InfoUSA picks up high-margin research services from Guideline, Kevin Rose does Pownce file sharing on the sidelines using Adobe's AIR cross-platform runtime environment, and Endeca is touted at a conference as the next billion-dollar Boston tech company.
In today's installment I summarize some of our recent key postings as well as provide a quick take on Newsvine's new ElectionVine portlet. Instead of just providing the traditional "talking head" I have provided most of this with (**echo chamber, please**) picture-in-picture narrative. If you shoot up your player's resolution to max the screen grabs are pretty readable, so it should be kind of a fun experience. Windows-based video technologies leave something to be desired, but we're wrestling it to the ground step by step. Enjoy!
Google has been playing at the edges of the healthcare industry from a number of angles, with scholarly content, Google Co-op-indexed reference content and a nascent Google Health initiative under the tutelage of Architect Adam Bosworth. The Google Blog announced a new advisory group of healthcare industry heavies that seems to indicate that whatever is on the drawing board at Google is likely to have very broad and deep impact. In addition to the COO of the American Medical Association the advisory group includes major players from research, hospitals, government, foundations and general media. Very notably absent from the group, though, are major publishers of medical research.
This would seem to indicate that a fair amount of Google's focus on healthcare is going to be from a consumer standpoint, but there's another way of looking at this as well. Google is assembling the parties who have the most invested in successful outcomes from the most efficient collection and distribution of medical information possible. In other words, Google is looking at healthcare from the broadest systemic perspective possible - and may as a result be focusing in on new ways to assemble, integrate and deliver medical information and collaboration on a global basis that scholarly publishers are nowhere near ready or able to enable. With enormous inefficiencies in both services delivery and information distribution the medical industry is in a position not unlike the financial industry prior to the introduction of efficient electronic trading information services. This would seem to parallel the highly profitable approaches that Google has taken to other information problems such as advertising that were too caught up in older publishing models for traditional media companies to make the strides that Google made with contextual advertising.
While initial offerings may tend towards modest consumer-oriented efforts on a scale of Revolution Health I sense from what I've been taking in lately that this initiative will challenge the medical content industry even more than the news industry has been challenged by Google's moves into indexing their content. Keep a close eye on both the consumer side of this equation as well as moves into making research, medical insurance and other data more accessible than ever before - with our without traditional medical publishers.
Kudos to David Pogue at The New York Times for a great review of the new iPhone from Apple. David's general view is that the appliance lives up to its hype, but he points out a number of key shortcomings, such as inferior text input (keys appears on the flat glass display), downright awkward phone call initiation, the need to ship it back to Apple after a year or so to get the battery replaced (a la iPod) and inferior network performance from AT&T. But while the iPhone may turn out to be the worst of both worlds for people already attuned to sophisticated mobile devices such as Blackberries (no coincidence that the splash ad for this article was for their new sleek model) the key to the iPhone's appeal centers around its ability to be a content-serving device like no other. GPS-keyed maps make the device a traveler's godsend for navigating unfamiliar territories and coming up with nearby services. The intuitive interface enables a user to shift to Web content seamlessly in a full-featured browser that comes with a very affordable (USD 20/month) internet access plan that may yet knock the legs out from underneath many an online content deal.
Ah, but with limitations there, as well. Flash and Java are not enabled in the browser, so the tons 0f online video and animated content available online is out of bounds. Of course there's video and audio from the iTunes store, which is most probably the point: after years of platform ju-jitsu from Microsoft to frustrate publishers it's Apple's turn to make it that much harder to come up with a platform-independent distribution strategy. But common file formats such as PDF, Word and Excel are accessible via iPhone so it will at least be useful for serious reading to some degree. And unless you're in an AT&T wireless hotspot broadband performance isn't going to be an option in most instances.
I think of the iPhone as a very portable Microsoft Surface - an appliance that is ahead of many technologies' ability to sustain a very compelling product vision but that nevertheless gets people jazzed about the possibilities of a new way of looking at computing. Unlike Microsoft's table-bound Surface, though, the iPhone is perfect for a younger, mobile generation not interested in plunking down thousands of dollars for a major piece of...furniture? But iPhone's most important impact on the content marketplace is likely to be its ability to create demand for broadband wireless on a mass scale, demand that's likely to fire up competition from other wireless carriers to deliver both more coverage and more effectively enabled interfaces to the Web. AT&T wins this round for Web access, but what will happen when Verizon enables YouTube access? Consider this iPhone debut the launch of the real mobile Web - with some frenetic developments yet to come.
