Browser Wars Redux: Microsoft Seeks First-Visit Status for Consumers and Enterprise Content
A revamped Internet Explorer browser tries to steer users to Microsoft's own search engine - a move that irks Google in spite of similar benefits its enjoyed courtesy of other software developers. more...

Bay Area Hold 'Em: McClatchy's Orphan Deals Solidify Focus in Non-Major Markets
In spite of a lot of agitation amongst major media companies the spinoff of McClatchy's "orphans" from Knight Ridder is nothing more than a continuation of their refocusing on non-major markets. more...

Reuters vs. Bloomberg: What's the Right Battle to Measure?
Reuters finally nosed ahead of their arch-rival in financial market data, but is this the race that really matters today? more...

Congoo Tries for Transparency in Premium Content Web Searches - Sort Of
A new service to search for premium content online trumpets itself as a breakthrough for users, but it's all too like other proprietary approaches.  more...

Microsoft's new beta version of its Internet Explorer browser (Forbes) is in many ways a catch-up to accommodate those who have come to appreciate the features of Mozilla's Firefox browser. It's a move reminiscent of the intense effort to re-launch IE some ten years ago to counter the then-dominant Netscape browser. As in that earlier era, the Microsoft strategy is to match rivals feature-for-feature with little twists that give the home team an advantage such as having a toolbar search box that defaults to Microsoft's Web search engine. In comparison, the toolbar search box in Firefox defaults to the Google browser, though there is no formal relationship with Google to enforce that advantage. Yet Google grouses in today's New York Times about unfair practices by Microsoft in setting their search tool's default to their own search engine. This seems like kind of a pouty response to a proven competitive tactic - one that's worked to Google's advantage amongst the many Google-friendly tie-ins from Web software developers.

Microsoft is going full-bore to realign its online initiatives to go head-to-head with Google wherever possible, even as they push "the user comes first" as their new mantra to soften its aggressive image. While the NYT article highlights the potential impact on ad dollars as a key concern of Google's in this reinvigorated competition for online audience, there is plenty of potential fallout from enterprise markets as well, where Google has an enormous lead over Microsoft in user mindshare for providing high-quality business information that it's trying to leverage into enterprise-based services. While it's far from clear that Microsoft's efforts will stem its competitive woes its powerful technology assets are becoming well aligned for the first serious across-the-board challenge to Google's emerging Web dominance. That's good news for content consumers, who will benefit from greater choice in high-quality services, and in some ways hopefully good news for Google, inasmuch as the competition will challenge them not to assume that they always know users the best in every venue.

The Associated Press highlights along with major papers the details of McClatchy's spinoff of four newspapers recently acquired from Knight Ridder, a complex series of deals that puts privately held MediaNews in the spotlight as the principal winner of the Bay Area's San Jose Mercury News and The Contra Costa Times with support from other chains, while Hearst gains The Pioneer Press in St. Paul, Minnesota and The Herald in Monterey County. The interest in the was enough to bring Editor & Publisher's analysis of this story for a good period of time today.

But apart from MediaNews becoming the fourth largest paper chain via this deal there's not a lot that's terribly new here. Like a game of Texas Hold 'Em poker most of the cards were already on the table before the final pieces fell into place. The interesting parts of this story are mostly in the little details, such as McClatchy picking up pieces of even more papers in non-major markets, emphasizing their positioning for news in markets in which electronic competitors are less likely to dilute earnings over the next few years.

The other not-so-small detail is that Hearst and Gannett are picking up minority interests in the MediaNews acquisitions, which is likely to raise concerns about the concentration of media ownership again at some point, but not likely to raise dust in the short run. But with both newspapers and magazines emphasizing online video production as a hot new outlet for their content there could be more complex ownership issues emerging in local markets where print video production begins to compete effectively with local TV news producers.

In the meantime a series of relatively quiet and complex deals such as those being executed via McClatchy is a good way to keep the regulatory spotlight away from potential ownership concerns. All appears to be on track in this little poker game, and perhaps everyone will go home happy yet. But if I were a betting man I'd put my money on McClatchy's markets. MediaNews knows what it has to do, but it's a far showier bet to think that any major is going to catch up with today's well-wired users that have a galaxy of good substitute content available. For now, I'm hiding my wallet.

