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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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