As noted in USA Today and many major outlets, the real victors in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision are not pornography vendors but the technologists who the court called upon to demonstrate that effective filtering solutions are a viable option to impeding Constitutional rights to free speech. While it's unclear whether this referral back to appellate court may have further reverberations in challenges to the U.S. Patriot Act, it certainly sends out a clarion call to content technologists trying to define what is and is not desirable content from a personal perspective. Tools such as Weblogs highlight the importance of allowing audiences to select sources from whom they wish to receive electronic content, thus allowing the best personal filter - the human mind - to determine what's valuable for any given person based on what's produced by a source. In an era in which individuals and institutions are called upon increasingly to be their own content filters instead of traditional publishers and intermediaries, those who enable these audiences to master their own content selection without external prejudice are as important to the future of publishing as any aggregation of content sources. The closer the vContent capabilities are to the audiences who want to define what's important to them, the better - and certainly governmental mediation of content value is about as far from that as you can get...

As we caught in Monday's headlines, AP covers the announced acquisition of Information Holdings Inc., a conglomerate of several key databases that will bolster Thomson's ability to provide workflow-oriented solutions to increase productivity in the biomed sector. IHI's MicroPatent division, which includes Trademark.com and Intellectual Property analysis specialists Aurigin, is a full-service intellectual property information, software, and consulting-services company with the world’s largest commercial collection of searchable full-text patent information, while its Liquent division regulatory-oriented software solutions, information products, and related services for the life sciences industry provide a platform for integrating in-house assets with external content sources. This continues Thomson's emphasis on providing workflow solutions tailored to solving the productivity needs of specific user types in specific market sector, in this instance leveraging both well-positioned technology assets and databases that are hard to replicate for coverage and quality. This kind of aggregation capability - combining on-site software solutions with intellectual property assets that are difficult to replicate - is the type of profile that will allow many major aggregators to survive and thrive as the era of the New Aggregation unfolds.

Shore Senior Analyst Jack McConville reports in our premium Finance weblog on the SEC's plans to release comment letters on filings, FactSet's plans for Paris-based broker estimates provider JCF Group, the expanded role of FT Interactive Data's pricing in Merrill Lynch's operations, Standard & Poor's signing Vanguard up for its equity research and Thomson's launch of its new MarketView news and market commentary.
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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.
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The New York Time Op/Ed pages, of all places, runs with TWO pro-file-sharing pieces in reaction to continued pursuit of consumer downloaders by the RIIA and highlighted by RIAA-supported legislation surfacing in the U.S. Senate (CNET News) to ban file sharing software. Kembrew McLeod's piece points out that CD sales increased 10.6 percent in 1Q2004 over the previous year, even as file sharing continued to surge. In other words, increases in file sharing do not seem to correlate closely with decreases in CD sales. The piece by William Fisher gets a little more to the core of the matter by noting how the entertainment industry handled similar technological challenges to content distribution far more gracefully. When U.S. commercial radio first came on the scene copyright holders encouraged its growth with royalty-free dissemination, which fueled the growth of their record sales, and then took a relatively modest royalty cut that now represents USD 300 million in annual revenues. When VCRs came on the scene, initial fears were replaced by burgeoning sales via rentals and purchases.

In the now-famous words of former President Bill Clinton, the RIAA goes after consumers "because it can," not because it is likely to have any significant impact on the industry as a whole or result in new business models that will help the music and entertainment industries to thrive. If the RIAA really cared about technologies that incited copyright infringement it could have gone after harder targets like Microsoft for the "Copy" and "Paste" functions that have been at consumer's fingertips for more than twenty years. File sharing is the new radio, filling the huge void left by the inability of the traditional broadcast industry to offer the public any substantial diversity in its musical content offerings and the inability of media outlets in general to target innovative content effectively at highly engaged audiences. Instead of trying to milk the last few miles out of outdated business models that don't provide the public what they're looking for the recording industry owes it to itself to take a look at how purveyors of professionally-oriented content have come to peace with their clients over the years and reached out for new ways to make their content valuable to their audiences in innovative ways. Sitting on a copyright doesn't do the public much good unless you can provide its value to them in a meaningful manner. The marketplace as a whole will win when innovation in content value takes the front page instead of fruitless protectionism.

