Vertical Leap: A Search Engine Conference this week featured both gorillas and startups, ranging from Google, Yahoo and MSN to stealth mode private companies, with advice ladled out by successful venture capitalists. The room was packed for this first search engine conference sponsored by the SDForum, a highly regarded non-profit venue for the technology community in Silicon Valley. Keynote speaker, David Hills, CEO of LookSmart, focused on the opportunities in vertical search to attract advertising money, a different currency and a different language for the typical technology company. He predicts advertisers and agencies will embrace verticals which offer audience segmentation closer to the point of purchase, but need easy ways to buy, a familiar theme. Verticals are not new, but he seems them accelerating much as cable media buying expanded with the multiplicity of channels, and that advertising money will follow as value is established. Yes, this is the latest flavor of niche publishing, just using web technology in addition to the human factors!

Money was also the topic for the obligatory venture capital panel on "Investing in Vertical Search", with the speakers emphasizing their interest in opportunities that have the potential of becoming $100 million plus companies. However, they see plenty of opportunity for innovative $20 to $30 million dollar companies founded with sweat equity and a modest amount of capital. Judging by the crowds in the hallways afterward, attendees were taking the opportunity to pitch their ideas for the next gorilla.

Ably organized by Dave McClure, Simply Hired, and tied together with his pithy "Top 10 Rules for Vertical Revolutionaries", the rest of the panels focused on established categories where vertical search is working today. The emphasis for this audience was consumer categories, and none were surprising. Each of these categories has its own nuances:

• Local Search was seen as a large opportunity, and is more than just business listings. Everyone is local, and the total advertising dollars for services is high, though fragmented. However, the key players are the big search engine companies, with representatives from Google, Yahoo!Local, MSN and Ask Jeeves talking about trying to provide great user experiences AND the right results. Interestingly, no one talked about how to partner with newspapers, with their experience in local news, events and advertising to follow the lead of their own local newly redesigned San Jose Mercury News.
• Shopping Search is another large opportunity, with the next frontier being information about local inventory. The big challenge is getting feeds from retailers, with manufacturer SKUs and product descriptions, then categorizing them into meaningful categories. Standardization is a major issue, a familiar aggregation issue. The importance of reviews and buying guides was emphasized, but this technology driven group, has not embraced paying for content from established authoritative sources.
• Travel search is an area of tools to find seat inventory and pricing across multiple carriers in real time. With the fragmentation of the airline industry, this has become even more difficult, and particularly so in Europe which has over 60 carriers. From a financial and customer relationship perspective, airlines prefer using vertical search rather than agencies such as Travelocity and Expedia. Cost of advertising, unsold inventory and technical infrastructure from the Sabre legacy are all issues in this still evolving vertical.
• Classified Ads / Job Search is consolidating around several models. On one dimension, there is the need to aggregate job listings nationwide, represented by Simply Hired. On a different dimension, Oodle specializes in large city sites with an emphasis on high end transactions such as real estate, which are concluded locally. Then eBay's Kijiji is the international version of Craigslist, a very successful model, which accepts no advertising, and charges for job listings in only a few cities. LinkedIn complements the job listing companies to selectively reach qualified candidates, as well as do reference checking.
• Blog search is still the wild, wild west and the panelists bogged down in discussion of the decade old wire problem of multiple rehashes of the same news. New technology, same journalistic issues. There was agreement that the Google Page Rank does not work well with the timeliness of blogs, so other algorithms are key to establishing relevancy, authority, and sentiment--key measures for advertisers interested in this new form of content.

The wrap-up of a long day was positioned as future technology directions for vertical search, but the focus became more general. PubSub was the most intriguing technology, since it is essentially an alerting service for new content which appears on the web in blogs, press releases, SEC filings, newsgroups and other sources. Other future developments include different algorithms for search, depending on the domain being searched, unified interfaces, and repurposing web content to provide useful answers. Not surprisingly, these are the same themes surfacing in the broader search world, which includes enterprise search and desktop search, as well as commercial search services, areas not included in this conference, but certainly part of the web ecosystem.

