Attendance at the conference in Santa Clara was up this year and road traffic heavier, both signs of an improving economy, and a good sign for KM practitioners and vendors. The overall focus that permeated the sessions was defining business requirements, then determining the appropriate measure of ROI, with less emphasis on the technology than last year. There was a wider appreciation of the people factor as the major factor in successful implementation of enterprise knowledge management programs, and acknowledgement that business processes should be the driver, not technology. Successful KM management focuses on solving a major problem for the organization, and having upper management backing of solutions selected.

The opening keynote by Dave Snowden of Cynefin Centre "Decision-Making and Innovation: The Real Function of KM" set the tone for focusing on the human aspects, by using an analogy of trying to manage a birthday party for a group of 12 year old boys. As in this example, an ordered process doesn't work, but setting boundaries and context (football outside, not inside!) does work for human behavior, which by its very nature is not tidily ordered. Within an organization, human systems are complex since each person has multiple identities, and different cognitive matches, and will respond to their own version of cause and effect. Focusing on outcomes and intended results is a better strategy for the business to adapt to its environment, rather than attempting to maintain a stable, predictive environment which by its very nature fails to detect disruptive new patterns. Certainly this model is more applicable to analyzing behaviors being monitored for terrorist activity, than the standard process oriented approach!

Bottom-up KM was an underlying theme of several sessions which focused on using wikis and blogs in the corporate environment. Recognizing that "everyone hates to file", utilizing tools that capture information as it comes into being, rather than after the fact, is a powerful concept. Capturing and/or replacing the ubiquitous email with personal publishing tools improves timeliness and simultaneously builds the knowledge store of the enterprise. In contrast many of the vendors with complicated KM "solutions", there were some innovative approaches with more understandable and less technical approaches. Traction Software can be configured to capture incoming and outgoing email as an enterprise weblog, using skins to emulate Outlook email look and feel, and has been adopted in the government sector. Ross Mayfield of Socialtext passionately described the benefits of the enterprise wiki as a collaborative workgroup social software. Questions from the audience raised issues of controlling access and security of information--clues that while this particular software can be quite effective in a workgroup team environment, widespread adoption in enterprise wide applications will be slower. On the other hand, TechDirt, an accidental KM service provider, is in the business of providing outside competitive intelligence as an RSS feed to a company blog or wiki, allowing commentary within the organization on outside content, an attractive feature for strategy, sales and marketing. All these companies are providing simple, innovative and inexpensive tools, with complex benefits, making them attractive to risk aversive organizations.

Social networks were another underlying theme with different approaches to identifying experts and capturing their knowledge, with a range of solutions varying from simple to complex. Creating a culture of sharing is one of the major challenges of KM systems, and interestingly, a recent American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) study in several major companies found workers were reluctant to be identified as experts. Yet this expertise is highly valuable to the organization for staffing and problem-solving. An interesting approach to solving this problem was demonstrated by Morphix, whose software simply looks at the email sender, the email receiver and the subject line to identify relationships and communities of interest, both inside and outside the corporation. Simple, no additional work for the communicators, yet powerful!

The session on metadata and taxonomies had standing room only, an indication of the continuing need to organize the content. And on the exhibit floor,in addition to the tazonomy companies, every content management solution had some flavor of categorization, but understanding the benefits and drawbacks of each approach is not intuitively obvious! And now taxonomy is evolving into ontology--new terminology, which may or may not be appropriate for a given application.

On the exhibit floor, FAST and Entopia were the "big booths" at this year's conference, representing the emphasis on search technology at this show. These represent best of breed technologies, but must be integrated into other applications, a drawback in marketing to organizations which have mandated integrated suites for enterprise software.. The good news/bad news is that are lots of options, from up and coming Your Amigo at the low end to Verity and Autonomy at the high end, as well as expanding OEM relationships to provide integrated solutions.

The tracks at the KM World & Intranets 2004 conference provided plenty of options for attendees at various stages of implementation to learn from each other, as they explored solutions for various industries and government sectors. But the overriding message was that Knowledge Management is become much more enabling personal knowledge networks and discovery processes, and less managing content depositories.

"There's nothing like a recession to focus your mind," noted Bill Pollack, President and CEO of American Lawyer Media at the American Business Media/SIIA session on "rich data" content at the McGraw-Hill building last week. Draconian cuts in ad budgets since 9/11 and a changing marketplace for professional content have forced some B2B publications to make huge changes to their operations over the past several years to become database publishers first and foremost, spinning our print publications still but now wary of the hard lessons that they have learned about ad cycles that do not always come back. As demonstrated by this representative selection of panels and speakers some of these lessons have been embraced aggressively by publishers learning how to service user needs more effectively than ever via online databases, while others are still pondering what rich data really means. Significantly many in attendance at this excellent but brief event were SIIA members - as many as half by some reckonings, though some attendees with both memberships came - so it's not clear just how clearly the traditional ABM crowd is embracing the themes laid out in this session. Ads are starting to cycle back strongly, now, though much of the action has moved online, so it's questionable as to how aggressively many trade publishers will continue to move towards injecting technology-driven content into their mix as apparently easy money comes back into the marketplace.

