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| Thursday, August 31, 2006 |
 When an online presentation called EPIC 2014 made its debut on the Web a couple of years ago amongst its futuristic and jarring predictions was that by that date The New York Times will fold and become a newsletter for the elderly and the elite. It was with some amusement, then, that I received my copy of the NYT at the end of my driveway this week and pulled out...a light-version newsletter of the venerable paper. In standard letter paper format of just eight pages in length, the newsletter is being offered to subscribers who would like to receive a light version of the paper via email in a format suitable for local printing. At fifty cents it's a convenience that people on holiday are likely to appreciate, especially since it includes the daily crossword puzzle, so it's not a bad use of the print format. Yet one wonders to what degree this kind of aggregation is going to appeal to readers on the go when the same machine that allows them to print out the newsletter also allows them to browse news online and to visit aggregation sites such as Original Signal that highlight the RSS feeds of many of the key Web 2.0 weblogs available online. Now if there were a news service that could allow me to get a print-formatted version of any number of news sources along with treats such as crosswords and such - ah, that would be worth something, to be sure. One cannot fault the NYT for trying to maintain the value of their brand for beachcombers who don't want to bring electronics along to ponder Will Shortz' puzzles but it highlights the opportunities for a new generation of aggregators to think about how they can create value for audiences on the go who have a world of content from other sources that can entertain them when they're not willing to browse the Web. Welcome to 2014, readers - a few years early.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:44 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 7:47 AM |
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| Wednesday, August 30, 2006 |
The "tubes" are abuzz with chatter about Google's new business-oriented " Apps for our Domain" service, which is interesting but somewhat off-topic for this weblog. Like many online developments Google's application suite is more about the battle for I.T. supremacy between Google and Microsoft than any specific publishing concern. But combined with the announcement of Google CEO Eric Schmidt joining the board of Apple the chessboard of corporate positioning takes on a new wrinkle that should get publishers thinking. With Microsoft's DRM scheme having been hacked already and the early views of their new Vista operating system presaging a slow and bulky package that's not likely to favor upgrades to current PCs Microsoft may find itself in a position that will not be terribly favorable for consumer and enterprise migration. So if Vista's going to be a slow-to-arrive "magic bullet" and Google's making headway with productivity apps that can appeal to the anti-Microsoft crowd, might this be a time when consumers and businesses begin to look at the Intel-based Apple platform as a more serious alternative? If so, then publishers have a lot to think about. With Apple's success in music and video downloads and pressures on them for more portability, the presence of Google on the Apple board is likely to influence moves that could result in content packaging that could appeal to a broader array of publishers and operate in both Apple and non-Apple venues over time. The bloom is already off the iPod rose, so the question becomes how to engineer the next content-driven gizmo success. The combined thinking of Google and Apple would be a powerful driver for a more content-centric approach to information appliances. Microsoft's new management team is trying to push in that direction also rather aggressively, but with a boat anchor like Vista to carry around it's not clear how quickly or effectively it's going to be able to make that transition. Expect Google-Apple alternatives that leverage Google's huge server farm investment to evolve incrementally and acceptance of them to accelerate as Vista question marks become more pronounced in business and consumer circles.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:33 AM |
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If you're one to look for " tipping points," news from Bloomberg of the availability of downloadable books from its book search service may qualify as the moment in which the norm was to have an eBook format available for literature. The service itself is nothing to shout about: instead of being able to flip through images of an introduction to Dante's Inferno online I can now view a download of that same book in PDF format plastered with "Digitized by Google" labels and prefaced by "keep it legal" advisories to encourage care as copyright laws vary from country to country. The boilerplate also advises against making commercial use of these downloads, which is somewhat ironic but necessary in the light of publishers concerned about Google's semi-competitive position. Other than that the PDFs are just image shots of a book right off of a library shelf, with all of the little notes, stamps and scribbles that a volume accumulates through the years. Searching of the PDF is not enabled since it's just an image file, which makes the searchable online versions more useful for research. But if you're dying to have one of these books on your PC or mobile device you're good to go. As is often the case with Google these features roll out incrementally and individually may not seem to be hugely significant in and of themselves. But in this instance I think that it's important to recognize the breadth of literature that will come into downloadable status automatically as time moves on. As with many Web inventions it's not so much what they do out of the box that matters as much as the net effect of millions of people worldwide becoming used to a format as normal and acceptable. Book publishers are beginning to ramp up for eBooks in a big way now that a new generation of readers migrates to Web-defaulted reading patterns, a trend that is likely to be accelerated by Google Books having made centuries of literature available in that format.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:02 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:57 AM |
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| Tuesday, August 29, 2006 |
The announcement of The New York Times' acquisition of Baseline StudioSystems is raising some eyebrows, as reflected in a piece at Motley Fool today (subscription). Brian Gorman points out in the article that it seems odd that the NYT would take on a company primarily oriented towards B2B business intelligence. Yet that in and of itself may be a key component of the deal, not to mention the rich licensing of entertainment profiles and other industry data to consumer portals such as Yahoo!. and more. On the B2B side the entertainment industry's bizintel infrastructure is has been tooling up significantly in recent years as the industry finds itself having to respond to more real-time marketing and image management issues prompted by Web distribution and commentary. So if the NYT is looking for a good foundation of revenues the B2B side of this deal makes sense, much as About.com's solid revenues made for a good starting point. But it's just a starting point. Beyond solid B2B potential is the ability to syndicate entertainment content to the explosion of movie and video outlets on the Web and to solidify its own solid entertainment content with rich data on the premium side of the online fence. While their Times Select premium online content offering has not been a failure it's had limited success with consumers: adding more solid sector-specific rich data to add to business coverage is perhaps another angle by which NYT can go more toe to toe with the Wall Street Journal over time in business sectors where it already offers significant strength. Another interesting property of Baseline StudioSystems is their Script Log 2.0 system, an online service that allows scripts and materials to be tracked and submitted online and assigns material to readers along with a host of reports and management features. In a world of journalism that is becoming increasingly virtual this may be infrastructure that could help an organization like the NYT could use to manage independent authors more effectively. Call that one pure spec, but it's a tool with intriguing possibilities. All in all this is not a deal that your average columnist can chop into digestible sound bites easily but in sum it seems to make sense from a revenue and strategy standpoint when you look at the details. Since fewer people go to newspapers any more to get entertainment listings this important information needs to be ready to travel with audiences to the entertainment venues that matter most to them - and along with that will come the Times brand. Think of this as but one step along the path towards The New York Times embracing The New Aggregation in a bigger way.
