Yahoo!'s move to bypass financial market data vendors and to source market data directly from exchange sources is more than a move to increase the efficiency of content delivery to consumer markets. It's also part of a wider strategy by companies like Yahoo! to provide more originally sourced content across the board - just as major institutions increasingly bypass middle men to create greater content value. For those professionally-oriented publishers and aggregators hoping that this is just a media story, take a look at the needs of your own institutional clients and consider how technology-savvy companies like Yahoo! can outscale many of your abilities to service your core markets with original content. It's more than a ticker that's ticking in this picture.

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Premium content vendors, there's hope yet for those hoping that the world will come to its senses and understand that content's worth paying for. A recent study by scientists at Duke University Medical Center highlighted in innovations report seems to demonstrate that the value of premium content is fairly hard-wired into our fundamental biology. The fruit monkeys in the study were given the opportunity to "pay" in fruit juice for access to powerful and attractive monkeys or less-powerful monkeys well known to them. The furry folks were glad to pay out handsomely for the powerful and sexy of their set, but required "overpayment" to view folks that were more humdrum. This is probably no news to purveyors of adult content and the National Inquirer, but it also indicates that there's something fundamental about attractive content that plays into the pocketbooks of people more strongly than we may imagine. The question is, what's the payment system? The monkey gives up something that would sustain him or her, which we presume equates to money, but increasingly payment is measured in something more personal: content from or about the individual. Understanding the many dimensions of value transactions such as this are key points to consider for companies weighing how to tune business models in the face of online audiences that interact with content in a wide variety of ways. Statistics gathered from Web sites have probably done more to advance the understanding of many fundamental aspects of the want and how of people's perception of content value than a thousand lab experiments, but the "whys" of what people consider valuable in content are still largely unexplored from a systematic perspective. Perhaps the Med center folks should mosey over to the Communications school at Duke and knock heads a while.

As the year 2005 rumbles into full view the business models that began to come tumbling down in 2004 are being pushed aside to make room for new business models that span old categories and define highly profitable niches. Shore sees four key areas where the rapidly shifting action will unfold in creating and expanding these new models: cooperation, commercialization, containerization and consolidation. This complimentary ShoreViews report provides an overview of Shore’s major themes for the content industry in 2005 from Shore President John Blossom and other senior analysts in the Shore network.

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In our Finance premium weblog Shore Analyst Jack McConville provides decisive insights on these and other late-breaking events in the world of financial content.

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Yahoo to Offer Financial Data Feeds
Lee Enterprises to Buy Pulitzer In a $1.46 Billion Agreement
Monkeys pay per view
Search Sites Play a Game of Constant Catch-Up
The Weblog Question: Ownership
Thomson Financial enhances Datastream service
OverDrive Now Offers Libraries Unlimited Download Audiobook Plan
Stratify Breaks New Ground in Electronic Discovery
Interwoven Takes Web Content Management to a New Level with Introduction of LiveSite
Business Blogger Turns Free Traffic Tips Web Log Into 400 Page Book – Has Giveaway at Site

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The lion's share of European languages are not going to disappear anytime soon, but content written in those languages is becoming a threatened commodity in electronic content. Thanks to the Web a handful of major languages are dominating the content that's made available online, predominantly English, but increasingly a wider range of languages that reflect the flow of both online and offline commerce. To counter this trend the European Parliament has voted to spend EUR 149 million according to noticias.info (in English) on an initiative designed to tackle the fragmentation of the European digital content market and to improve the accessibility and usability of geographical information, cultural content and educational material. This is a politician's dream vote, of course: who can be against native languages and culture disappearing? Yet the sad truth is that the search for relevant content is coalescing languages into smaller pools than ever before. If one is able to find the answers to a question via a search in an easily understood language it's increasingly unlikely that multilingual content will abate the desire to get timely and relevant results regardless of its language source. Language is a key component of content value, but preservation alone will not maintain the value of that content in the eyes and ears of an online audience. Making sure that content is well-translated in global languages as well as local languages and providing easy access to both is the key to good multilingual content, a practice mastered well by major outlets in Korea and Germany but less so in other key markets. Pride of language will not be enough to provide successful content marketing - and global understanding of local cultures via content.

