people continues to heat up. On the professional side,
though, things are at least as interesting in social
networking tools, with players like LinkedIn
providing high-quality business contact networking and
Groove
Networks providing a pro outlook on content and task
sharing. All of this activity on the software and services
side, though, does not seem to be matched by professional
content publishers. Big database subscriptions will
continue to be an important factor for publishing in
professional circles, but the ability to help individuals
to collect and share valued content and its implied
credentials is a factor too important to be missed for the
long run. |
|
|
|
| 19
January 2004 |
|
|
Corporate Pirates:
Institutional Content Confronts the Era of Rights
Management |
|
|
|
At January's
SIIA Brown Bag Luncheon on "Piracy, Copyright and
Digital Rights Issues in Digital Content" the true tale of
content piracy's impact was told. As much as the kids have
grabbed the headlines, institutional content piracy has a
longer and more powerful legacy to examine, as highlighted
in the
USD 20 million court judgement against global
financial advisers Legg Mason in favor of a small
newsletter publisher. Digital rights management is hardly a
panacea for problems with complex corporate publishing
relationships, but independent publishers and technologists
are rewriting the rulebook on how content is sold and
accessed in major institutions. |
|
|
|
| 12
January 2004 |
|
|
Gizmo Glut: How
Multi-Purpose Platform Proliferation Creates Content
Opportunities |
|
|
|
This year's
International
Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas offered a stunning
galaxy of devices large and small for consuming a wide
array of content sources in multiple formats. Whither
standards in all of this? For many the push to get into the
hottest devices possible has left standards hanging in the
breeze, while others such as Real Networks and IBM opt to
open rights-protected content delivery to the widest
audiences possible. Much as it may chagrin gizmo producers
who want to gain advantages over their competition, it's in
the content industry's interest to create an environment
where they can deliver content objects to the widest range
of devices possible. |
|
|
|
| 5
January 2004 |
|
|
Yesterday's Model:
How Zinio Takes Content Forward into the Past |
|
|
|
A recent thirst for info on the latest
cars finally persuaded me to buy a magazine subscription
from Primedia via the
Zinio
electronic magazine reader. The chugging, oversimplistic
viewing engine that manages the commercial and tech details
seems no more likely to allow Primedia and others to catch
up with the wave of tech-savvy readers most in a position
to try the technology than Detroit was in its years of
ceding automotive market dominance to companies more adept
at blending art and science for consumers. Intelligently
engineered content objects are the wave of the future, but
molding them around technology centered on retro business
models is a sure-fire waste of time. |
|
|
|
|
29 December 2003 |
|
Crystal Ball: Key
Trends for Professional Content and Technologies in 2004 |
|
|
|
The allure of business trend forecasting
still seems to hold its attraction for many, so as we sign
off on a very interesting year in content and technologies
we welcome in 2004 as the year when "The Walls Come
Tumbling Down." Content and technology vending will become
increasingly entwined as professional content profitability
moves to models that combine the best of individual and
institutional markets. Say hello to the Publishing
Organization, the institution that uses publishing
technology as a capability that can add as much to the top
line as it does to the bottom line. Webloggers look to
profits, search gets personal, ads go where they've never
gone before, Global markets get local, web services get
real and print publications face the reality that real
profits are electronic first and foremost. Look out below,
here comes a rough-and-tumble year! |
|
|
|
| 22
December 2003 |
|
|
Shopping Malls: Content
Aggregation Models in the Era of Amazon Technology |
|
|
|
It's the height of the holiday shopping
season, a time when smart shoppers click their way to
sanity via online outlets like
Amazon.com. But as much as Amazon is profiting from
holiday sales in their own storefront they're discovering
that the real money is in providing ecommerce capabilities
to others via its technology and online marketing experts.
