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| Friday, December 30, 2005 |
 Reuters reports on the idle dream of a U.K. college student hard-pressed to come up with his tuition money that turned into big money overnight. His Million-Dollar Home Page sells ad space for $1 a pixel for advertisers wanting to put up a graphic with a link and some supporting text that pops up when you point your screen cursor over an item. Kind of a dumb idea? Maybe so, except for one thing - the page has almost completely sold out its inventory of a million ad display pixels and has attracted attention from potential investors. Even more significantly, the page is generating traffic for advertisers that is providing an excellent return on investment, attracting big-name advertisers along with smaller fry trying to get some sort of visibility in the limitless space of Web advertising. What's at play here is an old idea that has found new life in the Web community. Think of Million-Dollar Home Page like a microscopic Times Square of online ads, random signage that's attractive in its ability to entertain people by the sheer number of large and small interesting and novel sights in a crowd. There's something very fundamental about enjoying picking something interesting out from a busy landscape, I suppose. Regardless of the metaphor that applies to this phenomenon it is interesting that this idea is proven out with such tiny pieces of variable Web real estate within a fixed block. Million-Dollar Home Page is proving this out in a very static model, but imagine what this could look like if it were combined with auctioned contextual advertising and social bookmarking topic heatmaps found on services such as del.icio.us. Ad values could soar per pixel of attractive screen real estate in the most valuable contexts and be tweaked from click to click depending on a given audience. The power of tiny advertising units is proven out already in a small way with VietmamNet, which provides tiny logo ads on the section headers of its navigation. It's a little like a ride in a Tokyo subway, where every tiny surface that the eye can appreciate gets used for ad space. In 2006 the key to big ad dollars online may be borne out in thinking about smaller increments of screen space that can be of use to advertisers and attractive to audiences.
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By John Blossom - posted at 6:56 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:38 AM |
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| Thursday, December 29, 2005 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:56 AM |
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| Wednesday, December 28, 2005 |
WSJ Online notes that in the face of free competitors such as Web portals, Craigslist and ad-supported street handouts many newspaper companies have decided to...raise their ad rates. While this would seem to defy some basic rules of economics regarding supply and demand, it's been a tactic that has at least stanched the blood of falling revenues in the short run. WSJ notes that Gannett Co.'s USA Today has been able to keep ad revenues at least flat through an 8 percent raise in rates as ad packages dropped 6 percent for the last six months, so at least the move has kept the cash flowing. But obviously the move is towards smaller audiences who prefer print delivery. At this rate newspapers may yet fulfill the dark view of the future found in the EPIC 2015 online multimedia essay: in EPIC 2015 ( nee EPIC 2014) it's presumed that by 2014 The New York Times will fold and become a newsletter for the elderly and the elite. But would that be such a bad thing? As noted in The New York Times itself, SoBe News, the developers of Ocean Drive magazine for the affluent South Beach community in Miami, Florida, is launching a magazine with a fixed circulation of 25,000 in February. The magazine will be distributed exclusively to current and prospective owners of condominiums developed by a Florida developer. The ability of print to appeal to upscale readers with time on their hands and coffee tables on which to put flashy status magazines is going to keep ad costs comfortably high for these types of niche publications for quite some time to come, especially when it's an elite few who can receive them at all. Much of the Times' print ad content is decidedly upscale already, as is its community-oriented content, so to some degree the Times is already on this path of catering to the carriage trade and drifting away from mass audiences. The answer to the dilemma of what to do with print may be to push harder to make it a more exclusive medium, both through demographics and the quality of personalized services that can be made available in customized print delivery. As to what this may mean for the quality of news coverage is a debate for another day, but it's a trend that's progressing perhaps far more quickly than even EPIC 2015 is predicting. The sooner that news publishers can move away from status quo print publications the sooner that they'll find a solid bottom to falling circulation and through loyal and appreciative targeted audiences.
