BellSouth Advertising and Publishing, the yellow pages arm of BellSouth, has announced that it has become an authorized agent for Google, and will market Google paid search programs through its vaunted 2,000 person strong sales force.

BellSouth and other yellow pages publishers such as Dex Media had previously created Web advertising bundles that they had been offering to their customers. These bundles consisted of various combinations of Web site hosting, Web site design, and entry-level paid search programs. However, this move by BellSouth greatly changes the playing field. It also appears to be an admission by BellSouth that paid search has become more than an optional add-on, and that search engine advertising is as compelling to advertisers as its own online yellow pages offering.

This deal also suggests some recognition by Google that to crack the potentially huge market for local advertising, it needs feet on the street, and that its self-service approach to sales and customer service fails to cut it with smaller and less sophisticated advertisers.

Can this marriage work? For BellSouth salespeople to successfully sell Google paid search programs in conjunction with print and online yellow pages, they're going to have deal with some sticky questions: Does Google replace the need for my online yellow pages advertising? How much of my yellow pages budget should I allocate now to Google? How come Google offers pay-for-performance pricing and you don't? One thing that is certain is that smaller advertisers are much more likely to re-allocate their existing ad budget to participate in Google than find new dollars to participate in Google. That means a real risk of revenue loss for BellSouth.

It's also important to remember that while corporate executives can make all the plans and sign all the deals they want, if the sales force doesn't buy in, they will not succeed. What kinds of things do yellow pages sale organization like? Simple, quick, easy, add-on sales that in no way jeopardize their existing revenue or commissions. The Google deal fails all these criteria.

My prediction: the BellSouth sales force will ultimately submarine this deal. Google will end up no worse for wear, and BellSouth will realize that repping their competition is not in their best interest. I'd also like to reiterate that what really may be making paid search so attractive is its pay-for-performance model. If so, BellSouth may want to take a look at Verizon's deal with FindWhat as perhaps a better path.

It's interesting to read the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review piece on how journalists can set up independently for profit. Pull up a weblogging tool, hang out your shingle, stuff in some Google AdSense ads and you're in business, right? Well, not quite. There are the small matters of a liveable income, marketing, libel insurance, incorporation, supplementary revenue strategies - the usual headaches that a small business owner faces. Services such as Jason Calacanis' Weblogs, Inc. have become more sophisticated in nurturing a wide array of business-oriented weblogs, taking a piece of the indie's hide in the process but developing for them a sophisticated revenue-generating publishing platform and editorial support system that lets them have the independent lifestyle without some of the hassles - kind of a cross between VerticalNet, VNU and ECNext, if you will. The level of overall infrastructure available to webloggers is improving dramatically as of late, so it's not clear that a Weblogs, Inc. approach is really necessary for independent journalism voices to succeed in the long run. It's also not clear that there's enough focus on quality B2B content beyond the obvious Silicon Valley/Alley players on Weblogs, Inc. to make this a place for a widespread approach to supporting independent B2B journalism. To be a true Newsmaster requires some in-depth understanding of your subject matter, understanding that goes beyond the typical dot-com 2.0 attitudes exhibited by most weblog "experts". In the independent content game, there will be a mixture of those who can best enable the technology and ecommerce aspects of content distribution from independents and those who can best provide editorial endorsement and guidance to those independents. The two need not necessarily be the same to succeed, though. Zagats for weblogs, anyone?

Reuters notes the emerging interest in acquiring online financial news source MarketWatch, with proceedings still in the preliminary stage. Whoever gets a hold of this organization gets a diamond that is hardly rough: with backing from Thomson, MarketWatch is bolstering its financial news coverage in an environment that is electronic-first and Web-grown all the way and becoming increasingly proficient at breaking financial news and feeding it to leading financial organizations via XML-based feeds. Anything's possible in this play - don't count out Thomson either, mind you - but probably the best fit here would be Pearson, which would pick up a nice real-time news creation and delivery team with a highly market-oriented U.S. focus that can complement its own more global, feature-oriented FT content. Put the two of those together and it spells Dow Jones - with an international Reuters-ish twist. The fun begins...