The department store is learning how to be a shopping mall
operator, and in the process creating lessons for
aggregators of premium business content like Dialog,
Factiva, LexisNexis, OneSource, Ovid and ProQuest. Lesson
to learn: technology may change the content commerce game,
but it's still all about the customer. |
|
|
|
| 15
December 2003 |
|
|
Pull Your SOX Up: Corporate Compliance Looms, But Content
Plays the Tune |
|
|
|
In the oncoming rush towards compliance
with the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 corporate governance
regulations, many content technology vendors seem to be
applying some of the same fear-driven tactics that drove
deadline-oriented millennium compliance investments. But
many companies aren't buying the fear pitch - in large part
because the publishing and storage technologies being
pitched for compliance are part of a much broader set of
competitive requirements that are driving institutions
towards being more effective creators and consumers of
content. Compliance is crucial and its benefits
substantial, but it's organizations learning how to
leverage content profitably that's really calling the
investment tune. |
|
|
|
| 8
December 2003 |
|
|
Tomorrow's News: The
Associated Press Gears Up for the Future of Journalism |
|
|
|
Born on the telegraph wires of the 19th
century, the Associated Press is readying itself at the
dawn of the 21st century via its
recently announced eAP initiative for infrastructure.
Its member news organizations can hardly wait, but by the
time it's done 30 months from now, how many of them will be
around to take advantage of it? In the rapidly changing
world of news aggregation, AP must consider how much to
cater to its existing constituencies and how much to tool
itself for a world that increasingly bypasses traditional
news outlets for its content. Given that it was the first
virtual news organization, perhaps it's ready to take some
significant steps forward. |
|
|
|
| 1
December 2003 |
|
|
The Age of Reason: The Perfect Knowing Machine Meets the
Reality of Content |
|
|
|
In the ongoing debates about what should
constitute the perfect way to capture and share knowledge,
a lot of ideal scenarios are concocted to get the world of
tacit knowledge properly disseminated to those that would
serve it with useful content. But who can ever know you
perfectly - and do you know yourself perfectly? It gets
silly pretty quickly.
The Robin Good weblog recently highlighted some of these themes, and
emerging from the fray is the clear picture that the true
nature of content is not well grasped by many who would
change the way in which we manage to acquire it. Thank
goodness we're not perfect knowing machines! |
|
|
|
| 24
November 2003 |
|
|
Take a Peek: Pay-Per View Best Practices Emerge from the
SIIA Brown Bag |
|
|
|
The latest
SIIA Brown Bag Lunch was entitled "Subscription,
Ad-Supported, Paid Search….BUT Where is the Pay-Per-View
Business Model in the Mix?" The implication is that in the
midst of the latest buzz about new ways of paying for
content pay-per-view has been lost a bit in the picture. In
a backhanded way that's a good thing, indicating that
pay-per-view has moved from its own trendiness to a working
range of successful business models with proven best
practices to share. And share is just what senior
management from Dun & Bradstreet, OVID, Alacra and
MarketResearch.com did - revealing a range of approaches to
successful single sales of premium content. |
|
|
|
| 17
November 2003 |
|
|
POST Time: Web
Services Standards Step Up The Race for Content
Distribution |
|
|
|
The world of Web services is about to
get a lot more interesting now that the
Web Services
Definition Language (WSDL) standards have been approved.