O'Reilly Radar covers the recent shift of Nature magazine's publishing policies to enable access to scientific research and data prior to it being approved for final publication by the prestigious scientific journal. Pre-published content will appear on the ad-supported portal Nature Precedings, along with unpublished manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and other scientific documents. Submissions are screened by Nature's professional curation team for relevance and quality, but are not subjected to peer review. The Precedings portal enables registrants to comment on posted materials and to upload their own materials for screening. While there is no promised path to any posted materials becoming an approved juried publication the implication is that exposure may help that process - as on the competitive PLoS ONE portal.
In truth PLoS ONE is a much more sophisticated offering overall, providing much easier digestion, notation and discussion of posted documents. Where Nature Precedings presents core content mostly in Word and PDF documents, PLoS ONE converts content into native HTML for easier online consumption and with dynamic footnote references, as well as the ability to order content in printed format. PLoS One also provides "chunked" content such as graphs and tables to help people zoom in on results more effectively. But still, in fairness to Nature the Precedings is an enormous step forward for a traditional scholarly publisher, one which, when combined with Nature's exciting main portal, is bound to make it a far more attractive online community.
The advent of the Precedings portal underscores the dwindling importance of final publication for scientific content in particular but also the increasing recognition amongst all publishers that traditional concepts of media need to adjust more rapidly to online publishing. Prior to a publication being finalized it becomes a magnet for social media, gaining audience and unique interactions that are difficult to find elsewhere - perfect for building portal traffic. Once it is declared "a publication," the reverse is true - it becomes far more important for the finalized content to travel into as many other contexts as possible to find new value. Once content is fixed in its attributes it becomes media, a commodity stripped of community and immediately in need of finding new communities and individuals to appreciate it.
This points out both the strength and the weakness of social media: it can build up loyal audiences, but unlike traditional media social media is not easily syndicated - you can't "clone" a community, whereas traditional media is all about effective cloning through syndication and mass distribution. In this sense one can see from this model where the transition from social media to traditional media is more than just waving an "approved" wand: one's whole business model for a publication has the potential of changing rapidly once it passes through that status change.
While it's still very early days for the Nature Precedings portal already it's attracted a good amount of content across a wide range of categories, holding out the promise that it will become a destination of choice for scientific researchers. But as promising and aggressive as this move is the Nature team still has catch-up work to do to get this portal up to PLoS ONE standards of usability and reusability. One hopes that in time the portal can become a more active gateway to peer review and not turn into a dumping ground for various papers and ideas. The promise is there for such development; here's hoping that such developments come sooner rather than later.
UPDATE - To clarify, the Nature Precedings portal allows content to be published by its members without the fees associated with PLoS ONE and in general content on PLoS ONE is meant to be at least on a potential track for juried approval as a publication. But still, PLoS ONE winds up having more features that make it a highly usable destination for collaboration, whilst Nature Precedings is more like a download center with some comments on the side. It would seem that the Precedings offering would benefit from some of the PLoS ONE usability and community features. Bear in mind also that some precedings posts are near-finished papers as well; the difference in business models should not detract from the wide range of content that's coming on so far. In truth it's so early in the life of Precedings it's probably too early to judge it too much one way or another what it's likely to hold based on limited postings to date.
About the only thing that broadcasters seem to agree on these days is that their business model is tanking... Talks on global broadcast treaty fail AP via Yahoo! News
It was a great SIFMA show in many ways, but also one which took me back to its roots. I remember when it was in much smaller quarters at New York's Sheraton Hotel, instead of its current footprint across three floors of the New York Hilton. Back in those days content technology advances offered relatively few trading advantages to individual organizations on the desktop - it was more a matter of making sure that you had the right specialized equipment in the back rooms feeding the trading floor. Years later we seem to be back where we started. The drive to reduce the cost of trading transactions in the face of disappearing trading profits in public markets has made the SIFMA show a gathering with relatively few high-profile desktop trading solutions being touted to an ever-decreasing population of decision-makers purchasing them. Traffic was reasonable but clearly down from earlier years. It's a flat world out there in finance - except in niches such as hedge funds where information innovation still drives profitable trading strategies.
