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| Thursday, November 30, 2006 |
 Earlier this week The New York Times highlighted the return of "old school" branded content, with sponsors such as Match.com buying both high-profile product placements and co-naming rights to cable and broadcast U.S. television programs. Shades of the 1950s, when shows like Texaco Star Theater were branded by corporations looking for cost-effective exposure - and control - in a young medium hungry for ad dollars. But Variety points to a new take on content branding - destination content focused on major brand products assembled by Yahoo. Yahoo has targeted 100 top consumer brands and products and has assembled content from their various portal properties to develop an immersive brand experience. First up: Nintendo's new Wii game console. Content from Yahoo covering the Wii includes postings from user-generated properties such as del.icio.us, Flicker and Yahoo! Answers as well as content from Yahoo! Games, branded gear for your Yahoo! Avatar, a buyer's guide with content from Yahoo! Shopping, and so on - and, of course, ads from both Nintendo and other advertisers taking advantage of a highly brand-centric environment. Brand heaven, right? Well, kind of. Creating a community around a major brand as destination content is a great idea, but the problem is that everything is so...YAHOO. Like so much of Yahoo it's hard to walk away from the experience feeling like you're really inside the featured brand: it's a little like saying "NBC's Texaco Star Theater." Yahoo is pressing hard to romance major corporate advertisers to take advantage of their brand-friendly approach to advertising, but as it trips over its own brand development efforts it seems to lay a consistent trail of brand conflicts. The mini-portal concept has a lot going for it but Yahoo needs to allow its own branding to recede a bit more and let the context speak for itself. An ideal environment would be a little more like a Wikipedia or MySpace, where the tools are there to create specialized portal presences but without an overbearing hand of traditional media-oriented marketers making too much of a fuss over the details. Let ANY brand use these tools to create their own brand heaven - and just stand back and enjoy the results.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:32 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:31 PM |
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An entry on Google Blog yesterday announced the death of Google Answers, a premium reference service that allowed users to get live support from hundreds of researchers to answer an unlimited range of questions. The content published via Google Answers lives on, but it will be an archive at this point. Google was remarkably open about its motives and reasons: Google is a company fueled by innovation, which to us means trying lots of new things all the time -- and sometimes it means reconsidering our goals for a product...For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people's minds...Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users. Certainly the relative success of Yahoo! Answers provides an interesting contrast to the fizzling out of Google's service. While the quality of answers in the user-generated content provided by Yahoo! Answers may not be professional grade in many - if not most - instances, Yahoo! is doing a good job of turning the product into an entertaining community portal - kind of an ad-hoc discussion service with voting and a smattering of useful information. Yahoo's marketing alliance with Answers.com may help to turn the product into a more serious reference service, but in the meantime the question becomes: what's the right model for a reference service that can incorporate user-generated content? Wikipedia tends to overshadow this question more than most services. With excellent placement in Google search results and its own unique following and quality control capabilities, it is rapidly becoming the default reference service of choice for many content users. People trust their peers to come up with useful information, but the lesson of Wikipedia seems to be that moderation and people with reasonable levels of expertise are key to successful user-generated reference materials. In the meantime reference desks at local libraries seem to be increasingly popular alternatives for people looking for one-on-one answers from research professionals, while professional reference services such as Guideline (which absorbed Find/SVP) have positioned their services on a more upscale plane of executive research. And while oftentimes overlooked in a new galaxy of user-generated content options online bulletin board services still provide a wealth of timely answers to pressing questions from experts knee-deep in very focused topics. All of these models provide Google with a lot of interesting options as it decides how best to be a source of answers to people who use its leading search service. It's refreshing to see Google admitting that not every hack generated by kids fresh out of grad school is going to be worth its weight in gold and to be willing to consider how to focus its energies on being a well-integrated service that makes it easy for people to go to one place to find as many answers as possible. Google is still chasing the dream of a Star Trek-like computer that allows one to simply ask a question and get an answer -and that's not a bad thing. What Star Trek's visionaries couldn't quite grasp at the time, though, is how user-publishers would fit into the picture. We'll see what Google can craft on its holodeck soon enough...
