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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 |
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 11:19 PM |
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| Friday, May 19, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:00 PM |
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| Thursday, May 18, 2006 |
It was an honor to speak at this year's BookExpo in Washington, DC today on a program entitled "The 2.0 Revolution: Seizing the Web's New Realities." This was a series of hour-long presentations from myself, Don Tapscott, President of New Paradigm Learning Corporation, Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine and Carly Fiorina, former Chairman & CEO of Hewlett-Packard. I wasn't able to stay for Carly Fiorina's presentation but I was very glad to hear Don Tapscott speak and to hear Chris' take on the transformation of his " Long Tail" weblog into a business book - my second time listening to his presentations this week, though this one was unique. Don is an amazing font of insights into what makes business and markets tick, generating long-lived memes such as "Paradigm Shift," "The Digital Economy," "Digital Capital" and the more recently coined "Wikinomics." Don provided a far-ranging talk on trends inspiring and growing out of the Web 2.0 movement, showing how the plethora of information appliances, mushrooming bandwidth, geo-mobility and multimedia sources have combined in open and self-organizing content services. Don showed some neat comparative performance charts from Alexa, showing how the growth of self-organizing Flikr now outpaces the pioneering Webshots service, Wikipedia flattening the flatlining Britannica, Blogger now eking out CNN.com and so on. These Web 2.0 winners are riding on the backs of digital natives, the children of post WWII "baby boomers" who were born to PCs, collaborative gaming and online communications and who will fuel the economy of the next few decades. The result is what Don calls "Marketing at the Instant of Truth," mining micro-relationships in an increasingly transparent marketplace that places a premium on collaborative relationships. These concepts Don markets in his well-received business books, which have packaged major trends to the needs of leading executives for decades. By contrast Chris finds himself pumping out his first business book under decidedly unique conditions. From a slide buried deep in a presentation deck to the most popular online story ever posted by Wired Magazine to a weblog that was used as an online community to evolve his Long Tail concept more fully, Chris has positioned himself in the somewhat untenable position of being the first person to try to evolve a Web 2.0 publication into the output of a mainstream publisher. Chris pointed out in his presentation that although the weblog has been instrumental in developing the book there is a wealth of new materials: less then five percent of the words used in the book overlap with the weblog, about half of the ideas and - surprisingly - the book has about half of the total text posted on the weblog. People may be likely to trash Chris' concepts if the book takes a dive, yet ironically if it does have problems selling it would probably be a great example of how The Long Tail and Web 2.0 can work together. The issue isn't whether the book is a hit but rather whether the total revenues that he can generate from publishing and other activities are going to have been worth its publishing. As for the book itself, I had a little time to examine an advance copy on the train back home. It's been positioned with the subtitle "Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More." The book is relatively short, which is oftentimes considered a virtue in trend-oriented books oriented towards senior executives. It's a well-written book, but it's interesting to see how the shape of Chris' ideas and presentations was changed in their conversion into book form from his original trend-setting insights backed by excellent statistical analysis of marketing and sales data. Much of the trimming and adding has made his concepts more accessible to general audiences. In the process of making it accessible and applicable to a wider array of business conditions, some of the edge from Chris' original efforts has been lost - a factor that may bode well for volume sales when it's released, but it will also mean less valuable content available in book format once sales settle down after its initial sales. What may help to mitigate this problem is Chris' diligent upkeep of his weblog on The Long Tail. It's kept his meme in play on Web sites linking to his weblog and may act as a resource for executives that want to dig deeper into the concept via the weblogs' deeper materials and discussions. These two factors are likely to help boost book sales in the long run, even if initial sales fall short of expectations. Whatever the sales of this first print run, it would be wrong to declare the book a success until the Long Tail concepts that he has offered have been proven out by the measurements of its sales over a fairly long period of time. In the meantime whatever doubters of the power of The Long Tail that are out there should retune their analysis to measure the total return on publishing from Chris' book instead of looking just at print title sales.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:31 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:12 PM |
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| Wednesday, May 17, 2006 |
This year's SIIA Content Forum in San Francisco was a robust gathering of content professionals, with great panels providing details on content product development, deployment, licensing, relicensing and search marketing. With an impressive panel of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs and Chris Anderson reminding us how large the "Long Tail" of content has become it would be easy to dismiss many at the conference as the "old guard" ready to head the way of dinosaurs. But evolution doesn't always turn out the way that you think that it will. Be prepared for the rapid evolution of many content companies into high-flying survivors that can feast on the best contextual opportunities for marketing content. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 7:19 PM |
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| Tuesday, May 16, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:51 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:19 AM |
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| Monday, May 15, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:43 PM |
