You have to be careful about drawing too may conclusions from a single day's headlines but it is interesting that there are announcements today both from Elsevier MDL and from Thomson ResearchSoft regarding features newly available on Apple's Mac OS X "Tiger" platform. Based on a highly tweaked version of the platform-independent Unix operating system the Tiger platform offers high graphics and analytic performance for scientists that need a high level of reliability and accuracy in their research. The portability of Tiger has allowed Apple to announce the migration of Mac OS X from its current Motorola processors to Intel processors over the next couple of years. It's therefore likely that Tiger will be a growing presence where there are specialized corporate and scholarly users who need greater performance using ubiquitous Intel-based hardware. Not coincidentally these high-end users are where many publishers and aggregators would like to make their mark.

It's not likely that we're going to see a flood of users embracing Tiger any time soon, even in rarefied scientific circles, but it's important to recognize that Tiger is but one instance of growing platform diversity in major institutions that must keep publishers and aggregators thinking broadly and openly about their content platforms and packaging. Be it on mobile devices important in medical work, in specialized field equipment or in desktop devices, it's important to verify carefully the changing relationships between content users and their equipment on a regular basis. We may yet see Tiger burning more brightly on everyday desktops, but in the meantime there's a good amount of high-margin money to be made with content that caters to its existing specialized users.

As noted in CNET News, the art and science of advertising has had a new wrinkle added as Google extends its AdWords capabilities into the domain of print. Working with two tech-oriented publications already using AdWords themselves, Google purchased a page in their mags that they then sold to its AdWords clients in divvied-up blocks (online version from PC Magazine). While at the moment no more than a small-scale experiment, it's yet another indication that the scope of Google's media model continues to expand its ability to deliver contextual content value in more venues than ever. It's doubtful that many mags will warm up to this concept in the short run, but in the long run it part of an important trend that's likely to grow.

Ad networks in the online world have already detached many elements of the ad sales process from both publishers and ad agencies. The Google experiment demonstrates that the ability to make money from available context without getting involved in the details is going to be a much wider phenomenon. It will absorb not only print outlets but more sophisticated electronic content downloaded into the devices of users. Instead of selling content that has context, the trend is to sell context that has content. Perhaps we think of this as ads today, but it's more about paid placement for any number of messages and commercial opportunities that are not packaged as traditional ads. Perhaps it's a display from a useful software application that complements a story. Perhaps it's an offer for a financial transaction that can be executed with a click. But most importantly it detaches that ad-placing function from the people providing the editorial content.

This opens the door to editorial content coming from any source that can get a piece of the action in a common contextual object - like the common ground found in search results today but with a difference. The day may come when a Google Newspaper or a Google Magazine with content tailored to an individual from many sources makes its way to our driveway or mailbox. If this concept frightens you, then get to work on making the name on those publications yours.

Google takes ad sales to print
LexisNexis inaugurates corporate reputation monitoring service
So where does digital fit into the media world?
Hurricane Katrina overwhelms Web sites
Blogger Faces Lawsuit Over Comments Posted by Readers
Copyscape Searches For Scraped Content
Intel encourages consumers to influence development of DRM
China's Sinopharm sells 50 pct of subsidiary to Reed Exhibitions
Standard & Poor's to Provide Securities Data to Innovest Systems
Elsevier MDL Announces DiscoveryGate(R) for Mac OS X ''Tiger'' to Reach Scientific Community Online
Thomson ResearchSoft Ships EndNote 9 for Mac OS X
FAST and AskMe Partner to Bring Enterprise Search to Expertise Management Solutions
blinkx Extends Its Lead in Searchable Video Footage, Doubles Content Partner List

