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Desert Visions: Topics of Discussion
for Next Year's Buying and Selling eContent Conference |
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3 May 2004 |
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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. |
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Sun-seared
desert landscapes peppered with quails and cacti have given way
to drizzly, dreary skies and forests pushing out their blooms
and leaves. Another
Buying and Selling eContent conference has become a chapter
in content industry history, leaving myself and the 175+
attendees to ponder the outcome of events at the
Camelback Inn from our home perspectives. As noted in our
extensive
weblogs on the conference, there was far less false bravado
and cluelessness mixing at this valuable intersection of
content, technology and human factors than in years past, with
many presenters and participants well focused on best practices
that promise to provide high value to professionals and at
least reasonable publishing profits for the near term. Vendors
are learning quickly how to work with institutions eager to
integrate their offerings into their own sophisticated
publishing infrastructures and demonstrate returns on
investment more highly targeted at bottom-line results than
ever. XML content packaging has become a powerful standard for
content producers and consumers alike, promising far more
concentration on technologies producing value for users rather
than on creating costly infrastructures.
But it remains remarkable how many of the
key lessons offered in the past year of content deployment have
not moved the basic marketing equation of many publishers and
aggregators that had leading executives in attendance at the
conference. Major Web search engines have blasted open many
fundamental assumptions of how people access and value content
to solve problems and entertain themselves both personally and
professionally, yet aggregators and premium publishers alike
talked at the conference about "dancing with the devil" when it
come to approaching distribution via these new pillars of
content value. The success of Apple's iTunes and the burgeoning
of rights-protected eBooks distribution via libraries have
demonstrated that rights-protected content that's made
user-friendly can be enormously successful, yet nary a
publisher in attendance considered rights management a serious
component of their distribution strategies. Standardized XML
syndication feeds, open access journals and purchasing
consortia are placing enormous pressures on publishers and
aggregators to adapt new monetization schemes, yet
long-established distribution models still prevail. In sum,
premium content publishing and distribution remains a very
conservative industry that is slow to adapt to the terrain
offered by today's content culture. Yet highly profitable
vContent companies soar along with double-digit growth,
changing the slices in the industry's profit pie day by day.
Given this split between conservative
outlook and new profit centers, what are some of the likely
themes that are going to unfold in next year's desert
rendezvous? Here are a few suggestions for next year's likely
topics and presenters at the BSeC conference:
- Premium publishers start dancing
with the devil - and liking it. 2004's conservatism and
legal wranglings will have given way to several major
publishers hungry to meet their users on their own terms and
frustrated with aggregators that fail to help facilitate
meaningful relationships with them. A variety of old and new
business models will be offered via open search engines to
access premium content sources, some direct from publishers,
some via aggregators and distributors. Digital rights
management for premium content distribution will still be in
its infancy for professional sources, but the increasing
success and distribution of rights-protected eBooks as
sources of useful content in a variety of professional
settings will have encouraged a number of leading publishers
to experiment more deeply with this and other
rights-protected models that enable users to act as
distributors and help publishers build relationship networks
for their content.
- Federated search is prevalent and
successful, but increasingly limiting. Amazon is the
keynoter for the conference, laying out how the Google
alliance via a9.com has evolved into the new Google universal
search interface that places premium content and products
from Amazon alongside open Web content and ad-placed content
in a manner that allows users to see content in their their
three predominant frames of mind: learning, buying and
browsing. As powerful as this federated search has proven to
be, though, institutional content purchasers continue to
chafe at the inadequacies of federated search at the
institutional level, where taxonomy-driven aggregation
collections fail to knit in smoothly with open Web and
enterprise search results. A leading supplier previews a new
search engine that treats all three kinds of content equally
to help people locate the truly relevant content that matters
to them at the moment.
- Personal knowledge management
begins to shape the landscape of premium content usage.
As part of a Shore panel presentation on "The New
Aggregation: Personal Knowledge Management Meets Premium
Content," a new provider demonstrates how its
Microsoft-based content collection and sharing software is
helping to create new, legitimate ways for professionals,
students and consumers to organize and expose content
collections derived from their own sources and Web sources in
ways that encourage the awareness of rights-protected premium
content via knowledge networks and other forms of communal
content value determination.
Groove Networks tries a similar demonstration for
team-managed content, but the software hangs. A scholarly
journals publisher shows how they are using personal
knowledge management tools to facilitate the peer review of
journal content and add value to the published articles.
NewsGator
demonstrates how their powerful search features create
mini-aggregation content mills from within Microsoft Outlook
using content delivered via XML syndication feeds.
These are all fairly incremental changes
for an industry that in large part still progresses modestly
into new technology environments. It's difficult for most
content companies to move forward any more quickly, though,
when the lion's share in new technology investment moves
towards other players who don't have to protect existing
content licensing agreements that are poorly engineered to
respond to today's technical realities. Only by aggressively
reconsidering and renegotiating the long-term value of those
agreements will today's publishers and distributors be able to
make significant changes to their eroding share of content
industry profits. It should be a fun time next year at
Camelback - for those who are willing to consider the vision
of where they need to be by that time. For the rest, well, I
hope that April showers are your thing.
-
John Blossom
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