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The Guardian noted recently the progress of U.S. legislation to make publicly funded research available online, a development that's been tracked for some time but one which is beginning to resonate more strongly with scholarly publishers facing mounting pressures in other research-intensive markets such as the U.K. As the Guardian notes if this legislation were to become law there would be a major impact on the margins of scholarly publishers, though it's far from clear which direction they would take to address the issue. The open access model is cited most frequently as a reasonable alternative, but it's not clear that open access will be feasible as a solution for each and every scholarly market. Established circles of academic peer review have a power base that will move extremely slowly towards any changes that would disrupt their comfortable position in the publishing industry. The slowness of change in the peer review process has been a hedge against rapid changes in scholarly publishing for many years, but with increased pressures from governments sponsoring research that hedge is likely to be trimmed reasonably soon. Governments needing results from research to power their economies in a highly competitive global economy have outgrown antiquated review processes and need new solutions - solutions that they're willing to force on a reluctant publishing industry intent on preserving print-based margins in a Web-centric publishing environment. Open access is not the answer to each and every publishers' issues in making a graceful transition to an era of online content distribution, but if open access is not the answer then scholarly publishers need to think far more aggressively about how they can make the scholarly review process more efficient to keep up with the expectations of global scientific markets under pressure. People may not be willing to pay for access to the research per se, but they'll probably value very highly content and context driven by peer reviewers and other scholarly contributors built around that research to help them judge for themselves how valuable a piece of research really is. It's time for scholarly publishers to develop aggressively post-print models of premium profitability - before anxious governments force their own solutions on them.
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:58 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 8:43 AM |
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| Friday, May 12, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:38 PM |
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| Thursday, May 11, 2006 |
Yesterday's annual press day at Google saw the debut of a number of interesting services. A new beta version of Google Desktop offers enhanced desktop "widget" software that can be dragged to a PC desktop or in some instances dragged from a Google personal homepage on the Web to the desktop. Nifty tricks that publishers should pay attention to, as they offer an opportunity to provide content in a key part of a user's screen real estate (see our earlier entry on Google's widgets). Also of interest are expanded desktop search capabilities and a new feature called Google Notebook due out next week. Google Notebook is billed as making it easier to collect and republish content from the Web. All part of the ongoing war with Microsoft for providing a usable desktop that blends Web content with personal and enterprise content, and all important evolutions in their own right. But the big news for online publishers this week is Google Co-op, a new feature that is attempting to blend content subscription and reference models with the search engine paradigm. Google Co-op has two main components: topic maps and subscription tools. Publishers both amateur and professional are encouraged to submit content from their Web sites to Google Co-op with XML tags that make it easy for their content to be categorized in topic maps that appear above the main Google search results. When a user enters a search query on Google that matches a topic, a listing of subtopics that have tagged content available appears above normal search results. Clicking on one of these subtopics then displays a listing of search results relating to that subtopic - with tagged content appearing at the top of the list. Users can "subscribe" to search results from sites using Google Co-op XML tags. Results from these sites appear above Google's normal search results and below the topic map when that site's content matches a topic. Users "subscribe" to sites much in the same way that they would subscribe to an XML weblog feed, except that you subscribe to links instead of to delivered content; click once on a publisher's icon in a directory that Google provides and you're done. While weak in its current form due to the very limited number of sites available for subscription (do I really care what Digg has to say about cancer? Maybe...). It's also possible to create subscription links to not only typical keywords but also very specific types of queries. For example, the technical documentation outlines how you can set up matches to queries such as "speed limit info for [place name]." Google Co-op has the potential to be an extremely powerful tool for publishers - especially those providing premium content. It addresses the issue of what content people really want to see from professional publishers willing to support tagging versus "all the web" results fairly neatly. The subscription features in particular hold great potential. User-driven premium content aggregation has come to town, it appears, in a design that drives audiences to publishers' sites directly as well as to subscription databases. There are just a handful of topics defined so far, one of them being "Health," which Janice McCallum discusses on this weblog in an earlier entry. As Janice notes Google Co-op is a way to encourage publishers to tag their content so that it will map to key topics effectively. The key thing to bear in mind is that this will be have to be true for ALL publishers rather quickly. As topics get built out over time more and more tagged content will push untagged content down the stack of search results for specific topics selected from topic maps. Normal search results will not be impacted in the short run - tags only relate to the topics when selected - but you can expect content with this valuable metadata to be factored into organic search engine results over time. In the meantime Google has managed to come up with an innovative approach to categorized search that compels publishers of all stripes to provide highly visible and usable metadata for their online content. In a sense Google Co-op is like an inside-out Google Base: rather than try to get publishers to deposit and categorize content in a place that may not offer its most valuable context Google instead has allowed content to stay in at home on the servers where publishers can manage its value most effectively. There are a number of rough edges to this new feature, as usual, but in sum has the potential to take the relationship between publishers, users and Web search engines to a whole new level of service. It also has strong implications for the enterprise search environment as well, as these same tags could be used in time to integrate internal and external content more effectively via Google Desktop-initiated searches. Just another day down at the Googleplex, though a very exciting one at that.
