Subscribe to our feed
(?) or add to:
MyYahoo
iGoogle/Google
Reader
Bloglines
Rojo
NewsGator
|
| Friday, June 30, 2006 |
 When I wrote my news analysis piece a few weeks back on the rising importance of portable storage media as content serving platforms, little did I think that such a neat example of this concept in action would surface so quickly. CNET's piece on their new V-Phone USB appliance provides portable storage packaged as a communications solution. Plug the V-Phone into any Windows PC's USB port and you have a ready-to-go Vonage connection complete with mike and headset - no software loading required and a spare 256MB of storage for files or contact lists. When wireless server connectivity gets small enough and cheap enough to fit into a "stick" appliance that can bypass USB ports as needed we're going to see these kinds of solutions bloom left and right - and along with them a new generation of mobile content services and solutions that will have cross-platform capabilities. That's probably not too far off: already wireless file servers are about the size of a paperback book. Keep your eyes open, there is more to come.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 4:25 PM |
permanent link to this entry
 bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 3:26 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Thursday, June 29, 2006 |
 While it's not the most amazing development in ecommerce - universal online "wallets" have come and gone through the years, after all - the new Google Checkout ecommerce capability is noteworthy for Googlish simplicity and universality that makes it a breeze to integrate. Neither a PayPal substitute nor a shopping cart service per se, Google Checkout provides a person the ability to execute one-off purchases on the Web via any site that chooses to embed Google Checkout payment buttons into a Web page displaying an item for sale. Click on a Google Checkout "Buy Now" button and you will get a one-click shopping experience that clears the payment and alerts the merchant of your purchase. There is no fulfillment or shopping cart management: purchases are limited to single items, though there is the ability to define multiple price points and descriptions for a single item. You buy it, and you're out. Google does have a network of popular shopping cart software vendors that have integrated Google Checkout buttons already with their software, so it is feasible to have some more sophisticated capabilities from the get-go. The nifty part of the Google Checkout program is that it offers a slight discount to advertisers using the Google AdWords program and the option of a common administrative login, encouraging merchants to have a one-stop source to acquire and monetize online audiences. Since Google Checkout integrates so easily with a Web site it's quite feasible to maintain existing ecommerce capabilities and drop in Google Checkout buttons in parallel, making it easy for users to get a trusted feeling coming in from a Google ad and a trusted feeling on the way out via their purchase capabilities. The combination of the ad program and the checkout program makes for an instant distributed eBay competitor: Froogle, Google Base, standard search results, Google Books or Google Scholar is the shopping center, but via AdWords and the AdSense network or direct browsing consumers can bypass the shopping center altogether and go straight to the merchant - while still offering Google a piece of the action as a trusted neutral party. This combination could be a powerful deterrent to the growth of the eBay ad network It's too early to tell if Google Checkout will attain widespread use quickly, but one senses that Google's brand value as a neutral third party with fewer hidden agendas than other companies (we're talking perceptions here, mind you) and the lack of any localized software "hooks" via the service will encourage users and merchants to sign up. The lack of sophisticated infrastructure in Google Checkout is rather a plus for most publishers, in that content purchasers can be encouraged to execute a purchase via a trusted financial venue while keeping the management of online subscription access and purchase fulfillment services undisturbed. Google Checkout is not going to change the ecommerce strategies of publishers in a large way but it is yet another tool that can be used in both personal and professional settings to facilitate the acquisition of premium content sources on an "on the fly" basis simply and effectively. Looks like GoogleZon may not have been necessary after all...
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 2:11 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
The announcement of Alacra's new family of RSS feeds for premium content comes as rather a coup for the business information services provider. Anyone can add to their weblog news reader feeds of new report notifications available via RSS from the Alacra Store on specific companies (example feed: Wells Fargo) or from a specific publisher (example: Fitch Research) or even a feed of business news and selected business-oriented weblogs from Newstex ( example). The feed provides a headline and a brief snippet from the item, which can be clicked on to bring one to the purchase offer page in the Alacra Store. While it's not likely that the average person will be using this setup to order USD 10 access to press releases, the average busy consultant who can bill through such expenses will certainly be interested, as will analysts and other professionals who focus on specific companies but who want to pick and choose premium reports carefully on any given day. Focused RSS feeds are a natural for the business and financial analysis community. Historically these users have relied on email inboxes to get research pushed from investment banks and other sources: in many ways their "inboxes" are their desktops. With email becoming an increasingly polluted and unreliable distribution channel, RSS provides premium content distributors with the ability to feed headlines and highlights directly into these users' inboxes via newsreader software and bypass the ugliness of email. Factiva has experimented with RSS feeds for very broad categories of premium news content for their subscribers, but their feeds lack the granularity and depth of premium content that Alacra is offering via this service. Shore's research into business content purchasing indicates clearly that business content buyers in a broad range of roles are increasingly interested in "just-in-time" content purchasing, especially when purchases can be matched with "top line" business development and sales opportunities. Tools such as RSS feeds from the Alacra Store allow professionals to have a high level of awareness of the premium content available to them on a focused and proactive basis - and to become purchasers of content that's right for the moment. This is a great tool at a great time for business users. The only real question is: what took the industry so long to get here?