Already a wide alliance of Web services software vendors
are highlighting their capabilities with open source
examples at the
Portlet Open Source Trading Site (POST) to promote the
adoption of standardized Web services. The race for
dominance in Web services has already begun amongst
technologists, but most content providers are still looking
for the starting gate. Given that Web services may prove to
be at least as transformative to their business models as
the Web itself, it's time for content companies to saddle
up and consider how to run - and win. |
|
|
|
| 10
November 2003 |
|
|
Print Profit Goes
Online: What WSJ's Counting of Web Users Means to
Publishing |
|
|
|
The power of online news outlets became
abundantly clear when
The Wall
Street Journal announced that its paid circulation
surged 16 percent in September - based on the inclusion of
online-only subscribers using its WSJ Online site. This is
a seminal event in the maturing the Web as an outlet for
premium content, but at the same time it may be somewhat
deceiving in its assertion of the value of current models
for premium online content. The Journal has some unique
assets that may make its model somewhat difficult to
translate for others following in their footsteps - and
some common liabilities that may make other routes more
advisable in the long run. |
|
|
|
| 3
November 2003 |
|
|
Books Revealed:
How Amazon's Full Text Search will Place eBooks in the
Limelight |
|
|
|
With online retailer Amazon's
implementation of online text searching for more than
120,000 book titles, the stage has been set for eBooks to
come into their own. The new ease with which one can
determine whether a given book is valuable for a specific
need will only heighten the demand to have that value
recognized as soon as possible and with usage as flexible
as today's online users have experienced with online
content for years. The stage is set for a new era in book
selling, but it's far from clear that publishers are ready
to meet the challenge. |
|
|
|
| 27
October 2003 |
|
|
Quiet Lessons:
How Professional Content Services are Learning from Paid
Search |
|
|
|
At the
SIIA Content Division's Brown Bag Lunch on "The Success
of Paid Search: How Does it Affect Content Companies?",
panelists from ad placement services and aggregators
wrestled with what's really working with contextual ad
services, but it was the quiet comments from Ovid that
deserve our closest attention. Players most familiar with
premium content used in major institutions are beginning to
look at ad placement services and are realizing that there
are key lessons for them to apply to their own operations.
Purchasing and using professional content may never be the
same. |
|
|
|
| 20
October 2003 |
|
|
Knowing
Organizations: How Content Publishing is Shaping Corporate
Culture |
|
|
|
This year's KMWorld & Intranets 2003 Conference
evidenced a level of acceptance of Knowledge Management
concepts that seems to point towards both great success and
a transition away from KM being a major factor in shaping
content technology. Effective content publishing
technologies are now becoming ubiquitous in major
organizations, with - and oftentimes without - knowledge
management as a prime driving factor. Knowledge
Management's contributions to the human side of
organizations will continue to be significant, but it's
publishing that is driving the most significant changes to
corporate culture. |
|
|
|
| 13
October 2003 |
|
|
Pencil Sharpening: Why
Paid Content Struggles to Define Meaningful Price Points |
|
|
|
In yet another turn of the online music
worm,
the Napster brand has been resurrected, this time as a
DRM-secured song down load service offering 99-cent song
downloads and other online treats. But why 99 cents for a
song? Does anyone really have a handle on how much premium
content is really worth in a technology-savvy publishing
world? The question reverberates
loudly into the professional world, where institutions are
creating extremely sophisticated publishing cultures far
more advanced than any file-swapping phenomenon could ever
have manufactured. Expect the institutions, not the
publishers, to lead the way towards new ways to price
premium content that make sense to results-focused
institutional cultures. |
|
|
|
| 6
October 2003 |
|
|
Federated
Foxholes: Moving Search Beyond Library Science to Content
Science |
|
|
|
While the
Library Journal points out that federated search
engines are opening up new doors for users to access
library content collections in ways to which they've grown
accustomed via public Web search engines,
Information Today reminds us that federated search is
hardly a magic solution for consistent and unified content
location. At best federated search delays the day on which
information professionals will have to face some harsh
realities about their place in managing premium content
collections. Use it for what it's worth, but be ready to
move out of your federated foxholes while you can. |
|
|
|
| 29
September 2003 |
|
|
Dot-com Redux:
Are Weblogs, Inc. and Red Herring Playing to the Past? |
|
|
|
Weblogs and newswires have been abuzz as
of late with new stirrings of former dot-commers building
portals to service business needs. Even as a revived
Red
Herring promises new tales of I.T. splendor, Wired
magazine spun
Rafat Ali's PaidContent.org postings on plans for
Weblogs, Inc. a portal
aimed to capture B2B weblog
providers.
Nick Denton's weblog was
skeptical of their chances, and it's likely he's right.