What started as a shot in the dark by a Las Vegas casino owner in 1979 appears to have run its course for the moment. CNET News covers along with others the (at least temporary) passing of the once-seminal and megalithic Comdex exposition in the face of a changing I.T. industry and the growing success of the consumer gizmo-oriented Consumer Electronics Show. Comdex rode the wave of a huge interest in all things Internet that just doesn't hold people's attention as a mass-market phenomenon anymore; Elisha Otis drew huge crowds to see his first practical and safe elevator being demonstrated at the New York World's Fair in 1853; within a few decades it was technology that was taken for granted. In the meantime the quiet revolution of content moves on, unimpeded by whether it's underlying technology is popular or not. This whole concept of treating people in personal roles as "consumers" and people in business roles using essentially the same personal equipment also lies at the heart of the matter, a distinction that seems to divide the world of content, as well. As content technologies have become vastly more powerful and affordable, both the content industry and the institutional I.T. industry are having a harder and harder time grasping how to approach the sale of products and services that span the personal/business world without getting pigeonholed exclusively into "consumer" and "professional" boxes that may hamper them in the long run. Geez, I wonder how the inventors of papyrus handled this one...

Yesterday, CNET News.com reported on the phase-out of paid listings by the search engine Ask Jeeves. The article says that "Critics say paid inclusion can blur the lines between editorial content and advertising." Well, those lines have been blurring for a long time, as we at Shore have been pointing out. Most of the paid inclusion programs instituted by the major search engines have had the objective of providing a more comprehensive and relevant service. To some extent, the paid inclusion programs have provided a way to include sites that would not automatically be placed high in search results due to the text-driven algorithms used by the search engines, although the sites may be very relevant to the user's query. In addition, users are clicking on paid search listing ads, so they obviously find many of them relevant and useful to their queries, too. So, the "paid" listings clearly have some role in increasing the relevancy and completeness of the search engines.

A couple of questions that need to be raised when this issue is debated:
--How should search engines incorporate results from sites that are not dominantly textual? Even if new algorithms are developed to rate the relevancy of, let's say, a numeric database, should the listing for the site be commingled with textual sites. Or, would it be more helpful to categorize the site separately in the search listings display?
--Since the lines between editorial content and advertising are blurring, how do you draw the line to decide who should pay to be listed and who should be included because of the relevancy of the content?

Ask Jeeves' SVP of search products, Jim Lanzone, states, "...it doesn't make sense to draw a distinction of a site in the index--if it's good, it's good. We have to have it anyway; why would we make them pay anything." But, let's face it, someone has to pay, and in the competitive field of Web search engines, advertising revenue is going to continue to be critical for some time. Wait, let me phrase that another way, fees from paid listings are going to be critical (since ads are paid listings of a sort). The challenge for the search engines is to find a way to display paid listings, results from text-heavy sites, and results from non-texutal sites, so that the multiple objectives of coverage, relevancy, editorial integrity, and ease-of-use are maintained for the customers. We should expect to see some developments in the layout of results pages from search engines in the near future.