MarketWatch gets bid approach
Running Your Own Site: A Primer for the Entrepreneurial Journalist
News Distribution: Wire solution?
OpenText Interview: Rules spur content controls
Dialog DataStar(TM) Upgrades Better Focus Search Process, Alert Users & Integrate Research
Enterprise Search: A Different Animal for Google
How Paid SEM Helps Organic Search Optimization
Media: Alternative and Influential?
KnowNow Wins the KM World Promise Award for Delivering Powerful, Event-Driven KM Solutions
Factiva boosts Abbey's anti-money laundering
Outercurve and O2 to Deliver Financial Applications to BlackBerry(R) Users

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The announcement of the Wall Street Journal Online's addition of a morning edition of its email summaries, edited by Joseph Schuman, the Brussels-based Journal staffer who introduced their Afternoon Report. It's nice to have a wrapup of the overnight news, and encouraging that the Journal is moving towards linking to other news sources, if but in a very modest manner. In the meantime, other news portals and search engine-driven news aggregators have been surging towards linking their content to any and all credible news sources and expanding the definitions of news credibility and editorial judgment. Nobody can fault the traditional expertise of the Journal's worldwide staff, but in an era in which audiences and technology as much as journalists determine news relevance, how much longer can news organizations operate profitably in the "walled garden" of their own exclusive and licensed content? Uniqueness in content is determined less and less by editorially-managed collections and more by the content itself and its assembly into a variety of flexible contexts, formats, communities and outlets that require more input than found in the typical news organization. Kudos to WSJ Online for another useful email edition, but we continue to look forward to leading news organizations to develop their core value propositions from the audience on in rather than the editorial staff on out.

On a secondary note, the links provided to set up this email newsletter were not working this morning from my WSJ Online account, a spokesperson at the Journal indicates that this is being addressed.

Yahoo battles Google for the cell phone
Online publishers rail against Google
Google Buys Digital Mapping Company
Web Feeds, Blogs & Search Engines
The Wall Street Journal Online Offers The Morning Brief to Subscribers; News From a Variety of Outlets
LexisNexis lands CFTC database contract
New Contextual Advertising Technology from Vibrant Media Paves Way to Greater Profits
Convera Announces RetrievalWare 8.1
CMP Media's InformationWeek and Optimize Announce Partnership With The Advisory Council (TAC)
New Google Print Program Offers Authors a Powerful Way to Market and Promote Their Books for Free

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Blogs: A Good (If Scary) Buy for Advertisers
The New Voices: Hyperlocal Citizen Media Sites Want You (to Write)!
Thomson profit stronger than expected in quarter
Copernic Ready to Take On Google In Enterprise Search Product
NewsBreak for Pocket PC review
Search Engine Delivers Content Based On The Day Of The Week
Reducing Expenditures and Driving Costs Out of the Corporate Library Budget
RSA Security Announces New Digital Rights Management Solution
GlobalSpec Survey Reveals Sketchy Web Site Content for Engineers Seeking Technical Data
Limelight Networks and BuyDRM Team Up To Provide Integrated PayMedia Services
PubSub Sidebar Adds Real-Time Monitoring of Weblogs and Newsgroups to Firefox Web Browser
New Law.com CLE Center Simplifies and Improves Online Continuing Legal Education for Attorneys
Rohm and Haas Engages FinancialContent for Enterprise Portal Content Solution

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Firefox aims for 10 percent of Web surfers
The Rise and Fall of a Dot-Com Pioneer: Update on "Flip" Filipowski
Reuters Subsidiary Lipper Announces Acquisition of Fitzrovia International plc
MP3 site settles for $10 million with RIAA
Vivisimo Introduces Velocity for Integrated Enterprise Search
Entopia Announces Third Generation Information Discovery Infrastructure, Entopia K-Bus 3
PR Newswire Launches Must-Have Tool for Public Relations Industry
IVI Communications and Viyya Technologies Sign Multi-Million Dollar Strategic Marketing Agreement
Thomson ResearchSoft and SCIPROOF Announce Marketing Agreement
Comtex's Finance News Selected by Northern Light for Business Research Engine
Grouper - Share Your Stuff With Friends, Legally
2004 U.S. Presidential Campaign Coverage Now Available via an RSS from Factiva