It's never a happy day when a company calls it quits, but it's especially sad to hear that Valeo IP will be closing its doors come early September. The company's ownership has decided based on its performance to close up shop, with clients given support until the September closing. Valeo IP caused quite a stir in the industry upon its launch with some innovative marketing ideas, enough to catch the attention of major players in the copyright compliance and relicensing industry and some high-visibility clients. But at the end of the day its messaging and product development became enmired in its legal dispute with Data Depth Corporation over the licensing of Data Depth's "iCopyright Tag" and Instant Licensing Software. The legal matter was never resolved conclusively and could have dragged on indefinitely, a difficult burden for a company managing intellectual property rights to bear.

While on the surface this is a victory for Data Depth Corporation and its investors, it is a victory that came at a fairly high price. Both Data Depth's and Valeo IP's efforts and reputations became damaged in this test of wills, to the benefit of not only Copyright Clearance Center and other content relicensors but also new players looking for marketing opportunities in content licensing. In the opportunities column lurk players such as Google and Microsoft that are focusing on how content gets monetized regardless of its copyrighted status. Many of these opportunities will come after content has been delivered, rather than beforehand, as distribution becomes increasingly commoditized into a utility service. Through this post-delivery view of content the "relicensing" business is being transformed from residual revenues extracted via awareness of legal enforcements into a fertile field for many forms of primary and add-on revenues, with copyrights being but one of many devices to be used for claiming those revenues.

The technologies that Data Depth brings for managing the awareness and licensing of copyrighted content are valuable components but it will take more than good features to claim victory in the marketplace. Recent court cases may bolster the spirits of copyright holders but it's far from clear that copyright in and of itself is a powerful monetization vehicle in the electronic era. It will take a clear vision of where the use and monetization of both copyrighted and non-copyrighted content is moving to create a framework that can benefit audiences as much as copyright holders in generating revenues from content that's already in the hands of licensees. In the meantime best of luck to the staff of Valeo IP as they consider their next moves.

Google testing tailored search
Web Content by and for the Masses
We're Not Content With Web Content
blinkx Debuts Podcast Search
For Soaring Google, Next Act Won't Be as Easy as the First
Microsoft Said to Be in Talks to Buy Adware Developer
Your brain: Search engine, or calculator?
Authors @ Your Library Database Launched
Denton subject to content theft disguised as “Public Art”
LexisNexis(R) Headnotes Now Integrated With Shepard's Citations Service
Ask Jeeves Announces Expanded Syndication Network
Elsevier Introduces ScienceDirect College Edition

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In a move that seems to reset the stage for the blooming taxonomy industry Factiva announced its acquisition of Synapse, a leading provider of software solutions for building and maintaining taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies. Coming to Factiva from Synapse in the deal is Taxonomy Warehouse, a collection of more than 500 taxonomies that provides a powerful array of "hooks" for contextualizing content. There are many highly competent companies that develop taxonomies and tools to develop and maintain them but this acquisition is a long leap for Factiva towards being a "big dog" in this space instead of an also-ran trying to leverage news-oriented taxonomies for places where they just don't fit very well. As I mentioned in our earlier observations on the file sharing case bounced back from the U.S. Supreme Court the real money for publishers to chase is no longer in distribution but in the contextualization of content. If you own the taxonomy process you have a significant part in the value of the content within those taxonomies, making taxonomies as content a highly valuable resource for tuning content sets to client needs. Taxonomies don't work very well on the open web though: they need relatively finite sets of content to be useful. But that works out just fine for most corporations trying to make sense of their own content as much as external content via taxonomies. This is a shrewd move by Factiva which is likely to be followed by other acquisitions by competitors trying to keep up with the taxonomy tide.

Here Comes the iTunes of News
Majority of mag websites now in profit says survey
Apple Updates iTunes Adds Aruntx Podcast Network
AAP Question Google’s Library Plan
TheStreet.com Shutters Research Subsidiary
Macquarie buys BBC Broadcast
Yellow Pages Association adds vertical search to Local Search Guide
MSNBC.com survives, thrives despite trouble between parents
Google to Earth: New 3-D Mapping Service
HuffPost First Blog on Yahoo! News
Podcasting: An Emerging Major Trend
LexisNexis Unveils Three New Products at Homeland Security Conference on Information Sharing
Factiva Acquires Synapse, Broadens Taxonomy Consultancy
Wright Investors' Service Launches Wright Reports, a Global Company Report Service
SanDisk FlashCP Technology Securely Distributes Copyrighted Content for Flash Cards and USB Drives
Cognos Extends and Enhances Reporting and Analysis Capabilities for Microsoft Office