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:35 PM |
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Google Health has been widely anticipated in the past couple of weeks. After yesterday's press day at Google, the reaction to Google Health seems to have cooled, perhaps because it was introduced as part of a new program at Google called Google Co-op. Instead of the approach taken with Google Scholar or Google Finance, where Google staff choose sites to crawl for inclusion in the specialty search areas, Google Health will be a cooperative project between product architects at Google, authoritative sites selected by Google, and content tagged by interested individuals, businesses, and organizations. The latter categories of content " contributors" will earn higher relevancy rankings if sufficient number of people subscribe to that contributor's collection of labeled webpages. Google Health comes out of the gate with seven "significant" providers whose content is being tagged by health professionals. They include the National Library of Medicine, Centers for Disease Control, Health on the Net Foundation, Harvard Medical School, Mayo Clinic, U. California, San Francisco, and Kaiser Permanente. Co-op verticals are a clever means of providing an incentive for publishers in the hottest topic areas to add consistent tags to their content to improve the relevance of search. It is too early to gauge whether this approach will work. There are some questions about ease of tagging (see Danny Sullivan's review in Search Engine Watch). Nonetheless, this approach has the benefit of adding depth and an added level of relevancy to main search engine results; providing a targeted experience for users who want authoritative information on health topics; and providing a means for knowledgeable insiders and publishers to raise their profile via votes of confidences in the form of subscribers to their labeled webpages. In essence, Google Co-op allows users to build their own list of favorites to rank as most relevant for a topic via subscribing to the sources listed in the directory as well as supplemental sources of labeled content. To reach its full potential, the ease with which individuals will be able to use the tools to become contributors to create their custom view of relevancy will be perhaps most important to the success of the co-op approach to vertical search.
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By Janice - posted at 9:46 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:23 AM |
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| Wednesday, May 10, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:03 PM |
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| Tuesday, May 09, 2006 |
It wasn't so long ago that virtually every American with a pulse and a mailbox would get CDs from America Online offering free dialup minutes to connect to the wonders of the Web filtered through AOL's "user-friendly" proprietary software. I only used the old AOL once and found it to be one of the most confusing experiences that I had ever had with the Web, but at its height in 2002 more than 26 million AOL subscribers found it to be their connection of choice. Now the Washington Post notes that AOL subscribers are down more than 30 percent from that peak, with queries to customer service reps down 50 percent, leading to 1,300 recent layoffs of customer support staff. Widespread broadband Internet access is noted as one of the key culprits in this decline, but the key factor is that people discovered that the Web really wasn't that hard a place to figure out after all - and filled with a lot of interesting stuff that AOL wasn't offering. Now AOL is backing away from a distribution-centric focus and trying to pump up its original content offerings with trendy weblogs and classic TV shows - none of which seems to be stemming AOL.com's steady decline in site traffic. As noted in this week's news analysis distribution-oriented content strategies are in decline across the board, with many outlets such as AOL that sought to find a magic chokehold on user access via the Web disappointed as those strategies melted away in the hands of users empowered by global access to infinite content sources. Media companies are starting to catch on to this concept, but for the most part they're still looking for new angles on distribution control that will give them a new edge. There are two types of content providers that will succeed in this emerging environment: those that can produce the most compelling original content and those that can contextualize content from any and all sources most effectively. Portals that do a pretty good job at these two key functions will have a hard time keeping up with those that specialize in one of these two key areas. This doesn't bode well for services such as AOL pushing "pretty good" mass media solutions for people who have ready substitutes. AOL helped a generation become wired, but once they got wired they mostly moved on.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:11 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:12 PM |
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The explosion of content from television producers bringing original content to the Web may look on the surface like a consumer content story, but it's really only a very visible sign of a broader story impacting all content producers. In a world with a limitless supply of content via a universal Web traditional content distribution is on its way to becoming a secondary business model. With the emphasis on getting the attention of audiences saturated with content options profitable publishing is less about controlling distribution and more about helping others to push content into its most valuable context without traditional distribution deals. Original Web-first content production is an important step, but without context-driven value the job is half done. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:53 PM |
