IBM spices up corporate search
Swets Gets $55M Cash Infusion, Will Guarantee Prepayments
File-sharing debaters swap harsh words
Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web
Matching Data To Device And Circumstance
NewsGator Selects Moreover Technologies for RSS News Feeds and Search
NewsGator Announces Three Key Partnerships to Drive RSS Platform & Adoption
Clovis and Moreover Technologies Partner for High Performance Delivery of News to Outlook Desktops
Dialog Now Offering Streaming Real-Time News Through Enhanced Dialog NewsEdge(R) Service
U.S. Department of Justice Selects LexisNexis as Primary Provider
Meteorlogix and Dow Jones Newswires Announce Agreement for Global Weather Coverage
The Sacramento Bee and The Modesto Bee Are Now Available on Factiva

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Not too long ago the question that people were asking was: whatever happened to Moreover? For a company that two years ago seemed to have the world of virtual news and journal aggregation in the palm of its hand it seemed to have disappeared into the woodwork. This low profile seems to have reversed course in the past few months as Moreover has inked and rolled out a succession of high-profile portal deals. Now Moreover is moving into the vanguard of content aggregation: the user's desktop. As outlined in our paper on The New Aggregation, the most important platforms for content aggregation today are the powerful devices in the hands of today's content consumers, so it is rewarding to see Moreover regaining a leader's profile and announcing deals with XML newfeed aggregator NewsGator and desktop content organizer Clovis. Both NewsGator and Clovis make use of Microsoft Outlook as a tool for adding and organizing high-value content in a familiar desktop application, though where NewsGator makes use of Outlook primarily as a convenient sub-platform for its feed aggregation capabilities Clovis uses Outlook as a vehicle to transform a broad array of content from both emails and other sources into organizing folders - handy for professionals who tend to use their inbox as their primary desktop. In both instances Moreover is placing itself in the right context at the right time for its Web and premium news and journal content., Instead of trying to outdo major news aggregators from a portal perspective Moreover is leapfrogging over the increasingly static portal concept and into the contexts in which today's professional content consumers use content most aggressively. The revenue fruits of these leading moves may not be significant for a while, but in the meantime Moreover increasingly positions its products where the revenue growth will be over the next two years.

Google News: Beta Not Make Money
Why Google News signals the death of the online exclusive
Tech firms rally against copyright bill
Right to roam web is heading for UK court
iCopyright Plug-in for Internet Explorer Announced
Good call as VNU rings up GBP1.3bn sale of Yellow Pages business
RSA Security Announces Plans to Make Digital Rights Management Easy for Consumers
Elsevier Brings Scientific Information To New Zealand
IDG's InfoWorld Media Group Incorporates Feedster Syndicated Feeds into Their New IT Product Guide
UK Government legal eagles eye LexisNexis

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The sold-out InfoCommerce 2004 Conference targeted executives and lead buyers from the directories and database publishing community, but its theme of a shifting balance of power seems to have attracted players from a broad array of leading publishers and content service providers who are seeking the answers to how to position their content services effectively in an increasingly open and competitive online environment. Complete coverage of the conference is forming now on our new Industry Events weblog.

Click here to view complete coverage of the InfoCommerece 2004 conference

From its humble roots as publisher of the Mutual Fund Sourcebook in 1984, Morningstar has grown its database of financial securities information and recommendations into a $139.5 million (2003) business that has an increasingly dominant position in the minds of individual investors seeking authoritative analysis and recommendations. This position has helped Morningstar to build a broadening range of services for investment advisors and financial institutions seeking similar services on a more sophisticated level. It's unusual for a content company to work this back-channel into B2B markets, but as Morningstar Chairman, Founder and CEO Joe Mansueto outlined in his keynote address at InfoCommerce 2004 keeping your content company focused on excellence and integrity can play a huge role in defining a content product that is difficult to resist. Morningstar's analysis tools employ industry-leading design and usability which are combined with increasingly broad and authoritative editorial content to make its coverage of over 100,000 investments an attractive choice for decision makers at all levels of the market. This authoritativeness helped land Morningstar a significant slice of the recent legal settlement that required major U.S. investment banks to make investment research available from independent suppliers. The same expectation of authoritativeness also puts Morningstar under increasing scrutiny by securities regulators for even minor errors, but that's part of the game to which Morningstar has graduated. It's a small price to pay for a database service that focuses on the long-term interests of its clients and its product team. In Morningstar database and directory publishers have a great paradigm to emulate as they learn how to adapt to a marketplace empowered by individuals and institutions that aren't afraid to click to the next player in a trice if a product fails to please.

