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| Friday, March 31, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:03 PM |
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| Thursday, March 30, 2006 |
 Business Week notes along with other majors Google's readying a stock offering that's expected to yield about USD 2 Billion at it's current prices - about enough to purchase the Facebook.com personal content portal, by perhaps no small coincidence. Facebook is about on par with Google's Orkut personal portal in traffic, but both are trailing News Corporation's Myspace.com personal content portal by a long shot: Myspace comes up number 8 in Alexa's latest Web site rankings. This can only warm Rupert Murdoch's heart, as noted by Forbes, who raised quite a few eyebrows when he bought the upstart portal for USD 580 million last July. With Myspace's surging growth - tripling traffic since last July - this now begins to look like a bargain. So perhaps 2 Billion is not too much to ask for a Facebook, the thinking goes. But looking at the historical traffic, it's not clear that Facebook adds up to a 2 Billion solution for Google. Although it came on strong in the past few months, Facebook's overall traffic has leveled off, according to Alexa, and still remains below Myspace's level of last July when they were acquired. Facebook may be a good acquisition, but it's doubtful that it's going to command the top line price they're seeking. Google could instead get a more reasonable price for Facebook and spread investments into other lucrative areas. Certainly their financial portal is a good start on offering more information to adults that can command valuable advertising, so expanding relationships with vendors such as Reuters in finance and other sectors may yield a broader demographic for advertisers keen for more valuable outlets for ad inventory. It's important to keep apace with the younger generations growing up on the Web, but the greatest gains in margins may be in servicing graying but affluent surfers effectively. We'll see where this goes but I am betting on some surprises in how Google puts these new funds to work.
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:00 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:19 PM |
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| Wednesday, March 29, 2006 |
InfoUSA's OneSource Information Services has announced the addition of its Account Intelligence service to Salesforce.com's AppExchange add-on software and content service store. The service pumps cleansed contact data and relevant news, research and data on companies right into a user's SF.com service, with administrative controls similar to OneSource's earlier offerings via this service. In playing with the AppExchange kit it's interesting to see how self-service sales for business content services have been extended to provide a sophisticated sales presence online. In addition to product information sheets and user reviews OneSource provides a slide show with built-in audio narrative based on Macromedia's Breeze application narrated by a sales executive. It's a reminder that people buy business content at the "point of pain" and that both services and marketing need to follow the users into the contexts that they value most to have those pain points addressed. Being able to get content into user workflows on an as-needed basis took a huge step forward when Salesforce.com introduced AppExchange: now it's time for more business content providers to examine how both services and marketing can move to where users have the need and to sell them in context on the value of their services.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:00 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:29 AM |
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In the ever-evolving battle for the pockets of local business advertisers the yellow pages industry has been fighting a tough battle to retain the advertising dollars of grass-roots patrons. More and more of these businesses are discovering that the first stop for people looking for local services increasingly draws them to major search engine portals. Increasingly this means not even bothering with the "local pages" offered up by one of these portals but just typing in what you think you need into the main search box of a portal and trusting the search engine to do the rest. This works increasingly well on search engines like Google, which have awareness of one's locality through examining your network connection and can use that data to put search results - and ads - in a more local context. So small wonder, then, that telecoms giant Verizon has announced that its SuperPages online yellow pages service has joined Google's AdWords reseller network to channel its advertisers into the contextual ads that appear on Google's search results and via other channels. This expands the Verizon relationship with Google in which they were providing profiles of their advertisers to Google. Yet one wonders whether this may not be a harbinger of broader business relationships yet to come for telecoms providers and Google. This of course helps Verizon to extend the reach of its marketing power for local advertisers into existing Google channels and provides Google indirectly with a huge sales force that engages small businesses on the level that most are used to dealing with to manage their tiny ad budgets. But given Google's push into wireless markets this may also be the start of a relationship that could result in a very convenient way for pumping ads into the ad-supported wireless services that Google is preparing to launch. I think of this especially in light of the recent patent filings by Google focused on providing sponsorship of browser windows and managing ads via wireless services. What better way to inject new life into yellow pages ads than to have an ad appear on your wireless device when you're closest to that local merchant? We have been telling people for some time to prepare for the seismic changes that are likely to unfold as Google begins to enable wireless services; the Verizon announcement is but one more reminder that this future is not so far off.
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By John Blossom - posted at 7:57 AM |
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| Tuesday, March 28, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:38 AM |
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| Monday, March 27, 2006 |
The announcement of an upgraded version of the popular Buzznet social publishing portal happens to coincide with the conclusion of spring break activities for many college students, so it's not surprising that the portal features photos, comments and stories from this annual pilgrimage of party spirits. It also helps to underscore the increasing similarity of many of these services: there are only so many ways that you can post pictures, comments and other personal content, just as there are only so many ways that you can go into a bar and get drunk. From the users' standpoint, that's probably not a problem. Kids love to hop from one hot spot to another, so having a variety of social content services at their disposal is probably not too different from having a strip of bars along the beach in Fort Lauderdale to support their real-world social endeavors. Wherever the scene gathers at the moment, there they go, from one bookmark to the next. But this vagabond spirit also highlights the importance of developing communities that are likely to have a little higher quality clientele and more of a sense of true community rather than casual relationships if advertisers are to make the most of social content services. There's plenty of money to be made in social content "gin mills," but it's in general a far better idea to be thinking about your audiences ahead of time and setting up features and reefs of high-quality content that are likely to attract a specific type of clientele for your advertisers. This may sound a little too much like - gasp! - publishing for some people's tastes, but as the breadth of social content services grows ever wider it will become far more important to think out loud ahead of time as to what you want your clientele to be when the party's over.