It was an honor to chair and moderate the panel for this SIIA event yesterday at the offices of Holland & Knight: we had about 70 attendees listening intently to contributions from the senior management of ClearForest, Factiva, FAST Search & Transfer, Endeca, ISYS and MarkLogic, all representing unique perspectives on the enterprise search industry. Being in the moderator's seat it was a little difficult for me to capture my usual blow-by-blow notes and somewhat harder yet to squeeze in all of the questions that I would have liked to have asked given the size of the panel and time constraints. Here, though, are some of my quick takes on the discussion, both what was said and what was not said:

Interface is king as much as source materials and algorithms. Being able to get at content via search mechanisms has moved beyond the "my algorithm is better than yours" phase to some degree, even when they matter, to the point where people are getting usable content at their fingertips based on a query. That usability is wrapped up strongly in interface design and content navigation capabilities build in to an interface. Thus you have an interface such as ClearForest's which is an excellent tool for sophisticated visual analysis of content and Endeca's Guided Navigation that gives people drill-down categories highly tuned to the search results and other approaches that assume not only that documents are text blobs lined up in a row but objects with extractable and sophisticated attributes that take their content beyond mere text and into the realm of salient answers.

Taxonomies matter, but it's still a struggle to implement them cost-effectively. Karin Borchert of Factiva came up with taxonomies as the linchpin of search capabilities two years from now in our visionaries "lightning round" of questions; with many of the advances being seen in taxonomy development and caretaking I'd have to agree that taxonomies have yet to come into their fullest use and fruition. With corporate compliance efforts and complex analysis tasks pushing institutions to classify more content than ever, it's likely that taxonomies will continue to be highly important tools. But as Lee Phillips of FAST pointed out, taxonomies oftentimes have a lot of care and feeding associated with them for full effectiveness unless you want to take the "inch deep, mile wide" approach of some providers. Good work for information professionals and corporate librarians, to be sure, but hard for them to keep in sync with what technology can provide to them. When taxonomies are highly adaptive to the content in their purview they can do wonders, but without good semantic processing and componentization of content from mere text into an array of usable content objects their power is limited.

The "Magic Box" has believers - in users. During the panel discussion there were some interesting exchanges on the "magic box" approach to search favored by open Web search engines such as Yahoo! and Google, the single source of answers that can hopefully interpolate human needs and express them in search results. People believe in the magic box, even when what they need may not be the most popular thing that appears at the top of a list of answers. Sometimes, as with a product such as ClearForest's, the answers lie not in a list but in seeing relationships amongst entities. Sometimes, as in Endeca's approach to navigation, the answer may come through exploring search-contextual categories as much as it does through seeing a listing of documents. But even when these approaches do provide value, the essential problem that most search technologies grapple with is that most people don't give a hoot about using sophisticated technology to get answers to their questions. A machine's job is to understand us, not vice versa. The unspoken truth is that most approaches to search today are still very weak in trying to understand the human aspects of what people are looking for in a query, and will remain so for quite some time to come. In the meantime companies have products to sell, so "magic box plus" solutions will be the norm for the foreseeable future.

Google isn't the enemy, they're just a media company (not). Jeff Cutler was kind enough to ask a pointed question about the presence of Google in the corporate space, given their efforts with search, Gmail and their enterprise-oriented search appliance. The strong consensus of the panel is that they're a nonplayer for the most part, a media company trying to make some interesting things happen but not a serious player in enterprise search. On the face of it this is an accurate answer: while Google makes money on its hardware/system-driven search appliances often enough, their approach to enterprise solutions selling is a non-starter from a practical standpoint, with a sales approach that has all the sensitivity of a county coroner. Google is not an I.T. company from this perspective, to be sure. Yet there are a number of highly successful content companies who have succeeded in enterprise content that have not wooed I.T. managers to get their products in the door - Bloomberg, LP's eponymous and originally "black box" financial content systems relied on sales to individuals to get their foot in the door to build what is today arguably the most successful financial content company in the world. What Google represents is an extremely well funded company with a search interface that the world loves that is doing its very best to romance each and every desktop in the world with an understanding of content from a highly human perspective. No, you won't see Google succeed for a long time in a big way with enterprise search: they don't have to. All they need to do is to drain off enough dollars being spent on "pretty good" solutions at the enterprise level to keep potential competitors from getting enough strength to take them on at the enterprise desktop level with solutions that don't require I.T. budgets for the most part - yet. The space between Google and more entrenched players in enterprise search such as Verity and Autonomy is going to get more narrow rather quickly unless search specialists decide how they want to address this march towards personal knowledge management. Players such as ISYS and ClearForest are in a very interesting position to capitalize on this movement - if they can get the right pieces in place.