Click here to view stories from today's industry headlines

Critics Pan Springer's Merger Plan
Opposition To Google's Book-Copying Intensifies
Baidu, Google dominate Net search in China
Equifax acquires BeNow
J-Lab launches site for D.I.Y. community journalism
CNNIC Releases China Search Engine Market Survey Report
Quality Of Wolters Kluwer Acquired Asset NDC Health is Low
Wolters Kluwer Health Adds Chemical Structure Searching to Its Pharmaceutical Intelligence Tools
LexisNexis, Biz360 Expand Alliance
Variety and TMS to Launch Worldwide Entertainment News Service
Bloomberg Chosen as Trading Platform for Indonesia Bonds
McGill University Selects WebCT Vista to Expand and Enrich Rapidly Growing Online Learning Offerings
Harris Corporation Demonstrates Integrated Software Applications Delivering Content to Multiple Devices
Max Muscle Selects ISYS Search Software's Enterprise Desktop Search for Advanced Customer Search
FAST and IntelliReach Partner to Bring Enterprise Search to Email Lifecycle Management
Elluminate Delivers Real-time Collaboration for Insights Learning & Development

Click here to view stories from today's industry headlines

The LexisNexis announcement of its sophisticated and powerful CopyGuard service is meant to send shivers down the spines of copyright violators. But its ability to compare works for suspicious similarities is more likely to protect publishers from plagiarism problems with its own staffs than to reap any revenues from content snatchers caught in the act. The problems of copyright law have far less to do with inadequate enforcement of outdated regulations than they do with technology that makes copying itself hard to avoid, much less control. Publishers need to focus more on copyright enforcement that enables users to get more value once they've received copies of content than on trying to control the copying process itself.

Click here to read the full News Analysis

As widely reported, Wolters Kluwer announced its acquisition of the Information Management division of NDCHealth bright and early this morning. The acquisition will approximately double the size of the Pharma Solutions Division of Wolters Kluwer Health (WKH) and will propel that division to be nearly equal in size to the Medical Research division, which includes the Ovid platform. The overall size of WKH will grow to almost $1 billion in revenue in 2005.

This acquisition fits with previous statements made by CEO Nancy McKinstry and WKHealth's CEO Jeffrey McCaulley with respect to their intention to add three new business intelligence products in 2005. The Pharma BI products of NDCHealth focus on decision support tools for sales and marketing departments within pharmaceutical, medical devices, and biotech companies. These high-value products (projected 2005 sales of $165 million) supplement WKH's flagship Adis R&D Insight pharma BI offering with new pharma BI offerings that compete more directly with the core IMS drug sales products. NDCHealth emphasizes the longitudinal aspects of its database with 7 years of historical data and differentiates itself from IMS by the fact that NDCHealth collects sales data on a customer level basis from retail, non-retail, mail order, and hospital and other institutional sources. One drawback of the collection is that it only covers the US market.

The multiples for the acquisition also look good at face value. However, there are a couple of details that require further scrutiny. WK states that the earnings multiple is 10.5 times EBITDA, which is in line with other industry deals. However, the calculation of EBITDA that is used includes adjustments that add $26 million in restructuring, depreciation and amortization, and expected cost synergies to the base $8.1 EBITA of the division in FY 2005 (which just ended for NDCHealth). The fact that $12.5 million in immediate expected cost synergies is factored in to the purchase price raises an eyebrow or two, but it's not impossible that WK can enact vast cost efficiences given the internal infrastructure improvements they have implemented over the past 2 years and the expected synergies in sales and marketing. The other concern relates to the rate of growth in sales of the target division. Nominal growth for the IM division of NDCHealth in 2005 was negative until Q4 when it was propped up by sales of ArcLight, a "new unique product". A lot is riding on the success of new products and the projected synergies between the companies in order to justify the terms of this deal. This deal definitely increases the position of Wolters Kluwer in the pharma business intelligence segment where it competes with Thomson Scientific & Healthcare, IMS, Reed Elsevier and others. But it is not entirely clear that the acquisition will give WK the boost in organic growth and in margins in the next year or two that it so sorely needs.

Free Wi-Fi? Get Ready for GoogleNet.
Craigslist booms on lure of free ads: Usage up 26% in NYC
An 'envelope, please' moment for books: Quills Awards stir debate on hype
When Content Isn't King in SEO
Rocketboom's Powerful Lift-Off
Finding Profits In Podcasting
Wolters Kluwer to Acquire NDCHealth's Information Management Business
Irish firm in enterprise alliance with Google
Verity Adds Bloomberg LP as a Customer
EBSCO Creates International Security & Counter Terrorism Reference Center

Click here to view stories from today's industry headlines

There has been a tremendous amount of hand-wringing in the press about a spate of new surveys that indicate that a growing number of consumers are routinely and aggressively deleting cookies from their computers. One study, for example, claims that 27% of consumers clear cookies from their machines on a weekly basis.