Nevertheless Gordon Hughes, President and CEO of ABM, sees "vast potential for all companies" in the rich media space as they feed database-driven content to their clients and ABM members, which in turn should foster more interest in ad revenues reaching those clients from B2B publishers. As Hugh Roome, President of Scholastic International put it, it's about being "transformed from a B2B company into a database business, where publishing is an important business but not the main business." The main business is extracting value from content by analyzing its value in the eyes of the marketplace. Like a small-market baseball team playing "Moneyball" to define valuable performance in a way that the marketplace may not recognize via traditional measurements, Hughes sees the necessity for publishers to look at content assets from outside of the traditional publishing perspective to understand their true value. For Scholastic this has meant recognizing that one of their most valuable assets was their deep relationship with teachers in the education marketplace and learning how to leverage that asset through the data acquisition capabilities of their customer service desks - data that they could leverage through their own products and that they could combine with partners such as AT&T's True Rewards plan to extend brand loyalty on multiple planes. This builds up to a USD 200 million ecommerce operation that is well insulated from ad revenue fluctuations and the even more chancy vagaries of publishing titles such as Harry Potter novels. Becoming a database publisher first and foremost, then, is about leaving presumptions about business models behind and taking on a powerful customer-centric view of what content will really matter to very specific and personal markets.

Details on the two main panel presentations and vendor presentations follow below.

Gregg Robins, Managing Director of Netburn McGill noted in his panel moderation role that although online ads have garnered much of the buzz in today's online media market, premium content sales are the quiet untold story. But together they're really complementary phenomena along a continuum as Steve Sieck, Managing Partner of EPS-USA noted in his presentation on the nature of rich data. Steve sees that providing rich data enhancement is a phenomenon that draws together content technology users, publication readers and advertisers in different ways in different market sectors: In legal rich data centers around e-discovery, electronic filings, online directories and workflow integration; in scientific and technical companies rich media enhances patent analytics and workbench data publications, and so on. So what IS "rich data?" Like the proverbial "I know it when I see it" statement about art, rich data seems to be more in the experiencing than the being: Steve sees it as content that's discoverable, browseable, cross-referenceable, repurposeable, reconfigurable, workflow-insertable and manageable. It's content that's Google-proof - by learning how to use search engines to enhance and not degrade content value. In other words, it's vContent - highly valued content that finds its greatest use in the most valuable human and technology venues available.

Developing this high-valued type of content is not without complication. As David Nichols, Partner at Morgan, Lewis and Bockius LLP pointed out, it's more important than ever in this enhanced content environment to be aware of and define carefully the patents, trademarks and secrets that can keep rich data advantages safe. But as Jim King, SVP of Business Operations at McGraw-Hill Construction notes, there are huge opportunities for rich data that far outweigh the risks - especially in lost productivity due to content failing to be interoperable with client systems is measured easily in the billions. "Google is always there, waiting to be searched," Jim notes, but an effective integration of well-designed content such as their construction project database with client data and client systems via efficient metatagging, XML formatting can greatly improve the odds that content will be usable - and reusable - in the right context, preferably on the local networks of major clients where it becomes a part of the company's work environment. Sometimes channel conflicts may arise, such as when integrated content is also available on the open Web, but in general Jim sees that these are relatively good problems to have - "There's enough to go around for everyone," he notes, as rich data assets will grow in value as they add more capabilities for integration.

From the perspective of a company investing in content companies rich data is important because it's where the growth is. Tolman Geffs, a Managing Director of The Jordan Edmiston Group, Inc. sees rich data creating high barriers to competitive entry due to high up-front investments as well a high margins once the investments are in place. Tolman notes that while "not frothy," M&A activity is up for database-centric publishers with healthy earnings multiples (10-13x), but not for the publishing sector as a whole. Most importantly, Tolman sees the security in business-oriented rich data lying in its inherent integration into client workflows: the value is not so much in the database itself or its editorial content but in its ability to provide a captive audience - an audience that is more likely to be receptive to value-add plays.

The most interesting point that came out in the Q&A session for this panel was the need for more focus on what was termed "superdistribution" - enabling individuals and institutions to be cooperative redistributors of premium content via their own systems and client relationships. As content becomes ever more imbedded in client workflows, emails and portals this is going to become the next "elephant in the living room" needing to be addressed. Be it via rights management software or other enabling technologies, database publishers need to consider how the enhancement of rich data by their clients via redistribution and recombination with other content sources can enable these clients as active business partners for furthering content value. Rich data is enriching its creators, but the true riches of commerce-enabled content objects are just beginning to be tapped in this unfolding environment.

