Well, you can't say that Google doesn't stick to their guns. The New York Times reports along with the world on the details of Google's S-1 registration statement for their initial public stock offering. Public shares will be a small portion of Google's voting share structure and the owners make it clear that although they'll play by the rules they are not playing the game. Quarterly earnings fluctuations? Think long-term, please. And your long-term goal? "Don't be evil," they opine. It's refreshing stuff from a company that stands to have a valuation nearly as large as Yahoo!'s right out of the blocks, even if somewhat disdainful of true public ownership. But what does it mean to the content industry? It means that there is at least one vContent company that's situated to make the tough decisions that may change the nature of how content value is determined and recognized - regardless as to whether content companies are ready to play their game or not. It also means that they're willing to make some major mistakes along the way to achieving that goal - which may or may not please their content partners. As noted in our weblog on the Buying and Selling eContent Conference there are many publishers and distributor of premium content that see working with Google as "dancing with the devil." Who is truly evil in this scenario? The good is in the doing as much as in the being, so we will have to see just how well all parties in this complex equation play along with one another.

One thing is for sure, though: with accountability comes humility, whether the accountable like it or not. Google has signed on for some extremely lofty goals that promise humanness as they try to change the face of how human understanding is formed. The IPO will give Google some immediate cash to counter more aggressive competition that's beginning to zero in on their basic value equation and an invested public interest that can act as a semi-empowered cheerleader for their efforts. Google hopes to minimize the pressure from their cheerleaders while trying to educate them, but as anyone who goes to a sporting event well knows, cheerleaders can turn on you when you least expect it. With numerous new product initiatives required for a more comprehensive competitive stance still in the formative stages there is a lot that can go wrong in trying to assemble their vision. Good luck with the IPO, Google; remember what you said in the S-1 as the times get rough.

Leading marketing information provider InfoUSA, Inc. today announced the pending acquisition of business information provider OneSource Information Services, Inc. in a tender offer for their stock priced at $8.85 a share, about 8.5 percent above ValueAct's offer to take OneSource private in February. The acquisition has some minor hooks that may require further board approval for the takeover, but all in all this looks as if it will be a clean acquisition. OneSource has been a solidly profitable business, but had been searching for new ways to take their business beyond its relatively deep penetration into sales support and marketing operations and business intelligence units into broader markets, and that may yet happen under InfoUSA's tutelage. Shore Senior Analyst Jean Bedord notes that InfoUSA has acquired about twenty companies since 1996 as economies of scale continue to drive margins down - including InfoUSA's, where profits fell 36 percent in Q12004 versus the same period last year with heavy investments in marketing hitting the top line but not yet the bottom line.

The acquisition is reminiscent of Dun & Bradstreet's acquisition of online business information provider Hoover's, Inc. last year - a large database company acquires a smaller player with greater user penetration and integration focus - but with some important differences. InfoUSA supports direct marketing campaigns with a broad and deep database of business and consumer directory products, vertical industry databases, online mailing lists, marketing leads and retail consumer products. Through its Donnelley Group - most likely to benefit from or to absorb OneSource - InfoUSA offers a wide array of content integration support tools, data enhancement and file cleansing services, to supply external content and improve client content for major corporations. The likely scenario is that InfoUSA will take advantage of OneSource's strong business indexing and taxonomy schemes, wide base of business information sources and deep penetration into the top-tier corporate markets to present a challenge to Dun & Bradstreet across the full breadth of business information products.

A conversation with OneSource Interim CEO Martin Kahn this afternoon confirmed the outlines of this deal, which he sees as "a very good fit" for all concerned. OneSource's focus on major corporate sales and a higher level of business information integration from dozens of premium sources certainly gives InfoUSA a fine capstone of market opportunities that would have been difficult to penetrate with their own market profile and resources. Martin confirmed that both the management teams and production teams at OneSource will remain in place, with only Martin moving on for the moment as he has now completed his duty of shepherding OneSource into the hands of an appropriate business partner. He also indicated that InfoUSA was keen to acquire OneSource's management team as a part of the deal, which certainly has a broad and sophisticated global focus that will assist InfoUSA in putting together the sales and marketing profile necessary to take on Dun & Bradstreet across a range of market opportunities. "The way I see it there will be two major players [in business and marketing information services] moving forward - InfoUSA with OneSource and D&B with Hoover's," Martin said.