Cookies are small files that your Web server software can place on the hard drive of every visitor to your Web site. Originally, cookies were designed to provide added convenience to the user. As an example, a cookie can be constructed so that a visitor to a subscription-based site doesn't need to go through the login process every site they visit the site.

For advertising-based sites, cookies are critical to measuring traffic and usage. If you ever wonder how a Web site without required registration is able to compute "unique visitors," the answer is via cookies. When a site user visits for the first time in during a reporting period, a cookie is placed on that user's computer that essentially says "don't count me again for the rest of the reporting period." If the user deletes that cookie, the same user is counted again, effectively inflating the unique visitor count.

When cookies represented a one-to-one relationship between publisher and site visitor, very few people found them objectionable. But when Web advertising networks introduced the concept of "third party cookies," things began to get ugly.

When an advertising network with say, 1,000 sites, places its cookie on a user's computer, it is then able to tell if that user visits any of its other 999 sites. Every time the user visits one of those sites, the network is able to capture this information, building a behavioral profile of the user. A number of years ago, one major ad network got a little too clever and started matching its behavioral profiles to online registration data, allowing it to know not only who you were, but your interests and Web surfing preferences as well. That hit a little too close to home, and the program was canceled after a storm of public protest. Behavioral profiles have again come back into fashion, the difference this time is that they are all anonymous. What upped the ante on cookies is when most of the popular anti-spyware software companies decided that these third-party cookies were invasive, and allowed users to delete them. Even though these software companies grudgingly admit that these cookies are generally not harmful and don't really invade anyone's privacy, they have an agenda of their own: it allows their software to "find more stuff" on user's computers, making their software seem more valuable.

It is possible to delete all the cookies on your computer using a feature built right into every browser. Trouble is, this deletes "good" cookies (those that speed login to specific sites by saving user name and password), as well as third-party cookies, which is why more Web-savvy users don't do it. It's also important to understand that most anti-spyware software selectively deletes cookies, trying to delete only third-party cookies. That means for most data publishers, the cookies set for subscribers with their passwords remain intact, and counts of unique visitors are not going to be distorted.

Those most loudly bemoaning the issue of cookie deletion are the advertising networks, which increasingly depend on the third party cookies they set to control ad rotation and target ads based on behavioral profiles. Some executives from the major ad networks are busy writing editorials suggesting that publishers must convince their audiences of the benefits of third party cookies. Correct me if I am wrong, but the only reason third party cookies need to be defended is because the slippery practices of some advertising networks have brought them into disrepute, to the point where legislation has even been proposed that could potentially outlaw cookies. But now publishers are being asked to run out and put their reputations on the line by endorsing cookies on behalf of this group of unregulated and often shadowy advertising networks. And since we're being asked to endorse third party cookies, and since networks can charge more for targeted advertising, is it not unreasonable to ask how much of that premium pricing trickles down to publishers?

Conde Nast Joins the Business Press
InfoUSA board rejects Gupta’s buyout offer
US: 51% of journalists use blogs
ABM Debuts New Trade Show Tracking Numbers
That’s What I’m Talking About
What Blogs, Podcasts, Feeds Mean to Bottom Line
Retailers hope shoppers buy blogs as the place to go
What the BEA/Plumtree merger means for Web portal futures
SIIA Survey Finds State Progress Slow but Steady on Adoption of E-Textbooks
Thomson Gale Introduces New Profiler Module

Click here to view stories from today's industry headlines

There's been lots of hot chat about how mainstream news organizations can tap the power of weblogs to create more content value for their brands. According to Technorati CEO David Sifry's weblog, Newsweek has come up with a reasonable solution to this quandary: put links to weblogs that point to Newsweek news and commentary on that content's Web page. To my knowledge this is a first for a major online news outlet inviting external blog content onto their own pages (example, have to scroll down about 2/3 of the way to find it on an individual news article like this - the BlogTalk example that Sifry gives provides a better but less representative visual). The aim here is to make the news article itself the focal point of weblog-driven news amplification and commentary, aided by Technorati providing the neutral selection and feeding of the content. Technorati also gets a plug and a search box for bringing people back to their site (sample search results , note that the Newsweek logo on the results page does not relate to the number of returned search results specific to Newsweek, somewhat misleading).

