Basic research is at the heart of many of the companies in Silicon Valley that are driving the value in publishing today. When the revenue and margin leaders in electronic publishing are plunking down 10 percent of their budgets on R&D it's hard to imagine how traditional publishers and aggregators are going to wheel and deal their way to a superior position against these competitors any time soon. When robust R&D is at the heart of your company's culture, innovations that surface as highly profitable products just seem to follow naturally. It takes more than R&D types to understand today's publishing environment, but if you're not attracting the best and the brightest of them you've got to wonder what tomorrow will bring to your bottom line.

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ABM survey shows surge in digital media
BtoB Online
Google Wants to Dominate Madison Avenue, Too
The New York Times*
How Google Milks Money From Web Search Better Than Rivals
Dow Jones via SmartMoney.com
Elsevier Poised to Enter Business Intelligence Market
Managing Information
Britannica Gets It
CRN
E-books attract young writers
Financial Express
Comprehensive Listing of Del.icio.us Tools, Plugins and Add-ons for Social Bookmarking
Kris Krug
PointRoll Ignites Local-Market Advertising on the Web with PaperBoy Local Delivery(TM)
BusinessWire
Speculation Swirls: Primedia Selling Pieces, Planning
Liquidation
FOLIO: Magazine
Social Content Web Site Digg Secures $2.8 Million Series A Funding
BusinessWire
REITcafe Launches First Website Focused on REIT Podcasts
PR Newswire
The Internet Archive Chooses LuraTech's Scanning Capture and PDF Compressor for Open Library Project
BusinessWIre

Now in its ninth year, this annual gathering has become the must attend conference for information professionals involved in Internet and Web based strategies. Presenters and attendees are at the forefront of implementing search technologies to deliver library services in innovative ways, with lessons learned from public, academic and corporate settings. Even Google, noticeably absent in previous conferences, participated this year, with challenging questions from this group of expert users, familiar with the dark side of information not acknowledged in the Google mantra.

- Keynote speaker Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Internet and American Life Project, spoke on
"Shifting Worlds: Internet Librarians at the Forefront", focusing on changes in Internet usage from the previous year (he was also a keynote last year) and the social implications. Internet technology, per se, is increasingly part of the fabric of everyday life and increasingly simply included in applications, such as public toilets in France with IP addresses and RFID tags on golf balls. Though broadband penetration has increased significantly in the last year, there is still a sizable component of the population termed
"cold" users (approximately 20% of adults) who do not use the Internet, due to philosophy or indifference, with an additional group of
"tepid" users who choose dialup, rather than the more expensive broadband. Libraries are uniquely positioned to provide an
"Information Habit" for reflection as well as expertise thus meeting the
"long tail" needs of these groups, as well as the "hot" users (87% of American teenagers!).

- Elizabeth Lane
Lawley's keynote speech on "Social Computing & the Information
Professional' was a whirlwind of evolving trends she observes in a dual role as founding Director, Rochester Institute of Technology Lab for Social Computing, as well as Visiting Researcher, Microsoft, bridging the worlds of information technology and libraries. Making search better is a function of social networks, such as del.icio.us rather than technology algorithms which try to mimic a good librarian. Social software functions as recommendations of various
"friends" to help find trusted information.. Another trend is
"partial continuous attention" as an emerging reality of social interactions juggling technologies, and not limited to teenagers.

- The closing keynote entitled
"Google: Catalyst for Digitization? Or Library
Destruction?" featured the ongoing conversation/debate between technologists, Roy Tennant, from the California Digital Library, and Rich Wiggins, from Michigan State on the implications of Google Print. From
Rich's view, though the costs of digitizing print copies has been reduced and improved, the task of digitizing and managing the estimated printed 20 to 28 million titles (Library of Congress counts) requires an organization which
"thinks big", and that turns out to be Google. Rights management is a big barrier, with the paradox of latent value in titles on library shelves which are not delivering royalties to either the author or publisher. Roy delves into the more nitty-gritty issues, such as retrieving references to multiple publisher editions of public domain books, without showing the free versions which have no publisher promotion.
He's concerned about copyright restrictions on the most current information, so users will retrieve out of date material, and assume
that's the best available information. Adam Smith, Product Manager, for Google Print joined the debate to present the Google point of view of fast development and feedback on products. This is a skeptical
crowd-the point was made that Harvard Library is over 400 years old, and Google is only 7 years old, so which institution would you trust?