Publishers, hold onto your hats and grab your digital cameras: it's looking like the next big battleground in the directory world is going to be visual.

All of a sudden, photos of businesses and buildings are red hot and getting lots of attention. Several months ago, infoUSA announced it had dusted off its mothballed project to photograph every business in America, and would be adding photos to several of its products, including its beefed-up business credit reports. CoStar, producer of a national commercial real estate databases, has a fleet of trucks running around the country snapping shots of every office building. Now, Amazon.com's new search engine, A9, is generating big buzz with a yellow pages directory with photos of businesses. And, rising above them all is GlobeXplorer (a 2004 InfoCommerce Model of Excellence), which offers aerial photos of America and which are being integrated into several business database products.

Why pictures? Let's face it: directory and databases are very useful, but very useful is not always the same as very interesting. Adding photos makes a database more interesting. In some applications, a picture may well be worth a thousand words. In fields such as real estate, it's hard to conceive of a product without photos. Even in a credit report product, a photo of the business might provide valuable added insight.

But do photos add much to a yellow pages product? I took a quick spin through the A9 yellow pages to try to answer that question. When you do hit a photo of a business (and A9 only has coverage in selected areas right now), it's impressive. A9 offers you a series of snapshots around the business, so you can get a view of the whole street. In a great case of unintended product placement, more than a few of these photos seemed to be of UPS trucks parked at the curb and obscuring the storefront, but overall the project achieves one of A9's stated objectives, which is coolness.

The big question of course is "why?" Is the user better off for having access to these photos? A9 suggests photos help users more quickly get to stores by providing a visual cue in addition to the address. That's certainly valid (although the cost/benefit ratio seems a bit high), but there is a bigger issue. In many cases I would be staring at a well-composed photos of a business with no clue what it did beyond the general yellow pages category in which it was classified. Therein lies the rub: A9 is layering these neat and glitzy photos on top of a very weak dataset. Photos may distract users from the lack of information about the listed companies, but they don't substitute for basic data.

A search for restaurants in downtown Philadelphia brought me lots of listings, all sporting name, address, phone and photos. Yet the photos, while novel and interesting, still don't tell me about cuisine, menu, hours, credit cards accepted, or any of the more mundane facts that are frankly more useful. When it comes to directories, photos without a strong underlying data record will never offer more than part of the picture.

U.S. Backs Off Relaxing Rules for Big Media
United Kingdom: Court Judgement Reduces Protection for Databases
Court Throws Out Case Against VNU's ACNielsen Unit
Technology Threats to Advertising Breach Newsroom Walls
Special Report: The State of Analyst Weblogs, Part 1
Blog Overkill:The danger of hyping a good thing into the ground.
Shoptalk: Beware of the Blog
Sad end for BBC journo's health blog
Tribune's Net Falls 36% On Staff-Cuts Charge
ECNext Launches eMarketing Consulting Service to Help Business Publishers Drive Web Revenue
Tekrati Debuts Directory of Industry Analyst Weblogs in Conjunction with New Communications Forum 2005
Compliance Web Portal With Legal Focus Launches to Meet Industry Hunger for Knowledge, Trends and Facts
Discovery Education Introduces Discovery Health Connection

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Amazon's A9.com search pictures your destination
Dow Jones-MarketWatch deal to result in job cuts
EU Parialment Approves eContentplus Programme to Promote Multilingual European Digital Content
C2C Address Freedom of Information Act Data Challenge
Big Wigs From the Blogging & Journalism Conference Say What They Found
Gannett, Knight Ridder Report Robust Q4s on Strong Ad Upticks, but USA Today Down
Germany: Blogs On Their Way To Media
Business.com "People Search" Provides Access to 24 Million Business Professionals Online
PARC Chooses LexisNexis Collections Solutions For Skip Tracing, Locates Debtors Faster, More Efficiently
Interwoven and Landor Associates Partner to Deliver Superior Brand Management and Marketing Solutions