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| Monday, May 08, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:09 PM |
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A rising tide lifts all presses, it could be said, and the latest publisher CEO survey from FOLIO: Magazine seems to underscore the overall buoyancy of B2B print publishing. In 2004, survey results showed 20 percent of publishers with margins of 5 to 9 percent, the 2005 study shows the greatest number of publishers falling in the 15 to 19 percent profit range. 80 percent expect revenue increases for 2006. Print is playing a key component of this mix, with more than two thirds of respondents expecting new print advertisers in 2006 and more than half expecting print ad increases from existing clients. But while print is still holding up current revenues, online revenues were cited as the fastest growing contributor. Online is not for everyone: 42 percent of survey respondents have NO online revenues. This paints a picture of an increasingly divided B2B publishing market, with those able to invest in online services doing so robustly and those late to the game challenged to make the transition effectively any time soon. With only five percent of respondents planning to start a new magazine title, it appears that publishers that have missed the online transition are going to be riding along as long as they can on their existing folios. Instead of new titles, most new investment appears to be going into online services, broadening out relationships with readership via an array of new services that provide contextuality for ads and content without having to invest in new title launches. So although we'll continue to see print as an important component of B2B publishing overall, the split between those with strong commitments to online publishing revenues and those who shy away from online is leading to a split in the industry as a whole. Within the next few years it's safe to say that many leading B2B publishers will see more than half of their revenues coming from online publishing, with those slow to commit to the online shift lacking the leverage to keep up with the more quickly growing core of online revenues available in the market. In this environment it's not clear that B2B publishers without a strong online strategy will be able to sustain their operations indefinitely. 2006 will be a comfortable year for many, but expect much tougher sledding in 2007 that may witness a new round of consolidations at rates very favorable to buyers.
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By John Blossom - posted at 7:45 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 12:16 AM |
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| Friday, May 05, 2006 |
Trends Is the Web the new Hollywood? CNET News Microsoft Ballmer: To Invest Rapidly As Other Big Net Cos SmartMoney.com Yahoo announces My Web 2.0: Making searching personal PC Advisor Sony, Apple, Microsoft, and others form digital exchange group Ars Technica Reuters, CME venture to target hedge fund growth with global Forex marketplace Reuters Consortium Raises Its Offer for VNU, Gains New Support WSJ Online* Got a Second? G.E. Has a Quick Message The New York Times* Federated Media's Advertising Platform Launch! Federated Media First Look: CBS Innertube paidContent.org Technology analyst expects further delays for Windows Vista The Seattle Times Blogs making their impact felt BBC News MSN partners with Reveille and Be Jane for MSN Originals Indian Television YouTube sees user rebellion Business 2.0 Circ Expected to Fall Steeply Again in Upcoming FAS-FAX Editor & Publisher Advanstar revenue, earnings up in first quarter BtoB Online Best Practices Why global internet freedom matters FT.com Blog smartly and let the cash pour in Money Control Cool Tools The dawn of the 'Smart Newspaper' The Editors Weblog NewsGator Unveils Groundbreaking Syndication and Social Media Platform MarketWire Cross-Media Authoring and Publishing Provides Single Source for Content Creation and Delivery BusinessWire
Deals, Partnerships & Sales IndustryBrains Announces Contextual Advertising Pact with ECT, Renews Relationship with The Motley Fool BusinessWire via TMCNet ProQuest Investments acquires common shares of Biosyntech, Inc. CNW Group Products, Markets & People Topix Launches Revenue Sharing Publisher Platform ProBlogger
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:54 AM |
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| Thursday, May 04, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:25 AM |
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| Wednesday, May 03, 2006 |
There's quite a bit of user-generated Kool-Aid being drunk by major media executives these days, as noted by paidContent.org's Rafat Ali in a recent post on the BBC's Director General Mark Thompson speech at the We Media conference. In a paraphrase of Mark's remarks Rafat notes "The audience phase of the media is over." I've been hearing a fair amount of this "death of the audience" riff in a number of conversations, postings and emails, and it's one of the more unfortunate side-effects of the hysteria over user-generated media. There will ALWAYS be audiences. Perhaps they will not be the mass audiences that media companies have targeted traditionally, but an audience is necessary for content to exist (see our definition on Wikipedia - fourth noun definition). What it is different in today's publishing environment is that publishers and audiences define themselves on the fly more than ever. A page of search results is a publication tuned to the needs of an audience of one. On a social networking site people post to be read, and those readers are an audience. The job of media is to facilitate content production that's valuable in the eyes of an audience. That's been its job all along, it's just that the producers and audiences are much more granular and difficult to pre-program. So yes, we may not be the pliant mass audiences that media producers used to service, but it's still the same gig. Let's ease off the "death of audience" thing, shall we?