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In a unanimous decision the U.S. Supreme Court sent lawsuits targeting Grokster Ltd. and other file sharing services back to lower courts for trial [Bloomberg coverage], a decision warming the hearts of media companies and putting illegal file sharing in the spotlight again. Media companies should have much to celebrate, as should mainstream technology innovators not trying to induce illegal actions. But while encouraging illegal activities is hardly admirable and worthy of legal action, user behavior will continue regardless of the entertainment industry's assaults in all venues. As shown in our recent survey of small and medium businesses sharing copyrighted content is frequent in the business world, with large percentages sharing content with their peers on a regular basis. The facts on the ground seem to indicate that many publishers and content services providers continue to take an unrealistic approach to electronic content licensing and the technologies that make their persistent views of content licensing obsolete.

In the greater scheme of things the issue is not whether technology can be used to violate copyrights: if this were the case then media companies ought to be suing companies such as Microsoft for software features such as "cut and paste." The greater question is why content licensing is not packaged in a way that takes natural and valued behavior into account and makes it convenient for content purchasers to exhibit that behavior legally and simply. Single-user, "lock box" licenses for electronic content make it hard for people to spread the news of what's good content to one another, limiting the most valuable electronic distribution network - trusted peers - from doing their job. Distribution is no longer the primary mission for most forward-thinking content companies: the primary mission has become making content as valuable as possible in whatever user-defined context it finds itself, regardless of how it got there. In this environment preventing distribution reduces the potential for revenues.

While this phenomenon tends to favor ad-oriented monetization models in the short run, the emergence of sophisticated XML-based packaging of content objects is likely to favor content companies that move aggressively to define packaging that makes it easy to facilitate premium shared and single-user services for content once it finds a valuable context. Traditional product-oriented content marketing will be replaced over time by efforts to push content into the hands of audiences that "get it" for a specific item and to encourage them to spread its use as quickly as possible to people who will demand premium services. Subscriptions will still be a part of this mix, but they will move away from distribution management towards other services, as they have already with publisher-provided "workflow" content applications.

So have at it and bash the Groksters of the world: they deserve it. But don't mistake the initiatives of clever if misguided software developers with the opportunities in the content marketplace that their efforts underscore. Until publishers move far more aggressively to monetize contextualized content better than anyone else they will continue to lose the battle for leading revenues. There are good reasons that Google and Yahoo! dominate with revenue growth: it's time for publishers to respond to those reasons and to produce products that adapt well to those reasons.

Entertainment Industry Wins U.S. Supreme Court Fight on Piracy
The Post-Grokster Era Begins
ChoicePoint gets 5-year IRS contract
Play It, Google: Google launches Google Video player
Google pays the price for being top dog
$500 Million Later, G+J Sells Fast Company, Inc. to Morningstar CEO
New Pew poll: Online newspaper readership growing
Are your feeds turning into too many long tails? Filter!
Knowledge Management : No Such Thing As A Knowledge Worker
Packing Up the Books: Online Discussion
Experian launches B2B marketing service
LexisNexis, University of Maryland Team Up to Preserve Images of U.S. Serial Set Maps

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Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine, unleashed a global debate with an article last December on "The Long Tail," the huge portion of content that's thought to be of residual value to companies catering to mass audiences but turning out to be both powerful and profitable to a wide range of audiences. Companies like Google and Amazon prove out this model every day on the web, but so do corporate librarians who focus increasingly on the bulk of content in their own organizations beyond the reach of commercial services. The future for librarians serving local communities can be found in looking at both online and corporate models for tips as to how to manage the content that matters most to highly contextual audiences.