This is a pretty shrewd technique for getting webloggers to write about Newsweek content: if they stand a shot at getting highly contextual links on a major news site sending traffic to their weblogs, why not mention Newsweek as the base source of a story rather than another source? As one commenter put it on Sifry's weblog, "Hell yes we want to see more of this!" It's a simple and effective way to drive traffic to their weblogs. News organizations are desperate to find better ways to be a part of the news conversation that is dominated increasingly by weblogs as the focal points of editorial story selection and spin via their links and commentary. This is a bold move by Newsweek to join the conversation with webloggers at more of a peer level, a recognition of their power to help shape the importance of news coverage. Technorati also wins big by providing webloggers an effective way to play with major media outlets, providing new branding strength that's bound to attract the attention of other outlets - or acquirers. The inevitable "leakage" of readers to other destination sites may hold back other publishers from trying Newsweek's approach. But with distribution prowess a nil-strength factor in Web content news organizations have to rely increasingly on the Web-driven conversation found in Weblogs and other emerging outlets to drive their online content into audience-defined relevance.

The recently announced implementation of the Knovel Library service at Black & Veatch Corporation, a leading global engineering, consulting and construction company, is an interesting example of how reference content can move from expensive shelf-sitters to active components in building workflow productivity. In this instance the match is perfect: in engineering and construction, having the right applied science data as quickly as possible is essential for coming up with the right calculations to support client projects effectively. Much of that content lies buried in reference books and eBooks, but Knovel extracts that content and makes it searchable and usable in ways that answer complex questions quickly - hence the claimed $1.5 million first-year productivity savings. This is powerful marketing ju-jitsu, turning the argument from "Why should we spend all this money on expensive reference products" to "How can we not afford to invest in the most efficient reference products?" There's a limit to what a fairly circumscribed content set can do to back up these claims and good measurements are essential for proving this success. But in the instance of Knovel Library targeting applied science specialists who need to get the facts and figures just right in practical solutions it's a compelling argument to leave the dusty stuff on the bookshelf behind and to get important deadlines met by spending much less time on finding the right answers to reference questions.

LexisNexis provides a strong paradigm on many levels as to how business content providers can work with clients to solve a wide range business problems. Add to this paradigm the recently announced relationship with Yipes Enterprise Services, Inc. to resell their LegalConnect! secure, high-availability network solutions for law firms needing scalable access to hosted legal services. Using these services LexisNexis will provide a more productized packaging to their law firm-specific hosted services, which include document management, electronic discovery, off-site document repositories, backup and recovery and network services. The ability to intertwine client-owned content with published content grows ever stronger in the LexisNexis model, creating truly embedded business solutions that prosper with premium content but are not wholly reliant on them for the value of the solutions.

This grey space between solutions traditionally managed by I.T. departments and companies and traditional publishers and aggregators is ground zero for many marketing efforts leveraging The New Aggregation, echoed by Google's recent moves to blur the lines between what constitutes personal content technology services and general publishing services. We are going to see more efforts at packaging in premium content as part of specialized networking services for business as a new breed of solutions providers learn how to use premium content to build business solutions in a more source-agnostic manner. If your customers need pipes, you may as well fill them with what they want and need in spades - even if it's not content that's in your current dossier. Nothing new in many ways, but for business-oriented aggregators trying to figure out the shifting terrain of packaging valuable services for their clients looking at network solutions from a content perspective rather than a purely I.T. perspective can make one wonder why some content players are so keen to shed their network operations.