- Blogging was highly visible this year, in contrast to last year, though this may have been a result of finally having free and effective WiFi access, thanks to the efforts of the Information Today staff. My experience with resort hotels this year is that adequate Internet access for technology savvy professionals is still sadly lacking. Information Today staff provided a lively live commentary on the conference weblog.

- Wikis and blogs are coming into wider spread use in public and academic libraries, both to improve internal staff communication and to communicate with patrons about library services, and as an alternative to intranets. Effective use was woven into presentations by Jenny Levine, Suburban Librarian System and TheShiftedLibrarian.com and Darlene Fichter, University of Saskatchewan.

- The emergence of public libraries as a hotbed of technology adoption and evangelism was highlighted in a separate track, as well as a Demo Derby at the Monterey Public Library. Twenty-one public librarians were on the panels at the conference providing their insights!

- The search related tracks were the most heavily attended sessions, with well-known experts talking about different aspects: Ran Hock on Desktop Search utilities, Gary Price and Greg Notess with updates on search engines, and Mary Ellen Bates with tips on utilizing search engines, Steve Cohen on RSS. The overall theme was the constantly changing nature of the search engines, along with the need to use several as each one has strengths and weaknesses.

- The joint Groxis and SunLibrary presentation was a highlight in the Information Discovery track, and a valuable lesson in a cooperative venture between a content buyer and an unproven visualization technology to provide high value to Sun engineers. The major insight was that metadata in indexed databases by IEEE and ACM provide vastly superior results compared to unstructured Web content. Later in the exhibit hall, attendees were stacked deep around the Grokker product booth to get hands on demos of the
applications-stay tuned to this space! By this time next year, there are likely to be more projects which blend both visualization technology and structured
databases - all reasons to come back to Monterey next year for the 10th anniversary of Internet Librarian!

Google flight search takes off
IBM to use Google desktop search deep inside firms
Fairfax Jobs Cut - Bad Decision in Growing Online Industry
Online opportunities make journalism’s future bright, despite gloomy feelings
Forbes Attacks the Blogs
CMP Media debuts lead generation and demand management program
CNBC Rolls Out Mobile Content in Asian Markets
Reuters revenue up, shares fall
Dow Jones Shares Up On Renewed Rumors Of Takeover
LookSmart(R) Unveils 161 New 'Vertical' Web Sites in 12 Categories for Consumers
Thomson TradeWeb automates CDS index market

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Internet to ask, 'How may I serve you?'
Google Base goes far beyond an Ebay competitor
Web Threats Keep Users Away
AOL Adds New RSS Content to Its Video Search Engine
Uphill battle for copyright protection in China
Who Owns XML?
Nasdaq reports profit, raises guidance
Bill Gates: "In 5 years, 40 to 50% of people will read their news online."
Standard & Poor’s lowers N.Y. Times Co. long-term ratings
Ontology Tools Survey, Revisited
McGraw-Hill's AccessMedicine Forms Alliance With Center for the Advancement of Health
The Wall Street Journal Online Announces 2005 Open House To Drive New Subscriptions and Ads
GeoTrust Expands TrustWatch Search Engine; Now Verifies Content Sites in Addition to e-Commerce Sites
Autonomy's Consumer Division Announces Creation of Conceptual Index of World Wide Web
www.InvestorIdeas.com Content Expands to Participate in Chinese Internet Market Growth
LiveDeal.com, Leading Free Local Online Classifieds Provider, Secures $4.85 Million in Series B Funding

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I am working on some private research for a client and found myself delving into materials at Archive.org, the public repository for past images of many of the Web's sites since nearly the Web's inception. The Internet Archive, is active in the Open Content Alliance (OCA), the Yahoo-sponsored alternative to the Google Print program. As you've read in our postings there are suits and complaints against Google's pre-emptive scanning of copyrighted materials, even though they expose only snippets of this content in apparent compliance with "fair use" restrictions. OK, so here's the irony: check out the FAQ on the Internet Archive's copyright policy:

The Internet Archive respects the intellectual property rights and other proprietary rights of others. The Internet Archive may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, remove certain content or disable access to content that appears to infringe the copyright or other intellectual property rights of others. If you believe that your copyright has been violated by material available through the Internet Archive, please provide the Internet Archive Copyright Agent with the following information...