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:17 PM |
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A mochila is a lightweight backpack, the type that students everywhere stuff with books, iPods and other useful content. The new Mochila content syndication service has a similar concept: let publishers pick up just what fits their needs from other publishers and then run with it wherever they need to take it. Mochila's by-the-item syndication allows licensees to pay for content outright or to take it for free if they're willing to use Mochila-provided ads. It's an idea whose time may be just right given the explosion of content destinations that attract today's users. Could Mochila be the tool that creates an explosion in ad hoc online syndication? Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:07 PM |
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Reputation management and media intelligence services have been hot on the lips of many content providers as of late, but selling content services into a specialized community such as public relations professionals can get a little sticky for a content companies. There are ways of doing business in the trade and consultancies that have been in the space for decades that are going to be far ahead of publishers in industry knowledge and networking. So its no great surprise that Factiva has announced a new affiliate network program to support its marketing efforts to support its line of services supporting public relations consultancies and agencies. This logical move, though, points up one of the continuing challenges faced by aggregators as they identify more and more specific market niches into which they can deploy content services: how to sell a content solution for business problems when the solutions providers in that space have their own way of doing business. Working with I.T.-oriented companies as partners to provide premium content services in enterprise and online portals is one thing: working with business solutions providers that may touch upon content technologies only lightly in their main line of consultancy is quite another. Yet this is the future for many content service providers identifying specific niches for complex services that can drive up revenues and margins. Working with affiliate networks can be difficult and can eat into margins, but where a content provider's brand is not well established in a specific market segment affiliates make great sense for supporting an initial penetration into narrow but lucrative niches. It makes sense especially for a company such as Factiva, which has a lot of irons in the fire and cannot afford to hire and train over-specialized sales professionals to service a specific niche with relatively limited market potential. As more and more business content providers define more niche-oriented opportunities on the high end of their markets the search for effective sales affiliations will become more important -and will inevitably push business content providers more into the roles of the companies with which they affiliate in order to maximize their revenues. Sales and marketing channel conflicts are likely to erupt in these affiliate programs as content companies try to build more home-grown penetration, but if content providers are interested in becoming business solutions providers that can dominate given solutions niche they will have to juggle affiliates and their own sales and implementation capabilities quickly and carefully to extend their relationships as broadly as possible. Over time this may mean that many business aggregators will come to resemble management consultancies more than content vendors - and that may not be a bad thing. It may also indicate the types of companies to which many high-end business content solutions providers may market their exit strategies in the years ahead. But in the meantime, there's lots of money to be made via affiliates to enhance business content's value in specific market sectors.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:52 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:33 AM |
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Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in review
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:00 AM |
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| Friday, March 24, 2006 |
The AP notes along with many others the technology winners and losers in the delayed launch of Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system, but the potential impact to content producers goes largely uncovered so far. Vista was to have been the lock-down platform for digital rights management that would solve the distribution issues of many media and publishing companies. Now delayed into 2007, 2006 becomes a year in which there will be far greater uncertainty amongst content producers about which path to take in protecting intellectual property rights. This opens up a huge window of opportunity for content producers to rethink their DRM strategies and to reconsider how open DRM standards or less platform-dependent proprietary systems may be able to help them make progress in their plans to protect intellectual property via rights management. It may also give enterprise-oriented companies a new opportunity to think about how the rapid progression of enterprise DRM to support compliance and legal retention requirements may need to be considered anew as factors in packaging content. While it's far from clear that content producers will start scrambling for these alternatives any time soon, the consumer side of the business doubtless sees holiday sales looming and will want to consider some plan "B"s to approach managing IP this year. Whatever their choices, the all-purpose Microsoft-centric PC as a repository for professionally produced content just took a huge step backwards. We're not likely to see Linux desktops sprouting up like weeds any time soon, but content producers may look back at this point in time and see that this was the beginning of a time when they began to consider more seriously how they could succeed independent of a Microsoft-dictated future for their content rights management.
