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| Wednesday, May 31, 2006 |
 No, this is not another "print is dead" meme-blast, but rather a tip of the hat to people who know where print can still be converted into profits. FOLIO: Magazine picks up on Kim Mac Leod's post-DeSilva & Phillips efforts with Regional Media Advisors, a venture that targets regional magazines for M&A activity. She's had one deal so far this year, but my guess is that she has selected a pretty good niche to mine. Regional magazines have no real direct competitors in the online world: most Web sites doing pure online geographic plays are generally specific to cities or towns. Regional content is hard to do online: it's broad enough that you have to "get" a fairly wide array of cultures to do editorial effectively and hard to find content suitable for many online campaigns. Most online sites covering regions are either function-specific (job postings, classifieds) or sisters of regional print publications, leaving little room for online-only revenues from unique editorial content. Weaker listening patterns on regional radio stations also tamp down alternative channels, though cable TV throws a very powerful regional punch. So for the time being regional magazines have some play. That said, with user-generated content, increasingly sophisticated online techniques for managing personalization, ad campaigns and local marketing, the time for profitable regional online plays that include a broad array of content may be upon us. Long story short: Kim, get a Web site.
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:28 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:32 AM |
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| Tuesday, May 30, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:56 AM |
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| Monday, May 29, 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 12:19 PM |
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Headlines will return tomorrow.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:45 AM |
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| Friday, May 26, 2006 |
The world of online pundits seems to have focused far more on the recently announced deal between Yahoo and eBay than the news that Google will be paying Dell Computer to load key components from its growing desktop suite of software on their PCs. The Yahoo/eBay deal is certainly significant in its own right: eBay takes in Yahoo ads, Yahoo will promote transactions via PayPal, eBay's Skype internet phone service will probably be used for Yahoo pay-per-call advertising services and a common toolbar widget will make it easier for people to shop and search online. Lots of "win-win" talk from analysts, and rightfully so, but it's important to note that these are somewhat defensive moves for both players. eBay has been facing a notable decline in visits in recent months as search engines and other user-driven content venues start to nibble away at their market share ( mySpace comparison), even as Yahoo looks to get a solid top-ten client for its ad network to replace Microsoft's exiting from their ad relationship. So "win-win," yes, but there are losses that needed to be covered in the process of forging the win. The real wins are probably going to be for PayPal, which will benefit from the broader transaction exposure, and Skype, which needed a far broader outlet to be paired with its telephony capabilities. For the main eBay portal there are possible wins from synergies emerging from Yahoo's alliance but these synergies are not necessarily going to replace the migration of younger users to the next movable feast of online coolness. Who owns the community coming out of this alliance? eBay is not likely to want to give up its relationship with its community of buyers and Yahoo will probably only extend their own users' profiles into eBay after a full acquisition. So the key factor that both of these players needed to amplify the most - a common community - will have to wait until some of the basic plumbing is in place to test out whether and how the two communities could blend effectively. Lots can happen in the meantime. The somewhat ad-hoc announcement of the Google-Dell deal looms as a far more important development in the long run, as it promises to offer Google better positioning in both consumer and enterprise markets in the desktop arena in which it has everything to gain and little to lose. In comparison with Yahoo, Google seems intent on bridging the work-personal gap in content and related services in a way that focuses on users as creators of content on an increasingly equal footing with traditional publishers, be they in personal or enterprise roles. The focus is on getting Google's search services integrated as default desktop and browser elements but there is noise about elements of Google's nascent office suite making their way into the package also. Google seems to have picked a good moment to position itself more effectively against Microsoft's multi-pronged efforts against Google and Yahoo. Getting to users before they even think about a Web destination is a key factor in developing the broadest revenue base possible, a goal which Google has helped to advance significantly with the Dell deal. So let's call this whole thing "win-win-win" - for now.