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:12 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:42 AM |
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| Monday, August 28, 2006 |
VNU's new ownership has moved to put in an aggressive management team focused on transforming the Dutch publishing giant into a high-efficiency engine of profits. At the head one now finds David Calhoun, spirited away from General Electric's Industrial division. A locomotive man at the head of this train is probably not a bad idea given the strength and vision that's required to lift leading B2B media companies into higher levels of performance. With Michael Marchesano and Robert Krakoff pulling their portion of the freight VNU has assembled a powerful team that will have a lot to prove and much to transform in the months ahead. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:52 PM |
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Trends Google, eBay form advertising alliance AP via Yahoo! News Google expands into business software market Reuters Google Adds Library Search TechWeb At Forbes.com, Lots of Glitter but Maybe Not So Many Visitors The New York Times* Google boss: 'Internet won't replace TV' This is London Windows Live breaks into Alexa Top 10 Read/Write Web Free Streaming Quotes On Yahoo Finance Download Squad More media, less news: Newspapers adapting to Web, but most too timid, defensive or high-minded The Economist European Commission calls on Member States to Contribute to the European Digital Library Public CIO Tribune to cut 250 call-center jobs in outsourcing move Reuters HarperCollins Explores Opportunities in China, India WSJ Online* Best Practices Outsourcing Creative Content Global Services Feeds That Matter: A Study of Bloglines Subscriptions ebiquity group An Open Letter to Microsoft - Why you shouldn't kill FairUse4WM Engadget Cool Tools Yoto T-21 offers portable media playback for USD 50 Engadget
Deals, Partnerships & Sales Groxis Inc. Raises $4 Million in Series B Financing; Visual Search Pioneer to Expand Marketing & Sales PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance The New York Times Company Acquires Baseline StudioSystems from Hollywood Media Corp. BusinessWire Convera Announces Web Search Partnership in Japan with All In One Solution to Create Portals Internet Ad Sales Products, Markets & People Post Time Media Launches News Blog and Website Portals for Information, Events, Activities and More PR Web
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:04 AM |
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| Sunday, August 27, 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 11:44 PM |
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| Friday, August 25, 2006 |
Investor Relations magazine reports on an interesting approach to openness in Web text mining taken by Quoza.com, an online service that focuses on extracting content from the Web sites of more than 7,000 public companies and news sources covering those companies. Much of this content appears on investor relations sites, many of which are hosted by Thomson Financial's CCBN corporate communications service. When Quoza's crawlers were getting so aggressive that they started to skew CCBN's Web site report statistics they were tipped off - and ticked off enough to bar Quoza crawlers. Quoza responded with an email blitz to CCBN clients suggesting that they check with their lawyers as to whether Thomson's actions were putting their companies in jeopardy of violating U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act Section 409 real-time issuer disclosure regulations. Needless to say, this caused quite a stir in corporate communications circles.
It's an interesting play to protect Web crawling, but it may be on shaky legal ground. The CCBN service is already exposing content to the public, while services such as Quoza are simply helping to accelerate the redistribution of this content. Quoza provides an aggressive crawling scheme, hitting sources once each minute on a 24-hour basis. This puts it in the zone of being potentially subject to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which has been used in a number of instances to rein in aggressive access to Web sites and other electronic facilities. The real question hinges on a key phrase in SOX 409 which says that information must be disclosed by corporations to the public on "an urgent basis". Is posting something on a Web site really "urgent" distribution? If there are distributors willing to do better, shouldn't public records be available to them on an urgent basis?
While good legal teams could push this to Thomson's favor without too much difficulty, there are reasons enough for them to rethink their approach to this situation. It's a simple enough fight to take on a renegade redistributor of public information, but what would happen if corporations with their own crawlers were excluded? That would be a tougher fight, no doubt, and a greater threat to service performance. Quoza could stand to get some marketing savvy and work with services suppliers such as Thomson to share the wealth from premium services derived from their proactive crawls so that their infrastructure costs could be born fairly. But at the same time suppliers like Thomson could get smart and recognize that there are great opportunities in distributing public information of all kinds far more aggressively than most IR site services are equipped to support. There are no clear heros or villains in this tiff but plenty of opportunity to make the most of public content.