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:46 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:42 AM |
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| Thursday, March 23, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:07 AM |
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| Wednesday, March 22, 2006 |
BBC News reports on a bill now passed by the lower house of France's legislature that would require content providers to offer non-proprietary DRM software on devices such as Apple's iPod. The bill is headed to France's Senate, but in the meantime according to the BBC Apple is firing back decrying "a state-sponsored culture of piracy." This of course ignores evolving open DRM standards promoted by organizations such as the Open Mobile Alliance, which would encourage the use of copyrighted content with DRM controls that don't lock a user into a specific platform. While the fate of this bill is still up for grabs it's clear that European and Asian markets are going to be looking for every advantage that they can find in re-establishing their hold on rapidly emerging mobile content markets in which much of today's entertainment is going to be consumed in the years ahead. To do this they must be able both to protect intellectual property rights and have access to platforms that allow them to have a firmer say over how content is licensed and priced. Apple's long-standing approach to keeping its sliver of market share has been to develop really nicely designed products to soften the ultimately unappealing prospect of being locked into a proprietary platform. That's served them reasonably well up to this point but with a burgeoning marketplace for open standard platforms and greater consumer demand to have content licensing separated from platforms it's a battle that's not likely to favor their content lock-down scheme in the long run. But then again we're all dead in the long run, as they say, so Apple and other dominant media-oriented companies are going to continue to resist the call for open DRM standards as long as possible. In the meantime content suppliers that are glad to work with open DRM standards are likely to increase over the next few years, creating new forms of competition based both on the inherent quality and marketability of DRM-enabled content and its ability to go where users would like it to go. France's rebel role in this debate is not likely to shake world markets any time soon but it will begin to accelerate the discussion amongst content providers towards a consideration of how DRM can be used to effect not only short-term profits but a long-term independence from the designs of technology providers that may not have content producers' profitability foremost in their minds.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:03 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:01 AM |
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| Tuesday, March 21, 2006 |
Reuters reports along with the world on the debut of Google Finance, the long-awaited portal offering that offers a clean and sophisticated look at financial content. Rafat Ali on paidContent.org notes that the portal was developed with support from Reuters, Revere Data, Dun & Bradstreet, Hoover's and Morningstar, but these top-notch sources are just the beginning of the story. The interface is in some ways quite familiar - only so many ways to show stock quotes and charts - but the interactive charting function is far more sophisticated than that offered by Yahoo! Finance. Glide your cursor over the points on the curve and you get automatic readouts of the market data at that point in time. The posting time of headlines displayed for a given stock are tied in to the charting function, so you can see easily how major news events related to stock movement. As with Google Maps, you can grab the chart with your cursor and drag it either direction in time - and as you do, the headlines move along with it to indicate the news for the displayed period. The rest of the page includes key company facts, a company summary, key management, top line company financials with links to details, data on related companies with links to sector data, blog posts gleaned from Google's own weblog search and links to other sources - including Google Finance's own comparison charts and research reports repository. All of this on ONE PAGE. Yahoo! Finance offers additional details such as SEC filings, holdings and insider transactions data that's likely to be of interest to more sophisticated investors, the Google offering provides a remarkable range of content in one spot accompanied by functionality that readily distinguishes it from the Yahoo! offering. This is a tool for people who want to understand the markets as easily as possible, with a great deal of thought put in to what an individual investor needs to know to monitor a company and make effective decisions. It can be argued that other offerings will offer more, but it's already a good enough offering that Google's pre-eminent position as a search engine destination can easily draw off traffic that would have been bound for other portals as a matter of course. With that traffic in hand this "Beta" version of Google Finance can be easily refined to bolster up its responsiveness to its audience. We've been aware of this for some time and aware of the players involved, but it's impressive nevertheless to see such a powerful and clean initial offering. There's little doubt that Google Finance will be off to a strong start - if they can keep the usual Google technical glitches at bay.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:26 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:20 AM |
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| Monday, March 20, 2006 |
Content relicensing services provide publishers with steady if somewhat unglamorous revenues from individuals and institutions willing to pay a premium for the rights to redistribute copyrighted content. But what about the untold millions of individuals who forward content via emails to people who they know - with nary a bit of revenues going to publishers? iCopyright has come up with a simple solution to this long-standing dilemma: make it easy for users to do this using a version of the content that has contextual ads embedded. It's remarkable that making money out of content passed from user to user is still such a new art for most publishers, but with iCopyright's new program it's an art that may become rather familiar to them.
Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:21 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:57 AM |
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A recent visit to the Associated Press headquarters in New York City brought me not to tony Rockefeller Center but to the more utilitarian west side of Manhattan, where AP has carved out a new home in space formerly occupied by the DoubleClick online ad network. While many media companies have taken up residence on the west side in recent years to cut costs and gain more open office space, there is something particularly symbolic about a news organization with more than 150 years of history settling down in a facility that is firmly set in the twenty-first century's vision of content creation. The lobby display cases show wonderful memorabilia such as cameras, typewriters and style manuals from the archives of AP but the news floors are strictly today's business environment, with multi-screen desktops spewing out text, video and audio to AP's editorial staff. There are deep-rooted traditions in the news business that have kept many news organizations from reinventing themselves effectively in today's marketplace, but the AP is moving rapidly to set its own pace as a leader in news content distribution and creation. With venerable competitors like Reuters trying their own impressive modern approaches to content development and distribution and the Wall Street Journal signing on to distribute select features content via Yahoo! Finance there's ample reason for AP to be aggressive in its thinking. In a news market that sees more branded content showing up in more content channels than ever before it's important for news organizations to bring their brands' value closer to readers who are increasingly agnostic in their approach to finding content. With its participation in experiments such as Newsvine AP is doing just that, even as it defines new ways to provide value to its members news organizations engaged in similar reader outreach efforts. Its facility is new and its marketing increasingly progressive, but the best of AP's traditions are not likely to be forgotten as it carves a path to provide the most value that it can to a global news marketplace.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:26 AM |
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| Sunday, March 19, 2006 |
Go on to most any trading floor in the securities industry and you'll find not only the buzz of people chatting about the latest market trends and research but as well the tapping of keys as those same people participate in online discussions with their colleagues about many of those same topics. One of the growing stars of such groupware in these financial circles is Parlano, whose MindAlign software is used in many of the world's major investment banks to help their staffs communicate with one another. MindAlign is a robust platform that allows users to communicate on specific topics across specific groups as well as in point-to-point conversations - good enough to allow some investment banks to bypass email altogether in their disaster recovery planning in favor of Parlano's ability to keep all key parties in the loop instantaneously in well-organized communications channels. In a recent run-through of Parlano's capabilities it became clear that major institutional investors are also beginning to take interest in group messaging products, even as Parlano begins pushing into non-financial markets and develops interfaces with public and vendor-based instant messaging networks. The inevitable movement in group messaging is to develop connectivity between the sell side and the buy side that moves beyond hit-and-miss emails and vendor message networks to persistent group-centered networks focused on specific topics that can distribute content to network participants as they keep market-driven conversations alive. Instead of the ubiquitous "inbox" as the destination of choice for market research group messaging channels will become the new common denominator for communicating transaction-worthy content. Where are content vendors in this new mix? Not much of anywhere, so far. Financial research vendors are still very concentrated on traditional editorial products, finished pieces that travel through email and Web site-based distribution channels. But as group messaging products emerge as channels that connect market participants as a primary means of communications it will become increasingly important for content vendors to have effective strategies for participating in those channels. This will mean research vendors being able not only to transmit research and analysis in finished pieces but as well to participate as peers providing valuable conversation-level input to these networks. Content of all kinds needs to move with the people moving their peers, and increasingly content providers need to act as peers within those networks themselves. Parlano gives a broad hint of the power of this concept when it can live independent of content vendor networks via federations of market participants. Here's to hoping that financial content vendors begin to pick up on the hint.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:15 PM |
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Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in review
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:10 PM |
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| Friday, March 17, 2006 |
At the recent ABM Digital Media Day Michael Azzara, Vice President of Internet business for CMP Media noted that "Audiences have begun to become the brands," an observation that would seem to compel magazine publishers to seek more ways to have those brands under their own marques. Penton Media just announced a foray into capturing user-driven branding by incoroprating the popular PracticalMachinist.com online bulletin board service into its Amercian Machinist Web site offering. Like user-driven offerings such as Craigslist PracticalMachinist is notable for its homeliness: it's basically an off-the-shelf online forum product. But at half a million unique visits the dialogs initiated by this service are forming the powerful core of an online community that manages its own content and market conversations with some efficiently. This is a good example of how it does not take the slickest technology or presentation to build up user-generated media; rather, it becomes a matter of having a true conversation of key people within a community to drive up authentice content that traditional editorial content can complement and reference. The dot-com classic " The Cluetrain Manifesto" reminds us that markets are conversations: in real life many key business conversations take place in coffee shops and other informal settings as much as they do in board rooms and high-profile events. Don't let the simplicity of many user-generated media facilities fool you, if the crowds and the conversations are right the dollars will follow more quickly than you may imagine.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:24 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:03 AM |
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| Thursday, March 16, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:10 AM |
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| Wednesday, March 15, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:28 AM |
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| Tuesday, March 14, 2006 |
The newspaper industry is reacting to the fallout of the McClatchy deal to purchase Knight Ridder, specifically the intent of McClatchy to spin off as soon as possible at least 12 of the 32 Knight Ridder papers ( LA Times), notably those in markets that don't match the dynamics that McClatchy seeks for long-term profits and growth. McClatchy tends to focus on small- and mid-market papers in growing markets, so it's not surprising that it's candidates for resale include papers in problematic major markets - including Tony Ridder's beloved flagship San Jose Mercury News. The New York Times captures the glee of Bruce Sherman, a major newspaper investor via Private Capital Management, who sees the deal as a plus in a fairly pessimistic market that he still sees as a solid investment. While there is a lot of drama and angst in this deal, when the dust settles it's likely that McClatchy will have done their very best to carve out a set of properties that are both profitable and demonstrating good growth dynamics in markets where there are fewer pressures than those faced by papers in major markets, where online substitutes for global and local news and advertising services are larger threats. In spite of the push towards more local online content many small and mid-size markets are still decent niches for newspapers, small enough that it's difficult for full-service competitors to be funded and draw allegiance from local retail advertisers but large enough to leverage profits via outlets with little strong competition. This formula is starting to change as online substitutes get more sophisticated and classified ads via Craigslist and other online services draw upon many of those same markets. But most all of these lack the combination of both strong local editorial resources and a sophisticated advertising and marketing infrastructure for local advertisers to succeed. User-generated media will help to tip these scales somewhat (one can imagine a player like Gather learning how to attack local markets with a higher grade of editorial content than most blog plays and both their own ads and Craigslist) but for the time being McClatchy is off to a promising if noisy start to as good a strategy as any one could come up with to manage the most promising and profitable Knight Ridder properties. For those left out in the cold from this deal our true sympathies, but sentiment will not take the place of good business sense oftentimes lacking in forging a solid future for news organizations in major markets.