Google Gets Better. What's Up With That?
Google, Yahoo Ad Battle Could Benefit Publishers
IBM Releases New Identity Resolution Technology
Reed to increase trade shows in Latin America
The Super Network: Why Yahoo! will be the center of the million-channel universe.
SwetsWise Online Content Signs Additional Publishers
SchemaLogic Introduces Vignette Taxonomy Integrator Adapter using SchemaServer Application
SIRIUS Unveils Wearable Satellite Radio
EmediaUSA Joins UK-based 101 Communications to Publish Email Bulletins for Special Interest Markets
ProQuest Appointed For UK eBook Deal

Click here to view stories from today's industry headlines

Google unveils instant-messaging, voice entry
Relax, Bill Gates; It's Google's Turn as the Villain
Dow Jones rises on more buyout talk; Dow Jones continues to deny it's seeking a suitor
Yahoo! Offers Cars for Content
Section Targeting by Google AdSense
Your Search or Mine? Jeteye hopes searchers will rely on strangers (and friends)
Yahoo, Viacom Forge Web Search Pact
Yipes and LexisNexis Deliver Scalable Network Platform for Law Firms
Productivity from Knovel Library helps Black & Veatch Engineers saves $1.5 Million annually worldwide
Nstein Technologies to drive content indexing on Cyberpresse
Rocketinfo Partners with Viapoint Corporation to Provide News Search Adapter
PennWell Launches PennEnergyJOBS, an Online Employment Service for the Global Energy Industry
Marsteller Announces User Generated Media Alliance with Best of Breed Companies

Click here to view stories from today's industry headlines

The recent announcement of Google Desktop 2 cranks up the heat a bit on Google's efforts to create a ubiquitous environment for content consumption. Like its earlier incarnation the new desktop tool provides searching of local emails, cached Web pages and office automation documents, but it adds an optional (but heavily pushed) "sidebar" feature that can display content such as weblog subscriptions, photo slideshows, news, recent emails, a scratchpad and a "Quick View" of a mix of recent and frequently used Web pages. All of these features can be tuned fairly easily for preferences and the sidebar can disappear altogether or be rearranged to personal tastes. Open up your Outlook and you get a new Google Desktop search bar embedded in the application, with quick search results for emails and a link to Desktop search results for more content from Outlook and other desktop sources. Like the earlier version there are some worrisome factors: I had by coincidence visited by bank's Web site just prior to downloading and the QuickView feature captured the signon page. However, specific pages or Web sites can be excluded from the feature's gaze (of course you have to be aware of that gaze first).

While there have been personal sidebar tools in circulation for some time, it's interesting to note the degree to which Google is trying to bridge the divide between Web tool and user desktop interface in melding personal and Web content with Desktop 2. It's a "My Yahoo!" on the level of content that matters most to an individual - personal content - with a mixture of content from external sources that's deemed important to an individual based on habits as much as conscious selection. Instead of sweating the details of developing "personal" portals online, Google is concentrating on creating personal content value where it matters most to individuals: in their own hands. While not the loudest of shots across Microsoft's bow, there's no mistaking where this personal approach is intended to lead the loyalty of PC users who find less and less use for the traditional Microsoft desktop. It's a far cry from a sidebar tool to an operating system, but what we click on is what we use and identify with as a brand. The brand of Google is gaining more depth by the day with users via tools such as Desktop 2.

LexisNexis service to defend copyrights
Google changes irk advertisers, please publishers
Google Searches For New Profits
Curse of the Skyscraper: Towers as Harbingers of Media Doom
Not So Fas Fax: An Analysis of the Flat Newsstand
Inxight with Customizable Architecture, Integrated User Authentication in SmartDiscovery Awareness Server
Knight Ridder VP for news to step down
Dow Jones Newswires and eSignal Expand Distribution Agreement on All eSignal Products
Former Presidents of Ask Jeeves International and Business Solutions Team Up to Join InfoSearch Media
Elsevier Health Sciences uses OutStart Evolution Learning Content Management System for eLearning
Standard & Poor's Equity Research Services Publishes Research Objectivity Policy
The Telegraph Group Selects NewspaperDirect's SmartEdition ePaper Solution
New Oracle Collaboration Suite Takes Aim At Microsoft SharePoint