Yahoo! home page, MyYahoo! get touch-up
Google's search will go beyond the browser
Dow Jones Launches E-Mail Newsletter Covering Buyout Industry
Online Libraries Slow to Take Off
CDs continue to dwarf digital downloads
Dialog Expands Dialog Choice Pricing Plan
Abbey Licenses Factiva Public Figures & Associates to Aid Compliance
Condesa Launches Blawg Republic
NetLibrary Signs Distribution Agreement with Penguin
Nature Publishing Group Simplifies Online News Process with Ektron's XML Authoring Tool

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With the eXtensible Markup Language gaining steam as a method for getting content to and fro in an easy-to-use format, more organizations turn to XML as a solution for driving down content delivery cost and complexity. Easier said that done in many instances, especially when it comes to getting search engines to hum across a wide variety of sources. But Mark Logic has drawn together XML-based content normalization, search and delivery capabilities in an open and flexible framework that makes the prospect of a universal enterprise Web environment based on XML standards far easier to consider for both enterprises and the premium content suppliers that support them. It might not be the sunniest news for content suppliers who had hoped to maintain proprietary advantages in the face of XML, but it's news worth watching carefully.

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In our Finance premium weblog Shore Analyst Jack McConville keeps you abreast of these and all the latest developments in financial content. This week's headlines include:
- Moody's Contemplates Dow Jones Downgrade
- ICAP in Newsletter Deal with Dow Jones Newswires
- FactSet Completes Fiscal 2004 on an Upbeat
- Hyperfeed Shares to Leave the Nasdaq Small Cap Market
- Thomson ONE Adds New Features
- HSBC Climbs Aboard the TradeWeb Corporate Bond Wagon

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Fear and Laptops on the Campaign Trail
Moreover Web news feed syncs up with ads
Web tool may banish broken links
If RSS ain't broke...
Google site in China under fire
Fortis Bank Selects TRS From Telerate and MarketXS
LexisNexis and Factiva Compared In New Product Review
BusinessFinance.com Categorizes Lending and Investing Criteria of Over 4,000 Sources of Financing
Taxonomy Provider Indraweb, Inc. Changes Name to Intellisophic, Inc.
Elsevier Announce New Obesity Surgery Journal

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Sony on collision course with music majors over mp3 format
More authors keeping Weblogs
Good Stock Advice or Online Noise?
It's the End of Classifieds as We Know Them
Wolters Kluwer Survey Says Compliance Remains a Top Concern for U.S. Credit Unions
BBC's teletext service is 30 years old - but won't see 40
Find.com Adds Content Providers to Existing Roster of Premium Sources Including Mintel, IOMA, Datamonitor
Wolters Kluwer Redefines Publishing in the Classroom of the Future
Web Services Content Integration For Government Contractors via Thomson Dialog and MAP ROI
EasyAsk Unveils Latest Version of Enterprise 9

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A lot of emphasis on technology that reads content resources on a Web focuses on extraction, on taking the good tidbits and leaving the rest as presentation "fluff". But what if that same technology could gain insight not only from the information but from its layout and other visual attributes? New Jersey-based Viyya Technologies has announced that it is getting ready to launch its first product, Viyya Lite, that will incorporate just such a concept in its content extraction and delivery technology. When Viyya's XCavator(TM) technology looks at a page of content it not only determines relevant words and graphics but tries to understand the layout elements that will be useful for its redisplay to a given user. From Viyya's perspective the goal is to emulate the mind's visual sifting of relevance as it glances through a page of content to determine what is relevant using all visual cues available. It's an "early days" technology, but with so many tools promising that mythical 20-30 percent savings in information retrieval efficiency it's interesting to see one that takes on the heart of the visual human element to determine what's worth absorbing. A vContent play worth watching...