Okay, so by now we've accepted the recommendations of the first panel that there is a great opportunity in rich data: how does one actually go about exploiting this opportunity? The event's second panel, chaired by Jeff Cutler, General Manager of the SIIA Content Division, focused on real-world examples of how rich data is helping publishers to succeed with technology-enabled content. As Jeff pointed out the stakes for publishers are being raised every day by the general content and computing environment of the Web - more than twelve million users signed up for Yahoo!'s new XML-enabled weblog feed service on myYahoo! in the first day alone, while various databases had a hard time locating the details of the ABM/SIIA seminar yet Google had it right on top of its search results. There is little "whether" in the need to respond to this environment in which individuals and institutions are today's leading publishers, only appropriate "whens."

Fortunately William Pollak, President and CEO of American Lawyer Media, demonstrated that a strong response to this challenge can occur in even mainstream business publishing companies when past presumptions about what can succeed in publishing are laid aside. After an initial venture into database-oriented publishing under the tutelage of "old hands" from legal publishing that knew very little about the new world of online publishing, they brought on a staff that knew little about legal publishing but a lot about what it took to make a rich data product succeed. The result was VerdictSearch, a brilliantly executed online service that collects trial information from attorneys, packaging it and elementizing it to the "n"th degree in a carefully designed database so that it can be as useful as possible to as many audiences and purposes as possible. Their "data aware" editorial process enables VerdictSearch to make it easy for attorneys to find case law applying to their own cases, to profile attorneys that they will be facing in upcoming trials, to market their services for appeals cases to specific targets - all delivered through a variety of channels and alliance to maximize the usefulness of the content in contexts that matter most to their users. Getting an editorial process that supports careful indexing of content is perhaps one of the greatest challenges in this new environment, but by sticking to the "nine little ways" to make money with rich data rather than risking all on one or two big money-making ideas American Lawyer Media has the luxury of a highly diversified revenue channel with client-generated content that is nearly impossible to replicate.

By contrast Dr. Louis Diamond, Medical Director of Thomson Medstat services a diverse population of professionals all interested in one group that contributes content only indirectly - patients. Medstat does not do a lot of custom work on their content collection but instead focuses on developing multidimensional access for more than seventy large companies, 20 U.S. states, the Federal government, health plans, pharmaceutical vendors and hospitals. Examining patient data for claims information, results of treatments for patient populations, demographics and trends makes this service indispensable for their broad client base. When rich data is central to your product, repurposing for multiple clients needs becomes both essential and highly profitable. Terrence Meacock, President, Jobson Meetings Group of Jobson Publishing, focuses on repurposing education services for the medical community means that rich data can facilitate repurposing of content that's under intense medical and regulatory scrutiny: get the courseware wrong and you can go to jail! For Jobson, rich data means having a variety of ways to control content quality and to support flexible sponsorship arrangements for major pharmaceutical companies. John Ware, SVP and General Manager for Reed Construction Data's RS Means product, integrates construction cost data and client data via third-party applications to provide "4-D" drawings of construction projects - 3-D site diagrams with data from RS Means available contextually with specific drawing objects. While this can lead to "mind-numbing" conversations about geekish things such as object-oriented programming models and a host of acronyms, this toolkit approach for third party developers provides a locked-in approach to value that's hard to displace.

Four different approaches in four different market sectors - and four different success stories showing how rich data can provide a winning plan for locking in highly profitable approaches to profitable databases that stray afar from traditional publishing models. There's no one "right" way to succeed with rich content, and no one right way to start with it, except perhaps to stick with markets that you know in the beginning to work out the technical, client and internal cultural issues. The thing that struck me most about this session is how those organizations that came from a strong traditional publishing culture had to put aside their old ways to come up with not just new technology but new ways to view their editorial functions that were at least as oriented towards data acquisition and disciplines such as taxonomies and categorization as text and fact delivery. It's a bit as if the "dot com" wave took its time reaching this relatively protected sector of the publishing industry and then caught up with a vengeance as B2B ads trailed off rapidly - only to find that the wealth of talent and techniques available helped them to make a transition into high-value database publishing far more effectively than many of their consumer media brethren have managed. Sometimes it does pay to let others go before you.

What was not addressed with any real depth in this event was the complex interplay between the ad-supported online environment and the database environment that's likely to become a much more important part of this environment as it evolves. There's still a strong tendency in trade publications to keep ad sales in the traditional paid-circulation model and leave online content endeavors in a pure subscription model. As demonstrated at last month's InfoCommerce 2004 conference, databases and ads for business content are hardly incompatible concepts. The combination of ad sales and database capabilities may yield far more revenues than these publishers have explored to date. Companies like ECNext that provided a presentation at the ABM/SIIA event are also well aware that rich data can yield more contextual placement of databased content in Web search engine results - another factor left largely unexplored by these panels. Also largely ignored was the role of copyright management controls in a rich data environment - perhaps because these products are largely subscription oriented and not yet confronting the emerging realities of content objects that are easily redistributed by their clients. ValeoIP provided an interesting and simple approach to copyright management in their presentation that is highly relevant to database publishers, but again the perceived need for these kinds of controls seems to lag in the rich data camp. As object-oriented approaches to rich content delivery take hold, this is likely to change.