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Reuters, Seeking Brand Awareness, to Offer G-8 News Online and Direct
Varying Content Commitments from Vendors for Yahoo! Search Subscriptions
ChoicePoint overhaul falls behind
Online music stores singing a new tune: No big labels allowed
The Newspaper of the Future
Cary's Dialog loses CEO; 150 jobs at stake
Audible to offer New York Times podcasts via RSS
Over 2000 bloggers taking cash for comment
Microsoft plans to deliver RSS support in Windows Longhorn
Collaborative filtering with del.icio.us
Still No Official Word on G+J Sale; Reported Buyer's Stock Dips
Thomson Financial to deliver Instinet's algorithmic trading strategies over AutEx
APhA Partners with Elsevier
RR Donnelley Premedia Technologies Launches Pipeline(SM) Project Management and Tracking Tool
Akademos Boosts Sales of Textbooks and Other Media with its Deployment of FAST ImPulse

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It's nice to hear Shore's themes being echoed in so many venues these days. Last week's SIIA Brown Bag panel in New York City focused on one such theme, the push for repurposing content assets for top line growth (see Patricia Joseph's report on the same topic). Hal Espo, President of Contextual Connections, LLC chaired a panel including Paige Amidon, General Manager for Market & Product Development at Consumer Reports, Victoria Cho Pao, newly appointed President of McGraw-Hills's Platts division (coming from McGraw-Hill Construction) and Joel Poznansky, President of Apex CoVantage Publishing Solutions.

From a consumer perspective Paige Amidon related the successes of Consumer Reports in creating new online services and print titles without using ads (CR is a non-profit), which places the emphasis on enhancing premium print titles and online services. CR does quite a bit of both, but the key from their perspective is having gone to an "electronic-first" content production model. This allows them to develop repurposing for content quickly and flexibly in both print and online media with special buyers' issues and focused online offerings with ever-deeper content in areas of high interest. While there were worries about how such an aggressive online content program would hurt revenues, but with a brand that is "better than the Pope", according to recent research, Consumer Reports has actually been able to raise subscription prices for its online content. The lesson from a CR perspective is to build rich packages of content through repurposing that are well targeted to the here-and-now interests of audiences and to build interactive capabilities considered essential by younger audiences.

Victoria Cho Pao focused primarily on her experience at McGraw-Hill Construction rather than her new assignment at Platts, where embedding value-add content into clients' professional workflows has yielded strong results for both ad-based content (more and more valuable pages of content) and subscription services. Using integrated solutions to provide repurposed content is not just about providing multiple sources in a common interface - an approach that is likely to promote discounting, as many aggregators know all too well these days. Rather the emphasis in providing workflow solutions needs to be on senior executives who care about the value of solutions and with a product pricing structure that is built from the ground up with repurposing in mind. All of this places a challenge on the editorial and marketing components of a publisher's organization, oftentimes requiring new skill sets in both areas to understand the kinds of content that are going to meet the value-add needs of specific markets and clients. It's important to avoid confusing the client in the sales process with too many options: sometimes repurposing is all about making things simpler, not more complex, connecting key sources of content in the most strategic way possible.

From the perspective of an electronic publishing solutions provider Joel Poznansky sees repurposing as nothing new in and of itself but with electronic content creation and distribution tools its acceleration is the key issue as more content than ever can be broken into small, discrete packages for targeted consumption. In his mind search engines are making the difference in the need to have repurposed content noticed in more contexts, requiring more work with metadata and indexing to have its attributes fully understood. The emotional attachment that many publishers have to established print titles and production methods seems to slow down the migration to electronic publishing that facilitates repurposing, Joel notes, but once through the change there's more likely to be a common vision for both print and online products that will inevitably change how information is designed. In the print world Joel notes that the finiteness of the printed page creates an attitude towards information design that is not easily parralelled in the relatively infinite display capabilities of online information. So repurposing from one medium to another requires not just a migration of information but a reassessment of how the quality of the product will be perceived in two fundamentally different media.

It's difficult to encapsulate what turned out to be a very insightful and spirited discussion of content production in the era of repurposing, but the upshot of all this is that repurposing is more than ever at the heart of the publishing industry. It may take the form of new media, new audiences, new formats or new features, but the ability to use online publishing technology to obtain insights into user needs and to turn around new presentations of information to fill those needs very quickly is a necessity for profitable publishing. Getting content into the context that matters most for audiences at the right place at the right time means far more emphasis on deep insights into user behavior and having the right technology and product focus to turn around those insights into targeted and saleable content. The good news is that it can mean a more effective capability for print profits as well as online, a factor that's not lost hopefully on those slow to turn to new production processes. Another highly valuable brown bag lunch with thought leaders who know how to deliver the goods.

The eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) has its fans and its doubters in the U.S., with many institutions and content vendors dragging their feet to use the standard for financial reporting and corporate information. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced a voluntary program to encourage filings, though so far only a smattering of companies are biting. So why should a business content vendor jump at XBRL at this point? Ask EDGAR Online, which has made data from all companies in its SEC feeds available in XBRL format and introduced its I-Metrix series of business analysis products that uses its Microsoft Excel-based XBRL interface to fuel I-Metrix' executive dashboard and alerts tools. The display and content integration capabilities of I-Metrix are fueled by business intelligence software from Theoris, providing powerful visual analysis of external financials, reports and company-internal business content to allow companies to develop compelling analysis for senior executives, financial analysts and auditors. The XBRL underpinnings of data from EDGAR Online allow an informed selection of specific data elements using its XBRL-based data dictionary to help build "apples-to-apples" financial data comparisons.

It's a slick series of focused capabilities that takes EDGAR Online via its Theoris partnership towards the business solutions market. Its strong front-end user technology and flexible back-end management via Excel makes a compelling case for taking advantage of XBRL formatting sooner rather than later for management teams needing sophisticated analysis with live updates - and not just in the U.S. The movement towards global financial markets and the subsequent need for standardized international analysis is creating another widening market for XBRL adaptation. This may wind up providing EDGAR Online a broader corporate marketplace beyond the financial services industry into which I-Metrix tools can be sold with EDGAR Online data and Web links. Scalability is claimed, though it's probably safe to say that the appeal of sophisticated analysis tools such as I-Metrix within a given company will provide a somewhat self-limiting challenge to the claim. With companies up to their gills in government reporting requirements, it may take the pull of more effective content solutions such as I-Metrix to push more companies into the XBRL camp more quickly. Until then, XBRL can prove its own merits clearly through I-Metrix applications.

It seemed to be for the most part a fish out of water at the SIA Show (weblog coverage) but one of the more interesting booths was a display by InterSearch Group, Inc.. InterSearch was announcing its Search Equity corporate search engine technology, which enables companies to profit from employees clicking on ads appearing in search results. With the Search Equity setup users have essentially the same search experience, but when someone at a participating enterprise clicks on a sponsored link it goes into a revenue share pool, from which InterSearch and their clients take a cut. InterSearch estimates that for each 1,000 employees a participating enterprise could take home more than $18,000 annually - a pretty tidy number. It's a very simple proposition that may have a lot of appeal to companies that provide access to open Web search engines anyway, though it's really just the tip of the iceberg. Companies are used to their content providers claiming the "real estate" in front of their staff as their own, when in fact it's via infrastructure paid for by the client. This is a small step towards companies beginning to recognize that their employees' desktops are valuable places for other businesses to communicate with them with value that they should be claiming for their own top and bottom lines more effectively. Should companies be paying aggregators for distribution of content? Or should they be charging aggregators for monetization rights on their internal networks? Sponsored search ads are just one monetization model to be used behind the firewall for external content sources providing contextual content value, with many new and repackaged models to come.

The 2005 Securities Industry Association Technology Management Conference was a get-together notable for the degree of shift in the marketplace for financial content services displayed at the conference's exhibit hall. The show is getting smaller in overall space and even as the booths being presented are mostly smaller and representative of a broader array of smaller companies servicing this marketplace. Notably the historical push of big market data companies dominating the show are long over. The Reuters exhibit still dominated the entry to the show but one you got past a spread-out set of Thomson kiosks and the vestiges of ADP the marketplace for fully integrated market data solutions begins to thin out very rapidly. Instead the new center of gravity for the show is the array of exhibits provided in the third floor ballroom of the Hilton by technology giants such as Microsoft, HP, IBM and the increasingly dominant presence of Sungard. Traffic seemed fair and informal "how's the show" queries seemed to elicit a lot of enthusiasm from smaller exhibitors looking to initiate serious conversations, but the buzz was mostly with solutions that bypassed content vendors in favor of financial firms and content technology companies.