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:35 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:25 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Wednesday, June 28, 2006 |
It was a pleasure to stop by the ContentNext mixer last evening and to catch up with several hundred of paidContent.org's friends and fans. By shortly after six the line to get in to the instant sellout event was already backing up down the staircase at the W Hotel at Union Square in New York City. Thanks to Rafat for a great event and congratulations to the ContentNext family of publications on their new funding and management. It's such a boost to see honest and humble efforts rewarded. Horatio Alger is still alive and well and living in Los Angeles. Business news has a new paradigm through the efforts of journalists like Rafat, one which has brought the value of community conversations to a new level. Rafat Ali kicked off the festivities with an interview of Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., Chairman, The New York Times Company and Publisher of The New York Times. Rafat did a fine and relatively gentle job of probing the state of the NYT's online efforts, though much of the info coming out was already fairly well known. Probably the most interesting point that came up was Mr. Sulzberger's compare and contrast of the NYT's printing of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 (after several days of excerpts in the newspaper the government stopped the printing by a court injunction) and today's era that would have allowed instantaneous release of the entire range of information gathered by the paper. The New York Times' recent coverage of bank records surveillance by U.S. government intelligence operatives may yet meet with a governmental response ("Treason...?" Sulzberger mused) but whatever the response the era of instant global publishing and republishing allows leading news organizations to have a much deeper and immediate impact with such provocative editorial efforts. But since these moments come and go so much more quickly the opportunity to monetize them at the zenith of their impact via ad services is more limited. This leaves in doubt the future financing of efforts such as placing correspondents in a Baghdad bureau (a USD 3 million for the NYT before salary expenses, according to Sulzberger). I'll have more on this quandary of finding the right revenue mix for news in this week's news analysis. The other interesting moment of the Sulzberger interview was when he waxed warmly over the new Times Reader browser, a Microsoft Vista-based application for reading a newspaper in a print-like format on desktop and oversized portable devices. While he has a strong commitment to making online publishing a financial and editorial success, clearly Sulzberger has a soft spot for print that's not going to go away any time soon. When an institution like The New York Times has made so much history and well-designed content in that medium it's hard not to linger with the format, but these little tricks of Microsoft to woo major publishers into feeling comfortable with the transition from print to Microsoft-captive digital revenues are mostly showboat efforts that have little to do with the ultimate future of publishing in electronic environments. As for the event itself it was an interesting mix of media-covering-media types along with reps from consumer and business publishing services and content technology companies - very representative of Rafat's readership. While the swarm of people focusing on online video technologies seemed to have a good time, the sponsor reps from FAST Search and Transfer looked to be rather glum (hey, doesn't everyone remember how important search is...?). Donna Bogatin at ZDNet gave the event high marks while noting that we've moved from VC-backed events in the dot-com Silicon Alley days to event sponsorships. The current content economy may have a certain bubble aspect to it, but it's a bubble in which people are making money rather than speculating about making money. Donna points out Jeff Jarvis' rather cranky weblog entry in which he puts down "...guys in nametags making pitches for their companies to anyone who would stand still and even those who would not." Well, it WAS a networking event, Jeff... Looking forward to the Fall event - in a larger facility hopefully. Though bring that caterer again, the canapes were great.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:15 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:13 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Tuesday, June 27, 2006 |
Someone over in the LexisNexis PR department has their finger stuck on the "Send" key this week. So far we have the announcements of Advanced Government Solutions, which includes Intelligence Analysis Solutions, Total Practice Advantage for Legal markets and the addition of Factset Research to LexisNexis Market Intelligence...and it's only Tuesday. Each one of these are strong integrated offerings for verticals that are spending big on content integration in the public and private sectors: law enforcement, intelligence, general legal practices and M&A specialists. They include the ability to integrate internal, external and internal community content to drive investigations both criminal and commercial. These kinds of highly focused vertical solutions are likely to help LexisNexis expand its high-value-add approach to content services, taking an increasingly neutral approach to content sourcing and focusing very heavily on the goals of their audiences. The Factset integration is of particular interest, as it claims to provide the first combined litigation and transaction data service via a single platform that can be used to develop clients for legal services in the M&A space from multiple angles. Compare and contract with Factiva, which, though it has received many kudos for its advanced search platform and sales integration tools, has had limited focus on productizing offerings for specific verticals and has not reached out as deeply as LexisNexis as of late for strong content aggregation partners. Neither approach is 100 percent bulletproof, but in an era in which content's value is all about the context, the richer contexts are likely to have the longer and richer returns.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:21 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
While I have weighed in already on the importance of Net neutrality for publishers, a few recent items are worth reviewing for the state of the debate. CNET News offers an interview with U.S. Federal Communications Commission member Michael Copps, in which he speaks out strongly in favor of neutrality and urges technology companies to weigh in on the issue through their lobbying channels. By contrast an op/ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle from the Heartland Institute, a purveyor of opinion with a particular outlook, argues that net neutrality actually favors providers such as Microsoft and Google with huge server farms to manage capacity. It's unfortunate that the Heartland Institute piece has received such prominent billing: it is pure bunk. Every publisher on the Web today pays for bandwidth that connects to the Internet, as does every user. An individual with a small Web site on a server farm pays more for more bandwidth, just as larger providers may pay for dedicated communications bandwidth. Users can order levels of overall bandwidth, as can businesses and other institutions, and not be bothered with how it's managed internal to the Internet itself. The fee structure to manage high-demand services is already in place and is carried proportionately