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:10 PM |
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While I am fond of using Amazon.com as much as the next person, I tend to view it much as I would any other store: find what you need, get out and do something else. Amazon is designed to make a content purchaser as smart as possible in as little time as possible; its pioneering pre-eminence in content ecommerce still leaves most outlets in the dust. I appreciate the Nordstrom's-like pampering I get on my visits via the contextual information that the site makes available such as reviews, looking inside the books and such, which help to enhance the purchasing experience, but at the end of the day it's still more of a storefront than a destination. So when The New York Times notes that Amazon is hosting weblogs of authors whose books are sold through their portal it's an interesting feature that brings the portal closer to being a destination site for people who want to hear from authors more directly. As shown in the example page for the Amazon Connect weblogging program, content from authors can be read as a part of one's personal Amazon home page, including mentions of local appearances and reflections on other topics that can help to build a relationship with an author. While book publishers offer promotional opportunities for their authors via online content through their own portals, Amazon is the first to try to aggregate weblogs from book authors in an environment that encourages interaction with authors in such a well-integrated content ecommerce experience. It's an extension of existing marketing methods in some ways - authors travel regularly to libraries and other community settings to speak and to interact with readers - but weblogs have the ability to bring communities to the author in ways that can build into more different kinds of revenue streams. Expect to see more authors develop online content in 2006 that will draw new kinds of revenues beyond book royalties.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:33 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:22 AM |
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| Tuesday, December 27, 2005 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:49 PM |
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| Monday, December 26, 2005 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:58 PM |
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Content crystal ball-gazers, rejoice: the best is yet to come in 2006 as publishers and technology companies vie for the hearts of publishing-savvy users looking for personal and professional content. Shore sees investing in users for 2006 revolving around four trendy "Ps" shaping content today: packaging, platform, premium and personalization. Watch the cash flowing into these investment area quickly as both established and new players in publishing get very, very serious about who is going to be on top when realigning business models settle down. You'll need real-time tea leaves to keep up with the content deals in 2006, but fear not - we'll be with you every step of the way. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:07 AM |
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| Friday, December 23, 2005 |
 While in Rome this October I had the good fortune of being interviewed by Robin Good for his open source movie The Weblog Project; my contribution was posted today. I was pretty tired by the time he rolled the camera but it was fun in any event and I am honored to be a part of this innovative work. I wished that I had mentioned how in some ways Rome is the birthplace of weblogs via the diurna journals from the age of the Roman Empire that slaves would compose and send back to their masters out in their countryside villas. Oh well, next time. Here's our clip (Apple format) along with a transcript...Here's the same on Nessuno.tv's site in Windows Media format, a little better contrast
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:38 PM |
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In this holiday season, we remind you to reach for the stars... for how will we ever get to the stars unless we reach for them? Our very best wishes to you, your families and your colleagues for a peaceful holiday season and a New Year that brings joy and dreams worth reaching for! From all of us at Shore Communications Inc.  Click here to view our online greeting card
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:45 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:41 AM |
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| Thursday, December 22, 2005 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:37 AM |
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| Wednesday, December 21, 2005 |
CNET News covers proposals for new U.S. legislation backed by major broadband Internet access providers to charge varying rates for varying types of traffic. This is a move which is meant to increase the ability of major ISPs to pave the way for more profits as video programming, IP telephony and other streaming media begin to gear up for Web delivery. While some of the proposed legislation (PDF) provides good basic regulatory reforms in light of the merging of telecommunications, television and Web marketplaces, it also sets the stage for ISPs trying to move from Internet access being a neutral commodity to a service that will have tiered pricing for different levels of access quality for content providers. Given the bandwidth-intensive requirements for streaming video and other content sources reliant on high bandwidth services there's perhaps more than a grain of sense to this proposal. But it also may wind up deterring the market penetration of these services as content providers find themselves having to wrestle with a new layer of commercial arrangements that may have to be onpassed to their audiences in one form or another more directly. Given that multimedia services are an increasingly important element for premium content providers maintaining and accelerating their market penetration the need to deal with premium communications fees is likely to slow that penetration, and hence slow the development of services. This may be good for major ISPs intent on creating their own video and phone services, hence their push. It also may tend to put a drag on other types of publishers that find themselves having to pony up to have performance that's on a par with their competitors in an escalating ISP fee war. Publishers of all kinds would be wise to look at this potential legislation carefully and to consider how their own lobbying efforts may need to be accelerated to ensure that they are not going to find themselves grabbing the short end of the available bandwidth. While it's important to make sure that there's adequate funds for building out broadband facilities it's probably best to have those funds come from more intelligently scaled user access fees that allow them to choose the quality of overall performance that suits them best.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:30 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:17 AM |
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| Tuesday, December 20, 2005 |
There was a great collection of headlines on paidContent.org highlighting some of the mounting skepticism surrounding the Web 2.0 movement. In summary the inability of Web 2.0 protagonists to define the boundaries of this buzzword sometimes makes it difficult for it to mean something that can really translate into a serious discussion, much less a business plan. Even Richard MacManus, one of the people initiating the use of this concept, has pulled the plug on Web 2.0, saying that he plans to be "focusing on more media-related web technology." We pulled the plug on Web 2.0 in October, of course, arguing that Web 2.0 was the tail of the content dog that's wagging easily deployed publishing technologies in more venues than ever before. At the time we said "Content 2.X is the technology business evolving along with the publishing business into a common content business in partnership with their audiences." We're still on target, as far as I can see. There is a lot of great creative thinking revolving and evolving around the easily deployed technologies that are at the center of Web 2.0, but the real opportunity is in creating monetizable content value, not infrastructure. This is something that publishers and media companies are getting better at day by day as they learn how to focus on user needs in a plethora of new contexts. Web 2.0 is dead: long live Content 2.x!