XML's day has barely begun. I sense that some of the comments from Paul Pederson of MarkLogic regarding the importance of XML in search may not have penetrated as deeply as they could have - no fault of his, just a matter of awareness, I assume. No matter, they were very salient, for the surge of content creation towards XML-based formats has just begun. Even humble weblogs are based on these highly manageable content transport standards, making it easier than ever to represent content "under the bonnet" in a highly useful manner while allowing end users to consume that content in any number of useful formats. The metaphor of a text document as an analog of a piece of paper is coming closer to running its course as the requirements for searching and storing content become ever more sophisticated. In this environment every piece of content will have the potential for highly flexible reuse in any number of venues, something that Microsoft understands very well at the macro level, even if their real-world implementations are lagging in exploiting this capability effectively. As Lee Phillips of FAST put it, "Don't limit yourself to search, think like a publisher." XML is one of the keys to help people focused on search to think about how content can be made far more useful to people in a much more flexible and contextual manner. Bottom line, search IS all about publishing content, and making that content valuable to specific audiences in specific venues is the key to future profitability for these companies.

My best wishes to all of the panelists, you all have very interesting products that will help to shape the face of vContent from quite some time to come. Also our great thanks to Jeff Cutler, President of the SIIA Content Division for calling on us to help pull this together. Let's do it again some time!

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.
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Find/SVP's announced new portal Find.com is an attempt to bring free and premium content and research from the Web, directories and other sources into a common search interface that will make it easier for individual professionals to find high-grade content in a convenient format. It's a concept that's being chased by any number of providers these days, including HighBeam, Moreover, the reborn Northern Light and Factiva. The TripleHop-powered Find/SVP efforts work hard to emulate many Google-ish features, with contextual ads on Web, directory and online news results and a clean and neutral tab-driven look and feel, as well as Northern Light-inspired category folders that crop up to the left of search results to help people further refine into content more focused on their needs. Premium content appears segregated at the top of Web results, while it is integrated into the main body of the research tab. It's an appealing interface at first glance, but lacks many of the well-designed user features of the HighBeam interface and does only a fair job of helping people understand what really differentiates content appearing in the Research and Directory tabs. The quality and characteristics of the search results in these tabs are all virtually identical - not giving one a strong sense of why we should care that its sourcing is truly premium, save that it's a more limited set of sources. For now we'll call it a good idea with decent technology in search of decent content and a clear appeal to the true needs of professional content users. Toss it on the stack with the others for now, perhaps it will mature over time.

The mainstream media this week seems to be broadening its awareness of last week's story (e.g., the Times on CNET)on Tim Berners-Lee's receipt of the Millennium Technology Prize from the Finnish Technology Award Foundation, valued at 1 million euros ($1.2 million). I wouldn't think that Tim is starving these days without this recognition, but it's interesting to see some ten years after the launching of a simple yet revolutionary idea that was shared with the world that the untold billions of dollars made on Web endeavors in that time were all spawned by someone who just wanted to share a good idea with other people. Significantly the impact of the Web is really not a technical legacy - the basic underpinnings of the Web are essentially unchanged since its early days and were largely in place even before its birth - but instead the Web's true impact is the ability of people everywhere to share content with anyone and everyone anywhere with commercial considerations made secondary. Clearly this fundamental idea has not inhibited content ecommerce but has instead has enabled new kinds of content monetization that are only beginning to touch the true heart of the publishing industry as it has thought of itself. Today the alarmingly simple methods used to spread weblogs to desktops everywhere offer a similar revolution to content creators and consumers - thanks to a few courageous pioneers who just wanted to share a great idea. Looking at many pioneers of such transforming concepts it's a spotty track record at best on how individuals and institutions fare on monetizing such revolutions - ask the Wright Brothers how they cleaned up (not) - so perhaps Tim was right to just let the idea evolve into its own form for its own sake. In any event, thanks, Tim, hope that you enjoy the award as much as we enjoy what your idea has brought into our lives.

