Bank of America Says Federal Charge Card Data Lost
Bloggers bring in the big bucks
NFAIS Conference Addresses the Battle for Mindshare
A Tag Team's Novel Net Navigation
IBM's Serrano heats up information integration
Kanoodle Announces 'BrightAds RSS' - Self-Service RSS Monetization and Distribution with Moreover
Ranking.com Database Releases "Free Usage" Guidelines
Crystal Semantics Granted Patent for World's First Sense Engine
OneSource Sees 130% Increase in Legal Sector Business in Three-Year Period

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The My Lexis personalized portal introduction this week has been a well-packaged fanfare for a collection of features that in some ways seems to be playing catch-up with some of the desktop capabilities offered by Factiva last year in its own innovative style. My Lexis offers a slick setup of search and services objects on its home page that can be rearranged in a drag-and-drop fashion, while federated searching across selected databases such as legal cases, news, statutes and regulations provides earch results categorized by document types for each category and indications of numbers of documents returned, with separate tabs for each set of search results. Links to other LexisNexis products complete the picture. It's a nice implementation, with good usability and thoughtful features that draw together the powerful LexisNexis suite of legal research tools in a more user-centric fashion. But for the most part these kinds of personalization features are not anything that users in major enterprises have not seen in their portal environments already from major software providers. Providing more productivity and usability for users if a good goal, of course, but for the most part major business content aggregators are still playing catch-up with enterprise software vendors in solving their clients' key content usage needs behind the firewall. My Lexis is a productive step in the right direction, but larger steps are needed by business aggregators of all kinds to get their content into more useful and indispensible contexts.

CNET News notes with other techie journals the ins and the outs of Apple's new gaggle of iPods, from color displays for photos, new case colors and a bitsy little Shuffle model to compete with less expensive players in the marketplace. Apple's aiming to become the default player for music lovers in all price brackets and making a tentative move towards bypassing PCs as the multimedia platform of choice. Rumors were flitting about that Apple also may make a bid for the floundering TiVo business, rounding out the picture of a content-centric consumer content play. Creating a multimedia culture that doesn't rely on Microsoft's PC dominance while accepting that dominance as a leverage point for now is a strategy that just might work. At the same time Microsoft also seems to have failed in securing other new platform venues for content, having nominal luck with PDA handhelds but being largely skunked in smart phones and text devices such as RIM's Blackberry. More and more content providers are getting less attached to Microsoft platforms as key components of the choicer parts of their revenue streams, even as Mozilla's Firefox chips away at Internet Explorer's prior lockdown of the PC desktop for Web content. In sum Microsoft's approach to content doesn't seem to be paying off very handsomely, being constantly locked in to strategies that put legacy platform revenue needs above the needs of content users looking to solve problems with innovative user-centric solutions. Expect this trend to continue as more business and consumer content makes its way onto alternative platforms that solve content problems rather than computing problems.

LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell has announced the launch of Attorney Match(SM), a service that allows consumers and professionals to locate lawyers via their Lawyers.com site that meet their needs for very specific matters. Users can query for free and locate experts in a wide variety of fields in a local area, or further refines searches by languages spoken, business-only matters category drill-downs. Results for a firm include a summary of their focus, bios on key partners, Web site links and, in some listings, links to submit email inguiries to the firm and representative clients. Attorneys pay a $450 annual listing fee be be included in the service. This is of course a direct challenge to Thomson West's FindLaw service and on a quick test drive Martindale-Hubbell seems to have come up with a very effective challenger. The taxonomies for locating service specialites are more robust and easier to navigate than FindLaw's, search result listings provide more information and much better formatting and features, as do the individual firm and lawyer listings, which also have an edge with their partner bio information. Understanding not only usability needs but the use of content to addresss specific personal needs can set a directory database service above its competition by leveraging content, technology and a deep understanding of user needs to create higher value services that command more effective marketing for their clients. Kudos for the LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell team for creating a vContent implementation that promises to raise the bar for barristers seeking effective marketing support.

Just yesterday, VNU's European arm announced a deal with NewsGator to distribute a bundled offering of the NewsGator RSS reader and VNU's business content covering the information technology industry.

