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| Friday, December 29, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:35 PM |
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| Thursday, December 28, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:56 PM |
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| Wednesday, December 27, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:51 AM |
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| Tuesday, December 26, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:49 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 12:32 AM |
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| Monday, December 25, 2006 |
 Shore is very grateful for all of the wonderful support that we have received from our customers, our subscribers and our friends and colleagues this year. We hope that your holidays will be wonder-filled and that your 2007 will be a year to remember!
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:50 PM |
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| Friday, December 22, 2006 |
 The launch of the new PLoS ONE scholarly research portal looks like a big win for open access research content from a number of angles. PLoS ONE is posting research and will allow interactive review before and after publication for scientific articles via a very sophisticated publishing environment. The PLoS ONE platform applies many of the best practices of social media, providing ready access to comments posting and awareness of active discussions to draw in more active discussions. PLoS ONE will publish all papers that are judged to be rigorous and technically sound, and had already posted more an 100 papers by its launch - a remarkable number for a just-launched scholarly journal of any kind. By contrast Nature's recently shuttered open-review portal trial, which ran for around four months, attracted only 71 authors willing to post their work online and attracted 92 technical comments. As we noted in our latest news analysis article one of the keys to successful social media products is a dedicated core of trusted contributors who will be able to ensure editorial success. PLoS ONE starts with a global editorial board of more than 200 scholars, ensuring a broad array of inputs for reviewing content. Some of the fears about having content rejected after having had it exposed to comments prior to publication may be relieved by the PLoS ONE policy that allows papers that have been already rejected by PLoS Biology and Medicine journals to be re-submitted via PLoS ONE. This is a potentially valuable feature, allowing research that may not have yet reached the highest levels of acceptance to mature through its exposure to comments from a broader audience. PLoS ONE is finally opening the doors to the potential for fundamental changes in how scholarly research proves its worth. With an open exchange of ideas and commentary facilitated by technologies long available to the general public and a solid body of research and reviewers PLoS ONE holds out the potential to liberate the highest levels of scholarly innovation from the regimen of the printing press. Changing the way that research is paid for was a good first step for open access, but with the ability to eliminate artificial distribution bottlenecks that choke off natural conversations PLoS ONE may do for scholarly research what Wikipedia has done for reference materials - with much more integrity in the underlying editorial processes.
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By John Blossom - posted at 6:26 PM |
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In the midst of the social media revolution it's easy to think that the war for profitable publishing will continue to be fought on the grand scale of major portals like MySpace and YouTube. Although major social media properties are certainly important factors in this movement the trend is already moving away from the gargantuan victors to more focused media properties. Pick your niche for which you think social media will succeed, listen to the audience in that sector - and then throw out the assumptions and limitations built into Wikis, weblogs and other social media platforms. Tomorrow's successful social media properties will move far beyond these simple tools to solutions that satisfy audiences in far more sophisticated ways. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:51 PM |
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| Thursday, December 21, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:51 PM |
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Well, no sooner do I finish with one answers service when another rears it head. I just received an email from Amazon announcing the launch of Askville, a new beta service that provides...yes, another community service for asking questions and providing answers. While demonstrating lots of best practices - good user interface, discussion boards to expand discussions on answers, the ability to view similar questions and their answers, tagging of questions - overall this is not much more than a well thought-out clone of other services. That said, it's a good clone, one that takes advantage of some unique Amazon strengths. Login to the service can be accomplished via one's existing Amazon account, while an icon on the top navigation bar tells me that I have already earned one "quest coin." This icon links to a placekeeper "coming in 2007" page for Questville, a service that appears to be a planned rewards center for Askville community members. The Questville twist is by far the most interesting aspect of this new service. Other social media sites are using cash payments and other forms of recognition to encourage loyalty, so that in and of itself is far from new. But here is an interesting example of Amazon building community content as a way to translate that community loyalty into loyalty for its other online brands. One assumes that Questville will provide rewards points towards purchases via Amazon, with the ability to promote content and goods available via Amazon that match an Askville's question activity - an Amazon speciality already. In a way Askville content becomes a great market research tool for learning about the interests of Amazon shoppers and matching them up with merchandise from their network of online stores. Why bother with external advertising when you can put the right goods in front of a captive audience for their choosing? This could be a particularly strong motivator for users with focused expertise to settle in to Askville and to have Amazon pump trinkets their way from their online store via Questville that match up with their interests. If you're, say, an expert on a certain kind of music, why not answer a few questions now and again to get some downloads or CDs from your favorite artists? Or if you're an expert on HDTV, you can build a franchise that will build points towards your purchase of the next hot model in Amazon's store. In the 1930's the Montgomery Ward department store chain devised a a brand-new character for a promotional story booklet: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Millions of kids scooped this up as their parents came into their stores for the holidays through the years. It became a huge loyalty factor in its time. Here is today's online department store coming up with year-round promotional content that not only drives traffic and brand loyalty but, if we can assume what Amazon will do with Questville, targeted sales. Yet again, content to the rescue of a sagging retailer. This interplay of questions services and online ecommerce is in its very infant stages at this point, but it is going to be a huge opportunity for content services providers over the next few years. Matching expertise from users, vendors and retail outlets with the curiosity of potential purchasers is creating a new level of online reference services that will act not just as searchable bookshelves but as confidence-building services that will facilitate the trust required to conduct transactions with a given party. Expect Q&A services to spring up like weblogs in many different kinds of venues in 2007, leveraging not just everyday users but the expertise available from local merchants, corporate help desks and other sources of insight that can support knowledge seekers.