Click here to view stories from today's industry headlines

Google search for Trader deal
Google Revamps Desktop Search Program
Where to Spend $4 Billion? Google Has Plenty of Projects in Mind
Microsoft demos RSS features in IE 7
United Business Media acquires Informex for $24 million
Sun launches open-source digital rights plan
Eight Masters Of Information
Big picture still hazy in video search
Copyright law needs drastic changes to keep up with technology
At Dow Jones, It's All About Family

Click here to view stories from today's industry headlines

Alas, the poor eBook has suffered quite an identify crisis these past few years - in spite of the fact that their sales growth continues to surge impressively. By some reckonings electronic books will be outselling their paper-bound counterparts as soon as 2010. But the key to the future of electronic books lies not so much in getting existing book formats into electronic packaging as in creating new concepts for packaging content for portable use that extend the concept of the book in new directions. The good news is that the resulting packages offer premium content providers significant revenue opportunities - if they can learn how to create products that appeal to users used to both text and interactive capabilities.

Click here to read the full News Analysis

The Boston Globe refers to Akamai as a "little-known company" in its article announcing Akamai's move into content creation. Since I'm based in Boston and I'm a long-time online media analyst, Akamai is anything but an unknown company to me. I remember when they went public in late 1999 and the stock price shot up from $110 to $145 on the first day. Not long afterwards, the price peaked at $345. One could say that Akamai was the Google of its time. (Note, current stock price is $14.93.)

This week Akamai, which is primarily known as a content delivery platform that speeds up users' access to high-bandwidth content, announced that it has introduced a Net Usage Index that tracks traffic to news sites on a real-time basis. The index as displayed on their web site illustrates usage by continent and is updated every five minutes.

Taking a step toward creating content based on information culled from their servers is a smart move. For now, it's a small step, since it is not clear how Akamai will translate the index into a service that can be monetized. But, there are definite possibilities to help advertisers optimize their reach, for instance. In addition, with so much attention from the big search engines and major publishers focused on expanding into Asia, combined with growing attention on creating search engines for video content, Akamai's strengths in serving high-bandwidth content and its global network should help the company increase its visibility and make a name for itself that is more widely known.

Amazon continues to innovate book marketing, with its debut of Amazon Shorts, described as "Short literary works delivered digitally for 49 cents each". These are previously unpublished short-form works of 2,000 to 10,000 words, many of which are from well-known authors, who already have full-sized hardcopy, ebook and audio book editions readily available on Amazon. At this price, individual authors may not make a lot of money on the new short digital works, but the advertising and public relations aspects are much more valuable. Today's featured Amazon Short is by Harry Dent, author of The Next Great Bubble Boom: How to Profit from the Greatest Boom in History, 2005-2009, a traditional hard-copy book, published in September 2004. His Amazon Short is dated August 1, 2005 and provides an updated view of his 2004 view, thus solving the inherent problem of keeping a traditional book current, yet utilizing established distribution channels. The sales page for this work conveniently lists "The Complete Works of Harry S. Dent" including the 2004 book at $26 list price, a nice upsell for a $.49 work, as well as the full backlist.

It's this understanding of the dynamics of the publishing business, and the tension between authors, traditional publishers and buyers that makes Amazon successful. The focus has been on technology in the ebook marketplace, but innovation in improving the publishing cycle and providing new value to readers which benefits authors will be key to growth in digital publishing, as seen in the growth in digital audio books. Amazon is valuable not only as a sales channel, but also for the profile of the typical reader / buyer, which is possible only in ecommerce channels, not the bricks and mortar retail channel. Feedback to authors has long been a Holy Grail, and Amazon is effectively working with authors, as well as publishers, on multiple levels, a key to business success.

14,159,265 New Slices of Rich Technology
Despite Earlier Predictions, 'Free' Web Is Going Strong
"Read All Over" — Including Online: $1 Billion in 2004 Online News Revenues
Akamai Launches Internet News Tracking Index
India govt rejects Reuters content services plan
eMeta's eRights Suite Aids Publishers of Digital Content
Internet Is Replacing TV in Korea
“Extreme data” revolutionizing the way companies do business, says CSC report
The RSS Crisis?
Bucks for blogs; "PR is Dead"
Demand For E-books On The Increase
Melodeo First to Offer Podcasts for Mobile Phones; Company Appoints New CEO

Click here to view stories from today's industry headlines