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The Autonomy announcement of its support for Information360's new desktop real-time information tool should not go unnoticed in your rounds. While news wire veterans such as Dow Jones and may find the press release's claim of offering the "first" real-time information exchange to be somewhat laughable, the focus and backing for this effort are hardly a chuckle in terms of their concept and apparent execution. Recognizing the explosion in unstructured Web and desktop content as a key driving force in determining content relevance, Information360 has leveraged Autonomy technology to develop what they term DORIS, the Direct On line Real-time Information System. In a nutshell, DORIS looks at a user's desktop content and determines when relevant content from suppliers that will include the UK's Government News Network (GNN) and London Stock Exchange Regulated News Service (RNS)as well as other sources match current needs and interests. This works in theory in two directions. Users such as journalists and other news-intensive professionals such as securities traders will in theory be receiving "self-breaking" news that comes to their focused attention naturally as DORIS interprets formal and informal news sources anonymously to identify contextually relevant sources being updated in real-time. At the same time news suppliers can better identify journalists and others who are within a community of users who are interested in their news and should be priority targets for further information. The communal and desktop evaluation aspects of this product are particularly intriguing, providing an angle on desktop news relevance that at first blush seems like a more advanced take on Relegence's real-time news and information relevance management capabilities. We'll report back as we learn more, but yet again individuals are being empowered as news gathering and interpreting agents who are changing the face of the publishing world.

Many B2B and STM publishers have been struggling to find the right model for distributing their content as they confront pressures that are pushing them towards opening their databases to Web and enterprise search engines. These publishers are seeking the right balance between maximizing the reach and influence of their publications while maintaining the ability to provide - and to be compensated for - premium features for their core readers. If anyone doubts if there are successful business models in an open access environment, they need only look at Google, whose share price has more than doubled since it went public. B2B and STM publishers cannot be Googles, but they can leverage the openness that user-empowering technologies provide to create richer revenue models.

Click here to read the full News Analysis

Occasionally print has its advantages, if but to allow one to catch up with things in an unwired environment. So it was nice this past weekend to catch up with the November issue of Wired Magazine on a color-watching drive through the New England countryside. I strongly recommend the article entitled "The Death of Brands" by James Surowiecki starting on p. 205 (old-fashioned linking convention!). It's a quick read that helps to quantify what has been obvious in the content industry for quite some time: brands as assets are both more important than ever before and more challenged than ever before. Brands are tools to leverage product assets well appreciated by their markets, but to coast on brand image for a nanosecond longer than a client will be willing to consider an alternative is a death sentence for profitability. As if to underscore this point this year's Newswire Awareness Survey focusing on journalists and media outlets found that 97 percent of the respondents care about the content from a given newswire source and not the source brand and that 80 percent had no stated preference for newswire brands. Major content providers have a little more brand leverage, but in an era of search engines and workflow software it's harder than ever to distinguish content based on a well-recognized producer label. It's all about what content DOES for people that matters these days; if your content hasn't done something for its audience lately, it's in jeopardy. This is why accelerating efforts to develop vContent is so important in today's content marketplace: the brand is what the product does, and not much more these days.

Footnote: The November issue of Wired also contains a Creative Commons-licensed CD sampler of songs by major artists and an article by Lawrence Lessig on the value of new approaches to copyright law in encouraging creativity. p.188.

Update: A busy day, but not so busy that I can't point you to an interesting site that came in my spam wave today that correlates with this entry: the Lexus site on MSN that extends the Lexus brand via online music, magazine-style content and shopping experiences. Quality content is being used to build up brands in a variety of effective manners these days - not all of them requiring traditional publisher-brand models.

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:

- Reuters Shares Jump on Revenue Outlook; Pending Sale of Radianz Position
- Thomson Financial Gets SEC Subpoena

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Yahoo, Adobe Team Up for New Web Services
Newspapers Create New Safeguards After Circulation Scandals
Is new media blogging out the old?
NetLibrary, Recorded Books Offer Downloadable Audiobooks; OverDrive Set to Launch
AOL members get more access to its content via AOL.com
ProQuest's CEO promises to cut costs
Autonomy Powers World's First Real-Time News Information Service
Survey: 97% of U.S. Media Care Only About Newswire Content - 80% Cite No Brand Preference for Services
NeuStar(R) Announces Identity Based Subscriber Services
Biz360 and Context Analytics Partner to Increase Business Impact of Corporate Communications

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The USC Annenberg School ' s Center for the Digital Future has just released results of a nationwide survey in year four of an ambitious ten year project to monitor how the Internet is influencing all aspects of American life. A noteworthy finding was that users are at last acknowledging that not all online information is created equal.

For the second year in a row, the study found a decline in the number of users who believe that "most information on the Web is reliable and accurate." The figure is now down to 48.8%. The number of users who believe that "only about half the information on the Web is reliable and accurate" continues to grow, and now stands at 41.5%.