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:01 PM |
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Trends Dow Jones to Pay $202 Million To Settle Dispute WSJ Online* The Times to End Daily Stock Listings in April and Expand Data on Web Site The New York Times* Internet means end for media barons, says Murdoch The Guardian Was Death of Newspapers Greatly Exaggerated, or Is Verdict Still Out? The New York Times* Ridder Surprised, Unhappy Over McClatchy Flipping 12 Papers Editor & Publisher The Future in Black and White Opinion Journal Dow Jones' reorganization gets mixed reviews BtoB Online Guarding Google's Data Banks BusinessWeek The New Nexis Web Search Guide AOL's Blog King Newsweek via MSNBC Weblogs Inc to become Netscape ? Jack of All Blogs Liberte, egalite, fraternite--and a more open iTunes? Blogma Google Maps goes to Mars PC Pro 25 Things I Hate About Google Search Engine Watch Gartner: Google enterprise search has its limits ZDNet UK WSJ.com launches redesign of home page BtoB Online Craigslist, Wikipedia founders chat at SXSW CNET News Now the little guy is the true pit bull of journalism The Guardian Best Practices The Myth Of Branded Content Robin Good When you need to localize and categorize CMS Watch Google's Big Daddy Seeking Content SEO Done Right Cool Tools Prospero Blogging Application Gains Traction With Major Online Publications PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance Researchers develop new digital rights technology Linux World Australia
Deals, Partnerships & Sales Newsweek Launches NewsGator and FeedBurner Services PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance Groxis and EBSCO Publishing Partner to Provide Visual Search Technology PR Newswire via Yahoo! FInance Metaweb Technologies, Inc. Receives $15 Million of Financing PR Newswire Products, Markets & People Elsevier Announces the Departure of Fiona Foley Managing Information Experian Launches New Credit Scoring System, VantageScore(SM) PR Newswire Wolters Kluwer Health Introduces Price Rx(TM) Drug Price and Reference Tool for Healthcare Professionals BusinessWire via TMCNet FIND/SVP Changes Name to Guideline PR Newswire Gather.com Launches National Scholastic Journalism Contest PR Newswire
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:58 PM |
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| Monday, March 13, 2006 |
The annual report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism sounds increasingly familiar themes for a profession under fire. The gap between still-maturing online markets and waning print markets makes it harder than ever for news publishers to commit expenditures to serious news. But the answers to this dilemma may be less in the news room and more in the marketing departments of major news producers. Serious journalists are products in and of themselves with complex distribution needs. It's time for a fresh look at how news organizations package, distribute and channel their content to audiences that are seeking them out in the venues that matter most to them. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:45 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:17 AM |
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| Sunday, March 12, 2006 |
Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in review
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By John Blossom - posted at 6:17 PM |
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| Friday, March 10, 2006 |
The output of Microsoft's Origami project to develop an all-purpose media handheld made its debut in the form of two devices from Samsung and Asus running the new Ultra-Mobile PC version of Windows XP. According to Engadget, that's about the end of the current story: there's little new functionality, just ways to use the tablet functionality of XP in a keyboardless interface that bears a striking resemblance the old eBook readers such as Rocketbook or a slightly plump version of Apple's pioneering Newton handheld PDA. There's something to be said for this almost-one-hand-but-not-really form factor for content electronics, yet most everything built to this size seems too fat and awkward to succeed as a content appliance. Microsoft stands a better chance than most to succeed with a unit this size, given its universally present operating system and a wealth of content and gaming experiences that can make their way onto this gizmo. But at the end of the day, so I really need another buggy PC for my content? And in this era of DRM gone wild, will I be able to stock up easily on premium titles on one machine that can make their way easily onto this mobile device? It's time for people thinking about mobile content to get away from PC processors as the heart of display units and to start separating displays from processing and storage whenever possible. In a perfect world I should have one gizmo with processing and storage that sits on my person or in a nearby pocket that can communicate with a number of display devices on or near my person via a Bluetooth-like wireless communications capability that will allow designers to place the emphasis on true handheld convenience. If I want to read an eBook, I can pull out my eInk display and when I need to work on my spreadsheet I pull out my keyboard-display combination to communicate with the same central processor, perhaps with a cable to increase performance when needed. Allow these displays to cache my latest reading interest with a minimum of local functionality to keep me happy and keep the rest in that little out-of-the-way box. The display gizmo could also be used to download content from my newsstand as I walk by, which could be held temporarily in my display device and then downloaded to the processor-storage unit for further use on any number of display devices. There. The future of display electronics is solved. Next...?