So legal eagles and Internet "luminaries" out there, please help me: doesn't this sound suspiciously like the pre-emptive "copy first, ask questions later" policy that Google has adopted? And isn't it providing for the pre-emptive display of full copyrighted works, not extracts, via the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine?" Although OCA members have some altruistic goals in trying to build open library sources online, it's no secret that OCA members will be just as active as Google in trying to find ways to make money with this content. If one doubts this at all please reference today's news that Microsoft is looking at joining the OCA. There may be both right and wrong things that Google is doing in its scanning efforts, but before its detractors get too high and mighty they'd be wise to look at their own policies regarding copyrighted materials and see if they are really doing anything other than blowing smoke around their most aggressive and powerful competitor.

With a wealth of concerns about compliance, security and legal monitoring in the financial industry the packaging of content has become a key concern for banks and brokerages worldwide. One solution that has emerged quietly on the infrastructure side in finance and other sectors has been Secure Document Exchange (SDX), a method for packaging content and functionality in digital objects that can travel through normal communications channels such as email from one company to another. SDX objects provide security, auditability, secure two-way communications and built-in forms to update data. Wolters Kluwer Financial Services has announced its implementation of SDX to support improved work flow and faster transactions in finance. SDX messaging in effect can create secure "deal rooms" in which information and insights can be exchanged and then deals secured via legal documents incorporated into SDX objects. While the emphasis at Wolters Kluwer Financial is on compliance, credit, and operational risk management solutions, the potential for SDX-style digital objects to become venues for deal-making of all kinds is huge - as is the importance of content vendors being able to provide content in SDX messaging that adds value to a transaction as it forms. We've talked a lot about the importance of getting content wrapped around the context of specific transactions as a key component for profitability in financial content; SDX represents the kind of transaction environment that may in time replace many desktop services as key market venues for financial content suppliers of all kinds.

Google To Launch Google Base
Google wants your car listings, events
MSN to Launch Book Search
Google-brary: The Status Quo of Tomorrow’s MEGALIBRARY
ValueAct ups bid for Acxiom to $2 billion; calls company direction 'fool's gold' strategy
Bill to shield reporters filed in Mass.
Thomson ponders options for free cash flow
VNU shares up on report of possible buyout
MetaCarta Extends Geographic Intel Capabilities with Machine Learning and Connector Framework
Wolters Kluwer Financial Services Announces Next-Generation Internet Document Exchange Solution
Stout Risius Ross, Inc. Selects LexisNexis Interface Software for CRM for Tracking Client Success
Fast enterprise search gets personal
LiveDeal Joins With Torstar to Deliver One of the Largest Free Online Classifieds Sites in Canada
NAVTEQ Announces Launch of Comprehensive Telecom Offering
EMC to Acquire Captiva Software Corporation

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It's a rather grainy screen grab and quite sketchy blog posts clarified by CNET News but a slipup in online testing revealed yet another seismic shift underway at Google: an open online database. No, it's not Oracle for the masses, but it appears to be an ingenious way for people to collect and organize facts in a database format that can be organized into specific data categories of a common or custom design. While the news-breaking Blogcritics post claims that it will be an open source database, it's not clear on the surface that source code will be available for this not-even-in-Alpha product. All very sketchy, and who's to say when or whether this actually emerges into the daylight of the Web, but it makes perfect sense in the broader scheme of things. Silicon.com's take on it is that it's a potential eBay killer, while ClickZ News sees it as a play for classifieds, both of which seem to be grabbing at the legs of a more generic content elephant grasped by Blogcritics: we're talking about open technology that can be used for virtually any purpose in the content marketplace, with or without ecommerce elements attached.

Web-based search has been centered primarily on texts since its inception, with multimedia added to the fray only recently. The missing component that's been a staple of institutional content sources all along has been structured data and digital objects that combine data, functionality and text. For all those who thought that relational databases would protect their content from commoditization, this is a shot across the bow that says: what weblogs did to news, open databases can do to your content. Mind you, mySQL databases as part of the LAMP Web server environment have helped to make databases more common as components driving Web pages, but apparently Google intends to expose databases themselves to Web searching and feeds in a much more generic way than ever before. That's a whole new wrinkle indeed. Keep your eye on this one, it's a powerful new development with enormous implications for content vendors.