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:33 AM |
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| Wednesday, November 29, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:47 AM |
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TechCrunch reports on the move by retail giant Wal-Mart to include rights to a digital download of the movie "Superman Returns" as its first foray into a sales model that includes both physical and digital product package. For USD 1.97 more than the DVDs face price a purchaser can get a low-res version in Windows Media format with PlaysForSure rights protection suitable for handheld devices with smaller screens. USD 2.97 gets you a copy of the movie with the same protection but in a hi-res version suitable for PC viewing, while USD 3.97 gets you both portable and PC versions. The rights-protected copies can be used only on one device at a time, but the license for viewing may be moved from one device to another. TechCrunch has its doubts about this arrangement, but overall you have to give Wal-Mart credit for being the first to feel out how rights-protected content can be used to move towards a model that can allow consumers to move towards downloaded movies at a nominal fee. With retail shelving space at a premium - DVDs take up more space in our local market than lettuce - and terabyte-scaled local content storage devices becoming widely affordable, it makes sense for the Wal-Marts of the world to start encouraging the digital option. Purists will decry the lack of a digital-only option and the inability to access fair use clips, but think for a moment where we were only a year ago with digital video content. Here we have a cross-platform, rights-protected download model for Hollywood entertainment in the hands of a major retailer, where a year ago most studios were mostly squabbling about what to do with digital download distribution. The big piece missing from this and from the recent BitTorrent deal with movie studios is a mechanism to enable viral marketing. Movie studios pour millions of dollars into major film releases to generate a little buzz that will help a movie generate theatre traffic. In the meantime services such as YouTube are out there enabling audiences to generate their own enthusiasm for digital video. With so much emphasis on locking down digital rights Hollywood is missing out on the opportunity to build up enthusiasm for a content product by enabling peer-to-peer marketing via fair use clips, mashups and other tools that enable people to create street-level credibility for content. Instead of trying to push their content at light speed into a brief window of mass distribution that trails off into "long tail" obscurity movie producers need to experiment with reversing this model. Let content find its own audience and digital sales via online channels to the point where theatre distribution will be accelerated by an active word-of-mouth from the online leaders in downloading. Since they'll be paying for the rights-protected version of this content and clipping out pieces to send friends, extra-digital marketing could be funded to some degree out of the proceeds of these efforts and probably targeted more effectively by zeroing in on the stuff that was most popular in clippings. Think of the theatre as the culmination of a communal content sharing event, rather than the be-all and end-all. Well, we can only hope for this - and wait for aggressive distributors to give it a go.
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:47 AM |
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| Tuesday, November 28, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:45 PM |
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| Monday, November 27, 2006 |
As major media consolidation deals bring more and more publishing houses into private hands, the challenges of converting these properties that can respond to the needs of niche markets are becoming more acute. Combining infrastructure and staffs cannot be the only factor leading to more success in publishing markets that are by their nature highly decentralized. There is a gap in management skills, industry outlook and strategic vision in publishing companies that is going to be hard to fill without confronting the waves of users who are eager to create their own decentralized media markets. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:53 PM |
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User-generated content becomes more diverse and powerful by the day. Where a questionable performance in a relatively obscure venue may have been excusable by a big media name in the past, the all-seeing eye of user content puts it out there for the world to see - and to judge. Recent court decisions in the U.S. and in Canada have recognized the rights and responsibilities of individuals who act as news agents independent of media companies or technology providers, providing a much stronger legal underpinning for these user-publishers. In the U.S. decision information posted to a Web site that could be considered libelous was deemed the responsibility of the person posting it and not of the services supporting them - a big win for portals supporting user-generated media services. In the Canadian decision a weblogger covering a public event who was harassed by local officials was deemed to have the same rights as official members of the press covering the event who were not troubled by the authorities - yet another precedent of press freedoms being extended to citizen journalists. Both of these decisions come at a time when the recognition and use of user-generated content sources forces the hand of the courts to defend content producers who have become valuable publishers in their own right. If they were not so, then the courts would have been far more easily convinced that portal providers were responsible for users' actions. Instead, the courts see that user-generated content producers, for better or for worse, are now fulfilling an important part of the role in public debate once reserved for traditional media sources. It's a very crucial step forward in creating a broader commercial framework for intellectual property management that can encompass all content producers effectively and fairly.
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:35 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:42 PM |
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While real-time financial quotes, trading tools and market analytics form the backbone of major content services in the securities industry, news is one of the key features of a financial content service that put its brand on the lips of traders. Thomson Financial's broadening of its news services through its announced deal with the Associated Press is another major step by Thomson to build an "on the lips" news brand, building on its July acquisition of AFX News from Agence France-Presse. Just as the AP-Dow Jones Economic Report created in the 1960s a combined service with far broader impact in financial markets Thomson is assembling a range of content with global reach to compete with providers such as Reuters who have had a worldwide financial news footprint for more than a century. But will building up news assets through traditional news channels be enough to make a deal-changing impact for Thomson Financial? Certainly deals like the AP alliance are absolutely necessary for Thomson to have a hope of pulling down more major deals beyond its core of low-end equities services and bond trading networks, but to some degree Thomson is chasing a target whose time is already passed. News wire services are no longer the be-all and end-all for news that moves markets, with corporate weblogs, proprietary Web scraping services and other news gathering capabilities competing with major news services for the attention of traders and analysts in financial institutions. At the same time the huge trading rooms that these services once powered are getting smaller by the day as highly automated trading capabilities begin to create a more narrow marketplace for financial news services. Even as Thomson Financial has a tough row to hoe in priming up a world class news service in the twilight of the widespread desktop trading era, competitors such as Reuters are learning how to leverage news assets far more effectively in online media markets. When Thomson jettisoned most of its print operations several years ago it lost touch with not only the surging ad revenues now found in online media markets but also a media outlook that provides a more engaged and interactive relationship with content markets. As a wide array of database publishers consider how to make more use of online outlets for their assets so must Thomson Financial consider how to build a more supple and engaged content brand that goes beyond the lockstep chase of Bloomberg and Reuters desktop positions via traditional marketing channels. Hopefully future Thomson news deals will be able to build on a now-impressive core of essential media to incorporate more progressive news sources and delivery platforms.
