I had the good fortune to get a thorough run-through of LexisNexis TotalSearch when I was judging the SIIA Content Codie awards a while back, and was impressed by the package even then. It's an interesting concept: a client's own legal documents can be extracted and normalized into a form that makes them searchable in much the same way that content from LexisNexis' own database, including embedded citations of case law relating to a given matter. Local content is held separately from LexisNexis content, but the shifting from local to vendor content keeps the same general interface and capabilities available. Now LexisNexis has announced the release of TotalSearch 3.0, now including Shepard's(R) Citations Service imbeddable into a clients' content, beefier searching tools and more integration into popular document management systems. While it may appear to be bass-ackwards workflow integration at first glance, when you consider how central the well-designed LexisNexis interface is to researching legal matters, it makes a good amount of sense to go this route. Treating content from all sources as potentially valuable in the right context is a very important key to creating value in content services these days, so treating a clients' content with equal importance to your subscription content is a play that can keep systems integrators from eating away at your margins - especially when it amplifies the value of your primary interface as a key component of that value. By turning content integration on its head TotalSearch is thinking ahead to new value propositions that will keep it in a central problem-solving role for its clients.

Reuters carries the comments of Gordon Crovitz, head of Dow Jones' online efforts, at the recent Bank of America media conference, in which Crovitz notes that free content on the Web with paid print content "is an unsustainable business model," and that publishers are devaluing their brands in the process. It's a true statement, but perhaps answering the wrong question. On the first front, there's no question that online revenues must drive access to both least-common-denominator and high end readers, even as print is becoming a specialty media service that caters to the either highest end of customers or the lowest, as with the free "street" publications being scooped up by major paper chains. In both models the middle is hard to sustain, and it's really the middle model in most marketing efforts that's under threat, regardless of the media in question. Just as medium-sized run-of-the-mill supermarkets were squeezed out by superstores and category-killer health food stores, it's questionable whether there's a long-term future for mass-market publications that cannot compete in the broadest marketplace or with a much more elite and focused clientele.

Dow Jones has a great editorial staff and is to be admired for its belief in premium content subscriptions, but a sober eye has to admit that WSJ Online is a product not that much different than any other online general business publication. You can continue to price the goods any way you want, but at the end of the day if the storefront's the wrong fit for the marketplace you must either change the goods in the store or find new channels. Looking at the strength of brands with broader market access such as Google or Dow Jones' own MarketWatch property and the strength of more specialized brands such as ALM there's an argument for a mix of high-margin-special and low-margin-general content that's likely to drive publishing markets for the foreseeable future. In the middle will be companies doing a great job of creating new value out of content regardless of its sources - companies that thrive on The New Aggregation model. Long live premium content - in the right package at the right place at the right time.

ChoicePoint to allow people access to personal records
Thomson Financial names Rowlands as CEO
MarketWatch Founder Is Hired To Head CBS's Digital Media Unit
Time Warner Won't Split Off AOL In Near Term
New Web sites to store public's digital content
Going Native: Making the Case for XML Databases
Law Firm Astor & Phillips Selects ISYS:desktop Search Solution for Attorneys' Desktop and Network Search
VNU Marketing Information to Deliver CBI - Continuous Business Intelligence Solutions for Global CPG Ind'y
Hummingbird Unveils New ECM Client for Microsoft Outlook Featuring Dynamic Business Views
New Vice President For Elsevier's Health Sciences Division
eCopy Forum Focuses on Creating Industry Standard for Transforming Paper Documents to Digital Content
Rocketinfo and CNW Group Announce 5-year Licensing Deal
Digital River Adds E-books Content to Its Downloadable Product Catalog
Elsevier Releases 4th Edition of Principles & Practice of Sleep Medicine

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Database operators settle freelance copyright suit
Hollinger Inc. Sues Conrad Black, Others, for $525 Million
Dow Jones Executive Foresees More Paid Web Sites
Read Your Blogs, Check Your Packages
P2P v. Big Content: Opening arguments in the Supreme Court case to watch
Jupiter forecasts online ad growth
Microsoft to plug ID controls into Windows
HighBeam helps employees do their own research
Calacanis suffers growing pains
Publish and don't be damned: WAM!NET plays a crucial role for high-performance content distribution
Analysis: Apple's incomplete legal victory
Google Scholar Advances, Universities Test Link Resolvers
Lawyer's plain-language blogging on Schiavo case a refuge for many
McGraw-Hill And Xrefer Establish Partnership For Online Reference
Elsevier MDL to Build New Electronic Lab Notebook for Life Sciences Research via MDL Isentris Technology
LexisNexis Launches LexisNexis Total Search v. 3.0 Major Enhancements Ahead of Schedule
Reuters Signs Partnership With blinkx TV
LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell Signs New Contract with Nixon Peabody
Press Release Website Offers Free Business News Content To Website Owners