In early July, the big news that VNU was acquiring IMS for $7 billion in a friendly transaction was announced. A new management structure for the combined company and significant planning activities have been underway and have been chronicled in company presentations and SEC documents. However, over the past month, news that some large institutional shareholders oppose the deal has been covered in the press. Today's Wall St. Journal article ($premium) reports that a consortium of private equity firms is waiting in the wings to make a bid for VNU once the deal is called off. Given all these reports of shareholder dissent, it is looking less and less likely that VNU's plans to merge its ACNielsen market research unit with IMS will occur.

The WSJ article states that the consortium wants to buy VNU in one piece--presumably to later break it up and sell the pieces for a price where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. But where does that leave IMS? With all the media attention on this pharmaceutical market research firm, it is likely that there will be a range of suitors, including strategic buyers such as Thomson and Reed Elsevier who have considered a bid for IMS in the past, as well as some newcomers that are positioned for growth in the healthcare segment, such as Steve Case's Revolution Health Care or newly-IPO'd WebMD. Last but not least, expect interest from several private equity firms that have been active in the healthcare sector.

While much of the online world crows on about the benefits of interactivity and community building, the plain truth is that such openness punching through from the open Web to intranets gives most corporations nightmares. A Wired News article points out that it's common practice for many corporations to filter out weblogs using many of the same tools used to eliminate email spam and access to entertainment sites. But of potentially greater concern to companies than someone sneaking a peak at their favorite time-wasters online is the tendency of people to post comments on weblogs that may reveal corporate secrets that would pose both competitive and compliance nightmares. Today's corporations are publishing entities more than ever, with both legal and regulatory interfaces to the public as well as sales and marketing front ends via Web sites and other collateral that reaches many audiences. As David Meerman Scott points out in a recent MarketingProfs article such online presences are about a lot more than just gaining a basket of sales leads from inquiry forms: online publishing provides corporations channels through used to build relationships with multiple audiences that are crucial components to strategic selling and maintaining relationships. So although individuals may yearn to reach out via weblogs to the outer world it's not likely that they're going to be encouraged any time soon in corporate circles focused on building coordinated online communications.

But such trends should not stop serious weblogs from being a key component in corporate content infrastructure any more than email is likely to be turned off as a communications channel into public networks. The issue is not weblogs as a channel but rather how weblogs are managed as content channels. Services such as Newstex provide via their subscription service packaging and indexing for quality weblogs that meet their own criteria for quality content along with premium news sources. This corporate-friendly channel provides weblogs the equivalent of a "visitor's pass" through the corporate infrastructure, in which form they may be consumed with fewer of the security and disclosure concerns that may worry corporations. What's missing from this equation, though, is a filterable online "white list" of weblogs that corporations and other entities can refer to that would provide some level of assurance on the quality and focus of specific weblogs. Such a mechanism would allow corporations to subscribe to white-listed weblogs fed into their corporate infrastructure via RSS feeds or other channels and then sanitized as need be. Individual corporations maintain their own white-listing infrastructures any way, to this would seem to be "low lying fruit" for those trying to add another layer of channel management to weblog distribution.

Share the Knowledge, Expand the Wealth
For VNU, a Shareholder Revolt May Lead to Its Sale or Breakup
Conlin Out as CEO of Primedia as Company Contemplates Split
Tribune Co. taking hard look at holdings
Blog Search Market Heats Up
No Longer Safe for Work: Blogs
Mercury News to discontinue three niche publications
New Times Will Buy Village Voice Media
Microsoft's RSS aggregator
Internet Librarian :: Day 1 :: Opening Keynote
ValueAct Ups Acxiom Takeover Bid
Econtent and the Law Practice
Biotech community built on shared Autonomy
ClearForest and Kapow Technologies to Integrate Web Content into Unified Business Intelligence Systems
SealedMedia Unveils New Documentum Content Server Solution
Dialog Group's Data-based Lead Generation for Pre-Movers Market Managed by 21st Century Marketing

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This year's Frankfurt Book fair drew more than 250,000 people to the world's largest content event, but the biggest event for books during the fair was the alignment of camps in the fight over Google Print. American publishers are suiting up for a fight on copyright issues, while German publishers seem to be content to let Google be Google and to get on with building stronger online presences for searching and consuming books. Given the history of other recent wars on copying premium content guess who's likely to be the richer of these two camps in a few years' time? It's time for all publishers to embrace fair use of book content for searching and to focus on how they're going to make money in a search-enabled world.