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:23 AM |
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Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in review
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:04 AM |
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| Friday, November 24, 2006 |
It turns out that not all is well in the world of Second Life these days. While members are still skimming around this virtual city in forever-young electronic avatar bodies, the growth of the service is creating new opportunities for crime, just as with any other municipality. Gamespot reports on problems with destructive worm programs destroying gamers' experiences in addition to last week's concerns about software that allows users to make copies of intellectual property sold by vendors in the online world. So much for good looks solving everything. Time and again we see software-oriented companies come up with great ideas for products that turn out to be recognized as content plays after the fact - at which point it's usually too late to address the basic questions of how to enforce intellectual property rights. As we warned in our News Analysis a few weeks back the lessons to be learned from Second Life are more about the general need of publishers to think about how to appeal to digital natives who have been brought up with gaming and a sense of being able to access content as they wish. Many marketers thought that they had found a special Nirvana in Second Life to bridge into this market segment, but you don't leave the rules of the "real world" behind in doing so. Instead of rushing towards a crude tool like Second Life to solve their marketing issues publishers and marketers need to concentrate more on how the lessons that can be learned in Second Life can be applied more effectively in the much more complex world of online publishing beyond it.
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:10 PM |
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A kind of geekish article by Om Malik on rapidly shifting technologies supporting municipal wirelesss Internet access prompted me to catch up on the world of WiFi a bit on a quiet post-Thanksgiving afternoon. A nice summary of recent news developments affecting WiFi provided by eWeek can be found here. In a nutshell muni WiFi is still taking baby steps but is beginning to spread through Silicon Valley communities fairly quickly, with some towns having their choice of networks from which to choose. While some major carriers are charging user USD 20 a month or so for town-wide access ad-supported systems by Google and others are also in play and gathering steam. One of the eWeek articles highlighted new fourth-generation wireless broadband equipment announced by Nortel that includes Internet everywhere, mobile video, VOIP, streaming media, data applications and mobile electronic commerce. This equipment will be ready to support new networking standards expected in mid-2007 that will mark the start of cost-effective, video-grade wireless services. I believe that one of the trends that we can expect to see unfolding next year is a radical expansion of the push towards municipal WiFi services in the U.S. Initial forays are already fairly successful in major cities, and with the advent of video wireless we're likely to see a much broader push not only for media-produced video but video being churned out by users and local merchants communicating with one another via municipal wireless services. It's also likely to spur on a new interest in automated content download services, such that people on the go can have their favorite news and entertainment showing up on mobile devices with greater ease than ever before. I have been warning for some time about the potential impact of WiFi on content deals cut by major media companies with phone companies using underpowered proprietary cell networks as a transport. It looks as if publishers will need to be particularly careful in 2007 in determining just how long of a lock-in on these kinds of deals will be in their best interest as Internet-friendly WiFi gains momentum. Presuming a "choke hold" on distribution via wireless is no longer an option in many markets. In the meantime expect plenty of legislative and legal rough-and-tumble as new power plays develop to get a piece of the municipal wireless Internet action.
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:51 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:02 PM |
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| Thursday, November 23, 2006 |
Have a Happy Thanksgiving!
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:11 AM |
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| Wednesday, November 22, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:03 PM |
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| Tuesday, November 21, 2006 |
Yahoo has been faulted for being slow on the draw in its deal-making efforts as of late, but with its deal with 176 major newspapers and a separate deal to provide user-generated content to Answers.com Yahoo is seeking to place its content and its ads in a broader array of destinations to make the bottom line look as good as the top line. In the meantime the global contextualization engine that is Google keeps chugging along with far better margins. Is it better to serve in the heaven of user-driven context than to rule in the hell of decaying media empires? Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:30 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:44 PM |
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| Monday, November 20, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:09 PM |
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| Sunday, November 19, 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 11:39 PM |
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| Friday, November 17, 2006 |
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. has announced its plan to acquire U.K.-based Blackwell Publishing for about USD 1 billion, according to Business Week and other sources. The deal is less than 3x Blackwell's annual turnover, not a disastrous price but certainly one that reflects the difficulties of scholarly and academic publishers in a marketplace that is growing leery of print assets as a foundation of future profits. To compete effectively, these publishers require the scale of inventory and finances necessary to justify sophisticated electronic publishing and ecommerce capabilities. The combination of Wiley and Blackwell will create a publishing company with a global scale similar to that of rivals such as Elsevier that are moving aggressively into electronic markets. John Wiley is a thought leader in its own right in electronic publishing. It has converted its corporate portal into a highly browseable ecommerce destination for book buyers and its Interscience portal for journals provides easy browsing of both scientific book, reference and journals content. Wiley's aggressive work with partners such as Knovel to repackage reference content into highly usable subscription assets also bodes well for Blackwell content needing to find its way into more valuable contexts. While consolidation is not always good for institutions seeking competitive content pricing in this instance the likely entity emerging from this acquisition is going to provide a more global-worthy competitive force in scholarly publishing that is likely to provide a healthy survivor in those markets rather than resources struggling to meet their requirements. Congratulations to both of these companies for combining two healthy efforts into a whole that's likely to be far greater than the sum of its parts.