Why is this significant? Because I think RSS feeds are potentially very important, and very good news for business publishers, including data publishers. RSS feeds are simply content sent by publishers in a standard XML format to users. Users read RSS feeds with newsreader software such as the product offered by NewsGator. RSS feeds are commonly associated with blogs.
There are two ways to view a blog. You can visit the blog just as you would any other Web site, or you can have new blog entries sent to you as RSS feeds. Every time the blog is updated, the new information is automatically sent to your newsreader and you are alerted.

What excites me is not the technology, which conceptually speaking is quite mundane. Rather, it's the potential of RSS as a new and powerful distribution channel. RSS feeds allow publishers to push content directly to the user's desktop, bypassing spam filters and a whole host of other hassles and delivery impediments.

That's why I have begun to think of RSS feeds as "trusted feeds." Users subscribing to RSS feeds are saying to publishers that they value, trust, and want or need this specific content, and they will pay attention to it upon arrival.

And dare I say it, the other reason RSS feeds are so powerful is that they represent push technology. Push technology has been discredited in the eyes of many because it has been so badly over-hyped in the past. But I increasingly believe the successful publishers of tomorrow must have a push aspect to their product. It's simply the only way to engage your attention-deprived users in a value-added way that doesn't offend. I would even go so far as to say that the surprising resiliency of print publications is due largely to the fact they push content to users, a different form of trusted feed if you will. RSS feeds aren't only for blogs and news stories. They are equally adaptable to pushing out new listings and other event-driven data. This kind of continuous customer connection is crucial these days as more and more publishers find that it's actually easier to sell a subscription than it is to get a subscriber to use a subscription. And if they don't use it, they won't renew it. Staying visible with your subscribers is essential. RSS feeds provide a low-cost and increasingly popular way to do this. With RSS feeds, the medium is very much the message.

Study Shows Rapid Growth in Online News Consumption
Google Toolbar's AutoLink & The Need For Opt-Out
IBM expands corporate search ambitions
LexisNexis creates new start page for researchers
ProQuest tops profits, sales estimates
Googlisation cometh!
Collaboration is the name of the game in New Zealand's libraries
German Search Engines Self-Regulating
Will Apple buy Tivo?
AOL Debuts Local Search

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Online Ad Points to Product Commentary Rather Than Homepage
Ads Embedded in Online News Raise Questions
A tangled web of law governing content
Bloggers Add Moving Images to Their Musings
Wireless's New Hookup
Apple revamps its iPod lineup
LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell Launches Attorney Match, Online Client Development Service for Attorneys
Rocketinfo to Access Prestigious NewsStand Inc. Content
Investor's Business Daily(R) Announces Content Relationship With Yahoo! Finance
Authentica Delivers Next-Generation Rights Management Platform
Viyya Technologies to Release Second Application in the VIYYA Product Suite
RSS Marketing May Overtake E--mail as Top Info Delivery Tool
Managing all forms of engineering content

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Apple to unveil new iPod?
Don't Fear the Blog and the Fury
ChoicePoint Suffers Fall in Share Price on Privacy Concerns
Desktop Search Tools Spark Enterprise Interest
UN edges closer to "internet governance"
MagazineLaunch.com Website Launched to Provide Online Resources for Magazine Startups
SemioTagger and Skyline--EContent Decision-maker Review
Volantis Launches World’s First Device-Independent Mobile Content "Player"
Market Reports and Information Portal Launched
ToolButton RSS Reader Announced
Searchfeed.com Providing Sponsored Content on Toolbars

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Google book plan sparks French war of words
Bloomberg Mess: CEO's Portfolio Trimmed
Tribune cuts CEO bonus
My Life In Media: Andrew Gowers Reflects on the FT
Sprucing Up: Financial Websites expand and merge, adding new features
IT is from Mars; Web Content from Venus
A Fluid Look at the News
PR Newswire Adds Print Clips to Industry-Leading Monitoring Service, eWatch(TM)
Autonomy Announces Strategic Acquisition of Revolutionary Structured Data Technology
FAST Improves the Search Capabilities of the National Instruments Intranet and Corporate Web Site

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The New York Times and just about everyone else who can get their fingers on a keyboard notes the apparent suicide of pioneering journalist Hunter S. Thompson, founder of the self-described school of "Gonzo" journalism in which his own antics played a vital role in his reportage of various political and social scenes from the rebellious 1960's onward. A difficult personality to a veritable science and not one to take lightly assaults on his outlook or style, Thompson provided a unique and fearless individualistic voice in magazines, books and papers that only loosely could be called edited content. He was the inspiration of countless self-styled journalists who believed in the importance of their own personality and outlook as part of a story, even when they lacked their muse's inherent insights, presaging the individuality that now pervades so many weblogs and other self-styled online content sources. Like Thompson, today's webloggers put it out there in the raw and create pieces that are important as much as for their unvarnished personal narrative as they are for any facts that may surface through their insights. While loose cannons oftentimes explode and go forgotten rather quickly Thompson managed to create a legacy for both his content and his style that has now outlived him in every sense. The importance of his "Gonzo" style may wane over time as widely distributed self-expression leaves the control of mass media outlets, but the courage to be seen for who we are in public venues will find strength from his example for a long time to come.

