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| Wednesday, November 30, 2005 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:20 PM |
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 paidContent.org offers a nice wrapup of recent Google headlines, including an observation by Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine: "The current valuation seems to presume a new revenue stream; soon would be good." Point taken. Google is throwing out new features faster than a luggage conveyor belt at the airport, which all seem to give the sense of momentum but many of which are just pokes in the dark from a revenue perspective. Will Google be able to deliver a mature, reliable marketplace for goods similar to eBay any time soon? Given the rawness of Google Base and the rawness of the content that it's attracting, I am not sure that "soon" is the answer to this question. Will Google Print actually prove to be profitable any time soon? Lots of content coming into place and lots of potential, but the ecommerce aspects are a huge question mark. Google is in a mindshare battle as much as a market share battle, trying fill the cracks of journalism with developing products in somewhat the same way as Microsoft became adept at sucking the market momentum out of a space simply by announcing their intent to deliver products into it. One important difference in Google's scenario is that they deliver bits to play with while evolving their strategy, but it's the same game: keep the spotlight on the brand so that it's perceived strength can discourage substitutes from being taken seriously. Thus far Google is becoming the new master of this technique. No wonder Silicon Valley types discredit Google for being Microsoft-like. There is bound to be some investor disappointment and stock price pullback as some of these initiatives mature at their own pace, but the only thing that has really changed is investors' expectations. Google has always evolved its capabilities at a fairly leisurely and careful pace: it's just that the stakes are so much higher to deliver finished goods that the marketplace will absorb quickly. Google continues to teach us new things about how to market content services, but some more traditional forethought may be needed to build market share and self-sustaining revenues against established competitors in market segments that are new to Google. Time has been on Google's side for quite a while, but perhaps not forever if they become laden with too many features still in search of a plan for productization and profitability.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:14 AM |
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| Tuesday, November 29, 2005 |
Back in the height of dot-com madness there was a lot a froth about counting unique Web site visitors - "eyeballs," as they became known - as a means of deriving valuations for Web sites built out of thin air. Unfortunately those metrics did not stand up to reason in the short term, and the rest is history. But the other side of the history is that traffic continued to build on low-rent sites based on weblogs and other user-oriented publishing technologies until monetization via ads seen by those eyeballs was an entirely reasonable business plan. Business 2.0 notes that although more sophisticated valuation techniques are still important, factoring $38 per unique monthly ganderer allows for some very interesting shadow valuations - $155 million for the geekish weblog Slashdot, $127 million for Facebook and $76 million for Nick Denton's Gawker Media. Looks like AOL got a bargain for Weblogs, Inc. at a paltry $25 million by these estimates - or came up with a more realistic formula for user-generated media value. It's highly doubtful that eyeball-only valuations will become the norm again but as a first-pass metric it shows the huge return on investment to which pioneers in user-generated media staked themselves with little more than a few years of sweat equity and some well-turned words. Just one more log on the fire for shareholders of established publishers to warm up their envy of born-on-the-Web properties.
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:28 PM |
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PC World reports along with other outlets on the initiation of a Pay-Per-Call advertising feature dubbed "Click to Call" to compete with similar offerings from other online services. Examples of how this works can be found on Greg Yardley's weblog: a little green phone icon appears next to an AdWords item, which when clicked on pops up a place to enter your phone number with extra space for descriptive ad text. The on-screen presentation in the AdWords space then guides you to the completion of the connection. As noted in the new service's FAQ it's free to the user unless you're on a mobile and consuming on-air minutes. Details on pricing are not available, but PC World speculates that based on other services the prices are going to be in the $2-$30 per call range with $7 as a median. Yet another "Wow, this is huge" item from Google, to be sure, but all part of a more general growth in sophisticated ways to connect people with people through search engine marketing and other highly targeted content channels. Pay-per-call is still in its infancy, with tuning it for maximum lead quality still a concern, but there is indeed huge growth potential for voice and visual communication services to become the glue for completing a transaction. Just ask eBay, which paid big for online telephony service Skype. It's all about building the transaction - I trust, therefore I execute. And who better to trust than Google, many a user may say. The power of contextual endorsement from Google's core search content rides again...