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Publishers to build own online book network
The 800-pound Google
The Parsons Project: Time Warner Chairman Talks Strategy
Why You Should Pay to Read This
Google exec touts communities, content over APIs
Blog to Wiki
Brand Blogs Capture the Attention of Some Companies
Motorola admits the ROKR iPod phone doesn't ROLL
Calls for New Metrics, Recognition of Product Placement Dominate 2005 AMC
Are Magazines Recapturing Leadership of Media World?
Kalikow - Music Business Information Guru Launches Mobile Business Information Group (Mbig.Com)
Scirus to Index Caltech Digital Archives
Reed Business Information Announces the BioDiscovery Expo 2005 - Free Online Conference
Dow Jones Newsletters Launches New Publication on Flourishing Hedge-Fund Industry
OneSource Releases Government Data Tool
Leading Brokers and Banks to Implement Reuters Post Trade Notification Service
ABN AMRO inks exclusive distribution agreement with Thomson Financial for embargoed research
Elsevier Society News Group to Launch CHEST Physician

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The San Jose Mercury News coverage (registration) and SJMN's weblog seems to be in the center of the surfacing dispute between free classifieds database Craigslist and classifieds search engine Oodle. The story seems to be that Craigslist asked Oodle in an undetermined communication, presumably with legal implications, that Oodle was pushing too hard to scrape links from its site for Oodle's cross-source classifieds index and search engine. But as of yet no specifics on any legal charges have been mentioned, only concerns that the posted terms of use have been violated. As Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Watch notes, though, "Looking over at Google, I see Craigslist seems to have no problem of Google indexing 12 million of its pages. Of course, there's a difference between indexing a page and scraping the content to be included in a more vertical service."

But is there really a difference? Oodle does in fact provide more intelligent indexing than a straight search engine would, using faceted navigation to peruse listings that can only be gained from databasing an index of full content. But at the end of the day such a function is no different from any other search engine that helps to contextualize links to full content. As such this is a potentially chilling development for any content provider deriving links and indexing to other content on the Web. But the apparently discriminatory manner in which Craigslist is enforcing its browse-wrap terms and conditions would seem to open up as many issues for plaintiffs in such cases as defendants.

There are many conflicting and hazy legal threads hanging over the crawling and mining of Web sites, but a lot of the issues seem to boil down to one key question: is building an index or other services derived from crawling open Web content an act that can be restricted on a discriminatory basis or not? Are links to "browse-wrap" legal terms found at the bottom of many Web pages hidden policies that can be changed and applied prejudicially by a Web site proprietor or are they public notices equivalent to "jackets required for gentlemen" signs posted in the lobbies of fancy but public restaurants, unmistakable to all who enter? To say that some can use access to public content for commercial purposes while others cannot would seem to run up against such basic issues of discrimination in public venues.

The twists and turns of legal precedents are highly unpredictable today but with meta-searching and federated searching services such as Oodle becoming increasingly common the law is likely to move towards supporting most uses of publicly available content without explicit, up-front usage contracts or clearly consensual notices, especially when usage falls short of full replication for commercial purposes or documentable abuse that restricts its use by others or its commercial exploitation by its owners. That's going to be a pretty tall bar for most content originators to cross before they can afford to complain about what has been made available to the public. In the Content 2.X era, working collaboratively with a user base that is increasingly a publishing audience is going to take us further away from hostile confrontations between content users and originators and towards an era in which all parties creating and using content benefit fairly and mutually from both its creation and its use.