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:07 PM |
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In a pair of interesting announcements Fox Interactive Media, which holds social networking portal MySpace as its primary asset, is putting its President Mark Levinsohn out to pasture, as reported by paidContent.org. Staci Kramer of paidContent.org speculates that the move may have been triggered by the exit of FIM COO Mark Jung, whose duties Levinsohn had been covering. Meanwhile over at AOL Jason Calacanis, erstwhile weblog impressario and reinventor of AOL's Netscape portal, is also on the way out according to TechCrunch, apparently due in part to AOL's chief executive Jonathan Miller exit. In both instances you cannot fault these executives efforts in establishing healthy media properties: MySpace continues to grow traffic and Netscape, after a transition into its new social news bookmarking persona, seems to have found its footing in the traffic rankings. Instead, it appears as if Time Warner and Fox have decided to start cranking up the profits in their Web 2.0 properties in the hands of seasoned media executives familiar with how to draw in big-name advertising dollars. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does signal a watershed of sorts for Web entrepreneurs who had hoped to make the most of marriages with major media companies. As is so often the case, vision and line management skills to toe the bottom line do not always go hand in hand. But at the end of the day these moves probably have less to do with the skills and personalities of the people involved than the realities of how quickly advertising dollars are likely to be shifting to contexts defined by social media properties. The major media companies want to make sure that they get this transition right, so that players such as Yahoo, already amassing their own impressive stable of social media assets and with strong ad networks of their own, will not beat them to the punch with major advertisers. In an era in which convergence is no longer just cocktail chatter but a rapidly approaching reality social media properties in the hands of these ad-driven executives are going the be asked to shoulder significant revenues for these companies in the near-term rather than as a down-the-roader - a move that may break some of the delicate chemistry between user-publishers and their products that holds loyalties together. It's a little bit harder to fire audiences than executives, after all. In some ways we may be seeing a replay of the ill-fated initial marriage of AOL and Time Warner - except that this time it's not the "Old Media" guy on one side of the announcement podium and the "New Media" guy on the other, but instead the "Merged Media" people confronting users who are nowhere near the podium. Best of luck to those leaving and those staying at AOL and FIM - hopefully there are plenty of geese with golden eggs for everyone...
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:23 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:14 PM |
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| Thursday, November 16, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:43 PM |
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The Washington Post reports along with others on Reuters Group PLC's acquisition of a USD 7 million stake in weblog syndicator Pluck. The Austin, Texas-based company is in a way providing the next generation of feed aggregation that builds on what Reuters has done already in financial content markets with its global real-time data feeds of securities trading data from the world's exchanges. Pluck's BlogBurst Syndication Network plucks out editorially selected weblogs and packages them into feeds that major publishers and corporations integrate into their portals to provide additional views in specific categories of content, providing the benefits of user-generated media alongside mainstream media. Other Pluck features make it easier for publishers to solicit user content for their own sites and to allow users to create their own aggregated feeds of news and weblog commentary. It's a timely move for Reuters, allowing them to gain both new media services to offer their clients through their global sales and distribution network while positioning their news as being in the same stream of relevance as increasingly respected weblog sources. Where this leaves other news producers and aggregators is probably a more germane focus at this time in light of the Reuters deal. AP has doings with Google to provide their core news content to a new iteration of Google News, which is likely to include user-generated content along the lines of the Newsvine portal that already consumes AP content, but other news wire services are far less aggressive in positioning their content alongside user-generated media. AP and Google offer a different type of synergy than the Reuters deal, but if Reuters is to add weblog content and other sources alongside its own at Reuters.com there could be an interesting competition a-brewing for a new era of news aggregation services. The Reuters deal may also accelerate interest in other services that are normalizing Web content into syndicated feeds to help media organizations take a similarly agnostic approach to delivering news products. Any one up for a deal with blog and news aggregator Newstex? The time could be right for a major player to swoop down and bolt on Newstex' capabilities to broaden their appeal. Whatever the ultimate consequences of this deal Reuters has made it clear that effective integration and acquisition of user-generated media is going to be a key element of any news service's strengths moving forward. Professional editorial sources will continue to provide a valuable core to those services but with a world of experts speaking their minds through weblogs it would be a foolish move to ignore these front-line authors as being outside the sphere of mainstream news any longer. Kudos to both Reuters and Pluck on a deal that seems to make the best of both of their strengths.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:54 AM |
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| Wednesday, November 15, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:35 PM |
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| Tuesday, November 14, 2006 |
 Early-stage, innovative content companies and companies that enable content creation, distribution and commerce solutions are invited to apply to present before an audience of industry leaders and corporate development executives, bankers, technologists and other influencers at SIIA Previews, January 29, 2007 in New York City. If selected, your company will provide a 10-minute Q&A presentation before an audience of senior executives, which could include your next business partner, customer, investor, or acquirer. Submissions are due by 1 December 2006. A committee of industry experts will review all submissions and select semi-finalists. Semi-finalists will be notified by December 15, 2006. Click here to read more about the SIIA Previews Event