California Governor signs Internet piracy bill E-mail address required to share movies, music online
Internet Users Would Rather Give Up TV Than Web
Paid Contextual Advertising Driving Search Towards Personalization
A brighter future for e-books
Input predicts growth in knowledge management
Open Text takes aim at enterprise Net searches
Connotate Completes Rights Offering; Enterprise Software Co. Raises $2.6 Million in Private Placement
FeedDemon Picks Moreover for News Feeds and Search
Blue Sky Factory Integrates Real Time Behavioral Tracking & Content Delivery Tools with iRMS
SearchGuy.com Partners With ValueClick, Inc.'s Search123

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Going to the Ask Jeeves search site you see a new Jeeves from a number of perspectives, as noted in CNET News. Just as the graphic of the friendly butler has been updated to a more macho and youthful fellow (previewed in their Japan site earlier this month), the site has a wide range of powerful user-friendly search features to keep it on a par with major competitors, such as news, image lookup, shopping, weather, travel and personality lookup, but there are also some rather unique ones as well. Being able to get a graphic of a page before downloading is a nice touch, along with a MyJeeves feature set that encourages users to save searches and links in a portfolio, which maintains not just the original URL but all the content of the search listing and adds in a note-taking feature. This little personal touch can store up to 1,000 links before registration is required, kind of an odd threshold that certainly ensures loyalty from the fully addicted but doesn't leverage much out of the relationship before then - as opposed to Amazon's A9 search engine which leverages one's Amazon registration from the get-go. It's not enough to break Jeeves out of the pack, though it is a step towards building relationships with an audience around search content that may set the stage for additional loyalty capabilities. But with talk of Google tooling up to release its own browser, it's hard to imagine how a well-designed but stuggling search service is going to make a go of it for the long run without developing some innovative new revenue streams. For now, they're still in the hunt, but Mr. Jeeves may want to get his CV ready just in case...

Butler Jeeves gets 'extreme makeover'
Google builds a browser
FAST Introduces Full-Featured OEM Enterprise Search Solution
Kwickee, The World's First Mobile Information Exchange Launches
Verity extracts meaning from content
Mark Logic Announces Open Content Architecture and Partner Network Targeting Enterprise Content
Pluck Selects Moreover Technologies for Aggregated RSS News Solutions
J.B. Holston Joins NewsGator as President & CEO
Verity and eFORCE Partner to Co-Market Integrated Portal Solution to the Healthcare Market
Viyya Technologies to File Process Patent Application on XCavator Technology

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One of our subscribers was kind enough to forward me a link to the recent Observer article in the Guardian by James Robinson which provides a high-level sketch of Reed Elsevier's plans to receive revenues from Google on link referrals to their premium scientific/technical/medical content sites, with other search engines potentially to follow. It's nice to see that Reed is exploring the path of The New Agggregation model that we've outlined, especially in that it's proposed that Google pay Reed for referrals. This is an interesting riff on the syndication model that Yahoo! and other portals use to pay for premium content appearing in their on-site services such as Yahoo!Finance: syndication without the pipe, if you will, allowing users of search engines to get syndication on-the-spot. How this monetization scheme works out in the long run for both Reed and Google remains to be seen, but it is a promising opportunity for ad-driven search engines to provide the front-end monetization for contextualizing serious professional content effectively in venues that readers go to first for answers.