As the crowd broke up to head on its way, it was evident that this was a meeting of two publishing cultures - one driven more by adapting traditional publishing models to advanced technology and another that's lived with advanced online content delivery for many years and is trying to take content to the next level for their individual and institutional clients as rapidly as possible. It's not necessarily a story of the late adapters struggling to avoid extinction: by having been protected from the need to change radically for so many years many business-oriented publishers can benefit from years of experience to position their publications very effectively in a rich data environment with little immediate fear of replacements for their niche interests waiting in the wings. But the culture changes and advanced skill sets required to make this transition may yet leave many of these publishers struggling to succeed in a rich data environment. The change to client-centric rich data publishing is inevitable for most publishers, but those who leave the door open for others to climb the supposedly high barriers to entry are likely to find themselves waiting for the next big trend - in some other industry.

The sold-out InfoCommerce 2004 Conference targeted executives and lead buyers from the directories and database publishing community, but its theme of a shifting balance of power seems to have attracted players from a broad array of leading publishers and content service providers who are seeking the answers to how to position their content services effectively in an increasingly open and competitive online environment. While print is still an important part of the directory and database sales environment for many publishers, this year's InfoCommerce conference assembled a community that is eagerly seeking how to position their products and services in an environment overshadowed by the power shifting to online-savvy content purchasers who recognize the value of these services but set their expectations of them against the capabilities of leading consumer-oriented search engines and portals. As InfoCommerce Group President Russell Perkins noted in his introductory address, "The Web exposes competition and levels the playing field." If your database or directory service doesn't please, the alternative is a click away - or less so if they're finding specific products and services from these publishers via contextual ads placed by search engines. With these more intense competitive pressures, Russell Perkins sees one key to distinguishing database and directory content is focusing on the "Three R's - Ratings, Rankings and Recommendations." It's no longer enough to set out purified content in electronic format to establish a thriving electronic content product. Simplifying selection processes with community and editorial content that amplifies fact-gathering and features with trusted expert views provides context that today's users expect if they are to trust a content product on an ongoing basis. Other forms of context such as workflow integration and effective use of contextual advertising also play an important role for directory and database publishers, making it even more essential for content suppliers to get to know their markets on a much more intimate basis than ever before. The InfoCommerce conference is proving to be a remarkably rich environment in which to explore these issues and their potential solutions.

The following weblog entries provide blow-by-blow coverage of each of the main panel and presentation sessions, along with other key coverage. Enjoy!

This year's InfoCommerce 2004 conference database and directory publishers demonstrated a wide and compelling array of success stories in applying both human and technology factors to their evolving success stories. The emphasis was on adding more value to content in more human contexts, in some instance meaning better interfaces and workflow design, in other instances better data design and management, but in all instances with an emphasis on maintaining relationships with audiences who are increasingly both sophisticated consumers and publishers who can contribute to the value of online content services. While getting human contexts right is still a challenge to many, the models of excellence offered at this conference point out some clear paths to future successes.

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From its humble roots as publisher of the Mutual Fund Sourcebook in 1984, Morningstar has grown its database of financial securities information and recommendations into a $139.5 million (2003) business that has an increasingly dominant position in the minds of individual investors seeking authoritative analysis and recommendations. This position has helped Morningstar to build a broadening range of services for investment advisors and financial institutions seeking similar services on a more sophisticated level. It's unusual for a content company to work this back-channel into B2B markets, but as Morningstar Chairman, Founder and CEO Joe Mansueto outlined in his keynote address at InfoCommerce 2004 keeping your content company focused on excellence and integrity can play a huge role in defining a content product that is difficult to resist. Morningstar's analysis tools employ industry-leading design and usability which are combined with increasingly broad and authoritative editorial content to make its coverage of over 100,000 investments an attractive choice for decision makers at all levels of the market. This authoritativeness helped land Morningstar a significant slice of the recent legal settlement that required major U.S. investment banks to make investment research available from independent suppliers. The same expectation of authoritativeness also puts Morningstar under increasing scrutiny by securities regulators for even minor errors, but that's part of the game to which Morningstar has graduated. It's a small price to pay for a database service that focuses on the long-term interests of its clients and its product team. In Morningstar database and directory publishers have a great paradigm to emulate as they learn how to adapt to a marketplace empowered by individuals and institutions that aren't afraid to click to the next player in a trice if a product fails to please.

In a thought provoking talk, Professor Barry Schwartz. author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less presented research with profound implications for publishers in his work on the effects of simply having too many choices. A supermarket study found that a choice of 6 jams resulted in more actual purchases than having a choice of 24 jams. Extend this out to 401(k) retirement plans where adding additional options results in reducing the participation, or the choices in health care providers, and the implications are profound. For information providers and website owners, this means limiting options can actually increase sales, and keep the customer better satisfied; complex may be satisfying for content developers, but is not good for sales!!!

Providing B2B tools to make buying decisions quickly with an fair assurance of making a good choice is the role of the Produce Reporter/Blue Book Services for the fresh produce industry. Jim Bartelson described the descriptive ratings they provide to help their customers save time by eliminating phone calls, so they can find the right producers, and then reduce their credit losses by a ranking system. This has high value in this industry which consists of perishable products with a seven day window of marketability, and whose products don't provide sufficient security for banks to finance.