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:17 PM |
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What's a "widget"? It's a digital module of computer program code and content that acts like an independent object within a given set of technologies. When the technologies of choice for widgets are based on the popular open standards for HTML, XML and JavaScript then it becomes easy to build popular widgets that can deliver sophisticated content services in standard Web browser environments without a lot of other technology getting in the way. This pretty much describes the widgets available through the new Google Homepage API, a new toolkit that allows anyone to develop interactive content that can be embedded on a user's personalized Google homepage. Yahoo also has a JavaScript-based Widget application, but unlike Google's it is a kit that allows very slickly designed graphic tools to be integrated into a desktop via a software download: they're not browser-based and therefore separate from a user's MyYahoo home page. While Yahoo gets the nod in terms of the visual sophistication of their tools and the breadth of widgets already built, Google is much closer in its browser-based approach to bringing useful content-serving applications into the environment in which most people consume content. This makes it far more likely that the Google approach will yield valuable content-oriented widgets. The widgets available through the Google Homepage API also benefit from the easy-to-use Google Homepage itself, in which headlines and other sources can be rearranged easily on the page with drag-and-drop clicks of a mouse. By comparison the MyYahoo home page requires more awkward rearrangement of page elements. This all adds up to a very prominent message to content producers that the aggregation of content is beginning to take on new dynamics via the development of widgets. Instead of trying to bring users to portals of a publisher's design publishers need to recognize that more and more content is being consumed in other portal environments, including the intranet portals of businesses and institutions. Via tools such as Google's widgets it becomes possible to maintain a personalized relationship with a user via a portal-embedded content delivery tool, enabling both information and technology services to be combined easily in an environment that users are drawn to on a regular basis. Unlike widgets developed for enterprise portals, though, the Google API opens up the possibility of widgets that do not require any institutional infrastructure: widgets can begin to have a life of their own, becoming digital content objects in and of themselves. There will be the usual little tools, toys and mashups developed for the Google Homepage API, but content providers would do themselves a favor by looking at this environment carefully and considering how they can create highly functional digital outposts on a major portal that can integrate in with a user's other favorite content and work tools. At the same time portal software developers would do themselves a favor by considering how easily imported widgets can allow users to assemble content-enabled digital objects in any environment a user desires. These are simple beginnings for online widgets, but harbingers of a major trend in content development.
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:57 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:54 PM |
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| Monday, December 19, 2005 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:54 AM |
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| Saturday, December 17, 2005 |
Maybe it's just me, but surfing the Web lately has become an increasingly frustrating experience. Without question, the major search engines have made tremendous strides in expanding the scope of their coverage, increasing the frequency of their updates, and most importantly of all, discerning the relevancy of search results. This is all for the good. Yet at the same time, an equal if not greater amount of intellectual energy and creativity has been expended on getting between users and their search results in the name of commerce. And the cumulative impact of all these tricks and games is beginning to counteract some of the true advances in search. I first noticed this with paid search links. Every so often, I'd be searching on something incredibly obscure, and my search results would contain a paid ad from eBay claiming the item was for sale on its site. "Not darn likely," I thought, and after some searching on eBay, I determined I was correct. eBay wants me to visit its site so badly it's willing to misrepresent itself to maximize traffic. I am seeing a number of retailers doing this as well. Type in a search for Brand A, and you'll see lots of links to retailers claiming to sell that brand. Click on the link, and you'll find they sell only the competitor to Brand A. Clever online marketing? No, because the retailer has angered me by wasting my time. Good for search engines? No, because these experiences teach me to discount and distrust paid links. You've probably also noticed the growth in pseudo-directories; sites that you land on by accident (or, increasingly, by misrepresentation) that contain endless lists of paid links, or search features that produce only lists of paid links as results. A close cousin of these sites are the notorious "link farms," sites created to make other sites look more popular and thus raise their ranking in search results. There are also a growing number of links that re-direct you from content you want to see to content a merchandiser wants you to see. Is this a problem? I think it is, because it reduces the ability of the search engines to deliver a fast and dependable result. Also, keep in mind that I am just discussing navigational sleight of hand. This doesn't even begin to address the growing issue of content accuracy and trustworthiness. The more I think about all these issues, the more I see a strong future for some form of vertical search. Interestingly, vertical search to date has focused on presenting users with highly focused content, which has value. That's all well and good, but the more I use the general search engines, the more I think that the real value of vertical search will be not only that it provides focused content, but that at the same time it is also providing filtered content, creating treasure by taking out the trash.