already by those services that want more throughput and by consumers who want more throughput on a non-prejudicial basis. Consumers both personal and corporate are beginning to become aware of this issue and hopefully will begin to weigh in as well. A great education piece can be found at Amanda Congdon's Rocketboom, in which she points out with good humor the impact of cable TV-like packaging that may fall out of non-neutral approaches: "I've got [the] Bronze [Web package], but boy, do I wish I could get Silver. Then I could get - Google!" In the current U.S. political environment anything is possible, so it's worth considering carefully just how these scenarios may play out. Further throttles and controls on Web content distribution based on arbitrary fee schedules are absolutely unnecessary and an impediment to the effective growth of online content ecommerce. Should non-neutral connectivity become a legal reality, it would penalize the U.S. economy while favoring nations that have much to gain from a more neutral approach. Hopefully non-media corporations weigh in on this as well, for without neutrality they would be set up for distribution fees on top of communications fees for them to develop their increasingly direct and sophisticated communications with their marketplaces. Should GM pay extra fees to up the multimedia capabilities of their online marketing and weblogs? I don't think that they'd be too interested, hopefully. The Web is a different animal, no doubt, one which has evolved quickly enough that the potential for new ways to market goods and services is already evident - ways that can only benefit from a level playing field that eliminates unnecessary intrusion by players that have little additional value to add to publishers, enterprises or consumers. There's much for publishers and marketers to gain by keeping the Internet a neutral stage. The time to speak up is now.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:15 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:12 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Monday, June 26, 2006 |
Trends Waiting for the Dough on the Web The New York Times* Murdoch on Google's Arrogance, Future of Mass Media I Want Media Interviews Microsoft Should Buy Yahoo, Says Merrill Lynch Forbes PLoS, Losing Money, Hikes Author Fees Cork University Press Bloggers Find Financial Backers For Their Independent News Sites WSJ Online* The Next Big Step: Announcing Our Funding, from Patricof's Greycroft Partners paidContent.org Corporate America wakes up to Web 2.0 CNET News Russian Mobile Content Market Shows 53% Y-O-Y TMCNet Google Blamed For Indexing Student Test Scores & Social Security Numbers Search Engine Watch VNU to expand digital offering with content studio Media Bulletin Google-backed FON begins global wireless Internet community push AFP via Yahoo! News What if They Built an Urban Wireless Network and Hardly Anyone Used It? The New York Times* Survey finds most b-to-b marketers lack confidence in customer data BtoB Online Best Practices In Terms of Web Usability, the Eyes Have It Publish Content, Contact, Community - A Simple, Universal Business Strategy Duct Tape Marketing (FMP) Deployment of Corporate Weblogs Will Double in 2006 BusinessWire via TMCNet Cool Tools Jookster: Mashes up web archiving, social networking and ranked searching The Social Software Weblog
Deals, Partnerships & Sales McClatchy to Sell Wilkes-Barre Times Leader to Group Led by Richard Connor and HM Capital PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance The Wall Street Journal Office Network Launches Today in Partnership with Office Media Network PrimeZone Products, Markets & People Reed Business Information Manufacturing.net: A New Real-Time News Service for Manufacturing Industry BusinessWire LexisNexis Launches Advanced Government Solutions to Enable More Effective Government Decisions BusinessWire LexisNexis Introduces Intelligence Analysis Solutions; Intelligence Analysis Supports Global War on Terror BusinessWire Enhanced SpringerLink Offers eBook Collection Information Today Standard & Poor's Capital IQ Further Enhances Its Information Platform Investors.com CMP Technology Launches EE Times Europe Online PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance News Service is First to Provide News Exclusively from Small Town America 24-7 Press Release blinkx.tv Extends Online Video Index with Public Information Films from the UK National Archives PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance Amdocs' Qpass Launches OpenMarket Exchange, a Catalyst for the Digital Content Marketplace PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 1:58 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
After chugging along with decades worth of PCs that never seem to get appreciably faster in relation to our content needs, hope is on the way. IBM's new experimental computer chips promise a 100x improvement in processor performance, with its availability to everyday users likely in years rather than decades. For those who had hoped for an evolutionary progression of publishing into the electronic realm, forgive me for being the bearer of bad news - the revolution will be at your fingertips even sooner than expected. Click here to read the full News Analysis
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:04 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
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
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 8:00 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Friday, June 23, 2006 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 9:34 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Thursday, June 22, 2006 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 8:33 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Wednesday, June 21, 2006 |
An interesting juxtaposition in the headlines today: as Microsoft announces its launch of a tool to embed Creative Commons content licensing information in works created via Microsoft Office CNET news covers growing opposition to the way Microsoft is implementing its Windows Genuine Advantage software anti-piracy tools. So at the same time that Microsoft is trying to encourage more flexible and friendly licensing for users' intellectual property it is zeroing in on much tighter licensing restrictions on its own intellectual property. There's nothing wrong with trying to do both, I suppose, but for the most part commercial companies setting up alliances with Creative Commons seem to be using it as window dressing to build up points with user-generated media folks while focusing mostly on mainstream publishers' property for business deals to drive profits. The gap between token support for user-publishers and more serious commercial encouragement may close somewhat as Windows Vista rolls out, widening the use of rights management capabilities that offer content licensors enforcement options. Could it be that Microsoft becomes a major facilitator of greater profits for user-publishers via a combination of Creative Commons and DRM? Wow, would be a bit of a stretch for BOTH camps. But as the propagator of the main platform users employ to be global publishers Microsoft has more to gain in the long run from the hundreds of millions of individual and enterprise publishers than from a relative handful of media companies trying to exploit those same user platforms. When you give users a clear "what's in it for me" proposition digital rights management tools will begin to make sense. Perhaps the Creative Commons deal is a small step towards a meaningful WIIFM proposition for Microsoft users. But one step must follow another. More to come...