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:55 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:35 PM |
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| Thursday, August 24, 2006 |
Thanks and a tip of the hat to DevX News for picking up on the announcement of the new Google Base programming API that allows content to be extracted easily from this rapidly growing data store. URL-based queries go in and an XML-formatted data feed comes out via Google's RSS-like Atom Feed format. Google offers a demo page to show just how easy it is to get information into a highly digestible form that can be used to build all kinds of content-oriented applications quickly and effectively. One needs to have a Google login ID to use the service (natch), but other than that it's open to all. For those who think that this may have impact just on consumer goods and services try out the tool on Product News Network Publisher Paul Gerbino's favorite example of "flushometers." The normal search results are here - a fair amount of useful industrial content, to be sure. The buzz surrounding Google Base has been fairly low key as of late but the reality of Google Base is an infrastructure that is allowing structured content to become as accessible as unstructured Web content in a simple and reliable format. With the Google Base API there's a tool now that will allow publishers of all kinds to consider how to integrate Google Base content into everything from mashups to high-end publishing products. It's encouraging to see a very visible example of how a new generation of feeds is changing how content can be consumed on many levels by individuals and institutions alike.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:09 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:04 PM |
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| Wednesday, August 23, 2006 |
Ken Doctor notes on his ContentBridges weblog an effort by Amy Webb of Philadelphia to try to consume nothing but online news content for thirty days - kind of the inverse of Morgan Sperlock's quest to eat nothing but McDonald's food for a month chronicled in his movie " SuperSize Me". It's the inverse because unlike Spurlock's dangerous weight gain Amy found herself on a starvation diet for certain kinds of news. Between mainstream news, weblogs and other sources she kept up with mostly via RSS feeds she felt that she had done a good job of understanding world and national news but she was flunking out on local news. Ken ticks of a short list of mobile-oriented equipment that can be used to "replace" a local newspaper these days, but it's far from clear that this alone is going to fill the bill. There are a wide variety of experiments in online local news collection large and small, including my home town's WestportNow, a great online collection of news, down-home photos and such. But in most instances they are supported by a very thin layer of revenues from Google AdSense and a few venturesome local merchants: most local advertising is either in print or search engine ads, not local online content sources. As much as it's great to talk about how weblogs and other user-generated tools are revolutionizing content, there are very few examples of how they are helping local communities collect and distribute news to the point of providing robust news-sustaining revenues. Local papers, especially community weeklies, continue to have a stranglehold on local news reporting of substance, and most continue to support that reporting via the one medium that local marketeers continue to understand: print. Search engine ads help local merchants to extend their markets, but it's print for the one thing that people are likely to pick up and browse at the local coffee shop. This will change over time as the Amys of the world get fed differently and a new generation of local merchants thinks differently, but I am not expecting that any time soon. For local news to succeed online there needs to be a combination of professional editorial resources combined with community input and the ability to help local merchants become online marketers as well as advertisers to drive new revenue streams. I have a six-year old business plan that's ready to be dusted off for doing this right - I don't think that the fundamentals of the market have changed all that much and newspaper chains will progress towards online solutions as slowly as possible until really viable alternatives arrive. In the meantime they will suffer a "death of a thousand cuts" from a wide variety of fractured channels such as Craigslist and American Town Network that are building pockets of value which will drain off their news-supporting revenues step by step. Sorry, Ken, print's not the enemy but a lack of imagination in how to develop effective marketing channels via online news for local markets. The solution includes today's technologies, yes, but these technologies have been widely available for quite some time. The imagination to string them together effectively with an effective marketing model is what's lacking.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:57 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:51 PM |
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| Tuesday, August 22, 2006 |
Elsevier has announced a new enterprise content mining and distribution service for its Scopus abstract and citation database of scientific, technical, medical and social science content. The Scirius search engine that has been used by Elsevier to crawl Web content for scientific information, powers the new Scopus Selected Sources feature that crawls similar internal repositories of scientific content. Using the Selected Sources feature an institution can expose this internal content to its own enterprise users via Scopus as well as to others outside of their enterprise. Lecture notes, presentations, manuscripts, pre-press papers and other similar materials will now be available to far greater general audiences, supplementing peer-reviewed materials available to scientific audiences within a familiar framework through which they already access abstracts and citations on published sources. The service is highly customizable, allowing customers to create complimentary content streams that fit in to specific areas of interest through the Scopus interface. While the technology used to create the Selected Sources feature is hardly new, it's a very important breakthrough for scientific publishers to embrace the exposure of enterprise content to a more general audience. It helps to expose ideas and research under investigation in a way that is far more likely to result in powerful awareness and interactions surrounding the work of scientific professionals in highly useful contexts. The Selected Sources feature positions Elsevier as a provider of a far broader base of content than just journals that can help scientific professionals to solve key problems and that can help to position participating institutions as thought leaders in ways that will encourage collaboration. It's "low hanging fruit" from a product design perspective but as a first step it's an exciting hint of what scientific publishers can do to develop high-margin services that amplify the value of an enterprise's intellectual property significantly.