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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Newspapers' $1 billion bet.
Hard News: Daily Papers Face Unprecedented Competition
Reuters: Not quite all the news fit to print out
Google toolbar move raises online ire
Yahoo 'in talks' over Indian deal
Tired of TiVo? Beyond Blogs? Podcasts Are Here
Couple build startup into blog powerhouse
Reuters' U.S. Workers Vote in Favor of Strike
Wikipedia's Growth Comes with Concerns (audio)
Redefine Information Services and Competitive Intelligence to Impact Bottom Line

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The "whys" of the New York Times' acquisition of About.com from its magazine-oriented parent Primedia were pegged by our own Janice McCallum nearly two weeks ago in our weblog as a good move for Primedia, which never seemed to know how to get the most out of it. Much of the media twist on this sale is less than complimentary to the Times, but there's plenty of method in its purported madness. When you're stuck between weblogs getting more attention on breaking news and search engines becoming the "go to" place for research, it helps to build a business model that looks more like a general content portal such as Yahoo! than yesterday's newspapers. There's no better time to expand your business model than when others can't figure out what their model is supposed to be.

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When we coined the term "infocommerce" way back in 1999, it was meant to express our belief that information content needed to be linked with software and become increasingly integrated into the business processes of our customers. This would go far beyond assuring high renewal rates. It would drive customer demand for better and deeper data, for which publishers would be able to charge premium prices, with all this data now integral to the basic operation of client companies. We saw this as a very attractive vision of the future, but at the time it really was in the realm of theory.

Over the past few years, we've seen these precepts of infocommerce become part of mainstream thinking in the industry, with more and more publishers talking about delivering high value data as continuous data feeds, and finding ways to embed themselves into the workflow, systems and processes of their customers. But while more of us are "talking the talk," still only a handful of us are "walking the walk."

That's why it is so nice to hear a top executive at leading company demonstrating that they not only see the future, but are making serious strides to re-position their companies accordingly. Nancy McKinstry, chairman of Wolter Kluwer's executive board, told the audience at the recent DeSilva & Phillips conference that it was the goal of Wolters Kluwer to move beyond providing their customers with information to read in favor of finding ways to "embed our content in what our customers do." And in a dramatic illustration of their commitment to this goal, McKinstry noted that the company now devotes as much effort to creating software as it does to creating content and has already reached the point where "we have as many programmers as we do editors."

That's a dramatic statement for a publisher to make, but it reflects the reality that our business is changing profoundly. Reference data has traditionally been standalone and passive, and that constrained both its utility and its value. Need to find something in the old days? You'd stop what you were doing, look it up, and then go back to what you were doing, often cutting and pasting or re-entering the reference data you had found. That's not efficient or productive or easy, which means that a lot of directories and databases became place of last resort, destroying their value. Information that is used frequently and valued highly is information that is integrated into the daily work of the customer, if not driving the daily work of the customer.

We've all talked about the desirability of owning "must have" information. This new environment allows us to get to that goal more easily than ever before, but we've got to see the vision, and make the necessary investment to adapt our products now. Those who do will find themselves with even better businesses than they ever thought possible. Those who don't will end up as roadkill on the information highway.

Reed Elsevier reported "the best set of results we have ever seen from the company", according to Lorna Tilbian from Numis Securities as reported by Bloomberg. Despite the positive growth in each of their four market groups, profit for the year fell 9.3 % primarily because of the weak dollar. However, analysts and investors were sufficiently impressed by the 2004 performance and outlook for 2005 to help spur a spike in the stock price, which made the weekly stock price chart for this week look like the proverbial hockey stick.