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How does a general aggregator add value in a marketplace swamped with general content? Build a better mousetrap for general business functions is one approach, one that Factiva is now running with via its recently announced SalesWorks product, providing a well-researched interface that promises high usability for sales professionals seeking business information. While Factiva's claim that it is the only sales-oriented source of information from sources such as Reuters Fundamentals, Bureau van Dijk, Standard and Poor's, D&B, and others may be a stretch in the eyes of competitors such as OneSource, It's clear that Factiva is trying to stake out a much more role-focused approach to content integration that will serve them well in the corporate space. Combined with Factiva's integration toolkits and extensive indexing capabilities this approach is likely to provide much more leverage for specific types of users seeking value in content from its context as much as the information itself. Sales integration is an increasingly crowded space, though, so Factiva will do themselves well to work closely with capable integration and service partners in this space such as Siebel and Salesforce.com - and to focus also on integration for verticals that are likely to yield a broader account footprint of integration capabilities. Lessons for all, here.

I've been wading through a vertitable lagoon of headlines on the recent announcements by Google's new beta providing online searching of consumer video sources, catching up with Yahoo!'s December announcement of a similar service as noted by Reuters and other sources. AOL has been doing this for some time, of course, so to some degree the arrival of Google on the scene is just waking the general news media up to a trend already well under way. What's kind of interesting this time around, though, is how accessible the new Google service makes business-oriented content: AOL is a no-op for most corporate folks at work, of course, so let's scratch them off the list for now. Instead let's look at a search for "dow jones industrials", one on the Google video search service and the other on Yahoo's video search service. Google is clearly going far deeper with its use of transcripts and close-caption text to capture video content in context, with several major TV news sources providing 37 results on the topic versus two results on Yahoo! with no accompanying text and little indexing info. Of course AOL parent Time Warner's content from CNN is not in the loop, nor Microsoft affiliate CNBC's content, but there is still a significant amount of business-oriented content available from this service that should catch people's attention - yet again another march stolen from other aggregator sources. Although the sophistication of this service still doesn't hold a candle to professional journalist sources of video such as The NewsMarket.com from a production use perspective the accessibility of text transcripts promises to transform the usability of video content as a research source in an online environment from many significant perspectives. Add in the effect of webloggers using this capability to point to significant video events and we now have a whole new layer of content fabric taking shape online. The fun just gets "funner"...

One of the panels at next week's SIIA IIS Summit meeting in New York is titled, Walking the Tight Rope: Balancing Online Revenue Channels in the Online Circus. For many publishers, revenues come from two sources: content sales and ad sales. In both areas, separate operations still exist for "traditional" distribution channels and "online" distribution channels. But, to serve the needs of readers and advertisers, publishers are going to have to start offering "media neutral" options. With content sales, customers increasingly want to be able to use the content they download (paid or free) on a number of media platforms. With advertising sales, advertisers are increasingly seeking options for creating and placing integrated campaigns that leverage a number of media outlets. MediaPost reports that ESPN is reorganizing its advertising sales units into unified teams of "'multimedia specialists' who will complete integrated deals and account executives who will execute agreements for a specific medium at a customer's request." Ed Erhardt, president of ESPN ABC Sports Customer Marketing and Sales, goes on to say that "This reconfiguration will...bring even greater value to our customers with our market knowledge, and enhance our position as the leading sports marketing and media entity in the world." The comment may sound a bit self-important, but it certainly reflects the reality that integrating advertising sales groups--and content sales groups--is a required move for publishers who truly want to succeed in the digital age. ESPN's move is a precursor for many more to follow.