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:56 PM |
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The announcement for Wolters Kluwer's new PubFusion content management tool claims that its EMC-based infrastructure is the first electronic package of its kind offered to scholarly journal publishers, an effort to recycle internal infrastructure that WK uses for its own journal and product production processes for its 160 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins journals. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins will be the marketing unit for the software which will be demonstrated at London Online. There are no online marketing materials for the product yet, but based on the existing LW&W titles and the PR information it's clearly a production system that tilts towards print production with "hooks" for presenting print-oriented materials online via a publisher's portal and via partners' channels. That's not a bad thing, given the state of scholarly journal marketing today. It allows them to hold down production costs with less paper-intensive processes as well as to use a production platform what will grow in more electronic-oriented directions without having to invest in bespoke/custom programming.
Think of PubFusion as ECNext for the scholarly set, if you will, helping smaller publishers to take advantage of solid infrastructure that's at least in line with the market's expectations. The fact that a major aggregator is initiating this effort gives it that much extra marketing punch, providing publishers with a look at how The New Aggregation is going to look moving forward. Content companies can support their clients' publishing needs with whatever discrete publishing and aggregation services add value to the content production and marketing process, either separately or in select bundles of capabilities. No longer does the content have to come to the database: the database can come to the content and provide value to the publishing process that can help publishers control costs and drive new revenue channels. PubFusion could be many things more than it is today, but as a starting point it's hats off to a great use of content technology assets that can help Wolters Kluwer build stronger marketing relationships with scholarly publishers.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:04 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:35 AM |
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| Monday, November 28, 2005 |
Break out the pitchforks and the torches, the shareholders are restless in the once-happy realm of publishing. While the likes of Google and Yahoo gobble up capital chasing extraordinary growth and healthy earnings, traditional publishers are caught trying to please institutional investors who may have very unrealistic expectations about what it takes to transform older business models into 21st century profits. But all is not lost for publishers that are willing to learn how to sell their positioning to investors with straight talk about both short-term and long-term expectations. The time for gladhanding colleagues on cushy buyouts is passing by as the time for true publishing survivalists to take charge comes into focus. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:48 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 7:58 AM |
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| Friday, November 25, 2005 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:52 AM |
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| Thursday, November 24, 2005 |
U.S. Thanksgiving Holiday
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:54 AM |
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| Wednesday, November 23, 2005 |
The financial research marketplace is no easy patch of ground to work these days. Large investment firms such as Fidelity are trying to strip research from major banks and brokerages from their trade execution pricing and there are a forest of research offerings from independent analysts and Indian vendors that are covering many topics very cost-effectively. So news from BtoB Online that Moody's Investors Service is picking up Economy.com comes as an interesting move to help Moody's keep in focus with professional financial analysts who are more likely than ever to be "rolling their own" financial analysis in an era of Fair Disclosure regulations that have made access to corporate data more widespread. Economy.com features a wide array of modeling tools and databases covering global markets with economic and credit risk data that allows financial modeling on many levels. More than just an acquisition of a stable of electronic publications, this purchase gives Moody's increased ability to sell a range of content solutions to analysts who may respect credit research offerings from Moody's and other research vendors but who want to see for themselves how the numbers really fly to gain a market advantage. Sometimes the solution is not what you're putting in to a research product but which research products a customer really needs to make a profitable investment decision.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:25 PM |
