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2010-04-28T14:08:00.001-04:00

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The Need for Public: The Future of Today's Local Libraries

2010-04-14T21:50:00.006-04:00

Westport, Connecticut offers its residents many benefits, one of which is an excellent public library that has become an ever more central component of our community. As prime local retail storefronts have been overtaken by national and regional chains and the Web absorbs much of our attention for personal contact, our library serves as not just a repository for knowledge but increasingly as the primary pubic facility used by many citizens. A storm knocks out your power for a few days? Camp out at the library and use the wireless and PCs to keep in touch with the world. Need a place to socialize or hold a business meeting in a place that's not too commercial? Grab a coffee at the library cafe or use one of its meeting rooms - that is, if you're lucky enough to be able to book one.

The problems and opportunities that our public library faces were the focus of a recent public forum that I attended, a meeting that drew some thoughtful citizens to respond to the library staff's planning efforts. What came through loud and clear from this session is that in spite of the "the Web is killing libraries" meme that is popular in some circles these days, our library suffers not from lack of use but rather from overuse. Its books, reference desk, reading rooms, book clubs, online databases and Web site, lectures, equipment rentals and childrens' programs are the focus of so many people in our community that competition for access to them is creating some hard choices for the library's planners. How does a public library adjust its resources and programs to serve a public that is hungry for far more than just access to books on shelves?

The answer to this question is complicated by the changing nature of content. Now that our local news is being delivered not just by local newspapers but as well by local Web sites and blogs and other online resources, archiving local news and knowledge is not as simple as tucking away the latest catalog of microfiche or stack of papers. Ebooks are increasingly popular as checkout items, but an expanding array of technologies makes electronic acquisitions for ebooks more complicated. Many towns and cities participate in collective bargaining for books and periodicals, but acquisitions still tend to be done on a town by town basis. And even as our library prepares to upgrade its cataloging system, the question of what should be in that catalog becomes ever more pressing.

In short, what is a public library is supposed to be in an era in which storing a print-based catalog of items is becoming one niche service amongst many is rather complicated. Most importantly, the older patrons of our local library were not necessarily the ones most focused on print services. Many of them were, in fact, more concerned about whether their grandchildren would have the right range of electronic services available for them. They understood clearly that the world is now focused on electronic content and that our library needs to focus on getting them literate in this emerging world. This includes, increasingly, ensuring that people in our community are literate not just about content that's been created by others but also literate about how to create content. Yes, our high school has some courses in this for the teens, but what about a local businessperson who needs to understand how to build a Web site or to optimize their ads for Web search engines?

One of the more neglected possibilities, though, seems to be the opportunity for local libraries to begin to cut the cord between catalog services and patron services more aggressively. If 90-plus of library patrons are discovering content via major search engines, it would seem to make sense to get library content that's available locally into those search engine results more aggressively. Yes, you have a link to World Catalog in Google Books, but what if local libraries were to expose key content via localized AdWords results in mainstream Google search results? There would be no real competition for these placements and people would be immediately aware that a local library would be a reasonable choice to check out even before they clicked through to a retailer's site.

Most of all, though, public libraries are becoming curators of the very sense of that it means to be in the public realm in our local towns. Our downtown resembles more a drive-through mall festooned with nationally known stores than the funky collection of local stores that used to thrive there years ago; our local movie theatres pulled up stakes years ago to make way for restaurants and retail space. A Starbucks or a McDonalds is a far cry from a place that people can really call their own as a public space dedicated to a community. Our town hall, once a school building, has an auditorium that's used for public hearings, but many people are looking for smaller meeting spaces for a broader number of meetings at the same time. What's needed is a curation of knowledge transfer that goes not only far beyond collections of books and journals from far and wide but also beyond what's captured online. It is the community itself that needs to be curated.

I left the library feedback session with a great deal of hope for the future of local libraries in our country. Libraries are becoming increasingly essential components for the economic and social strength of local communities, empowered by electronic content to deliver traditional information services more efficiently while freeing up both facilities and staffs for more complex missions that make use of the unique knowledge assets that can be found and created in our local communities. We are still in the very early stages of this transformation of local libraries into being community curators, but I think that it will prove to be the cornerstone of a renewal of local economic and social vitality. If you know what your town has that's unique and valuable and you make it accessible to the world, and combine it with the best of what's available in the world as a whole, then you empower citizens to invest in their communities far more effectively.

Magical Mystery Tour: Come Join Us for SIIA NetGain 2010 in San Francisco, 24-25 May

2010-04-13T15:09:00.003-04:00

Every now and then you get an opportunity to go to an industry event that's doing something really unique and fun. This year's SIIA NetGain event in San Francisco is going to be just that. In addition to a great day of speakers and experts from B2B and consumer media laying out today's best practices in content services, the second day will take participants on a tour down Highway 101 to some of Silicon Valley's leading companies for "up close and personal" interaction with the leaders in content technologies. And when we say leaders, we do mean leaders - try Google, Apple and Adobe, for starters. If you want to rub shoulders with the greats of the content industry from both the East Coast and the West Coast and do some real business while having a great time, get hopping and register soon. Frankly, for the price they're charging it's an absolute steal. Early bird registration ends Monday!

Click here to learn more and to register for SIIA NetGain 2010

Apps Lapse: What Publishers Lose in the Race for Contained Content

2010-04-09T10:02:00.016-04:00

Apps fever is sweeping across the content industry, spurring hopes amid content providers that software applications development toolkits available for mobile devices like Apple's iPad and iPhone and Google's Android phones will allow them to define new channels for revenues. Certainly "apps" that can be downloaded from online storefronts provided by these and other platform providers are taking off in a big way.

There are more than 160,000 apps available for Apple devices that have been developed over the past two years, while in the six months since the introduction of the Android Marketplace there are already more than 42,000 Android apps available. The lure of having a little icon on the desktop of these devices for apps that can add engaging features to content - and, many hope, premium revenues - is hard for most publishers and services developers to resist.

And why not? After all, mobile phones come equipped with all sorts of new sensors and services that make the integration of content with mobile services very intriguing. People are "checking in" to hot spots via geolocation apps like Foursquare and Godwalla, pinching and zooming their way through layers of data in mobile Google Maps, as well as downloading movies from Netflix and steering airplane traffic via Flight Control HD, not to mention reading news from magazines and newspapers. It's all a bit reminiscent of the PC-based consumer software revolution of twenty years ago, when store shelves were lined with all sorts of packages to make use of that generation's emerging technologies.

Go to a tech-oriented store today, though, you'll find that packaged software is pretty scarce. Along came the Web, making both software downloads an easier way to get a hold of zippy applications as well as Web sites that made content like CD-ROM references seem like stale stuff. Apps are in part an attempt to reclaim the glory days of premium packaged software, as well as an attempt to shove content services into Web-proof cans that will "protect" them from all of that nasty Web content that would otherwise be rubbing up against it. If you doubt this, try using the default search tool on the new iPad; you'll be directed to apps-only selections for your content, forcing you to go to your browser to find content from the Web via the search engine of your choice (by contrast, Google's Android-equipped Nexus One's default search looks at content on that device plus Web content, with a separate search for apps via Android Marketplace).

There are pluses and minuses for Web-based content versus apps-based content - thanks to Jill O'Neill of NFAIS for a link to this nice tech summary by Richard Padley - but the largest minus of all for content producers seduced by apps mania is findability. Although many apps consume Web-based content - or are, in many instances, just lightly reskinned versions of Web content - apps exist largely in a netherworld of darkness when it comes to search engines. That's just fine by many publishers that are more eager to reproduce the print experience on devices like iPad via premium apps than they are eager to get their apps content discoverable via the Web. In hopes of offering their advertisers and shareholders new value via apps through old software and publishing models, the presence of findable options for their content via the Web is a given, or, for some, perhaps, something that they wish would go away.

Yet, curiously, neither the Web nor the power of search engines to get good content in context at the point of demand show any serious signs of going away. In fact, with the continuing expansion of HTML 5 Web standards, Web-enabled applications are starting to interface with many of the mobile sensors that today's apps toolkits enable software developers to exploit. Publishers may be looking to apps as an alternative to the Web for advanced functionality, but the Web itself is becoming increasingly functional and extensible into sensors on mobile devices. Even in today's apps on Apple and Google Android devices, most links in both editorial and ads in these apps lead typically to Web content. The notion that apps are going to make the Web disappear by the desire of publishers willing it to be so is a myth. There is no substantial "there" in apps without the Web.

Nevertheless, apps are going to be with us increasingly as combinations of information and experiences that provide value to audiences in new contexts. As such, apps fit Shore's definition of content, content that still needs to be discovered as Web pages do, even if, perhaps, in different ways. In a sense search engines traverse some apps already by querying databases that drive some Web sites. But the broader question is what happens when unique content gets delivered via apps and not via their Web page equivalents, be it via HTML 5-enabled apps or via apps using proprietary toolkits such as Apple's. There's the strong chance that some sources of content will sink permanently into the "dark Web" again, not to mention new sources of content that will never be discoverable via the Web.

Great minds are thinking about this, of course, but not necessarily equally. One of the great neglected opportunities of the apps era is creating search utilities that can place emerging apps into the right context via search alongside more traditional page-based Web content. Already we get video clips, images and widgets delivered up via search engines that match particular queries or metadata clusterings; why not apps also? Some apps providers may balk at this notion, preferring to keep content consumers corralled into can-like containers that limit their options for cross-pollinating with rival apps platforms. The gaming console industry has certainly managed to keep stores that used to stock software well-lined with CDs that are in essence apps for those devices, so perhaps publishers have reason to hope. But my sense is that it's largely a false hope.

I believe that it's a false hope because browsers aren't going away any time soon. In fact, Web browsers are becoming only more powerful, with ever more technology packed into them to launch advanced applications as well as run-of-the-mill Web pages. Thinking of the rapidly developing Chrome OS operating system, browsers are, in their own way, even becoming devices themselves. If you thought that the iPad was slick, imagine what happens when you get an instant-on device that you can log into once and be enabled for both everything that the Web offers and everything that premium apps offer from one Web-driven touchscreen device? Now imagine one step further - imagine that it's all discoverable via one search utility. Game over, content industry friends.

The same discoverability issues will exist within enterprise firewalls, of course, if not moreso. Most organizations cannot afford to have their content locked into proprietary apps if they are to build business intelligence dashboards from multiple sources rapidly and effectively. Few will have patience for publishers wanting to sell them independent apps "cans" - you may as well tell them to go back to the era of CD-ROM products. No chance. As more enterprise-ready apps make their way to the marketplace, their day-to-day utility to individuals in businesses on mobile platforms will clash more and more with the need for those businesses to break open those cans to increase productivity amongst collaborators. Images of jolly executives toting touchpads to board meetings with print-friendly digital documents are largely mythical representations of how businesses really need to work today. It's not about individual convenience as much as getting teams productive as rapidly as possible. In a corporate world that's trying to break out of its own silos constantly, tight-as-a-can apps for content consumption are silos that few will be able to afford.

With all this said, the new generation of software and content services developed via emerging apps offer tremendous promise as platforms that can deliver real functional value to audiences. However, that functionality in and of itself cannot replace the need to find all of the relevant content that's needed to accomplish personal or organizational goals, be it through an app or any other number of useful content consumption tools. It's the ability to integrate content from multiple sources with multiple sensors that makes apps most valuable; using apps as a short-cut DRM tools based on proprietary standards shuts down most of the value that they have to offer in the first place. So, as you approach your apps strategy, remember at least these three simple rules:

Don't use apps as an excuse to ignore the power of the Web
Use apps to extend functionality that integrates content, not as a tool to segregate it
Design your apps with content discoverability via search in mind - even if your current app store search tools may not warrant it

This is all a way of saying that although the current interest in apps has grabbed a lot of headlines, there will be plenty of other trends grabbing headlines in the months ahead. Brace yourself for an emerging, complex landscape that will be integrating the world of apps and Web pages into a cohesive whole of services, with search engines playing a key role in gluing these together rapidly into on-demand services that individuals and enterprises will be craving. If you thought that apps were going to line up your content problems into neat little packages, it's time to break out the can opener.

Regulating the Ether: The FCC Confronts the Limits of Net Neutrality

2010-04-07T08:25:00.010-04:00

The Internet is an odd thing. In some ways it is a medium that acts in essence like radio, but with a nearly infinite number of broadcast channels. Sometimes this "ether," as radio was termed in its early days, is used for one-to-many communications, as in Web sites and feeds, sometimes it's used for one-to-one communications, as in email, instant messaging and IP telephony. In all instances the general concept of the Internet is that any individual use of it is just a series of small data packets flowing through any number of different kinds of network connections. In other words, the Internet succeeds largely as a technology by being completely blind to the content of what is being transmitted through it, either in its human value or its internal form.

It is this fundamental form of being an infinitely scalable broadcast spectrum that seems to be at the heart of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's troubles in trying to enforce its doctrine of "net neutrality." These efforts experienced a setback recently when a U.S. Court of Appeals decision (PDF) struck down the FCC's attempts to claim regulatory authority over cable Internet provider Comcast's efforts to throttle the Internet bandwidth available to file sharing services. The FCC had argued that it had the ability to stretch its existing regulatory mandates via "ancillary authority" to cover this specific issue. However, the appeals court found that the FCC's efforts were a stretch too far.