There's a world of sophistication that's come to business
publishing since the technology crash, sophistication
that's likely to drive highly valued content to other
channels. |
|
|
|
| 22
September 2003 |
|
|
Fountain Flowing:
Can Factiva Redefine Premium Aggregation Value with IBM? |
|
|
|
As Factiva
announces the deployment of
its vast content collection on IBM's new Web Fountain
platform, it is being heralded by these partners as the
dawn of a new world of content value. Complex, human-scaled
questions can now find answers in a flash from a sea of
premium, public and private content. But will this fountain
of knowledge flow as freely and steadily as they hope? The
very thing that makes Web Fountain formidable - its scale -
may in fact turn out in the long run to be as much an
impediment as a strength in helping companies to create
highly valued content efficiently. |
|
|
|
| 15
September 2003 |
|
|
Package
Deal: How Personal Publishing Can Transform Content
Packaging |
|
|
|
In a week that saw the
RiAA's lawsuit against downloaders unfolding and
Barnes & Noble pulling out of eBook distribution, many
publishers and distributors seem to be struggling with how
to confront the power of personal publishing's impact on
their business models. You cannot wish personal
publishing's power away, nor can you ignore that its power
is really only just beginning to have significant impact on
both the publishing industry and professionals in the
institutions that they serve. Smart publishing companies
will embrace personal publishing technologies aggressively
and learn how to make content valuable because of, and not
in spite of, individual publishing capabilities. |
|
|
|
| 8
September 2003 |
|
|
Paper Training: What the Persistence of Print Teaches Us
About Content Value |
|
|
|
A forthcoming
Pew Research Center Internet Project report
recently previewed by The New York Times indicates that
print lingers strongly for many adults, and is still at
least on a par with electronic sources for the younger set.
Print is weakening in its influence, but its inherent
strengths still remain poorly translated into many
electronic formats. But at the same time what defines
profitable printing has been changed fundamentally by
electronic content channels. Understanding what makes
printed content valuable is essential to both electronic
publishers and print operations alike. |
|
|
|
| 2
September 2003 |
|
|
To Have and to Have Not: Succeeding
in a World that Awaits In-Depth Content |
|
|
|
How great is the divide between those
who are swimming in content and those who beg for scraps?
Compare and contrast the
results of a UC Berkeley report that estimates new
electronic content generation at more than an exabyte
annually with
a UN task force report which notes that fewer than seven percent worldwide
have Internet access. If
knowledge is power, then we are poised on the verge of an
explosion of empowerment though enabling inexpensive and
worldwide access to professional content.
Opportunities abound in this picture for those willing to
embrace them. |
|
|
|
| 25
August 2003 |
|
|
Comeback Kid: Can
Contextual Content Save Microsoft Office from Irrelevance? |
|
|
|
Microsoft has been unveiling a steady
and growing stream of commercial content partners who are
integrating professionally-oriented wares into its Office
2003 product line via its new
Research Library. Having so much invested in the power of
its content authoring tools, it is wholly in Microsoft's interest
to give today's leading publishers - the individuals and
institutions equipped with powerful content authoring tools
- the ability to integrate commercial content efficiently.
But are publishers and the institutions that they serve really ready to accept
and manage this new environment?
There are as many dangers as there are opportunities to
explore. |
|
|
|
| 18
August 2003 |
|
|
Naked Chef Meets
the Grateful Dead: How eBook Distribution is Ahead of
Publishers |
|
|
|
According to news reports
from
Slate and others, people around the world have
been emailed a very attractive eBook with recipes from
Jamie Oliver, known as the "Naked Chef" from the
BBC Television cooking show of the same name. Small
problem: although the recipes are authentic, he never
produced the book hitting people's inboxes. Bootleg
content, once the purview of fans of
The Grateful
Dead's friendly rock tunes, has hit mainstream
publishing. Can publishers finally figure out how to
leverage and manage social networks as powerful marketing
channels? Some people don't appear to be waiting for the
answer. |
|
|
|
| 11
August 2003 |
|
|
Strategic
Positioning: How Professional Content Can Profit from
Individual Context |
|
|
|
Vendors such as Yahoo! through its
Overture subsidiary and Google
via its AdSense capabilities
are breathing life into many portals'
online ad sales through placing contextual
ads on a page based on its content,
as highlighted by The New York Times.