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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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| Monday, August 21, 2006 |
It's still a hot market for mergers and acquisitions in publishing today, especially for companies that have picked out profitable niches and built strong relationships with their audiences. But it's clear that the deals of 2005 are not the deals of 2006. Where last year portfolios were being trimmed and fattened left and right this year is seeing aggressive multiples rewarded only to those companies that have defined diverse paths to profits that will fit in with increasingly sophisticated and demanding audiences. Getting 12x cash flow is not unheard of these days, but be prepared to be examined carefully for how your products and services deliver on many levels. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 7:00 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:02 PM |
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Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in review
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:14 AM |
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| Friday, August 18, 2006 |
Microsoft's new Windows Live Writer weblogging beta software is getting positive reviews from many corners, albeit with some grumblings that it's dumbing down blogging for the masses. But at a first pass it's a very competent package that integrates well as a front end to many existing weblogging packages - including Google's own Blogger utility. Two days after the Live Writer introduction Google introduced quietly its own beta of an enhanced version of Blogger that offers features such as tagging that have been offered by other weblogging services for quite some time. The Blogger beta has been marked by numerous technical issues and limitations chronicled in the Blogger Help Group bulletin board. While Google would probably say otherwise it appears that the Blogger beta is a very rushed response to Microsoft that is exposing the limits of Google's current vision for personal publishing. While suppliers such as Google and SixApart have been focusing on weblogs and others on Wikis, Microsoft has rightly broadened the question that they are trying to answer in personal publishing. With a mish-mosh of weblogs, wikis, emails, messaging and other systems available for personal expression there is a crying need for an environment where it's easy to shift from personal expression to collaborative expression to formal expression as simply as possible. This first "hit" application from Microsoft's Live family is an important step towards a more author-oriented approach to personal publishing that other tools suppliers need to consider carefully in expanding their own marketing strategies. The days of weblogs and wikis may not be numbered, but the days of having to wrestle with half-baked software packages that solve only part of what people want out of personal publishing may be drawing to a close.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:40 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:46 AM |
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| Thursday, August 17, 2006 |
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on Google's launch of a free municipal WiFi network for its home town of Mountain View, California, with MetroFi providing the "tubes" for the system covering its 72,000 residents. A Google ID and password are required to log in to the free system, a strong motivation for people to provide profiles to Google that will activate a widening range of value-add services such as personalization, mail, messaging and ecommerce. Google sees this as a lever to accelerate rolling out similar services in San Francisco, a strategy that will make a Google login a "must-have" for Web users on the go in wired municipalities. Google claims it has no plans to put an additional layer of ads to monetize their wireless plans, seeing the additional eyeballs for its existing ad services a good enough revenue driver that supports its mission of universal access. This will work in some locales such as Silicon Valley where Web access is considered a birthright by many. But what about the far-flung corners of the earth where public funding for such ventures may be a little shaky? As the showcasing phase of this project progresses, there will need to be a firmer value proposition offered to municipalities for providing services of a high enough quality to justify an investment in free access. In New York City there are islands of free access that are oftentimes highly overcrowded with users and prone to hackers: with more solid funding of access through optional supplementary ad layers Google could provide towns and cities with the ability to choose how they want to finance free WiFi to the point where we begin to have truly universal access. Don't expect this to be the last word in what Google will do to move forward with WiFi support, especially should media-conscious carriers begin to make competitive offers to municipalities. It's kind of ironic that the old AOL model has been turned on its head to provide a universal login centered around the world's content rather than a proprietary set of databases - something that the telecoms carriers are having are hard time accepting as well. With Google's increasing abilities to contexualize and localize ads for its users, they have everything to gain from its universal access efforts. Just think of all of those coupons that they just launched through Google Maps - what a kick to be able to log in to Google right in front of a store where you can use their coupon! Early days, to be sure, but the mission of universal access could be just what Main Street/High Street needs to get a shot in the arm.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:51 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:37 AM |
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| Wednesday, August 16, 2006 |
An AdSense banner ad caught my eye in searching for headlines today that brought me to the site for PayPerPost, a rather ingenious way for marketers to get PR out in the "blogosphere". In a nutshell, a company wanting PR (termed "advertisers" on the PayPerPost beta Web site) can post opportunities for webloggers to post content on their site regarding a specific topic that a company would like to have covered. Bloggers have to fulfill certain quality requirements and posts must stay on their sites for a period of time before they will be paid by the marketers - and the pay ain't much: 100-word posts go typically for USD 10 and 50-word posts for USD 5. For these rates the likely quality equates to little more than paid search engine spam for marketeers who want to create synthetic "buzz" for their products and concepts. Yuk. If this particular instance of Pay-Per-Post is not likely to result in quality content it's worth noting that the model as a whole may have some long-term promise. We see at Gather contests for the best stories submitted to the service and of course AOL has had a good degree of success in hiring away social bookmarkers from the Digg service to support Netscape. People with money are willing to pay for amateur and semi-pro content out of pocket, a concept that may have some appeal to people who are unable to get out of contextual ad dollars what they feel their efforts are worth. The trick is to make it a market for independent journalism and not a propaganda marketplace. For example, if a on online journal or a corporate weblog needed a piece on a particular topic, why not put out a price tag for it and let good webloggers fight for the right to post at a realistic rate? Or, alternatively, if a good weblogger is writing on a key topic, why not auction off the redistribution rights to the highest bidder online? Some say that there's no such thing as bad PR, but it's clear that paying for artificial enthusiasm disguised as real interest is not in the long-term marketing interests of companies. But on the other hand new tools that enable high-quality independent writers and opinion-makers to make a living out of generating content that's consumed via key channels may be in the long-term interests of both publishers and authors. Expect there to be further ideas for online authoring marketplaces that provide a more sophisticated approach than PayPerPost to paying authors for quality content and more ideas as to how marketers can leverage weblogs effectively for PR value in a more authentic way.