As The New York Times observed, the decision was written in a way that would make it difficult to reverse via further appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, so this is more than just a one-shot setback for net neutrality. In reading the decision, it seems clear to me that the court is saying that the fundamental issue that the FCC has in pursuing net neutrality as a policy goal is that the legislation that empowers the FCC for regulation does not really support the concept of what net neutrality is trying to accomplish. In essence, net neutrality advocates seem to want the Internet to be a medium that is regulated in such a way that the private policies of Internet service providers would not interfere with a public policy of non-discriminatory access.

In pushing for net neutrality, in essence the FCC is asking all of the companies supplying Internet services to treat Internet traffic within its "pipes" as a protected public resource, such as water from a lake or river. A model of sorts for this type of access already exists within the structure of FCC regulations: the common carrier, such as a telephone service provider. Yet as Fred Campbell of the Wireless Communications Association International (WCAI) pointed out earlier this year, "Assuming the FCC does have jurisdiction to regulate the Internet pursuant to ancillary authority, it lacks jurisdiction to enact its proposed net neutrality rules as written, because the proposed non-discrimination rules are stricter than those applicable to monopoly common carriers..."

The main rub here is that the FCC is not at this time trying to regulate the Internet as a common carrier telecommunications service but rather as an information service. Ultimately the FCC doesn't want to have the type of common carrier regulation of Internet service that it already applies to telephone networks, in which phone service rates are regulated tightly. In essence the FCC is trying to say something rather simple - that the Internet is a common carrier from a non-discriminatory access perspective but an information service from most other perspectives. The "most other perspectives" has to take into account, of course, the growing use of the Internet for telephony services, including services such as AT&T's new in-building mobile phone services that employ Internet-connected devices to deliver mobile phone connectivity where their mobile service signals don't reach. AT&T applies a surcharge for this service, even though people are already paying both for the Internet service and the mobile phone services that provide this connectivity. So, like it or not, the issues that brought common carrier regulation to the telephone industry are encompassing the Internet already as the common carriers have come to dominate the Internet access business.

In the short term, one strategy that the FCC could employ is simply to shift its pursuit of net neutrality to leverage its common carrier authority more strongly. Yet with the decades of court precedents based on its existing claims to authority over the Internet, that may prove to be a fairly messy route. I wouldn't want to second-guess the regulators in the short run, but the real solution for net neutrality is one which is probably the most dangerous one politically: new legislation that will enable the FCC to redefine fundamental aspects of its regulatory authority more in line with the Internet era. This is long overdue, but not tackled easily in an environment in which there are many people wanting to do things with the "pipes" and the "water" of the Internet but few people able to speak loudly in favor of the non-discriminatory aspects required for the vibrancy of the medium.

This brings us back to that old concept of the "ether," a natural medium that somehow gets messages from one point to another. The Internet has become so ingrained as a tool for our economy and for our personal communications that it is far more like a growing natural resource needing nurturing to encourage its growth for public use rather than a fixed public utility needing close scrutiny. It's difficult for anyone to say with certainty what shape the Internet will take in ten, fifteen or fifty years. Certainly if some of the future scenarios that I paint in my book Content Nation come true, the pace of the Internet's integration with human life will become increasingly like dealing with truly natural resources. From this perspective, I think that the FCC needs to look at how to think of the Internet as a radio spectrum defined for public access, much as it regulates specific radio frequencies today, with some elements of common carrier regulation added.

From this perspective, it could be that the emerging U.S. broadband policy could be back-leveraged off of existing policies being established for wireless broadband communications. In other words, instead of broadband wireless connectivity being viewed as an extension of the Internet, perhaps the "wired" Internet now needs to be viewed as a common carrier extension of a radio-based Internet medium that is likely to dominate in coming years as the prevailing access method, be it over short distances, such as with in-home wireless routers or with AT&T's mobile phone repeaters, or over long-distance radio connections. The FCC licenses radio spectrum already to common carriers for mobile services, so this would seem to be the right "hook" on which to hang future net neutrality regulations.

While the appeals court did the FCC no favor in its ruling, it was at least right in pointing out that the FCC needs to face some harsh realities if it is to implement net neutrality effectively. After years of failing to address the critical impact of the Internet on the U.S. role in the global economy, the FCC is rightly trying to set the stage for even greater economic growth for the U.S. in the years ahead via net neutrality. Most importantly if affects the ability of businesses both large and small to communicate directly with their markets cost-effectively. The FCC needs to ensure that this commercial benefit of the Internet is protected by minimizing the role of "middle men" in trying to impose private regulation on public communications. Hopefully this will become the cornerstone of improved approaches to net neutrality regulations by the FCC.

Come on Over to My Pad: Balancing iPad Frenzy with Long-Term Media Needs

2010-04-05T14:47:00.010-04:00

Unless you were under a rock in a far-flung desert it was hard to miss the launch of Apple's iPad tablet computer over the weekend, an event which, while generating impressive coverage and good first-wave sales, seems to have raised as many concerns among publishers as it has raised lavish praise and attention. Clearly the era of touchpad tablets is now officially upon us, with Apple using its now-customary combination of brilliant engineering and proprietary gatekeeping to tip the playing field in its favor in another neglected market segment. The iPad is well-timed from Apple's perspective in that it managed to swoop on to the scene ahead of other rival touchpad devices from Hewlett Packard and other providers, albeit with a stripped-down feature set and relatively few options for software and premium content.

No worries there from Apple's standpoint, for the moment of inflection that they are shooting for has a lot more to do with seizing momentum amongst confused and disorganized media companies that are beginning to realize that their underfunding of effective Web publishing strategies is beginning to come home to roost in a big way. The parallel that Apple is drawing on is not so much the iPhone as the iPod, the portable music player which came along at just the right time to herd panicked music industry executives into yet another attractive, convenient solution for digital music distribution that required relatively little thinking on their behalf and plenty of hopes for secure revenues. Several years later, the iTunes music store captures about 69 percent of online digital music sales, disintermediating not only music publishers but the Web in general from the lion's share of premium music revenues.

Flash forward to 2010, when this time it's print and television media producers that are struggling to come up with premium Web strategies. Remarkably, many of these publishers are willing to pretend to themselves that it's worth jumping through hoops for the iPad launch, because, as noted in a Wall Street Journal article, it really doesn't matter if you get only a trickle of data and relationship equity from the "handful" of early iPad adopters. Oh, really. It's another way of saying that publishers are afraid of Apple's power in the digital content industry and not willing to chance that they will be on the outs with trend-setting audiences. In the meantime they enable yet another disintermediating proprietary partner.

One key difference between the iPod launch and the iPad's is that the publishers in print and video have many more well-developed channel alternatives than were available to the music industry when the iPad launched. Book and magazine publishers have Amazon's Kindle, Barnes and Noble's Nook and Sony's ereaders for monochrome content, while a broad galaxy of mobile phones offer color reading experiences for both ebooks and Web content. In the short run book publishers have even been able to leverage the iPad to get Amazon to push up ebook prices to levels more comparable to iPad pricing. But looking at this broken terrain of content ecommerce and packaging, it's a discontinuous mess for the most part, with platform fragmentation that plays into the hands of major Web outlets and device marketers that can muscle in on publishers' value propositions.

All of this argues ever stronger for cross-platform packaging and ecommerce for premium content, of course, a theme that should be familiar to readers of ContentBlogger. Since people are willing to pay for premium content experiences, it makes sense to have an appealing way for publishers to manage this concept via standardized premium Web ecommerce without having to lock into a labyrinth of platform providers that will increase their costs of delivery while slowing down their ability to respond faster than the Web does to deliver interesting content. Yes, it's appealing to limit your channel partners to create some type of limitation that creates the impression of artificial scarcity, but the Web is not radio or television, where the public have access to a tiny fringe of the delivery medium. By frittering away effort on proprietary ecommerce of all kinds, publishers continue to empower acceptable substitutes from all-Web sources that can tap their markets more rapidly and more effectively. The iPad is only one of many new devices that distracts publishers from this fundamental economic reality.

Large media companies will continue to love Apple, and vice versa, as they help to kid one another about the youthfulness of their vision. The people who I saw toying with the iPad in stores were mostly middle-aged or older, or small children with their parents. It makes for an appealing "Family Computing" story line for reporters looking for a new angle, conjuring up pictures of families guffawing together over an iPad game the way that they used to play Parchesi or some other board game. Well, it's a sentimental image, to be sure, but probably not a very realistic one. Most of the kids who I saw toying with the iPad in a local store went immediately to the Web; they know where their content lives, and they're not likely to want substitutes.

So as the Touchable Web begins to unfold, let's not confuse attractive features with the fundamental economic realities that the Web has introduced to publishing. The iPad will be with us for quite some time to come, but the Web is not likely to disappear as an economic issue for publishers just because a good weekend of PR helps launch yet another almost-Web-enabled device. Once the sweet taste of iPod eye-candy wears off, we will be facing the same sour realities that there are a lot of interesting sources of content that it and other devices deliver that have nothing to do with the hopes of major media companies.

ASIDIC Spring 2010: Smart Content Pulls Into View for Enterprise Publishers

2010-03-23T18:23:00.009-04:00

It's always been fun to be a part of ASIDIC events, so I was very pleased to have been invited to moderate a Q&A period at this year's Spring ASIDIC get-together at the offices of Lyrasis in Philadelphia. It's a bit more low-key venue than for previous ASIDIC events, which reflects in some ways the challenges that many enterprise-oriented publishers have faced these days, but also the degree to which their business models are trying to catch up to the value points in publishing that revolve around metadata and search technologies. The good news is that the ASIDIC meeting pulled together some excellent case studies demonstrating how publishers are moving away from "pull up a document" styles of electronic publishing towards using sophisticated semantic processing to get their content ready for battle for use in contexts driven by metadata. Here are some links to the panel-by-panel posts that I recorded on Google Buzz (no login required to view, login required for comments):

IDC's Sue Feldman on the New Search Architecture
Sue was in good form, I really enjoyed her insights. Key stats from IDC's 2010 enterprise user survey: 21 percent use colleagues as their first stop for information, 61 percent go to the Web first, only 1.8 percent to their subscription database services. My take: if you're not using the open Web and social media as marketing channels, you're missing more than 80 percent of your opportunities to be relevant in the "go-to" source for people who need your enterprise content.
Thane Kerner, Silverchair - A Primer on Semantic Technologies
A good overview of today's semantic technologies and terminology. One of the nice things about this ASIDIC meeting is that it got pretty deep into the implementation of semantic technologies without lapsing into endless "geek speak."
Case Studies - IEEE and SciTech Strategies, Inc.
This was a very interesting study of how the IEEE used domain mapping as a tool to reveal expertise appearing at the intersection of subject domains not usually associated with one another. By using taxonomies and domain mapping they revealed opportunities at the intersection of information technologies and medical science - the type of opportunities that innovation professionals are focusing on to build out new markets for products and services.
Case Studies - Enhancing the user's experience with semantic "smart linking."
McGraw-Hill highlighted work that they are doing using metadata and XML-formatted content to build out new editorial content for their premium Aviation Week and Platt's enterprise services rapidly. These technologies are enabling them to generate "topic pages" rapidly that can be destinations for links embedded in their news coverage and archives. Metadata can also enable opportunities at the intersections of their publishing properties - for example, it would be interesting to see how information on commodities such as jet fuel prices from Platt's could be made useful in Aviation Week content.
Case Studies - Collexis and the American Association for Cancer Research
This was an excellent example of how deep taxonomies and semantic technologies solved a very crucial problem for a scholarly publisher. Collexis enabled AACR to identify a much broader range of topic experts to be available for peer-reviewing scientific research articles and to filter out people who may have a conflict of interest. At a time when scholarly publishers are trying to position their assets more effectively against Open Access competitors, being able to demonstrate superior methodology for peer review via advanced technologies is a great idea.
Case Studies - Getting references right - how semantic technology helps linking, findability and analysis
Interesting example of how the American Psychological Association went from a "square zero" in Smart Content to state-of-the art infrastructure to help it begin to build rich and powerful search experiences on Mark Logic's XML server. One of the real stories about semantic technologies today is that although it's not effortless to make the transition to Smart Content, today's technologies can enable publishers to make that transition much more rapidly and cost-effectively. Harder, though, is getting business models up to speed.
Closing keynote - Steve Sieck, SKS Advisors
Steve always has powerful and thoughtful insights delivered with a good dose of understatement, a combination that makes him well worth listening to at events. Steve did a good job highlighting some of the key "what's next" themes for semantic content, including social media integration, "linked data" - enabling data to "talk to other data" on the Web in ways that enable semantic APIs - and the extension of semantics into marketing and branding.

