where content, technology and people meet. (SM) Publishing and content technology executives use Shore to measure and understand their markets and competitors, define marketing strategies and implement successful content products and services using Shore's highly actionable insights into vendors, institutions, individuals and virtual communities.
ContentBlogger is the 2007 SIIA CODiE Award Winner for Best Media Blog
COMMENTARY:

Insights and headlines from Shore analysts on trends in enterprise and media content markets.
  Subscribe to our feed (?) or add to: MyYahoo  iGoogle/Google Reader  Bloglines  NewsGator  Rojo
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 11:44 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 

By John Blossom - posted at 7:47 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  0 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 11:33 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 11:02 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
Trends
Google to Offer Downloadable Versions of Out-of-Copyright Books
Bloomberg News
Hypergrowth Web era gives way to media dealmaking
Reuters
IDG Goes To China
Forbes.com
Danny Sullivan Leaving Search Engine Watch
Daggle
Google CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt Joins Apple's Board of Directors
PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance
Clip and Save Holds Its Own Against Point and Click
The New York Times*
Pilot invites go out for Microsoft’s AdSense competitor adCenter
TechCrunch
Mags drop print for Web to reach teens
AP via Yahoo! News
A Social Newsblog and Sighting Center for Information, Entertainment and Interaction
PR Newswire
Will All of Us Get Our 15 Minutes On a YouTube Video?
WSJ Online
Now Even AT&T Loves MuniFi
GigaOM
Blogs Start Job Boards
Red Herring
Ex-Rocketboomer partners with PopURLs
Scobelizer
Microsoft's Digital Rights Management System Hacked
All Headline News

Best Practices
9 Ways for Newspapers to Improve Their Websites
The Bivings Report
Targeting the Social Behavior
ClickZ News
Mining the World's Data for What You Need
Ecommerce Times

Cool Tools
Nimbuzz: MSN and Google Talk for your mobile
Download Squad
blojsom: Internal Aggregator Plugin
blojsom

Deals, Partnerships & Sales

Elsevier to Publish ISA Transactions
ISA
Saxony Consortium Chooses Elsevier's Leading Online Resources
PR Newswire
Marketingworks to deploy Nstein's Ntelligent Enterprise Search and sentiment analysis via IBM
PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance

Products, Markets & People
Swets Launches the 'China Suite'
Managing Information
Yahoo! Go for Mobile Now Available for Windows Mobile Devices
BusinessWire
Jupitermedia's JupiterWeb Division Launches APIFinder.com
BusinessWire
OhmyNews Japan service launched
The Japan Times
JupiterResearch Adds Research Service Dedicated to Social Marketing
Tekrati

By John Blossom - posted at 10:57 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 4:12 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  0 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 

By John Blossom - posted at 10:42 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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

By John Blossom - posted at 3:52 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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

By John Blossom - posted at 10:04 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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

By John Blossom - posted at 11:44 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 4:55 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  6 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 

By John Blossom - posted at 4:35 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 12:09 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  2 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
Trends
AT&T sues data brokers for stolen customer records
Reuters via Computerworld
eBay Loosens Restrictions on Digital Content Sales
Auction Bytes
Asia warms up to intellectual property
CNET News
Google Data API Opens Up Its Base
DevX
How Will Search Fit Into The Media Mix In 2011?
Search Insider
The Web 2.0 Economic Conundrum
Micro Persuasion
VCs See Dollar Signs in Blogosphere
Law.com
Investing in blogging, part II
Scobelizer
Fireside Chat: The Long Tail
37 Signals
Suppliers, Intermediaries Tear Down the Walled Garden of Content and Let Users Inside
HospitalityNet
A New Story Lead for the Newspaper Industry: Newspaper Websites Contribute to Audience Growth
PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance
'Wiki wars' rage in political arena
McClatchy News via RealCities
Harlequin hopes e-book offerings will seduce more readers
IT Business.ca
Borders Group Down, Reshuffles Management
AP via Houston Chronicle
Actress Xu Jinglei most popular blogger in world
China Daily
Internet search gets Web 2.0 style
CNET News

Best Practices
How to make your blog more useable in 3 steps
The Blog Herald
Going to the Source: Dallas Paper Uses Footnotes in Print
Editor & Publisher