A good deal? We at Shore think so. It gives D&B a sorely-needed run for the money and places their Hoover's division on notice that consumer-savvy online content sales are now part of the combined InfoUSA/OneSource portfolio. Shore Senior Analyst Janice McCallum adds, "The potential for OneSource to move into the internal company database coding space that D&B dominates is amplified by this move. I think it's a good move by InfoUSA, who needs to find a way to play a role outside of the commodity data business at this point. It looks as though InfoUSA wants to crack the top tier of 'national accounts' and sees OneSource, which sells to large accounts, as helpful in their quest. They have been very strategic in their acquisitions in the past and the acquisitions have generally worked out well--either in expanding their data sources, improving quality of data by adding verified source data, buying quality brands (like Donnelley) with established customer bases, or buying up smaller competitors. It's likely that InfoUSA also sees OneSource as helping it enhance its position with CRM technology vendors like Siebel. And, OneSource's content integration experience--especially integrating news and other Web-sources with company information--will be a big plus to InfoUSA."

The clash of cultures from two companies targeting very different spectrums of the marketplace may yet prove to make this a tricky marriage, but all things being equal, this is a major vContent play for the business information marketplace that promises to hold out great value in the months ahead.

For advisory services on a follow-up basis to this important announcement, please consider our Private Advisory Services to gain further insights from our team members.

Details in Weblog to follow, for now the BusinessWire Press Release.

InformationToday's Buying and Selling eContent Conference at the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, Arizona lived up to its billing in most ways this year, with little meaningless bravado about the direction of the content industry and plenty of seasoned insights into where valued content is headed in the months ahead. This is not to say that there weren't people with vision: keynoter Louis Borders, CEO of KeepMedia, laid out a compelling vision of what tomorrow's "walled garden" of content ecommerce may look like in the not-so-distant future to kick off the event and there were plenty of speakers and participants who did not hesitate to point out the direction of how value will be produced in the industry moving ahead. But unlike years past there were few overhyped voices spelling out how people had better "get it" (or else), and many voices saying in effect, "We think we get it, we think that we're moving in the right direction, and we're doing what we need to do to meet the future." Most seemed to be happy enough to buy in to one of the themes laid out by Outsell’s Anthea Stratigos: "Have fun!"

But if the 5.6 percent growth in the content industry forecasted for 2004 in Anthea's presentation can be called fun then we're all in need of a little more time in the spa at Camelback. While a few vendors in attendance such as Yahoo! could boast about significant revenue gains, most of the traditional top names in attendance are barely treading water and many of them face significant challenges from strengthening new high-growth forces in the industry that they must either confront or join in collaborative efforts. In pondering the theoretical distribution of premium content via Google Corilee Christou, VP of Licensing for Reed Business Information coined a phrase used oftentimes during the conference, "Do we dance with the devil?" That seemed to sum up much of the undercurrent of angst enveloping major publishers and aggregators in attendance. Major search engines, consumer Web portals, open access to peer-reviewed journals and XML-based weblog syndication streams were but a few of the major hobgoblins that seemed to be daunting forces for many players. But for the most part attendees seemed to be content to dance with partners in attendance, and wait for the devil to take his due at some other time. Perhaps sooner than most would like...
[NOTE TO FEED SUBSCRIBERS: I will be backdatating subsequent entries on this topic to allow for "top-down" reading on our Web site. My apologies if this is a little confusing at first...]