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:11 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:09 PM |
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| Tuesday, August 15, 2006 |
While yesterday's Wall Street Journal article emphasized Google's efforts to make nice with publishers and media companies as a key component of its growth strategy, it's clear that it will be through a Google-shaped view of the world regardless. An interesting example of this can be found in today's Mercury News story on Google's use of ValPak local coupon data from Cox Enterprises in Google Maps. Pull up a local search for services such as car washes and ValPak coupons available in that area will be displayed (disclosure: I tried this using the example in the MN story, but darned if I can figure out yet where the stuff displays. But it's there, we're told.). This is going to be fairly emblematic of the kinds of deals that Google will be striking in many instances with premium content sources: contextual uses that add value to Google's key strengths and that generally avoid looking too much like any other portal on the Web. With players like Comcast going after the Yahoo look-alike market, that's largely a losing proposition for Google. Getting syndicated content to work well in a Google-shaped world may not always result in content products and services that look familiar to suppliers, but in the race to get content into its most valuable contexts Google's emphasis on unique tools that provide a way of relating to content that is easily re-contextualized via mashups and other tools is going to provide publishers with an important boost in their efforts to become relevant to increasingly source-agnostic audiences. As content brands change to become something that content does for a person rather than what content is it becomes more important for publishers to understand how to play with Google to stay with the shifting focus of their audiences.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:12 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:57 AM |
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| Monday, August 14, 2006 |
The recent Wikimania conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts fell on the heels of comedian Stephen Colbert's revealing how easy it is to twist Wikipedia content to one's own liking. In spite of Wikipedia's editors correcting his gibberish quickly and effectively, the question of how to get Wiki content to be both democratic and authoritative is not being addressed very effectively yet by Wiki proponents. The enormous potential for collaborative content will go largely unrealized until more effective systems are put in place that recognize how hard it is to defend a democratic publishing institutions from the tyrannies of both the mobs and the authorities. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:42 PM |
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Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in review
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:49 PM |
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 Shore Senior Analyst Jean Bedord attended the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, California and is providing coverage on our Industry Events weblog. Her latest report analyzes how search engine providers are positioning themselves in a field dominated by giants. Stay tuned to ContentBlogger for continuing insights from Jean into how to create value in publishing through best practices in using search technologies. Click here to read Jean's report on Search Engine Giants
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:07 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:49 AM |
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| Friday, August 11, 2006 |
The wires are abuzz with stories about U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman's loss to an upstart in the State of Connecticut's primary election this week with analysis from major media outlets on what various parties did to bring about this rare event. Time magazine weighs in on the importance of politically oriented weblogs in backing Lieberman's opponent Ned Lamont in building interest and momentum that lead to the defeat of the three-term Senator. You can go to the political weblog of your choice to judge for yourself as to what this is all about from a political perspective, but perhaps the most significant aspect of this event from a publishing perspective is how weblog endorsements of Ned Lamont in the early phases of this campaign seemed to have a significant impact in forming public opinion, as opposed to the usual practice of newspaper editors offering their selections in a race a few days before an election. In this instance most papers in Connecticut backed the loser, but more to the point they seemed to be bystanders in a dialog between voters and online opinion-leaders who were acting as both persuaders and facts-gatherers throughout this election. The only real advantage that major media outlets seemed to have was on election night itself, when underpowered weblogs and campaign sites were locking up with enormous surges of traffic while newspaper sites were well-scaled to handle the additional traffic. The role of newspapers seems to be shifting as opinion-making moves into community-driven weblog publications that are delivering opinion, community feedback, facts and links to facts in one unified stream of content. User-generated media offers a truly interactive brawl of ideas which, while oftentimes a stranger to objectivity, allows the public to wrestle with facts and opinions communally in the ways that democracies were meant to provide open consideration of all matters. I liken them in my own mind to the public hearings that we have in our town on key matters: you get leaders, cranks, drama-seekers and just plain citizens listening and sometimes standing in front of a microphone to speak their mind. Facts get tweaked along the way but when both sides have a chance to duke it out as a community somehow the truth that's best for the public tends to surface. By contrast traditional news media is a story-telling media, backed oftentimes by enormous production assets that can provide compelling content to support marketing efforts, but ultimately a bystander in public conversations. Now that they no longer have a monopoly on making the public aware of news, news outlets are faced with the question of how to develop news as public conversations that absorb facts and opinions from wherever they may arise. The Connecticut primary demonstrates that news organizations are in danger of becoming after-the-fact polishers of stories and opinions that have already made the rounds to the opinion-forming public. That may not be a bad thing in some ways - with less of a role in the "spin cycle," journalism may be able to focus more effectively on getting to the bottom of more stories on a factual basis to support public opinion-making. We can only hope.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:17 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:14 PM |
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Shore Senior Analyst Jean Bedord has been attending this week's Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, California and providing coverage on our Industry Events weblog. Stay tuned to ContentBlogger for continuing insights from Jean into how to create value in publishing through best practices in using search technologies. Click here to read Jean's report on Search Engine Strategies
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:58 AM |
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Yes, we haven't spent a lot of time lately fixing up ContentBlogger, but we're making progress. Here are a few new features that we've added: - Click on the envelope at the end of each entry to email it to a friend or colleague
- Links to the ten posts previous to the one displayed appear on the left
- Links available to add entries to the del.icio.us and digg bookmarking services
- When inbound links are available they'll be listed at the end of entries
- Simplified navigation
More to come, but for now enjoy the improvements, suggest some more, and spread the word!