All that and much more made the trip down to Philadelphia for the day well worth it. As I was discussing with an attendee afterwards, this is still the early days of semantic implementation for many publishers, with many high-value products and services only beginning to emerge for enterprise use. For example, what happens when you start applying semantics to newly released scientific research that puts previous research about a company's drugs or medical technologies in a negative light? All of a sudden technologies that were intended primarily as search interface tools then become powerful technologies for building real-time news and intelligence that can move securities markets rapidly. We're in the early days for these technologies, indeed, offering publishers opportunities to "leapfrog" their way into new value propositions.

Yet looming above all of these opportunities is the Web itself, that vast collection of human insight that most people still use as their primary reference so often. Precious little was said at ASIDIC about how to use Smart Content to built more Web-aware content. There was also an interesting interchange that I had at the end of the meeting with a long-time indexing expert who mused about how in many ways the metadata that was adding the most value in many of the examples discussed at the event were not necessarily those tried-and-true indexing tools that have been used for years. Yes, the truth about metadata is that much of what has been considered useful "information about information" is just the starting point for adding value to content today.

Here, also, the Web points the way. While Google is not thought of as a service that uses semantic tools in its presentation of content, in fact its content is rich with semantic inferences from Web page links, analysis of use statistics, evaluation of geo-tagged data and other content to derive useful information and experiences. These happen mostly "behind the scenes" in Google services, but they are there nevertheless, aiming towards the very "accuracy" that was discussed at the day's sessions. Ultimately Smart Content is the content that transforms what was previously thought of as just a publication or a search result into the input for sophisticated content-serving applications, whether they are presented as a publication or a problem-solving tool or a workflow service.

Thanks again to the ASIDIC team that put together a very interesting event with great attendees. Hopefully better times will enrich us with more events like this.

"Heard on the Street": Is it Time to Retire the Hot News Doctrine?

2010-03-22T17:54:00.015-04:00

Barry Graubart's Content Matters highlighted a recent court ruling by a U.S. District Court judge against TheFlyontheWall.com, an online information service has sold news and headlines for the past twelve years to investors that it aggregates from various sources in the financial community. It seemed like a fairly quiet and unremarkable "heard on the street" service, a grass-roots version of similar services offered by major information suppliers for many years. Surprisingly, though, the judge in this case ruled that the "Hot News" legal doctrine, first upheld nationally by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 1918 ruling, could be applied to the news organization's attributed headlines and snippets of reports from stock analysts at Morgan Stanley and other major investment banks.

The judge applied some relatively arbitrary standards to her ruling, suggesting that a 10ET daily curfew might be appropriate before TheFlyontheWall.com could start disseminating their "heard on the street" information about stock recommendations and that the situation could be reviewed in another year - presumably long enough for TheFlyontheWall.com to have disappeared from the scene or to have little option for legal challenges. See Barry's post for some great links and his own (attributed) snippets from some of the major players and commenters on this case.

There are many instances where news information services have tried to appropriate others' content in full to build real-time information services, so this challenge is not altogether new. There are, however, some odd wrinkles to this case that are worth thinking about in terms of their implications to news gathering and dissemination. To the best of my understanding:

The information regarding the bank analysts' recommendations is coming, presumably, from people who have received them. This is, as I recall, a relationship that is known in the news business as "having a source." If you have a problem with that relationship, you should speak to the source first and foremost.
The information disseminated is attributed to the creator of the stock report. In fact, it would not be valuable without knowing the source. This is the equivalent of a major newspaper attributing a breaking news story to a competitor- but still breaking it. Something is private until someone decides to make it public.
Except for small snippets, the research reports themselves are not being duplicated. The only thing that is really being disseminated is the news that the report is out and the general recommendation. This appears to be even less than the typical press releases that are disseminated by major securities ratings firms such as Standard & Poor's and Moody's, a public service. Note that these ratings agencies also sell their full research reports as a separate product.
While major banks do profit from their research reports, the sale of those reports has not been a major source of revenue for them. They are produced primarily to induce their clients to execute trades with them, from which they receive trade commissions. Their primary source of income comes from trading, not from distributing time-sensitive facts. In other words, even if what brokerages say is newsworthy they are not in the news business. Neither is TheFlyontheWall.com in the securities trading business.
The actual collection of the news of a stock report was a fairly trivial act by the banks in question. They had the reports, and they distributed them to their clients. The report itself may have taken effort and expense, but since they were fully aware of the report and fully in control of its release, the news of the report itself as as simple as posting it on a Web site or emailing it to a client.
The banks cite violation of their intellectual property rights. News of a research report collected under the guidelines of "fair use" is not the same thing as disseminating the report itself and its detailed rationale. Unless TheFlyontheWall.com is violating the terms of an agreement that they signed with the banks or a distributor to receive the research, IP rights don't really figure into this issue.
Given that news organizations such as Dow Jones already create elementized news feeds that enable electronic trading programs to interpret news items automatically to trigger trades after nearly instantaneous analysis by software, the claim that research reports distributed by email and Web sites is "hot news" that can move markets is highly suspect.

I could go on, but it seems to me likely that Judge Cote has misapplied the "Hot News" doctrine in several fundamental ways. Moreover, I think that it's increasingly likely that we will see the "Hot News" doctrine challenged in some fundamental ways in the years to come. In an age in which virtually anyone can mention to the world what they have heard on a news report via online services such as Twitter, the "pains and expense" required to acquire and disseminate news are at a fundamentally different point in the evolution of publishing technologies than they were in 1918. When the public owns the distribution channel, as the Internet now allows. the economics of news are quite different than they were then. I can sympathize for those in the news world who feel that their reports can give people private advantages, but for how long can the privacy of "news about news" be expected to hold up via today's technologies?

Stock analyst reports are meant to help their clients to jump in to a market for a security or to head for the exits - advice that may or may not be sound at the moment, but which, as a private news event, at least gives investors with major holdings a few moments to think about it before the general public reacts rightly or wrongly to the news of the report. This justifies the securities firms taking a position in these securities in the first place to facilitate trading, in theory. The real risk is not in the cost of the report, as cited in "hot news" court precedents, but in the report issuer's acquisition of securities at a particular price.

In general form the arguments being put forth by the major banks seem to be of about the same texture as those being put forth by major news organizations trying to restrain the use of headlines in online search engines and social media news services. When a gap in technologies creates an opportunity for private advantage in breaking news, then it seems that publishers have a clear opportunity to profit handsomely. This has been true from the time of Julius Reuter and his pigeons carrying stock quotes across a gap in a telegraph line, or even as far back as the Roman elites who paid their slaves to tell them what was happening in the heart of the city's political and business centers. But when those gaps no longer exist, then the advantage is not really about a greater good; it's really about trying to maintain business as usual when business needs to move on. Markets are all about finding private advantages, but if market participants don't consider them to be private advantages, then there's not much that brokerage houses can do.

I would be willing to stake the banks a few seconds in today's technologies before quibbling with services like TheFlyontheWall.com, but even in its heyday the major exchanges were rarely asking for more than fifteen minutes to delay stock quotes being distributed to the public. Now that stock markets are eager to get their quotes out to the public as soon as possible, it seems that the markets themselves have acknowledged that today's investors have a need for a level field of information if markets are to succeed. Finding liquidity in publicly held stocks just isn't that big a deal anymore and research itself will not fill the pinch that the brokerages are feeling as a result, no matter how they try to adjust the terms of its release. In the meantime, the "Hot News" doctrine may live on, but at this point it seems to be headed towards a head-on collision with the First Amendment. Until then, if banks and brokerages want their research to be private, then they should require secrecy from their clients, not from news organizations doing their job.

Enterprise Publishing and the "New Normal" in I.T. - Are You Missing the Trend?

2010-03-15T22:47:00.003-04:00

I've been mini-blogging quite a bit lately on Google Buzz - you can pick up my feed here if you'd like until I brain out a way to integrate it into my newsletter - so I have been a little quieter than usual on ContentBlogger. One of the more interesting items I've come across in buzzing is a great article from CIO Magazine that outlines the enormous value gap that's been arising in enterprise information technologies. With the latest economic downturn many major organizations began to look much more carefully at what kind of value that they were getting from their I.T. operations. In a nutshell, many organizations didn't like what they saw. Some of the key items revealed by CIO Magazine included:

Fewer than half of people in enterprises are using installed software effectively
60 percent of enterprise staffs blame their I.T. departments for a "lack of success"
In 2009, I.T.'s top priority is modernizing legacy applications
Walt Shill, head of the North American management consulting practice for Accenture, declared that "strategy, as we knew it, is dead." It's now all about operational flexibility and how fast businesses can seize opportunity. If strategies and forecasts have to change daily or weekly, then so be it.

Although this may cause enterprise information services companies jump for joy at first reading, I have to suggest that it should be a strong cause for alarm for them to consider. While this may mean that enterprises are going to rely upon external and information service providers more frequently to get the jobs done that their I.T. departments cannot get done, it also means that the trend towards agnosticism in finding solutions to information problems is only going to get stronger. Whatever platform, tool or information service can solve the job today will get used, as long as it's affordable and helps major organizations adapt to their needs. If you thought that your information products and services had branding problems already, hold on to your hat.

Perhaps more to the point the CIO Magazine article is also pointing towards a broader and more troubling trend for major enterprise information providers; will there in fact be a market for them once the economy recovers? Of course law firms, banks, manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and other major consumers of information services are not going to disappear overnight. But what seems to be happening is that many of the business processes through which these enterprises survived and thrived over the past several decades are shooting blanks. We already know that central budgets for buying enterprise information services are more challenged than ever; but as the economy recovers, it's not only doubtful that enterprises will be willing to stoke up on huge subscriptions, but also doubtful that they will be stoking up on big I.T. initiatives to integrate internal and external content sources.

The "agile enterprise" meme sold these days by Gartner - the same analyst firm that sold enterprises on the "everything in one big database" concept that they've spent so much money on the past twenty years - is in essence a reskinning of the problem to find ways to keep enterprise I.T. departments in the strategic loop in their organizations by telling them how to create "people-centric workplaces." Well, these managers have been working with people all of these years already, so I am not sure exactly what wand will be waved over their heads to make them able to respond to their needs better just because their managers demand it. Moreover, as the CIO magazine article points out, while their bosses may be deploying their workforce in office-less environments increasingly, their information assets are mostly oriented towards fixed locations and technology platforms and will have to remain that way until their organizations go completely mobile. In other words, they will have to spend both on "agile" I.T. initiatives and traditional initiatives just to keep everything I.T. afloat.

In other words, many of the fundamental concepts of IT that have been promoted for the past few decades no longer give businesses operational advantages but they have to keep spending on them anyway. The Web has accelerated the flow of information and services that can lead to effective decision-making far more rapidly than enterprise IT managers have been able to accommodate.

This is likely to leave less of the information pie available for spending on any specific set of external information resources. Information needs will shift more rapidly than ever, placing a premium on content services that can aggregate content from any source, be it content that a vendor has licensed or the latest information from key Web sites and feeds. Worse yet, what spending will be increasing is less likely than ever to be on large-scale information subscriptions. With search engines and social media tools enabling people to find the content that professionals need in more contexts than ever, there will be more pressure for both on-demand content purchases and content subscriptions more oriented towards specific people in specific work roles. Yes, workflow will be a key factor in servicing these clients, but the assumption that major enterprises will pay major monies for across-the-board access to workflow tools provided by a central vendor assumes that these organizations' tools and goals are constant enough to respond to such long-term investments.

Instead, enterprise information services are facing an era in which, like their customers, they will have to enable their content to show up on more platforms through more channels than ever before. Moreover, as with the growth of Salesforce.com, many solutions oriented at first towards small to medium enterprises are likely to scale up cost-effectively as platforms from which more targeted information services can be launched to meet the needs of larger enterprises. If agility favors smaller companies that lack the legacy of failed I.T. investments that larger organizations must still bear, then there will be increasing pressure on large organizations to adopt similar methods. We can see the beginnings of this trend as major organizations begin to embrace cloud computing resources, but that's just the start of a broader trend towards in-house enterprise I.T. resources dwindling rapidly over the next decade.

At the end of the day, this means one very important thing for enterprise information providers: if you thought that your business could be segregated from the Web as a whole, increasingly you'll be dead wrong. In an era in which business advantages go to those who can connect with people more efficiently rather than those who can segregate their information resources more effectively, the ability to have your information anywhere on any platform will become a mission-critical requirement for enterprise publishers. Yes, your customers are thinking workflow, but look carefully at where they're headed with those workflows. Few will have the luxury of it staying on the same platforms that they're on today over the next few years. It will be more important for you to be a part of those workflows wherever they're headed than to own them all. Feeds, APIs, on-the-fly aggregation and rapid service development tools will be more important than ever this year. It's the "new normal" for enterprise information services - one which means that business will be far from normal as the economy recovers.

My Notes from an Interview on Ebooks

2010-02-26T16:37:00.003-05:00

I just sent off some responses for an email-based interview as background for an upcoming article on ebooks in a magazine. I thought that I would share them with you in the raw here to open a discussion on ebooks that we can continue on Buzz or via the comments section of this blog. What are your thoughts about how publishers should approach ebooks?

Questions and my responses:

—It seems like the specifications for e-readers vary widely from device to device, and this year’s offerings look just as varied. Are there particular capabilities or specifications that publishers are really looking for from e-readers right now? What would an e-reader “silver bullet” device need to be capable of?