This capability, though, could be
positioned just as easily for context-based access to
premium content. Premium professional content vendors
have much to gain from rethinking how contextual content placement can
be used for targeted, variable monetization - and as
pointed out by the AP, variable monetization
based on an individual user's context and profile is an
idea whose time has come in ecommerce. |
|
|
|
| 4 August
2003 |
|
|
Brown
Bag Special: Feasting on the Edge of Content and Technology
Convergence |
|
|
|
The
SIIA Content Divsion's Brown Bag Lunch on content and
technology convergence threw LexisNexis, Yahoo!Finance, CCH
and a leading lawyer from Mintz Levin against the leading
issues of these merging disciplines. What emerged from the
panel was a clear picture that the content industry is
moving rapidly to meet many of the challenges and
opportunities that lie at the edge of this intersection.
However, when it comes down to the more scary issues, the
leading edge seems to be gaining speed on even the
strongest players in professionally-oriented content. The
answers may take more than a quick lunch break to figure
out. |
|
|
|
| 28 July
2003 |
|
|
Rethinking Books: How
Amazon's Text Search Plan Opens Books to New Contexts |
|
|
|
Retailers and institutions alike are
having an increasingly hard time leveraging value out of
books. To light a spark under its own book sales, online
retailer
Amazon is
about to provide searching of online book texts for
thousands of non-fiction titles. While Amazon's primary
focus is to increase sales of existing books, the new
capability opens up many interesting new paths for the
marketing of book content in online environments. Expect
institutions that consume much of the world of non-fiction
titles to benefit from this trend as much as individuals
and publishers. |
|
|
|
| 21 July
2003 |
|
|
The New
Aggregation: Moving Beyond Big Collections to Content
Solutions |
|
|
|
As
LexisNexis
rolls out three major new capabilities for integrating
published and internal content into highly valued products,
the focus is on aggregators trying to define an enhanced
range of services for their clients that focus on solving
specific kinds of business problems rather than just adding
new professionally packaged sources. While many aggregators
are beginning to offer greatly enhanced content service
offerings, it's not clear that these companies are
altogether ready to face up to the consequences that these
capabilities will generate in their revenue streams. All
looks happy at the moment as both the content and the
services remain in high demand, but expect changing
expectations to reshape this happy picture fairly quickly. |
|
|
|
| 14 July
2003 |
|
|
Watching Weblogs: Why Content Vendors Must Tap Into
Personal Publishing |
|
|
|
While weblogs have created quite a stir
in the past year or so, they've actually been a part of Web
life since its earliest days. What's different today is
that serious people in many professional circles create and
use weblogs to communicate with their peers worldwide. Even
Microsoft, known to have missed a trend or two with
disruptive technologies,
seems to be trying to catch the beat. While some savvy
media companies and professionally oriented publishers have
caught the beat as well, most content vendors have turned a
deaf ear to this emerging capability. They do so at their
peril, for in weblogs and related technologies can be found
the keys to how people want to receive content on a
personal level. |
|
|
|
| 7 July
2003 |
|
|
The Search for Context: How Content Vendors Can Redefine
Contextual Value |
|
|
|
As
newspaper editors moan about a lack of turnaround in their
businesses, it's clear that fundamental economics are
not the only culprits slowing the content industry. In the
realm of professional content, the clients increasingly own
the context of their content from top to bottom. If a
publisher or aggregator does not control the context of
content use, how can they control the value of their
products and services? Truth is, context isn't lost to
vendors in institutional portals - it's just taken a turn
that requires more creative thinking about how to create
value for clients. Here are some ideas to help those
seeking to find the sweet spot in today's contextual
content sales. |
|
|
|
| 30 June
2003 |
|
|
Tea Party Brewing: How the Push to Lock Down Content may
Backfire |
|
|
|
Now that the
Recording
Industry Association of America (RIAA) has decided to
get heavy with Web downloaders of copyrighted tunes, strong
currents of sentiment and action have been set in motion.