Cool Tools
Stay informed with 4INFO mobile search
Download Squad

Deals, Partnerships & Sales

Moody's 49 pct stake purchase of China Chengxin gets govt approval - report
AFX via Forbes
Elsevier to publish Mendeleev Communications: Russian Academy of Sciences partners with Elsevier
EurekAlert
Taylor & Francis Partners With EBSCO In Global eBooks Offer
Managing Information

Products, Markets & People
Rightslink(R) Chosen by Springer to Fine-Tune Worldwide Copyright Permissions
BusinessWire
Factiva Achieves Top Market Position According to Analyst Firm
PR Newswire via Bolsamania
VNU Business Media launches 'Contract China'
BtoB Online

By John Blossom - posted at 12:04 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 12:57 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
Trends
Google could face Brazil lawsuit
BBC News
Researchers Yearn to Use AOL Logs, but They Hesitate
The New York Times*
'Google-creep' strikes again as website puts itself up for sale
The Guardian
How Google can make - or break - your company
Fortune Small Business/CNN
Privacy Worries Spur New Search Engine Tool
InformationWeek
Microsoft Signs Agreement to Show Ads on Facebook Friend Finder
Bloomberg News
Blogging for big bucks
Business 2.0 via CNN Money.com
Blogs As Media Bubble Business 2.0, Or Something Like That
paidContent.org
Exploding books: The blooking of the world
BuzzMachine
Google's love affair with old media
FT Deutchland
What's the Big Deal With Social Search?
ClickZ Network
Marketing.FM Marketing and Advertising Blog Network
Online Marketing Blog
U.S. magazines' newsstand sales fall
Reuters
Can German engineering fix Wikipedia?
CNET News
ABC Sells News Clips on iTunes
WSJ Online*

Best Practices
Digital Diet: Just Say No to Papyrus
Content Bridges
Exploring the scholarly neighborhood
Google Blog
Eliminating the Echo Chamber
The Blog Herald

Cool Tools
Windows Desktop Search 3.0 Beta 2 released - finally a GUI
Download Squad
Urchin RSS Aggregator
Urchin

Deals, Partnerships & Sales

Knovel Partners With Synapse Information Resources for Engineering, Pharma and Industrial Content
PR Newswire
FAST and Fuji Xerox Singapore Team Close Partnership to Serve the ASEAN Market
BusinessWire
EcoWin data added to Perfect Information analysis
Information World Review
Outsell acquires Electronic Publishing Services
BtoB Online

Products, Markets & People
VNU Names David L. Calhoun Chairman of the Executive Board and Chief Executive Officer
BusinessWire
BusinessWeek Appoints Roger W. Neal As New SVP and General Manager of BusinessWeek Online
PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance
ScienceDirect Redesign is Proven to Enhance Researcher Productivity
PR Newswire
VNU Business Media pulls content from five titles to create new Web site for marketing professionals
BtoB Online

By John Blossom - posted at 12:51 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  0 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 11:13 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  4 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
Trends
FTC chief slams net neutrality
Silicon.com
Publishers Fight Back Against Google with New Book Search Service
eWeek
VCs see opportunity in blogosphere
CNET News
Google CEO wants $74 billion TV ad market
ZDNet
YouTube to Sell Advertisements In Video Format
WSJ Online*
Google & MTV Networks Streaming Content Pilot
Search Engine Roundtable
AOL Reviews Privacy Policy After Shake-Up
CIO
WaPo Does FM?
FM Publishing
Standard & Poor's places CNET Networks on CreditWatch
BtoB Online
WOWIO Introduces 'ebooks for Free' Concept to U.S. Readerdom
PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance
Google welcomes Writely sign-ups
CNET News

Best Practices
Content Aggregation And The New Curators: Podcasting Newsmasters
Robin Good
RSS Syndication Raises SEO and Online Visibility
The Open Press
How Weekly Magazines Try to Balance News on the Internet, in Print Editions
WSJ Online*

Cool Tools
Winer Navigates RSS River Of News On Mobile Devices; Starts With NYT, BBC
paidContent.org
AmigoFish, VlogMap Point to Podcast Goodness
MediaShift
SanDisk takes on Apple with latest MP3 player
FT via MSNBC