There were a few key themes that I saw taking shape at this year's show:
Everything old is new again. I enjoyed a few minutes chatting with Jeffery Wells, now VP of Product Management at Exegy, a provider of infrastructure for ultra-low latency market data feed processing. For several years the solution touted by Wall Street firms was to shove huge banks of standardized blade servers at trade tickers to be able to keep up with information surges. But with the cost of energy increasing rapidly greater single-platform efficiencies are beginning to look more attractive. Shades of the "minicomputer" revolution of the 1970s and 1980s - custom computing platforms are coming back, thanks to new economics in trading.
ASP financial content services are becoming a reality. While financial trading partners have long used private networks to communicate with one another the push for cost controls is leading to some interesting developments in networked services. Collabnet is a service that enables customers that include investment banks to collaborate on software development with outsourcing partners in Asia and elsewhere. What's interesting is that Collabnet provides this as an ASP-based service instead of installing it in-house on private servers and networks. Nothing new in the greater world of business but remarkable when you consider how reluctant investment banks have been to open their operations up to ASP services before. Also demoing at the show was Salesforce.com, an ASP-based sales force automation tool with financial modules integrated via its AppExchange service. Is Wall Street ready for a wider range of ASP-based content services? The push for economic operations seems to be pushing secure ASP content solutions to the forefront. Don't rule them out from your own product plans, but be ready to have your answers in hand for how you manage security.
Rapid development of executable trading strategies is powering low-latency data feeds. Automated trading based on high-speed data feeds has been around for years, but these days "real time" feeds need to have sub-millisecond delays for trading strategies to be effective. But equally important is the ability to tune trading strategies as rapidly as possible to take advantage of the speed of these feeds. Vendors such as Progress Software were demonstrating capabilities that allow new trading strategies for low-latency feeds to be turned around in a few hours. As important as the speed of feeds can be the ability to translate your knowledge of market conditions into automated decision-making seems to be fueling many boutique solutions.
Mining the Web and other sources is helping banks to build their own custom content. One of the more exciting types of tools highlighted at the show were packages that made it easier to mine and aggregate content from both traditional and non-traditional sources in interesting ways. FirstRain was demonstrating highly personalized research services that enable its clients to get information from many major published sources and internal sources tailored to their exact needs. Connotate was demonstrating Web mining capabilities that enable investment banks and other institutions to quickly develop custom research and data from any number of online and proprietary sources. While getting high-quality subscription databases is still an important part of the research equation for finance tools such as Connotate and FirstRain are allowing institutions to define custom sources of content that are feeding decision-making processes with unique insights that may give financial institutions an advantage in the marketplace. With the ability to define structured content dynamically these types of services are accelerating the ability of institutions to gain insights from any potentially valuable content source.
What happened to the graphs? For years you could walk down the aisles of this exhibit hall and be overwhelmed by the number of charting packages made available by content and software vendors. While charts were certainly a part of the mix, the emphasis on automated execution via low-latency feeds has placed more of the analysis investment for real-time content into algorithmic trading packages. However, a retail-oriented analytics package from Blocks combined a drag-and-drop financial modeling package with a charting package to enable retail investors to develop sophisticated trading strategies and to trigger them off of charted real-time data events. A nifty combination that would have been the envy of many a trader not so many years ago and now available for you and me. Graphing is still an important analysis tool for financial content but it's far from the cutting edge for most financial services these days.
Lots and lots of small companies. While SIFMA has always had its fair share of up-and-coming companies in its mix the show was notably heavy with startups and small innovators this year. Certainly Reuters, Thomson, Sungard, IBM and others had significant footprints this year but there were many more small companies working their way into main-floor and mid-floor footprints that would have been relegated to upper-floor boonies in past years. While not necessarily a good sign for the short run I take this as a good sign for the years ahead. Hopefully we're witnessing a new wave of innovation for the financial content industry that will begin to drive new products and services away from traditional data delivery platforms and towards more innovative forms of collaboration and execution. This is an industry starved for really fresh ideas right now, but with so many fundamental infrastructure issues sussed out in recent years expect financial institutions to begin to invest anew in fresh looks at the world of financial content.