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By Russell - posted at 3:05 PM |
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As surely as the birth of jazz music was shunned by many classically trained musicians the rise of user-generated media has gained the scorn of many professional content producers. But when you're using pretty much the same tools as any professional producers in a medium that reaches the world as easily as any one the differing qualities of user-publishers should not be discounted too quickly. User-generated media from individuals and institutions is more than just a fad - it's the major publishing trend of our times that has informed and modified how we approach professional publishing forever. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:10 AM |
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| Friday, December 16, 2005 |
With the ability to mash together content and technology from all sorts of sources into newly useful combinations gaining prominence the launch of Alexa Web Crawl this week( ClickZ News) makes it that much easier for innovative thinkers to create content aggregation services by using the Alexa cache of 4 billion Web pages and its search service to identify and publish content that's of key interest to specific audiences. Amazon's Alexa service will even provide hosting for your application if you're so inclined. It's a far more aggressive repurposing of content caching than even Google's promotion of its APIs for useful mashups - and one that probably opens at least as many questions regarding the repurposing of copyrighted content for potential commercial use. When all the world's a database the power tends to flow to those who can repurpose that global database most effectively - placing ever more pressure on publishers to package their content for maximum value in era of open content repurposing. It also calls into question just how much longer search engine crawlers are going to be welcomed universally into the sites of content owners trying to attract audiences of their own. With Alexa's hooks into statistical ranking of Web sites the likelihood of Alexa being rated "crawler spam" is relatively low for now. In fact, such a product may help to alleviate the burden of crawlers over time if Alexa's caching can provide more effective information with fewer complications than direct crawling. But in The New Aggregation, an environment in which owning databases and distribution is less important than owning the context of content usage, publishers are going to have to adopt their product packaging and marketing for obtaining maximum value in far-flung contexts that are often many times removed from their point of origin. Alexa Web Crawl is at the very early stages of its development but it augurs the development of more value from search-based applications that are removed from the search engines themselves. Welcome to the era of search publishing, where crawling content is just the first stage in developing valuable tailored online publications for focused audiences.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:27 PM |
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Washington Post reports on Google's $1 billion-dollar victory in the contest for AOL's quest for an online ad and technology partner, a coup that had pitted Google against Microsoft and Yahoo. Of the options available to AOL it was clearly the best match and a great match for Google as well. In Microsoft AOL would have had a search partner with unproven ability to deliver sizeable audiences across the consumer spectrum and one with its own portal ambitions via MSN. Yahoo would have provided a much more media-savvy partner with a strong advertising product and strong user-generated media capabilities - perhaps too strong for a company that is already well down the road with integrating user-generated media and video into its own portal capabilities. And although Yahoo's search capabilities have strengthened considerably in the past year they have failed to make much of a dent in its stagnant market penetration. In Google AOL gains the industry's leading source of online contextual ads, the strongest and fastest growing search presence, the most innovative approaches to user-oriented content aggregation via leading technologies and little direct competition to its established base of in-house and licensed content. AOL specializes in creating online communities and in listening carefully to its user base. Google is rather awkward when it comes to dealing with the human element of content but has the vision to create brilliant technologies that will bring users closer to the content that they want. The cultures are about as far apart as one could imagine - rather the opposite problems of the AOL/Time Warner merger - but with a mere 1 percent stake in AOL the pressures to combine the uncombinable are not likely to be great for some time to come. Add in Google's recent launch of XML-based modules for adding applications, mashups and other content to Google Homepages ( CNET News) and you're looking at an extremely powerful base of content technology capabilities that can boost this potent combination of media giants into new levels of exposure and profitability. The wild card in all of this is the power of user-generated media as a draw for large-scale content sites: Yahoo has been very aggressive in its recent acquisitions and partnering moves for social networks and content, moves that may not pan out in the short term for profits but that hold great long-term promise. Google's popular Blogger.com lags in functionality in comparison to other leading providers but has a strong market share, while its Orkut.com social networking portal has good traffic but little mindshare and lagging functionality as well. Yahoo may luck out with its user-generated media moves and create a more fun place to visit than the combination of AOL and Google can manage. But the key for 2006 will be who can draw the most ad dollars as quickly as possible; from this perspective the combination of mature and growing Google and AOL capabilities could be ringing in the most profitable combination of all of the majors.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:16 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:49 AM |
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| Thursday, December 15, 2005 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 7:34 AM |
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| Wednesday, December 14, 2005 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 7:39 AM |
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| Tuesday, December 13, 2005 |