Deals, Partnerships & Sales

GlobalSpec Announces Enhanced Partnership with CMP Technology's Electronics Group
GlobalSpec
Moreover Technologies and Information360 to Provide Media and Researchers with Real-Time Online News
Internet Ad Sales
Encyclopaedia Britannica Selects Omniture to Optimize Online Customer Engagement
Internet Ad Sales
CMP Sells Book Titles to Elsevier
FOLIO: Magazine
OCLC Unifies Digitization Forces with Its Acquisition of DiMeMa
Information Today
Perfect Information Partners with Reuters EcoWin
BobsGuide
Salesforce.com Acquires Kieden
WSJ Online*

Products, Markets & People
ScienceDirect Redesign is Proven to Enhance Researcher Productivity
PR Newswire
Springer Launches SpringerLink for Access to the Springer eBook Collection
Managing Information
Nstein launches 12 UIMA annotators supporting intelligent enterprise search and sentiment analysis
PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance
Mondosoft Names Agner N. Mark as Chairman of the Board
BusinessWire
Dow Jones Newswires Unveils "Dow Jones Advantage" Enhanced Development Program
BusinessWire
Plaxo Introduces "Connected Index," Ranks Most Connected Countries; Argentina Tops List
BusinessWire
Scopus Announces first-of-its-kind Customized Institutional Resources and Digital Archive Searches
WebWire
LexisNexis to offer new e-mail archive service
Dayton Business Journal
Elsevier To Publish Chinese Chemical Letters
Library Journal

By John Blossom - posted at 11:06 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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

By John Blossom - posted at 7:00 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 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:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 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 12:14 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 11:40 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  4 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 

By John Blossom - posted at 10:46 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  2 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 11:51 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 

By John Blossom - posted at 10:37 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  2 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 3:11 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  3 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
Trends
Google gives city free Wi-Fi Internet company's hometown of Mountain View gets network
San Francisco Chronicle
Google Says It Has No Plans for National Wi-Fi Service
The New York Times*
CNN expands citizen journalism with I-Report initiative
Strategiy
Handicapping The Next Big Web 2.0 Sites for 2006
Ajax World
Web 2.0 and Its Impact on Blogs - Will there be an Alternative Medium to Blogs?
Eioba
Proquest deals aim to retain 2 leaders
Ann Arbor News
Penton Reports Revenue, EBITDA Increases in Q2, First Half of 2006
FOLIO: Magazine
‘New York Times’ ad revenue drops 3.3% in July
BtoB Online
Until Recently Full of Promise, Satellite Radio Runs Into Static
WSJ Online*
Satellite TV providers bow out of wireless sale
Reuters
An end run round copyright laws?
CNET News

Best Practices
AdSense Placement Optimization: User Behavior
Robin Good
Turn Library's Information Stew Into a Gourmet Menu
Law.com
ALM Report: Knowledge Management Begins to Gain Ground in Law Firms around the World
BusinessWire
New Fortune SEMLogic(TM) Research Sheds a Light on How Search Engines Determine Rankings
BusinessWire

Cool Tools
Google, Neven Vision & Image Recognition
Search Engine Journal
Trailfire Rewires Web to a Blogger's Point of View; Enables Trails and Comments on Any Page
BusinessWire
Web Content Grabber: Mine Phone Numbers Yourself from Yellow Pages Services
CWZG.com
Google Talk marks first year with upgrade
CNET News

Deals, Partnerships & Sales

PatientKeeper and Wiley Combine Patient Information With Evidence-Based Medicine
Managing Informaiton
Yahoo! Advertisers to Reach Consumers Through go2's Mobile Local Content Channels
BusinessWire
Elsevier in content deal with Jordanians
UPI
TheStreet.com and NASDAQ Launch Broadcast Co-Branding Initiative
BusinessWire
Wiley Acquires Clinical Cardiology and Scanning Journals; Expands Clinical & Microscopy Portfolio
BusinessWire
Attune Adds Google Search to Enterprise File Platform
Byte and Switch

Products, Markets & People
Complinet Helps Improve Due Diligence With Adverse Media Search Service
PR Newswire

By John Blossom - posted at 3:09 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 12:12 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 

By John Blossom - posted at 11:57 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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

By John Blossom - posted at 11:42 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 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 2:49 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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

By John Blossom - posted at 11:07 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 

By John Blossom - posted at 10:49 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  3 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 12:17 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  2 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 

By John Blossom - posted at 12:14 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  2 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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

By John Blossom - posted at 10:58 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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!