As noted in our earlier News Analysis, KeepMedia has been evolving a sophisticated, customer-focused retail model for premium content distribution over the past several months, applying many of the lessons learned in Louis Borders' years as a bookstore retailer to create a "content concierge" environment complete with online and emailed recommendations of content that would complement a reader's expressed interests. Louis laid out an excellent analysis in his keynote address on what's required to create an outlet for content consumers that brings the best of "bricks" retailing concepts to the "clicks" of an online content service. His demo of upcoming features for KeepMedia included a user-defined music channel that plays when visiting their site (in-store music!), video ads that play only on demand and can be forwarded to friends in email and other community-oriented niceties. Also expect more multimedia/interactive content, localization and more premium add-on items so that the basic MediaPass subscription package remains affordable. "A company is a value network" Borders noted in his presentation, noting the successes - and failures - of many major companies that either adhered to or ignored this maxim. KeepMedia is pushing to build a sophisticated value network within the confines of a "walled garden" of premium content. But as noted in Jean Bedord's report on the eBooks marketplace, walled gardens are hard enough to maintain for premium content in the physical world - wireless allows eBooks to come to the local coffee store more easily than going to the bookstore for coffee, for example. Getting the context of a sophisticated content consuming experience right is going to be as important for KeepMedia as getting magazine publishers to become more cooperative in providing deeper, timelier and richer context outside of their own "walled gardens." In the meantime, KeepMedia seems to be content with a "go slow" approach that will allow them to build a successful formula over time.

Timothy King, SVP for Planning and Development for John Wiley and Sons, Inc. and Paula Galbraith of Library and Information Services at Solutia, Inc. combined to discuss today's "ins and outs" for institutional content purchasers. From Timothy King's perspective, much of the challenge for a publisher of a wide range of scientific, technical, and medical books and journals for professional education and consumer markets is to find the right range of business models to reach a range of marketplaces in which consumption patterns are changing rapidly. As with many other premium publishers Wiley sees the success of ad-supported sites targeted towards individuals and the increasing prevalence of federated search engines and knowledge management initiatives at the institutional level as indicators that new kinds of delivery and partnerships will be prevailing to get content to users in the right contexts. Preserving the integrity of a cherished print brand while pushing more high-value content such as rich media will be challenging in this environment and partnerships and alliances are certainly necessary to ensure a solid future for that brand. From the institutional purchaser's side, Paula Galbraith painted a picture of intensified challenges for a company that has recently passed into Chapter 11, which changed her focus 'radically' overnight. Content purchasing deals finalized last fall had relevance that was rendered moot by January, placing only additional pressure on her to explain why the typically arcane formulas of aggregators and publishers to ensure revenues based on total headcounts were to the company's benefit. Both sides of this equation paint a picture of institutional purchasing requirements that increasingly disfavor mass-scale, long-term purchases which may not reflect ongoing needs effectively. The focus of businesses and researchers today can change radically overnight for any number of reasons, leaving a core of content that's a given but a much wider range of content which finds its value only in very specific and context-driven usage situtations. All of this points to more models for distribution and purchasing, more credit-card purchases billed any number of ways on an internal basis and more flexible ways to combine enterprise search capabilities with ecommerce that will not hinder the ability to locate the right content at the right time - regardless of whether rights to it are owned at a particular point in time. The buy-side/sell-side dance goes on, but with a lot of new steps coming in to play.

Aggregators are discovering more than ever the importance of working collaboratively with clients to solve in-context content issues, as exemplified by the conference's panel on close teamwork between the institutional buy side and sell side. Lucy Lettis, SVP and Director of Business Intelligence for Marsh USA, Inc. relayed how when she came to this leading risk and insurance services firm she threw a challenge to business information services specialist OneSource to roll out a business information solution tighly integrated into Marsh's internal portal. With glove-close design, implementation and training along with leveraging OneSource's key strengths - while not trying to replace the strengths of other suppliers such as Factiva - the result was a highly successful implementation. Key to the close cooperation what having OneSource providing data via detailed usage reports via registrant-based usage tracking. Susan Adinolfi, Director of Library Services at Merrill Lynch, presented a dual partnership with Alacra and LexisNexis. Alacra has worked extensively with Merrill to develop "Public Information Books" (PIBs), briefings on targeted companies that are pulled together from a wide range of content sources for various kinds of strategy-setting sessions by Susan's unit to support Merrill decision makers. Before Alacra's involvement, putting together such key documents could take the better part of a day for just one PIB, but Alacra pulls them together from LexisNexis and other sources into a single PDF-based document with just a few clicks, cutting the effort down to just a few minutes of effort by Susan's staff and incuding billback info so that content costs can be allocated appropriately to revenue and cost centers. Steve Goldstein, President and CEO of Alacra, gave a demo of this PIB-building capability that seemed to have impressed many.