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:31 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:49 AM |
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| Thursday, March 09, 2006 |
Computerworld and other trade journals report on the new WebFocus intelligent Search offering from Information Builders. WebFocus Intelligent search feeds content from enterprise databases and other structured sources via Information Builders' cross-repository report building tools into a Google Search Appliance to allow enterprise users to get business intelligence from these sources as easily as they do from enterprise Web servers and the open Web. The key to the system is their iWay Enterprise Index that monitors and transforms content from structured sources into a form that can be indexed by the Google Search Appliance. This setup can also handle custom queries for content that's not cached in a pre-built report, so raw data can be transformed on demand into content for search results. That's a pretty neat trick from a company that's been around for decades with one of the most widely used report generation software packages in the world. It's also a very interesting inroad for Google, which has had some success in indexing enterprise Web content with its search appliances but has not been a major player to date in the push towards integrating structured and unstructured enterprise content for unified search solutions. Advanced integration tools from other suppliers may offer better architectures and more ability to integrate other sources and publish content in more varieties of forms. But this combination of a very widely known report generating tool with the search interface most widely accepted by users is likely to appeal to companies that don't want to give up established tools while they push to develop integrated business intelligence solutions. Content providers take note, there are many platforms to consider as potential points of integration for business intelligence - and not all of them are the tech leaders that typically roll off of our tongues these days.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:40 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:36 AM |
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| Wednesday, March 08, 2006 |
Reuters reports along with The Wall Street Journal and other majors the proposed USD 9 Billion cash takeover of VNU by a group of private equity firms that is meeting yet again with a cool reception from its institutional investors. Several holders of VNU are dead set on splitting up VNU assets here in now to gain more value, in spite of what WSJ points out would be adverse tax considerations to do so. Is VNU undervalued? This may be a matter of shareholders staring at the gate after the plane has left. When the deal to acquire IMS Health went sour there was still a relatively hot market for acquiring mainstream media titles based on the return of reasonably strong print performance for B2B media and the promise of online growth through VNU's increasingly sophisticated editorial and marketing strategy. The thunder from many of last year's deals is long gone, though, as investors look at an increasingly soft market for print and a focus on media market coverage that is becoming more dispersed as both producers and channels multiply. This does not necessarily favor long-established titles such as Hollywood Reporter and Billboard that are focused on the industries that have the most to lose from these changes. The sagging ratings for the recent Oscars television broadcast underscore the problems of tracking an industry trying to find its soul anew. Somewhat related problems exist on the Marketing and Media Measurement sides of VNU's business as viewership patterns in television migrate to new online and offline channels faster than many had imagined, but with still a high level of support from institutions that need these services in order to survive and set strategies and increased investment in new measurement models. The bottom line is that the VNU valuation for this buyout is overall a very fair deal considering market conditions and the work that needs to be done to provide a better focus for VNU's considerable assets. Yes, the pieces could have value independently that would be of interest to the markets, but each of those pieces face challenges in their core markets that may require more restructuring and more growth in demand for their capabilities before that value could be realized. In the meantime VNU needs to focus on accelerating its core marketing strategies to make sure that they can keep up with rapidly shifting markets for their services. Its time for VNU shareholders to stop staring at the gate and to realize that markets have moved on to the point that their expectations are no longer realistic.