Some publishers are beginning to consider new content and features for ebooks, such as video interviews with authors and "hooks" into Web content such as social media services. In some instances publishers are hoping that such value-add content may allow them to command higher prices for ebooks than the prices that have dominated for ebooks from major publishers since the introduction of ebooks on Amazon's Kindle platform. To this end a platform such as Apple's new iPad is attractive to publishers, as it offers a device that can work well as a general computer and as a display mechanism for rights-protected content. But there will be relatively few titles that will be targeted for such enriched content. So what is the "magic bullet" platform for ebooks? The one that's been out there for more than fifteen years, I would argue: the Web. Ebooks will do best when they can be linked into Web content effectively, not necessarily on the device on which we like reading book content the best. With dozens of new kinds of mobile devices being introduced every year, now, it would be counterproductive for book publishers to try to target only a handful of devices for commercial success. It's best for ebook publishers to enable their content to "play well" on as many devices as possible and to ensure that what a reader does on one device can lead to a valuable experience for the same person on other devices that they use. For example, if I have just finished reading a chapter in a book about the state of business and economics in China, that's a great opportunity for book publishers to be able to apply metadata and keywords relevant to that chapter to other services that I as a reader may use. Some of those may be integrated into the ebook reader directly, but I'd probably appreciate them in a private email or messaging service delivered on a platform where I can consume or purchase other forms of content easily. Publishers should think of the ebook itself as just one item in a systematic approach to engaging audiences interested in specific authors and topics. Some of that approach may be delivered best via a publisher or a bookseller on their own portal, but their metadata may lead to rich experiences on partner platforms as well, triggered by contextual advertising network technologies or other technologies.

—On a related topic, are there specific capabilities that consumers are now looking for?

One of the key items that consumers ask for consistently is the ability to call ebook content their own and to be able to manipulate it the way that they would other forms of electronic content. Being able to cut, paste, share and annotate book content is key to enhancing its value in the eyes of book-reading audiences. These types of features, though, are the ones that publishers are least likely to offer to consumers without some form of rights management technology controls. While publishers have a right to defend their copyrights effectively, they have to consider carefully how content reuse and sharing can enhance the value of their products. O'Reily Media, for example, is pushing to have DRM controls removed from ebook content that they distribute, so that it can be used more effectively in collaborative environments. Eliminating DRM can also accelerate the ability of ebook content to be used by its purchaser on any number of technology platforms. This will accelerate also the likelihood that someone will actually read a book that they've purchased. In doing so, that reader is more likely to follow up with more purchases of similar content or value-add content associated with that title.

When you think of it, a paper edition of a book has nothing more than the copyright symbol to protect the legal rights associated with its content. Why would publishers want to frustrate consumers who have already demonstrated via music download purchases that they need the ability to transport content that they've purchased to new types of devices easily without the frustration of dealing with incompatible DRM systems? Ebook services need to enforce copyright but also enable the value of ebooks in as many contexts as possible. DRM services as designed today make that relatively hard to do. What is really needed for ebooks is a built-in ecommerce service that enables both the purchase of ebooks on a person-to-person distribution basis and that enables other types of ecommerce for related content and experiences. For example, if someone forwarded me a link to an ebook for possible purchasing or sharing, I should be able to be presented information about attending upcoming book talks by the author near me automatically on an opt-in basis or related titles or videos that are available. In other words, we can use the offering of content sharing as a revenue-generating experience from many angles.

—Are there any particular e-reader devices coming out in the near future (or that came out recently) that really stick out to you as being potentially influential devices?

Apple's iPad is bound to be an influential ebook reading device, if but because it introduces color formatting to ebooks in a user-friendly design, but I think that the most influential ebook technology will not be any one specific device but the ePub ebook publishing standard. This standard is gaining wide acceptance as a common format for ebooks, although rights management services may differ from publisher to publisher for ebooks published using that standard. Cross-platform standards will help to make ebooks accessible on more devices more rapidly than any one "magic bullet" device can afford publishers. The Nook ebook reader released by Barnes and Noble features ebook content published in ePub format and has been a very popular unit so far. Other devices such as Plastic Logic's Que device are promising advanced touch-screen devices for displaying ebooks and other types of electronic documents, but they are very expensive compared to consumer devices. Probably the most important devices are mobile phones, which are the most plentiful media-displaying devices in the world today. If you can reach book-reading audiences on mobile phones, then you don't have a very effective ebook strategy.

—Are there any specific markets where ebooks have the potential to make a big impact, yet still remain more or less unexplored?

Ebooks open up the possibility of both new ecommerce models and the re-introduction of older commmercial models for books in new ways. For example, in the 19th century it was fairly common for books to appear bit by bit in periodicals. I think that it's worth considering how popular authors may prove to be a source of subscription revenues for book publishers via Web portals for periodicals sponsoring such bit-by-bit access to a book, or even via email or direct downloads onto mobile devices. Ebooks are also just beginning to touch on some of the potential for creating new opportunities in packaging content for educational markets.

—Is Apple’s agency model of ebook selling the new standard? Does Amazon have any hope of holding onto its retail/wholesale model, and maintaining control of the pricing of ebooks on its website?

I think that we will continue to see a mix of retail/wholesale and agency models for ebook distribution, but publishers have a lot to gain from the agency model if they choose their partners wisely. Amazon in a sense has an agency model built in to its model in the sense that it enables people to embed "kiosks" for selling books in Web pages. Whether its an agency model or a retail/wholesale model, the important thing for publishers to do is to make people aware of books in as many contexts as possible where people are likely to have interest in purchasing them. Helping Web site developers and individuals with their own social media presences to "dress up" Web pages with information about and from ebooks will get them in front of people at the times at which buyers are going to be most likely to have their attention.

—Related question: If the agency model were to become the new standard, what effect would this have on ebook pricing in general? Are ebooks going to become more expensive all around? And would higher prices benefit the industry in the long run, or potentially harm it?

Publishers are looking for better margins and retail prices from ebooks in general. While the agency model has been held up as a tool to enable better prices and margins, it's not clear that enabling publishers to set their own prices via the agency model is going to support prices and margins in the long run that much better than the retail/wholesale model. The agency model also opens the door to price competition between publishers, as they seek the right balance between unit sales and margins. So it's possible that what we'll see in the agency model is a handful of books at higher price points and a majority of books at lower price points. The main problem that book publishers face is not competition from Amazon or ever other book publishers but rather content that's been born on the Web - including ebooks that have been developed through online services. By managing information about what Web-native ebook content is most popular, this new breed of publisher may develop to become "good enough" alternatives to major publishers that many ebook consumers will be glad to consume their ebooks at price points that will be much lower - and, often enough, better integrated into online content. I think that higher prices via the agency model are fine for established book publishers in the short term, but if they don't use those improved margins to invest heavily in digital-first marketing strategies then they are going to squander the real opportunities to develop profitable ebook publishing strategies for the long run.

—It seems like the multiple competing mp3 marketplaces quickly collapsed into just two or three players as the digital music market matured. Are we going to see the same thing happen with ebooks?

Just as the commonly accepted MP3 file format flattened out the music player marketplace, so will the ePub format make it harder for devices to develop proprietary appeal based on file formats alone. In the long run that's a good thing for publishers, since it means that ebooks will be useful on billions of devices rather than millions. Book publishers need to be ready to accept that this is beneficial and to prepare revenue models that are designed to maximize the benefits of rapid and broad dissemination of ebooks, taking into the account the potential power of viral marketing. What could be better than to have someone chatting about a book that they loved at a social gathering and to enable people who hear their praise to experience that book in part immediately via a tap of two mobile phones, as used in the Bump mobile application? Book publishers need to trigger sales based on social interactions far more aggressively - search alone cannot help them to build online revenues effectively.

—E-Ink, color LCD, and other display techs like Pixel Qi: what are the pros and cons of the various display technologies? What seems like the most likely way forward for the e-reader industry?*

While eInk has definite advantages under specific circumstances, such as bright sunlight and limited battery recharging opportunities, the increasing life of mobile device batteries and increasing efficiencies of backlit touch mobile displays are making eInk increasingly a niche device play. The real problem with eInk and similar technologies is not the technologies themselves but the demographics of the audiences that they serve. eInk-like technologies are oriented towards people used to print materials. The younger generation of readers has grown up rarely using paper for reading in general, so being able to duplicate a paper-based reading experience, be it in book, magazine or newspaper format, is far less important to them. Paper-analogous technologies tend to be more important to publishing executives stocked with employees who have skillsets most readily adapted to print-formatted materials. Touch-sensitive displays are particularly appealing to publishing executives for similar reasons, but these technologies will benefit Web-native materials as much as they will traditional media materials, so there's no strong reason to believe that they can develop unique market advantages through touch interfaces either.

—How do you feel about hybrid devices like the enTourage eDGe and iPad, which position themselves as being somewhere between an e-reader and a netbook? Are one-purpose e-readers like the Kindle becoming a thing of the past, or is there still potential there?

I think that there's still definitely a place for limited-function ebook readers. Books are a very personal experience for a reader. Book readers tend to use books as an opportunity to spend one-on-one "quality time" with a particular author, tuning out other stimuli to concentrate on what is usually a very carefully prepared manuscript. With that said, though, people find themselves shifting from a book-reading frame of mind to their online frame of mind fairly rapidly and fluidly. For these situations, having an ebook on a multi-function platform can be very beneficial to publishers, as it may allow them to take those moments of transition to put their book content into more contexts at a time when a reader is most motivated to do so. Publishers have been drawn to simple ebook readers initially because they feel that this replicates their existing relationship with readers more effectively - and they do, by and large. But in limiting their vision of their relationship with readers to their existing models, in part to prevent duplication or sharing of book content, they have shut out books from the billions of people who interact with content and with one another every day on the Web. Standalone ebook readers will continue to have appeal, but these devices must enable readers to interact with the Web through other Web-enabled devices more effectively. For example, though I may not want to do social media sharing of a passage from an e-book via a Kindle or a Nook ebook reader directly, I should be able to build a queue of excerpted passages that I can then manipulate via a mobile phone application to share with others.

ContentBuzz: Sirius XM Posts Profit, Its First Since Merger

2010-02-26T08:59:00.002-05:00

Yes, recovered from near bankruptcy, but still dealing with a bankrupt business model. Subscription satellite radio is dead in the face of subscription Web radio services such as Pandora and Last.fm. You have to literally go 22,000 miles into outer space to try to find technology rare enough to think if a "walled garden" that can compete with mobile Web delivery. That's not to say that there aren't good uses for satellite broadcast services. I'd suggest that Sirius - or whoever gets access to its frequencies - consider real-time broadcast services that complement the Web content that more and more people can get in their mobile devices, perhaps providing data, video and music downloads that would otherwise be too data-intensive for mobile networks. Or, who's to say, perhaps, print-on-demand subscription newspapers.

Sirius Posts Profit Since Merger in 2009 - NYTimes.com

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About ContentBuzz: Integrating Google Buzz into ContentBlogger

2010-02-25T16:50:00.002-05:00

As those who follow me on Twitter may know, most of my posts of news headlines these days come by way of Google's new Buzz social media service. When you click on my links in Twitter or, on ContentBlogger, via the headlines window, you'll visit my Buzz posts that have my more detailed headline commentary. Many of these commentaries aren't as detailed as my ContentBlogger posts, but they are timely insights, nevertheless. Moreover, you'll be able to take advantage of the Buzz commenting service to share your thoughts with others on both the news items and my commentary. You're not obliged to have a Google Accounts login to view these comments, so I consider this a more open alternative to Facebook commentary, and one that is free of some of the commercial and personal "noise" that one finds on the Facebook service.

From time to time on ContentBlogger you may now see items prefixed with the term "ContentBuzz." These will be items that I have cherry-picked from my Buzz stream for your consideration. I'll include a link to the original news item that prompted the post along with a link to the item in Buzz, where you may contribute your own comments - or, if you prefer, you can continue to leave comments on ContentBlogger. Hopefully I can get this merged in more effectively in the weeks ahead - any and all ideas appreciated - but for now, be aware that there's a lot more commentary coming your way.

Alternatively, to subscribe to a feed of links to my Buzz posts with headlines, click here.