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paidContent.org reports on IDG CEO Patrick Kenealy's stepping down to start a new fund for IDG's Venture Capital arm. Patrick steered a course for IDG that has brought its prestigious I.T.-oriented titles steadily more into line with online delivery, though taking some pains to make the content somewhat scarce in search engine results outside of online distribution partners such as Yahoo. This opened up doors for search engine-friendly suppliers such as TechTarget to fine-tune topical content channels for highly effective lead generation. The challenge that IDG faces in Kenealy's wake is not unusual: most generally-focused business and consumer titles are having a hard time keeping up with content users who know how to aggregate content effectively themselves through search engines, filtered alerts and weblog feeds. Given the I.T.-friendly crowd that is IDG's focus, the problem becomes that much more accentuated. IDG has great content and is no slouch in deploying features that will keep readers in their camp, but the opportunity for IDG at this juncture is to think far more aggressively about the role of search engines, user-oriented feeds and user redistribution. This means thinking more clearly about each article as a robustly featured and strongly branded digital object whose value can travel through user-defined channels and gain value through its travels. As with many publishers the "safe haven" offered by syndication partners such as Yahoo is likely in the end to limit the revenue growth potential of IDG that can be gained by dealing with users as much more powerful partners in the content distribution game. Our best wishes to Patrick in his new role: hopefully he will spread the seeds of vContent on fertile ground.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:57 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:12 AM |
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| Tuesday, November 22, 2005 |
Well, it took some chutzpah to have their new weblog's coming-out party at the Rainbow Room under a corporate-sounding name and a good amount more humility to say that it was a bad idea. Open Source Media has announced that it is returning to operations under its original Pajamas Media moniker, according to a a weblog entry by founders Charles Johnson and Roger L. Simon who eat a raw chunk of crow and admit that the "time to be grownups" approach requested by their financial backers was not working in the user-generated media marketplace. Presumably the PM branding will be applied to the new OSM infrastructure, and possibly a more personal editorial voice as well, as suggested in our earlier post. Weblogs require brand building on a much more personal level than traditional media outlets, which can be a challenge for suppliers who are trying to mix mainstream content sources and packaging with user-generated media. Media in general is all about generating valuable endorsements, both explicit and implicit: user-generated media takes that concept of endorsement much further into the content itself than other media, but it's the same game on a peer level more than an expert/god/goddess level. Corporate packaging can offset that peer-level endorsement value if it's not done in a way that allows individual voices to express their weight and value effectively. On the other hand, you can blow both your personal and corporate branding by trying to "play the heavy" in personal content: Jason Calacanis, now in the role of shepherding Weblogs, Inc. through the AOL empire, breathed hot and heavy recently in a recent post on his weblog, threatening to call out the AOL lawyers to deal with a blatant ripoff of the Weblogs, Inc. design. People want to know that you have some power in personal content, but they want to know that it's your personal power and brand that's in play. Somehow I can't imagine Jason's approach playing very well with either corporate parents or your audience. As more mainstream content begins to rub shoulders with personal content these complex branding issues are going to become harder to manage for both individuals and the corporations who would like to leverage one another's talents and brand value. Content packaging is just beginning to bring these somewhat conflicting and contrasting branding issues into focus, with effective resolutions few and far between.
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:03 PM |
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The Washington Post notes along with other majors the birth of the World Digital Library, an effort led by the Library of Congress with financial backing from Google and in partnership with other national libraries such as those of Russia, Spain, Brazil, France and The Netherlands. The goal is to create a common online repository of public-domain works such as rare books, manuscripts, maps, posters, stamps and other materials collected from around the world. Already Google has helped the Library of Congress to digitize thousands of works, so this is a reminder of sorts to the library community at large that Google is in line with the core mission of archivists worldwide. Yet as pointed out by Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Watch if you'd read The San Francisco Chronicle's article on "A World Library Online" via SFGate today you'd be reading about how Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle is saving the world from the rash plans of Google through the Open Content Alliance initiative. Key quote from the SFGate: "I had a feeling of being back in the early days of open source software -- where everybody was there because they hated Microsoft," said Paul Duguid, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems. "This was the un-Google meeting." The SFGate article replays the OCA party line about "evil" Google trying to make commercial hay of their scanned content. Yet further down in the piece we learn of Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile machine, a unit which is able to pop out scanned books into very credible print facsimiles of an original. Gee, that doesn't have much commercial potential, does it...? OCA has some great thinkers, some great content and some great goals, but it's time for this "my global vision is more pure than yours" nonsense to come to a halt. OCA members have commerce on their minds just as much as any one else and Google has a genuine interest in making public domain content available to the world as much as OCA members. The only point where OCA winds up being a "kinder and gentler" force is in its being more solicitous of publishers' fears of Google's efforts. Fear-driven marketing generally turns audiences off in the long run, a factor being discovered by Sony BMG in its efforts to introduce spyware into is DRM for audio CDs ( eWeek). At some point OCA is going to have to implement support for commercial content as well as public domain content, at which time the true shape of this commercial competition with Google will become more clear. Until then, spin doctors will do what they can to shift the dirt to the other guy.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:32 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:30 AM |