While the image of the online investor has tended to center around macho tools to help daily traders of securities and aggressive fund-pickers, the truth of the matter is that most of today's investors are oriented towards keeping long-term nest eggs in good shape through well-reasoned asset allocation management. So the announcement of Morningstar's acquisition of the privately held asset allocation services of Ibbotson Associates for $83 million in cash seems like a very well timed deal to bolster Morningstar's already powerful online presence for individual and professional investors. Ibbotson's provides investment consulting for asset allocation and fund research as well as and investment management capabilities to institutions that will complement Morningstar's professional products and services. According to the announcement this acquisition will make Morningstar one of the largest independent providers of managed retirement accounts in the industry, making for easier decisions in the workplace for 401(k) plans and other investment vehicles that are the most frequent points of investment management for most individuals. Morningstar's acquisition of Ibbotson positions them more powerfully as a full-service provider to retail investment advisors and managers. It's a move that meets consumers at their real point of need for goal-oriented long-term investing rather than stopping where traditional financial trading and investment management content and technologies leave people short of those goals. But it's also indicative of a broader trend of content providers building execution value through enhanced services that meet the multi-faceted needs of their audiences. This helps to diversify revenue streams away from the traditional sources found in advertisements, subscriptions and events. Maximizing the ability to execute transactions via the context of a content service is the key to content offerings in most any environment where a high involvement with content leads to sales of products and services. It's as important for content providers to understand what people want to buy and how they want to buy it as it is for their advertisers and channel partners, so that they can add as much value as possible to the execution of a transaction with a user.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:48 AM |
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Reuters reports on plans by HarperCollins to start scanning its inventory of 20,000 book titles into digital form so that Web search engines can index them for online audiences. There are no immediate plans as to how HarperCollins plans to monetize books via this effort, but clearly book publishers are beginning to realize that new market channel strategies are going to be required if they are to maximize profits from online access and sales moving forward. HarperCollins chief executive Jane Friedman told Reuters "This is going to be a costly initiative," likely in the millions. Heavens. Actual investment in new business models. Friedman is quite right that book publishers have to take better control of their own inventory and stop treating online marketing as something best left to others with well-established online retail capabilities. Channel partners such as Amazon, Google and the Open Content Alliance are certainly good "clicks" equivalents to the "bricks" retailers that have serviced the book publishing industry for centuries, but the value of all online content revolves increasingly around the communities that have interest in it. Publishers of all kinds are beginning to realize that leaving that community-building entirely to search engines and content portals disintermediates them from both revenues and relationship -building capabilities. Book publishers are not very far along on this path, but as the tenor of their attitude towards online search engines and portals shifts from crying foul and conservative aggregation plays to staking out a claim of their own using books as premium destination content they are far more likely to develop their own highly profitable online presences. This may result in business models new to book publishers in some instances while in other instances it may mean breathing new life into very old models such as serialization via ad-supported distribution. Whatever the outcomes may be it all starts with committing your inventory to having its own independent online presence. Here's to HarperCollins succeeding in establishing a strong new presence online where books can thrive in new and exciting ways.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:56 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:53 AM |
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During the last week, a group of panelists joined in discussing different aspects of the Google story, focusing on its accomplishments and ambitions, with the full commentary at SiliconValley.com. Each of us brought our own perspective, so I am sharing this with our readers: "While much of this conversation has focused on Google as a company, I look at Google through the eyes of a researcher trying to find answers. Google changed the market for online information by making the world of HTML content more easily accessible and enabling mashups such as maps and addresses, which were difficult to do in a different technical environment. But there's a universe of information that's not accessible, premium content, and the content in databases as well...as Gary Price documents so very well at www.ResourceShelf.com . Then go over and look at http://www.docuticker.com/ see the variety of reports being generated by our tax money and non-profit organizations. I see two challenges finding this content in Google, and reasons to move to other resources. The first is that general search engine technology is still in its infancy for retrieving relevant information. (Vertical search works very well for this problem!) Books and reports don't have PageRank, but are authoritative sources. There are some brilliant minds working on this aspect of retrieval, so this area should improve. It's startling how different the search results can be in different search engines. The second challenge is much more intractable, and that is rights management which has always been messy (even worse than water rights), and has become more so in the digital age. Steve Arnold has mentioned that legal issues could have a significant impact on Google. I have to second that....the engineering mentality and brashness of youth doesn't recognize that content producers own their intellectual property and have the right to determine usage. Granting permission is a fundamental aspect of content management, and Google has to grow up to understand the implications of that. They could find themselves with Microsoft sized legal bills, and court mandated changes to their business.........."