Bloggers tackle the Super Bowl
New York Times Net Slips On Payroll, Print Expenses
Are Sites Revealing Microsoft's Secrets?
Sue different: Apple threatens insider sites after leaks
IBM raises BI ambitions
ALM Launches ALM Research Online
Qpass Buys Up ucp morgen
Stellent Partners With Fast Search & Transfer to Expand Search Technology Suite
LexisNexis RiskWise and Quova Align to Prevent Credit Card Fraud for Global E-Commerce
Nielsen BookData Strikes Data Deal With Askews Library Services

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Google Steps Into TV Search, Joining Rivals
Bloggers, Traditional Journos Face Off in Harvard Square
Internet searchers are confident, satisfied and trusting – but they are also unaware and naïve
iTunes sell at brisk clip -- a million per day
Legal Music Downloading Up
Top Vendors’ Announcements Reflect Familiar Themes at ALA Midwinter Meeting
At Free Library of Philadelphia, 20 Branches to Operate Without Librarians
The growing market for organizing: Tomorrow's content may be home grown
LexisNexis Launches Chinese Online Service
Factiva Offers Company Information from Leading Global Providers with Unrivalled Global News
Research: Why Has Europe Been Reluctant To Fully Embrace ICTs And Advanced E-Business Tools?
Survey: One out of Four Enterprise Companies Plans to Purchase a Dashboard Solution in 2005

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Today marks the official closing of the Dow Jones acquisition of the MarketWatch investment portal, a move that will give Dow Jones lots more pages in which to place ad inventory in a surging marketplace for online advertising. It's better to have a big board than a small one when the surf gets tall and wild, but when you're defining your wave as "real" content it's going to be hard to capture all of the wave that's upon us. Traditional publishers are scrambling to catch up with this powerful new force in their marketing mix, adding weight to the idea that indeed there can be too much of a good thing if your competition gets a hold of it before you do.
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Internet News Sites Are Back in Vogue
Newspapers Face Antitrust Scrutiny
Blogs: Some Rights Reserved
Rich, Tailored Content
Seeking Better Web Searches
RSS Becoming the Next Standard in Commercial Web-Publishing and Online Information Distribution
Friendster, Love and Money
OneSource Debuts Tool for Small, Midsize Businesses
Reed Elsevier's legal unit LexisNexis buys China's PRCInvestment
ProQuest Extends Factiva Agreements, New Latam Newsstand, Enhances Collection, Federated Search
Stylus Studio and Mark Logic Announce Integrated XQuery Development Support for XML Content Server
Bankrate, Inc. Renews Agreement With The New York Times on the Web
Dow Jones & Company Closes $528 Million MarketWatch Acquisition

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Media leadership nears changing of the guard
Magazines Gussy Up Web Sites to Court Ad Dollars
Google outgunned?
ALA in Boston: Attendance Bounces Back
When Bloggers Make News
Send 'free' to work: Creative Commons brings copyrights into the digital age
FinancialContent Offers Business News Headlines From Reuters.com
Fasteer: The P2P Digital Store that Rewards its Users
Believe It or Not! Young Reader Defends Newspapers
ALM and Harvard Business School Publishing to Collaborate on Law Exec Management Development

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Well, two months ago you heard on this weblog about the impending death of the alliance between Factiva and IBM to promote its Web Fountain product. This week IT Week notes that you may now send flowers officially to the dearly departed. According to the article poor performance was the main sticking point, with content refreshing oftentimes occurring not even on a daily basis. That could get a little sticky with people becoming more intent on monitoring reputation on an increasingly real-time basis. As we noted in our earlier weblog reputation management has become an increasingly competitive field, leaving those late to the game having a difficult time leveraging the untamed content that puts the advantage in aggressive technologists' hands. It also reinforces some original thinking that I had about the Web Fountain/Factiva alliance two years ago: content can help sell iron, but it can't make up for weak software or iron. Doubtless Factiva is not done with this vein of thinking, as the need for effective reputation management is growing and relies increasingly on content sources that have breaking insights well before traditional news outlets, but it will take more than a secondhand I.T. approach to the problem at hand to gain pre-eminence in taming unstructured content for corporate use. See today's item on ChoicePoint for some best practices in this realm of content. A thanks and a tip of the anonymous hat to our source on the earlier weblog entry: I never doubted you.