So yet another SIFMA show sails into history. Let's hope that next year's addition features a little more buzz and excitement in the hall generated by something other than Sopranos stars, slot cars and scantily clad young ladies.
A preview of the SIFMA show, thoughts on Jerry Yang in it for the long haul against Google, Reuters Interactive and Science Magazine's content previews. Let us know what you'd like to see in our ShoreViews reports!
When Techobabble 2.0 ranked information and communications technolgy (ICT) industry analyst weblogs recently I was pleased to discover our own ContentBlogger in the top ten of all ICT weblogs. More specifically, sandwiched in between Forrester and Jupiter's top weblogs and several notches above Charlene Li. The blog acknowledges that heavies such as Charlene came in low in some objective criteria such as Technorati rankings, but still, this is a very cool thing. Especially cool is that ContentBlogger was tying the very top analyst weblogs in TB2.0's own ranking criteria.
Wow.
Our heartfelt thanks go out to Jonny Bentwood over at Edelman for his analysis and for his recognition of our efforts. It's rewarding to see how our efforts rank amongst the leaders in the industry. Our heartfelt thanks go out also to everyone who tunes in to ContentBlogger online or via our ShoreLines newsletter. It's a privilege to be of service to you and an honor to be amongst such talented peers in this recognition. We'll just keep on doing our thing here at Shore, and make it only better as we go along.
Brightcove is one of many video distribution platforms that wrestles for attention in the media world, an effort made easier by the announcement of a deal with Fox Entertainment Group to provide them with a platform for their IPTV plans. Brightcove's portal has featured primarily user-generated content and community, but its technology can accomodate long-format entertainment programming as well. Will Fox use Brightcove technology exclusively for its mainstream programming or will it use Brightcove's platform to build up user-generated content communities around its own assets? Time will tell, but my guess is that Fox Interactive Media's experience with MySpace argues for Fox having a good dose of its own user-gen content in the mix alongside mainstream Fox programming feeding synergies into the MySpace platform.
The key point in this deal is that an OEM strategy seems to have paid off for Brightcove based on the strengths of its own portal strategy that allowed them to refine its functionality with live audiences and to continue to act as a test bed for ideas that can feed into their partner networks. OEMing can be tricky if clients can't visualize the potential outcomes of using a product tailored to their needs, especially when you're a young company trying to get attention in a crowded marketplace. Having in effect bootstrapped their OEM strategy with their own Web site Brightcove made it that much easier for a prospect like Fox to say yes.
AP reports on Terry Semel's stepping down from the CEO role at Yahoo after challenges to his leadership at a recent stockholders meeting made a swift move to restore investor confidence an imperative. The move is notable as much for what didn't happen as what did: Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang will be taking on the CEO role to re-establish both investor sentiment and Valley creds for the short term while Susan Decker, thought to have been Semel's hand-picked probable successor, notches up to President from overseeing ad operations. This may mean a wait-and-see period for Decker while the company as a whole adjusts to Semel's departure before moving up to the top role but more likely it's a move for Semel to have a proxy for his vision at Yang's disposal to ensure that his initiatives have some leadership to prove out his legacy.
Semel's media background was seen as a plus when he took over at Yahoo, promising "adult" leadership and the ability to lead Yahoo towards deals with mainstream content providers that would help to build up its portal in the eyes of online audiences. But a funny thing happened on the way to the earnings reports: search engine Google proved that being able to contextualize the world's content was more important than trying to build a bigger and better AOL. Yahoo has made some strong moves in recent months towards building up the power of user-generated content to drive Yahoo traffic, but the key revenue driver - contextual ad performance - continues to lag.