The issues being advanced by American corporate content
interests are cut and dried legal issues from an objective
standpoint. But nations have been lost - and born - when
people fail to look beyond the issues at hand to the
broader needs of the marketplace that they are serving. The
Boston Tea Party is a good example of what happens when
one small group decides to fight back against companies
that don't listen to their clients. What happens, though,
when all the world is your harbor? |
|
|
|
| 22 June
2003 |
|
|
After
the Storm: The Changing Shape of Financial Content Markets |
|
|
|
At this year's
Securities Industry Association Technology Management
Conference & Exhibit vendors large and small yet again
catered to the elites of finance to show them how financial
content and related technologies would change their
markets for the better. While many of the financial
content vendors have weathered the aftermath of the 9/11
and regulatory storms, the changes required to adapt to
this new environment are far from over. Look for big
suppliers to continue to struggle to stay big, open
standards to drive through a wealth of new and innovative
content sources, and the anti-tech bastion Bloomberg to
continue its slow erosion. |
|
|
|
| 15 June
2003 |
|
|
The Nature of Content:
What Turns Information and Experiences into Something
Valuable |
|
|
|
The Ambient Orb, a novel approach to
information display created by
Ambient Devices, made its debut recently in
The New York Times. Program it to respond to changes in
your favorite stocks, the proximity of the bus going home
and voila - the cheerful little orb starts glowing whatever
color you want when the conditions are as you dictate.
That's content in its most basic form: something that an
audience can experience in a venue and a manner that has
value to them. The orb itself may be of limited use, but it
speaks volumes about how different the content business is
from the information business. |
|
|
|
| 8 June
2003 |
|
|
What's in a Name: How
Information Professionals can Seize a New Identity |
|
|
|
At this week's
Special Libraries Association conference, the
organization's members are considering a name change that
will reflect the needs that represent the future of their
practices. The SLA is endeavoring to position itself
squarely in the thick of the Web-lead revolution that has
transformed content retrieval and purchasing into a
productivity-leading science. The good news is that
information professionals are well positioned with
human-oriented skills to make even more significant
contributions to providing value in technology-based
content environments. But as with any makeover, some may
find themselves facing a bit of an identity crisis once
they realize the full extent of what it will take to make
the most of these changes. |
|
|
|
| 1 June
2003 |
|
|
Big Systems Discover
Big Content: A Less than Perfect Meeting of the Minds |
|
|
|
With the
settlement of the Microsoft-AOL suit, we're beginning
to enter an era where the interests of large systems
providers like Microsoft and IBM and large content
producers are going to be more cozy than ever. But as much
as the development of broadband content capabilities may
seem to parallel the transition from radio to television in
an earlier era, there are important reasons why this is a
less than perfect analogy. The winners will be those that
understand exactly why today's technology and content are
not synonymous with the analogies of eras both long-gone
and recent. |
|
|
|
| 25 May
2003 |
|
|
Lessons from "The Star
Wars Kid": The Value of Social Networks in Publishing |
|
|
|
What was at first just a prank by some
mean-spirited classmates of a French Canadian teenager
turned into an international content sensation almost
overnight. The
video clip originally created by the kid known only as
Ghyslain has now been downloaded
by millions worldwide and has rumbled into the limelight of
the mainstream content community. While Ghyslain doesn't
stand to make much by his venture, it raises interesting
questions as to how content can be produced and monetized
in the future. Professional producers and consumers of
content are likely to benefit from social network
publishing as much as consumers - when the tools are there
to do so. |
|
|
|
| 18 May
2003 |
|
|
Capturing Content
Value: Why Digital Rights Work When they Work for People |
|
|
|
Digital Rights Management (DRM) has long had a
reputation of being a technology trying to solve a problem
that no one really wanted solved. But recent advances by
Apple in selling 99-cent songs online and the growing
success of eBooks in library settings help to underscore
that technology and standards are not nearly as important
as finding business models that provide real value to
content audiences. The success of consumer-oriented
business models is placing increasing pressure on
professional content distributors to consider how they
position the value of their premium services in ways that
make use of DRM as a tool that can add value in ways that
users appreciate. |
|
|
|
| 10 May
2003 |
|
|
Time Warp: Google vs.