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:15 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:58 PM |
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| Thursday, May 25, 2006 |
While flashy iPods hog the billboards and street posters in may urban centers, the quiet revolution is not in proprietary mobile devices but in the rise of pervasive memory sticks that are affordable and increasingly roomy. Why lock your library of premium content into one expensive mobile gizmo when you can hook up all of your favorite devices to one common storage device that travels with you as you please? Publishers that have gone the old "license the platform" route for electronic content are going to have to adjust rapidly to portable storage media that will be far better at putting publishers in a direct relationship with their audiences. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:49 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:14 PM |
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Linkstorm is the reborn Content Directions, a company which struggled along with others to breathe life into the Digital Object Identifier as an industry-standard persistent link reference but found more interesting opportunities in the features that could be built off DOI infrastructure. The Linkstorm version of the company is focused on two key opportunities: providing value to links in advertising and in editorial content. It's a concept that has been picked up by Reed Business Information for online global news from their Flight publication, a major victory for Linkstorm beyond their initial base of directory clients, as noted in their announcement. Hovering your screen cursor over a Linkstorm link exposes a tiered directory of navigation options, which could include both related content and options such as purchasing, emailing or embedding Linkstorm-enabled links in your own Web site for an article (example article here - hover over the headline). The result is a system that allows publishers and advertisers to create contextual navigation not only to related content but to related functions that can enhance the value of an ad or article significantly. Instead of thinking about how to get someone from whatever page a link leads to in an ad or headline to the content that's most attuned to their immediate needs, Linkstorm links provide a method of self-determined navigation that allows users to bypass precious seconds in search of what will really motivate their interests - without giving up valuable screen "real estate." Still missing from the Reed Business implementation is how to identify to users the availability of this navigation: the Linkstorm links appear as normal navigation elements until you happen to cursor over them. Linkstorm has a suggested icon to use to identify their special links, but it's not used in this instance. Linkstorm offers a very valuable navigation tool that allows the content itself to navigate audiences to more refined interests - a great example of how to leverage the context of content in powerful ways. In doing so we need to think more carefully about how we use available space in an online page to provide these kinds of experiences and make both publications and ads more interactive navigation experiences. Linkstorm may not be the definitive answer to navigation issues, but it raises many powerful opportunities to explore in the meantime.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:02 AM |
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| Wednesday, May 24, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:57 PM |
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| Tuesday, May 23, 2006 |
The rap against Google's enterprise search strategy revolves oftentimes around its lack of sophisticated presentation of taxonomies and categorization, strengths enjoyed many familiar names in enterprise search. But using the interfaces provided into the Google Search Appliance and Google Desktop Inxight Software has announced the integration of its content extraction and content clustering capabilities to content retrieved by Google's enterprise search technology. As demonstrated at the Enterprise Search Summit conference today in New York City, the Inxight Search Extender clusters search results into dynamically generated categories, providing both topic-oriented views and extracted content in categories such as "People, Places, Date/Time, Product, Currency" and so on. Right-clicking on the results can allow one to hook into content from subscription services such as LexisNexis or Hoover's or to online services such as Google Earth. That's pretty handy in and of itself, but the kicker is that Inxight can also flip this around and provide on-the-fly clustering for Google results in its Intelliseek-based Inxight SmartDiscovery federated search technology. With the SmartDiscovery interface the Google results are exposed as one of several aggregated internal and external sources, providing a relatively quick and simple integration across both structured and unstructured content sources, including premium content. This helps to narrow that gap between traditional business intelligence applications and Google-crawled content that much further, as well taking away some breathing space from more sophisticated enterprise search engines, enterprise subscription aggregators and auto-clustering tools trying to define their own niche. Using the OneBox application development program Google has insinuated its way into a wide variety of valuable mainstream enterprise applications (see our earlier weblog entry), making it as easy for users to look up purchase orders in an Oracle database as it is to track a FedEx package online. This rapidly growing network of affiliates extends many of Google's online philosophies for content integration deep into enterprises. The Inxight Search Extender is a fairly simple example of this growing strategy, but one which makes it clear that labeling Google Enterprise as an unsophisticated newcomer underplays the strengths of its rapidly growing range of leading solutions partners. This is one area in which it turns out that Google plays very well with others, indeed.