What are the prospects for Yahoo in the wake of Semel's reign? All in all, pretty good. While Yahoo has suffered from focusing too intently on traditional media products in the past, its push towards stronger social media offerings and innovative reuse of these assets for new portlets for consumer goods and hot topics offers Yahoo a role as a lead innovator amongst traditional media companies. With Semel out of the picture it's likely that staff trimmings will cut through some loyalty factors and allow Yahoo to gain some momentum in deal-making to shore up its innovation position and market share. Yahoo is building high-quality content that appeals to mainstream Web users, effectively bridging the gap between AOL-like neophytes and seasoned users with highly focused interests with an array of well-designed content products.
But the key problem remains that Yahoo has mapped out a strategy that weds it largely to the goal of most traditional media companies: build market share and viewership for a destination portal. While its ad network will help Yahoo to expand past that footprint effectively, their dedication to making it work for brand advertisers is likely to make it too focused on the declining footprints of traditional media companies to build market share quickly enough to be fully competitive with Google's ad campaigns. As pointed out by TechCrunch recently the "long tail" of content is getting only thicker, placing a premium on products that can absorb and interpret its content for highly focused audiences. This will continue to play to Google's advantage as it builds both revenues and margin from an abundance of less-expensive content sources that can be monetized through its contextual ad technologies and dominant search engine.
Yahoo has also neglected its enterprise strategy for many years, effectively ceding this arena to Google and a host of other services that are effective in contextualizing both enterprise and Web-sourced content. With "prosumers" dominating online markets increasingly Yahoo has little to offer professionals online beyond its dominant financial portal. Google's enterprise efforts may be also-ran in comparison to efforts by IBM, FAST and Autonomy, but increasingly it's an also-ran that just happens to have at least some footprint everywhere. On the publisher's side of the equation are subscription database services struggling to hold on to revenue and margins through more sophisticated content integration services - not likely candidates for partnership via Yahoo's highly consumer-oriented efforts.
New management can help Yahoo to take advantage of its considerable media assets but it's going to have to be a team that's willing to make some tough decisions regarding its traditional media partners fairly quickly. As more of these partners take a multi-channel strategy for content distribution the advantages of paying hefty percentages for the use of their content only props up the potential revenue streams of Yahoo competitors who go to play with mainstream media players. Yahoo must dance delicately as it works to continue its strong relationships with existing media companies while managing to be much more stingy in its licensing negotiations, so as to free up more capital for deals and product investment.
What will be Semel's ultimate legacy? I think that it's easy to lose sight of how disjointed Yahoo was when Semel took over. While balkanization still plagues some Yahoo operations overall he helped to forge what it arguably a well-run company that has created a dominant position in many forms of destination media. The ad game was already moving out of Yahoo's grasp when he came on, so while he can't be credited for a triumphant reversal he laid the groundwork for a good product strategy. The largest spot on Semel's record will be the loss of major deals for online video. With Google Video emerging as a leading search engine for video content across the Web and YouTube firming up as the leading source of user-generated online video it can be argued that Semel's media roots failed to prepare him for the most rapid shifts in online entertainment in the past ten years. But this blind spot was hardly unique amongst major media companies.
We'll see how rapidly Yahoo repositions its considerable assets in the months ahead, but my guess today is that Yahoo will emerge a year from a now a far leaner operation more focused on user-generated content and on making content from all sources more usable. Mainstream media and brand advertising will still be a very important part of Yahoo's revenue mix but we're likely to see Yahoo acting more as a better bridge for media companies to Google-like strategies that lead mainstream media content away from the confines of fixed portals. Better widgets, better feeds, better toolkits for developing branded portlets, better user-enabled aggregation tools - there are a lot of ways to make Yahoo content grow beyond its current destination footprint. That is, if Yahoo is willing to challenge traditional media companies more aggressively to move beyond their roots.
Coming next week - our first in a series of online video segments we're calling ShoreViews Video, providing our commentary, events coverage and industry executive interviews. Stay tuned!
USA Today reports on a test drive of Joost, the much-ballyhooed portal that promises to be the "future of television." That phrase in and of itself should be a clue as to both the strengths and limitations of a service that maintains much of what traditional video producers and advertisers cherish. Joost is amassing a library of entertainment from major U.S. television networks dating back to the 1950s, along with more recent cable television shows and news from Reuters and other sources. After a software download (natch) you get to use Joost's technology to view full-length TV shows with a minimum of in-line advertising from major corporations. Joost promises full-length movies in its mix, though one assumes that they will be either ad-supported or pay-per-view - and not usable outside of the Joost viewer, of course.