Google's Profit Jumps Sevenfold; Revenue Doubles; Are TV Ads Next?
Craigslist targets Oodle for 'scraping' its listings
Google's Escalating Book Battle
Copyright vs. copyrape: the Google Print saga
Publishers become retailers by selling online
Apple is Readying Vingle: Radio or Wireless Net?
Wikipedia's audience quadruples
FindLaw to launch new home page
How to make money on your news content website
Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form New Partnership
Business Wire Confirms Its Growth Strategy in Continental Europe With the Opening of Its Paris Office
Cadmus Communications Expands Its Highly Successful Global Packaging Solutions Network
PrimeZone Expands Media and Online Reach in China through Strategic Partnership with China PRnews
LexisNexis(R) Enhances Its Fraud Prevention Resources With The Release of Business InstantID
New Media Strategies RIses in the Ranks on Inc. Magazine's List of Fastest Growing U.S. Companies

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I don't pick up news from United Press International every day, so it was interesting to click on a headline in my daily rounds and discover that UPI is now using text ads to support its feeds, along with providing RSS feeds of their content. While having ads on a wire site is not groundbreaking - Reuters has been pushing a subset of their wire content online with ad-supported pages - the UPI's use of text ads acknowledges that these days a smaller wire service has to compete more on the same terms as proliferating weblogs that use text ads to support their operations. So, why not use the same revenue streams that this level of competition does since it's getting harder for small wires to get hooked up with ads in mainstream outlets? It's an interesting solution to the ongoing question of where wire services fit in with today's media mix.

UPI provides news gathering and distribution solutions on a number of levels now, leveraging their infrastructure and staff in a number of ways that also tend to resemble the multi-faceted revenue streams of many of today's online operations. UPI is on to something with this model as a way to get into the mainstream of today's user-oriented aggregation with traditional journalism on its back end. It will be interesting to see where they take their editorial stream as this model evolves: will UPI be a career stepping stone for webloggers wanting to move on to mainstream journalism without giving up audiences in established online channels such as RSS feeds? Or will the flow begin to go the other way, with services such as UPI used as a starting point in the careers of journalists seeking independent careers?

The new Flock browser has made its pre-release developers' debut and is available for download. The browser's source code is also available for download for those wanting to tinker and improve on its capabilities. Flock's premise is straightforward: make it easy for people to use and interact with user-generated media. The browser's very intuitive bookmark function can save a user's favorite sources to their del.icio.us account, thus allowing bookmarks to be shared instantly with anyone using this service. You can also build special lists of items about which you want to blog and grab photos from Flikr. But the most interesting aspect of Flock is that it makes it easy to create personal aggregations of content from weblog feeds - it's as simple as adding a bookmark in most instances. Editing a weblog can be done within Flock also.

In truth Flock is not doing anything that other services aren't providing already in their online services or via components that can be dropped in to existing browsers. The power in this still-thinking-about-the-business-plan effort is to see how content aggregation and authoring by individuals is becoming the center of people's content experiences. The browser remains the least common denominator for most people's electronic content experiences today and is likely to remain so as more sophisticated tools come along to make the experience even more intuitive. As for Flock itself, its reality is a little humbler than the Web 2.0 hype that has surrounded its debut. Think of it as an early demo of where future content aggregation and creation desktop products are heading in the era of user-generated media. Much more exciting things to come, perhaps from Flock itself but just as easily from elsewhere, given its public license.

AOL Rediscovers Success With Free Web Sites
Publishers sue Google over book search project
New York Times Executives: Aim To Trim Costs, Boost Revenue
VeriSign's Content Revenues Drop 25 Percent Sequentially
As costs rise, library cuts journals
The European Commission Imposes DRM as the Unique Solution
Copyrights, Trademarks and Search Engines
Making Bucks on Blogs
Yahoo Buys Whereonearth To Boost Local Search
Ovid Partners with QUOSA to Offer Desktop and Team Sharing Platform for Full-Text Article Retrieval, Search
Knovel Releases "Knovel Plastics"; New Resource Will Increase Productivity for Plastics Industry Engineers
Thomson Higher Education U.S. Exclusive on Select Harvard Business School Publishing Multi-Media
LexisNexis(R) Martindale-Hubbell(R) Comprehensive Benchmarking Study of Small Law Firm Marketing
Hurricanes hurt earnings at ProQuest

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As CNET News notes there is a new collection of online and traditional media journalists who are congregating under the banner of Pajamas Media to aggregate news and news commentary weblogs. Founders Charles Johnson and Roger Simon took up the blogging bug after seeing the ability of weblogs to break news stories and to "out-report the mainstream media" on breaking and investigative news. But certainly the success of weblog parties such