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:39 PM |
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The Editor's Weblog posts a good piece on the Financial Times' recent decision to extend the time for postponing posting of their news content to major content aggregation services from 12 hours to 24 hours. As John Burke points out there are many aggregators who scoff at this move, pointing out that knowledge workers in today's enterprises prefer to get content in one place via applications that they trust. With an elite print readership the FT has been slow to pick up the pace of developing its online presence, but as European online markets heat up they've begun to take a fresh look at how they position content for their users. While John Burke and the aggregators have an important point about valuable contexts provided by aggregation services, it's an argument that tends to sidestep the obvious concern that many publishers have with managing contexts with users in aggregation services today. Typical content aggregation services strip out everything but metadata and raw text from a news provider's content, leaving little for their users to click on if they'd like more value and depth from the publisher. Most want it that way via aggregators to encourage more direct relationships where possible, but the increasing use of open Web search engines as a source of referrals for ad-driven online revenues is pushing many publishers to reconsider carefully how they license content through aggregators. At the same time Google Co-op encourages premium publishers to add metadata and navigation context to their content similar to that provided by the enterprise aggregators - in an environment that allows for direct access to original versions of publishers' content. The argument for publishers working with major aggregators to license content still holds water, but it's time for both publishers and aggregators to consider how they can do a better job of providing both normalized search results and access to the richest versions of content available from a publisher in context - whether as an included part of their aggregator subscription or via their direct relationship with a publisher. As the "where" of content becomes less about where it came from and more about how valuable it can be in user-defined contexts the issues surrounding aggregator content licensing will be rising to the fore in ever-larger ways.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:19 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:11 AM |
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| Monday, May 22, 2006 |
One of the more interesting moments in my travels last week was coming out of a conference session at BookExpo in Washington, DC and having one of those field-level promo people shove a flier in my hand for...podcasts? Yes, podcasting books was a fairly hot trend at BookExpo this year, along with a variety of packaging options. As outlined in last week's Library Journal article ideas for packaging books more effectively in digital form are beginning to include not only text but virtually any media that can be encapsulated in digital packaging, including links, comments and community features. Other tools such as Osoft's rechristened DotReader (formerly ThoutReader) emphasize the role of premium books as but one source of media that people can to share with their peers to be productive in a Web-centric distribution environment. All of these developments, though, seem to be at odds somewhat with the editorial processes that create books as we know them today. It's still a fairly laborious process that creates a book, which in some part is responsible for their lasting value but also for their increasing challenges in meeting the needs of a content marketplace that's addicted to online content. Chris Anderson noted in his presentation at BookExpo that blogs and other forms of online content were about external context and whereas books are about internal context, capturing ideas versus exploring ideas. I think of it as the difference between a jam between jazz musicians jamming and a symphony: one form is born to improvisation and updates while the other is crafted for eternity. The question being, though: who's writing symphonies these days? The beauty of books is that they can be crafted for the ages, yet most of the money in books is from content that has much less lofty goals. As more online "symphonies" come into being, the editorial processes that have defined the creation of long-lasting books are likely to get more in line with online production processes and leave the question of what a book is increasingly in the hands of authors and the audiences that are attracted to their content instead of in the hands of traditional publishers. Online works such as Wikipedia hint at our ability to create lasting human knowledge in a new editorial regimen quite divorced from the book industry and yet with many book-like characteristics in its overall value. We're still waiting for the debut of that first great online novel, but with the rapid development of publishing technologies that can enable the creation of new kinds of books its time will be doubtless upon us quite soon.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:38 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:25 AM |
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| Sunday, May 21, 2006 |
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