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 1:50 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 1:48 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Tuesday, June 20, 2006 |
As pointed out by CNET and others the new Netscape Beta is a combination of Digg-like content voting and commentary with a layer of editor-picked selections from the voted pool of content to highlight key items and occasional "anchor" comments from Netscape editors. Unlike Digg, which has built an intensely involved community on a relatively narrow range of tech-oriented topics, the Netscape Beta covers more broadly popular topics such as health & fitness, real estate, autos, celebrities and so on. The initial impact of this effort on traffic has been minimal - even discouraging, judging by Alexa stats. If you look at stats overlayed for both Digg and Yahoo's del.icio.us you can see that the Netscape beta intro was fueled almost entirely by users curious about the Netscape service who were already involved in social bookmarking. Thus far the user recommendations are pretty slim beyond the typical focus of Digg-eratis - leaving it up in the air as to whether Netscape.com natives will take the bait. If nothing else Jason Calacanis has assembled in the Netscape beta a very attractive media property that mixes the latest best practices for community building through social bookmarking with editorial input from "anchors" who are active participants in news gathering within the social bookmarking model. In a recent story on North Korea's missile deployments the Netscape anchor covering this topic chimed in with some useful information about how Wikipedia is covering the story as a current event and a promise to dig for further background information and coverage. This commitment to agnostic news gathering to complement user efforts is potentially a huge plus, emulating the activities of a host of user-generated portals that link to news stories and other sources within a rich and sophisticated community-building tool. But there is also the possibility that this will act as somewhat of a turn-off to users who will come to depend on anchors more than their fellow users for input on relevancy. We'll see how this develops in the eyes of users, but at first pass I think that Jason has greased it on the design front and has offered a twist on editorial input that could prove to be very powerful if their efforts offer the right mix of quality input and sensitivity to their communities.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 3:42 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
Last week's story from AP and other sources on Thomson's acquisition of European equities news agency AFX is downplayed by Thomson in an Information World Review weblog entry this week, which is perhaps appropriate given the scale of the scale of the deal. Rumored to be a USD 20 million takeover, AFX offers a relatively small impact on Thomson Financial's greater bottom line and evolutionary impact on its top line. But the scope of AFX's position and influence offers Thomson some intriguing opportunities. While AFX content will be used primarily within the Thomson One desktop package to round out European news more to a par with Reuters and Bloomberg in European markets, AFX cuts a very global footprint that covers Asian markets very actively and an online media presence via syndication clients such as Forbes that give AFX a significant amount of Web exposure on international topics of interest to investors. Modest though this may seem it is perhaps the beginning of Thomson having a small toe in the waters of online news distribution that has been sorely lacking. With CEO Dick Harrington working mightily to keep Thomson a growing company some diversification into strategies with Web components tied to non-enterprise revenue sources is overdue. In the meantime AFX offers Thomson Financial an important step towards a full-replacement product in European markets.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 3:12 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
The anemic progress of Google Finance has been gaining some attention lately, with a News Factor Network article highlighting the portal's lack of "stickiness". Many users who have been using Yahoo! Finance or other online financial portals get locked in to these services via personalization features and stock lists that make them daily "must see" visits for individual investors. Google finance has a portfolio tracker feature but there's not easy way to transfer one's holdings to the service and no alerts triggering features. This list could go on and on, but the point is clear: Google is very late to this game and is not likely to catch up any time soon, in spite of an array of very valuable features and sources on the service. As a whole, though, the more important deficiency is the service's lack of focus on users' real needs the service fails to answer the question: what does an individual need to do in order to be successful with their finances? While the answer to this question may not come from Google any time soon, its existing capabilities could be fed into other applications and portals that can come up with those answers via mashups and other Web services-oriented integrations. Google seems still at this time to be an "anti-portal" of sorts, moving slowly and deliberately to develop breakthrough features that could power solutions in any number of contexts. The unique features and first-rate sources used in Google Finance could be used to power any number of portal solutions in both media and enterprise environments. This may not bring them to parity with Yahoo any time soon in terms of absolute audience for their portal solutions, but it's a more likely strategy in the short and medium term to allow Google's solution to work its way into workflows that are useful to their audiences. In the meantime it would be nice if the considerable talent at Google would focus itself as much on the "what I need to do" aspects of usability in its online offerings as much as it does on developing powerful features that may leave a significant portion of their needs unaddressed.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 2:07 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 2:05 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Monday, June 19, 2006 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 2:52 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
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
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 2:16 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Friday, June 16, 2006 |
American Business Media has been pushing its "rich data" concept to B2B media companies for some time, now, but only a handful of business publishers have undertaken new initiatives to develop new online data assets to service their audiences beyond traditional editorial products. Yet M&A data indicates that the payoff to publishers that develop these assets is enormous. A recent ABM seminar showcased the "hows" of successful rich data initiatives. In a nutshell, the secret is this: listen to your audiences and find out what you can offer them that will change their work lives and their relationships with customers and suppliers - year in and year out. Click here to read the full News Analysis.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:41 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
TechWeb notes a demo by IBM of enterprise-oriented mashups at a recent conference using Web services via collaboration software that are able to feed in content from both an enterprise's own content and Web sources. The claim is that these quickly developed apps can appear on desktops in as little as five minutes ( Joe McKendrick at ZDNet thinks that's too slow). It's not clear when IBM will get around to making these tools "prime time" but their press release covering the demo makes it clear that enterprises have greatly increased interest in user-driven collaborative tools to drive the aggregation of content within and beyond enterprises. As highlighted in our paper on The New Aggregation, with users empowered with powerful publishing technologies increasingly the aggregation of content from publishers falls into their hands. Now that Web services technology are in wide use within enterprises and on the Web publishers and aggregators need to think much more seriously about enabling users within enterprises to use their content in user-defined collaborative services such as mashups. Strategies based purely on I.T.-deployed portal platforms will certainly still yield strong results for many publishers, but the time is upon us when enterprise users will be demanding content within highly functional packaging that they can deploy in any number of unique configurations for themselves and colleagues. There's a lot more than weather maps that should be flowing through these applications. It is certainly early days for this type of delivery for professionally produced content, but with the accelerated pace at which these technologies are being deployed in enterprises the time to investigate effective positioning of B2B publications and content services within user-deployed Web services.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 5:25 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:02 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Thursday, June 15, 2006 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:40 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Wednesday, June 14, 2006 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:54 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Tuesday, June 13, 2006 |