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:50 AM |
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| Thursday, August 10, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:20 AM |
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| Wednesday, August 09, 2006 |
While U.S. copyright law has always been more liberal than the European Union towards the right of publishers to copy facts for other uses the advent of the Web has raised a flurry of U.S. lawsuits in recent years to claim more intellectual property rights to factual data. But USA Today notes that a recent decision in a closely watched case has tipped the scales in favor of facts-seekers. The ruling against Major League Baseball Players Association by a content licensee that was denied a license renewal for baseball players' names and statistics notes clearly: "The undisputed facts establish that the names and playing records of (MLB) players as used in CBC's fantasy games are not copyrightable and, therefore, federal copyright law does not pre-empt the players' claimed right of publicity...the First Amendment takes precedence over a [right to publicity]." This will be a boon for data miners that have been fighting a myriad of conflicting laws, regulations and Web site terms and conditions - and a shot across the bow to EU publishers that continue to fight off claims to legacy database products. The EU Database Directive of 1996 provides " sui generis" protection to facts that have some significant investment in them, but a relatively recent Working Paper being circulated is pushing to drop these requirements and has drawn support from institutional content purchasers. Though this may sound like an attack on publishers' profits, comments from the American Library Association point to a section in the working paper that underscores the negative effects of data protectionism: "Alarmingly, in the years since the adoption of the Directive, the European share of the global database market has decreased relative to that of the United States, and the ratio of European to U.S. database production has decreased from 1:2 to 1:3." In other words, if the directive is necessary to protect the viability of premium database producers, what is the evidence that it's working? Though this "rising tide" of facts access may not lift all publishing boats equally the net effect on the publishing industry of resisting over-protection of facts is in general quite positive. The USA today article on the decision against the MLPA notes that fantasy sports are generating an estimated $100 million in revenue and growing at a 7%-10% clip annually - a growth rate that may be stymied if these small publishers are forced to pay for data that should be in the public domain. The Web has raised the awareness and value of public domain content as virtual "seed money" that allows content properties to develop to the point where they're worth considering for acquisition by major publishers or further nurturing with higher margin products and services. Database publishers will continue to protect truly unique intellectual property whenever possible, but the time is upon us when the publishing industry needs to focus IP protection efforts on content that's truly unique and to leave the doors open for developing more business relationships through factual data and other content that should reside squarely in the public domain. It's more sweat, yes, but sometimes sweat is not a bad thing. UPDATE: paidContent.org notes the inevitable appeal on this ruling, but expect it to have quite a bit of influence in the meantime. While there will be some strong arguments from publishers for the basis of an appeal, historical facts on public acts are likely to carry the day.
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By John Blossom - posted at 6:03 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:13 PM |
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| Tuesday, August 08, 2006 |
At first the acquisition of Opinion Research Corp. by InfoUSA seemed to me like a bit of an odd duck: a business information database provider going into the research business? But at the end of the day, it's a perfect match in many ways. Research companies are always having to shell out for lists of people with whom to conduct research, and oftentimes the information that they receive in the process of culling through those contacts is valuable feedback for a database provider. At the same time InfoUSA's Donnelly Marketing arm tries to provide value-add for core InfoUSA databases and other content through its various sub-enterprises. What better value-add than to provide not only sales leads and company profiles but in-depth information on the attitudes of the markets to which you're selling? It provides a new layer of customizable value on top of InfoUSA databases that positions it more as a strategic marketing solutions resource. This combination should allow InfoUSA to stake out that position very cost-effectively in ways that go well beyond mere workflow integration and that focus instead on the key decisions that senior marketing managers must make in committing sales resources. The culture match may take some work, but in the meantime it's a deal that may not be stirring much coverage today but that will be sure to have resonance for some time to come. UPDATE: An additional thought: if the overhead of using humans to maintain a database is becoming less advantageous in an era of online data mining and collaborative data development, what better way to leverage those resources than to put their high-touch efforts to work on much higher value products and services? This impresses me as a smarter deal the more that I think of it.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:40 PM |
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While a great deal of attention is being lavished on the details of the USD 900 million deal that will give Google a win over Yahoo for search services on MySpace and other Fox Interactive Media properties, the bigger picture is that Google continues to invest in relationships that strengthen its core assets rather than chasing markets that are not in its strong zone - a move that FIM seems to have echoed. Ross Levinsohn, president of FIM, notes in a paidContent.org interview that "At the end of day you realize what you're really good at is a couple of things. You're really good at creating content, you're really good at enabling content, you're really good at selling big Fortune 1,000 companies on branded advertising and sponsorships. that you're not really good at is competing with giants like Google and Microsoft and Yahoo in search. And so you take advantage of what you're good at." And at the end of the day, was it cheaper for Google to try to build and develop its own unique community of online publishers to generate inventory for ad pages or to put a deal in place that leveraged the top online community? Easy "do what you're good at" choice at this point. Google also seems to have played the "do what we do well" card in other venues lately. It's sidestepping music downloads for now where Apple has a solid footprint and where music companies are far from having their act together on cross-platform digital rights. On the other hand it's reaching out to the XM satellite network to sell its ads via the dMarc radio ad management system it purchased earlier this year, so it's not as if Google is not finding ways to monetize music. At the same time Google's video efforts are getting a big boost via a deal with Viacom to distribute MTV video clips and clips from other Viacom properties with ads. While it has left brand advertising largely to others, Google has consolidated its position as the dominant search engine and ad network through these recent deals and has not had to contend with some of the identity crises faced by portals such as Yahoo! and AOL. When the inevitable ad crunch comes, it won't hurt to be the one on top of the pile with the top search engine to power it through leaner times.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:59 AM |