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By Jean Bedord - posted at 2:15 AM |
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| Monday, December 12, 2005 |
Reuters reports along with other majors the acquisition of social bookmarking service del.icio.us by Yahoo, yet another move by the online portal giant into user-generated media. Del.icio.us traffic has been soaring over the past month according to Alexa stats, presumably in association with the takeover, and has shown steady traffic growth throughout the year. While boasting 300,000 registrants the deal is less about raw traffic than about building on the "go to" buzz that has grown around the social bookmarking service, which provides a common repository of links to pages that interest its users. Combined with its recent launch of Yahoo Answers and its earlier acquisition of social photo sharing site Flikr, Yahoo is shoving a big stake in the ground to become a leading destination site for user-generated media. The ultimate value of user-generated media in and of itself may be debatable in some ways - del.icio.us is usually awash in trivial bookmarks that are as much about self-promotion as genuine content sharing - but in many ways its the LACK of "quality" that gives a service such as del.icio.us its true quality. Del.icio.us acts as a real-time barometer of people's online habits, providing raw ratings of what's of interest to people on the Web that would be otherwise very difficult to obtain. The ease of bookmarking pages with del.icio.us makes it a simple "voting" mechanism" that distinguishes pages of content that were visited from content that people are willing to recommend to others. That's herd mentality, to be sure, but as the herd defines for itself what's interesting it creates instantaneous trend tracking and packaging that most traditional mass-media publications could only dream about. While search engines are going to remain a solid point of reference for problem-solving content retrieval, social bookmarking is just beginning to come into its own as a service that can help browsers to get a sense of what's the most important current content in a given subject area. The "micro-trends" identified in social bookmarks will help to create finely tuned marketing opportunities in much the same way that stock tickers identify windows of opportunity for securities trades as a day unfolds. Bear in mind also that it's not always the latest and greatest content that will be identified via a social bookmarking service: sometimes items in "the long tail" of content not in the media spotlight are rediscovered by people and re-exposed via a social bookmarking service, creating a complex heat map of interests that will require more sophisticated marketing techniques to exploit. Yahoo seems to be winning the battle of getting to the pulse of users via user-generated media, but it will be a long war with many new developments to come in 2006.
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:33 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:31 AM |
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| Friday, December 09, 2005 |
NetImperative picks up on the Skype Internet telephony service's integration of local business listings from Thomson Directories. Business Listings will appear at the top of the page and a list of businesses will appear down the left hand side which are then geographically displayed on a map. The listings enable one-click voice calling to a merchant via Skype's network by clicking on the provided business. With a proliferation of interest in pay-per-call this year what better place to get PPC integrated than the phone itself? The telephone is not just a communications device but an instrument that people reach for to solve problems. Let us not forget that the first words spoken via a telephone were "Watson, come here, I need you." Thinking of Yahoo's interest in integrating telephony into their offerings and their recent launch of Yahoo Answers, it will be interesting to see when the day will come when instead of picking up a mouse to get our online questions answered we will instead simply speak into our online headsets and find ourselves connected to the person who has the answer to our needs. A day perhaps closer than we may think, given the rapid integration of voice and directory services with online portals.
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:41 PM |
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RSS feeds used to syndicate weblogs and other simple XML-formatted content have made it possible for people from all walks of life to be content distributors, something that used to be reserved for news organizations, stock markets and the like. So it's kind of interesting that StreetIQ.com is partnering with FeedBurner to provide financial quote data in a standardized XML format via FeedBurner's platform. FeedBurner will be using FinancialContent's RSS format for financial data to provide standard metadata such as ticker symbols and market categorizations. This kind of extension allows market commentary via text and podcasts to be pulled into applications that can place related content contextually around the feed's output. The unsung virtue of RSS and related simple XML-based syndication tools is the ability to insert more sophisticated XML packaging with a general XML wrapper. If the receiving application does not have mapping for these elements they're ignored, allowing simple transmission of content for those who need it and sophisticated transmissions for those who do - all without any changes to coding on the receiver's end. With a proliferation of highly sophisticated content channels in professional financial circles RSS is in some ways a forgotten stepchild at this point by hard-core traders, but as StreetContent.com illustrates RSS can allow a proliferation of far more sophisticated financial content on an opt-in subscription basis than may have otherwise been the case. Financial institutions looking to hold down costs may want to consider other extensions of RSS that could allow for the simple establishment of information streams to prospective institutional buyers and sellers. The idea of transmitting sophisticated XML-packaged objects with a wide variety of content and transaction elements embedded in them is just beginning to come into its own and can be expected to accelerate as institutions seek to develop new ways to have execution capabilities built into every communication with the marketplace. RSS may not be the right vehicle for many of these communications, but it may turn out to be an interesting staging ground for institutions who need to re-invigorate one-to-one relationships with trading partners who are already embracing RSS feeds with enthusiasm.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:23 PM |