Tracking usage info for publishers via these kinds of close aggregator relationships proved to be one of the key points at the conference. In the Q&A portion of this panel Andrea Broadbent, Director of Corporate Licensing for the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. raised the pivotal issue: would aggregators be willing to provide this usage information to the publishers who feed content to the aggregators? While there was a general nod in this direction from Andrew Hughes, Vice President for Content at OneSource and Elizabeth Rector, SVP for Enterprise and Library Markets at LexisNexis, the question was left largely unanswered by both these aggregators and others at the conference. The plus of these tight integration relationships is that aggregators provide a high level of value to their clients: the minus is that publishers are beginning to realize just how much more isolated they are from their ultimate users in these close relationships. As today's aggregators begin to look more and more like software integration houses, the stage is being set for publishers to reconsider their business relationships with aggregators and to seek the widest range of distribution channels that can ensure both premium content profits and a more intimate relationship with the people who value their publications.

A panel discussing the evolving models for licensing and rights management for publishers highlighted the expanding variety of approaches to monetizing content that are blending the experiences of consumer ecommerce with institutional sales. Corilee Christou, VP of Licensing for Reed Business Information, noted that "bigger isn't always better" in her world of controlled circulatoin publications, where major outlets such as Variety play alongside lucrative but niche-oriented trade titles. For all of these a wide variety of old and new revenue models abound: syndication feeds, royalites from host usage, percentages on transactions triggered by ad click-throughs, as well as new subscription-based sites and pricing content by the article and by site fees. Even in this fairly stable universe of business content, though, Corilee is aware of the growing influence of search engines superceding Web sites as destinations. Scott Kinney, EVP for Licensing for CBS MarketWatch, has seen MarketWatch evolved from a destination "dot com" site to a company that targets many professional investors via direct feeds and feeds via distribution partners such as Thomson FInancial, which is tripling MarketWatch's editorial output for its own use. Feed and other non-ad forms of licensing have allowed MarketWatch to lower ads to a third of its overall revenues, providing a strong profile for future growth in both institutional and consumer markets. Ken Kirkley, Director of Corporate Sales and Marketing at ProQuest, takes the approach of doing distribution deals with just about anyone - "ProQuest is Switzerland," Corilee offered - but still hesitates on search engine distribution via Google and others without a strong buy-in from their huge stable of news and professional content suppliers. This problem of buy-in is likely to be a rubbing point for many aggregators, who are likely to see individual companies ready to make the search engine leap on their own peeling off the value of aggregators' base of titles bit by bit - cannibalization from within, if you will. Craig McKinnis, Strategic Content Partnership Manager for UPI, has "nothing to cannibalize" when it comes to approaching the marketplace with their own licensed news feeds, but is trying to rein in resdistributors that fail to keep UPI abreast of how their content is being used. As UPI starts to take on third party content using their facilities for redistribution and fine-tune their management of third parties, this situation is likely to improve.

Original content producers who are largely still in control of their own distribution have a lot to gain from new distribution and licensing models as the search engine era moves forward. There's clearly still a role for infomediaries in this new landscape, but licensing is going to have to accomodate original content producers' desire to be in touch with their end users far more effectively for these infomediaries to survive. See our upcoming report on The New Aggregation for more details.