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:45 PM |
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| Wednesday, December 20, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:16 PM |
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Jeff Cutler, Chief Revenue Officer of Answers.com invited me to chat with FAQ Farm founder Chris Whitten yesterday to learn a little more about this key acquisition for Answers Corporation. Full disclosure: the lunch was great, and my apologies to Answers VP Bruce Smith for almost eating his Caesar salad. Other than that, my insights remain untainted. FAQ farm is a very important acquisition for Answers.com, which has built up an impressive core of reference content from quality sources, including content from Wikipedia, but has not yet developed its own unique content sets. The well-established community that forms the base of FAQ Farm's answers provides the core upon which the Answers product can build that content. The first shot at this boost from a reference content community will take form as WikiAnswers, which will be an Answers-branded complementary product to the main Answers.com reference product. Will it pay to keep these two sources of content separate? The Answers team contends that this is the way to go, and there's reason to think so on some levels. Building authenticity in Wiki communities requires a sense of product ownership as well as community on some level that will allow the leaders from the community to feel that they are not just a cog in a greater machine. That's a little hard to manage when user content is seen as an add-on rather than the main attraction. There are balances that can be struck to integrate mainstream and user content in a way that provides both a sense of community and a sense of other content available to service one's interests. For example, the Newsvine online community continues to grow with a mix of newswire content from AP and user-selected articles with a rich community of comments, so these mixes can succeed - if the sense of users being in control takes hold clearly. But that sense of control may not appeal always to the wide array of publishers licensing premium content to a service like Answers.com, nor will it necessarily appeal to users who have come to rely on Answers for quick lookups across a wide range of well-edited sources. People attracted to a community Q&A product like FAQ farm or Yahoo! Answers have significantly different motivations than those looking for quick answers: it's as much about the social interactions and exploration as it is about knowing what to look for in a new computer. FAQ farm adds some interesting twists to the Q&A concept by adding a comments section that allows discussions to keep on growing on hot and evergreen topics, as well as serving as a Wiki-like service for questions as well as answers, but at its core it's about growing a community of people who like to hash around interesting questions and people who like to answer them. That's a far different dynamic than your typical search engine or reference service, one that can build up a unique kind of loyalty if done properly. FAQ Farm has the basic ingredients to be that kind of service in a bigger way: now it's up to the Answers.com team to give it the exposure and sophisticated marketing outlook that can help take it to the next level of commercial success.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:54 AM |
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| Tuesday, December 19, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:30 PM |
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| Monday, December 18, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 7:15 PM |
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Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in review
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:14 AM |
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| Friday, December 15, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:38 PM |
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The announcement of a deal for CSA parent Cambridge Information Group to acquire ProQuest is an interesting acquisition coming at an interesting time. CSA's Illumina interface provides a powerful search interface into scholarly content relating to arts & humanities, natural sciences, social sciences and technology. With the ProQuest acquisition CSA picks up an organization with very deep roots in library services and a much deeper content profile for scientific, technical and medical content, plus centuries-deep electronic archives for newspaper content. The combination of core academic and scholarly content with core news content gives CSA a much different potential profile for its services. Illumina clients will certainly benefit from a broader collection but the combination of these sources also places CSA in a position to offer a wider array of corporate information services, as well. Not necessarily benefiting from this deal is Thomson's attempted spinoff of Thomson Learning, which Thomson hopes will generate cash for bolstering its position in its financial, legal and pharma markets. While it appears as if the CSA deal for ProQuest has been in the works for a while the timing of the deal in light of Thomson's efforts seems to place it as a pre-emptive effort to position CSA as a more dominant player in library markets against potential rivals scooping up TL assets - and perhaps lowering TL's valuation in the process. This means that acquirers of TL may wind up with more left in their pockets to invest in making it a more effective business unit, which could be good news for buyers, but it may take some shine off the sale from Thomson's perspective. Challenges in library and academic markets has brought a number of vendors to rethink their portfolios, but in research-intensive markets the demand for high quality research products is not going to disappear. The Googles and the Open Content Alliances of the world will pick more of the low-lying fruit of this sector as time goes on, and they may in time decide to go for the premium offerings to round out their online research offerings, but that's a way down the road at this point. For now consider CSA as having made a good move at a good time to broaden its footprint and to fend off others who may want to find a way to make life difficult for them. Not a bad ending for the ProQuest story, either, given all their recent turmoil. Good luck to all!
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:49 PM |
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