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Red Herring notes along with others the debut of Yahoo Answers, a Beta site that leverages user expertise rather than professional researchers to answer questions on a wide variety of questions. As RH points out this is a play for user-generated content, and a very interesting one at that. Online group discussions in list servers, bulletin boards and other community-oriented content services are oftentimes the venue for questions posed to a group of user-experts, but in those venues questions from amateurs are oftentimes ignored or serviced by a relatively narrow group. Yahoo Answers turns this formula on its head and focuses on the questions as the bait for any one to answer. As seen in the service already there is no lack of questions in the world. From " What is the phone number for WQUI 95.9 in Detroit?" to " How did Johnny Cash get the scar on his face?" to " How to analyze literary texts and short stories?Could you give some tips for analyzing and examples?" Yahoo Answers has plenty of questions, though not that many answers yet - and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think the most fascinating thing about this new service is the way that it treats questions as content in and of themselves, content that can be matched to advertisements pointing to goods and services that can answer a question, to be sure, but much more than that as well. Questions content can give an extremely valuable map into what people are really trying to answer in their queries that doesn't come out in typical search engine queries, where users are used to limiting the scope of their wording to meet the capabilities in search engines. This is enormously valuable market research in and of itself: instead of asking people questions to learn about their needs and attitudes, learn about those same things by the questions that are most important for them to answer, with the semantic details needed for finer analysis in perfect context. As a service Yahoo Answers on day one is obviously well-designed in many aspects to be highly usable (though the search box placed in the lower-left part of the screen is awkward and the searches crude - doesn't handle plurals) and already has attracted a community of users who likes to answer questions on a wide variety of topics. Yahoo does the human side of things very well in their services. But one assumes that more than just a community is going to be needed to fill in the gaps of people who have immediate needs to be addressed. People are willing to wait for the answer to "What is the meaning of life?" but they may not be so patient for "How do I stop the bleeding?" With that in mind the other likely follow-up is that Yahoo will probably use this service as test input for the semantic processing of questions in general, so that more reference-oriented content can be integrated into the service one it's clear that it will service those questions effectively. Looking further down the road we may be looking at is phase one of development work on a natural language query interface that may someday become the primary interface for searches via Yahoo. It looks like simple questions may lead to some very sophisticated answers.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:38 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:32 AM |
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| Thursday, December 08, 2005 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:51 AM |
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| Wednesday, December 07, 2005 |
The Associated Press picks up on remarks by Francisco Pinto Balsemao, the head of the European Publishers Council at a recent conference in Brussels in which he backed strongly AFP news' $17.5 million suit against the Google News search engine's searching of copyrighted news content and called for a shift to more paid online content. The remarks have quite generated quite a stir of online comments, including these collected by CNET News. Mr. Balsemao may have some legitimate concerns, but given the success that many news organizations have had in leveraging the power of search engines, weblogs and other sources of online links to their Web sites, what is the real solution for people trying to assemble news sources from a variety of online sites? Do we outlaw search engines and herd people back to the mainstream news portals to consume content behind paid subscription walls? It seems as if the hybrid model being championed by the TimesSelect experiment may be a better compromise for publishers. paidContent.org notes that there are about 330, 000 subscribers to TimesSelect as of the end of November, about half of which were paying as online-only subscribers. At $50 a head that's about $8 million, roughly 4 percent of the $200 million in revenues this year to date from The New York Times online operations. There was a 19 percent growth rate in TimesSelect membership from October to November so given the strong attraction of new online revenues there's reason to think that this could represent at least ten percent of online revenues for them next year - enough to help pay for improvements to the product that can further improve product quality. Then again, if you have a local paper and are trying to wall out non-local "clicks" for local advertisers a fully walled site can make sense to some degree if there are no immediately available substitutes. American Journalism Review recounts how the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington went back to all-subscription and stabilized online readership at 1,000 paid subscriptions. But this model doesn't bode well for attracting new usage - it's more of a solution for publications that have saturated their market already. The real question to be answered is how newspaper and other established media are going to bridge the revenue gap between relatively low online ad rates, driven by an abundance of inventory on non-traditional sites, and relatively high paper-based rates. "Walled gardens" may attract higher quality audiences but they are not going to address the fundamentals of what determines online ad rates for sites of general interest. Worse still, as more sophisticated advertising and marketing tools reduce reliance on subscriptions as a qualifier for quality conversions, making your walled garden too big can reduce the likelihood that these tools will be exploited aggressively. The solution is not to blame the newcomers to publishing but to learn how to adapt to a new landscape that will not have much tolerance for paying for things just because it suits outdated business models. If publishers believe that quality is worth paying for, then go ahead and charge for it. As Times Select has shown it is possible to be profitable and to coexist with search engines. But be aware that the perception of quality in the eyes of advertisers and audiences is not likely to change just because you want it to. If audiences find satisfying legal alternatives to established products then respect their wishes and compete with those alternatives more effectively.