There are some key online add-ons that are supposed to jazz up the Joost offering - searchable archives, integrated chat and online community features - but for the most part Joost sounds like a fairly sealed container that allows the "television" phenomenon to be bled onto the Web in its fairly native form. With only up to three minutes of unskippable ads per offering, it's not clear that first-run, full-length television is likely to make its way into the Joost collection with any speed for producers needing a stronger revenue stream. Instead, Joost appears to be a tool for syndication rights owners to expose their libraries of older content more efficiently than via cable outlets. And with far fewer total channels than today's high-bandwidth cable offerings - which also include premium and cacheable on-demand programming - Joost is not necessarily giving younger online audiences a strong reason to shift from looking over the top of their laptop screens at television to have a closer look at Joost's offerings.
Most importantly, though, Joost is a no-op when it comes to video sharing or user-activated embedding or syndication. User community functions hang off the side of Joost's programming instead of allowing video to take its place in a myriad of user-defined contexts. Most online video viewers are not looking for this thing called "television" on their computers. The TV is the high-res appliance on the other side of the room that serves a parallel purpose to the in-your-hands experience of online content. If Joost is an attempt by TV traditionalists to have online audiences think of video on their laptops or desktop units the way that they want them to, then they are probably going to be very disappointed by the Joost experience.
There is a place for full-length programming that integrates with online audiences, but it's not likely to be in the format that experiments such as Joost have provided to date. Instead it's more likely that programming that has originated for television networks will take a parallel place to most online video for now until television producers are more willing to think more creatively about monetization models. In-line ads need to give way to parallel ads and contextual programming that can hang off the side of a TV program in much the same way that text ads, banners, scrapers, widgets and other contextual content hangs around core content on a Web page. There will still be a place for barrier ads for video, audio and text online but they will be a smaller portion of the revenue mix in most instances.
This concept is likely to feed back into television itself as display units become larger and more sophisticated. Digital TV shows are likely to be "framed" with complementary ads and content that can lure people into investigating viewing alternatives. We may also get to the point of having "this click is sponsored by..." advertising which may invite viewers to look at ads on their way from one channel to another. However it's done I believe that in-line advertising is being held onto as a security blanket right now by TV producers and ad specialists in large part because they have not invested in the skill sets that will take them beyond that model - in spite of online video's rapid growth.
Joost may enjoy some modest success at first but given the myriad of competing channels for video content - and an explosion of more interesting monetization models starting to be wrapped around online video - Joost programming may never rise to the level of pre-eminence that its backers would hope for in time to make a real impact in online video markets. It's far more important for video producers to embrace distribution models that allow content to flow into the contexts that audiences value most - those defined by themselves and their peers in whatever venue they desire.
While Nexis tinkers with the edges of its market footprint Dow Jones's Factiva unit is pushing forward with two key enhancements that are designed to change the scope of what business information users are likely to expect from their suppliers. Dow Jones' upgrades to its Synaptica taxonomy management services enable different taxonomies for different user groups - an essential tool for adapting business information into departmental functions - and enhanced semantic support for RDF, SKOS and OWL semantic standards that will enable Dow Jones clients to process and interpret a wider range of content types more effectively - including multimedia content. No small surprise, then, that the other announcement from Dow Jones is a deal with EveryZing (recently renamed from PodZinger) to integrate audio and video content from major suppliers such as The Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, BBC Radio and other major suppliers. EveryZing's already heavily categorized video content includes news from around the world in several major languages, making it a natural for integration into the Factiva set of general news and research content, enhanced all the more by the increased semantic prowess of their semantic tools.
Video is certainly all the rage on the Web and gaining steam within the enterprise as network backbones and security infrastructures are tuned to deal with more pervasive video consumption. Dow Jones' aggressive positioning of its integration capabilities combined with timely multimedia content will position them well as a supplier of both content and integration tools as enterprises think more seriously about how to integrate business-ready video into their portals and collaborative tools. In a sense this gives Dow Jones additional leverage against the increasing penetration of services such as Google's enterprise search appliances that enable both enterprise content and content from the Web that will be backed by their "Universal Search" capability to make its way into corporate Webs.