The REAL center of the show has become the institutions that are the focus of integrating securities trading technology into their core trading strategies. Beyond the usual suspects of major investment banks are companies such as Lime Brokerage LLC, a boutique trading company a the SIA show billing themselves as a "direct access securities broker." Yes, it's a source of trading liquidity for hedge funds and other trading partners, but at least as important in their selling proposition are their trading technologies and interfaces. In other words more than ever content vendors are competing with their customers for defining the value-add layer of content services supporting specific market niches, as increasingly those layers are essential for defining profits as well as managing expenses. Thus Reuters, with its algorithmic trading services featured at the SIA show, finds itself trying to stay a step ahead of their clients' improvements in program trading infrastructure capable of managing trading via proprietary algorithms consuming realtime and fundamental financial data. With the value and advantages of specific sources of financial content becoming more transitory and proprietary than ever, the dissipation of interesting content product displays at the SIA show is a pattern that's likely to continue for some time.

In an environment like this the traditional product development lifecycle for most aggregators appears exceedingly slow in comparison to what their customers are doing with heavy investments in trading and market data infrastructure. So although the solutions-oriented displays by Reuters focusing on hedge funds, asset management and direct feed management showed many powerful capabilities, these are solutions for increasingly smaller and focused market segments. They at least seemed more focused than the more generic solutions being shown at the Thomson display, which featured at one point a presentation on the importance of Intel processors in their solutions mix. With solutions such as Reuters RDF Direct allowing its clients to consume feeds from exchanges and clients directly without the inherent latency in centralized ticker plants, even as Hyperfeed takes over the Reuters TRS trading room platform to manage distribution of content at client sites, the model of The New Aggregation is in full flower in financial market data: specialization in specific aspects of content aggregation that work best for a given model while abandoning those that are best provided by clients or technology companies.

While the SIA show remains a valuable outlet for financial content vendors it is becoming increasingly hard to find the diamonds in the rough at this venue. The main ballroom exhibits of technology companies do provide a particular focus for the exhibition, but there's less and less rhyme or reason to any of the other display areas. Where do I go to find network solutions? Trading floor solutions? Up and coming content providers? While the Hilton facility has always had limitations in this respect the fragmentation of the industry and the propagation of small suppliers providing displays makes this an increasingly frustrating exhibition to traverse. Most exhibits have become far too small to gain any sense of what a vendor is trying to accomplish. Since space is not at a premium at this point it would be nice for the pricing for exhibitors to reflect the changing face of the industry to encourage more vendors to present messages that stand out from the pack.

Much of the early media buzz on Google's move to ecommerce functionality (initial WSJ article, premium) focused on the concept of Google going into competition with eBay. But as Internetnews.com pointed out later in the week a very likely source of the rumors may have more to do with the fruit of a patent filed by Google last December that provides for a number of content accessibility capabilities - including management of access to premium content from magazines, CDs, DVDs and audio books. This is already promised in the FAQ page for Google Video, which states that although current uploads are distributed for free the ability to charge is in the wings. We'll leave it to others to track the potential eBay aspects of Google's ecommerce initiatives, but clearly Google is sticking to its core philosophies in assembling content ecommerce capabilities - making unique technology available to all who desire content commercialization in an apparently source-agnostic manner. As we mentioned in last week's weblog entry the Yahoo! Subscriptions beta is publisher-centric, focusing on searching premium sources that still have their own unique premium access management methods.

The source-agnostic Google methodology is certain to make publishers used to managing access via their own established controls somewhat nervous, but it's a vision that someone is going to win with eventually in the long run - perhaps even Google. What eBay has demonstrated is that "the long tail" of commerce for goods outside of the mass marketing spotlight are well-served by an open marketplace that allows sellers and buyers to find one another efficiently - a concept that seems to draw in the mass-marketed goods over time as well. The supplier that focuses on creating a content marketplace that works for buyers as well as it does for sellers of all kinds is the one likely to become the eBay of content. So far that's not major aggregators or Yahoo!, which seem to be unsure about having today's premium content in the same league as other sources via search and ecommerce mechanisms. There are any number good reasons for segregating high-quality content from junk, but the wheres and hows of this are changing rapidly. All publishers and aggregators need to be prepared to have their content and content services compete in an open marketplace that favors buyers as much as sellers. Will Google be that marketplace? Stranger things have happened...