Persistent Content Researchers |
|
|
|
Google's
Craig Silverstein sees a world of
content that's as easy to access as speaking to a 23rd
century starship's computer. But while his vision seems to
be crystal clear for immediate content, things seem to get
a little cloudy when he tries to focus on preserving the
context of content over time that will allow for more
effective historical research. Looking at yesterday through
today's Google-colored glasses inevitably creates
historical distortions. But the ease with which Google
answers today's questions makes it hard for many people to
imagine finding content any other way. Merging the best of
Google's context-building concepts into historical content
services will create a far more valuable view of our past. |
|
|
|
| 2 May
2003 |
|
|
Trust and Content: How
Broker Research Broke Wall Street's Power Houses |
|
|
|
U.S. securities markets have been rocked
by the disclosure of easy influence over research produced
by supposedly objective securities analysts at major
financial institutions.
As ongoing investigations by regulators reveal just how
pervasive this practice has been, settlements with the
government are beginning to commit these firms to more
objective research practices. In today's content
environment, though, the content markets themselves are
pushing these institutions to change their ways at least as
hard as the government. Success in all sectors goes
increasingly to those institutions that can learn how to
make trustworthy and responsive content a central component
of their business relationships with clients and suppliers. |
|
|
|
| 25 April
2003 |
|
|
The Great Content Migration: Personal Communication
Channels Search for Power |
|
|
|
Vendors are vying heavily for the
attention of institutional dollars to replace email with
improved content technology, in the hopes that email
content will make a huge migration to their particular
solution. Personal content is definitely cropping up in new
and interesting channels, but it's important to recognize
that people use these new channels for their content value
first and foremost. With recent research showing that 80
percent of corporate users prefer email to the phone, email
represents not just a legacy application but a highly
valued content channel that's difficult to replace. When
replacing a content channel, don't think that technology
alone can displace the perception of inherent content
value. |
|
|
|
| 19 April
2003 |
|
|
Crossing the
Great Divide: Why Content Companies Must Take the
Technology Leap |
|
|
|
At the
Buying and Selling eContent conference this week,
content vendors squirmed while forces of technology-induced
change pressed in on long-standing business models. By
contrast, at the
Enterprise Portals and Web Services conference, there
was nary a content vendor, in spite of content's central
role in these key delivery channels. Although content
companies have begun to embrace some new models, it is
clear that institutional and individual clients are driving
the content technology that is forcing them to consider any
changes. It's time for content companies to leap
aggressively into this fray and to help define how the best
of old and new concepts can be merged effectively. |
|
|
|
| 11 April
2003 |
|
|
How Corporate
Governance Regulations are Shaping Content Value |
|
|
|
In response to recent high-profile
scandals,
U.S. corporate governance regulations are
increasing the requirements for auditable document
retention and management significantly. The new corporate regs are aimed at
internal publishing - the very arena in which institutions
are undergoing a revolution in content integration,
publishing and distribution. Expect this new environment to
give corporations a much stronger capability no only to
monitor and track overall content creation and use, but
also to create a new awareness in corporations of how to
shape and direct valuable content to the most appropriate
audiences - for both internal and external purposes. |
|
|
|
| 4 April
2003 |
|
|
Content and Free
Speech: How Personal Publishing is Changing Business
Culture |
|
|
|
Intel's email lawsuit in California courts, which aims
to restrain incoming email from an ex-employee containing
anti-Intel messages, is a key example of how the line
between free speech and privacy continues to be a key
factor in corporate content as well as in the public realm.