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:59 PM |
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Stock markets reacted with recently typical disappointment about Google earnings growth based on some data that slipped out in a recent analyst presentation ( New York Times), which is somewhat ironic based on the core data presented in their slides: if you're not happy with 20-plus percent revenue growth, 35 percent margin and about twice the revenues per employee of peer companies, then perhaps it's us and not Google that needs a reality check. But the real news coming out of this session was captured by Greg Linden and Richard MacManus at ZDNet, when some as-yet-unannounced product plans were alluded to in the slide narrative. The key phrase from Greg's notes: "We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today." GDS is presumably Google Desktop Search, and GDrive is presumably a capability to store users' personal content within the Google infrastructure. Google makes it clear in their analyst presentation that their goal is to store 100 percent of the world's personal content in one form or another, so GDrive would be a step in this direction. But the Lighthouse mention goes unexplained. MacManus believes that it relates to access control lists, so reasonable speculation could be that this is a form of access control for content stored in Google infrastructure...perhaps even a form of universal rights management, I would add, that could extend out to user platforms. Whatever the ultimate product direction that Google takes with these inferences it's clear that their strategy is to provide a comfortable home for content that can be used and reused in many different environments. This is not so different from what content companies such as LexisNexis are trying to accomplish via partnerships with document management infrastructure providers ( see our News Analysis), so let's not circle the "Google is trying to destroy publishing as we know it" wagons just yet. But it again emphasizes that when the world is a database, aided and abetted by strategies from providers such as Google, traditional publishers need to take a much broader look as to what constitutes publishing services. That's difficult sometimes when so much of your current revenue base is centered around centralized databases, but platform independence is pushing content to be able to manage itself in more universal access media day by day. Without any significant investment in user platform technology, Google is free to service publishers in this universal media far better than players such as Microsoft that may own huge shares of today's corporate and consumer infrastructure but whose strategies seem inevitably to center around the defense of that infrastructure rather than the defense of users' needs to have universal access to content. Lighthouse could be the bridge that publishers will be using to move from decades of frustration trying to manage content on machines that are designed to be inherently hostile to the interests of publishers to an environment in which every person is recognized as a publisher that needs to manage their content in a sensible fashion with the world. More to come, but it's an interesting glimpse into where the buzz is likely to be in the months ahead.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:04 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:52 AM |
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| Tuesday, March 07, 2006 |
Trends Online search up 39% in January BtoB Online What is Google's Lighthouse? ZDNet Hearst buys NetDoctor as spark for online efforts Reuters Microsoft denies role in arrest of Chinese journalist Forbes Microsoft back pedals on 'better than Google' promise PC Pro Media veterans attack Google News Freelance UK Another 'Saturday Night Live' Video Removed from YouTube Publish Newspapers needn't fear Craigslist Rocky Mountain News Old Media Loves New Media Red Herring Financial Times to Host Free Access Week at FT.com, March 5 - 11 FT.com Best Practices Corporate Library Structure and Budgets Signal Trend Towards More Digitalization PR Newswire SES Roundup: Pimp your Podcast, RSS Feed, and Blog Publish
Deals, Partnerships & Sales Information Builders Add Google to BI Mix CBR Online Convera Launches Open Excalibur™ Partner Program, Factiva, FMS, Language Weaver, MetaCarta Join Internet Ad Sales Wolters Kluwer Health's Drug Dosing Database Licensed for 450+ Hospitals GEN Wolters Kluwer Financial Services and Suntell Form Strategic Alliance PR Newswire Digital Matrix Systems, Inc. to Offer LexisNexis(R) ThinDex(R) Score BusinessWire via Chron.com Products, Markets & People Reuters Strengthens its Asset Management Content with China Data and Research Bobs Guide Inxight Enhances Entity Extraction in ThingFinder, Adds Fact Extraction to ThingFinder Professional PR Newswire LexisNexis Launches ''LexisNexis Practice Management 2006'' Integrated Software for Law Firms BusinessWire New York Times Launching DealBook Report On Web Site Smart Money
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:19 AM |
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Wikis gained a lot of publicity last year, but successful communities built around wikis are not mushrooming with anywhere the speed of weblogs. This may be in part because up to this point wiki technology has been pretty geekish. No offense to some of the progressive-thinking people behind those early efforts but there aren't too many right-thinking people (don't count me in that camp) who want to muss with raw code these days to publish anything. We've tried to instigate wikis on a number of occasions and have met with huge indifference from executives when they are asked to contribute. A new tool called Wetpaint hopes to change that with a far more intuitive and easy way to add content to a collaborative database. As demonstrated in their Sandbox hands-on demo adding text, graphics and tags and additional topic pages is as easy as any user-friendly weblog interface. A sample finished wiki looks pretty nice and includes features for monitoring content via a watchlist account or email. Moderation controls, AdSense ads and popular tags are all part of the package, making it very simple to create powerful and effective self-monetizing collaborative content communities. A signup promises the ability to use this tool on one's own Web site. Wetpaint lacks some of the advanced tagging that some established tools provide (at least that are evident) but out of the box Wetpaint is a huge step towards helping people to create community content anywhere with far less hassle than in the past. Maybe this time execs will feel comfortable chipping in content.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:49 AM |
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| Monday, March 06, 2006 |
The move towards technology providers packaging software as a service (SaaS) is attracting an increasing number of enterprise and media content companies determined to provide more functional solutions to their audiences. Some such as LexisNexis go all out and partner with major SaaS infrastructure providers to engineer complete subscription-based solutions that combine internal and external content into a useful whole. Others take a more modular approach and provide premium content solutions within existing SaaS platforms. Both approaches have their advantages and precedents, but for content companies the one choice that's not on the table is ignoring the power of this growing movement. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:51 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:54 AM |
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Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in review
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:31 AM |
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| Friday, March 03, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:02 PM |
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| Thursday, March 02, 2006 |
Sometimes the phrase "rich data" floats around like a dangerous buzzing critter that will never have to worry about touching down on anything solid: other times it's as real as can be. On the real side of rich data McGraw-Hill Construction announced a new " Network for products" online product catalog that integrates with editorial content from its online Architectural Record portal. The service provides not only product lookups but as well a directory of construction projects in which products have been used and people in the construction industry who can be contacted for product information and expertise. Manufacturers can provide their own project galleries and case studies linked directly from their product information in the Network, with much more flexibility for graphics and appealing presentations than found in typical product databases. The Network portal was still a little buggy in first-day use, but overall very easy to use and focused on its audiences needs with great precision. This is an excellent example of the "rich data" concept at work, with three key elements represented: integration with editorial content that draws people to an in-context solution, a comprehensive and respected database source and direct contributions from the target industry that add unique value and loyalty for both audiences and for contributors who need to reach those audiences. All three are needed for successful rich data plays if they are to create not only "bolt-on" features but as well unique content value that will have long-term appeal and self-reinforcing barriers to entry by competitors. As I mentioned in my news analysis this week there are only going to be one or two publishers that will succeed in any given industry vertical with rich data plays, so the resources that a McGraw-Hill and Sweets can combine enhance very effectively McGraw-Hill's increasingly dominant position in this market sector. It pays to be rich when you're trying to succeed with rich data may be part of the moral here, no doubt.