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A recent rant on AlwaysOn discussing blogworking - community-developed weblogs, or "mob weblogs," if you will - noted that AlwaysOn has spun off a quarterly print publication that packages together its insights on technology and media with special online access privileges and special discounts. This is yet another example of online-first publications developing new revenue streams from print, but most interestingly one derived from a true online publishing community. Magazines and journals have always been about trying to define and service specific communities, but it's interesting to note how print publications can spring from successful online communities that define themselves, as opposed to having to rely on overdesigned marketing studies to trim down content to what appeals to a given demographic. Print as a service to club/association/community members takes on a new meaning in this light as a premium capability for ad-supported online community members who want to upgrade to a new type of "in" crowd within that community. These kinds of uses of the print medium as secondary channels for premium communities are likely to increase and prevail as the changing economics of publishing make "online-first" revenues an economic necessity. Print as a primary model for publishers may be seeing its day pass, but trees will continue to be killed in the name of content that draws people together.

Blogworking: The business begins to mature into print
The U.N. thinks about tomorrow's cyberspace
BBC warns IT consultant over 'illegal' Ceefax site
It's time to re-invent the upfront ad market
Speedy desktop search tools raise security concerns
Answers.com Goes Mobile
LexisNexis Butterworths Budget Service Right on the Money with Exegenix Content Conversion
Xinhua PR Newswire Launches Service Showing China Clients Where Announcements Appear Globally
Google Agrees To Acquire Urchin
eGOware Supplants RSS Technology
Convera Secures $5 Million Equipment Loan

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In a wave of fast and furious change news organizations are fighting back against search engines and independent classified services with their own services and pointed counterattacks against perceived IP infringements. AFP takes a swing at Google News while Gannett, Knight Ridder and the Tribune take a stake in new search engine Topix and CitiExpress readies a Craigslist alternative - all in one week. It's certainly a very spirited street fight, but one wonders whether these are blows that will have any sort of deep impact on a news industry that won't wait for major publishers to catch up with new aggregation patterns. The news industry was happy to try to catch up with the "New News" promised ten years ago; are they really ready to do battle with the "New 'New News?'"

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Bloomberg News reports on the largest private takeover of a company since Kohlberg Kravis's $31 billion purchase of RJR Nabisco Inc. in 1989. But instead of ponying up to milk a consumer company the consortium of buyers lead by Silver Lake Partners, Goldman Sachs Capital Partners and other leading financiers are taking under their wing the most widely successful content technology company in the financial sector. SunGard has been a regular acquirer of content technology companies themselves through the years, so to some degree this is a deal in theory not unlike someone sweeping up a portfolio of leading financial content technology companies in one fell swoop. At about 2.9 times revenues that sounds like a pretty good basket buy, a lot more reasonable than some other newsworthy acquisitions. While much of the coverage in the trade press and general media on financial content centers around companies such as Bloomberg, Thomson and Reuters, it's SunGard that's gained the greatest integration into major investment banks in recent years by concentrating on not just desktop trading functionality and availability services but 'straight-through' trade processing functionality and other key back office and mid-office processing needs. It's a heavily I.T.-based approach but one that fits in very well with the increasingly complex requirements of financial companies needing to track and manage both internal and external content sources cost-effectively. As in other areas of the content industry it's increasingly hard for mainstream content companies to catch up with leading technology companies who have tackled a wider range of sector-specific content management issues internal to their clients than most of them are comfortable managing. If I'm one of the "Big Three" content vendors I'm a little worried that there's more acquisitions that this consortium may be considering to provide additional content-oriented services to draw the "sell side" of finance closer to the "buy side".