But the "catch-up" nature of the EveryZing deal underscores the degree to which Google is developing business-ready content sets far broader than Dow Jones and other business information suppliers. Dow Jones, Nexis and others hope to continue to pull trumps on Google with more select licensed sources at their disposal tuned to very specific enterprise audiences. And with sales and support staffs that have been knee-deep in enterprise needs and solutions for years folks like Dow Jones have some important edges in being able to integrate content effectively into enterprise platforms. Yet one wonders how much longer search-oriented business information suppliers such as Dow Jones are going to be able to leverage their licensed content sets to stave off more direct competition from Web-oriented integration specialists such as Google. Is Dow Jones' Factiva unit a search and taxonomy company with licensed content or a subscription database service with some nifty integration tools? Neither answer may be sufficient as stronger competitors enter the stage with better generic answers to these questions and others with more sector-specific answers. But for now, kudos to Dow Jones for keeping Factiva fresh and relevant.
Reuters notes the steep discounts being promised by book retailers when the new Harry Potter book from Scholastic hits the shelves of stores in July - no surprise, given that Amazon is already offering pre-ordering of the book at a 49 percent discount. With the younger book fans of the Potter series already very Web literate only the most avid fans are going to bother to line up on the release day to snatch up a copy at a bookstore rather than pre-order online. And if that's the case, isn't that what they call a matter of...supply and demand? The book industry is one of the last bastions of supply-oriented publishing that stands a shot at making its margins off of the "tall tail" of high-volume publishing, but implicit in their need to compete with online outlets is the greater need to build margins from "long tail" content - and yes, from Godiva chocolates and espresso - once customers are in the door. But if the most successful book franchise in modern history has become nothing more than a loss leader for long tail books eating up rent, climate control and staffing then the "big box" book stores may be headed to the remainder shelves in their efforts to compete with online content sellers and distributors.
For the time being the movie industry seems to have staunched some of its woes by leveraging available screens to make the most of the unique context - precisely orchestrated opening weekends - that they can offer for their wares. The movie distributors and theatre operators have the advantage of not having to compete with online outlets for same-day distribution with lower overhead and the added advantage that going to the movies is a social activity by and large. But even here the demand to distribute movie content online will push movie theatre operators to many of the same decisions that bookstore operators are facing today.
How to do better? To some degree the book industry addresses this with kiosks in other big-box stores that highlight popular content selections. But both booksellers and movie producers need to get better at making these kiosks centers for consuming long tail content as well as the hits. I can punch in an order at my local supermarket deli counter's touchpad screen to pick up cold cuts after a few minutes of shopping: why can't I do the same and pick up a print-on-demand book or a freshly burnt video? Or better yet, do it online at Amazon or some other outlet and direct the order to my local store for pickup? Zero inventory and shelf space for the retailer, easy profits and the ability to focus customized offers on the person picking up the merchandise. It's coming, don't worry.
Read/Write Web notes the following comments by Tapan Bhat, Yahoo's vice president of Front Doors, at the recent NextWeb conference in Amsterdam. Tapan told attendees that search would not dominate the web in the future:
"The future of the web is about personalization. Where search was dominant, now the web is about 'me.' It's about weaving the web together in a way that is smart and personalized for the user."
Well, yes and no, Tapan. Yahoo's personalization plays are exploiting the trend towards audiences aggregating their own content from various sources, including feeds, widgets, bookmarking services and other social media tools. User-defined aggregation plays a key role in defining where and how people look for and find content. But where is most of that content coming from? Search engines power many of the mashup and widget-oriented aggregation plays that are touted as the leading edge of social media. Be it through Google or more enterprise- and media-oriented services such as MuseGlobal, Mark Logic, Nstein or Really Strategies search services are evolving into the back ends for value-add content services that place valuable content in customized contexts well beyond traditional search results. So there's no escaping the importance of search and its ability to return the most relevant and useful content.