How do users determine quality? The answer in a word appears to be "brand." Users consistently rated the information quality of "established media" and government Web sites higher than Web sites of individuals (which I read to include small and unknown media sites as well). According to the study, 62.1% of users believe that established media Web sites are "mostly reliable and accurate" and 56.5% of users believe that government Web sites are "mostly reliable and accurate." The percentages rise even higher when the study looks only at users who've been using the Web for a number of years.

I've suggested for several years now that there would ultimately be a "flight to quality" as users began to realize how much inaccurate, outdated, incomplete and biased information exists the Web, and that this shift would primarily benefit those established publishers with a reputation for providing quality data. These data suggest that this important and very positive shift is already underway.

Detailed data from this survey can be found at: www.digitalcenter.org

Google earnings wow investors Firm's profit more than doubles in quarter after IPO
Google desktop search sparks security scare
Speak Clearly and Carry a Manual: Microsoft's New Home of the Future Debuts
Yahoo buys e-mail search company
Which? and Reed scoop top awards
Find.com Business Search Engine Adds MarketResearch Content
LexisNexis(R) Enables Research for the 'Mobile Lawyer' With Expanded Applications for BlackBerry(R)
Google launches enterprise search solution in Europe
ProQuest Company Reports 11 Percent Earnings Growth for the Third Quarter of 2004
Open Text Corporation Book, Managing the Information Explosion, Tells CEOs How to Survive, Thrive

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The Wall Street Journal breaks a cracker of a story on the potential sale of its majority stake in Radianz to British Telecom, potentially raising up to GBP 140 million in funds in the process. Radianz was formed out of the network operations unit of Reuters four years ago with networking partner Equant, providing secure and reliable network connectivity to the financial community. Recently Radianz has moved to provide more value-add content and transaction services via its networks to its clients, moving towards providers such as The MacGregor Group that have been expanding their connectivity offerings for trade order routing and management to include more market data services. Perhaps in the end it is proving to be too big a leap into the value-add arena when their backbone revenues are up against communications giants like BT that have more scalable facilities. Reuters will get some well-timed cash out of the deal, but at the end of the day the ability of network services companies like MacGregor to provide a rich array of content services over mission-critical networks should not be overlooked as a market opportunity. It's a tough choice to make to walk away from connectivity altogether, but without the richness of a range of post-trade services such as MacGregor's to leverage the trading content components it's probably best to call it a day.

It's worth noting briefly that in the world of consumer media CD sales are perking up, up ten percent over last year, as CNET reports. RIAA reps tout the effectiveness of their piracy campaign as a key factor, but that seems to ring with about as much authority as a politician's spin on their record. The key stat is the 59 million single songs that have been sold via outlets such as Apple's iTunes and MusicMatch. Seems I remember buying singles as a kid when I wasn't sure I wanted a whole album - oftentimes upgrading anyway once I found out how much I liked the artist. Anti-piracy efforts may be having some effect on buyer behavior, but the more likely scenario is that content consumers are becoming comfortable with the ease and convenience of rights-protected downloads. Something for other types of premium content providers to think about.

Mark Glaser's USC Annenberg OJR article on news sites' efforts to open up to their readership picks up on the impact of news search engines that we've been following for a while, adding several interesting details. The Wall Street Journal Online will have a five-day trial starting 8 November (mark your calendar!) of its entire site for free, while New York Times technology journalist David Pogue will be equipped with his own weblog service. The WSJ effort will try to promote other rich content with deep linking into its own site from its pages, while, as noted earlier here, BBC News is going with links to outside sources via Moreover. How quickly things change - or more to the point, how quickly things change when publishing concerns wait too long to make changes. It's been clear for some time that the Journal and other behind-the-firewall publications have been missing out on a lot of the fun as readers learn how to find multiple sources on the news that matters to them most via news search engines, RSS feeds and personal aggregation services such as MyYahoo!. One has to assume that the WSJ is taking a look at the gap between its subscription revenues and actual site visits from subscribers and discovering that they had best be expanding their online readership base quickly. Whether this means that the Journal will be introducing new revenue models is yet to be seen, but it's likely that the emerging dominance of search engines and XML weblog feeds is pushing premium news content providers further away from traditional "lock 'em up" subscription sites. As new models evolve, the crying need for a rights management strategy for online news archives will become far more apparent. See Business Week's article on users sharing site registrations for collateral proof that online premium publishers have been living in a dream world without rights management.