Getting beyond "the container" as the content product - be it a feed, a magazine, a book, a Web site - was a key theme for this year's Buying and Selling eContent conference and the panel that focused on business models and packaging understood this at least as well as anyone in attendance. "The Internet is the TV of the workplace," noted Elisabeth DeMarse, President and CEO of Bankrate, Inc., under whose leadership Bankrate evolved from a dot-com casualty to a healthy, $37 million company providing a portfilio of financial information and services portals. Having survived the era of "burn rates" and other irrational high-stakes approaches to profitability, DeMarse guides Bankrate towards low-risk, high-profit incremental investments to limit outlays that can bring in new revenues from its receptive but demanding audiences. This means repackaging content in whatever form and format makes sense in a "create once, use many" model that can see content appearing in anything from a Bloomberg-like interface to more tech-oriented raw interfaces. For Forrester Research, the challenge is packaging a service that had been sold as a monolithic, report-intensive research and advisory product for a new generation of users used to finding information easily on the open Web and services such as LexisNexis and offering a wide variety of models that will appeal to both individuals and institutions. Brian Kardon, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer for Forrester, uses a mix of free & fee content, subscription and transaction purchasing, bundled and unbundled models to address these evolving markets while evolving their content to the more human side of the vContent equation: topic-centric "boot camps", webinars, telecons, events and multi-client benchmark studies. Jim McGinty, President of Cambridge Information Group, has bet heavily on Internet-based access to their research since before the dawn on the Web and still focuses on a fixed-price subscription approach that focuses on proving out value by lowering the cost per search on a continually improving basis - today at about 40 cents a search, or $3 a session.

These are moves that generally meet with buyer approval, but it's a moving target. Lidia Huk, Information Resource Manager for AT&T, sees that "all you can eat" models can still work, but it's one that's challenged on pricing far more frequently and requires highly actionable usage data to spell out realistic ROI equations and effective integration into internal federated search capabilities. Barbara Peterson, Manager for Global Knowledge Management for Ecolab, echoed many of these themes, adding the perspective of a global purchaser who has to accomodate user bases that sometimes consist of just one or two people in a particular country: pricing and distribution models need also be flexible enough to support major knowledge management initiatives that make use of content from internal, external and vendor sources to drive decision making in an environment that values answers and solutions above content brands. Content companies are moving to meet these shifting needs, but with content containers busted wide open and user needs becoming ever more ephemeral and integrated into much more sophisticated business goals, it will be a race of ther next few years to keep up with these expectations in a profitable manner - no matter how much both sellers and buyers talk about "win-win" scenarios.

Patrick Spain, CEO of HighBeam Research, reflected at the beginning of a panel on the convergence of software and content on how five years ago the CEO of then-high-rider VerticalNet somehow managed to complete a speech at this same conference during which the dot-com bubble was bursting in real-time and leaving his company $1 billion poorer before the stock markets closed that day. How times change. Today's Web portals thrive on honing the edge of converging content, technology and human factors in an environment that's remarkably free of hype and long on profits for those firms that can do it extraordinarily well. Certainly Yahoo! is a lead dog in defining the model for online financial success, servicing over 2.1 billion searches a month into a collection of more than 4.6 billion online documents. Search is a key vContent convergence and Yahoo! has moved quickly with its YST (Yahoo! Search Technology) to close the gap with Google's capabilities via this Google-less search engine, along with desktop toolbar widgets and contextualized content for search results, including localized content, stock graphs, news and financials, and so on. Also key to Yahoo!'s evolving vContent strategy is the inclusion of RSS-based feeds into MyYahoo! pages, an attempt to encapsulate the trend towards personal aggregation within the portal framework. Will Holmes, Business Development Manager for Microsoft Corporation, focused on how Microsoft is trying to drive content value into the hands of the millions of individuals equipped with their desktop publishing tools, using XML as the underpinnings to integrate the estimated 80 percent of available content that resides on personal drives and files with professional offerings from Factiva, HighBeam, Gale and others via its Research Pane to make it easy to integrate this content with personal documents - usually within the confines of an existing enterprise subscription. HighBeam focuses on the ground between the Yahoo!s and MSNs of the world of content, providing a high level of one-stop convenience and usability for individual subscribers wanting to search for both Web-based content and premium aggregated content, - including its highly popular images library - along with desktop integration capabilities such as importing content into Microsoft Word and Powerpoint presentations.

The convergence of software and content gives more players more ways to sell to more individual and institutional markets for content than ever before. Presentation, packaging and relevance becomes increasingly targeted towards the needs of specific users in specific contexts rather than distribution containers and mechanisms, promising the greatest rewards to those who can repackage and repurpose content most efficiently in those contexts. In this environment it becomes less important as to who is the publisher and who is the tool provider than it is to be the one who doesn't care particularly about those distinctions on the road to providing the greatest possible value.