ContentBuzz: iPad purchase plans sluggish, AdMob survey finds

2010-02-25T16:00:00.002-05:00

Well, this may be an example of a poorly targeted survey returning data that creates its own reality. So one in six iPhone users intend to purchase an iPad. Well, is that so bad? It means that some people already heavily invested in mobile touch devices may actually go out and purchase a second one. That's not necessarily bad news. What the survey really doesn't tell us is how much the iPad will motivate purchasers who have yet to obtain an advanced mobile phone. In theory, that's supposed to be one of the key iPad appeal points, right? You know, get mom and dad who have never used a PC to cozy up to this magazine-sized gizmo? What the survey tells me is that leading technology adopters are having a hard time understanding why they'd buy an iPad - which may affect the breadth of the buzz that would push people who follow the leaders to consider a purchase. But that may not say anything about people who don't listen to those leaders. We'll see, but my guess is that by the time the iPad launches the buzz on competitive devices will be ramping up.

iPad purchase plans sluggish, AdMob survey finds | VentureBeat

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The Rebirth of Print: Time for the New Aggregation Plays to Take Off

2010-02-08T11:40:00.005-05:00

Somewhere in the world today a printing press operation is preparing to go dark. Mind you, it's not a universal phenomenon; in markets such as India, where a burgeoning middle class is hungry for news and not yet equipped with an abundance of electronic media sources, print media is actually growing. Scholarly publishers are still doing well their premium journals and custom print for B2B and consumer markets is thriving. But in many developed media markets print operations are struggling to stay alive, with 2010 expected to be a year in which newsstands begin to display significantly fewer titles. Barnes and Noble, with its Nook ebook reader, offers free wireless in their stores as a bundled part of the service, trying to encourage both browsers and coffee-drinkers to make more use of their "big box" stores real estate. It's a Web-eat-paper world, and the publishing industry is wearing newsprint shorts.

Yet the broader picture of print is that print publishing technology has never been more sophisticated, cost-effective and capable. Many of the same technologies that enable the Web also enable printing presses to deliver mass-customized printing runs, allowing wholesale book distributors such as Ingram to deliver profitable print runs for titles with as few as two ordered units. Mass print customization also allows ever more effective tailored marketing materials, allowing highly customized color post cards, brochures and other high-value communications tools at very competitive prices. In short, print rocks, if you do the right things with it.

The wrong thing to do with print is to expect to do the same thing again and again and expect different results. That is, as many will tell you, the definition of insanity. Unfortunately, this is the insanity that grips much of the B2B and consumer publishing industry. I paid a short visit to the recent Professional Scholarly Publishing 2010 conference in Washington, DC, though far less time than the event deserved. I was encouraged by the American Institute of Physics winning a PROSE award for their work to advance scholarly publishing through its Web-enabled services. Yet at the same time I was confronted by a surprisingly young attendee who had a hard time getting his head around the definition of publishing that I had used in my book Content Nation, which embraces social media as a key form of publishing. He saw this concept as "too broad" a definition of publishing. In spite of many advances in electronic publishing, many people at the heart of the publishing industry still see the traditional business model and functions of publishing as the "real" publishing industry. You can see this attitude in many of the efforts to adopt electronic publishing platforms that enable content to look more like print publications, as if waiting for the Web to give up its "defects" in failing to adapt to their ways of doing business.

Well, certainly the Web is still a relatively young form of publishing technology, in spite of its rapid advances. But it is not the Web that has failed publishing: it is publishing that has failed publishing. It's only as red ink has flowed liberally in the past couple of years that many publishers have made the hard decisions to adjust their staffing levels to the revenues that they can expect in a Web-first world. There are simply far too may substitute information sources available to the average person that can be discovered via search and social media tools to justify the dedicated brand approach to publishing that most publishers use as their fundamental business premise. If "a brand is what a brand does," then most publishing brands just don't do what Web publishing outlets such as Google and Bing do. If that "doing" doesn't align with the classic "dos" of publishing but still satisfies markets, that doesn't mean that it's not publishing.

This brings us back to print, where, in spite of the capabilities of mass print customization, most publishers insist on creating print artifacts on a mass scale that are in essence the same. Yes, you get some zip code-level tailoring of ads, sometimes, and perhaps some regional content, but it still isn't dawning on most publishers that the real opportunities in print are in creating highly customized artifacts on a massive scale. These are still seen by most publishers as "ancillary revenues," much as they saw Web operations as a little bit of gravy on top of the meat of their print revenues. But now that Web revenues have to sustain them more as their meat in many instances, most publishers have failed to position their print operations as highly targeted and highly profitable value-add operations, Instead, they continue to seek out ever-slimmer markets for mass-produced print content, either resigning themselves to smaller audiences or seeking out larger audiences with ever-slimmer slices of least-common-denominator content that offers little long-term brand value either as a product or as a service.

The answer to this problem can be seen in a now-familiar model: Google. Instead of trying to assemble a portal of perfectly curated content for specific audiences to consume over an indefinite period of time, Google decided to focus on search as a tool to curate content tailored to specific people's needs at specific moments. Each search result is a publication, with its own editorial rules, tailored ads and features. It happens to be a publication assembled from any number of sources, selected based on the editorial recommendations of people using content on the Web, via Google's ever-changing PageRank algorithms.

The question is, why haven't publishers awoken to the opportunities to take a Google-like approach to print? Just as the advantages of search technologies are largely wasted on relatively small collections of content, so are the advantages of today's mass-customizable printing technologies wasted on relatively small collections of content collected by a particular publishing house. The Web exists, and will, in all likelihood, never cease to exist as a medium that reduces distribution costs and speeds to near-zero levels.

This means that print as a platform must adapt to Web economics to deliver optimal results. To do this, print media must adopt a Google-like model of source-agnostic content aggregation tuned to the needs of tiny and/or individual audiences. In other words, just as search engines have enabled people to aggregate content from anywhere that meets their needs, so must print media operations if they are to return high value. Some service, somewhere, will enable people to print any collection of content from whatever source in whatever form suits them best in whatever quantity suits them best.

Some might say that copyright concerns stand in the way of such an approach, that this would be the equivalent of enabling anyone to print up content willy-nilly. Not so. What really stands in the way of this happening is an antiquated sense of "this is what publishing does." If publishing in the classic sense is getting value from copyrighted content, then simply tune that classic model more effectively to the available channels. In this instance, that tuning would require a more flexible approach to content licensing. Today, content licensing is still largely a person-to-person effort, requiring business development specialists or marketing managers, legal departments, and days, weeks or months of process time required to enable one publisher to use another publisher's content, be it in print or electronic form. But if today's printing technologies have the ability to assemble content with Google-like agnosticism and speed in a way that's tailored to very specific needs, then it is content licensing, not copyright, that stands in the way of more effective print revenues.

Thinking of both existing licensing technologies from organizations such as Copyright Clearance Center and iCopyright as well as emerging technologies from organizations such as Journalism Online, we are likely on the verge of a new convergence of licensing and printing technologies that can revolutionize what appears in print. This does not mean that print as a whole will surge back as a primary profit center, though. In the long run, the time that it takes to spool out pages of print will never be a match for the Web's ability to spin out tailored text and multimedia content sets instantly and effortlessly. But it does mean that the wide availability of custom printing technologies and the wide availability of people with professional printing skills figuring out what to do next in the aftermath of the current print apocalypse is likely to fuel the Google-like print revolution of mass-customized print content delivery no matter what. The main question is whether it will be Google taking on that challenge on a large scale or someone else.

The other key question, though, is whether publishers are going to balk at the notion of massively automated content licensing for tailored publications. Given history and publishers' attachment to the notion of their brands being what they want them to be rather than what their audiences want them to be, it's likely that many will balk at the idea. In that period of balking, it's likely that widely available substitute sources of printable content will work their way into these opportunities - leaving established publishers as also-rans yet again, though this time in their native medium.

Publishers failed to optimize their operations for Google-like content searching in time to take advantage of the in-the-moment opportunities available to them, in part because they were afraid that it was a technology that was in conflict with their publications' Web sites. The same sort of tensions seem to exist with customized printing and typical print editorial operations - and the same opportunities await publishers that tackle them proactively with aggressive automated content licensing strategies.

High-value purchasing and advertising opportunities await those publishers that begin to take highly customized printing opportunities more aggressively. Just as Web revenues looked like a puny investment early on, so does custom publishing look more like a sideline than a main line of revenue to many publishers. But in a world in which Google has become the center stage of most of the world's content access, it is imperative that publishers look more seriously at how their print publishing models are affected directly by the same potential for agnostic content aggregation - and leverage them as rapidly as possible for high-margin revenues.

Noodling With the Nook: First Impressions of the Barnes & Noble Ebook Reader

2010-01-31T16:01:00.016-05:00

My wife was bugging me before Christmas for a nice toy that I would like as a gift, so I thought that it couldn't hurt to get Barnes & Noble's new Nook ebook reader, which, at the time, was due for delivery before the holidays. With a hybrid eInk display for text and Android-driven touch interface for navigation combined with ePub-formatted documents, at least it would be a "walking the talk" gizmo that reflected how I saw what publishers should be doing with ebook distribution.

Unfortunately on Christmas day I got a nice new traveling case and screen protector, but only a placekeeper for the unit itself, which finally arrived the day that the Apple iPad was launched. Hmm, interesting timing. There's really no comparison, though, between the "whats" and the "whys" of an ebook reader like the Nook and a device like the iPad. The nook is all about simplifying and in some ways enhancing the process of relating to printed material, where the iPad is about the multi-sense world of Web media, with books a nice part of its capabilities but one not necessarily likely to appeal to many of its core Web-raised customers.

The Nook definitely has a leg-up overall on its Amazon Kindle rival, in the sense that it combines both the sophistication of a touch interface with a very simple and enjoyable page-turning experience via its eInk interface. I had my doubts about this combination, but, while not perfect, it works out pretty nicely overall. You can swipe your finger across a row of book, newspaper and magazine titles like you would on a touch-screen phone interface, tap once and start digging in. A second or two after your text is displayed, the color touch interface powers down and you're enjoying crisp eInk text, which only improves its readability in bright daylight. That's a boon when on a beach or in a sunny train or plane seat where moving to a better spot is not an option.

The physical controls of the Nook are bone simple. An "on" button on the top of the unit, a bar between the eInk display and the color touch display that activates the touch screen, and page-turning buttons on either side of the screen. The page-turning buttons are just about perfect and a joy to use. Each page-turning button has a pinhole-sized protrusion in its middle, which makes it a no-eyes procedure to get your fingers in the right place, and no edges. It's a seamless case, so there's no place for dirt, dust or sand to get into the controls or to spoil the smooth look of the unit. Best of all, the buttons are repeated on either side - a huge plus for righty-lefty usability and for when you get in those wierd positions that feel great put that put your hands at odd angles.

Downloads of new and updated materials are smooth and effortless, with simple and well-designed procedures. It's a no-brainer to use for all of its basic functions. Searching the Barnes and Noble store is simple and easy via a touch keyboard, which overall is no worse than Kindle's weird Chiclet-style physical keyboard but has rather slow typing response and an early-release Android look and feel that leaves something to be desired compared to the Android-based Nexus One phone that hangs next to me most of the time. Barnes and Noble also provides its own content via "The Daily," a daily newsletter that includes a listing of your latest content downloads. You can accelerate download performance by powering up your Nook on your local wireless network, but it will drain your batteries fairly rapidly. Without a wireless LAN connection or a lot of use of the color display, your batteries can last for days, typically, since the eInk display is not powered once a page is displayed.

While I am certainly open to reading book content on powered displays, I really like this "off" nature of eInk. After a day of staring into backlit computer and phone displays, there's an "unplugged" aspect to the Nook that fits the nature of book reading nicely. Reading books is about sharing some "quality time" with the thoughts of another person. The simplicity of the Nook encourages me to tune out many of my typical daily electronic distractions and to focus on one relationship. Want Web browsing? Go to your PC or phone, please. The only other significant function of the Nook is its ability to play downloaded music, which is a nice complement to reading, if I am willing to tax the batteries a bit. Downloading tunes from a PC is easy via the Nook's standard USB cable, which doubles as the charging cord when plugged into a special AC converter. Economy of design and purpose is the theme with Nook, and overall it delivers on that theme well.

However, the Nook is far from perfect. The delay in getting this unit to market was doubtless getting some of the product development kinks out, some of which still shine through. The most glaring problem with the Nook is its overall performance. Loading large books for reading can take several seconds in many instances, and some large ebooks did not load at all (possibly due to being formatted an older proprietary format not compatible with Nook). Page-turning is quick and smooth enough and bookmarking functions simple enough, but the bookmarks themselves cannot be given easy-to-use human names; you're stuck with a geekish, URL-like name based on chapter numbers that is hard to understand. At times it seems that bookmarks were not being saved. The note-taking capability on the Nook is decent but nominal at best, not something that's likely to satisfy a real student or scribbler often. You can bump up font sizes in the eInk display, but there's only three settings overall for font sizes. An extra-large font setting would be nice for those days when your eyes have had far too much work. Combine these rough spots with the touch keyboard issues, and it's a fair bet that the Nook needs a newer version of Android ASAP to improve performance and a few interface tweaks to boot.

And while the online store interface is smooth and features millions of books from Google Books, Barnes and Noble's own ebook title offerings are still a little bit thin; you'll get most major titles, but don't expect too much peripheral content beyond Google's offerings. Some of the ecommerce for newspapers and magazines is still a little rough also. The online store, for example, lists The New York Times as a $13.99 subscription. For, what, a month? A year? It doesn't say. The subscription provides only a subset of NYT information, which is a bit annoying, but you get at least the highlighted stories that you're likely to want to spend time with in an "unplugged" mode on the Nook.