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:24 PM |
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 The Creative Commons system for establishing general licensing terms for online content has been the hobby horse of proponent Lawrence Lessig and other free content enthusiasts for several years, but it's a system that seems to get more lip service than use at times. The key gap is that while Creative Commons license "deeds" define when people may reserve full copyright for commercial uses the Creative Commons system itself does little to facilitate the conversion of those opportunities into revenues for a publisher. The announcement of Lisensa may herald a closing of this gap. Lisensa is a new service that facilitates both the licensing of content for commercial use and the collection of use payments. A publisher can identify a Web site URL to be managed by Lisensa and then specify the terms of its commercial use. You can specify no commercial use, use without limitations or use with specific limitations - similar to the Creative Commons deed structure. In the "Yes but" option, though, the publisher can request attribution, a link-back to the original post, use of only a 500-character "fair use" snippet from the piece and whether payment is required for an annual subscription or per-post. Once this information has been specified, Lisensa generates HTML code that can be inserted into the online publication to generate a link back to Lisensa to manage the commercial licensing process. Lisensa takes ten percent of whatever commercial transaction transpires, if there is in fact money changing hands. With spam weblogs mushrooming and individuals becoming more aware of the commercial potential for their self-published content a system such as Lisensa may offer an appealing way for independent media producers to have a clear path to monetizing their content that doesn't require a fleet of media lawyers to "do the deal." Unlike services such as Copyright Clearance Center and iCopyright, the emphasis in Lisensa's approach is on facilitating primary content licensing via commercial publishing partners instead of content relicensing by individuals and institutions using content for purposes other than commercial publishing. With a networked world of publishers and republishers the model of Lisensa offers some important lessons for how publishers can approach the user publishing community more effectively without finding themselves dealing with new permutations of the Legg Mason lawsuit. It also offers some lessons for content relicensing companies, which need to consider how to position their capabilities in a world that is creating new publishers every minute via weblogs and other social media services. Lisensa may not be the most sophisticated license manager in the world but as with weblogs themselves sometimes simplicity is a virtue that can gain you a lot of mileage in the marketplace.
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:00 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:56 PM |
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Already tired from a year's worth of Web 2.0 buzz John Markoff of The New York Times is spinning out Yet Another Meme - a "yam" known as Web 3.0. In Markoff's eyes the new game in content is to push out concierge-like services that analyze Web content to discern much deeper patterns of meaning and more intuitive results for answer-seekers. It's all pretty true stuff, but it's also stuff that's been under development for a long, long time - and is not likely to provide quick payoffs any time soon. In the meantime publishing-empowered users are organizing content themselves and coming up with some pretty compelling insights of their own. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:02 AM |
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| Monday, November 13, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:03 PM |
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| Sunday, November 12, 2006 |
In a sign of possible changes afoot Christopher Cox, the new Chairmen of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, is mulling over using corporate weblogs as a venue for publishing financial statements and other key content required to fulfill SEC regulations. Interestingly enough, Cox made this statement on his own new SEC weblog, according to AP. While the SEC is no stranger to online innovation, this is a potentially huge step towards positioning weblogs and syndicated weblog feeds as a major component in the fabric of financial content outlets. The system of relying on established press release channels for these disclosures still serves a general purpose for corporations wanting a prioritized queue of content for editorial desks and securities traders using real-time news feeds, but for more general investors and analysts the performance of an RSS feed will be more than adequate in many instances. The likely use of weblog feeds for SEC-mandated disclosures will accelerate the trend towards corporations managing their own PR channels more directly than in the past. As users learn to aggregate content themselves far more effectively and corporations gain confidence in the simplicity and reliability of self-syndicating feeds the need for premium press release services is becoming more specialized - and questionable. Except a high level of enthusiasm for this proposed deployment of key corporate content from corporations looking to simplify disclosure compliance requirements - and plenty of worried looks from press release distributors trying to come up with more value-add services to justify their costly premium services.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:57 PM |
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Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in review
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:53 PM |
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| Friday, November 10, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 7:58 PM |
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| Thursday, November 09, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:08 PM |