I was fortunate enough to chair a roundtable discussion at the Buying and Selling eContent conference on the convergence of content and technology, which drew an interesting cross-section of content aggregators, publishers and purchasers. I was struck in this discussion by how pervasive XML is today as the basis for most high quality content production and distribution. From the perspective of some of the global publishers, though, XML is not yet a global distribution standard, with plenty of localized distribution methods that still dominate in some areas of publishing. Nevertheless, XML offers the power of standardized distribution with the ability to personalize content in terms of its presentation. RSS syndication using XML was a topic in this and other roundtables, but notably only myself and Paul Gerbino, Publisher of the Product News Network, raised their hands amongst the attendees as being active users of this form of content distribution. It will be interesting to see how many hands go up next year. Put simply, XML is enabling individuals and institutions to access content in a standard and predictable manner that forces content providers to examine the basic value of their content more than ever before. The ironic part of this conference is that so many publishers are doing the right things with technology to add value in the right places for content, but yet this doesn't seem to alter the fact that most new ways to deliver content in a valuable manner are not being developed by established publishers or aggregators but by new players that focus on what users find to be valuable rather than on protecting long-established content licensing models as a source of revenues. The dot-com era is comfortably over, but its lessons seem to have come home to roost for good.

Allen Weiner, Research Director for Gartner Group Inc., finished off the conference with a view of the content industry from the perspective of a research and advisory service that caters to the technology and media sides of the content equation primarily. Not surprisingly Allen's "digital media titans" included key enablers of hardware, software and services such as Microsoft, Apple, Dell and Verizon, as well as low-tech content producers and aggregators that provide high content value to mass markets with little overhead or investment. Not one traditional publisher was mentioned amongst the ranks of these titans and disruptors. The presentation had all sorts of flashy graphs and graphics but somehow seemed a little behind the times in spite of much of its content and outlook being on target with what we're seeing in the industry. Perhaps its coming at the end of an intensive and insightful conference may have left me in a jaded mood, but I think that it also gets to the heart of how many analysts perceive content as an industry through eyes that insist that I.T. is driving the industry as a whole. Certainly from our own perspective at Shore technology is a key ingredient in creating vContent, but the kinds of high-tech "shovels" that are likely to fuel the continuing content revolution from this point out are not likely to be the ones that powered it back in the Gartner-fed bubble days. The emergence of more ubquitous content distribution standards and the prevalance of peer-to-peer content generation and validation capabilities is creating content value increasingly out of the hands of major media publishers and distributors and further away from the control of technology that's increasingly commoditized as much as the commercial content that it supports. It's way too early to call the era of "digital media titans" dead before it's barely begun, but there is a pall to the message that should remind us that while fear may motivate people to use consultants, it's rarely a motivation that results in sound business strategy.

Primedia's About.com has "overhauled" its site, as reported by Reuters via Cnet, in order to strengthen its brand and encourage users to spend more time exploring pages on its site. About.com is an ad-supported site that contains guides to a wide range of mostly consumer-interest topics--e.g., health, sports, gardening, travel. Sort of a collection of online consumer magazines. A key source of revenue for About is Google's AdSense, a relationship that was sealed when Google acquired Sprinks from Primedia last fall. According to the Reuters article, the revamped About.com will offer more targeted advertising based on a user's profile, and repeat visitors will see different landing pages from first-time visitors. But, About.com will also have to improve its methods for directing users to related content on other About.com subject guides, if it really wants to encourage users to stick around and explore additional areas of its network. Perhaps more important, About.com should seek some non-advertising sources of revenue.

On a related note, Charles McCurdy, the former CEO of Primedia, has announced that he has formed a new company, Apprise Media, which will be backed by Spectrum Equity Investors. Spectrum has committed $175 to $200 million to help Apprise Media acquire stakes in niche publishing businesses, according to BtoB Online.