Finally there's the color touch display, which feels comfortable to use if you're used to touch-screen phones and is generally a pleasure to use, with easy-to-use menus and features that are well-designed overall. The main annoyance here, though, is that after a day of touching the screen of my Nexus One, it feels kind of awkward to look at content in the eInk display that's controlled in the touch display below it. A full-touch display such as in Plastic Logic's new Que document reader would be ideal, but I am not interested in hauling that much hardware around. A Nook slips comfortably into my parka pocket and is not hogging up any significant space on the coffee table next to my favorite reading chair. And again, since book-reading is about getting into the words more than fiddling with features, I am willing to live with the compromise.

I am not really sure that you can call the Nook clearly superior to the Amazon Kindle as a machine, but it's definitely a sleeker and more flexible unit overall with better design and more potential for improvement via its Android underpinnings, as well as more potential to get your content to play nicely in other ebook readers via its use of the ePub formatting standard. I was unable to test out the book-sharing feature yet with another Nook user, but this is certainly an important first that deserves at least a nod of appreciation for the many efforts that Barnes and Noble has put in to replicating some of the most important parts of the book-reading experience. Nook's titles are a little pricier than those found in the Kindle store, but that's a small price to pay for the ability to use content on other ePub-compatible readers. Lock-in to the Kindle system is the price to pay for it's cheaper titles, a price that I am not willing to pay.

And I suppose that's the point of the Nook at the end of the day. It's a great little reader that will allow one to prepare for any number of great new ebook-displaying products that will be coming out in the years ahead. With the Kindle, or, for that matter, materials on the iPad purchased via Apple's online store, you're likely to have a more restricted range of technology options moving forward. It's not clear that standalone ebook readers will be with us much longer, but for those wanting simple functionality in a rugged unit with great battery life that will be highly usable in any number of conditions that would be daunting to many advanced display units, the Nook offers a good reading experience and the ability to escape without hauling around a pound of books - or Jeff Bezos' business model hangups, either. That's good enough for me today, at least.

iPad Launches. Winner: ePub and Web Standards

2010-01-27T15:05:00.026-05:00

With the media industry salivating over Apple CEO Steve Jobs' announcement of the new iPad as if it were awaiting an injection of Viagra, you'd think that the machine would do everything except change a flat tire. Well, the hoopla is over, and the iPad is...a large iPhone, essentially. Nice, sexy, though functionally not really a breakthrough device compared to the impact that the original iPhone had on mobile markets. However, then the other shoes started to drop after the klieg lights on the announcement stage began to cool off a bit. The two key factors: price and e-book packaging.

First, the price. At $499, the iPad is coming out at a blow-away price point that will make its purchase an attractive and simple alternative for many people who would otherwise be considering a PC or Mac as their next step-up from a mobile phone - or a slightly more pricey unlocked Google Nexus One superphone. This matters in a big way to global markets, where billions of people who are experiencing Web content for the first time on mobile phones will be looking for their next step-up device for content consumption.

Keep your eyes open also for possible subsidies on this price point as mobile network-enabled versions of the iPad hit the market. Just as King Gillette figured out how to give away razor handles to sell disposable razor blades, Apple will find many ways to lower the cost of hardware acquisition to lock people into their software and ecommerce services. Since the iPad technology and apps are largely warmed-over iPhone components, one assumes that not much R&D was required to launch this model, so there must be a good amount of "wiggle room" in the iPad's pricing for such deals.

Its aggressive price point also pegs the iPad as a highly attractive alternative for educational markets, the original market that launched Apple's growth years ago as a scrappy alternative to then-crude PCs. Given the average college student's expenditures on textbooks, an iPad equipped with ebook versions of those texts that they can use for most other schoolwork along with their favorite entertainment will be a very appealing option. It's also a price point that pretty much resigns most existing ebook readers to also-ran status as cost-effective platforms for people on the go. What do you want at your train or airline seat as a light PC alternative, an ebook reader or something that can also play movies and help you get some emails done? Problem solved.

The other factor that is very appealing on the face of it is Apple's decision to deploy an iTunes-like eBook store with content formatted in the ePub open-standards ebook and emagazine format championed by the International Digital Publishing Forum for several years. Having an ebook reading software package that will, in theory, be compatible with content purchased from any ecommerce service using ePub-formatted content will be a great boost to ebook, enewspaper and emagazine sales. However, the caveat with Apple's use of ePub standards is that ePub leaves the door open for the optional use of proprietary DRM tools, such as those used in Apple's iTunes store and Barnes and Noble's online ebook outlet.

If you're happy using iTunes on whatever platform you're using, then chances are Jeff Bezos over at Amazon just bought himself a huge headache after having alienated publishers with onerous revenue share agreements to get content in Amazon's proprietary Kindle format. I've said it often that the proprietary Kindle format was a dead end, but no more so than today. In a sense I wonder if the publishing industry went along with the proprietary Kindle early on as a ruff of sorts to keep the combination of Amazon, Google and open standards from running away with the entire premium content ballgame while they developed a more palatable alternative. That may be giving the people involved too much credit, but it's curious. Perhaps it's not too late to dust off some of those "GoogleZon" memes, after all.

Now that the book industry and other media producers have an alternative to Amazon's stranglehold on them, it will be interesting to see whether they will find themselves in a new Catch-22 situation. Have they run from Amazon's dominance only to discover that the grip of Apple's DRM on ePub-enabled content winds up being an even worse stranglehold in the long run? Time will tell, as will the details that unfold over the next few weeks regarding the iPad's compatibility with premium content purchased from non-Apple outlets. If it's easy-peasy to pull up content purchased elsewhere in ePub format on the iPad, then publishers will have done themselves a great favor. If they drank too much of Steve Jobs' Kool-Aid and allowed it to be hard to use other DRMed or non-DRMed content via Apple's ePub reader, then it will be a more-of-the same dilemma for publishers overall.

While the media industry seems ready to declare Steve Jobs the next David Sarnoff, their "homeboy" genius of content, technology and human insight, the overall reaction to the iPad by consumers so far seems to be warm but not necessarily hot. If you love Apple products already, then you're probably going to plunk down your five Franklins as soon as you can. If you're a person who's already equipped with a decent PC, an iPhone or Android-enabled mobile device, then you're probably saying, "Oh, a big iPhone, neat" - and then going back to surfing the Web. iPad as a gizmo is nifty, but it's not grown new capabilities that people haven't seen before in one form or another. If you're an enterprise I.T. manager, you're probably saying, "Oh, brother, another device to deal with, thank goodness it's basically just an iPhone" - which may simplify adoption at schools and universities especially.

And if you're a book or magazine publisher, then you're probably feeling pretty good at the moment - but then, perhaps, realizing that Jobs spent most of his demo showing how great it was that the iPad rendered Web pages and YouTube movies so well. Sorry, dear publishers, the Web is not going to disappear just because there's a handy new netbook that does DRM the way that you want it to. The iPad will definitely be a boost for print-formatted electronic content, but this is highly unlikely to address key revenue and cost issues that are ultimately the enemies of many publishers. By the time that iPads start coming out in March (and in April in mobile network-enabled configurations) , competitors will be that much further down the road towards their own cost-effective tablet and touchpad interfaces that are likely to be committed to open standards more aggressively.

Yes, this means that Google is still very much in the mix for premium content. Google's Chrome OS will be available in the next year, and rest assured that this next-generation computer operating system will have some deployments that will be remarkably iPad-like. Already its Android operating system is the basis for Barnes and Noble's Nook ebook reader being shipped in a few days, equipped with ePub-formatted content. Could this alliance form the basis for another end-run around Amazon for book and magazine publishers? It seems that not too long from now we will start thinking of Google and Apple the way that we used to think of television and radio networks, with Microsoft striving to get its own new-generation devices into the mix as well.

In the meantime, there are TiVos, Playstations, mobile phones, ereaders and a galaxy of other gizmos that will keep both the iPad and any other particular device from being a "magic bullet" that will solve the distribution problems of media companies definitively. All hail Jobs, today's knight in shining armor for a content industry still struggling with the realities of the Web some fifteen-plus years after the launch of HTML-based graphic browsing on the Internet. Then let's look at how many gray hairs some of us have gained since that time - and accept that the iPad is just another beautiful, functional tool from Apple that cannot stave off the effects of the Web indefinitely. Even with Viagra, you have to come down to life size eventually, after all.

SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010: The Future of the Content Industry

2010-01-26T09:04:00.028-05:00

Yes, there is a future for the content industry in media and enterprise markets, and the Software and Information Industry Association Content Division has been charting it for several years now at its Information Industry Summit events in New York City. This year's IIS is drawing more than 300 executives from leading content and technology companies, a good crowd in the middle of a dismal economy. No surprise, given the star-studded line-up of speakers that was assembled by the Content Division this year. You might say that these people are documenting a future that people have been talking about for many years and that finally arrived - a future in which the Web dominates the dialog on profits and products on a daily basis, even as high-value premium products punch through to define new opportunities for value in enterprise and media publishing. Key to that trend is the rise of technology companies that are driving change in major publishing organizations, which enable publishers to define new relationships with their clients. Are all of these publishers ready for this ever-present "future?" Let's see what these experts have to say. I will be posting on our events blog throughout the day and linking the posts to this entry. You may also find my conference Twitter messages (and retweets) here.

AppFail: Amazon Opens Up Kindle, Only to Expose Its Flaws

2010-01-22T11:10:00.005-05:00

Amazon Kindle has always been an odd duck of a platform, a proprietary e-book reader that bundled wireless access with a device that offered a very limited range of functionality. But as the first major e-book platform with an integrated ecommerce function, it gained early followers and a lot of media hoopla. Enter Apple, which is trying to become the default delivery mechanism for a galaxy of mainstream media content sources via its soon-to-be-released whiz-bang iSlate platform, including book content from Harper Collins. All of a sudden last year's bright, shiny thing from Amazon seems not so bright and shiny after all, prompting a late move by Amazon to open up its Kindle platform more aggressively to software developers.

As noted by CNET, though, this is way too little at a time in which software developers are inundated with platforms begging for appplications to make them stand out from the crowd. To boot, premium applications will have to pay a healthy chunk of their revenues to Amazon, presumably to cover the cost of downloads, which is bundled into the Amazon service from a consumer perspective. Kindle readers on iPhones and other platforms may help to buoy Amazon's overall e-book strategy, but it is highly doubtful that the Kindle itself has much of a lifespan as a multi-functional content delivery platform. In turn, this puts pressure on Amazon's overall sales picture, as a generation attuned to iTunes downloads may be more willing to add books to that list of items to cram into their portable devices than to shift to downloads on the Kindle platform that's centered around yesterday's content formats.

The vision of the Kindle was myopic from day one, too bent on luring timid publishers into the e-book era before others became premium e-book download kings. While this did leverage Amazon into an early advantageous position for e-books, its focus on a pioneering device locked it in to formats and concepts that reflected the fears and limitations of the book publishing industry more than it did the realities of a Web-enabled world of a multitude of content formats, publishers and delivery channels. Its onerous cut of Kindle e-book revenues also gave publishers a good reason to work with other platform providers to get a better piece of the action. The net result is that Amazon is in strong danger of becoming a book distribution channel that fails to lock in a new generation of book readers on emerging mobile platforms.

With Apple setting itself up as a primary download competitor, the question becomes whether Amazon wants to continue to try to be the Microsoft of e-books via its proprietary approach or to become the Google of e-books in response to this challenge. In other words, is Amazon willing to admit that it made a huge mistake in not aligning itself more with a cross-platform, open standards approach in preparation for the inevitable platform battles that required stronger technology partners? There may not be a black-and-white answer to this question, but clearly Amazon needs to focus more on channel strategies and content publisher relations than on multi-function platform development. This is especially important in light of media companies that manage multi-channel products - "Avatar" lives as a movie, as a game, and, inevitably, as videos, books and so on. Amazon should be focusing more on the question of how to be a download king for content of all kinds rather than a gizmo king.

The logical leading partner in this would seem to be Google, with its emerging Android and Chrome OS platforms, options that weren't on the table in any serious way a couple of years ago but which are now coming to market aggressively. Microsoft will certainly be in the mix also, but it's playing catch-up in mobile platforms at a time in which Google is preparing to soar past many established vendors with its cross-platform Android operating system. In February the Barnes & Noble Nook e-book reader will be the first model delivered to consumers based on Google's Android operating system, opening the door to thousands of applications that could be integrated with e-books easily on that device, as well as on other Android-based devices. While there are notable flaws in the Barnes & Noble strategy - too few books, no reader yet for other mobile devices - its use of the ePub standard for its downloads and an incorporated lending model is closer to what will help book publishers to integrate with many other kinds of content and platforms quickly and profitably.

Book publishers have, predictably, dug themselves into an early hole in the race for digital markets by rejecting standards that would make cross-platform use of e-books a simple thing for consumers. One of the great things about books traditionally is that they didn't require a special technology to use them. Why would publishers go out of their way to balkanize their market into dozens of different proprietary formats that can only discourage people from picking up books in general? While it will take some time to undo this damage, there is still time for book publishers to avoid the mistakes of the music and video industries and decide on formats that will encourage cross-platform use of e-books as simply and inexpensively as possible and which encourage developers to create functionality around e-books that enhances their value and their integration into Web-based content, collaboration and community services.