Healthcare Grades provides decision making tools for both consumers and the businesses providing healthcare services, so they have to reach two constituencies. John Morrow described their mission, which is to improve the quality of health care, but while this means improving "cost and quality" for the providers, it means "positive experience" for the consumer. Branding is a major issue for them to communicate their value in providing relevant information to evaluate available choices. Their primary tool is communication through the media, particularly daily news, such as newspapers and television, i.e. using lists of top hospitals in a city.

For both the produce industry and the healthcare industry, establishing credibility and providing objective information is a challenge. Overall, this type of service is very effective in improving quality within the industry. Witness the effect of Consumer Reports, which now is now finding that most products are quite good, so now consumers have to determine the functions they really need, again the paradox of choice!

"Search engines are not an unstoppable force" is how Russell Perkins opened the session titled Outmaneuvering the Search Engines. Then he introduced speakers who set out to prove his bold statement right. Dan Savage, President of ThomasB2B.com, the new online ad network launched by Thomas Publishing this month, made a very good case.

Dan emphasized that ad networks that are more tightly-focused provide a distinct advantage over broad networks like Google AdSense, because the more narrow focus enhances the ability to match advertisers to the segment of buyers they want to attract. As a result, click-through rates are higher and the quality of the click-throughs is better, which translates into a willingness to pay a higher cost-per-click (CPC). Plus, the well-defined taxonomies derived from the specialized directories from the Thomas Global Register make it easier to select appropriate categories in which to place ads. In the case of Thomas, the taxonomies are also translated into 9 other languages, which avoids problems related to attempting to use literal translations of product names and descriptions.

Jason Kalin, VP Business Development at IndustryBrains, added another voice expressing the power of placing ads on sites whose audience matches the desired characteristics of the advertiser. IndustryBrains was a pioneer in recognizing the importance of allowing advertisers to select focused sites, and relevant categories/sections of the sites, on which to place their ads. IndustryBrains currently has 70 publishing partners onwhose sites advertisers can select to "pay for the brand" of the publisher. Jason pointed to sample publishing partners such as Bankrate, InfoWorld, and JiWire, as success stories, and further indicated that IndustryBrain partner sites receive anywhere from $1,000 to $4,000 per month in ad revenue.

Tarik Qahawish from Netvention also spoke on this panel. Netvention differs from the ad networks mentioned above, but represents a fascinating example of an aggregator that extracts factual data from company web sites to create a database that describes the technical features of a Web site--its software, ecommerce system, ad system and more.

When is a directory not a directory? When it tries to go beyond ads and listings to become a more valued form of content, as exemplified by three leaders in taking the directory concept to a new level. In the eyes of Reid Hoffman, Chief Executive Officer, of LinkedIn, a new level means going from directories as a flat listing concept to a networked model in which all of the listing and relationship content is built by the contacts themselves, forming a secure, trusted and user-controlled environment for sharing contact information within their "six degrees of separation". With a new registrant every 17 seconds and over a million contacts registered in little more than a year, LinkedIn is confirming the concept of individual publishing as a key driver of today's content value. Samer Hamadeh, Co-Founder & CEO of Vault, Inc. takes a different approach to enhancing the value of personal content by leveraging beyond its subscriber-supplied content to surveys on past employers and other value-add content from users that can be remarketed on multiple levels. Surveys alone attract more than 20,000 subscribers. While print publications are still important to the older Human Resources directors, Vault concentrates on the value of both its database and its ability to leverage its model into related markets - college surveys, anyone? Håkan Axelsson, Sales Director at EuroContactPool, collects contact information for 14 million sales leads, also offers EuroInfoPool, collecting public information on over 50 million European companies from various public and private sources. Instead of managing its own data it acts as a clearinghouse for company information, simplifying access and licensing, a major vaue point in the USD 3 billion market for company profile information. All of these are instances of companies executing with excellence in their own space by leveraging ontent assets from other sources efficiently and efficiently into very effective businesses. No wonder their post-panel presentations in the main hallway were amongst the most popular of the conference.

Many publishers lack an understanding of the library market, which is divided into very separate market segments which share the same name, but have distinctly different funding, buying and usage patterns. Public libraries have to meet the needs of their communities, academic libraries build collections for their students and faculty, but corporate libraries have to consistently prove value to their businesses. All face the problem of getting adequate funding, though for different reasons.

Jean Bedord, Shore Communications, an adjunct faculty member in the Library school at San Jose State University described the unique King Library, which combines both the main branch of the San Jose public library and the academic library for the university. The evolution of the digital library comes in different flavor--for King library, this means 400 public access computers and 500 laptop computer ports in the library itself for a very wired student body and public--a major change in the last 10 years. It also means access to electronic resources and databases 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, as compared to the 81 hours a week that the physical building is open.