Positioning premium business information in an increasingly fragmented field of channels and audiences can be a problem these days. As Shore's research shows there is high demand for content at the moment of greatest need, a factor that tightens up the sales loop and increasingly puts the emphasis on self-service sales of subscriptions and individual reports and records from business information databases. Up until recently LexisNexis has extended only a pinkie toe into the waters of single-unit business information sales with its AlaCarte online portal, vending mostly low-priced items such as archived news from licensed media sources. But now in partnership with content ecommerce enabler ECNext LexisNexis has announced a far more aggressive offering: corporate affiliations reports data. Corporate Affiliations.com offers content from the core LexisNexis database that provides global coverage for about 200,000 prominent public and private parent companies and their subsidiaries, divisions, joint ventures and affiliates. Corporate affiliations data is a key element for analyzing corporate finances, legal relationships, strategic sales and competitive positioning, especially tricky with multinational companies for which overseas relationships in key developing markets may not be readily evident looking at public filings in markets such as the U.S. Pricing is based on the number of company entities returned in a given report: simple companies with few affiliations can go for as little as USD 9.99, up to the most complex companies with many relationships that will set you back USD 310.99 a report - or get a monthly subscription for USD 300. Well-maintained corporate affiliations data is definitely a key premium content service, with fairly specific audiences within both large and small businesses and professional practices. A service such as Corporate Affiliations.com offers an excellent positioning of premium content for these audiences, offering well-scaled pricing and a well-designed ecommerce experience that makes it easy for this valuable content to be put to use quickly for those willing to expense it to the top line via a one-off sale or to the bottom line via a subscription. ECNext has already proven out its ability to field one-off sales of premium business information as a standalone service by its remarkably successful Manta portal which sells business profiles from Dun & Bradstreet and other high-ticket sources: it's a logical third party for LexisNexis to turn to for support in this project. Ground-breaking services such as The Alacra Store have demonstrated the viability of one-off business information sales for some time now, but LexisNexis and ECNext are demonstrating that a la carte sales can be adapted effectively to very sophisticated premium databases without relying on outside aggregators for a sales venue. With the Web becoming the dominant "go to" source for users in corporate settings seeking outside business information selling premium business content online in the "right-sized" packages that fit a user's immediate needs is a "must have" strategy for business information database providers. Online sales allow database publishers to develop both incremental revenue streams and deeper customer relationships for a wide variety of content sources at the user level. This is a crucial factor for database publishers involved in increasingly complex enterprise-level sales, demanding lengthy negotiations involving both corporate librarians and I.T. specialists to provide sophisticated integration and services. Online sales allow users eager for a "need it now" solution to be satisfied as efficiently as possible so their sales forces can stay focused on big-ticket sales - and to get sales leads for upgrades along the way. Hats off to LexisNexis for an aggressive positioning of sophisticated business information that fills an important gap in the growing array of premium business content kiosks. Now if only they could do the same for enterprise-ready Web services...
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 7:36 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
I saw the link for the LA Times interview of Google CEO Eric Schmidt come up yesterday in my headline searches in which he says that Google is a technology company and not a media company, but that registration panel gave me that split second to say to myself, "Ahh, I've heard it all before." Based on a flurry of posts from Rafat Ali, John Battelle and others I reviewed the story and the weblogs...and I HAD heard it all before. All Schmidt is pointing out - and rightly so - is that a company like Google, unlike traditional media companies, focuses on contextualizing intellectual property created and/or owned by other sources. Media companies, on the other hand, focus on owning and monetizing their own intellectual property, usually copyrighted. That's a pretty simple division of focus. What Google IS, however, is a content company - a company that provides information and experiences created by individuals, institutions and technology to benefit audiences in contexts that they value. The information and the experiences happen to focus largely on others' intellectual property, but it's the same net effect: Google just decided to focus on monetizing the value of contexts, not intellectual property ownership. The net effect of this concept is that media companies struggle in their efforts to become content companies. We can see how this plays out by looking at a 1-year trend from Alexa stats for a few major news outlets: The New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times and Reuters. Great media properties all and many of them have benefited from improved strategies. But at the end of the day, they're all sagging: there's only so much great intellectual property of your own that you can crank out on a given day, versus an infinite sea of content in public, private and enterprise settings to be contextualized. We also see it in the struggle of B2B publishers to add "rich data" to their core editorial content: most of them are content to be media companies with some additional digital content assets in their portfolio, with little thought given to changing core missions. I don't believe that media's days are numbered - there's always a market for well-designed intellectual property - but I do believe that we're seeing clear indications that the media as a whole are outnumbered - and out-technologized - by content producers of all sizes and shapes who take a very different view of intellectual property. Increasingly this includes mainstream content producers looking for improved channel strategies. As Jim Cramer points out at TheStreet.com there's nothing to say that come some fall the NFL could decide to bypass television networks altogether and pump its own sports programming and ads onto the Web for direct consumption. So is Google a media company? For their own sake, I hope not. Good choice, Eric...
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:21 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:16 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Monday, June 12, 2006 |
David Kirkpatick's excellent article for Fortune on the level playing field that online publishing offers would be a must-read on any day, but it's underscored by today's New York Times article on how print tabloids' "exclusives" on photos are getting upstaged by online upstarts and John Battelle's post for FM Publishing noting how GM chose to reply to a Tom Friedman column [premium] that took a few slaps at the motor giant. The GM case is of particular interest: as John notes GM wanted to reply with a full op-ed piece, which the NYTimes wanted whittled down to a couple of hundred words - basically a letter to the editor - and the word "rubbish" excluded. Instead of going this route, GM posted its full reply on its corporate FYI blog, reaching the world in its own venue just fine, thank you very much. While GM's corporate blogs may receive a trickle of the overall traffic that the NYTimes receives, their point is made - without any editorial filters, facilitated by the level playing field of Web publishing. When people talk about a level playing field for publishing oftentimes people think of fanatic citizen journalists holed up late at night in their jammies pounding away. But as this incident underscores corporations and other major institutions are very active members of Content Nation also. Every entity on the face of the earth can publish today and reach a global audience on that level playing field with the most nominal technical commitments - and many have value propositions for their publishing that support one or more personal or corporate bottom lines. So when the U.S. House of Representative decides to take a pass on "net neutrality" they may think that they're doing corporate campaign sponsors a favor, but they should think again: there are a lot of corporations out there that do not want to add to their cost of doing business by having to dicker with "fast lane" fees to be heard equally. Some simple math would show that there are a lot more of those publishers on the Web at this time than traditional media and telecommunications companies. Egalitarianism can work for giants, after all, if it's given the chance. It's a concept to which publishers are still trying to adjust -but adjust they must.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:54 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:51 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