By John Blossom - posted at 2:50 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
Thursday, August 10, 2006

By John Blossom - posted at 11:20 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  2 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 6:03 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  3 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
Trends
Yahoo's Lost Bid Doesn't Spell Doom
BusinessWeek
Open-Source Networked Journalism Meets SmartMobs: NewAssignment.net
Robin Good
Fantasy leagues can use baseball stats
USA Today
Leading Brand Marketers Demand for Audited Advertising Numbers from Interactive Publishers
BusinessWire
Our analysis of click fraud detection
Google Blog
Fair Isaac, SEMPO invite pay-per-click advertisers to participate in click fraud study
BtoB Online
Content criteria to assess Australian media mergers
Nine MSN
Source Media In Advanced Talks To Buy eFinancialNews
paidContent.org
The wiki faithful look beyond encyclopedias to activism
The Boston Globe
Napster: Too Legit to Profit
SmartMoney.com
Online media's 'Californian' adventure
USC Annenberg OJR
Om Malik Blows it
Technosailor
News Corp. Earnings in Line
TheStreet.com
On Amazon, All of a Sudden Everyone's a Milk Critic
The New York Times*
UK PubMed Central To Launch in January
Library Journal
How big is the Blogosphere really?
GigaOM

Best Practices
Search Engines: Friend or Foe?
Search Engine Roundtable
Creating Web 2.0 Applications: Seven Ways to Fully Embrace the Network
Sys-Con Italia
SES 2006: Optimizing Your Feed
Web Pro News

Cool Tools
TV on BlackBerries from CanWest and Rogers
Mediacaster
Do You Squidoo? If You Have an Abiding Interest in Anything You Should
Associated Content

Deals, Partnerships & Sales

EDGAR Online Partners with TheMarkets.com to Offer I-Metrix Professional to 1400 Buy-Side Firms
PR Newswire
Cooke Communications Replaces Manual Search With Coveo Enterprise Search
PR Newswire

By John Blossom - posted at 12:13 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  2 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 12:40 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 11:59 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  2 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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

By John Blossom - posted at 11:37 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  2 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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

By John Blossom - posted at 1:41 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  1 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
Trends
Google to distribute MTV clips with ads
AP via Settle PI
Google: not gonna do music
Engadget
Google, XM Reach Ad Pact
WSJ Online*
Europe’s Papers Join the Cry of "Read All About It, Free"
The New York Times*
Transformation continues apace at Wolters Kluwer
Information World Review
It's on Wikipedia, So It Must Be True
Washington Post
Venture Capital Report: Where's Web 2.0?
The Boston Globe
Yahoo! Answers is a disaster
Download Squad
M&A Activity Continues to Soar: Jordan, Edmiston Group announces 20th deal of the year
FOLIO: Magazine
The paid user generated content pot continues to stir...
The Blog Herald
University of California may join Google scanning project too
CNET News

Best Practices
Intellectual property and the bio revolution
Laboratorytalk
Lessig seeks legal ground for content exchange
CNET News
Howard Rheingold on the future of commons-based content production
Robin Good

Cool Tools
Wordpress.com Rising: Stats After 8 Months
TechCrunch

Deals, Partnerships & Sales

Investors, Including Bono, Buy a Piece of Forbes
The New York Times*
LYCOS Enhances Broadband High Quality Video Content with Launch of Update Hollywood
PR Newswire via Yahoo! News
One Laptop Per Child Includes Wikipedia on $100 Laptops
PR Releases Database
Elsevier MDL, Fisher Biosciences’ Global Chemicals unit collaborate to improve chemical sourcing
WebWire
Barclays Capital Selects Townsend Analytics' RealTick(R) Direct-Access Trading Platform
PR Newswire

Products, Markets & People
ebrary New Purchase-Only Titles offer Customized Collections of eBooks from Leading Publishers
BusinessWire

By John Blossom - posted at 9:51 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  0 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 9:13 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  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 12:53 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  0 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
Friday, August 04, 2006

By John Blossom - posted at 11:53 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  0 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 11:04 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  2 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 10:37 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  0 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 

By John Blossom - posted at 10:33 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  0 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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. "Spoke Gives Free Access to Database of 30 Million Business People," 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.