A few highlights and comments on the future direction of Reed Elsevier gleaned from the reported results and analyst call yesterday:

International: Expect continued expansion into China and other Asian countries for two obvious reasons: growing demand for business, legal, and scientific information in the region (China in particular) and because of the weak dollar, which makes US sales less attractive. Case in point: Reed Business launched 10 new magazines in China in 2004.

New Product Introductions and Enhancements: Look for continued investment in product development to help transform Reed Elsevier content into applications that incorporate must-have content into the daily routine of targeted professionals in the medical, legal, and engineering fields. Elsevier's MDL and LexisNexis' risk management tools are two representative examples.

Acquisitions: Growth in the LexisNexis legal and Harcourt education markets were supported by the Seisent and Saxon acquisitions. Sir Crispin Davis, Reed Elsevier's CEO, used the example of Applied Discovery's 100% year-to-year sales growth to underscore how acquisitions can be leveraged with RE's sizeable sales force, brand strength, and other infrastructure assets. Expect more acquisitions that focus on technology-driven applications in Reed's legal and medical markets.

Online Advertising: Reed Business continues to solidify its relationship with Google with the AdSense for Search program, which has been very successfully implemented on Kellysearch.com. One can imagine an expansion of Adsense for Search into other Reed Business, LexisNexis properties, and even Elsevier publications in the future.

Along with growth through new products and acquisitions, Reed Elsevier's core scholarly journals and LexisNexis database publishing businesses are benefiting from an improvement in academic library budgets and spending on corporate and business information, respectively.

Reed Elsevier management is smart to focus on getting closer to their customers by investing in application platforms that provide productivity tools to their ultimate customers. But, they are smarter still for not taking their eye off of their core asset: quality information that can be leveraged in multiple ways. It is the combination of quality information and tools for using the information to enhance productivity (vContent) that will entice customers to open their wallets to content-intensive products and services.

The Times Company Acquires About.com for $410 Million
Random House Joins Media Rush to Mobile Phones
Buy and Read Ebooks with Your Mobile Phones
The Bloggers are at the Gate, Sire - Pat Oliphant
The cost of ethics: Influence peddling in the blogosphere
Firefox reaches 25 million desktops
Web Executive Sees Online Video Ads Taking Off
Startup tags along as weblogs go corporate
The copyright 'copyfight' is on
Google blazes trail to Oregon
Factiva Adds Critical Web Content From Moreover Technologies to Media Monitoring and Reputation Mgt.
McGraw-Hill's New Digital Engineering Library Provides Unrivalled Content, Functionality, Editorial
FAST Launches Search Best Practices Consulting Service

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Search: Scaling Down for a Big Market
Reed Elsevier Rises as Company Predicts Business Titles Growth
The Cahners have left the building
Google soups up search toolbar
The Underrated Enterprise Web: No Gerbil Cannonballs But a Lot More Bang
IPod and MP3 player ownership soars
Dow Jones News Service is Available on William O'Neil + Company's WONDA 5.2
Weblogs Inc named by Business Week in top five online firms to watch in 2005
Rabobank switches to Temtec analysis system
First Wave of Enterprise Customers Adopt Vivisimo Velocity
CNN.com Offers Free RSS Feeds to Users, Bloggers

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Some time ago Yahoo! had pretensions of making an impact in the enterprise space with tailored portals, but withdrew to focus on shoring up its core consumer-oriented businesses. On the heels of recent efforts to get its stock quotes up to business-level quality via direct sourcing comes word via ZDNet Australia that it's thinking actively about coming back to the enterprise space through potential extensions of its fomenting desktop search capabilities. Very few details and rather uncertain as to the whens and hows, but clearly this is a Google countermeasure, as are the promises in the article of considering new forms of content that can be brought to a Web audience via search engines. Yahoo! has a very successful media-oriented content strategy, but it's definitely a few steps off the pace just now in taking the more source-agnostic approach to content that's been Google's claim to fame. Yet neither of these companies seems to have done a great job of thinking about how enterprise content differs from open Web content. Google's still trying to get back on its feet with versions of its desktop search that are ready for enterprise-level security expectations and experiencing tepid acceptance of its enterprise search appliance. Yahoo! is still betting more heavily on developing itself as a media property than trying to understand enterprise content needs from the professional user's perspective. I'm not discounting entirely the suggestion that Yahoo! will move back into enterprises with a network search function, but don't expect it to be a significant factor without a great deal of careful product development. Just flipping some search code and indexing at an enterprise is not going to do much to impress them without a much deeper understanding of enterprise knowledge management needs.