Shore Senior Analyst Jack McConville reports on a major buy side sales success for Standard & Poor's equities research, the new MarketView news and commentary service on Thomson ONE and FactSet's healthy earnings.
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US investors are projected to spend almost $19 billion on equity research in 2008 - more than double the $9.2 billion that was spent in 2003 according to a ground breaking report written by Integrity Research Associates, LLC, a new affiliate team of Shore Communications Inc. The report describes the evolution of dramatic changes to equity research, analyzes the forces behind these changes, outlines the evolution of critical challenges facing the three major sources of equity research -- sell-side firms, buy-side firms, and independent research firms -- and forecasts the market's growth over the next five years. The big gainer in market share is the independent research segment -organizations that market their research directly to institutional investors or indirectly through brokerage firms that don't produce their own research. Independent research revenue is expected to increase by 195% in the next five years, from $1.38 billion in 2003 to $4.07 billion in 2008, a gain in market share from 15% to 21.4%.
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CNET News reports on portal and Web services provider Yahoo!'s exit from the instant messaging enterprise software marketplace, the last remaining leg in its collapsed enterprise software efforts. This hardly means that Yahoo! has given up on having a presence in the enterprise, however: as noted in our earlier news analysis, IM as a software play for the enterprise may be done but it's hardly tapped yet for premium content delivery and still an important bridge between the world of individual and institutional content. Research noted by CNET sees 85 percent of North American desktops in business having IM on their computers, most of it downloaded from open Web sources such as Yahoo!, MSN and AOL. Building up from these individual relationships into ranges of services that support enterprise workers at the individual level is key to many content service providers' strategies for success behind the firewall and into the complex fabric of interests and needs represented by today's publishing-enabled enterprise content users and producers. It's a positioning that many major premium providers still struggle to emulate - and may never do with full success until they accept the new primacy of individuals empowered to publish.

The New York Times (reg. req.) reports on a recent trend in consumer magazine publishing where publishers are issuing private label products that leverage their brand name with their readership. Maxim magazine was an early entrant in this space with hair dye for men, which purportedly appeals to the hip or wannabe-hip male audience they serve. The article reports that Maxim is considering extending into nightclubs and frozen foods that bear the Maxim label. Maxim isn't alone in leveraging its brand into product extensions. Nearly everyone is aware of Martha Stewart's Omnimedia and its home goods products sold at K-Mart. And, Prevention Magazine is introducing a line of vitamins in the fall.

Now, not only is the line between editorial and advertising getting blurred, the line between publications as an advertising platform and as the advertiser is merging as well. Although publishers have to be careful not to alienate their existing advertisers, it is easy to understand the appeal of private-label products from a financial point of view because of the additonal revenue and high margins. And, while it is unlikely that we'll see soon see business publications hawking hair dye, it is not unusual to find publishers leveraging their trusted reputation in a particular space to lend their names to conferences, executive training seminars, topical books, and the like. With e-commerce capabilities already in place on their Websites, who knows what sort of brand extensions we'll soon see from major online business publishers?