On a related note: in searching for news headlines I've noted that The Detroit News is coming up a lot these days for stories from the Associated Press. It's ludicrous how many regional and local papers have knee-jerked back to a registration-required model for even wire service content. This seems to play into the hands of papers that are willing to open up to the search engines and help monetize this content that's widely available anyway. Thanks, Detroit.

Reuters Weighs Sale of Radianz
For Missing Web Pages, a Department of Lost and Found
Online Search Universe Is Expanding
Information Society Brings Good and Bad News for Journalists
Open Season: News Sites Add Outside Links, Free Content
Even with Google, local PC search not perfect
Google leads the charge against file names
CD shipments surge after lean years
New Elsevier Mdl Patent Chemistry Database; 28 Years of Patent Chemistry Now Structure-Searchable
Comtex Introduces New Products: theflyonthewall.com and Sinocast's China Financial Watch

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The San Francisco Chronicle made a big splash today with a story that includes forecasts of Google advertiser accounts. The forecasts were included as assumptions in an internal document that Google provided to its outsourced IT partner that is building and administering its AdSense billing and settlement system. The forecasts are the eye-catching news item here, although the forecasts may be less than scientfic for the purposes of writing specs for the billing system. Nonetheless, the story does confirm the identity of the Bertelsmann subsidiary that Google has contracted with. As referenced in an earlier entry in this Weblog, Google is partnering with BFS Finance, part of Bertelsmann's Arvato Group. BFS, because it only has offices in Germany, Austria, and Ireland, may seem an unlikely partner for Google. However, Arvato has offices in NY and Valencia, CA. For a project the size of the Google deal, it's probable that Arvato is utilizing resources from its IT division in Valencia as well as its BFS group.

LookSmart names new CEO
New Microsoft software tool leverages power of online 'presence'
Why Web Publishers Fear a Little Sharing
PR bloggers enter the story
Knowledge Management Involves neither Knowledge nor Management
Verity enhances search platform with Web services interface
Wolters Kluwer Acquires SIAN
Hoover's Online Launches New UK Site, More Quality Company Records and Powerful, Time-Saving Tools
New Weblog Search Options at RocketNews
Lippincott Williams & Wilkins Will Work with XyEnterprise to Automate Publishing Operations
Open Text Launches 'Communities' Software for Collaboration
ISDD Launches Knowledge Management Software For Medium Enterprises

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It is no coincidence that Elsevier, the publisher of The Lancet, distributed a press release to announce that the number of registered users of The Lancet's website has surpassed 1 million on the same day that the Public Library of Science (PLoS) launched its new medical journal, PLoS Medicine. PLoS is headed by some of the leading proponents of the Open Access movement, and in its own words is "committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource". The primary target of the Open Access movement in its drive to change the current model for pricing and distributing scientific and medical information is none other than Elsevier, the world's largest publisher of STM journals.

As a consumer of health and healthcare information, I find the goals and determination of the Open Access community admirable. As a long-time publishing industry analyst, not a research scientist, I don't feel qualified to assess whether the proposed solution of an author-pays model for covering peer-review and publishing costs will in fact improve the state of scientific research or improve decisions made by healthcare consumers. However, I do feel qualified to comment on issues related to evolving publishing models and the economic incentives for authors and publishers to create appropriate content and value-added tools for various audiences.

In the current environment where consumers increasingly use the Web to find information about goods and services they buy, and where health-related information is sought by between 71 and 80% of online users (according to Harris Interactive), Open Access proponents are right to suggest that there is a demand from average consumers for trustworthy and authoritative healthcare and medical information. If federally-funded research reports become freely available on the Web by mandate, then commercial STM publishers will have to find a way to add value to differentiate their offerings from the "raw" content that is produced under grant. Enterprising publishing companies will embrace new technologies (some more quickly than others) and will find new means of adding value to core content to target the information needs of a variety of user populations with differentiated products in order to create commercially-viable products. This is the essence of the publishing business.

To end on an ironic note, it is quite likely that "open" access to basic scientific and technical research information will occur with or without external intervention as an expected consequence of technological advances in digital publishing and the economics of Web distribution. Commercial STM publishing companies will invest resources in improved methods for accessing relevant content and in developing value-added content for specific audiences. Basic content will become commoditized. The spotlight that the Open Access movement has directed on STM journal publishers will likely acce