While there may be some sucking up of pride in Amazon's C-suite to make these things happen, they are absolutely necessary if Amazon is to extend its early ecommerce successes based on Web standards into mobile markets. Perhaps Amazon forgets that if it weren't for Web standards, the world would not have discovered its leading ecommerce services in the first place. Amazon needs to re-discover its appreciation of the power of Web-oriented industry standards for e-books and re-establish itself as a company that can carve out the broadest opportunities for content ecommerce via the widest array of content platforms. While this may not always sound like music to the ears of its publishing partners, it's the only way in which it will be able to offer a sound alternative to media companies that are locking themselves into proprietary platforms that will inevitably place Amazon in an awkward relationship with them. I don't put much hope on this happening in the short term - some changes at the top in Amazon may have to occur for this to happen - but it's likely their best road to success in the years ahead.

DeepDyve Content Rental Points the Way to Broader and More Flexible Scholarly Revenue Models

2010-01-18T11:32:00.007-05:00

With more publishers of scholarly and learned professional journal articles trying to build revenues through improved marketing, the search, display and sales tools being developed by DeepDyve are finding stronger interest than ever 2010 among publishers. DeepDyve exposes free and premium scholarly content through its own search engine and through the search tools of partners and makes it available through its read-only viewing tool embedded in Web pages. This allows people finding articles to "rent" them on a once-off basis in read-only mode for as little as 99 cents. This can be particularly handy for people who would otherwise have little occasion to purchase a full subscription to a premium scholarly journal, thus opening up this premium content to markets that would otherwise not provide opportunities for new publishing revenues.

How much more revenue? In a recent discussion with DeepDyve CEO Bill Park, he indicated an estimate in the low billions USD for the total market available for "rental" pay-per-view style access to scholarly content. While this is certainly not enough to float the boats of scholarly publishers in general, it's largely found money that will increase their total revenues at a time when revenue growth is a challenge. That's a concept that attracts partners large, small old and new to DeepDyve's services, including newly announced alliances with De Gruyter, one of the oldest and most respected scholarly publishers, and CiteULike, a Springer-sponsored social boomarking service for scientific researchers.

For De Gruyter, an established brand still requires new marketing techniques to reach researchers who do not have access to paid collections in institutional libraries, while CiteULike, a venue that attracts researchers both in institutional and independent settings, provides a way for people in cross-disciplinary research to sample collections that may eventually be a part of their more permanent interests. In both instances the services of DeepDyve are well aligned with the needs of people involved in innovation management as they probe their own adjacent markets and test out new ideas that may be worth research and product investments.

Scholarly publishers are having to adapt to research markets that are increasingly moving beyond traditional academic boundaries, prompting both alliances with organizations such as DeepDyve and their own repackaging efforts to make topic-based slices of content available from a broad selection of their journals. While the topic-based repackaging has its merits, the DeepDyve approach to ad-hoc access on a read-only basis is an essential component of this repositioning of premium scholarly content, allowing publishers to test out what kinds of content are attracting premium access far more quickly than traditional marketing cycles are likely to capture.

So not only is "rental" content valuable in terms of its direct and ad-supported revenues, but also valuable because it is, in effect, "live" market research into "willingness to pay" habits in specific market sectors. It is then up to publishers, of course, to respond to the insight that they can gain from this sales data to consider new slices and titles that can respond to premium opportunities more rapidly. The more partners that a company such as DeepDyve gets, the more insight they are likely to have available to their partners via use and sales metadata to determine such trends. Should Google Scholar join the many established publishers already using DeepDyve, their metadata on content usage could become more interesting yet.

To some degree these concepts are "Publishing 101" ideas, but the speed with which research markets are shifting are changing the ways in which they need to be applied. With permanent collections of well-established journals constantly under the pressure of institutional budget cuts, the pressure is on scholarly publishers to define "must-have" collections that are really responsive to the needs of their customers. DeepDyve's content discovery and "rental" tools can help publishers to respond to both opportunities and threats to premium revenues more rapidly, even as they build premium revenues on an on-demand basis. Yes, this may seem like ancillary revenues to some publishers, but it is revenue that is both sorely needed and which can be a guide to where best to grow broader revenues that are more easily defended in challenging times.

Here Come the Tablets: More Reason to Love the Web?

2010-01-15T15:04:00.010-05:00

This year's International Consumer Electronics Show was awash in more tablets than a local pharmacy, with both actual models being shown and overarching buzz from Apple's anticipated iSlate tablet offering expected later this year. While many of the new tablet models were largely warmed-over versions of netbooks or smartbooks, some were oriented towards executives and (presumably) wealthy students who would be willing to pay close to a thousand dollars for a tablet that "acted" like a paper document. Two key models making their debut at CES in this column were the Hearst-sponsored Skiff newspaper and magazine reader and the Que document and e-book reader from Plastic Logic.

The Skiff initiative from Hearst is far more than a tablet gizmo, encompassing distribution on a number of platforms including smart/super phones, PCs and other devices on which their clients would presumably want to view content laid out in traditional print format - and pay presumably premium print prices for it. The reader itself has a display almost as large as a typical notebook PC, with wafer-thin construction, eInk-like resolution and touch-screen activation. The Que reader is a similarly "thin is in" device, but the content that it can manage is oriented towards both traditional media and enterprise document management. The idea behind both devices is that you can have the convenience of digital storage and display without the hassle of dealing with Web-oriented content formats.

The real rationale behind these initiatives, of course, is more of a regressive approach to content than a progressive approach. The Skiff screams at its audience, "Print formats are still relevant, darn it!" while the Que burbles out, "Web sites for collaboration? Nevah hoid of it." And in common to these devices both traditional publisher and enterprise document management business models hope to thrive by locking in support for bright and shiny new high-tech toys that amuse people enough to let them forget that they are paying not just for a pricey device but for outmoded ways of looking at content aggregation, integration and contextualization. The Web site for Skiff tells people first that it's a "publisher-friendly" device, meaning that publishers can obtain revenues from lock-in via proprietary formats while changing as little of its outlook on its revenue streams as possible.

I am hard-pressed to think of an army of executives who have to already juggle laptop PCs, smartphones and other gizmos who will find their world to be truly simplified by this emerging world of proprietary devices. There's little doubt that the tablet format for devices will begin to pick up steam this year, especially those that are touch-enabled devices that help to eliminate the need for physical keyboards. But much of the tablet buzz is smoke and mirrors for journalists, hiding the broader reality that most major publishers are faced with a world in which their revenue streams are drying up and unlikely to be propped up for very long by proprietary tablet plays. None of these devices seem to address the primary issue facing their operations: namely that the Web as a whole is far more interesting and engaging to its readers than any given publication.

Publishers do need to focus on quality editorial operations, to be sure, to ensure that they have a product that's worth the premium prices that they hope to extract on their tablet devices. But their real competition is not bloggers or online aggregators, but other Web formats. The ease with which video can be displayed both on PC and mobile devices and the rapidly accelerating integration of voice services into Web services is creating an environment in which an enormous amount of information is being created and shared with people around the world well before it ever gets into words. The prevalence of status posting services such as Facebook and Twitter make people aware of the first and best news coverage of an event to the point that follow-up reports are as redundant to the general public as they are to stock traders equipped with real-time news feeds.

Yes, the experience of print is engaging, and, often, seductive. But in an online world built around relationships, context and collaboration, investing heavily on keeping up the appearance of the seductiveness and power of print seems to make about as much sense as an 80 year-old investing in a fifteenth round of cosmetic surgery. Premium publishing models are important, but investing in outdated business models to drive premium revenues again and again is a non-starter. It will help to stem the tide of the Web no more than 3-D television or other diverting forms of repackaging. The movie "Avatar" succeeded not because of 3-D images but because it appealed to generations young and old who are moving into new forms of relationships with information and experiences via the Web, enveloped in them constantly to the point that publishing is becoming part of who they are, as I infer in Chapter 10 of Content Nation.

With this in mind, I think that the most important "tablets" are already in many people's pockets - Web-enabled smart/super phones that provide touch-activated access to content and applications that free people from heavy and expensive PCs. Most of these devices cost a fraction of the price of the premium tablet units being promoted for sale. When touch-sensitive tablet devices based on Google's open-source Chrome OS debut later this year, the need for price-sensitive access to full-display content will be underscored yet again. The publishing industry will never grow, much less survive, if it insists on locking its hopes into the most expensive delivery mechanisms available when cost-effective alternatives abound.

What publishers should be focusing on is enabling their content for cross-platform distribution as effectively as possible, demanding premium price points where warranted based on the contextual value of their communities, features and services, not on the fleeting value of a handful of specific devices. If we are headed towards a world in which people will be able to wave an RFID-enabled phone at an item to purchase it, or similarly to execute a business agreement, then publishers need to jump off yesteryear's bandwagon and tool content to be valuable where organizations generating products and services will be thrusting their marketing investments. Gimmicky tablets will prevent this no more than Cinerama-produced films stemmed the rise of television in the 1950s and 1960s. So congratulations to the tablet producers for sucking money out of publishers who should be investing elsewhere. Hopefully next year's CES will see some more sensible solutions to content display and distribution that will be true boosts to publishers.

Hart Beat: Dow Jones Combines Enterprise and Media Operations

2010-01-06T08:58:00.007-05:00

When News Corporation took over Dow Jones two years ago, it was quick to move out key senior Dow Jones managers and move in its own team that had a vision for how to make the brand a profitable and thriving outlet for business news and information. At that time I said on ContentBlogger, "The opportunity is for News Corp to enable a more aggressive melding of enterprise and media services as the differences between today's business media outlets and today's enterprise portals begin to narrow." I also speculated at the time whether Dow Jones Enterprise Media head Clare Hart would stick around to become a player in this mix or move on, suggesting that at least for a time she was respected enough that it was worth her hanging in there.

Two years later, Clare Hart and her work for DJEM remains respected, but times have moved on, and, according to news reports, so has Clare as the enterprise media group at Dow Jones is being merged with their consumer media group. Dow Jones CFO Steven Daintith is taking over the Dow Jones COO role for now, an indication that a promotion into that role for Hart was not in the offing, so moving on seems like a good bet for her at this time. While some may read "glass ceiling" or "Murdoch loyalists" into this move, I think that it's more a matter of where companies like Newcorp need to bring business information services such as their Factiva property to gain more profitability. The direction for more profits from the licensed business media sources in Factiva's database is definitely towards the online media side of Dow Jones operations, a move that requires a different set of skills than those needed to make subscription business information database services successful in increasingly complex enterprise technology markets.

As I noted last October in ContentBlogger when the Wall Street Journal Pro Edition was launched, the rise of real-time Web news aggregation is accelerating the need for business media properties to become more effective news aggregators. At the time I noted that this would be a good move to make better use of Factiva assets in the Pro Edition framework, a move that seems far more likely to unfold now that the siloing of Factiva and other Dow Jones enterprise assets has been eliminated. Among those other assets that are more likely to emerge more aggressively in the new alignment is the Dow Jones Business & Relationship Intelligence group (formerly Generate), whose alerts-oriented mining of news sources will have a broader market to tap into via the Pro Edition platform. Thinking of Newscorp's push to gain more online revenues from paid content sources, these types of premium services are ripe for better integration into ad-supported Dow Jones content.

This is also, of course, a somewhat back-handed way to say that there really isn't much of a strategy available to Dow Jones to increase revenues simply by waving a wand over broader segments of its existing online content. That ship sailed many years ago, as the WSJ Online edition gradually moved towards a large portion of its content being available online without a subscription. Their hope lies in providing more value in their offerings to individuals who may not have access to large subscription databases and sophisticated alerts services in their companies or who have found access to such services harder to justify under central information budgets. Moving to make DJEM resources more available via their consumer and "prosumer" platforms is a natural bridging strategy into these needs that can set up broader enterprise sales strategies over time.

In the meantime, though, this move is somewhat of an admission that the subscription database business for business news is a dying business model. Factiva has been as aggressive as any other player in business information in adding features and integration capabilities to its offerings, but at the end of the day the value-add from such services is drifting away to enterprise technology players more quickly than Factiva or other enterprise news aggregators can counter with improved products and services. There are just too many enterprise platforms in which this type of content is needed, creating broad product and feature disintermediation. Harvesting structured information from unstructured news and information sources is one approach that many enterprise content vendors are taking to counter this trend, but this alone ultimately doesn't justify the typical subscription structure for news databases.

You can see where this consolidation of enterprise-oriented resources with consumer media resources at Dow Jones may spell problems in focusing on enterprise opportunities, but at the end of the day the software and the thousands of licensed content sources that Dow Jones pays for have to grow profits for them more quickly if they are to be worth the price. With enterprises increasingly reluctant to pay for licensed content that offers few or no advantages over Web-accessible content, the Web is the only probable point of strong growth for old-line news aggregators. This may not be a pretty transition for many Factiva staff, but it's one of those long-delayed and necessary moves that will at least set the stage for more robust growth in enterprise markets for Dow Jones in the long run - even if that growth comes from non-traditional channels.