Say hello to Valeo IP, a reskinned version of RSI Copright that still focuses on content relicensing for electronic and reprint distribution but with a greater emphasis on today's leading publishers - the individuals and institutions that consume and redistribute copyrighted materials. The announced relaunch comes with nicely packaged features to help users establish a friendly relationship with relicensing as a service, including a complimentary news clipping service, facilitation of emailing content for redistribution and easing the traditional tasks of corporate compliance and reprint management in a more user-centric fashion. It's a very clever repackaging effort, making the concept of content licensing more like a user benefit than an unattractive, geekish chore, but the package as a whole does not stray too far from the traditional bounds of the reprint management business. Yet the outlines of a way of doing business are there that seems to leave rivals such as Copyright Clearance Center still pondering how to position themselves for a more profitable profile. Within their "find-clear-use" cycle Valeo has the potential to manage not only relicsensing agreements but primary content licensing at the individual and institutional level, a far more profitable scheme and one more in tune with the real needs for process improvement that institutions are seeking today. Slick new Web sites do not a product revolution make, but having a message and a positioning that appeals to end users may help Valeo to position themselves strongly for the future of commercial content licensing agreement management in the New Aggregation business model.

Online ad revenue jumps 40 percent in first half of 2004
ContextWeb Steps Into the Contextual Advertising Ring
Policy, Not Technology Creates Barriers to Info Sharing
RSiCopyright Becomes Valeo IP; Corporate Licensing Service Adds Depth and Breath to its Existing Service
IHS Acquires USA Information Systems
Verity Announces Integrated Enterprise-Class Extraction Software
The Wall Street Journal Online, ConsumerReports.org To Share Relevant, Consumer-Focused Content
U.S. Courts Contract for CCH's Authoritative Online Content As Part of 10-Year Agreement With LexisNexis
LexisNexis Applied Discovery Enhances Online Document Review
Authors Harness the Power of the Internet with CyberRead
Real estate listings score InfoUSA Yellow Pages content

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Online contextual advertising is commonly associated with Google’s AdSense and Yahoo!/Overture ContentMatch programs that are open to anyone who submits the required materials, agrees to the terms and conditions, and enters their bids in the auction-based system. However, the success of online advertising has attracted the major players—both advertisers and publishers—into the contextual advertising realm. These players have a different risk/return profile, but they are willing to pay real money to reach highly targeted prospects. Is there an advertising technology and services company that can deliver the level of accuracy in contextual matching that the professional publishers and top advertisers require? With some new venture funding, ContextWeb is setting out to prove that they have the right formula.

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Ask.com's Jeeves disappears on 'gardening leave'
This Compilation CD Is Meant To Be Copied and Shared
Textbook Prices On the Rise
Amazon A9: Really Scary !
Beyond File Sharing: P2P Radio Arrives
New Start-Up Breed: Born in the USA, Made in India
Las Vegas System Uses OverDrive for Ebooks
The McGraw-Hill Companies' Standard & Poor's Division Completes Acquisition of Capital IQ
Cendant to Deploy EMC's Content Management and Networked Storage for Compliance Initiatives
A Music Download Site for Artists Less Known

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In an aggressive and innovative move, FindWhat has launched a new targeted pay-per-call service, which as the name implies, links the Web to the telephone primarily for the benefit of those advertisers that do not yet have a Web presence.

Working with technology partner Ingenio, the FindWhat pay-per-call service will allow advertisers to bid for position using the same popular per-per-click auction model which is distributed throughout the FindWhat network of partner sites. Each pay-per-call ad will contain a special 800 number. When dialed, the call will be automatically forwarded to the advertiser's regular business phone line, and the advertiser will pay only on a "per call received basis."