Corporate libraries face different challenges in providing value to their internal clients in order to continue getting funding. Valerie Ryder represented Air Products, a products manufacturer, and Denise Dodd represented Independence Blue Cross, a service provider for health care claims. Both of them are buying more electronic content than in the past, but face significant hurdles in doing so. Print products don't require license agreements, and are fixed price for unlimited use, though limited to physical buildings and routing slips. By contrast, license agreements have to be reviewed by legal, rights have to include contractors and intermediaries, browsers and plug-ins must comply with IT standards, usage reports must be available, and the publisher must pass purchasing department guidelines for reputation and risk. And in addition, to this, different access options are needed: transparent IP authentication in the case of Air Products, and user id's and passwords for Independence Blue Cross.

And finally, there is the sticky issue of pricing, and a plethora of different publisher pricing models, which may not relate to the reality of the actual number of users of the information. Though a corporation may have thousands of employees, it may only be a 20 person chemistry department that uses a specific database. Print products are still purchased, and may in fact be more flexible, than electronic products limited so specific users, rather than available on an as needed basis. And if the electronic product is priced unreasonably higher than the print product, the information center will continue with the best value that meets their business needs. For academic and public libraries, the same issues arise and frequently a consortia handles the negotiations for a group of libraries. Successful selling into this market means adapting to library needs as customers rapidly adopting new technologies, not clinging to existing print business models!

The Online Ad Sales panelists drove home the point of the value of well-targeted online ads for B2B advertisers. Mitch Rouda, President of Hanley-Wood Interactive, summed up the current attitude toward online advertising among his constituents this way: "everyone knows it works and we can prove it!" In Rouda's words, online buyer's guides succeed as advertising vehicles because they "reach specifiers at the point of decision". Just the fact that he refers to his target market as "specifiers" is enough evidence to prove that they are distinct from the average online shopper. For Hanley-Wood, they know that the user of their ebuild.com site is in the market for building products and that the buyer, excuse me, specifier, will have well-defined requirements regarding size, color, material and other product dimensions.

Mitch and his team are obviously doing something right. Online ad sales are tracking at about $3.6 million for 2004 and Mitch is gunning for "five in five", that is, $5 million in ad sales in 2005. Not bad.

Jim Mitchell from KellySearch, a Reed Business Information company that produces a worldwide product directory, seconded the themes introduced by Rouda. KellySearch launched in 2001 and now 90% of the company's business has moved online. KellySearch uses Google's AdSense for Search, which is essentially the new name for AdWords for Search. Since the content on KellySearch consists of product lists by category, selecting keywords for KellySearch doesn't involve much guesswork: you just select which category headings you want to bid on. KellySearch's success with Google AdWords and AdSense provide enough positive results so that Mitchell's talk could have been called "Maneuvering the Search Engines."

The main point made in the Online Ad Sales session--which also included the CoStar Group that provides information for commercial real estate brokers and Industrial Quick Search, which is a virtual aggregator that helps directory publishers with search engine optimization (SEO)--was the importance of matching the advertisers with sites that attract the right community of users. In other words, it's the quality of the eyeballs or leads that matter. And B2B advertisers are willing to pay for quality leads. It's like the theme of Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross: in an environment where the motto is "always be closing" you have to have the premium leads.

As outlined by Richard S. Eisert, a Partner at Davis & Gilbert LLP, the world of enforcing the rights of publishers and audiences consuming digital content remains pretty wild and wooly, with a maddening lack of consistency in legislation and enforcement likely to remain the state of affairs for some time to come. Where there has been increasingly effective enforcement of the U.S. Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA) with recent judgments and tightening of the definitions of "unsolicited ads" received on fax machines, online perimeters for content remain far less enforceable. The U.S. CAN-SPAM Act of 2004 is only beginning to provide a vehicle for touching the people who are sucking an estimated USD 8-12 billion a year from the economy in lost productivity, though the most hopeful route for enforcement appears to be the ability of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to raise civil suits against perpetrators. Still, all in all it leaves little cheer for list publishers who are trying to push their marketing tools to reach an audience increasingly hostile to unsolicited electronic ads. While software used to "scrape" content from sites still poses a threat to database publishers, there appear to be some new and innovative approaches to using old legal concepts for defining the limits of this capability for secured or properly labeled content, such as trespass to chattel, meddling and breach of contract. Properly labeling displayed pages with links to implied or express "clickwrap" agreement to refrain from scraping and crawling a site (example from eBay, see Section 7) remains the best protection to provide relief via statutory damages, though, and should be implemented as a matter of course on all online database sites. Don't expect any "magic bullets" to solve these issues anytime soon, much less international cooperation: we agree with Eisert's assertion that the U.S. is not likely to pass legislation enforcing the rights of database publishers similar to that found in the E.U. anytime soon, in spite of recent Bush administration initiatives (WSJ Online - Subscription. The business of profitable electronic publishing is not always easy in such a legal environment, but with a minimum of sensible precautions and practices there are reasonable practices that promise to provide increasingly enforceable limits to use for those who are willing to press the issue.