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
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 1:41 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Friday, June 09, 2006 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 9:24 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
Content relicensing has been a poor stepdaughter in the eyes of many publishers, incremental revenues that trickle in when their audiences decide to toe the line on copyright compliance. But what if learning what your redistribution rights were was...fun? Copyright Clearance Center's Rightsphere provides enterprises with a powerful tool to help users feel good about content relicensing - and in the process encourage publishers to think more positively about users being distribution agents for premium content. Click here to read the full News Analysis
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 1:25 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Thursday, June 08, 2006 |
The relative quiet surrounding the Section 115 Reform Act (SIRA) pending in the U.S. congress is turning into a louder and late-breaking examination of its larger impact on Web publishing. The stated primary goal of this legislation is to provide a single point from which to license digitized music for distribution online and via emerging channels such as satellite radio. This single point is likely to be one of the agents already used for managing radio royalties. Along with this comes the necessity of artists to accept a blanket licensing fee similar to that provided by radio broadcasts - one can try to negotiate with individual outlets but there's scarcely leverage to do so. The U.S. Copyright Office's statement largely supports the legislation, seeing that it will allow consumers to enjoy vast quantities of music online through licensed channels. While simplification of licensing is a good goal for online distributors, it's unclear that audiences will benefit in any great way and will very likely pay higher licensing fees based on the legislation's notion of "distribution." As pointed out by a letter delivered to Congress by legislation opponents "distribution" under this bill could be expanded to include every consumer timeshift recording on a VCR or TiVo, every text web page, any audio or video clip on any web site, every television that does "freeze frame" or "instant replay" and every analog cassette or CD recorded from FM or HD Radio. It's questionable as to whether the bill's provisions could be so easily extended to all of these options, but the potential is certainly there. It also leaves largely untouched the potential of users to be distributors and redistributors of content via this system - and thus leaving open a wide number of issues as to how or why users should use such a system to distribute their own works. The most worrisome part of the legislation is that it provides for a royalty-free license for distributors to use intermediary technology to produce intermediate copies of works on their way to users. Free it may be, but the implication is that anyone not complying with this distribution system is using unlicensed technology to distribute electronic music content. All good for copyright holders, but it offers a potentially chilling effect to anyone wanting to develop innovative ways to deliver content. This legislation is trying to mix in controls similar to those provided by the Federal Communications Commission to govern radio broadcasts with royalty schemes that have been used in that medium - with no clear picture as to who in the government should be aware of and in charge of the technology that's used to distribute content. The bill itself is burdened with many specific references to technology that could be outdated easily within a short period of time. It's rather like recent "tax simplification acts" - in which things are simplified for those who are able to shepherd the legislation through to their advantage and complicated for the great number of people who must endure its impact. The most discouraging aspect of this legislation is that it will widen the gap between user-generated content and commercially produced content. Everything points to the value of content becoming greatly enhanced on the Web when users are in control of distribution and helping to push content to its most valuable context. By insisting on regaining a chokehold on distribution and trying to segregate user content from commercial content music publishers are trying to make time stand still. Yes, you can use legislation to push amateur and non-commercial content down to "the end of the dial" but unlike the broadcast era there is no end to the dial online: there is relatively infinite bandwidth for new channels to emerge. Users will migrate to the technology that suits their needs best, with content sure to follow. Supporters of this legislation should think long and hard about what they are about to set into motion. Passing this bill into law it will make the lines of demarcation between old content creation and distribution methods and new methods much more sharp - and in doing so reduce the opportunities for established content producers to take advantage of the most innovative and revenue-producing content packaging techniques. In creating a stronger fortress for copyright music producers and distributors are leaving open fertile plains for content that focuses on monetizing contexts rather than copies to flourish - and in doing so further erode the value of copyright as an instrument of commerce and innovation. Here's hoping that the broader implications of this bill are discussed thoroughly before it moves along any further.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:20 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:07 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Wednesday, June 07, 2006 |
TechCrunch highlights the sinking fortunes of PubSub, a content filtering tool that burst on to the scene a couple of years ago but seems to have been moving past its peak as of late. PubSub was supposed to tame the "firehose" of content that was available from online sources such as weblogs, press releases and financial reports and filter it effectively based on keyword searches. Unfortunately, the filtering never quite matched up to the reality of people's expectations, providing content that was little different than the output of many search engine queries and in the eyes of at least one commenter at TechCrunch sending out content from "spam blogs." By contrast a comparison of Alexa stats with Newsvine shows that news being filtered by humans seems to be gaining in popularity. It's very hard to provide all-in-one filtering services that can top human intelligence as well as major search engines and weblog filtering services such as Technorati. At the same time aggregators servicing enterprises and publishers are becoming more willing to select high-quality Web sources to add to their offerings, broadening the marketplace for online content in venues previously reserved for major publishers. There are still a lot of good ideas out there for managing Web content that are going to grow over time, but many tools that people had been hyping are going to fall by the wayside - again. In developing content technologies, it always helps to have a deep understanding of your audiences as both markets and content creators and to develop products that service their expressed needs. Having a good algorithm and a desire to market it is generally a one-way ticket to the bit bucket without a plan to create unique content in a way that satisfies audiences consistently. PubSub may yet turn their plans around and they have retained a decent audience, but we can expect to see many features in search of publishing markets begin to consolidate into plays that address some more cohesive user needs.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:53 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:51 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Tuesday, June 06, 2006 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:40 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Monday, June 05, 2006 |
I've been in an email exchange with someone who insists that weblogs don't break important news. Well, here's a wonderful and simple example at Search Engine Roundtable. What does it mean that the administration of Google's Froogle online shopping service is migrating to Google Base? Not much, according to Google's Help Pages: Froogle's search results will remain separate from Google Base. However, the Froogle Merchant Center is being replaced by the Google Base dashboard. Items submitted to Google Base which are appropriate for Froogle will be displayed both in Froogle and in Google Base search results.