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:18 PM |
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When I was a kid (yes, that long ago) I used to like a weekly magazine called The Saturday Evening Post, a collection of news, fiction and humor that was tuned to what was then very mainstream Amercian tastes. Norman Rockwell, famed painter of classic American scenes, had his work grace the cover of the Post many times. The original Saturday Evening Post drifted into memories a long time ago, a victim of modernizing tastes. The title was revived in recent years with somewhat the same formula of content and an online version but it doesn't capture the American imagination as the old version did. The original version included the works of leading authors of the day such as Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells and Willa Cather: it was a good read. Upton Sinclair is said to have called the Post "standardized as soda crackers," and it certainly did have a pretty rigid formula. But it was more than just what sold ads. In some ways the Gather.com community has rediscovered this formula using user-generated media. If you look at the most popular categories on Gather - random musings, life, love, humor, politics, writing, family, poetry, relationships, living, children, storytelling, writings, U.S. politics, poems, travel, food, news, memories, kids - it reads like the table of contents of the old Post. The photos posted and appreciated by Gather members are for the most part very down-home pictures: weddings, pets, pretty trees and so on - snapshot versions of Rockwell paintings. And in the middle of the Gather formula are writers trying to write quality fiction and topical content that has far more than just "sex appeal" at its core. It's largely intelligent content written by and for average people who are able to express their common values through the Gather system. While the Gather community is still evolving, the content it's collecting is demonstrating not only that the editorial quality of user-generated media can be quite high but that there is a sum value to a well-designed authoring community that can have both personal and mass appeal as few mainstream media outlets can hope to generate. Gather was growing more slowly than Newsvine for quite some time but in Alexa stats it is catching up quickly both in terms of current traffic and traffic growth rates. I believe this is in part because Gather has stuck to their knitting on getting a strong user content community developed that is no longer overwhelmed by its mainstream content from NPR. Content needs to be authentic from the user on in, something that Yahoo is learning the hard way according to today's New York Times and something that business publishers are learning as they integrate their content in with their client's work needs. The true democracy of content in this era is that content that works for the true benefit of an audience is winning.
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:27 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:41 AM |
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Robin Good posts today a synopsis of his success to date as an independent online publisher, success that flies in the face of many who are now souring on the ability of user-generated media to sustain profits independently. Robin has built up his weblogs and premium publications over the past few years into a USD 20K/month business, which sits in or near the top 8,000 of Alexa-ranked Web sites and among Technorati's top 300 weblogs. with consistent and steady growth. That's a business that can sustain an independent publisher quite comfortably, albeit with contributions from other writers. Robin does it with very aggressive use of the best tools for channeling and monetizing his efforts: aggressive and comprehensive submissions to RSS weblog feed search engines and directories, weblog "pinging" to alert readers to new content, marketing articles through alternative channels, submitting content to news hubs, social bookmarks, and - yes - email newsletters to build quality traffic to a site. Robin tunes his content with almost religious precision to get the best match between content and keywords with high-value clicks via contextual ads to make sure that they are both relevant and revenue-generating. All of this is...work. But it's independent work, work that anyone who had both the will and the ability to write and to manage a small business could take on to one degree or another. Not many will do this to the level of achievement that Robin has attained, but in doing so he points the way towards a lifestyle that many authors may yearn for but never quite attain. The tools are there in raw form, and with services such as Gather.com that encourage amateur authors to find both a voice and an audience for original content there will be more and more talented writers who will learn how to make money from their talents without having to rely on traditional publishing outlets for some or all of their incomes. Given the sketchy returns that the vast majority of authors see from their work through traditional channels anyway online publishing will become a lifestyle option for many more authors who can get those revenues with far less hassle and humiliation than they'd otherwise have to endure - and with far more potential to be engaged with audiences who will appreciate their voices. Like a sports team that has neglected its "farm system" to develop up-and-coming talents traditional publishers are going to have to reconsider how they can develop and encourage independent writers in this new type of self-empowered publishing environment. The era of the "free agent" writer has arrived, thanks to people like Robin Good who have shown that success is indeed possible as an independent publisher.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:50 AM |
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| Wednesday, March 01, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:32 AM |
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