Acxiom agrees to buy Digital Impact for $140 million
Dow Bets Big
Top court to hear landmark P2P case Tuesday
Database company dossiers not always complete or accurate: AP reporter
Tribune looking to turn the page on uncertainties
Yahoo: Exporting An Uber-Brand
Justices Let Stand Ruling Rejecting Journalist Privilege
Blog-o-mania Hits Newspapers, With 'Attytood' to Spare
News Aggregator The Briefcase Steals Content
Endeca Provides Latitude for Information Retrieval and Analysis
Intelliseek's BlogPulse 2.0 Features Faster Performance, Deeper Search and Graph Creation
McGraw-Hill strikes deal to sell publications on expertsadvice.info, a knowledge-based Web portal
ALM Appoints John Mason to Head Pennsylvania Newspaper Group

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Mind you the announced deal by Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp to acquire search portal AskJeeves for about USD 1.85 billion in net cash is not the biggest surprise as of late, but it's interesting how it's receded into the coverage woodwork fairly quickly. Jeeves is a competent search portal that pioneered the concept of answering consumers' questions and that has recently bolstered its online resources to provide better answers and more user-friendly services. It's commercially attuned search results and services are a great match for IAC's wide stable of leading online ecommerce and personal service portals, a Yahoo!-like framework that can be used to glue these properties into the semblance of a cohesive online media presence rather than balkanized stand-alone sites. Yet why does that seem to be so...20th century? Diller has a great nose for successful media properties, but this may be an instance where one plus one equals three or more. It's hard to imagine that a Jeeves-enabled service could be anything more than a third or fourth place contender in the online portal wars - which may be enough in IAC's mind to justify the purchase. With Jeeves search options on IAC's wide catalog of successful portals Jeeves may have a new entree into the minds of consumers that had been lacking before in a pure search-only approach to getting in front of users. This may be one of those instances where the boutiques wind up sending traffic to the "department store" search engine rather than vice versa. That may be all the synergy that IAC needs out of this deal - for now.

As I write this, we're putting the final touches on a new research report called Database Subscription Pricing Benchmarks, based on InfoCommerce Group's Subscription Price Index database. The SPI database allows us to examine how the marketplace has changed between 2000 and 2004, and that change is fascinating.

What's particularly noteworthy is the shift in attitudes in just four years. In 2000, publishers were being relentlessly pressured by a marketplace that honestly believed it could find anything it needed on the Web for free. With so many ill-fated Web start-ups, along with a lot of established publishers, indeed offering their content for free, the move toward a world of free content seemed inexorable. Needless to say, it wasn't a happy time for subscription-based publishers.

Those that continued to charge for their content were certainly in no position to seek premiums for their Web offerings, and the trend at the time was towards "parity pricing," with print and Web versions priced identically. Indeed, many publishers were having such difficulty with their sales that the idea of the bundled offering -- buy the print version, get the Web version for free -- became a marketing staple. This bundled offering neatly sums up the thinking at the time: I can't charge for my Web content, but I can give it away in order to spur sales of my print version, which is tangible and still has value.

But look at where we are now. By the end of 2004, the situation had flipped: publishers still market the bundled offering, but now it is buy the online version and get the print version for free. No difference in economics, but a huge difference in perception. Publishers have realized that the market is moving to the Web, so they are increasingly putting the emphasis on their online products. Even more importantly, people are increasingly willing to pay for Web-based information.

This change has reflected itself in pricing. Publishers are moving away from parity pricing to charging significantly more for their Web products, reflecting their inherently higher value. With solid evidence now that users both want Web products and are willing to pay for them, we're seeing more and more publishers starting to invest in their Web products, adding new features, functionality and content, which allows them to charge even more. It's a new virtuous circle: users are willing to pay more for higher quality Web products, spurring publishers to keep rolling out ever more sophisticated and powerful products. But while we stand at the threshold of a new golden age in database publishing, many would say it's been a long four years.

As noted by MediaPost's Online Media Daily and others note the arrival of a new Beta search tool on Yahoo!'s portal that looks at Creative Commons-licensed content, providing a typical search box and the ability to specify content that can be used for commercial purposes and content that can be modified, adapted or built upon. Searches work well enough - a search for mobile content yields a link to PaidContent.org at the top of the list, an early and enthusiastic Creative Commons supporter - but with about ten million pages of Creative Commons content out of billions of pages on the Web it's not likely that all that many people in the general marketplace for content are going to use a separate tool for this kind of searching. This is more of a move to appeal to the enthusiast core of webloggers and other Creative Commons aficionados and let them know that Yahoo! "gets it" on some level and wants to attract some street buzz and buy-in to their expanding efforts to use personal and community-built content as a cornerstone of their value proposition.