I will provide a detailed weblog entry on this year's Buying and Selling eContent event later today, but first the outlines of what has thus far been an excellent conference. This year's edition of Information Today's premier event for the content industry attracted a great range of senior executives from the online and institutional publishing and media camps, with about half of the attendees new to BSeC and about a third returnees from multiple earlier events. While there were contextually appropriate technologists in plenty, for the most part there are very few "fish out of water" this time around. About the only down side was having fewer players from the institutional "buy side", in part because of tight budgets, no doubt, but perhaps also because these institutions need to consider sending people who represent their own roles as publishers as much as their buying roles. Apart from that I'd say attendance was about even with last year. I don't know whether it was the blazing Arizona sun or the very well focused panels, but people seem to be especially relaxed and eager this year to make deals and find answers to puzzling publishing and distribution questions. To some extent the somewhat lower profile of buyers may have been helpful in this regard, as there has been less posturing and preening for valued accounts and more focus on the real issues faced by the content industry. Key points thus far: the walls really are coming tumbling down, as previewed in our 2004 forecast; vendors are working more closely than ever with their clients to come up with solutions that work within the context of their institutions' specific integration requirements. On the online side of the equation, major portal providers see clearly that there is great use of their products by individuals within the institutional space, but are still puzzling as to how best exploit these opportunities without upsetting ticklish distribution agreements.

Just a taste of the action for now, more later. If you missed this one, you missed a good one.

Summary: 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. Read the full News Analysis

Shore Senior Analyst Jack McConville reports on how the dropping of the Moneyline moniker is affecting Telerate marketing, Reuters' first earnings report based on its new market segmentation model, Thomson toe to toe with Bloomberg in market share and Thomson's refocusiing of its efforts in domestic Canadian markets. more...

Today's public library is quite different from 10 years ago, thanks to the Internet and public access computers, as aptly described in "Libraries Wired, and Reborn" in the New York Times. Remember when libraries were supposed to become obsolete since everything would be on the Internet? Best guesses are that 1-3% of available content can be accessed on the Internet, which means at least 97% is still found in traditional books, databases, paper based formats, microfiche, and such, all of which are found in libraries. In addition, access to Internet requires both hardware and a connection, which may not be available in the home or business, as I found out while serving on a Little League baseball board.

Enter the new public library, with an expanded mission to provide access to information using technology. Rather than decreasing library usage, the Internet has actually substantially increased library usage, with public access computers a major factor to draw in new patrons. According to the article, 95% of public libraries now have PC's for public access, many aided by grants from the Gates Foundation to rural and low income communities. My experience is that those PCs are very busy, with a typical 30 minute limit per person. It has brought in a whole new community: teenagers without any other access, over 50's just learning to use the Internet, minorities who can't afford computers. Once there, the reference librarians can assist with search strategies, including paper based access to information. Once inside the building, these new patrons can discover the wealth of DVDs, CD's. books in foreign languages and local and international newspapers. and typically, there are popular literacy and ESL (English as a Second Language) classes, without fees.

In highly wired Silicon Valley, in my city of Cupertino, a new public library will open this fall, the largest civic project ever undertaken. A new city library just opened in Santa Clara to lines of waiting patrons, and the San Jose Library audaciously combined a public library with an academic library. Lots of public access computers, and even more laptop connections at tables and workstations, are key features, as well as community and project rooms. The children's reading rooms also have computers, for use by parents as well as the younger patrons.

Yet this very demand creates its own problems. Public library funding is an easy target for cost-cutting by politicians unfamiliar with the new library community. The public library constituency is not vocal or wealthy, so getting adequate operating funds is a continuing struggle. Just as I have become active in public library advocacy, won't each of you support your local public library in getting more funding?

CMP's InformationWeek has introduced a newsletter called Managing Offshore. The newsletter will be sold on a subscription basis and will include access to premium research and other content on the Website, as well as invitations to Webcasts and events. An important element of the subscription package is the Managing Offshore Index and the related tool on the Website, which allows users to track companies that provide outsourcing services with interactive tools.

The for-fee subscription model is a departure for CMP, which is known for its ad-suppported controlled circulation model for its stable of trade publications. The question is: can CMP persuade a segment of its audience to pay for content it produces? In this case, they have a good chance of succeeding. InformationWeek has a track record for selling research that it produces. Furthermore, InformationWeek is well respected for its editorial quality. With outsourcing, CMP has chosen a hot topic that has a financial impact on many companies. Even in the environment where so much content is available for free on the Web, serious business users are willing to pay for focused content from a trusted source.