What makes this new offering even more noteworthy is that it has been specially tailored to local advertisers, as advertisers will bid for categories rather than key words, and they'll bid for those categories in specific geographic markets. As Rick Szatkowski, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the FindWhat.com Network and Private Label Division explained to me, "Every market, local or national, becomes its own auction environment for products and services, thus [advertisers] may bid $10 for the "personal injury lawyer" category in Atlanta, Ga., $12 for the same in Roswell, Ga., and $5 for the same in College Park, Ga. (both are Atlanta suburbs). The individual market will determine the value. The process works the same way for advertisers seeking local prospects for their products, choosing the local geography in which to show their ads. So, for example, if a florist in Chicago chooses to advertise under Florist-Chicago category, she will only be bidding with other advertisers who also bid in the Florist-Chicago category, not national florists."

For each forwarded call, the service will use a "call whisper" feature, which will announce the call to the merchant, but the caller will not hear it. That's a powerful way to reinforce the value of the service and gives advertisers a way to measure the quantity and quality of the leads that are generated. In addition, advertisers will be able to view itemized reports showing the caller's phone number (the last four digits are stripped off so advertisers aren't tempted to telemarket the list), time of call, call duration and cost for the call.

I asked Szatkowski if advertisers, now able to assess the quality and value of each call with the "call whisper" feature, might start pushing to only pay for calls that result in sales. He noted that, "Today, advertisers invest significant dollars in direct marketing and other print advertising media. They pay a flat price and have no sense of the quality of leads from those ads or the quantity of the leads; no sense of ROI from the largest portion of their advertising budget ... and there are no refunds for non-performing ads. To the extent that we now give them a tool to measure both the quantity and quality of the leads immediately, the advertiser has the ability to modify the creative if it is not drawing leads that convert and can, as a last resort, take the campaign offline immediately. The sunk cost in our model is minimal as compared to traditional advertising and the opportunity to change or "stop the bleeding" is immediate." In short, this perfect linkage of advertising to results give advertisers more control than any other form of advertising -- even "traditional" Web-based pay-per-click.

Regular readers know that I have been skeptical of all the hype surrounding local search, largely because the approach of most players to date has been to offer Web-based global reach to local businesses with no Web sites -- hardly a recipe for success. With pay-per-call, I believes that FindWhat has "cracked the code" with an offering that provides all the benefits of the Web without advertisers having to change they way they do business. As importantly, it's based on a pricing model that reflects the local nature of their businesses.

Industry veterans know that "key phone" programs with dedicated phone numbers are one of the industry's most powerful and effectives tools to prove directory advertising effectiveness. FindWhat is moving the key phone concept to a whole new level.

This is powerful, revolutionary stuff, and FindWhat is ready to offer it to publishers on a private label basis, something well worth considering.

Recently announced enhancements to the Thomson ONE suite of financial content products targeted for institutional equities markets provide a high-quality directory of financial contacts and technology that allows one to share any Thomson ONE content with a client. The first leg of this round of enhancements uses staff from the Nelson Directories product line to maintain a comprehensive database of contacts, CDA Spectrum equivalent, roughly, but integrated into the Thomson ONE tool tightly to help trading and sales desks identify prospects more quickly. The second leg is a screen capture feature that allows images of 1charts, data and other page elements to be combined with user data and content into client email messages. It's interesting to think how the financial content industry has moved from complete paranoia about content redistribution to recognizing that communicating content from sellers to buyers is a key value point in being able to make the transactions that pay for the financial content services in the first place. Supporting individuals and institutions as publishers trying to create value propositions of their own with premium content is an important key to today's vContent marketplace.

A Wall Street Journal for Your Weekend
Microsoft flip-flop may signal blog clog
Forget unstructured data (it's all structured)
All about e-books: Dip into the huge online world of electronic books
Overzealous Lawyers Beware: Today's Sites Are Fighting Back
Thomson Financial Enhances Thomson One
IHS Acquires Intermat, Inc.
Feedster Powers RSS and Blog Search Results for Eurekster to Expand the Scope of Social Search
FindWhat.Com Announces Exclusive Distribution Partnership With Bizjournals
Convera Completes Private Placement

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The announced acquisition of the MusicMatch online/offline music service by Yahoo! generates all sorts of buzz from a media perspective, but a moment