The New York Times noted earlier this week the struggles of a professor from the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication who put together a 20-minute collage of multimedia materials for presentation on a CD-ROM at a conference ironically entitled "Knowledge Held Hostage: Scholarly Versus Corporate Rights in the Digital Age." Months of haggling with rights holders - sometimes just trying to locate them was a huge hassle - and USD 17,000 in royalty fees later, the professor had his brief montage of clips from old TV shows, songs and texts. It's a brilliant illustration of the problems of employing fair use of content being encountered with digital sources, underscored by the draconian and occasionally nonsensical provisions of the U.S. Digital Millenium Copyright Act that make it all the more compelling in many instances to forego trying to do the right thing with content rights. Understanding the value of content and being able to capitalize on it effectively is certainly a valid commercial goal, but oftentimes rights holders are not responsible in making either fair use applicable in even very sensible and useful non-commercial settings such as a simple thought provoking piece for a highly limited audience. The time is coming for DMCA to be modified to put more onus on rights holders to make enabling reasonable compliance for researchers as easy for users to pursue as it is for the rights holders to pursue users. Otherwise, the realities of everyday economics make "finders keepers" a stance that courts are more likely to approve of at some foreseeable juncture for instances such as this.

The Seattle Times opines on the fate of content ownership in an era in which downloads are changing the perception of ownership value. It's a conjectural piece, but paints the current conventional wisdom that content ownership is dwindling away. Yet many trends point to the contrary: CNET reported on Friday that a group of major music retailers have backed off plans to support a Web portal that would support music downloads, noting that the USD 11.2 billion in CD sales in 2003 still dwarfs the USD 245 million for online music downloads, which pulled even with cassette sales. Even taking a key example from the Seattle Times' own account, the ability to have permanent content archives and on-demand printing is likely to create demand for content that would otherwise be serviced intermittently at best by traditional publishing methods. Storage and ownership, however, are becoming less connected, as the ownership of rights becomes a more important factor to content consumers than exactly how we clutter up our disks and shelves. Humans are "thing"-ish creatures, though, so whether its a cache in an iPod, a hard drive at work or some petabyte-scaled storage system on the Web, people will want to have an ownership relationship with content in many instances for the foreseeable future. Being able to change our virtual ownership into new forms of physical ownership conveniently has become as important as creating collections of content itself - something that consumers figured out long ago and that publishers are just beginning to grapple with.

Shore Senior Analyst Jack McConville reports on a busy week at and around this year's Securities Industry Association Technology Conference & Exhibition, including Radianz hooking up with iDeal, Thomson signing Capco and Legg Mason and integrating AutEx with Thomson ONE, Reuters America's flexible new Reuters Station, Telerate's three-year deal with HSBC, Reuters selling its stake in GL TRADE, Mainstream distributing Bloomberg News and more.
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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.
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It's amazing sometimes how media companies continue to drag their heels on the most obvious exposures to their product base from emerging technologies. The New York Times reports on set-top digital recording provider TiVo's plans to support downloading of videos via the Internet. I was at a conference on digital rights not long ago chatting with an expert on securing rights on cable programming via set-top boxes. When I asked him what his unit could do to manage internet content also being delivered via cables, he drew a blank. Looks like TiVo didn't, nor many other providers who look at the opportunities offered by leading technologies and how they serve user markets. Is this a major threat to existing content channels? Probably not as much as some may fear, anticipating months of headlines from legal wranglings. The likely and largely unforseen consequence of this emerging capability is for new sources of video content to sprout up on the Web for distribution. Today's 100+ channels of cable content comes at a steep premium, with much of it stale and repetitive. What if users could choose new and innovative video streams intertwined easily with more commercialized sources via cable, satellite and broadcast? The ability of the Web to create and amplify user interest in content would be extremely useful in helping to widen the popularity of innovative multimedia content channels. All points to the strong necessity to have rights-secured access to content objects on the Web to facilitate such capabilities. Heel-draggers, please step up your pace to meet enticing new opportunities. [UPDATE - Monday, 14 June: The New York Times reports on RealNetworks' alliance with the Starz Encore Group to suppport monthly USD 12.95 monthly download subscriptions for rights-secured access to up to 100 moves a month via the Web. Makes perfect sense: the idea that we need hundreds of channels to schedule content for times that probably don't match with our desire to view something is rather passe. It's a great positioning for premium content - though a threat to premium cable packaging in the long run.]