The Washington Post provides an excellent profile of Alpharetta, Georgia-based ChoicePoint Inc., one of the leaders in mining content on individuals' lives into actionable intelligence for law enforcement organizations, political parties, credit bureaus and human resources professionals. With a nearly insatiable thirst for multidimensional analysis of individual habits and lifestyles, most especially in the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, ChoicePoint has grown through acquisitions, intelligent market positioning and creating high content value out of raw information materials into one of the most high-powered content services providers in the content industry. The important thing about ChoicePoint is its emphasis on content services: with much of its collection being public records the emphasis at ChoicePoint is on discovering content value in the contexts that matter most to clients, be it through custom filtering, visualization and content sharing networks for law enforcement. As we emphasize here at Shore, content is not what sits in someone's database with intellectual property rights: content is what happens to information and experiences in the venues that audiences value. While the article notes that the legal definitions surrounding the use of some of its core data may come under more scrutiny in time, for now consider ChoicePoint one of the key suppliers of vContent in the industry - one whose success is certainly worth monitoring.

The initial consumer electronics hubbub surrounding the launch of Apple's new Mac Mini has died down but the rumble from enthusiasts is just beginning to take off, with interesting implications for how content is consumed. As noted in CNET News, a car restoration buff who also is a Mac buff is studying the feasibility of installing the new Mini computer in auto dashboards, providing a wide range of information services. In theory his goal is to provide 21st century content and navigation capabilities, such as digital music (natch), GPS-driven maps and such, but also potentially access to hotspots in a parking lot. To complement the desires of car buffs Slashdot also notes that Mac enthusiasts are already learning how to perform surgery on the new computer to hop up its performance - 21st century hot-rodders, if you will. This all points to an important step for the Mac platform as a device that consumers embrace as a personal device much the way that they embrace an iPod or a PDA - something that Microsoft's multi-headed PC/server/PDA/xBox strategy has yet to achieve with equal consumer enthusiasm. The Mac Mini bridges the gap between desktop paperweight and a content machine on the go that can configure itself into the kind of content appliance that people need at a given moment. The ability to allow enthusiasts to adapt content appliances to their immediate needs will doubtless accelerate the universal acceptance of rights-protected content objects in consumers' minds, allowing both technologists and content creators to consider new ways in which to reach their audiences with high-end content products and services. If you've been ignoring the world of portable content until now, please listen to your alarm clock - the time for taking content objects on the go seriously has arrived officially.

Putting the Mac Mini in your dashboard
Electronics Firms Form Digital Media Rights Accord
Belo Localizes Interactive Division in Bid to Recapture Classifieds
ChoicePoint finds wealth in information
Australian Content Added To Dialog Newsroom
Seeking Man-on-the-Street Views of Iraq, U.S. Reporters Turn to Bloggers
AOL to Expand Its Capabilities In Web Searches
HandHeld Entertainment Announces Plans to Launch a Digital Content Download System
Farlex, Inc. Adds Houghton Mifflin's American Heritage Dictionary to www.TheFreeDictionary.com
Rethink Data Protection or ... Risk Catching Data Protection 'Pneumonia'

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The Thomson Corporation has announced the acquisition of Hildebrandt International, the largest consulting firm serving the law firm market. Hildebrandt will continue to operate as an independent company, and will become part of the Thomson Legal and Regulatory group.

The combination of publishing and consulting companies is quickly becoming all the rage, but it's a strategy not without risks.

The value of the consultant is as much in objectivity as it is in specific knowledge. For that reason, the brand of the consultant is tightly intertwined with the consultant's independence and integrity. The first time a Hildebrandt consultant ends up recommending, say, a West knowledge management product -- even if for all the right reasons -- the brand takes a hit should the client, however briefly and incorrectly, infer that a conflict may exist. If this happens enough times, the brand can become seriously damaged.

That Hildebrandt will operate as an independent company doesn't so much solve the problem as change it. If Hildebrandt maintains true operational autonomy, many opportunities for leverage and synergy will be lost, so Thomson won't be able to maximize its return on investment.

Am I suggesting that Reed-Elsevier would have been a better home for Hildebrandt? No, because LexisNexis has even more products, initiatives and ventures in the legal market, which would have compounded the issue of conflicts. Actually, I would have seen a company like ALM (formerly American Lawyer Media) as the most likely buyer. They would have brought all the synergy with far, far fewer industry entanglements.