Email is the focus of this particular suit, but with the
proliferation of authoring capabilities using many new
kinds of technology and outlets, it's becoming a question
as to how much longer corporations will be able to have
final say over every form of expression reaching - or
emanating from - their own facilities. Content culture is
quickly shaping business culture, and the winners will be
those that know how to "walk the talk" of effective open
expression. |
|
|
|
| 28 March
2003 |
|
|
The Real-Time
Dilemma: What Really Matters with Immediate Content |
|
|
|
The phrase "real time" has taken on a
life of its own as enterprises and vendors learn how to
create and deliver up-to-the-moment content and services to
their audiences. But even as institutional and public
portals learn how to cope with the technical challenges of
immediate relevance, the question of making money with
real-time content looms large in many minds - both from the
perspective of sellers and users. When looking at the
history of real time content in the financial markets, it's
clear that money can be made on both ends of the equation.
But smart organizations will learn how to place real time
content in a broader perspective, and allow it to serve
their needs, not dominate them. |
|
|
|
| 20 March
2003 |
|
|
Content in
Conflict: How Pervasive Content is Shaping the War in Iraq |
|
|
|
Twelve years after Operation Desert
Storm, the US and its allies have returned to face a much different battlefield,
both in the war itself and in how people are
creating and experiencing war-related content.
The proliferation of content publishing tools and channels makes it possible to
see the war in a much more unfiltered and immediate light
than in any past conflict. Many major media outlets
are using these tools, but more humble sources are shaping
the action, also. This parallels what seems to be
happening in the content world at large. The ability to
extract value from unfiltered content providers and
opinion-makers can provide
any community or institution with a sense of what is really
happening in their own "ground wars". |
|
|
|
| 13 March
2003 |
|
|
Learning from the
CD Wars: Seeking "Cool" Content Value |
|
|
|
As reported in today's
New York Times, major music publishers are getting
wiser about how to approach defending the value of their
CD-based products by applying improved technology and
providing more interesting supplemental content. It's back to
basics - instead of blaming customers for abandoning a
content product that had gone stale, they are wisely
looking at the quality of the experience itself in
comparison to other technology-driven content products.
Be it the latest Techno beats or the beat of the stock
market ticker, content markets wait for nobody to
tell them what's a valuable information experience. |
|
|
|
| 5 March
2003 |
|
|
"The Afterweb":
Wrong Lessons from the Right Trend |
|
|
|
Major print publishers are embracing
print-styled electronic delivery of their publications.
Companies such as
ZInio,
LinkPath and
NewsStand are hoping to entice print readers to use
their tools - and on the high end of the business, they are
making nominal headway. But the real motivation of the
publishers is to try to preserve ad-driven financial models
based on controlled circulation statistics as readers
become increasingly web-based. In the end, they will
only be chasing to preserve an old business model
- and they may fail to respond to the real opportunities
for monetizing content in the electronic era. |
|
|
|
| 27
February 2003 |
|
|
Google's Blogger
Gambit: What is a Portal, Anyway? |
|
|
|
Web content specialist
Google
recently announced its acquisition of Pyra Labs, creators
of
Blogger.com, a major source of weblogs content and
tools. It is a well-timed and on-target acquisition: Google
has built its business around the premise that content
creators and their audiences are the ultimate subject
domain experts, and the assets of Blogger.com fit in nicely
with that premise. Portal creators should bear the outlook
of Google in mind when determining what will make their
ventures successful. Technology and infomediaries can
help to structure, channel and compile portal content, but
in a successful portal an authentic and respected community
creates and validates the core of a portal's being. |
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| 26
February 2003 |
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The Good Ship
Reuters: Which Iceberg Hurt the Most? |
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As
Reuters
Group PLC endures
its greatest loss ever as a public company, it's worth
considering how this media giant worked its way from being
the pre-eminent supplier of financial information worldwide
to an increasingly tenuous position in the changing world
of content and related technologies. Put simply, the
fate of Reuters was sealed years ago when it failed to miss
just how radically the Web and its technologies would
impact its core content business model in trading rooms
around the world. Ironically, it was not for lack of
technological savvy: rather, it was a failure to appreciate
how people were using content and technology to build
relationships that drove content value. |
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