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| Tuesday, January 31, 2006 |
We'll be at the SIIA Information Industry Summit for the next two days, blogging along as time and batteries allow and providing you with insights into the thinking of the many leading figures in the content industry. Follow along as we add items to our Events Weblog. Stay tuned!
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:31 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:42 AM |
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 2006 is the year in which we'll see content companies making far greater investment in publishing infrastructure and in new marketing strategies to tailor their services to increasingly sophisticated users untethered from many traditional content sources, distribution channels and platforms. Shore sees four key areas where investing in users will be most active: packaging, platform, premium and personalization.. Our annual outlook details the major trends that will be impacting the content industry as seen by our award-winning team of industry analysts. Click here for details and a complimentary download
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:29 AM |
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| Monday, January 30, 2006 |
In an age of instantly available global content services the gestation period required to bring most any book to the marketplace seems to be far out of synch with the expectations of most of today's audiences. How do publishers maintain the integrity of book publishing while adapting to the expectations of an electronic era? Safari Books Online's new Rough Draft product line offers audiences a chance to peek at new books online as they're being developed and to provide useful feedback in the process - all for a premium price. In the process of doing so these publishers and audiences are reshaping the very nature of what a book is and can be as a form of vital content. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:51 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:33 PM |
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 User-generated media is still a work in progress, trying to find a model that allows it to amplify the best of mainstream media sources while adding its own unique value with original works. As noted in our earlier News Analysis on Gather mixing the two together in a community-driven publishing environment with monetary rewards for publishers is one important key to develop both ratings and loyalty, but we suggested that it would be nice to make the model more open and to onpass revenues directly to publishers. A new "private" beta product called Newsvine seems to be striking the right balance between core media, content, community commentary and original publishing. Newsvine takes news wire content from AP and wraps comments, chats, and rankings around them, but also provides the ability for users to "seed" other stories from Web links and to build the same type of community content around them, as well as around content posted from community members. Newsvine content can be fed via RSS or a Javascript tool that allows headlines from an RSS feed to be embedded in a Web page. Users whose content attracts ad clicks will get to keep the ad revenue from those pages, so there's a high motivation both to contribute content and to make a community aware of it. While the front-and-center AP content may offer a little less of a homespun community feel compared to a service like Gather it offers both strength and neutrality that is likely to accelerate contributions from a wider array of individuals who are looking for a tool that offers more real content and community than a Digg and more of an open model than a Gather. Newsvine is in its very early days but it seems to strike the most powerful balance between content from individuals and mainstream sources to date - with reasons for people to grow with the service that jingle in the pocket.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:18 AM |
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If you've been stopping by HighBeam Research as of late you no doubt have noticed that the search results from the HighBeam Library highlight both premium and free sources available from the online research service. Today this live "Beta" has been dubbed officially successful, as HighBeam announces the availability of both formerly premium sources such as BusinessWire, Financial Management and Science News for free via the HighBeam Library as well as high-quality sources from the open Web such as American History, CIO, Financial Advisor, Inc. and Wine Enthusiast. HighBeam will also gain free content shortly from the Oxford University Press, including The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English and The Oxford Pocket Thesaurus of Current English, while Oxford will also contribute additional premium content to HighBeam's reference collection. The HighBeam Library will also see new premium contributions from the archives of the Washington Post and Knight Ridder newspapers. Alexa stats show overall visits to HighBeam to be stabilizing somewhat over the past several weeks so the combination of premium and free content in a consolidated index is certainly finding some appeal among online researchers. This mix of monetization models is most likely to service the needs of online searchers who care far less about how content is gathered and licensed and far more about whether it actually does them any good. Putting free and paid sources of equivalent quality side-by-side is the best way to service these discriminating users who can choose their level of financial engagement accordingly. HighBeam is offering incremental steps towards unified searching of free and premium content, but they are steps headed in the right direction to be sure.