The announcement of Thomson Financial News is an interesting positioning of assets both old and new into a product with much more understandable packaging that compares apples-to-apples more easily with offerings from Reuters and Bloomberg. Broad market coverage via new Dow Jones subsidiary MarketWatch provides an important hub of content that allows pieces from Thomson products such as IFR, CCBN, SDC deals data and Thomson First Call to fit into a cohesive news and market commentary framework with extra depth for Global 1000 companies, sectors, fixed income and foreign exchange. It's an important step in taking Thomson away from its legacy of balkanized products that were increasingly difficult to sell as standalones and creating a market presence with a content product that complements the client-centric approach of the Thomson ONE platform. Step by step Thomson is creating a unified, simplified and flexible approach to financial content that makes it easier to understand as a viable alternative to Reuters and Bloomberg. Does it matter that Thomson Financial News is cobbled together from lots of small pieces loosely joined? Given that this is how much of today's successful content is being assembled anyway, this normalized and productized federation of content is very much in line with other developments in news content delivery. Still, additional editorial capabilities from Thomson and others to assemble news and commentary content into more useful packages on the fly hopefully will be in the pipeline in time.

Citizen Journalists: Could Wikinews Become The Next Associated Press?
Reuters's Profit Soars On Cost Cuts, Asset Sales

Blog Awards: Like Blogs, They're Diverse, Global and Freewheeling
Thanks to Cellphones, TV Screens Get Smaller
Media pros ask: 'Is it time for a new business model?'
Can Bloggers Be Sued For Libel?
Concepts and a Design for Fair Use and Privacy in DRM
Everything I Need To Know I Learned Online
Thomson Financial Launches Thomson Financial News
WSJ Online and Outercurve Technologies Announce Launch of 'The Wall Street Journal for BlackBerry'
Go Beyond Search Engines. Introducing Keepad. A novel concept in web research tools.
Factiva Educates Global Staff More Efficiently with 'eTopics' Training Initiative Using Brainshark
Bibliotheque Municipale de Lyon Chooses Autonomy to Guide Users to the Right Information
The Fannie Mae Foundation Taps Vignette Collaboration Solutions, E-Mail Integration Key

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It's often bandied about that Wal-Mart constitutes the seventh largest global economy, so I suppose that it should come as no surprise that VNU has announced the launch of a subscription-only portal dedicated to assisting companies that are suppliers to the retail colossus. Dubbed Smart Supplier, the site provides exclusive insight into Wal-Mart's product category and operational strategies. Consumer product manufacturers and distributors will find information on what product categories are being introduced or expanded, which ones are being cut back or eliminated and so on, according to Modern Materials. It is interesting to see not only business intelligence packaged for a specific company but to see it packaged as an online title, a highly targeted strategic and tactical tool. While this is focused intelligence on a huge scale, it points the way towards what kinds of titles are likely to thrive in the future. Very purpose-driven content highly focused on very specific business or personal relationships that can leverage intelligence from a wide variety of sources is a winning ticket that may allow publishers to fill an aggregation role that was usually left to more scattered coverage across general titles in the past. It's a race between enterprise portals, aggregators and publishers to identify and fill these highly targeted needs; given the willingness of publishers to leverage advertising in this model to monetize highly contextual content we'll bet on the publishers winning this foot race for now. [NOTE: The Smart Supplier site seems to have some technical difficulties today.]

Yahoo desktop search tools may move from desktop to Intranet
Ask Jeeves mulls Firefox-based browser
Content Management for Everyone: ECM for the masses
Reuters launches interactive TV channel on the internet
Reed Elsevier deals online recruiter Emailjob.com
Federal Appeals Court Rules Against Reporters in CIA Leak
Adding semantics to the Web
ALA Is a Business! - Restore the balance between revenue and service
Healthvision To Include Elsevier's iCONSULT As Part Of Electronic Health Record For Physicians
VNU's SMART SUPPLIER Web Site Provides Coverage of Strategies of World's Largest Retailer
Thomson Delivers New End-to-End Product Labeling Solution to the Pharmaceutical Industry
ValeoIP to Provide Knight Ridder Digital with Online Content-Licensing Services
Mashboxx Selects Peppercoin to Process Small Payments for its Online Peer-to-Peer Music Network
Blackboard Reports Record Growth for ASP Services in 2004; More than 80 New Clients in 2004 for Hosting

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