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Way back when the Ford Motor Company was trying to make some inroads against its giant rival General Motors, Ford used the then-fledgling science of consumer research to come up with a profile of what American consumers were looking for in the affordable car of their dreams. The research said that it had to be stylish, futuristic, sleek and powerful and so Ford went out and built what they thought would be people's dream car - the Edsel. The poor Edsel was a flop, burdened by hideous styling, me-too engineering and poorly designed features that drove buyers to GM's dreamy Chevrolet Impala in droves. The moral? If you promise your customer the product of their dreams, you had best deliver or they'll be a long time in forgiving you. As David Pogue notes in The New York Times today, Microsoft may have dreamed up another Edsel in the form of its Zune multimedia handheld. Zune does lots of things that an Apple iPod doesn't do, most notably including the ability to allow Zune users to share photos and rights-protected music files with one another via a "beam it up" wireless networking capability, as well as a radio tuner. But as David points out, what's the point of having a wireless network that works only with other Zunes - you can't even communicate with a Windows PC via the wireless capability. Like other half-hearted stabs at opening up DRM to accommodate file sharers, the emphasis is on pushing sales rather than creating a strong networking effect. Zune's proprietary DRM allows three plays of a shared file within three days, after which you're directed to Microsoft's download store. I like the first part but the three days is nutty - as David points out it's likely to turn off a song just as people are beginning to get interested in it to the point where they may want to share it with others. And of course there is no ability to share files with owners of other multimedia gizmos. Kind of lame, given the proliferation of multifunction phones that have cameras and entertainment systems built in. BTW, what's with the radio? Do kids with iPods really care about it any more? With the marketing and merchandising effort that's about to be unleashed for Zune you can expect that more than a few are likely to be gift-wrapped for the holidays come December. But in trying to replicate the proprietary approach to technology and intellectual property management that Apple took to get the iPod off the ground Microsoft may have replicated iPod attributes that are least likely to succeed in the future. Like Apple Microsoft may find itself with a beachhead to nowhere in Zune, a bulky solves-everything machine that tries to be the half-answer to too many questions at once. It's really a very simple formula that needs to be applied to mobile content: let rights-protected content go from one machine to any other machine via any convenient transport with controls that allow for fair use, competitive ecommerce options and the ability for users to add value to the content that can be reflected in subsequent transactions. Stop looking at machines, Microsoft: look at how people really add value to information and experiences. Come on, it's in you to do it, we know. See our definition of content on Wikipedia to get the fuller picture.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:49 AM |
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AFX covers along with others the acquisition of Relegence Corporation by, of all companies, AOL. At first glance this seems like an odd marriage: Relegence has been focused intently on providing filtered real-time news services to high-end financial traders, a very nichey crowd that is experiencing cutbacks in the face of greater trade automation and tightening margins. Of what value is Relegence to consumer markets? When you take a look at the product in any detail the answer has to be: tons. Relegence provides a sophisticated but easy-to-use tool that allows a user to select key news sources and to define their relevance to specified search patterns as the content streams into a user's desktop applications. Other key capabilities such as "Heat Factors" to indicate market-moving stories, event detection, automatic summarization and clustering of related stories guide users to finding the news that's right for them in the moment.
A few years ago Relegence's capabilities were fairly rarefied compared to how news was being managed on the Web. Today, with a proliferation of RSS news feeds, clustering search engines and alerts services from Web portal providers the capabilities that were once reserved for the darlings of Wall Street are now in demand for everyday online content consumers. In Relegence AOL gains a company that has both sophisticated news filtering capabilities and a strong sense of user interface design that is likely to appeal to online audiences who want machines that do what they want them to do without much hassle and geekishness. This is one way in which AOL may be able to come up with a more unique proposition for its portal services to get it in the game with increasingly sophisticated online competitors leveraging feeds-based news aggregation. Congratulations to both companies on a deal that's likely to be one of many in coming years that mines the benefits of the financial community's expertise in serving up real-time content to demanding audiences.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:25 AM |
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| Wednesday, November 08, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:51 PM |
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Any number of extraordinary things have been happening in the wake of hotly contested U.S. elections over the past few days, fast-paced events that are hard to follow sometimes. It happens to have coincided with some research I've been doing on Wikipedia, in which I've been impressed by the degree to which its enthusiast editors keep key content fresh. So when news of Donald Rumsfeld's resignation from his position as Secretary of Defense came across the wires I was not necessarily surprised to see that a Google search for his nominated replacement Robert Gates returned Gates' Wikipedia page as the first search result. Wikipedia content places very high in many Google search results, not only its articles but its user profiles as well. But the key factor was that his bio had been updated to include dozens of useful new edits from several sources within hours of his announced nomination - including information and links about the nomination itself. When I think of all of the sophisticated business intelligence tools that are being developed by publishers and content services providers to build briefing dossiers on companies and key contacts it's hard to imagine that many of them would be able to pull together a final product like this so quickly and effectively. Wikipedia was well-documented weaknesses and limitations, but recently the palaver floating about that focuses on these minuses tends to obscure the enormous pluses that this user-generated content source offers information seekers. Part reference tool, part real-time news source, part discussion tool, Wikipedia offers a wealth of content that is oftentimes fresh and difficult to top for Google-ish convenience and satisfaction. If you're wondering why Wikipedia's traffic has gone up more than 50 percent in the past six months look no further than incidents like this. It's like having a reference librarian writing you a custom book every time you get curious about something.