In other words, it's another step towards Google Base becoming an all-purpose mart that can provide eBay-like ecommerce services for a broad array of content, goods and services. Just a minor technical migration, right? Thinking of the "Google Health is coming" meme that was circulating a few weeks back when in fact it was Google Coop that was coming along, it generally pays to look at some of the little details that come along from the Googleplex to see how the big picture is developing.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 4:13 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
The Wall Street Journal (subscription) reports on the troubling revelation that impact factors, the calculations used to calculate the value of a scientific journal based on the frequency of citations to its content, may have been manipulated by some publishers by their pressuring of article authors to increase their citations of a particular publication. The article cites Richard Albert, the deputy editor of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, who indicates that "boilerplate" letters go out to many authors submitting papers to be considered for publication with wording that requests citations. There are also "legitimate" ways to build up impact factors for a publication, such as publishing reviews of other articles that offer little if any new research but provide a context for citations to count against impact factor totals. The article deserves a careful read so as not to take some of its revelations out of context, but the pieces presented are part of a broader picture of established publishers trying to shore up their value in an era in which competitive outlets challenge their supremacy. Many of these same publishers rail against "link spam" that artificially inflates Web page rankings for content from many sources. How is the tilting of impact factors a similar phenomenon? We leave you to be the judge of that. But be it a close or distant relationship it's clear that the pressures on expensive print journals to sustain their revenue models are only increasing in the face of content technologies that make it easier than ever for legitimate peer communities to define the value of authoritative content more quickly and effectively than traditional print techniques. In the process of moving from traditional review and ranking techniques with only the greatest of reluctance many scholarly publishers are missing enormous opportunities to redefine how scientific thought can be made available and useful in much more efficient, effective, reliable and valuable ways. It's not a matter of paid-versus-free, either: it's not clear that "open access" journals offer any significantly better review and impact measurement value, only a new way to subsidize existing review and ranking techniques. What's needed is a review of the review process itself and how it could be implemented more efficiently using today's user-driven publishing techniques. Academic circles will move very, very slowly to change the peer review process through traditional journals: too much professional might depends on the process for them to do otherwise. But intelligent publishers should be working now to develop more efficient ways to evaluate the ongoing value of scholarly content that take far more advantage of the online technologies that have made advances in much of today's scientific thought possible. There will be far more premium value to be obtained from a superior method of bringing good scholarly thought to market more quickly and effectively than from defending a system that is in danger of hurting the cause of progress as much as it helps it. To those publishers who feel that markets have no alternative but to play by this game, I'd urge them to recognize that in an increasingly global publishing marketplace alternative systems are going to evolve more quickly than one may imagine - especially when emerging economies can provide themselves with more advantage when they do so. The Western style of scholarly publishing is likely to be challenged in the years ahead by Asian markets that want to accelerate their progress in bringing products and services to market based on advances in scientific thought. It is a shift that is likely to resemble the acceleration of automobile production coming out of Asian markets past Western manufacturers that were unwilling to give up established manufacturing and marketing methods. The time to consider fundamental changes to scholarly publishing is now, not tomorrow. Tomorrow belongs to those who made that decision today.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 1:18 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:26 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
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
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:57 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Friday, June 02, 2006 |
I've been trying to avoid the whole Yahoo! Video thing - kind of an obvious target - but today's Wall Street Journal article on Time Warner's revived split up plans (premium) makes for an interesting compare and contrast with other major media companies' doings of late. The WSJ article highlights a slap-down of Sports Illustrated's proposal to integrate its content into AOL to provide them with a branded sports portal. AOL's reason: SI has nothing to offer us. Translation: we're over subsidized brand aggregation. Either a brand stands in the eyes of an audience or it doesn't. The real brand is the audience itself and their focus on the context that an online publisher creates in increasingly agnostic formats. Why didn't "synergies" work? Bad timing, for one, given the explosive growth of online content, but one must also factor in the growth of content aggregated from non-traditional media sources and the proliferation of outlets for potentially synergistic content. Simply put, there's just too much interesting stuff out there for consumers to make managing the short end of the content tail in a proprietary environment your primary aggregation strategy. Even enterprise-oriented companies such as Reed Elsevier, Thomson and Reuters are seeing this strategy fray at its edges. So on to Yahoo! Video. It makes oh so many of the right moves. Well-designed interface, easy to use search and navigation features, incorporates user-driven feedback for ranking clips and show, user-driven tagging, a virtual aggregation scheme, a "featured" section that highlights key choices, tons of mainstream video content, an ideal environment for brand advertisers...and it misses the point. It's all about mainstream media,, in spite of user-generated packaging. When I look at the "popular" section you get only one page of video listings - with no paging to other selections. The number of video selections on this page adds up to thirteen - the number of TV stations on old U.S. VHF broadcast TV tuners. Yahoo! Video is a masterful execution of mainstream online media strategy, as is much of Yahoo!'s offerings. Yahoo is everything that AOL should have tried to be (and may yet become), the best agnostic sourcing of mainstream content combined with the best of online content that blends with mainstream in a way that doesn't upset advertisers coming over to online from traditional broadcast, cable and print media. But at the end of the day, Yahoo! seems to be largely of the mind that the Long Tail of content is just garnish on top of a traditional media steak. Get user-generated content, yes - but throw it against a relatively safe set of content that reinforces traditional marketing schemes. Be it through aggregation or acquisition, Yahoo! Video is a fine demonstration of everything that a hit-driven strategy should try to be. It's McContent for those who rarely venture away from the hits, American Idol for mouse potatoes. By contrast there is, of course, Google Video. You can get all sorts of mainstream content if you want, some of it for a premium price. Popular stuff is not limited to a handful of choices but extends down to the top 100 videos and beyond. Almost all of popular sources are born-on-the-Web footage. Random selections are featured on the home page to encourage exploration and new experiences. And search results are notably different in their contextualization. Type in a search for "9/11" on Yahoo! Video and you get lots of mainstream media footage on the Moussaoui trial. Type in a search for "9/11" on Google Video and you get the popular online documentary "Loose Change" and other web-grown video presentations presenting conspiracy theories about the events of that day. Dangerous stuff, not the kind of content that's going to attract national brand advertisers - but compelling community-driven content. Google is, and remains, a service that is all about exposing both the best of mainstream media sources in competition with the best of long tail sources, leaving it up to audiences to determine which sources work best for them wherever possible. If it's a little open-ended and challenging for those looking for closed and simple solutions, audiences know who's next door. Congratulations to Yahoo! for a very well thought-through online video product - and congratulations to Google for a video product that challenges us to think about our choices.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 2:53 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