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:23 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:26 AM |
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| Tuesday, May 02, 2006 |
If Google's elementary school report card would have a note from the teacher it would probably read "doesn't play well with others." On the other hand Microsoft's report card would probably say "plays hard with others, but at least they play." Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch has the best links and summary coverage of the quiet but profound split between Google and Amazon, a shift that opens another front in the rapidly escalating battle between Microsoft and Google. Instead of Google search results for Web content on Amazon's A9.com search engine one now gets results from Microsoft's Live.com search engine. There are also reports that AdSense ads have been pulled from Amazon.com pages. For people who were wondering a month ago why Google is preparing to raise another USD 2.1 billion in a new stock offering the Washington Post has the answer: Microsoft has earmarked more than USD 2.4 billion in its aggressive drive to establish a stronger position against Google and other major online rivals. Google guessed the amount pretty well, it would seem, and wanted to factor it in to their investment plans. While Google's direct revenues from Amazon were relatively minimal, the symbiosis between the two companies appeared to be significant - until Google started getting up the dander of publishers with its book scanning efforts and Yahoo and Microsoft started to get friendlier with them via the Open Content Alliance. With book publishers becoming more aggressive at managing the online packaging of their products it is good for Amazon in the short run to work with partners that will not be bogged down by chilly relations with publishers. But the other significant piece of the puzzle picked up by paidContent.org is Google being swapped out as the search engine of choice for Amazon's Alexa.com portal, which serves up not only stats on Web sites but also houses a major archive of Web content that Alexa makes available to Web application developers ( see our earlier weblog entry). This sets the stage for Microsoft to play a more aggressive role in developing mash-ups and other value-add applications with archived Web content. There's no doubt about it - this is a full-scale war that will be waged relentlessly on all fronts. How will this actually pan out in the long run? In the WaPo article A9's David Tennenhouse was rather hedged in his statements: "Our engineers have done some testing and evaluation, and overall we concluded this was an interesting option to discover information," said David Tennenhouse, chief executive of A9, a subsidiary of Amazon.com that provides search and mapping results.
Asked whether Microsoft's search engine is better than Google's, Tennenhouse said, "It will be up to users to try that out."
This could just be what Amazon felt comfortable letting out, but it seems to imply that this change is being done for business reasons more than anything relating to the technical performance of Google. If Microsoft succeeds in helping Amazon grow the deal will probably be called one of the more shrewd turnabouts in recent online memory. But if not, then there appears to be enough long-established goodwill between Google and Amazon to re-open the relationship should things not work out too well with Microsoft. Goodwill will probably not be enough to get things to that point of reconsideration, though. Google needs to evidence more concrete movement towards supporting ecommerce for major suppliers of premium content products if it is to parry this thrust by Microsoft any time soon. The competition is good for us content consumers if it all comes out as a fair fight, but it may require some changes to Google's schoolyard report card to make it an even affair.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:19 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:13 PM |
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| Monday, May 01, 2006 |
Exclusive content deals may seem like a throwback to a simpler era of commercial agreements, but with the emergence of publishers pushing rich data solutions we may expect to see more of these emerging in key market sectors. With the open Web providing more ways for publishers to market their value-add rich data content directly to targeted audiences there's less of an incentive to relicense content except where partners can add the most value possible through their services. Add in the value that subscription database services can add to the Web sites of publishers and there are more reasons then ever for such exclusives to create unique content services in both enterprise and online markets. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:22 PM |