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:52 AM |
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Shore Senior Analyst Deb Wiley reports on the "smaller" convocation of 11,000 information professionals in San Antonio, Texas that revealed how search and monitoring services are allowing infopros to define valuable content services that provide measurable return on investment. Read Deb's full report on our Events Weblog
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:52 AM |
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| Friday, January 27, 2006 |
CNET News offers the best coverage in a confusing field of reports on weblog comments by Linus Torvalds, progenitor of the open source Linux operating system that powers many of the Web's servers. Torvalds states in his posting that he does not plan to convert his Linux code to support the proposed new version of the Free Software foundation's GNU General Public License, the legal instrument that has been the foundation of the open source programming movement for the past fifteen years. Section 3 of the proposed license, entitled "Digital Restrictions Management" (sic), states among other things that the new GPL license will not support "modes of distribution that deny users that run covered works the full exercise of the legal rights granted by this License." This means that works using DRM cannot be used as a distribution mechanism for software protected under this proposed license, but also that it would not be possible to create an open-source DRM system using the GPL Version 3 license. While Torvalds does not rant directly against the anti-DRM stance in his post, he is clearly opposed to the measure. To some degree he is no doubt thinking about the commercial viability of the widely used Linux software in an era in which publishers are trying to adopt viable strategies for protecting copyrighted materials. But I think that the larger issue is whether this is a legal provision that serves the public or whether it is a provision being used to frame an ill-formed political debate that has no real place in a legal document for open source software or other types of electronic content. The provisions of the proposed license state that "no permission is given to distribute covered works that illegally invade users' privacy" and yet at the same time it "intrinsically disfavors technical attempts to restrict users' freedom to copy, modify, and share copyrighted works." This is the core of the problem: if users are supposed to have their rights to personal privacy protected, shouldn't those rights include the ability to protect their intellectual property via technology as they see fit? In a world of user-generated media, "we" are "they"; it's individuals as much as media companies who need DRM to manage content that finds its greatest value in the hands of the audiences who use it and create it. "The commons" is an important feature in any successful community, but its value comes from people being able to have both common rights and personal rights. Pushing away DRM developers from a GPL framework will make it far less likely that a DRM framework that works for individuals as much as for institutions will see the light of day. That's bad for the commons as much as for private goals. Increasingly the commons will be found not in central repositories but in digital works distributed to and by individuals that have both public and private elements. Every author and user should have the right to define their comfort levels for what they consider public and private use of those digital works as they please within broader legal boundaries. Open source licensing has been a boon for online publishing; hopefully its proponents can find the right mix of recognizing the rights of individuals as both publishers and users of content that will carry it forward into the emerging era of user-distributed digital works.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:09 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:07 AM |
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| Thursday, January 26, 2006 |
Well, it's one of those days when you have to go through the details of earnings reports carefully to get a clear story. The good news at Factiva is that their top line grew by 12 percent in 2005 to USD 281 million, a report in line with InfoUSA''s 11 percent increase. However operating income at Factiva was down 36 percent, including a $4.3 million "restructuring charge" that was "primarily reflecting employee severance and termination of an operating lease" according to parent Dow Jones' SEC filings. This charge presumably accounts for a negative operating income at Factiva for 4Q05, which otherwise would have been about at the same levels as 4Q04 and down only 12 percent for the year. InfoUSA provides an important benchmark for performance, though: it managed a 77 percent boost in net operating income for 2005 and a 70 percent rise for 4Q05. InfoUSA has been long known for lean-and-mean operations and with the addition of OneSource Information Services last year it has been applying those talents to a premium business information service that is benefiting from its aggressive moves into sales force automation integration. As the press release from Factiva today noted it has a lot of things to consider in its plus column for 2005: its sales integration services, reputation management and taxonomy services have advanced its ability to bring business news and information into more useful contexts in its core accounts. But as parents Dow Jones and Reuters wrestle with their own struggles to prop up their bottom lines Factiva is going to have to move quickly from being a coddled experiment to a strong contributor to both top and bottom lines. With its restructuring and a strong '06 product announcements thus far there's reason to think that it's moving in that direction, but it's going to have to be a sprint rather than a trot as competition from across the spectrum zeroes in on Factiva's core value proposition.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:27 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:09 AM |
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| Wednesday, January 25, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:16 AM |
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While there's quite a bit of excitement about Google's new video search and ecommerce service it's also taken considerable flak being generated by those claiming to be in the know about what video on the Web should be. Many of these suggestions call for slickness and more features, but the basics of what make content work on the Web don't necessarily call for the most flashy and gimmicky solutions. It's more important to think about where video content is put to use by users and portals that put it to the most use by its audiences. That may mean more than premium video benefiting from online exposure but that's the playing field that premium providers must adjust to sooner rather than later. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:38 AM |
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| Tuesday, January 24, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 6:37 AM |
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| Monday, January 23, 2006 |
For those of you who read our earlier news analysis on the potential impact of a shutdown of Research in Motion's Blackberry mobile devices, today's news ( CNN Money) that the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal on a patent infringement suit brought against RIM should leave you well prepared to think and react to this event. As popular as any given gizmo may be at one point in time, many, if not most, will fade away rapidly in the rapidly evolving world of consumer technologies. Remember TiVos? Maybe not for long. iPods? Gosh, those were neat back when, weren't they? The details of where to take your content channel strategies in this shifting world of mobile and wireless platforms is detailed in our earlier news analysis, but to put it simply, it's time for publishers to think more seriously about platform-independent content packaging and licensing. For all of those out there trying to redirect content licensing deals in the wake of this court decision, best of luck.
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:32 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:32 AM |
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| Friday, January 20, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:16 AM |
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