1 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
Reference books may conjure up images of the rows of dusty volumes down at the local library awaiting an expert's touch to guide you to arcane facts and figures. For engineers in scientific and technology oriented industries, though, reference books are becoming highly searchable and interactive sources that make their users' lives much easier. Providing an effective transition into the online realm for long-trusted reference books takes a lot of deep insights into how an audience uses reference content to solve critical problems - research that database publishers have engaged in for years. Now that book publishers are getting the hang of online reference tools, where will we see their business models move next? Click here to read the full News Analysis
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:44 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:02 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
Greg Sandoval at CNET News has a great summary of the relative non-progress of newspapers in adopting weblogs effectively. While deals such as the recently announced AP/Technorati alliance are making blogs more prominent in mainstream news outlets when they link to their content, for the most part news organizations are pretty timid in supporting true user-generated media under their editorial umbrellas. Greg catalogs many of the recent failures as well as the bright spot of community-driven weblogs developed by the Austin Statesman-American, content that has its own featured spot on their online home page. But even here their weblog content is off to the side: it's not "editorial" content from a news organization's perspective. This gap is accentuated in Greg's piece by Patrick Williams, managing editor of the Dallas Observer, who wrestles with journalists who put out their leftovers in personal blogs and the wealth of self-proclaimed opinion-makers who fail to put out any new facts in their weblogs. Yet behind these stalking horse excuses lies the real truth: user-generated media confuses publishers. Oftentimes it's messy, illiterate, non-journalistic and crass - yet oftentimes it's true and compelling in ways that journalists never dare to be. Bloggers tend to stay on their soap boxes, which can be annoying if you don't like what they're saying but they tend to stick with issues and stories in ways that journalists chasing trendy stuff oftentimes fail to emulate. The power of national and global advertising markets killed any sense of true objectivity in journalism: too many dollars chasing too few truths for too many people. The stakes have become too high, much as in Chris Anderson's " Long Tail" the stakes for mass-market premium content have become so high that publishers take very few chances in creating content for the greatest number with the least common denominator. But in the Long Tail the model for profits reverse: it's okay to make a little bit of money off of a ton of things that get monetized when people surface their value individually or collectively. So you do get a lot of junk in weblogs, but the junk trickles away from meaningful contexts while the true and truly entertaining content has a way of finding an audience all on its own. What is quality journalism in a weblog-driven world? The stuff that doesn't go away, the stuff that continues to get linked to by people in the know again and again. Weblogs are truth in motion, content that's willing to wait and to work to find an audience for its truth to develop or to have it flushed out in a flash as the occasion dictates. Traditional journalism is based on the concept that you have only one chance to print the truth correctly for mass-produced profits and immortality. Weblogs offer the truth the opportunity to bump around for a while, finding its own footing like a baby stumbling through its first stroll across a room with helping hands at the ready. This type of truth oftentimes fails to draw mass advertising for its real-time state, but that's okay: it will be real-time whenever its focused audience is ready for it. Most newspapers will fail to embrace weblogs and other forms of user-generated media because of its inherent lack of appeal for mass advertisers - and in the process turn loose a world of news content to be contextualized elsewhere for very targeted online advertisers who are willing to wait for the content that its audience desires to come along. The truth may not make us rich in this model, but it will liberate the truth from mass market monologues and make it a part of focused conversations that will yield a greater value to society as a whole. The sooner that news organizations work to contextualize a truth whose time has come regardless of its source the sooner that they will be on the road to a hybridized model that will sustain their long-term financial health. I'm not optimistic for this happening any time soon, but you never know.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:26 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Thursday, June 01, 2006 |
Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg has put together a nice piece on his CEO blog about the differences between their content serving technology and content management systems (CMS). In a nutshell CMS technology is used by enterprises to develop content for publication and to store it in a central database: CMS emphasizes workflow controls, publishing controls, auditing, rollbacks, and so on. On the other hand, XML-based content servers take content from all sorts of repositories, including CMS platorms, and packages it in the best way possible for a variety of audiences whose needs may have very little to do with how a CMS manages content. A CMS is a great way to keep your finger on content creators and to keep them productive: content servers keep their audiences productive by serving up content in far more useful forms. Content servers are being used quite a bit these days for publishers looking for quick solutions for "chunking" content from document repositories that can't be reconfigured easily every time someone comes up with a new idea for a content product. The separation of content creation technologies from audience-driven content publishing technologies is responsible for many of the key advances being seen in publishing as of late. What format and selections of content does a user need? It can vary greatly from audience to audience, making it very impractical to approach existing content creators and their support staffs to adapt to those audience requirements on a fairly arbitrary basis (from their perspective) or to try to repurpose legacy content. This same concept lies at the heart of the success of search engines: search query results are in essence custom publications that normalize content from a multiplicity of formats and sources to suit an audience's need for prioritized organization. We may encounter these sources in their native form if we click on a link from their listing in search results, but in most instances that document was never developed with presentation within search results in mind: the search engine technology took what it needed to make it relevant to the audience. Mark Logic is but one example of technologies making these kinds of transformations possible, but one that clarifies the differences between process-oriented content management and audience-oriented content servers and services. As publishing becomes less tied down to specific output formats and more driven by audiences that demand content in packaging that's highly attuned to their immediate needs the very nature and value of "works of authorship" is being changed. Copyright is becoming a less important commercial concept than context rights in large part because of highly responsive content technologies, making the creation of valuable and highly tunable context for an audience an original work in and of itself. Maybe it's time for us to ditch talk of "I.T." in the publishing industry and start focusing on the value-producing capabilities of "C.T."
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:02 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 8:51 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