The greater issue to be addressed by Yahoo! and other search providers both public and institutional how to make their users aware of effective use for ALL content based on its rights structure. The Creative Commons movement has done an excellent job of helping valuable content to flow into valuable and valued new contexts and to encourage repurposing with respect for rights owners, but traditional copyrighted materials are also fair game for reuse - if the ease of doing so is provided. Services such as Copyright Clearance Center and Valeo IP make it easier than ever to do just that, providing opportunities for reuse from a much wider perspective than many may imagine. I'd much rather have a search environment that calls out the terms of reuse rights in general search results, so that the merit of the content itself can stand on its own in relation to other sources. This will become more important as premium content providers merge subscription-based and ecommerce-based sources in with publicly available sources via federated searches in enterprises and via public search engines. Great to have Creative Commons get more visibility, but there's a broader problem to be solved that's not really being addressed by "preaching to the choir".

Yahoo! Partners With Creative Commons
All the news robots pick
Many Advertisers Find Blogging Frontier Is Still Too Wild
Yahoo Lawyers Ask Court for Protection
EU to push for research and convergence in Information & Communication Technologies (ICT)
Bloggers Narrowly Avoid Regulatory Crackdown
Cult Branding and the Art of the Deal at Newspapers '05
RSS Alerts go mobile
Corporations spent $35.5 billion on custom publications in ’04
'New News' retrospective: Is online news reaching its potential?
“Blog People” Fight Back, Creatively
Why Quality Content is Key For Search Engines
File sharing on the rise: Pew study
Let fans decide on digital rights: ITunes hacked
Elsevier Reveals Open source Cross-Referencing Tool
ProQuest to Distribute ACM Journals

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Google co-founders left out of bonuses
Newspaper Bargains
Blogs, Everyone? Weblogs Are Here to Stay, but Where Are They Headed?
The Role of Business Intelligence in Knowledge Management
EFF Appeals Ruling in Apple v Bloggers case
UK Report: Libraries Should Offer Premium Services
CityXpress Launches Craigslist Competitor for Newspapers
SIIA's Content Division Announces New Vice-President
Rocketinfo Monetizes RSS Feeds With Kanoodle
Best-Selling Dissertations Find Their Audience
First Horizon National Corporation Deploys Verity Ultraseek on Its Public Web Site and Intranets

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As noted by AP and several majors the Topix.net news portal has news majority parents today, with the combination of Gannett, Knight Ridder and the Tribune as parents. As noted in the announcement on their Web site Topix intends to remain an objective source for headlines from over 10,000 news sources but now able to take advantage of the extensive advertising and content assets available from its new parents. Why does that sound like a contradiction? Because it is, of course, but no mind, it's a sign that major papers are getting serious about playing in the emerging space for news aggregation that is rapidly crossing the boundaries of paper-bound editorial thinking. Today's news reader wants to get the right information from as many sources as possible in a convenient Web format, increasingly placing companies with editorial resources in the position of having to place their content in environments other than their "home sweet home" news portal to be effective in the eyes of their readers. Unlike traditional database-driven content aggregation services, though, in The New Aggregation providing an editorial context for news sources that meets the needs of individual readers is increasingly important. Major papers dragged on for far too long thinking that the combination of traditional aggregators and their own portals would cover the needs of their readers, but are now forced by the success of Google News, Topix and other on-the-fly headline aggregators to consider how they may be able to have their editorial and advertising resources play in this more open environment. Purchasing Topix gives major news outlet a compliant partner in this effort, but it's far from clear that this will result in a compelling news product in and of itself. Topix is only a starting point for an effort that will require a lot more development to develop "tomorrow's newspaper". With the resources at their disposal it's likely that such development will be on tap, but being able to blend "old news" editorial and advertising culture with Web-driven expectations of sophisticated readers via a cross-source portal may prove to be more difficult than Topix' purchasers may imagine. The good news is that they picked a pretty good place to start.

Media Firms Piece Together New Strategies
Diller brings convergence to Web
The Topix for Today: Gannett, KR, Tribune Invest in News Site
Google to expand operations in India
RSS Use to Increase Dramatically, Survey
How to succeed as a citizen media editor
Nerac Announces Plans for New Content Integration and Patent Search Platform Using Mark Logic
China's C1 Energy Headlines Now Available On Reuters
1,200 LexisNexis Authors Use Arbortext Enterprise Publishing Software to Automate Editorial Process
AIB signs data supply deal with Reuters
VNU sells magazines, Web site to Schofield's Ideal Media

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As noted by Information Today the service formerly known as Eliyon has become Zoom Information Inc., with a new portal at zoominfo.com serving as the home page for the company that has been collecting personal profile information on professionals and public figures from public Web pages since 2000. The Zoominfo portal is Google-like in its appearance, a bone-simple search box and search results that list names, number of references and a spritz of teaser data complemented by Google AdSense ads. Each profile lists the person's current position, past employment and extracts from the pages from which profile information is extracted.