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Trends Google selected as MySpace search system Reuters FIM-Google: Levinsohn: "When Sergey Comes Down, They're Pretty Serious" paidContent.org AOL members' online searches made public USA Today Latest stats on the blogosphere: doubling every six months continues, about 18.6 posts per second ZDNet Ads in a Mere Magazine? How Last Century The New York Times* Microsoft shows off improved search CNET News EMC Makes It Harder To Forward Documents VAR Business The Web Returns to Health: 'The Last Frontier' on Internet Draws Big Names and Their Money Washington Post Small, midsize businesses spend more than half of ad budget online, plan further increases BtoB Online Viacom considers bid for Social Networking Site Bebo FT.com* A Forbes Family Fund-Raiser The New York Times* Best Practices Copyright Issues Present Ongoing Dilemma: To Link or Not To Link? USC Annenberg OJR ALA, in Congressional Testimony, Expresses Concern About LC Library Journal And the Killer Content for an Intranet is... CMS Wire Cool Tools Google Related Links, now with video Google Blog
Deals, Partnerships & Sales Vocus Acquires Online Press Release Newswire PRWeb PR Web Kanoodle to Recast Itself as Seevast - Parent Co. Forms From Two Existing Units and One New Unit PR Newswire Elsevier MDL partners with SciQuest; Partnership to Develop E-Procurement Solution for Reagents BusinessWire Pearson buys data firm Mergermarket Reuters via The Scotsman InfoUSA agrees to buy Opinion Research Corp. BtoB Online Products, Markets & People Umbria, Inc. Launches Breakthrough Blogosphere Analytics and Reporting Platform PR Newswire Prospero’s Moderation Services Delivers Online Community Insight dBusinessNews Topix.net expands news archive Reuters via Yahoo! News
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:37 AM |
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| Monday, August 07, 2006 |
Book publishers are working hard to improve their online marketing channels for their titles, but ironically they receive the least help in many instances from the authors of those books. Most book author Web sites are weak marketing tools that are designed to do little to help build a reading community or book sales. Compare this with webloggers such as David Meerman Scott, who has leveraged his personal weblog into a marketing vehicle for an e-book - and now for a print title from Wiley. Book publishers need to consider how to make money on marketing capable authors as they develop their skills in an online environment rather than limiting revenues to those harvested for print. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:41 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:51 AM |
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Shore Senior Analyst Jean Bedord will be attending this week's Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, California and providing coverage on our weblog. Say hello to Jean if you get a chance and stay tuned to ContentBlogger for continuing insights from Jean into how to create value in publishing through best practices in using search technologies.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:13 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 12:53 AM |
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| Friday, August 04, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:53 AM |
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| Thursday, August 03, 2006 |
AP covers its own deal with Google in the wake of paidContent.org's tipping of some of the very closely held cards yesterday. Google NDAs are squeaky mum in general, but clearly the movement under way with AP has broad enough implications that they're going to do their best simply to acknowledge that they're working together and to leave it at that. But the key phrase in the AP article tells all: "Google indicated AP's content will serve as the foundation for a new product that will be introduced in the coming months as [a] complement to its popular Google News service." Hmm, let's see, the definition of complement - "Something that completes, makes up a whole, or brings to perfection." Now, what would complete Google News and bring it closer to perfection? Could it be...social news tagging? Could be. And where has AP succeeded already with social news tagging in a growing online community? Well, at Newsvine, of course. Who's to say what's really up but I'd put at least a few chips down on the Google-sponsored introduction of Newsvine or a Newsvine-like service that helps audiences both to tag news and to create news. Newsvine features AP content as its mainstream anchor for users but allows users to vote on and tag content from any source as newsworthy and to develop their own articles for the Newsvine user community. Though Newsvine's rank and reach in Alexa stats has been fairly constant in the past six months that's not untypical for many social news sites - and like most other social news sites the general trend is gently up. With a boost from Google exposure the solid features and actively engaged community in Newsvine could act as an amplification channel to provide a mix of automated and user-edited news that will be necessary for Google to take its news service to the next level. Unlike services such as Digg it's not hostile to the idea of mainstream media involvement in projects, a stance that will aid Google in developing a broader array of relationships in the news world. If this works out with AP content, it's not unlikely that other major media channels will be along for the hunt as well soon enough. This could easily take a whole new twist - maybe it's just AP news videos or some other limited move - but in the meantime " faites vos jeux" as they say in Monaco.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:04 AM |
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BusinessWeek's article on the ins and outs of AOL's plans to drop connection-based subscriptions in favor of an ad-driven revenues covers the main points of the decision but The New York Times' coverage cuts to the heart of the matter when it quotes Morris Mark of Mark Asset Management: "“It's something they should have done two or three years ago," Mark said. Right he is. Major media companies such as AOL fussed and fumed about synergies and trying to put a garden wall around audiences that could not be serviced by captive content effectively; now AOL and others have to be content with a less-dominant position which, while certainly profitable, seems to be a beat behind the times. The long-term question for many media companies right now should be not how to maximize ad revenues but how to develop buffers into revenue models that will protect them in the next inevitable ad downdrafts. There's plenty of room for growth for online ads in an infinite sea of online page inventory but as ad spends become dispersed into more and more discrete channels via ad networks to follow the far-ranging interests of online audiences new plans for premium components must be developed fairly rapidly to weather the inevitable shifts. Loyalty through online communities will be a key anchor for introducing new premium components, which places AOL in a fairly good position through services such as its instant messaging. I think that you'll see that formerly dominant portals such as AOL will need to become more adept at premium profits through user-generated and user-syndicated content than Yahoo! and other portals that have the leverage and position to develop their own ad networks more effectively. Right now the rising tide lifts all boats in the ad world, but prepare yourself for the sea shifts ahead.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:37 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:33 AM |
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| Wednesday, August 02, 2006 |