The Times Online notes the latest chapter in the perennial battle between financial content rivals Reuters and Bloomberg in their efforts to gain market share supremacy through their services to the global securities industry. According to The Times, Reuters is claiming through its slim eking out of another one percent of market share that its 27 percent slice of the pie now places it atop Bloomberg for the first time in a decade. As noted by The Times, though, this comes in part due to the absorption of user positions gained via the Reuters acquisition of Telerate last year - an indication of just how much potential redundancy there is in the financial content game - and a more accurate assessment of how data feeds contribute to the Reuters market share. So although Reuters has much to cheer about in terms of its efforts to revitalize and consolidate its product line, the gains in market share are hardly to be called organic at this point.

The broader concern, though, is whether this annual exercise in "mine is bigger than yours" is really telling Reuters shareholders what they need to know about their market position. Bloomberg is certainly facing major challenges as it tries to roll out expanded datafeed services and to fend off vendors nibbling away at their messaging services that are at the heart of their platform's value as a channel for deal-making; their monolithic pricing also faces stiffer opposition from clients as "The" Bloomberg becomes less of a desktop presence. All good news for the crew over in Canary Wharf, to be sure. But the broader issue of market share is not how much Reuters is slicing out of Bloomberg but rather the death by a thousand cuts that it is suffering from niche players, networks and content distributors more willing to bypass Reuters and Bloomberg services altogether to create a new fabric for financial content services.

A new generation of content services is emerging in financial markets thanks to the rise of increasingly independent content creators and network infrastructure and standards that eliminate much of the historical need for content aggregators to manage real-time market data. In this new era of financial content value-add service providers such as Reuters and Bloomberg are still critical components but they can hardly call the tune for the dance as they did when their global technology services were the only cost-effective way to glue financial content together effectively. We'll continue to see the annual Reuters market share studies come out, no doubt, but it would be refreshing to see them consider some of the emerging factors in the marketplace for financial content services more seriously. Otherwise these stats will have all of the heart-pounding relevance of major television network rankings in an era of online access.

InfoWorld picks up on a new round of PR for Congoo, a tool to make it easier to access premium content located via a Web search engine. Congoo is a toolbar that you can download for your Internet Explorer browser (Firefox promised) that will allow you to form search queries much as any other search engine's toolbar. Enter some personal information in the Congoo tool such as zip code and email address typically asked for registration-based access to premium content and you're ready to start looking for premium sources. Search results yield a section on top of the page with premium results, followed by normal query results from the Yahoo! search engine, along with sponsored links to advertisers on the right side. Click on a premium result and you can get limited free access or easy pay-as-you go access with a click from a popup box, which then stays out of the way to allow you to access premium sources unimpeded.

That's the good news...now for the not-so-good news. Most of the premium sources are news and press releases stored in a subscription collection called Libraryo.com, with the most prominent direct access sources being Encyclopedia Britannica and institutional Investor. In some informal testing, I was able to find articles from Institutional Investor on the open Web that were displayed in the premium results of Congoo, as well as BusinessWire archive press releases available for free on the free side of the HighBeam research portal. However, on the plus side the Institutional Investor and EB results link to their native Web sites rather than the stripped-down Libraryo.com results for papers and press releases. The larger problem is that the Congoo tool does not work in conjunction with other search engines: you access the premium content only from the Congoo search portal, which is available today only to tool downloaders.

In a general sense there's a lot to be said for having a tool like Congoo to make premium content accessible easily from an interface that includes Web content. It's an idea that has been tried from many angles already by Factiva, Yahoo!, Highbeam and other prominent suppliers. But none of these efforts have been able to detach their subscription access schemes from a proprietary search engine or database management system. At the same time Yahoo!'s Subscription Search beta has virtually disappeared: the landing page still exists but it no longer returns search results.

Aggregating segregated premium content works well for some specific applications and content types, but as a general concept it's proven itself to be a loser on the open Web. The segregation of premium content in search engines has not enabled its value to be assessed in direct comparison to non-premium sources. Shore research shows consistently that people are willing to pay for premium content when it serves an important purpose in an important context, with Web search engines a key source. If that perceived value is so high, why continue to confuse content consumers by insisting on artificial segregation? In enterprise search engines and applications content from personal, enterprise and external sources are combined as needed to provide the highest contextual value possible. There's no real reason to do otherwise on the open Web - a fact that more and more publishers are beginning to appreciate without the help of traditional aggregation services.

Content license management for subscription content still revolves largely around database access controls rather than the devices used by individuals and institutions licensing content. With the prevalence of search and access methods for content in today's public Web and enterprise networks, there is a real need for more universal content monetization controls that don't tie publishers to these database services. Congoo tries to look like it can provide that universal access, but it's a long way off the mark, unfortunately. Next...

Interview: Vivian Schiller, New SVP/GM, NYTimes.com

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