David Adler President & CEO of BiZBash, a directory and online community for corporate and non-profit events planners in New York City and beyond, provided a very perky presentation to wake up the morning audience on the second day of this conference, but the substance of his message was well-served by his fun-imbued approach. Beyond the confetti and zany ideas for making events successful (food hanging on walls? living dessert displays?) was the key factor of recognizing "events as human capital" - content, from Shore's perspective - and providing an emotional connection to content brands that go far beyond the efforts of traditional magazine, database and directory publishers. As David put it at the end of his presentation, "The best way to appeal to humans is to be as human as possible." This is a lesson that's being learned by many of the presenters at this conference, but is only beginning to become a concept that mainstream database and directory publishers find appealing.

Shore has identified the shifting of power in content aggregation services away from traditional, factory-like database services to nimble networks that provide specific attributes of content aggregation as The New Aggregtion, so it was rewarding to see how three significant players in content aggregation are picking up the challenge of this trend. Patrick Spain, Founder, Chairman & CEO of HighBeam Research, uses New Aggregation concepts for his online free and subscription research service targeted at individual professionals and SOHO businesses to "delight the user" with a network of federated Web search, professional contacts data from web-scraper Eliyon, News and magazines from ProQuest and an assortment of reference products. These networked resources are drawn together via a Web interface that is researched to the "T" for usability and constantly tweaked to reflect lessons learned from client interactions. Steve Goldstein, Chairman & CEO of Alacra Inc. "aggregates the aggregators" with a broad menu of professionally-oriented databases assembled in text and indexed federated searches using Alacra's advanced indexing of company and securities identifiers. Listening very carefully to client needs for content and improvements to its unique reports assembly interface keeps Alacra one step ahead of their high-powered corporate and professional clients. Meg Shea-Chiles, SVP for Global Alliances & Partnerships at Thomson Financial outlined their remarkable transformation from dozens of disparate and unintegrated financial content products into a common, networked infrastructure of XML-standardized content sources served up in a unified workflow-oriented interface to research, analyze and communicate with financial markets. In doing so Thomson Financial has turned a business that was mostly resisting the decline of growth into its maturity into a business that is growing solidly as it adds much higher content value to its clients. In all of these instances the emphasis is on delivering return on investment for its clients by pushing aggregation value out to the desktops of users that have the ability to draw upon these and their own networked sources in their own highly powerful aggregation and publishing environments. Database publishers of all kinds need to look carefully at the models of these leaders in The New Aggregation to make sure that their own value propositions are not becoming stagnant behind out-of-date technologies and business models.

What's a valuable taxonomy? If you could succinctly summarize the wisdom from the art and science of organizing content into useful filing and retrieval schemes, the answer would to this question would be "it depends." There's no one right way to use taxonomies, but this panel of experts in taxonomy development and deployment came up with some important best practices. From the perspective of Trish Yancey, President & COO of Synapse Corporation
, a valued taxonomy is one that your clients find to be indispensible, small enough to be maintained cost-effectively in the face of ongoing change but broad and deep enough to fit a wide variety of content types. While there are instances in which it may pay to do this from scratch, Synapse's Taxonomy Warehouse provides a clearinghouse for taxonomies that can be used by institutions and publishers to seed their efforts - well worth a visit for database and directory publishers considering how to monetize their own taxonomies. Luke Beatty Director of Corporate Development for WAND Inc. focuses on deploying effective taxonomies for online database and directory publishers serving a wide range of industries, a good taxonomy acts as a good seed for building keyword structures granular enough to support placement of content in search engine ad inventories effectively, effort that can benefit from a close collaboration between a taxonomy expert and the client's product team. For Andy Podolsky, Senior Ontologist for Convera, making taxonomies work effectively in a collaborative environment means working with companies that consume taxonomies to help resolve content from structured and unstructured content sources effectively, an environment that can live comfortably with multiple taxonomies working in parallel to solve content access and management problems. On the other hand, Steve Papa, CEO of Endeca looks at taxonomies not so much as a way to store information but as the core of their multi-faceted navigation structures that adapt to the wanderings of users through a database and present only the relevant options available in a given context. Given their success in enabling ecommerce via majors such as Barnes and Noble and their increasing penetration into intranets, it's an approach to consider carefully when the value of content comes down to hard cash on the table.

Which of these approaches is best? It all depends, of course, but in all of these approaches the common key is to recognize that a useful taxonomy can be one of the most valuable ways to enhace the market value of your own content and can help publishers create more loyalty in institutional markets at a relatively low cost.

If it weren't for Tim Berners-Lee and the W3 Commission, it's not certain that they would be any standards in online publishing. The publishing world has been notoriously bad in cooperating to form standards for categorizing and interchanging content. However, one standard gaining acceptance is the XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) for financial data. Deborah Doane, VP Marketing for EDGAR Online, described the business advantages, as well as the technical advantages, of adopting open standards. She explained that having standard formats would create new competition between current providers, but that the advantages of being able to more effectively mine the detailed data in SEC reports (and other financial reports) would allow content publishers to focus on higher-value services. Echoing the comments from the Pricing Session, Deb emphasized the need to focus on adding value via analysis, tools, and consulting in order to retain a premium service at a time when basic data are becoming commmodities.