Google Nexus One: Untethering from Traditional Models 1.0

2010-01-05T14:12:00.015-05:00

I don't jump often at first-generation technology for most things, so it's no surprise that I waited a while to get a smart phone. But in a sense I have waited for the first generation of what was termed a "superphone" in today's announcement of the Google Nexus One, a Google Android-based mobile device built by HTC and sold directly by Google from its own online store. The Nexus One goes toe-to-toe with Apple's iPhone in many ways but it also begins to challenge the content industry to consider what today's proliferation of mobile devices means for their marketing strategies.

Unlike the Apple iPhone, you can choose to order a Nexus One "unlocked" from Google's online store, meaning that you can get it without having to be locked into any telephone company's contract or service plan. You can then, if you choose, get the voice and data plan of your choice with a technology-compatible vendor (T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon in the US, and most non-U.S. carriers) or, if you choose, just use WiFi and to get connectivity to data and Voice over IP services on the Web.

I ordered the "unlocked" version of the phone within a few minutes of the online store going live, a bone-simple process. I noted on the order page that Verizon will offer "locked" access for this phone soon, marketed under the "Droid" moniker it uses currently for Motorola's Android phone offering on Verizon. For the time being I have decided to use the Nexus One as a "data only" phone, using VoIP when I am in WiFi hotspots. This may allow me to use it as a replacement for my desk phone, since it's always in range of my local WiFi (let's see what happens when Google announces its integration of Gizmo5 VoIP services for Google Voice). I think of it like having Skype in "walkabout" mode with a trendy earpiece that has Web access. Once the service plans for data-only access to phone company networks have improved a bit and I can suss out what to do with my last remaining copper phone line, I'll think about which U.S. telco vendor will be best to choose to fill in the gaps for WiFi service.

If you look at most coverage maps for mobile data access and the ability of emerging networks to support both voice and high-speed data more reliably on a single network connection, why would I do otherwise for an advanced phone? If voice is moving towards being a service on consumer data networks, as it is already in most major enterprises, and voice services such as Skype and Gizmo5 are providing increasingly reliable VoIP phone-like connectivity almost anywhere, then I wonder whether it makes sense to lock into any traditional voice services for a superphone. I'd rather use a simple mobile phone as a voice backup service for those hard-to-reach spots that Google Voice can ring as needed and go superphone for voice on a good data-only network for the rest.

As voice becomes more integrated with Web applications and content services, the need for their integration is going to become more obvious fairly rapidly. One of the demos at the Nexus One press briefing was of dictating text messages and emails. It wasn't a particularly spectacular demo, and I am sure that less carefully tested examples may fare worse, but going to and from voice and text as a standard interface is more likely to make the combination of voice and data an essential factor in information services in the next few years. Since the Nexus One is pretty well positioned for the most advanced high-speed data networks rolling out over the next couple of years, I think that I am covered on that front for now.

As for the phone itself, I hate to say it, but technology changes so quickly these days that it's almost unimportant beyond a certain point whether it's a perfectly awesome phone or not. You can look at the Engadget review and judge for yourself, but overall it's as good as an iPhone but without two-finger touch software (which will come soon enough, since the hardware handles it, apparently) though trumping the current iPhone with a screaming 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Most importantly, though, it's built on an open platform developed by a company that believes in the Web as the real unifier of content services, not proprietary networks or platforms. With all of the tablets, readers and other gizmos coming out this year that will try to pretend that the Web isn't very important, it will be nice to have a mobile device that puts the Web experience for content first, with some neat-o applications in a spiffy, sleek package to boot. That'll do. For now.

WiFi Plus Mobile = A Whole New Ballgame for Content and Communications

2009-12-31T13:08:00.006-05:00

What can happen when you combine wireless broadband Web access with local wifi hotspots? A lot, when you come to think of it. Gizmos such as Novatel's "MiFi" unit that enable someone with mobile broadband access to set up their own local wireless "hot spot" have been out for several months, but the importance of these units is heating up with their connection to higher-powered broadband networks and the addition of features such as onboard data storage on SD cards. With more throughput and storage for data comes more ability to use these units to coordinate the bushel of devices that technophiles now travel with, helping them to synchronize communications with the world and with one another through one convenient hub. But it also presages a major shift in how homes, businesses and the world connect with one another for content.

Today most people have their mobile connectivity running in parallel with their home or office connectivity, including parallel networks for voice, video and data that cost a handsome sum for most people using them. Yet with one of these mobile network hub devices, it's easy to see how all but the most demanding uses for voice, data and video can funnel through a mobile broadband connection that can stay on our desktop or follow us on the go. Our smart phones, our eBook readers, our netbooks, our desktops, our in-home phones and our home entertainment devices can all be brought together on one seamless wifi-based communications medium.

This is likely to accelerate the move in voice communications away from traditional point-to-point circuit networks and towards an era in which voice communications are a feature of integrated voice, data and video services. It also means that we're more likely to overcome some of the global connectivity issues that exist for mobile devices: be it CDMA or GSM networks underlying mobile broadband connectivity, if you're near a hotspot of some origin, you should be able to get voice and data communications. Services such as Skype will certainly prosper in the process, but other services such as Google Voice, which help voice communications to get routed to any number of devices, are also likely to prosper as voice communications become more identity-centered rather than phone number-centered.

The bigger picture, though, is of a world in which inexpensive broadband hub devices can be placed easily in small communities and used to power local communications with both the outside world and with people within the community. Today we're seeing these devices powering personal communications, but I think that the larger potential is for devices that can connect communities with one another first and foremost with a minimum of technology. If you are living in a community in which each person cannot afford a mobile phone, that community may be able to afford collectively one connection to the outside world which is shared with a MiFi-like device that can make its connection available to the community in a reasonable scope, say a kilometer or so. People in that community could then use their mobile devices to communicate with one another and with the world, with very little ongoing cost to any one person beyond the initial cost of their own device. Most importantly, you could set up these local communications networks with or without direct connectivity to the outside world. You could have your own local Web of sorts, perhaps even with services such as Google Wave being used on a federated basis to facilitate content collection, communications and collaboration.

In turn, these individual communities could cooperate with other local communities to build "bottom-up" communications networks, developing regional communications systems that may be centered around local languages and dialects, connecting to more commonly used languages found in the "outside world" through a handful of communications access points. Every kilometer or so you could poke a solar-powered hub device into a convenient spot to keep the influence of a particular network growing. All of this would be developed on global communications standards, of course, enabling new ways to connect to the world over time, but regional communications would thrive, with or without help from the "outside world."

While the more than 1.4 billion people already using the Web are certainly a significant marketplace, I do believe that much of the future power of Web-based communications will be found in the expansion of more "bottom-up" networks amongst the five-plus billion other people in communities that find themselves on a different economic and cultural playing field than the rest of the world. We talk sometimes about the "dark Web" of content unavailable to search engines on the Internet, but there's a far greater "dark Web" of knowledge and culture that's beyond the Web altogether. The "top-down" Web will penetrate this arena only so far, as it tends to be in the hands of people who have, in their own way, a great deal of autonomy, in part because of their economic isolation. But as the "bottom-up" Webs begin to meet the world of the Web as a whole, it will be exciting to see how both economic and culture opportunities for people on both sides of this divide develop.

Fortunately there are devices coming along that should help to accelerate this convergence. The One Laptop Per Child organization is targeting the release of a $75 device called XO-3 that is a bone-simple tablet equipped with wireless communications. As technology tends to push towards such visionary price points sometimes more rapidly than the pioneers, I think that it's safe to say that within a few years the convergence of such devices with localized broadband networking will enable communities around the world to join the Web age in ways that may surprise the rest of the world. So if you're looking for great new opportunities in content markets, I think that "going local" may take on a whole new range of meaning shortly. We'll keep you posted on these trends throughout 2010. Have a happy new year celebration and best wishes for a prosperous 2010!

Shore Communications Inc. Waves Goodbye to 2009

2009-12-23T14:28:00.004-05:00

What a year it's been.

iPhones rocked, Google shocked and social media was no longer mocked as publishers and technology companies flocked to online content business models;
Bing had a fling and even Windows 7 would sing as Kindle took wing, but proprietary platforms are no longer king;
Those in the cloud were quite proud of profits that wowed enterprise and media markets and vowed that all content would thrive in its shroud;
Enterprise vendors clung to tight margins and hung on to hopes of new profits among rescaled businesses flung across a changing world;
Twitter got the Web a-flitter about real-time chitter-chat, making news publishers bitter about the new heavy hitter;
Murdoch howled about profits fouled by search engines that prowled for news, while AP scowled at content reuses that tempted its members to throw in the towel;
Smart phones got fast and netbooks now cast a shadow over the last bits of old-school computing;
Save the best for last! It's Wave, the rave of brave trend-setters, promising an enclave that will repave the road to the Web's future;
Feel like you need a suture or two? Don't worry. The couture of content will change soon enough. The future is bright - for those who are tough.

Everyone at Shore Communications wishes you a great holiday season and a fantastic 2010. Enjoy what is important, and let's build the future of content together next year! I hope that you enjoy the following year-end video.

Farewell, Editor & Publisher: How Many Canaries Can You Ignore?

2009-12-11T08:42:00.016-05:00

In the process of selling off several of its core B2B entertainment industry titles, Nielsen Business Media also announced the eminent closing of Editor & Publisher, the century-plus old trade publication that had chronicled the ins and outs of the news industry. At a time at which magazine closings seem to be about as regular as train stops on a commuter line, E&P's demise is not exceptional in many ways. Any number of trade publications are struggling to survive in an era in which online media enables unlimited competition for the attention of its readership and for its advertisers' and subscribers' cash. But there is something particularly poignant about E&P's shuttering. After all, if an industry which insists that the quality of its content will be its distinguishing factor cannot support the high-quality journalism covering itself, then how can they expect others to do likewise for their own interests?

There are few people who can scream about canaries in coal mines and get away with it for long, and I am no exception to that rule. If you haven't figured out that most publishers are caught between highly skilled staffs oriented towards traditional publishing platforms and new platforms that can't deliver them decent salaries with room for both management's profits and platform reinvestment, then you must have been clipping your bond coupons on a tropical island. But that doesn't mean that publications like Editor & Publisher have to die. What it does mean, though, is that in some ways the publishing industry is returning to its roots of scrappy, independent publishing that may do better without the overhead of large, corporate parents.

This doesn't mean that news publications will always do best as independent outlets, but it does mean that publishers that are mean, lean and more focused on their markets than on hitting the train back to comfortable suburban homes are going to do just fine. The good news is that Web infrastructure is perfectly suited to such operations, most especially when publishers listen to their audiences and engage them effectively. An interesting an ironic example of this positioning is the recent rebirth of Conde Nast's former Portfolio.com Web site by American City Business Journals as a portal oriented towards the owners of small and medium businesses. With a platform that is well designed to slice and dice content and functionality for any number of focused local and topic-oriented markets, ACBL's no-nonsense approach to publishing is far more emblematic of what will succeed moving forward in profitable B2B and consumer media than the high-gloss world of major media companies.

The caveat to this approach, though, is that the scrappy publishers must push themselves to the extreme to take advantage of highly affordable publishing technologies to outpace major media companies in having audiences adopt their brands on the platforms that they prefer. This is to some degree why blog-oriented publishers such as TechCrunch and The Huffington Post have survived and thrived in online media. Having been handed the equivalent of a guerrilla fighter's AK-47 automatic rifle in today's affordable social media publishing technologies and deploying the tactics and strategies that they enable, lean and agile online-first publications and their technology partners have carved away a good portion of the meat of publishing's profits.

It's not as if the major media companies can out-tech these smaller rivals easily, either. The expense and useful life of proprietary content technology development is rarely beneficial to a publisher today. There are some exceptions to this rule on the very high end of content markets such as in financial securities trading and other specialized professional functions, but in general it's source-agnostic content technologies that have defined today's most successful publishing platforms. For general media markets, publishers have tried again and again to gain the upper hand through sponsoring source-specific content technologies that simply don't deliver all of the information and experiences that people expect now through source-agnostic technologies.

It's what you might call a prolonged mourning for the mass-production printing press era, the ability to define a marketplace through a technology that only traditional publishers could afford and master easily. Sorry, that train left the station a long time ago. By ceding their technological superiority to others, publishers sealed their fate years ago. If Compuserve had knocked the socks off of the Web in its ability to amaze and delight content audiences, it would still be around today. Consortium services like Hulu are trying to regain some of that high ground of technology, but as long as they fail to leverage all of the content that people find to be valuable based on the artificial divide of "it isn't real content," they will always fall short of audiences who know "real" when they see it.

In short, I do think that the closing of Editor & Publisher is a small but significant landmark in the history of publishing. It marks the point in the publishing industry's history when it admitted that it no longer really cared about its traditional strengths. Print publishing and the editorial disciplines that drove it are now officially legacies that will inform the future, but no longer define it. There will continue to be print products indefinitely, and highly customized print products are likely to be a growing marketplace for some time. But when an industry will no longer buy coverage of its own traditional operations, then it's time to admit that a chapter in that industry's history has been finished. I wish the very best of luck to the staff of Editor & Publisher, they have put out quality journalism in the face of enormous industry change. I hope that we will see E&P resurface in the near future as a web-first publication, perhaps with a focus on the future rather than on the past.