Where Tapan may have a point is that people aren't really looking towards new search engines to solve their problems. paidContent.org noted the arrival of Ask3D, a refreshed version of the Ask.com interface that, well, looks pretty much like the old interface but a little prettier. Ask.com is a good search engine, but I think that the personalization movement is a little bit off target. It's not so much about "let me personalize my search results" as it is "tell me what I want to know." If user-defined personalization accomplishes this, great, but Google's emphasis on anticipating what users need on a more personalized basis is probably closer to what will succeed for the 80-percent crowd. As noted by Information Today the new "Universal Search" interface does a lot to customize search results to a specific context automatically, a concept that Google will expand upon as it integrates content from its wide array of search-based services even further over the past several months. For the 20 percent or less who will demand more control and features sooner there's now Google Experimental, which includes early-stage features that may make their way into the Universal toolkit soon enough.
So is search really "done" at this point? As the hottest problem to solve perhaps search is indeed past its peak, even though search engines will still continue to be refined. But the new generation of content services have search at their core and will add in feeds, Web mining and other capabilities to aggregate content on the fly far more effectively than information services have done to date. We all applaud Factiva's new integration of audio and video content into its search capability, for example, but the real proof of the pudding will be the applications that Factiva's clients choose to build off of such content. Consider search at this point the ad hoc database building tool of choice for millions of users that is only beginning to be used to its fullest extent to create highly valuable content services.
Two weeks ago when we covered the offer by Rupert Murdoch to have NewsCorp take over ownership of Dow Jones there was plenty of froth from the Bancrofts and some media pundits that this was a "no way" proposition, making us just a little nervous about our bullishness on the deal. Two weeks later the Bancroft family has issued their own press release independent of Dow Jones to indicate their intent to provide Dow Jones with new ownership and that they are willing to speak with News Corp as a potential suitor. Murdoch's patience and low-key approach seem to have brought him at least to a place at the table, if not one fully welcomed, as the Bancrofts seem to have concurred with our earlier conclusion that this is the right time to make a sale. While there is always the potential for a surprise bid from the wings it's probable that whatever solicitations the Bancrofts initiate for alternative offers will be more to provide emotional and intellectual backing to the very likely consummation of a deal with News Corp. Investor's Business Daily noted earlier regarding this deal the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu's writing that exercising patience often leads to victory in war. Perhaps the patience of both the Bancrofts and Murdoch are about to be rewarded with equal measure.
In browsing through YouTube today I was thinking about the importance of the musicologist and folklorist Alan Lomax in bringing obscure American folk music to mainstream media outlets. Through Lomax's recordings in the mid-20th century we gained access to pivotal and influential artists such as Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Woody Guthrie and other performers who have become icons of American culture. Their songs have been "mashed" (covered) countless times by popular artists, creating a legacy of profitable operations for music publishers everywhere. Lomax' subjects were far from slick: some were in or just out of prisons, sitting on tin shack porches in the backwaters of the deep South, up in the mountains of Appalachia - it would be fair to call most of them "nobodies" by the standards of any day.
Today I can turn to YouTube and get a catalog of folk performances with breadth that far outstrips anything that Lomax was able to acquire through his years of sojourns. The average teen humming a song on the edge of her bed in front of a webcam is not likely to become a new Jelly Roll Morton, much less a Sade, but voices such as this have restored the concept of folk art being something that anyone can create for anybody. Which of these performances is worth watching? The new Lomaxes of the world are us, the audience, providing accolades through our use and ranking of their content. Mainstream content being transformed in this environment through mashing is the equivalent of a seamstress cutting up scraps from a designer dress to make a beautiful quilt - it returns the content to its roots as a resource for new folk communication.
When one goes into a major city you're surrounded oftentimes by street performers of various kinds, usually average at best but often enough inspiring in both their content and in the context in which they've chosen to perform. YouTube makes everyone's home a street corner, re-integrating our modern American culture that has been decimated by the automobile cult with its look-alike shopping strips that discourage folk activities in favor of consuming finished goods. Finished and packaged content still matters in a very important way, but I think that we're only at the very leading edge of understanding how profoundly human communications have been affected by services such as YouTube. The emerging dominant culture of the 21st century will be unplugged and unmediated folk culture, free to be free or commercial or whatever it desires to be in the moment. What Lomax exposed through 20th century technology YouTube will unite through the 21st century's direct communications between folk artists and their audiences.