We had the pleasure of seeing a sneak preview of the Zoominfo portal a few weeks ago in our visit to then-Eliyon's offices (see our earlier News Analysis) and found the positioning to be very insightful. For a young company that has few direct competitors, Zoominfo has little to lose by this new positioning and everything to gain. It still retains its high-test capabilities for sales force integration and support of major content distributors, but now has functionality that will make it as easy as "Googling" someone to get well-formed information direct from the Web on more than 24 million professionals, mostly in the U.S., the U.K. and other English-speaking countries. This in and of itself is powerful positioning for the open Web, where the vast majority of searches for information on professionals begin.

Significantly, though, the syntax of features built into the Zoominfo query interface fit remarkably well with those used in the Google interface - a very handy coincidence if one wants to be positioned for more intimate relations with the search giant. Zoominfo is an extraordinarily strong rebirth of a company that was already reaching a significant degree of success with personal content but with new financial backers eager to bring them to a new level of performance. If anyone doubts the power of raw Web information made highly accessible through data mining techniques one need only watch the trajectory of Zoominfo to get a better understanding of how business information aggregation is evolving far more quickly than many traditional sources may imagine. Yet again, good content is where you find it.

Google to Drop AFP from News Index
Eliyon Renamed Zoom Information with New Consumer-Oriented Strategy to Match
SunGard Data Mulls Selling Company, Shares Jump 24 Pct
Big Business Blogging
Internet Marketing Solution - Content, Content, Content
U.S. Reuters employees in byline strike
Scripps Takes Latest Channel Direct to Web
Zinio Systems debuts Zinio Reader 3
Endeca Expands Information Retrieval Vision at PC Forum With Launch of Endeca Latitude
PRnews.cn Content Now Available via Factiva on Desktops Globally
TechTarget Optimizing Bitpipe Partner Network to Add Top Business Sites and Targeted IT Sites
Wolters Kluwer's New Corporate Branding Accelerates the Company's Strategy and Vision for Professionals
Contact Networks Raises $1.6M in First Round Financing
EMC Turns a Corner on Content Management
Norwich Union Life selects Autonomy to maintain competitive edge

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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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Congressional hearings, major retoolings of vendor policies and concerns over long-avoided regulations hang heavy in the air for personal content vendors these days. Was a crisis of this kind avoidable? Probably so, given the lack of focus that many personal content vendors had on how their content was being used and the assumption that possession was nine tenths of the law when it came to relations with people profiled in their databases. Successful personal content companies today win when they treat their products first and foremost as a personal service that has both the opt-in and the control of the people profiled. Technology helps to drive the scale, but a people-first approach to personal content is the key.

Click here to read the full News Analysis

Ask Jeeves Inc. to Be Bought for $2 Billion
AFP sues Google over copyright infringement
Consumers Spooked By ID Theft, Switch Banks
Keeping A Grip On Identity
Media Deconcentration
Yahoo buys photo-sharing site Flickr
Borders Looks Beyond Border
The Company Bloomberg Keeps (for Now)
Redefining the Debate Over Protecting Intellectual Property
Latest Online Scoops Thwart Apple's Bid For Secrecy
Find/SVP to acquire Atlantic Research, Signia Partners
Autos.com Expands to Offer Industry-First Consumer Ratings and Best-in-Class Used Vehicle Rankings

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A major article in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal is suggesting that advertisers are beginning to balk at the rapidly escalating costs for keywords. The article cites examples such as "mortgage," which now goes for $7-11 per click, and "mesothelioma," a form of cancer caused by asbestos, which goes for $49. It also notes that eBay, one of the largest purchasers of keywords, is publicly complaining about high price levels. The article suggests that high prices, combined with growing awareness of click fraud, and the presence of middlemen, could cause a backlash that would curb the rapid growth of paid search revenue.

As Executive Editor Staci Kramer of PaidContent.org astutely notes, "The real lesson here: nascent also equals unpredictable, and overreaction in any direction can -- and will -- do damage." But marketing sloppiness exhibited by many keyword marketers is taking its toll as well. Increasingly in a product search, I'll find an eBay ad saying it's got what I'm looking for. When I click through to eBay, I frequently get the message "no items found matching your search term." Perhaps eBay thinks it is clever marketing to have dragged me to its site. My reaction, however, is that eBay just wasted my time, and I am sure to be less receptive to its keyword come-ons in the future.

It's not just eBay; a large number of online retailers seem to be buying keywords for products they don't sell, and brands they don't carry. The marketing obje