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:15 PM |
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| Tuesday, November 07, 2006 |
A video on YouTube from 2003 highlights all of the neat-o things that Microsoft had planned for its then-labeled Longhorn operating system release, including new tools for search, video, photos, music, telephony and content sharing. Three years later the Longhorn release is stumbling out the door as Windows Vista, a bloated and underwhelming release that offers few of the bells and whistles that appear in the Longhorn promo video. And why should it? In the meantime we've come to enjoy the likes of Google and other desktop and enterprise search tools, YouTube, Flickr, iTunes, Skype and a myriad of content sharing services, each of which is happy to live on whatever AJAX-supporting platform comes along. Instead of waiting in fear for Microsoft independent content providers leveraged the power of the Web to come up with their own solutions. It's a conclusion that Microsoft itself seems to be coming closer to accepting as its Windows Live suite of online services becomes the focus of more of its product development. Is the stillborn Vista release the beginning of the end for the content industry's infatuation with the PC? Not really. Having reliable general-purpose computers has been the fulcrum for many of the content industry's developments, and the combination of platform capabilities combined with networked content will continue to be a key focus for value-add content services for years to come. But in trying to extend its near-monopoly over the world's desktops with built-in services Microsoft has boxed itself into a corner filled with obsolete desktop software and proprietary content serving solutions that don't make a heck of a lot of sense to enterprises and consumers alike. Better to have a lean and mean kernel of an operating system that works like all git-go and to focus on enabling the world to add value to it through great content services. Hence, perhaps, the new deal between Microsoft and Linux vendor Novell that will help Windows and open-source Linux operating systems live side-by-side more effectively. The Microsoft of five years from now is going to look a lot more like a cross between the sprawling offerings of Google and IBM than yesterday's one-box solutions coming out of Redmond. When people care more about their content collections than the machine running them technology providers need to adapt to their audiences' needs as rapidly as possible - which argues towards content coming up through a new range of information appliances as much as through yesterday's laptops and desktops. Farewell, Vista, we hardly knew ye - we're off to the content store with our mobile phones.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:33 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:26 PM |
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Social networking services for people in professional roles are booming, but business information providers have made relatively scant use of them to boost the value of their own services. But with the debut of the new Hoover's Connect service business information browsers can benefit from their social network being right at their fingertips when they're sizing up potential opportunities in the Hoover's database. It's an interesting twist on workflow integration that puts the power of business information alongside personal contact information in a trusted environment without a lot of CRM gibberish to get in the way. This is a powerful combination to watch - and to emulate. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:05 AM |
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| Monday, November 06, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:42 AM |
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Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in review
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:58 AM |
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| Saturday, November 04, 2006 |
The 10th annual conference of KM World and Intranets Conference in San Jose, October 31 - November 2, reflected the complexity of knowledge management today. There were sessions on KM itself, then additional tracks for Intranets 2006, Content Management and a new event, Taxonomy Bootcamp. Attendance increased this year in the concurrent Streaming Media West conference, with an expanded presence in the shared vendor exhibit hall, reflecting expansion of video on the web. Web analytics and business applications were part of the mix, reflecting a shift from a more technology based focus. The payoff for effective knowledge management is improvements to the organization. Using that knowledge for innovation, rather than just maintaining the existing business, was the challenge described by keynoter Steve Wunker, Innosight, as he described cases of disruptive technologies. Second day keynoters, Dave Snowden and Cindy Gordon, carried that theme further, showing the infamous video clip with the gorilla walking unnoticed through a basketball game. Closing keynoter, Peter Andrews, identified two major future trends: nanodevices and virtual living, as epitomized by World of Warcraft and Second Life. Organizing digital information was a major topic at the conference, with Taxonomy Bootcamp keynoter, David Weinberger, focusing on the complexities of providing context for categorization. Traditional taxonomies are based on physical objects, but in an electronic world, linkages permit multiple taxonomies with different views. Tagging is a way of capturing emergent terminology, but taxonomies provide structure. Overall, the taxonomy sessions in the KM track were well attended along with full rooms for the Taxonomy Bootcamp sessions. Search is the driver behind expansion of categorization, as it exposes different aspects of information, which have been hidden in silos within the organization. On both the exhibit floor and on the panels, search vendors described their different approaches to making it easy for users/customers to find "stuff" on enterprise websites. Endeca provides guided navigation, Vivisimo does clustering, and the Google/Yahoo/Ask world does keyword matching...all valid approaches. But the crucial aspect of implementation within the enterprise is characterizing the application, determining the relevant content, and then selecting a search software! As Steve Arnold aptly stated "Search is hard".... he described the upcoming battle for the desktop between Microsoft with its upcoming new release of Sharepoint, and the ever expanding world of Google on the Web, as well as competition among the other major search vendors. Though not represented at KM World, Autonomy in its different flavors and FAST are competing head to head in the OEM marketplace as well as large content providers. Smaller search vendors can be found in other niches, and at other price points....all leading to the need for search consultants, such as New Idea Engineering, with their popular Dr. Search to review cases on the exhibit floor! Presentation is another aspect of organizing information which extends into designing websites to provide information in alternative formats which provide context and additional meaning. Jeffrey Veen, Design Manager for Google, showed examples of Google map mashups that provide extra utility for the organization, by presenting information in different formats. Tools like this will have a major impact on the intranet designs that are utilizing Web 2.0 technologies (whatever this term really means!). Improving the user experience was an underlying theme for many of the sessions. Information is both generated by the organization and utilized by the organization for decision making, so optimizing usage is a crucial challenge. The challenge for attendees is to find the right approach to their situation, given the myriad of options available in a rapidly changing environment. Though there are no easy answers, this conference gave them a lot of different aspects to explore! Labels: Jean Bedord