By John Blossom - posted at 11:04 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  2 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 

By John Blossom - posted at 10:46 AM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  0 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
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.

By John Blossom - posted at 12:16 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  0 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 
Trends
3 of L.A.'s Billionaires Have Eyes on L.A. Times
LA Times*
Pearson ponders web strategy as profits rise
The Guardian
Media heir wants 'Airbus of the web'
FT.com via MSNBC
EC eyes single market for digital content
PC Pro
Inform Links Publishers to Web
Red Herring
Ten Toes in the Multimedia Waters: 2006 is turning into the year of trying everything at once
Poynter Online
Amateur Hour: Journalism without journalists
The New Yorker
Ziff Davis Owner Officially Seeks Sale
FOLIO: Magazine
Making the jump from one-man blog to community website
USC Annenberg OJR
Wachovia Conference Call: Dismal Stats on Auto Ads
Editor & Publisher
Digital rights fuel open-source debate
The Oregonian
Siggraph: Taking on fair use, privacy and DRM
CNET News
CNN.com creates user submissions section
AP via Boston.com

Best Practices
Interface Design: Usability And Visual Innovation Key Future Success Factors
Robin Good
But Would You Pay For It? Free Versus Paid Content Online
TMCNet
Blog Advertising: A Quick Tutorial
ClickZ News

Cool Tools
Amazon.com Announces Library Processing for Public and Academic Libraries Across the United States
BusinessWire via FinanzenNet

Deals, Partnerships & Sales

Merriam-Webster Selects Healthline to Deliver Medical Information to Millions of Health Seekers
MarketWire
Sphere.com and Clickability to Connect About.com Readers to the 1.3 Million+ Related Articles on Its Site
PR Newswire via Finanzen.net
Wired and Sonibyte Partner to Provide Podcast Content
PR Web via Yahoo! News
NewsGator Brings Podcasts and Other Content to Yahoo! Messenger
MarketWire
State of Minnesota Selects PTC(R) Arbortext(R) to Streamline Legislative Publishing
BusinessWire
InvestorIdeas.com™ Features Audio Video Content from ClipSyndicate
Newswire Today
blinkx Partners With Trouble Homegrown Adding Thousands of Hours of Garage Video to Search Index
PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance
MondoSearch First Search Engine to Integrate with Sitecore CMS
Submit Express
Son of Real Estate Mogul Buys New York Observer
WSJ Online*

Products, Markets & People
Spoke Gives Free Access to Database of 30 Million Business People
Spoke
Industry Moves: Yahoo Media; NYT; iFilm; BigFish; Penton
paidContent.org
LexisNexis Risk Management Introduces New Investigative Solutions Line
BusinessWire
Mobileplay offers free mobile services with Opera MiniT 2.0
Kauppalehti Online

By John Blossom - posted at 12:00 PM
permanent link to this entry        bookmark this entry:  AddThis Social Bookmark Tool
  0 comments (click to view or to add your own) 
 

To top of page To Top of Page

COMMENTARY: INDEX
CONTENTBLOGGER
INDUSTRY EVENTS
CONTENT NATION

Read ShoreLines, our free weekly email newsletter.

Sample issue
Follow us on Twitter
Get headline-only feed
Buzz news comments
RECENT ENTRIES
READ CONTENT NATION

Learn how to thrive and to survive as social media changes our work, our lives and our future.
Buy the book
Read it online
Read our social media blog
WEBLOGS: ARCHIVES
 
 

shorename.gif (1190 bytes)
[HOME] [US] [SERVICES] [COMMENTARY] [RESEARCH] [EVENTS] [PRESS] [CONTACT]
Copyright © 1997-2009 Shore Communications Inc.  All Rights Reserved - Click Here to Read Terms of Use
Corporate Privacy Policy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?