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paidContent.org posted an initial review of Yahoo's new Tech portal, a rival for CNET that tries hard to be less techie in attitude and more magazine-like in its metaphor. In his quick take Rafat calls it a "work in progress," which is true enough, though progressing towards what is a little unclear. The first impression of Yahoo! Tech is a site that bristles with ads, accentuated by a central box that slashes up an initial animated ad integrated into the page itself that can be skipped if desired. Replacing it is four equal-sized boxes with attractive graphics and headlines: place your mouse cursor over any one of these and it provides a bigger picture and an explaining subheadline. This central zone on the home page is all done in Macromedia Flash, so you can't right-click on any of the links to launch it into a new window, but hey, this is supposed to be for non-techies, right? If that's the case, then how come I get a help page when I click on the "add a product" box to the "my saved tech products" box to the right of the features? Oh, the help text says "To save a product to this list, click the Save for Later button on the set of pages related to an individual product or from a search results page, then click on Add to My Saved Products." Where's the "Save for Later" button? Ah, there it is, in little type underneath the rating and price info on a product information page. Hmm, some good ideas for usability, but they need polish that makes it truly non-technical as possible to use. The site also has a handful of "advisers," including a "Mom" advisor (sic), a "Techie Diva" and a "Working Guy." These are nothing more than weblogs, which seem OK but the editorial style is more like a magazine column than a typical weblog. More to the point, there's no way yet to tell from a product page what one of these advisers has for advice, so it's not clear how much value is there having these integrated into a database product. The product search tool fares a little better, fine-tuning a given query automatically as you select refining criteria from a menu of parameters such as price, vendor and so on. A navigation guide with popular categories size-weighted appears up top on the home page and on pages that you follow from that navigation, providing a useful level of faceted navigation but it positioning seems out of place on the home page. Feature articles are along the lines of "finding the perfect cell phone" and include links to content in PC World magazine as well as links to highly recommended products in the Yahoo! Tech database. It appears as if the marketing team at Yahoo! set out with some very specific demographics in mind and tried to carve out a product that had content that was an amalgam of CNET and About.com held together with glossy media production values to appeal to a non-technical audience. The result is somewhat disconcerting: the site is clearly oriented towards maximizing the rich data from both professionals and users that underpins a good consumer guide these days but its seems to be at a loss as to how to have the site as a whole hang together as either a publication or a tool or a meaningful combination of both. The editorial content is very disjointed and in general doesn't integrate well with the very competent buyers guides. It's a step towards Yahoo providing more destination content that has AOL-like appeal for mass audiences and brand advertisers trained by traditional media, but it's a site that needs to focus more on the basics of what it takes to make content appealing to online audiences. Like many of Yahoo's current efforts you can feel them straining to appeal to users in every way they can right out of the box, but it's perhaps best to do so with a bit less noise and a few more pieces in place to keep the appeal focused more clearly on the specific motivations that bring people to a site. Good production values can make a site more visually appealing but they cannot overcome underlying weaknesses in the fundamental concept of a content product.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:13 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:06 AM |
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Microsoft's new beta version of its Internet Explorer browser ( Forbes) is in many ways a catch-up to accommodate those who have come to appreciate the features of Mozilla's Firefox browser. It's a move reminiscent of the intense effort to re-launch IE some ten years ago to counter the then-dominant Netscape browser. As in that earlier era, the Microsoft strategy is to match rivals feature-for-feature with little twists that give the home team an advantage such as having a toolbar search box that defaults to Microsoft's Web search engine. In comparison, the toolbar search box in Firefox defaults to the Google browser, though there is no formal relationship with Google to enforce that advantage. Yet Google grouses in today's New York Times about unfair practices by Microsoft in setting their search tool's default to their own search engine. This seems like kind of a pouty response to a proven competitive tactic - one that's worked to Google's advantage amongst the many Google-friendly tie-ins from Web software developers. Microsoft is going full-bore to realign its online initiatives to go head-to-head with Google wherever possible, even as they push "the user comes first" as their new mantra to soften its aggressive image. While the NYT article highlights the potential impact on ad dollars as a key concern of Google's in this reinvigorated competition for online audience, there is plenty of potential fallout from enterprise markets as well, where Google has an enormous lead over Microsoft in user mindshare for providing high-quality business information that it's trying to leverage into enterprise-based services. While it's far from clear that Microsoft's efforts will stem its competitive woes its powerful technology assets are becoming well aligned for the first serious across-the-board challenge to Google's emerging Web dominance. That's good news for content consumers, who will benefit from greater choice in high-quality services, and in some ways hopefully good news for Google, inasmuch as the competition will challenge them not to assume that they always know users the best in every venue.
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:30 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 8:24 AM |
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