The press release announcing the availability of Spoke Software, Inc.'s business contact service for free caught my eye, as did a Red Herring article that pulled extensively from the press release. "," the press release headline promises. Well, not quite. For free you get a teaser of titles available from specific companies on a company search or a listing of titles only that might match on a person search. OK, so take a bite of the bait and sign up for the service, which requires a download of software that integrates with your email client. Not too onerous, right? Until you try using the service, at which time the agent that you've installed starts to sync information from your email into your "SpokeBook" online database, from which Spoke draws information to validate. That's not necessarily bad in concept, but in the Spoke scenario going in a few minutes from "Gee, I think that I'd like to try this" to having software try to mine your entire email database without any filtering is very jarring. That's a pretty big commitment just to toy around. Spoke's claim is that this automated mining is preferable to services which require more commitment from its users: "With no need to track points, make trades or give away colleagues' direct contact information, users can take advantage of Spoke's unprecedented free service by simply validating where their business contacts work, a process that Spoke automates." Spoke exposes by default the name, title, and company information from your synced records and allows any other Spoke user to make inquiries of you for referrals to your contacts. That's a fairly immediate networking opportunity but without a stronger opt-in aspect to the service it's not necessarily one that provides the strongest introduction opportunities. Take, for example, a Spoke search on Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft. I get some basic information back from Spoke - company main phone number, Web site, and an interesting list of titles that people had in their email clients for this person (Chairman of the Board, Chief Software Architect, CEO and Chairman, President, Big Kahuna (sic), Chairman/Ch. Soft. Arch, Chief Technologist). Well, which one applies these days? Several might, but if it weren't for Mr. Gates being a prominent figure it would be " go fish" time to figure out an appropriate title. On the networking side, if I want to get more information or an intro I can look at "referrals" and pick from people in my network who can be potential points of contact and send them an email - if I feel that they have a good network. The 5-level network rating says I have pretty good "ins", but I have no idea what it's based on. Trying Spoke from a company perspective, the service does not seem to discriminate very effectively between actual and potential employees. A search on our own company yielded several people who are or were affiliated with Shore but never "card carrying" team members. A similar search on Zoominfo yielded much more accurate and up to date information. My overall impression is that data quality for mapping contacts to companies is very low in comparison to other services that have maintained a higher level of commitment from users and human involvement in editing. The features and architecture of Spoke make it the kind of tool that would be very useful in corporations and other closed environments where this level of automated information sharing could find acceptance amongst an already cooperating group of people - kind of a Knowledge Management tool for sales force automation, if you will. In a public environment, it's not clear that it adds reliable value - especially since the level of commitment to maintaining accuracy from people in the network is far from clear. Services such as Plaxo do a much nicer job of enabling people to keep their contact lists in sync with colleagues and contacts; services like LinkedIn provide a higher level of assurance in the quality of potential introductions; services like Jigsaw provide a highly motivated set of companies and individuals dedicated to content quality; and services like Zoominfo are far more advanced in providing well-organized and edited profiles of people and companies with good features for users to edit information. In summary, Spoke is a nice piece of software with rough edges on both the content concept and the business model that make it a bit of a question mark for business information seekers. It's one thing to understand sales force automation and data mining; it's quite another thing to understand what will result in a quality business information product using both automated techniques and the efforts of people using an online service. Spoke's trashing of established providers of contact information is rather out of date: most major services are making use of automated techniques to improve their content sets, albeit with their own issues in blending that information with manually updated records. There's hope yet for this service in a field of alternatives that have not yet proven out one dominant and bulletproof approach but it will take a more sophisticated attitude towards user contributions and a deeper appreciation of comfort levels in how mined data is used in Spoke to make this a natural choice for most business information users and partners.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:04 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:46 AM |
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| Tuesday, August 01, 2006 |
My News Analysis piece on newspapers integrating external news headlines from Inform into their Web pages drew a response from Paula Hane, News Bureau Chief for Information Today, Inc. Paula notes: "For the big guys this is ho hum. However, for smaller publishers and media orgs, the real gain would be to pull in related content from your own site and from affiliated sites and sister publications." Good point, Paula, it does all start with your own publications to make sure that there's good navigation to contextual content that will support more page views. But beyond that essential content brand reinforcement there's the need to build editorial strength in the eyes of one's audience. Smaller publishers as much as any other kind treasure each click that can be held to one's native content. But that instinct has limited the reach of all news publications as users crawl far and wide to get a comprehensive picture of what's happening in specific niches - hence our own daily search for headlines that takes us to dozens of Web sites and search engines. To bring it back to the Pew Research data, look at the huge gap between "online newspapers" and "online news" - that's the gap between one's own publications and the interests of one's audiences. There's only so much content that any publication can hope to generate to fill that gap. With that in mind, there is at least in the abstract an argument for smaller publications being MORE aggressive than larger publications in seeking out links to external content using editorial resources. The big publications are more likely to opt for automation because of the breadth and scale of content that they span. But smaller niche publications can afford to be more aggressive about cherry-picking content from other sources to allow them to have a broader set of content that can appeal to readers while allowing editorial resources to focus on the most important items. This can take those resources away from repackaging press releases and other routine activities that could be better focused elsewhere. There are no pat answers to how to adapt a mainstream publication to a readership that's used to looking elsewhere for a full set of content to meet their needs, but considering carefully how active selection of links can help that effort is an essential element of successfully expanding a publication's focus.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:16 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:00 PM |
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