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| Monday, November 21, 2005 |
Ah, print, the darling of trade publishers everywhere. It's still a potent weapon in today's B2B marketing wars, but with trade events and online publications soaring in their revenue mixes today's B2B publishers are oftentimes perplexed as to how to deal with the shifting strategic role of print. Just as yesteryear's battleships and today's aircraft carriers had to adapt their strengths to new types of missions B2B print publications can find important roles in today's business marketing mix - if they cede their former glories to new types of strategic and tactical roles. After all, how many things does an executive get in the mail these days that they really want to open? Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:18 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:39 AM |
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| Sunday, November 20, 2005 |
The San Jose Convention Center was the new venue for this conference, reflecting a faster pace and bustle and appropriately enough, a city center rather than the technical complexes of Santa Clara. The KM World and Streaming Media conferences run concurrently, and have adjoining exhibitions. This year, there was significant traffic from the KM conferences and exhibits into Streaming Media, as business solutions now involve streaming media technologies. Overall, this year's program emphasized the application of the theory from last year's show, translated into actual practice. Recognizing that KM comes in multiple flavors, Tom Davenport, the keynote speaker, focused on different categories of knowledge workers, and the strategies that can be applied within the categories for 1) process and measurement, 2) organizational technology, 3) personal technologies, 4) social networks and 5) physical workspaces. These theme carried through to the individual sessions. Search strategies dominated both the conference sessions and the exhibit floor, with the greater understanding that content management builds the repositories for various types of search. The challenge of relevant search is delivering the right content to the right knowledge worker at the right time. Collecting the content involves integration into workflow processes, and collecting relationships, not just the text itself, the domain of social networking applications. RSS and blogs are part of the technology to enable this process. More details on those sessions can be found on the Shore Industry Events blog. Just as knowledge management has many flavors, so does search technology. Deciphering the value of search companies is a major challenge, since their marketing messages all sound remarkably alike, equally incomprehensible. Hence the opportunities for the increase in consulting companies on the exhibit floor and preconferences (as well as the speaker/book authors on the program) to guide customers through the maze of competing "secret sauces". As another dimension, the luncheon panel hosted by Verity, focused on conveying the value of enterprise search to executive management differentiating between the consumer search engines (meaning Google/Yahoo) and the varieties of enterprise search, which require relevance, not popularity. The same challenge faces the fast growing world of business blogs, which have to be differentiated from the personal journalism public blogs. Knowledge comes in more than just text formats, and that realization was woven through the sessions for both KM World and Streaming Media. Personal knowledge management is not just the desktop, but also mobile devices, which become a format for delivering earnings calls for public companies, and expanding communication with constituents for public agencies, as well as a disaster recovery backbone. Streaming media provides for educational events, such as the Live Webinar on search, as well as delivering healthcare information to consumers. More details are covered in the Shore Industry Events blog. Overall, these conferences are an excellent snapshot of the current state of approaches and vendors in knowledge management. The case studies are particularly instructive in looking at the dimensions of real life situations. Enterprises are tasked with solving problems, not buying technology, and the multitude of "so-called" solutions actually fit best in specialized domains, where they can provide high value. As this process continues, look for more consolidation, such as the Verity and Autonomy merger, represented separately for the moment. On the other hand, other useful technologies will emerge, such as Grokker, a last minute addition to the exhibit floor, with their exciting visualization technology for traditional published content in aggregated databases. Stay tuned for next year's developments in this fast moving space!
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By Jean Bedord - posted at 2:50 PM |
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| Friday, November 18, 2005 |