Finding authoritative information sources has always been a major challenge for searchers and researchers. The commercial search services were born over 30 years ago to answer this need, and while the technology has steadily improved, obstacles to finding those sources still remain. In a thoughtful post to the liblist-l at Yale University, Chuck Hamaker, a librarian at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, expresses his concern that book content is not as visible to students and scholars as articles, primarily because journal articles are indexed widely, have the context of snippits and are available full text in electronic format through some service. By contrast, books remain stuck in print silos, with the exception of some emerging book databases such as ebrary and safari. As Hamaker observes, "Massive indexing of monographs which is what I see Google Print actually doing, is critical for survival--the survival as usable text, of the book, to keep it from becoming nothing more than an interesting artifact of civilization."

The current controversy between the Association of Academic Publishers (AAP) and Google Print focuses on legal definitions of copyright, which were developed long before the electronic age. The value of indexing and assisting the scholar in in finding knowledge has been ignored. As an adjunct faculty member teaching online searching as a distance learning class at SJSU School of Library and Information Science, I introduce my students to a wide variety of electronic sources, particularly full text, since they have only virtual access to a library. But those sources do not include scholarly "books" because they are not indexed either by traditional classifications systems or full text.

Journal publishers found that indexing, particularly in Google Scholar, has increased usage of their journals and improved their electronic revenues. By contrast, scholarly books have abysmally low actual usage by library patrons, hence the question of the value of continuing to spend scarce budget resources on this type of material. Improving usage should be the major concern of book publishers, not throwing up roadblocks to wider access; it's time to think marketing and moving into the twenty-first century.

Clock Ticks on Old Media
Net To Newspapers: Drop Dead
US newspapers find readers-if not money-on the Web
Preregistration Up for ALA Conference
Plenty of Room at the Bottom? Personal Digital Libraries and Collections
Dow Jones Hires Yahoo Executive
Blogs: A Rich Media Ad Playground?
ABM Dips Toe into Podcasting in Latest E-Media Foray
Online communities: Growing an Internet garden
Weblogs Inc., to include chat rooms for leading blogs?
VIYYA cuts search time in half, personalizes, filters & processes web and content search automatically

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A New Page in Google's Books Fight
Leader: Is the iPod love affair over?
Blog tool wins innovation prize
Newspaper Executives Cautious On Outlook for Ad Spending
Larry Kramer: CBS will be web centric and bypass cable
Six Apart Adds Earnings Capabilities to TypePad Weblogs
ECNext Names Marty Kahn to Board of Directors
NewsGator Technologies Introduces Business IQ Industry Intelligence Svc with Factiva's Editor's Choice
Answers.com Partners with IceRocket
Elsevier's ScienceDirect Passes 7 Million-Article Mark
Mobile search engine developed for off-portal content

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So, is the fracas about the Google payment system just the coming to life of the payment tracking system that they disclosed in their S-1 and was reported on by Shore in a May 2004 Weblog?

In the S-1, Google reports that they are contracting out their "worldwide billing, collection and credit evaluation functions. The third-party provider will also track, on an automated basis, our growing number of AdSense revenue share agreements."

In October of last year, our Weblog commented on the IT partner arrangement again when Bertelsmann's BFS Group was disclosed as the IT partner in a San Francisco Chronicle article.

From this analyst's perspective, it was clear from the beginning that the system, once created for settling AdSense payments between publishers and advertisers (and of course, Google, too), could be extended to serve as the backbone for settling content e-commerce (and product e-commerce) payments between members of the Google network. Indeed this is big news, since a payment settlement scheme on a scale that Google can provide dwarfs other attempts at micropayments or online subscription services and opens the door to experiments with new models of aggregation that don't require significant back-office billing and payment operations. However, it shouldn't be surprising news to Shore readers...

Google Moving Forward on Payment System
Newspaper Executives: Concerns Over Industry's Health Overblown
How syndicated information enhances content delivery for Office Depot
'Wikitorial' Pulled Due to Vandalism
The Business of Blogging
OneSource Extends Product Portfolio To 3.7 Million UK SMEs
Relegence Selects Newstex to Supply Content On Demand
Elsevier’s Scopus Garners 500 Customers in Six Months
Thomson ResearchSoft Releases EndNote 9 for Windows
FinancialContent Partners With KRT InfoConnect to Offer Local Business News

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