David Sidman, CEO of Content Directions, described a different standard, the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Background on DOIs can be found at his Web site. Basically, by assigning a DOI to a document, image, segment of a document or other "object", a permanent link is maintained to the original object. David even demonstrated the utility of establishing a DOI on oneself! My key takeaway from this session was the ability to use the new DOI multilink feature to provide a link to a selection of related content--a sort of contextual content matching in a box. DOIs are growing in popularity, so this is a space to watch.

The core message from the Pricing session is that it is possible to differentiate raw content through value added features and package the same content for different audiences using very different business models--from a free, advertising-supported model to a premium subscription model.

W3Data demonstrates how the same database can be provided for free on the Web and also packaged as a value-added solution to corporate customers and sold on a subscription basis. Max Bardon, the CEO of W3Data, described how value is added via integration tools and software that are packaged as solutions to specific business workflow problems.

Paul Murphy, CEO of Eagle Eye Publishers, attributes his company's success to its attention to client needs. They add context to the government contracts data through historical analyses, categorizing the data and helping customers mine the data to "find the answers" they need to procure contracts or better compete in their segment.

Kathy Greenler Sexton, CMO of HighBeam Research, described how they have studied their audience in order to understand how various segments use HighBeam's service. After identifying their highest value segment, they have been able to further study the needs and pricing sensitivities of the target customers. HighBeam uses the interactive features of the Web to gather real-time feedback on design, product features, and pricing options.

All three panelists emphasized the importance of understanding the needs of your target segment so that you can add value to raw data via tools, analysis, insight, and consulting services to offer a premium product that solves a problem faced by that segment.

Clarifying the technology was the theme for this session, separating the issues between mobile platforms and wireless access. Currently, the mobile platform is a laptop computer or a PDA. Bruce Brownson, Directory Downloads, Inc., highlighted market research showing one third of PDA buying is in the institutional market, particularly the Blackberry PDA which has a miniscule keyboard. He expects the PDA to evolve into the Smartphone which will be a personal device, with the full functionality of today's PDA plus telephony, as well as additional capabilities, including MP3 and extensive memory. Given that the number of cell phones is growing rapidly and are replaced on a two year cycle, these new devices will dominate the market in two to four years, so publishers need to plan now to take advantage of the opportunities. Directory Downloads focuses on building contact databases that can be downloaded in Microsoft Outlook, a standard Microsoft application, then additional software can be used to move information from the desktop to the mobile platform, freeing the data from dependence on a specific operating system. This is a very solid approach, allowing the market to evolve!

Wireless access is crucial to mobile workers, "people on the go" who are working without desks and a fixed location. For publishers, this implies a Web connection, either slow through cell phone or local wireless network. Keith Yerian, bGlobal LLC, built an application to download real estate listings to PDA's for use by agents. The data is priced higher for the desktop version which can be used for market research purposes, but at an affordable $50 for individual use on the PDA. The primary limitation is the size of the screen limiting the number of fields, such as directory names, addresses and phone numbers, so advertising is not feasible. PDA's do have a significant advantage with speed and battery life, and many will now accept a memory stick for work flow software and applications. Electronics companies are going to develop new gadgets, so publishers can benefit by taking advantage of trends in new technology..... Who would have thought a camera phone would be so useful in the real estate and home improvement business, a truly mobile population!

Workflow integration is a buzzword in the industry today, and the concept really came alive with presentations by companies identified as Models of Excellence by the InfoCommerce Group. StarCite has developed an integrated approach for the corporate meeting planner, and a fascinating case of creating value by beginning with a simple directory of hotels and their available conference facilities. Then it expanded to a process of submitting electronic RFP’s, and then managing the logistics of attendee registrations. With opportunities to monetize at each step, through transaction fees, advertising and management reporting, this is an attractive business model!

Another Model of Excellence was GuideStar, which provides information about the non-profit sector, an underserved area. They obtain copies of IRS financial filings for non-profit organizations and build a database for use in different markets: grant seekers for funding sources, vendors to market goods and services, researchers to analyze the dynamics of the non-profit sector, and donors for discovery and due diligence. Financial institutions may well become significant customers with the rise in donor advised funds. Questions from the audience made us realize how little we knew about the finances of this sector, in contrast to the readily available wealth of public company information.

On the surface, IT research would not appear to be a promising area for growth, yet Wendover Corporation, another Model of Excellence, is prospering in providing IT sales leads for B2B technology companies. They do this by making over a million phone calls a year to determine what companies will really be buying, their technical platforms as well as the names of the people who will be making those buying decisions. This database can then be analyzed to provide market research reports indicating buying trends in the large ticket technology sector. Interestingly, the challenge to their technology customers is the actual followup by sales reps, so Wendover is expanding into providing appointment services for the reps. Workflow integration does indeed provide new opportunities to provide high value content and value added services!