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:38 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:33 PM |
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Several months back I noted in our weblog a company called Factbites, a search technology company whose search results provided a knowledge outline for a given topic gleaned from content hosted at reference-oriented Web sites. Factbites itself has not progressed very far but Answers.com has answered the call to provide better knowledge outlines for reference content audiences with its announced acquisition of Brainboost, a search engine technology company that focuses on using natural language processing (NLP) to build knowledge outlines in search results. Brainboost technology uses NLP both to parse search queries formed in natural phrases and then looks at the semantics of its target content sources to find answers to those questions that match not just words but phrases that provide answers to the full human context of a question. The results can be quite powerful. If we were to ask "When was the Declaration of Independence Signed" to Brainboost, Ask Jeeves, Factbites and Google, we'd see that while Google may have come up with some good reference sites the actual answers in the content returned in the search results are far more accurate in Brainboost than any of the other sources. Although Factbites does let us know further down in its outline that most delegates signing the actual declaration did not do so until much later than the traditional 4 July 1776 signing date Brainboost lets you know this up in the top of the search results. So Brainboost not only points us to well-defined answers but also points us immediately to some of the controversies that may surround what seems like an easily answered question. Reference products are an excellent target for natural language processing, as I mentioned to Reuters News yesterday afternoon. The content targeted by reference services tends to be found in a few relatively focused sources and structured in answer-like phrases that will lend themselves to this technology's strengths. Ask Jeeves has promised this kind of capability for several years but since it needed to tune its capabilities to a wide range of search query types - product lookups, travel directions and such - the technology was never really tuned to the kinds of content that would yield naturally phrased answers to naturally phrased questions. It will be several months before we see the application of Brainboost technology to Answers.com but when we do see it expect Web users to begin to gain more confidence to formulate searches in natural phrases - and to be doing so via Answers.com. Thinking of how these capabilities could be applied to speech recognition interfaces may bring us far closer to Google's vision of a Star Trek-like computer churning out real answers to human questions far sooner than even Google will be able to deliver. Unless we see an acquisition some time soon...
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:00 AM |
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With patent spats in U.S. and Canadian courts threatening to unplug Blackberry users from content on their objects of desire it's a good time to consider how wise it is to be chasing one hot content platform after another with content licensing deals in hopes that publishers can keep in touch with their users. The ideal digital content platform for publishers is not the latest faddish gizmo but the digital objects that they create to run on these hardware platforms. Keeping content highly profitable in the midst of disposable technology wars means thinking long and hard about how you're really going to make money in the long run on from content users using these devices. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:21 AM |
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| Tuesday, December 06, 2005 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:04 AM |
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| Monday, December 05, 2005 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:44 AM |
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| Friday, December 02, 2005 |
Factiva's deal with LexisNexis to distribute their business news and information database into the legal sector gave them instant penetration via one of the most sophisticated tools available on legal desktops. Now comes the announcement of Factiva providing its Company Taxonomy tools to Fitch Ratings' Research product with company relationship data that will allow their research subscribers to navigate complex company relationships more easily. A toehold for more content yet to come? That's speculation, of course, but it demonstrates the wisdom of recognizing that an aggregation product cannot develop the perfect workflow for every audience. Savvy partnering with those products who "own" specific workflow relationships can make all the difference in creating market penetration where it's difficult to establish all-new channels cost-effectively. That's nothing new, but with greater flexibility to provide portions of their aggregation capabilities such as taxonomy toolkits today's aggregators are finding a much broader array of methods in which to enhance content through a partners' platform. As Web services become more sophisticated we'll see an even broader array of partnering capabilities open up for licensors and licensees. It's no longer just "let's license the feed" to get things going.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:49 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:45 AM |
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| Thursday, December 01, 2005 |
Google Base is filling up with content faster than a college mixer once the kegs are tapped. Both content and commerce-related items are being posted in a broad array of sectors, with most entries being outbound links to existing items' Web pages, a la eBay and other online services. One oddity about the "who" of this became fairly evident after a stroll through some product listings: many of the items being posted are from Amazon, though you wouldn't notice that from a casual glance. A relatively random query on products shows what appears to be a random array of Web sites posting books and other goods - booksforasteal.com, bideals.com, checkcheap.com - until you click on the links. They all lead to items posted at Amazon.com. Google Base provides Amazon with a more anonymous ecommerce environment for those who are looking for more home-grown suppliers, a way for Amazon to appeal to an eBay crowd without having to pay the eBay/PayPal freight for execution. An interesting thought when one remembers Amazon's plans to make more eBooks available for sale and possible rental. Google Base remains amorphous, messy and not terribly usable just yet, but you can begin to see clearly the outlines of how it's intended to be used. The data items that one can store in a Google Base record relative to a link become keywords for faceted navigation to those items stored elsewhere, providing fast and efficient filtering based on specific area of interests. And with this faceted navigation will come the potential to provide highly targeted ads and/or specialized storefronts for a range of goods. In this sense Google Base is a giant metadata factory, providing navigation elements based on user-contributed records that would not appear in typical Web page metadata. It's not the way that most companies would build metadata, but with a tip of the hat to social bookmarking tools with which users contribute keywording for Web pages it's a pretty clever way to encourage people to index the Web in a highly efficient, user-focused way. So much also for OpenURLs and DOIs - just keep your record in Google Base up to date and the world will beat a path to your content. Maybe.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:46 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:11 AM |
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