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By Jean Bedord - posted at 2:20 PM |
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| Friday, November 03, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:05 PM |
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| Thursday, November 02, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:36 AM |
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| Wednesday, November 01, 2006 |
The Library Journal covers a new report (PDF) from the British Academy on how the push towards DRM and licensing content via databases is putting the crunch on research in the U.K. The whole report is a very good read, but if you're strapped for time here are a few key portions that speak for themselves quite eloquently: The findings of our various consultations showed that there was a lack of clarity about the nature and scope of the moral and economic aspects of copyright, and the two are frequently confused. The moral rights of the author relate to respect for his or her creative activity while the economic rights of the rights holder relate to the economic interests in commercial exploitation. While both kinds of rights are important, it should not be taken for granted that the scope of the moral rights of the author should be identical with the economic interests of the rights holder, and distinct issues are involved with the exercise of each right. Copyright must not become censorship: this is inconsistent with requirements of free speech and the stimulation of creative activity and with the broader public purposes that copyright is designed to advance. This on the impact of DRM on research: Given the importance of databases to academic research and the growing amount of work that is being published electronically, it is important that academic researchers are able to access this material, whether through fair dealing exceptions, or on reasonable terms. However, the development of specialist technologies (DRMs) is threatening to inhibit access for the purposes of academic research even where fair dealing exceptions are applicable or, indeed, the basic material is out of copyright. DRMs are making access available only in return for payment and are locking away valuable material, because they can over-ride both fair dealing exceptions and the term of copyright. "The technologies are extending beyond the law they are supposed to uphold."
And this from the conclusion of the report: Whilst copyright law provides specific exemptions to enable creative and scholarly work to advance, our findings show that these exemptions are in some cases not achieving their objectives, because the scope of the provisions are increasingly narrowly interpreted... [The] distinction [between commercial and academic use] has now broken down because copyright holders are actively looking to maximise the revenues from copyright material, and are demanding high fees for its use; and publishers are insisting that unnecessary permissions nevertheless be obtained, since they are becoming increasingly risk averse and are not prepared to stand up to unreasonable demands from copyright holders.
Publishers of scholarly works face a true dilemma. If copyright holders insist on driving up the cost of acquiring content for research purposes and hobbling fair use then they are going to raise the cost of doing that research at academic institutions and therefore lower the amount of research being done. In effect research institutions holding copyrights are all taxing one another in an effort to try to turn their research insights into revenues to fund more research but driving up the cost of sharing ideas that could spur new research in the first place. We're at more or less the worst intersection of licensing paradigms established by subscription database services and of traditional print pricing. With a captive audience forced to play by the rules of juried publications, scholarly publishers are in effect taxing national economies who play by these rules. No small wonder, then that one of the report's key recommendations is to have the U.K. government step in and regulate the licensing of scholarly content. Hopefully the scholarly publishing industry can come to a better conclusion on their own. But with emerging markets such as China and India beginning to become research powers in their own right the nations that have been sponsoring scholarly publishing services up to now may find that they have more to lose in intellectual prowess to these developing nations if they don't step up support for more open access to scholarly research some time soon.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:13 PM |
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The Wall Street Journal covers in its "Heard on the Street" section the revolt of minority shareholders in the Sun-Times Media Group Inc. seeking a quick sale of its holdings, even as the rival Chicago Tribune and other Tribune properties is sniffing out a potential sale. Add to this the potential sale of seven of The Copley Press Inc.'s holdings and Dow Jones' sell-off of six community papers and it's red all over. In spite of its planned sales Dow Jones received a lower debt rating and negative outlook from Fitch today, underscoring the challenges that traditional news organizations have in convincing financial analysts that they're on anywhere near the right track to regain lost ad revenues. Is there still a winning formula to be had for traditional metro newspapers? As The New York Post crows about its improving circulation against major competitors the answer may be to consider the low-brow route to survival for print. With broadband access relatively stunted in U.S. markets less affluent Americans are going to be sticking with newsprint for longer than others. The NY Post goes for 25 cents at metro news stands - just enough to convince people to sell them - and manages to provide a fresh mix of local information and gossip that is the commuter's answer to supermarket tabloids. That doesn't bode all that well for ad dollars for upscale products and services, but it provides a niche that can keep it ahead of free street newspapers. But looking down the road newspapers need to think about how they can make better use of mobile platforms to reach the broadest demographics possible. While not everyone on the lower end of the economic scale is going to have a computer, most everyone does have a mobile device that can receive downloads. Getting news and advertising in context with your local whereabouts is where newspapers started centuries ago; it's a core mission that they need to translate to electronic platforms more effectively. Doing so will give them access to both low-income and high-income audiences far more effectively. Unfortunately most newspapers are massively under-invested in mobile localization capabilities: it's the Googles of the world at this point that will be the local contextualization kings. News chains need to amp up their mobile capabilities quickly and arm them with social media features. If not, then they may find themselves looking a lot more like Weekly World News than today's robust news outlets.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:26 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:06 AM |
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